The Long Good Friday: Underseen Early 2000s Indie Horror

by Tom Nix

In semi-continuation of our first Out of Obscurity column, this week’s Long Good Friday features a trio of recent independent horror films that simply didn’t get an audience. These flicks deserve more eyes.

May // 2002 // dir. Lucky McKee

May is a socially inept, shy, kind of off girl. Growing up with a mentally and verbally abusive mother who wouldn’t even let her take her doll out of its glass casing to play with, May has always been a little awkward.  She has a lazy eye, and her doctor suggests she wear an eyepatch to correct her vision. Needless to say, this doesn’t get her any friends either.

Some one once told her that if you don’t have any friends, make a new one. And that’s what May does. She meets a whole group of new people, and even starts to fall in love. But her oddness prevails. These people eventually turn their backs on her in her 20′s just as they did when she was small.

May decides then and there that none of these people were perfect for her. Only parts of them were perfect. So, naturally, she starts killing them and cutting them up to make a life size doll out of their perfect parts.

May is a genuinely disturbing movie, with an incredible anchoring performance by Angela Bettis. The movie, shot for $500,000 by a first time director, is comfortable with blasting through barriers that would normally be considered taboo, even now. In addition to some shockingly effective gore (this movie looks like it cost 8 times the actual budget), this movie features lesbian trysts, self-mutilation, and irreversible damage to blind children. It also features what is probably still the creepiest and unexpected ending in a horror flick in a good while. May is the real deal.

Love Object // 2003 // dir. Robert Parigi

Certainly the most deserving of the “indie” tag of this week’s title, Love Object is an eerily effective no-budget flick about the dangers of falling in love with a sex doll. Yeah, that’s right. Long before Ryan Gosling took the love of a rubbery broad to pseudo mainstream audiences with Lars and the Real Girl, Robert Parigi was examining the psychology (emphasis on the psycho) of a relationship in which only one of the participants has a heartbeat.

The movie tracks Kenneth, an awkward technical writer at a firm that specializes in electronics manuals. He is eventually assigned to a big project with the attractive new temp, Lisa. Unsure of how to approach and entice her, Kenneth instead orders a sex doll that is tailored to look exactly like Lisa and begins living out what he imagines is their real life relationship.

With his new found confidence from his new “girl,” Kenneth eventually starts to win over Lisa in real life. And the more time he spends with her, the less time he spends with his doll. And that’s when things get really weird. Sure, the doll begins to get jealous and starts to torment Kenneth’s love life. But the real greatness of the film is how rapidly it pushes past the idea of a homicidal fucktoy and into the true nature of obsession, delusion, and insanity.

I could never call Love Object a great film, but for a movie that is refreshingly DIY, it shows a ton of originality and a fearlessness unmatched by a lot of first time directors. It shies away from the really gory stuff almost out of necessity of conserving the funds for the shoot, but still has the ability to shock with how far it is willing to push the situation developed in this completely psychopathic love triangle. I hope someone gives Mr. Parigi a real budget one day, because the man could be dangerous. I mean hell, he managed to snag both Udo Kier AND Rip Torn for a movie about a man and his silicone sperm depository. Give the man some respect!

Below // 2002 // dir. David Twohy
Written by Darren Aronofsky. Directed by David Twohy of Pitch Black fame. Ignored by everybody.

Below is a taut, suspense driven haunted submarine movie set in World War II. The USS Tiger Shark is an American submarine sent out on a mission to destroy German warships. After a successful attack, the captain of the boat is killed on deck, allegedly by falling overboard attempting to collect a souvenir from the destroyed ship.

The new captain, Lt. Commander Brice (the always reliably great Bruce Greenwood), rescues three people – a British nurse, and two sailors – from the wreckage. They are from a British hospital ship taken out several days earlier.

Shortly after these people are taken aboard, however, strange things start to happen. The crew starts seeing things. The sub starts experiencing unexplained mechanical failures and inconsistencies. Stories are being told that maybe old Captain Winters isn’t quite dead. The sub is constantly trying to steer itself back to the place where the German ship was destroyed.

Below may not actually be as independent as the rest here. It features a full submarine set, lots of explosions, a huge cast, and some crazy CG effects. What it does share with the rest is that it is a genuinely unsettling flick. The tight, cramped, uncomfortable spaces of a WWII submarine are even smaller and more terrifying when the unexplained is happening all around. The movie makes very little use of blood and gore, and instead opts to use these cramped quarters as well as just the appropriate amount of atmosphere to give the viewer the creeps.

Very few things are what they seem in the world of Below. It even features a very restrained and complete performance by Zach Galifianakis as the boat’s resident “mystic.” Below was notoriously included in the Dimension Films Fall Dump of 2002 with a little flick called Equilibrium. They both were treated to about 50 screens for two weeks.

But unlike that other film, Below is actually worth watching.

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Originally posted in an online journal on September 28th, 2003.

Chasing Amy: Love, Loss, Lesbians, and Literary Genius

It’s safe to say that a very large percentage of my humor, my writing, and even to a limited extent, the way I speak, has been directly influenced by Kevin Smith. Somehow a fat nobody from New Jersey made a connection with a fat nobody from Ohio. I just got him. This is a man who has lived the American Dream. He laid it all on the line for something he thought was good and worthwhile, and he reaped the benefits of that decision. This is someone who has been making a living doing exactly what he wants to do, and that’s a miracle for anyone, let alone in the Executive Obsessed Hollywood circle. That’s admirable. So, too, is that this man has earned a cult following by both ripping off past auters and telling dick and fart jokes in a way that makes them come off as having genuine comedic integrity. Most admirable is that the time that Kevin dropped one of the best movies of the 1990′s in early ’97 based off of his own personal experiences. No day-in-the-life motif that dominated his first two films. No absurd situational comedy. This movie was one of a kind. An uproarious film that is peppered with vulgar and base sexual humor that in the same breath offers up some of the greatest characterization with some of the most vividly emotional and soul stirring drama ever seen in the comedy genre. Fuck, he even pulled a performance out of Ben Affleck. Chasing Amy is a story of love, and loss. It is a story of innocence and understanding. It a story of incredibly intimate personal tragedy, and because of that, it deserves every modicum of admiration it receives. In my mind, Amy is an achievement in cinema that few people have ever come close to accomplishing.

It’s a very misleadingly ingenious script. The love shared between Ben Affleck’s Holden MacNeil and Joey Lauren Adams’ Alyssa Jones is tangible. It permeates the movie. Which is why the ultimate heartbreak is so convincing and shattering. Alyssa is a free spirit, a roamer, an unchained soul. She has looked for love in every nook, in every alley, in every bed in New York. She’s tried men, women. She’s tried everything in the search for the one person who would make her the happiest. She finds that in Holden, a very traditional and flawed twenty-something man. Holden’s best friend, Jason Lee’s Banky Edwards, is at once both immature and inimitable. He’s funny, but in that embarrassing kind of way. He doesn’t approve of the relationship between his best-friend and the -up-until-recently lesbian, Alyssa. It’s both because he has a passive-aggressive prejudice against gay people, and because he sees that the relationship will break both Holden’s heart, and their 20-year friendship. Thus, a triangle is formed, and one of extremely accurate emotions and agendas.

The characters are what pushes the story forward. Smith creates them vividly, and their reasons and actions are appropriately misplaced and ignorant and incorrect. They’re all flawed. They’re amazingly three-dimensional. Just when you root for the lovers to end up on top, you realize that sometimes they come off as absolute idiots, and that’s why they’re so perfect. It’s because they aren’t. Holden is dismissively stoic in his standards and beliefs. So much that he risks the two people he loves most in his life because of his stalwart inability to accept change. Banky is both the fool and the genius. He sees things for what they are, but his wisdom comes in the guise of pure idiocy. He is also full of hot air, and is a slur-spouting madman. He’s probably the least likable of the characters, and that’s exactly why he works so well. Alyssa is the pinnacle of reason. She’s done it all, and knows exactly what she wants and doesn’t want. of course, she does things wrong from time to time, but since this film is almost a love letter to Joey Lauren Adams, her character comes off as the one who is the most reasonable, despite her obscenely sordid past.

There is a reason this story works. It’s because the plot is derived almost verbatim from director Kevin Smith’s real-life stint with Adams. It’s obviously exaggerated, but Holden MacNeil is Kevin Smith, and he comes off as a likable loser, and as a complete fool. It’s nice to see honesty instead of ego for a change. It’s also amazing that Adams even agreed to be in the film. She is effectively playing herself, in a script that mirrors her real life relationship and brings out all the flaws in it. This film was made while the two were still dating, and that makes it even more remarkable that she would take a script that in some way was a harbinger of the inevitable defeat that their relationship would eventually come to.

The script points in this direction the whole time. You see the uncomfortableness of Holden when he witnesses Joey’s love for women for the first time. You see Banky rattling of reason after reason why the relationship isn’t going to work. You see Holden make all the wrong choices until there is simply none left to make. And in one of the best scenes in the movie, the plot is spelled out word for word by the character whose words we’re supposed to take least seriously, Banky:

BANKY
This is all going to end badly

HOLDEN
You don’t know that.

BANKY
I know you. You’re way too
conservative for that girl. She’s
been around and seen things we’ve only
read about in books.

HOLDEN
But we have read about them. So we’re
prepared.

BANKY
There’s no ‘we’ here. You’re going to
have to go through this alone. And
it’s one thing to read about shit, and
something different when you’re forced
to deal with it on a regular basis.
When you guys are walking in the mall
and both your heads turn at a really
nice looking chick, it’s going to eat
you up inside. You’ll spend most of
your time wondering when the other
shoe’s going to drop. Because for
you, this isn’t about cool weird sex
stuff, it’s about love.

HOLDEN
Maybe it is for her as well.

BANKY
Somehow I doubt it.

HOLDEN
Everyone’s not out to get someone in
life. Bank.

BANKY
Everybody has an agenda. Everyone.

HOLDEN
Yourself?

BANKY
My agenda is to watch your back.

HOLDEN
To what end?

BANKY
To insure that all this time we’ve
spent together, building something,
wasn’t wasted.

HOLDEN
She’s not going to ruin the comic.

BANKY
I wasn’t talking about the comic.

It’s Shakespearean. The tried and true “fool” of the story has the clearest vision and the bet advice and foresight. And because that dialogue is delivered by the least credible character, it’s all for naught. Flaws make stronger characters, and Amy has some of the strongest characterization of any film in recent memory.

This film deserves the Criterion Collection treatment it got on DVD. It’s a sucker-punch of a movie that is more than the sum of its parts. The movie uses drug, sex and vulgar humor while mixing in a relationship as real as any you see on the streets. It’s a lesson in love, with lesbians. It’s something that runs deeper than the jokes, and something that has more heart than movies that are solely based around a romance. This movie offers opinions on alternate lifestyles that are positive and reinforced. For my money, it doesn’t downplay same-sex relationships or imply that the “natural” way is man/woman. A majority of the supporting cast is gay or bisexual, and they are not played for laughs because of it. They are played for laughs because of the intelligence of their comments and the appropriate lashes they make at both the gay and straight communities. This movie is simultaneously serious and farcical and it balances itself on the edge of a razor. One false step and the movie could become either a mockery of itself or a blundering mess. It plays both cards as well as any veteran blackjack dealer, and not once does it misstep on its fine-line journey.

There are so few stories today that resonate with the sheer intensity and intelligence that Chasing Amy does. It preaches openness and understanding while offering up lines like :” I’ve got a weird thing for girls who say ‘aboot’.” It proves that in love, you have to put individuals ahead of their actions. That love exists everywhere, you just have to know where to look for it. And not limiting your options can yield some positive results. And it proves that great writing makes a great movie. This story is about love. It’s about all the right kinds of love in all the wrong places. It’s about human nature, and why we’re destined to be idiots. It’s about freedom, and the right to love the one your with, no matter who they are. Above all else, it’s about life, and all the shit it throws at you. We’re imperfect people in an imperfect world. And Chasing Amy is all of that in two short hours. Hats off, Kevin Smith.

You’ve made a believer out of me.

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By Ryan Brlecic

1.) The Beyond, 1980 dir. Lucio Fulci

Usually as an avid film watcher one comes to know Lucio Fulci in the following way: “There is this movie where a zombie fights a shark, you really need to see it” (Zombi 2). So you do. Then after you realize Zack Synder’s end credits sequence from Dawn of the Dead was able to remake that movie in under five minutes, the effect wears off. Fulci’s work however can linger and the urge to explore it further might resurface; this is when most find The Beyond. This film represents both a highpoint of his later career and the starting point of his cinematic downward spiral.

Good horror can be debated, but true horror should have an almost metaphysical linger on it’s intended audience. Zombi 2 never reached past the sights of tearing flesh and shock of gore, it stayed comfortable in being simple suspense. With The Beyond, Fulci uses everything at his disposal to envelop you in madness and present you with no easy answer, no good, or solution once Hell begins to slowly encroach on Earth. He leaves nowhere safe, so much so that by the end the only place you have to run is into Hell itself.

This is part where I could entice you with lines about scenes from this film, but this film is too good to be boiled down like that. Fulci sets about destroying the flesh – slowly boiling it away in the process – in effort to leave nothing but the soul of true horror. Watch this film now and when you meet avid film watchers, ask them if they know Fulci.

2.) The City of the Living Dead, 1981 dir. Lucio Fulci

It should be pointed out that all three of these films share another connection past the slow retreat in Fulci’s abilities. They all follow a theme of awakening horror that will unleash hell on our plane of existence and are known as “The Death Trilogy”. The City of The Living Dead (COTLD), follows a reporter and a psychic race to close the gates of hell after the suicide of a clergyman caused them to open, allowing the dead to rise from the grave.

Inspired most likely by Dario Argento’s “Mothers Trilogy”, Fulci set out to document our descent into madness in his own connected series of films. With this film he shot high and came in somewhere between his previous ventures. COTLD has more then just brief moments of the brand of terror that made The Beyond an horror essential, but it falls back on Fulci’s bad habits and the lackadaisical film-making of Zombi 2.

The film tries to give you more informed madness and often this causes the film to be slow at times. The plot however still represents that of trying to piece together a broken mirror with only a few of the big chunks in hand. Fulci seemed to be resting on his laurels with this entry. This however was and is a Fulci film and memorable for a scene in which a young woman proceeds to vomit up her insides while crying blood (Editor’s note: her boyfriend in the scene is none other than Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi). In the end however the film is more memorable then most Fulci fare, but lacks the lasting power of The Beyond.

3.) The House by the Cemetery, 1982 dir. Lucio Fulci

All of the above leads to The House by the Cemetery, for those that enjoy Fulci (warts and all) this film represent an end of the road for the filmmaker. It was the last time his work seemed to gel in that vaguely familar Fulci style of horror. Lucio made films till his death in 1996, but The House by the Cemetery (THBTC) was the last good film he made.

The Beyond’s horror affected the world it inhabited. COTLD’s horror affected the town it resided in. THBTC affected the house and more importantly the family that it lived in. It is unsure if Fulci meant to explore unfathomable events and death in almost a russian doll like fashion, but it seems to have unfolded that way. There is not much to say for THBTC besides that is it worth  watching to round out the death trilogy and more than likely geared for avid fans of Lucio Fulci. By this film Fulci’s layers had peeled away, boiled down to nothing but his cliches, and leaving nothing but the lingering essence of his brand of horror on film.

What watching Fulci Leads to

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The above picture pretty accurately sums up how I felt after watching this film.

Murder Party was heralded as a brilliant low-budget horror movie, steeped in genre history. It seems more like the genre stepped in something. the story hinges around Chris, a very lonely and boring traffic policeman, trying to enjoy Halloween in spite of his situation. So, when he comes across a stray, black envelope inviting him to a “Murder Party,” Chris goes home, juryrigs a costume out of a cardboard box, bakes a pumpkin loaf, and attempt to enjoy himself. At a house that is miles away from where he lives. With people he doesn’t know.

So its much to his consternation (or, actually not – Chris barely reacts to anything going on around him) that the partygoers have a plan to murder the guest that shows up. They’re a bunch of art students, you see. And their endgame is to turn the act of human sacrifice into an art exhibition to impress a shady art dealer who has promised the “winner” of the group a sizeable grant.

Well, at least that’s what I think happens. You see, this movie has no time for things like continuity with a plot this complicated (read: not). No one ever really competes for the prize, and the grant issue isn’t even really brought up until it fills a need for a useless reveal/subplot. Not to mention how most of the running time is spent letting completely unlikeable, whiny, self-obsessed art students talk about the most trivial things. I will give the flick points for accuracy, but it’s still not something you’d expect to see in a horror film. Especially sine the film is seemingly not attempting to ridicule the stuck up art world and is instead content with allowing these idiots to fanwank themselves for 30 minutes at a time.

It’s depressing. You can tell from the movie’s premise that the creators had something interesting to say. The idea of a literal murder party is pretty inspired. Plus the ideas of obvious trust-fund kids wanting to commit murder for the sake of art (actually money, passed off as art) is appealing. So why is this movie so relentlessly terrible?

Simply put, its because the people involved are relentlessly talentless. The cast is uniformly awful, playing smug when smarmy is appropriate. Hell, the actor cast in the lead spends most of the film with a gag in his mouth because he wasn’t a good actor. The dialogue doesn’t help their case either. It plays out like a badly written Kevin Smith movie with its head even further up its own ass. The editing falls totally flat. There are many times in the film attempts to use a smash cut to elicit laughter. Not a single one of them works, as the scene before it is played too long, too short, or too obvious. The direction seems to consist of simply telling the actors where to stand (and often in visually unappealing tableaus) and to say words. It appears that subtleties in performance, or visual storytelling were glossed over, or more likely, flat out ignored. The only success is the cinematography, and this is simply because the steadicam operator didn’t have parkinson’s. The shots are flat and boring, but at least they’re consistently non jittery.

I am aware that this film was an extremely low budget release. It went to production without any funds set aside, in fact. And with that in mind, the effects are admirable. They’re few and far between for a reason, and none will stick with you any longer than the running time. It’s just a sad sight (and one far too common in today’s genre filmmaking) that a group of people that wanted to make a horror film so badly were able to miss the mark so broadly.

It seems very much like I am picking on a small movie about people at a party who want to kill someone for art for not having any artistic merit. And I am. But please let me qualify my hatred. There are many, many, terrible films that I unabashedly love. And the reason is simple. They know they’re complete trash, and the effort is put into making the audience go along with that trash from the opening. Transporter 2 does not attempt to address issues that affect anyone. It is simply there to put a foot chart on your face and learn the Jitterbug. Even flicks like Andy and Luke Campbell’s almost brutishly bad Demon Summer boil down to a group of friends that are obviously having a great time shooting a crap horror movie and to hell with you if you’re not along for the ride. Murder Party is like showing up to a LAN party and having everyone gregariously talking about how to harvest figs. They’re having a grand old time, but why the hell did  you get an invite?

Murder Party, in the end, brings up some very interesting ideas to the table. The idea of the privileged becoming savages for unsavory reasons. The conflict of dealing with people who want to kill you for no reason (but instead just tie you up and talk about themselves for 5 hours), the complete fakeness of people, and wha reality exists underneath. The idea of the act being the art. All of these concepts are introduced within the running time of the film, and none of them are given any discussion beyond the sentence or scene they are mentioned.

One of these days, I hope I will get a chance to champion a low budget, independent, innovative, and effective horror movie. I just hope I don’t have to suffer through many more movies like Murder Party in order to get there.

4.5 out of 10

Note: 1.5 of these points come from killing the biggest hippie in the film with non-organic food.

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1. Face The Sea Of Darkness
2. Schweick’s Destiny
3. Woe Be Unto Him
4. The Voice Of Nothing
5. Falling For Emily
6. Liza Sweet Liza
7. An Eye For The Dead
8. Beyond Emily
9. The Bridge
10. Looking For Joe
11. Hospital Creaking
12. Acid Burn
13. See How I Destroy Your Lives
14. John And Lisa’s Blues *
15. The Blind
16. Ghost At The Piano
17. Room 36
18. Hotel Lament
19. Liza Gets Schweicked
20. The Evil Below
21. Voices From The Beyond
22. Spider Attack
23. On That Day
24. Death Chorus
25. You Must Return
26. Liza Damned Liza
27. Undead Rising
28. Descent
29. And All Therein That May Be Explored
30. Finale
31. The Beyond
32. Reality Is A Nightmare
33. Goodbye Lucio

And there you have it. Imagine the possibilities. How many people will be talking about “Liza Damned Liza’s” show in their friend’s basement next week. The chugging metal of “Death Chorus.” “Schweik” will also suffice. Then everytime you play a show, you can use your band name as a verb. Lisa will get Schweiked every night this week. Ensure this. Also worth noting is Cat in the Brain, Fabio’s last composed score. I don’t know how you manage to not sell a million records under that moniker.

These are band names that you would expect to pay a fortune for. It’s not very often that a benefactor will just hand out phrases like “Face The Sea of Darkness.” But here at The Red Circle, we feel that everyone should be given the ability and the right to make Nickelback look like assholes. So here’s your chance, totally free of charge. All we ask for in return is for you to love us.

Note: Fabio Frizzi had no involvement in this article. I am not even sure he is still alive.

*If you change the name of this track to “Tom and Lisa’s Blues,” you have a more accurate title for the movie The Room. Track 13 is also appropriate.

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