The Film Corner with Greg Klymkiw

Chancellor Stephen Harper is the most insidious
of all Canadian Colonial Backwater Prime Ministers
in the "polite" genocide of our First Nations people.
Heil Canada! Heil Old Money! Heil Der Führer!
Heil Harper!

Trick or Treaty?
Dir. Alanis Obomsawin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are many things that disgust Canadians about Chancellor Stephen Harper, but for me, the worst is his refusal to properly deal with the egregious theft of Aboriginal Rights during the signing of the notorious James Bay Treaty and also, several horrendous things he simply chooses to ignore as the most vile Prime Minister in Canadian history. Alanis Obomsawin's important body of work, including her new film Trick or Treaty?, confirms that Canada has always been the most insidious colonial backwater of them all and the genocide it continues to perpetrate upon our First Nations is perfectly in keeping with the country's sickeningly polite approach to decimating those who would dare get in the way of Old Money's needs to keep amassing money by just taking it (tactfully, graciously and ever-so sneakily, of course). Obmosawin's new documentary focuses upon a massive peaceful protest in Ottawa, the nation's capitol, that's designed to force Chancellor Harper to meet face-to-face with those First Nations Chiefs most affected by the over-100-year-old treaty which was designed and implemented to steal land and not allow any meaningful sharing in the decision-making process of dealing with said land. The result of the James Bay Treaty has been abject poverty, skyrocketing rates of suicide and environmental destruction, all of which affects not just our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, but ALL Canadians.

Top: Vile Canuck Bureaucrat (is there any other kind?)
Below: The True Heroes of every living Canadian!

The core of the film involves a re-enactment of the 1905 signing of the James Bay Treaty (aka Treaty No. 9) in Moose Factory, Ontario. Presided over by the brainchild of this event, the late, great Dr. Stan Louttit, Grand Chief of the Mushkegowuk Tribal Council, presents some of the most damning evidence of Canada's wilful apartheid and genocide (take your pick, Canada's done both) against our First Nations. One of the earliest 20th Century Canadian Nazis was a petty bureaucrat (bureaucrats are the pathetic dweebs who implement the desires of our foul politicians) who rose to power within the Department of Indian Affairs to eventually become its Obergruppenführer. In the film, Louttit brings our attention to Scott's evil when he reads the following words of the foul bureaucrat:

"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic . . ."

These are the words with which Scott extolled the virtues of Residential Schools - a horrendous program that forcibly wrenched over 150,000 Native Canadian children from their families and homes, shoving them into boarding schools designed to break their spirit and remove all vestiges of indigenous culture from their hearts and minds. To do this involved physical and psychological abuse that was little more than torture and rampant sexual abuse, all of it perpetrated by - no surprise - Catholic nuns and priests.

So get this, Louttit exposes the fact that Scott, this paragon of forced assimilation, was also one of the chief bureaucrats present during the signing of the notorious James Bay Treaty where he and several others outright lied to the Native leaders about the content of the treaty and created an entire facade by which the First Nations representatives signed a document based on what the bureaucrats assured them was in the treaty as opposed to what was actually there. Louttit also exposes documentation which proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt, so no matter what physically exists in the treaty, the fact remains that the treaty they signed is ultimately the treaty imparted to them verbally. Native culture was rooted in an oral tradition. The signatures are actually "marks" (usually a single "X") since the men who signed the treaties did not read or write English.

This powerful core of Obomsawin's film is deftly woven into the harrowing hunger strike implemented by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence who went on a six-week-long liquids-only program to demand a meeting with Chancellor Harper and Canada's Governor General David Johnston to address a variety of issues related to treaty rights and the economic, cultural and societal plight Native Canadians find themselves in because of said treaties like James Bay. Obomsawin also includes a pointed Native Studies lecture dealing with the exploitative aspects of Treaty No. 9 and an astonishing, by-foot journey undertaken by several young Native men across Ontario's icy tundras from the far north to Ottawa itself.

And what of Chancellor Harper in all of this? It's what he chooses not to do that's the most egregious action. Looming in the backdrop of many of the activities is the symbol of Canadian evil, the Parliament Buildings, our very own Reichstagsgebäude. Harper is nestled safely within and yet a woman is potentially dying at his feet, thousands of men and women are gathered and even engaging in several spectacular displays of Native culture and then, several young, brave men have travelled by foot, thousands of miles to be in Ottawa.

Where the fuck is Chancellor Harper? Would it have been too much for him to make a few public appearances and say a few words to the assembled (no matter how empty they would have been)? He's simply nowhere to be seen, nor heard from throughout the range of spectacular, impressive and deeply moving events captured by Obomsawin's film (including a monumental circle dance involving hundreds of people).

Trick or Treaty? was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It's somehow ironic that Harper, in his continued assault upon Canadian culture, is continually destroying the fabric of our cultural institutions and his vehement financial dismantlement of the Board itself is something we might, as a nation, never fully recover from.

At the end of her film, Obomsawin leaves us with a montage that's as heart-lifting as it's heartbreaking. It includes the powerful words of John Trudell. I'll leave you now, with the refrain:

Crazy Horse
We Hear what you say
One Earth, one Mother
One does not sell the Earth
The people walk upon
We are the land
How do we sell our Mother ?
How do we sell the stars ?
How do we sell the air ?

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5 Stars

Trick or Treaty? plays at PLANET IN FOCUS, the 15th annual environmental film festival in Toronto. Obomsawin will be present for the screening. If you haven't seen it, don't miss it. If you HAVE seen it, see it again. For further information, visit the festival's website by clicking HERE.

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Williston, North Dakota has no affordable housing.
Williston, North Dakota refuses to help the homeless.
Pastor Jay's church becomes a homeless shelter.
Williston, North Dakota is not amused.

The Overnighters
Dir. Jesse Moss

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The fine, God-fearing, deeply religious citizens of Williston, North Dakota, do not extend Christian charity to the homeless. They just want to run them out of town. Most of the supposed miscreants and criminals are, in actuality, dirt-poor men of all ages who've left their families, friends and hometowns behind to combat their poverty by taking advantage of the huge fracking oil boom in this otherwise dull, closed-minded little community. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in Williston never bothered to address what would obviously have become and indeed is an affordable housing shortage. Hundreds of men from all over America have descended upon the bucolic, middle-of-nowhere burgh of Christian fundamentalism and even those who can get jobs, cannot afford to live in Williston. The citizenry do not want outsiders in their community. Outsiders might, after all, be criminals.

But, never fear, these men have a champion in the form of Pastor Jay Reinke, a caring, intelligent and deeply committed man of God who decides to open the doors of his parish to the homeless. With the assistance, though mostly support of his wife and children Reinke transforms the Concordia Lutheran Church into a massive homeless shelter.

The Overnighters is the title the powerful, moving, often harrowing and at times, deeply disturbing feature documentary by Jesse Moss. It also happens to be the name of the program Reinke runs, for by day, as many as 60 men are either working or looking for work and overnight, they're sleeping on floors, in pews, in storage rooms and for the many who can't get in due to Reinke's desire to avoid overcrowding, they sleep outside in their cars in the church parking lot. The idiots on the Williston municipal council have banned overnight parking on ALL city streets. Gotta love that down-home Christian charity.

Director Jesse Moss leaves no stone unturned in telling this amazing story. The central conflict is Reinke's head-butting with the municipal council, other citizens and even his own parish. The local daily newspaper hates his guts and places stories everyday that directly or indirectly slam the existence of the homeless shelter. The council even begins to dredge up all manner of legislation to make life miserable for Reinke and his overnighters. The good Pastors's family supports him, but they're also on the short end of the stick since Reinke is working everyday for long hours. He even has conflicts with some of the men.

Still and all, he's passionate and committed to extending Christian charity. Though he does extensive criminal background checks on all potential clients, he realizes that desperate men in desperate times might well have criminal records. Reinke's desire is to simply get to know the men and the circumstances which led them to commit the crimes. One of his overnighters is a registered sex offender. Fearing this will cause controversy, the Pastor removes the man from the church and, with his family's unreserved support, allows the man to sleep in the Reinke family home. Besides, the sex crimes registry in the USA is so Draconian that this middle-aged man, who now finds himself sleeping in the family's basement, has a weighty stigma attached to him because of the fact that, at the age of 18 (!!!) he was having sexual relations with his 16-year-old girlfriend (!!!).

Moss's commitment to this very long story, which transpired over a considerable period of time, is admirable. In fact, the film is ultimately a harrowing, character-driven story and we follow Reinke as he slowly begins to lose it. Shockingly, a secret is soon revealed that devastates the Pastor, his family, the community and certainly us. The sad reality exposed is that Christian charity really doesn't extend beyond fundamentalist lip service. A Pastor, a Man of God, is after all, a Human Being - deserving of both respect and forgiveness as much as any man.

It's just not in the cards. Most Christians, it seems, are the biggest hypocrites of them all.

Especially in Williston, North Dakota.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

The Overnighters is a FilmsWeLike release at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For further info, visit the TIFF website HERE.

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Gum. The DIRTY secret.
The HEART of DARKNESS!
The environmental PESTILENCE!

The Dark Side of the Chew (2014)
Dir. Andrew Nisker

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Watching this film was so utterly repulsive to me that I often found myself gagging and retching. This had nothing to do with the quality of the film or lack thereof. In fact, the film was so successful that I could have no other response. You see, I hate gum. I have always hated gum. Even as a kid, the very idea of chewing something that I had to spit out, leaving a masticated, gob-glistening wad of filth on the ground sickened me. And believe me, I had to spit it out because the very idea of having to touch it with my fingers, if even to dispose of it, made me sick to my stomach. I hated seeing people chew gum. I hated when those same people blew bubbles, cracked it and even worse, when they chewed it with their mouths open. Where, when, why and how I developed this hatred of gum is a mystery to me. I just know I've always had an almost psychotic aversion to it. Worse yet, now in middle age, my hatred for gum has accelerated to a point wherein I still go apoplectic when I see and/or hear anyone chewing it, but now, I know that if I was allowed to legally carry a handgun, I'd be tempted to use it upon whatever miscreant displayed this bovine behaviour. My target would be man, woman or child. I'd show no discriminatory mercy. I'd fill anyone full of lead and proudly declare that I'd be much happier watching an endless loop of Divine eating fresh, steaming dog shit in John Waters's Pink Flamingoes than see people chew gum. Andrew Nisker's The Dark Side of the Chew is, at least for me, a blessing and a curse. His one-hour TV Ontario (TVO) documentary focuses upon the environmental pestilence of gum and in fact, has given me even more reasons to justify my hatred of it. Nisker appears in the movie himself and takes us along on his country-hopping journey into a veritable Heart of Darkness.

Nisker is Willard. Gum is Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. What Nisker discovers is an environmental Apocalypse!

Now!

What we learn, as Nisker himself learns, is that gum is one of the biggest environmental blights upon the planet. In days of yore, gum was derived naturally from a weird-ass tree in the jungles that once teemed with the Mayan Aztecs. However, when the natural source of gum started to dry up, almost to the point of extinction, gum manufacturers had to find a new sticky source to inject oodles of sugar into and surround with flavoured, crunchy candy. What, pray tell, did those pesky corporate piggies come up with? Well, hold onto your hats, folks.

Gum is made of plastic! Yes, plastic. And where, oh where, does most gum end up? You guessed it. On sidewalks. Now, if it just stayed there, accumulating like some toxic, viscous gunk on the pavement, ever accumulating until. . . what? Mounds of sticky filth - impeding byways and highways? Nope. That's no good. And get this: there isn't a city that doesn't spend enough money to feed the world's starving populations several times over for several millennia to clean gum off the streets. Where does it all go? Into the water. Yup, tons and tons and tons of plastic are steamed off the streets and into the sewers and back into the water. From gum. Your gum, Clarabelle Cow. And this is not much good for any living thing.

Gum chewers are chewing plastic infused with sugar or sugar-free chemicals like Aspartame, then they're spitting it up onto the ground whereupon it's "cleaned" up, right back into the environment.

This, frankly, is appalling enough for this fella', but Nisker doesn't stop there. He takes us deep into the heart of gum's darkness and we learn more about it in one hour than one would think was humanly impossible. We discover fossilized gum, we travel to various manufacturers of gum and we even get a couple of tastes of "greener" gum options. It all still ads up to the same thing - waste and pollution.

Nisker even seeks to test out the scientific and medical claims made by gum manufacturers. A few of these tests are downright illuminating. Not surprisingly, we learn there is no truth to the ludicrous claims, but worse yet, we learn that many of the claims are so outrageous that they seriously affect those who buy into it and subsequently use it upon our children.

Ultimately, Nisker's film is so exhaustive, he might well have just called it Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gum But Were Too Ignorant To Ask. We get the history of gum, its sociological and culture impact and most of all, the damage it's doing to ourselves and our planet.

All of this is presented in a breezy, clever and entertainingly digestible fashion. (Except, for me, during closeups of people chewing the wretched stuff and the clever digitally animated ooze of gum that floods the streets and even chases Nisker at one point like a river of molten lava.)

For me, though, his movie makes me think that maybe, just maybe, I haven't been a madman for all these years. I now have an Encyclopedia Britannica worth of reasons to detest gum even more. And now, I even dream about gum and in my dreams I see a glob of gum crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and ending up into the eco-system, the food chain and into my mouth - to ingest the cud-chewings of plastic, spat out upon the sidewalks of the world.

It's enough to make you sick.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

The Dark Side of the Chew is the Closing Night Gala of the 2014 Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival in Toronto. For further info, please visit the festival's website by clicking HERE.

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YOU WILL BELIEVE
A SHARK CAN FLY
AND IF YOU BELIEVE THAT
I'VE GOT A BROOKLYN BRIDGE
I CAN SELL YOU CHEAP!

Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)
Dir. Anthony C. Ferrante
Starring: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch, Robert Kline, Robert Hays, Billy Ray Cyrus, Perez Hilton, Kelly Ripa, Al Roker, Kari Wuhrer, Wil Wheaton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Inclement weather hits the New York-bound flight from L.A. Never fear, though. Robert Hays (Airplane!) is the pilot. But, wait! What's that we see out the window?

Oh, Jesus! No!

SHARKS!

This is more than mere inclement weather. This is that meteorological phenomenon which hit L.A. last year. It's a sharknado - a tornado so fierce it rips thousands of sharks out of the ocean and has them whipping around within the funnels of H2O, allowing for extra propulsion to dive at their targets, jaws agape, lusting to ingest whatever their tummies desire.

Within the first ten-or-so minutes of Anthony C. Ferrante's Sharknado 2: The Second One. a passenger is decapitated by a shark (in the plane), our leading lady (Tara Reid) has her hand bitten off by a shark (in the plane) and the pilot is swallowed whole when a shark crashes into the cockpit (uh, you guessed it, in the plane), until our stalwart hero from the first Sharknado (Ian Ziering) commandeers the controls, dodging hundreds of hungry airborne sharks until he can safely crash-land the airplane.

Alas, New York is about to be hit with a shit-storm of sharks because frankly, there's not one, but two - count 'em - TWO sharknados headed for the Big Apple from opposite directions like mega, funnel-shaped Twin Towers threatening to collide with each other in the heart of Times Square. And as we watch, mouths agape, we realize we're about to participate in what might be one of the most gloriously ludicrous monster movies of all time.

The first Sharknado was happily stupid. Sharknado 2 grabs a nursing sow by the teats and begins pulling maniacally like Quasimodo the Notre Dame bell ringer. Whereas the first titty twister of a Sharknado was so awful it was good, our followup picture is so good, it's hard to believe how awful it truly is - but in all the right ways - and possibly in ways that might actually be good. At a certain point, surrealism overtakes the whole affair and your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not the picture is endowed with considerable merit (or not, or whatever, it doesn't matter). Director Ferrante and screenwriter Thunder (Surely Not His Real Name) Levin have us soiling ourselves from beginning to end, not out of fright, but because the movie is genuinely funny.

Where writer Not His Real Name excels beyond the preposterous genius and variety of tornado-propelled shark attacks are some of the finest lines of dialogue ever scribed in an awful movie. My favourite, by far is when our bland leading man visits our bland leading lady in the hospital where she's recovering from a shark biting off her hand (yes, she's the one, the lassie who gets chomped by a shark in the plane in the first ten minutes), he attempts some levity meant to cheer her up, points to her bloodied, bandaged stump and remarks:

"The next time you offer to lend a hand don’t be so literal about it."

I'm still slapping my knee over that one, good golly gee. My other knee is also sissy-boy-slapped all to hell from laughter over seeing the head of the Statue of Liberty crash into downtown Manhattan and take out an unsuspecting bystander. Will wonders never cease? No, they don't. Witness, if you dare, our dreadful leading lady retrieve her hand from the jaws of a shark to get her wedding ring back.

This, I believe, is truly worthy of a full-on sissy-boy slap-party of guffaws.

With an atrocious leading man and equally abominable leading lady, a handful of fun supporting turns (notably Judd Hirsch as a cab driver) and the most ridiculous number of cameos by American pop culture icons (Billy Ray Cyrus, Kelly Ripa, Al Roker, etc.), there's no way anyone but some high-falutin' egg head is going to not love this tasty mound of fresh, steaming shark poop. The special visual effects are undeniably atrocious, but they're so unsparing in their sheer volume, that you occasionally convince yourself how great they are. Which, of course, they are most certainly not.

That, ladies and gentlemen, takes some doing and Sharknado 2: The Second One does it real good.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Sharknado 2: The Second One is available on an outlandishly rich Blu-Ray edition from VSC that includes 2 commentary tracks - TWO!!! - tons of behind the scenes featurettes, a genuinely fun and informative short on casting the cameos, a gag reel, extended and deleted scenes and gorgeously moronic cover art and menus. Feel free to order the movie directly via the appropriate Amazon links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

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1817. Indiana.
Log cabin. Deep woods.
A boy's love for his mother.

The Better Angels (2014)
Dir. A.J. Edwards
Starring: Jason Clarke, Diane Kruger, Brit Marling, Braydon Denney

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In life and even after death, our real angels are indeed, as the title of this great film tells us, The Better Angels.

Fading up from a pitch black silent screen, one simple, powerful quotation from President Abraham Lincoln, tells us, and in retrospect, corroborates that this is the very core and essence of the dazzling directorial debut of Terrence Malick's longtime editor A.J. Edwards. It reads:

"All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

As the text fades down, we're left with a silent black screen for a few moments until a stately, ravishingly composed and arranged orchestral score envelopes us in the dark. Once the piece ends, we're greeted by harsh monochrome light attempting to break through an overcast sky and resting upon a set of steps that lead upwards to a series of majestic columns.

Moving inside and beyond this brief exterior shot, we're treated to a series of images by a camera aimed along the massive columns as they try to reach beyond the ceiling to be nourished by the light of the heavens. We get a brief glimpse of a bronze plaque embedded into the back wall and try as we might, it's impossible to make out what the words represent since the camera turns itself around as if from the point of view of these words, the plaque flanked by sculpted doves.

From within the darkness of this perspective we finally get a glimpse of the light pouring through the massive columns as the voice of an old man asks, "You wondering what kind of boy he was?" And then, we're gloriously winded by a smash cut to a river at dusk, the still water defined on either side by banks of majestic trees casting dark shadows upon the shimmering beauty, at once beautiful and alternately not unlike a visual representative of a lamentation for a time long passed.

This transition from the cold stone under grey light, representing something long dead, but worthy of the sort of worship its architecture demands, to the stunning beauty of the natural world is not only cinematically powerful, but in fact, is part of the film's overall style and storytelling techniques which, far exceed the cerebral pretence of Edwards' mentor, colleague and producer of this film. Terrence Malick's Tree of Life and To The Wonder were both such ludicrous wanks that it's kind of cool seeing the wankier inspirations being transformed into simple, emotional storytelling.

Our narrator gives us few details about "the boy", but then, we don't need too much more than what we actually see ourselves. What we do see is delivered in the measured pace of rural existence and though there are many Malick-like bits of cerebral looking-up-at-trees and so forth, it's all rooted in character and narrative (albeit a smidgen off the regular beaten path) in addition to the film's extraordinary tone.

The picture is ultimately so gorgeous, so inspiring and often heart-wrenching that this story about a little boy growing up in a little log cabin in Indiana in 1817 is compulsively watchable.

We learn from our narrator that the lad's name is Abe (Braydon Denney) and that he'll eventually leave home at the age of 21. It wouldn't take an Albert Einstein to figure out we're in on the childhood of Honest Abe Lincoln himself, but I suspect if I hadn't known before going in that this is whom/what the picture was dealing with, I'd like to think I'd have potentially been watching the story of a young boy, any young boy and his deep, undying love for his mother.

I will say, though, that the images and events rendered by Edwards and his cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd, all underscored by a gorgeous soundtrack composed by Hunan Townshend, are ultimately so potent that I did indeed file away my knowledge that we were following the young boy who eventually became one of the great presidents of the United States of America. What's kind of cool about this is that we're left with an evocative portrait of pioneer life that gives us a sense of both the hardships and joys of working the land and being inextricably linked to it.

The narrative of Abe's younger years is presented in a series of impressions of days and nights that proceed over the course of time and we're moved forward by some of the most spectacular jump cuts rendered in any film in recent memory. Though some cuts are clearly of the breathtaking variety, many seem so perfectly fluid and in fact seem as gentle as required, when required. We get impressions of children at play and at work, but we're almost always within Abe's sphere and/or POV. Ultimately, the film focuses upon a simple trinity of characters overwhelming all others populating the frame. The most important relationships involve Abe and his stern father (Jason Clarke) and his truly angelic mother (Diane Kruger).

When Abe raises the ire of his father and gets a stern lecture and/or a painful whipping, it's of course his mother who applies the gentle words to calm Abe and to help him understand and love his father in spite of the punishment. One of the most moving sequences is when Abe's mother tenderly describes the look on her husband's face when he first laid eyes on the boy after birth. She assures him that his father had nothing but adoration in his eyes and that she knew that he would always go to the wall for Abe and protect him with his very life.

We do indeed experience moments of tenderness between Abe and his Dad. We also come to understand that it's Abe's mother who recognizes the boy's special gifts and tries to convince her husband that Abe's not cut out for the rough, brutal hardships of working the land. Dad seems at first to dismiss this out of spite or even jealousy, but as the film progresses, we see that Abe's Dad wants to build fortitude and perseverance in his son.

When Abe's mother is taken ill and dies, Abe's Dad marries anew and Abe's stepmother (Brit Marling) proves to be as angelic, if not even more spiritually connected to the boy. The trinity of Father, Son and Stepmother is also as strong and important as the first one.

In both cases, it is the MOTHER (by blood and by marriage) who is able to outwardly perceive Abe's intelligence and sensitivity, whilst Dad is the hide toughener. One sequence even has a dreamy, ghostly moment when both mothers connect fleetingly and we are infused with an almost spiritual warmth, a glow that carries us and Abe through whatever hardships he continues to face.

And as haunting and sad as many of the impressions Edwards imparts are, we're always tied to the glory and spirit of the natural world and the special love that only a mother and son can have. The film paints a portrait of the formative years of a great man, but what we're often aware of is the potential of greatness in any man who honours God, nature and of course, his mother.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

The Better Angels is in platform theatrical release via levelFILM and can be seen in Toronto at the Carlton Cinema. Why this isn't also unspooling at TIFF Bell Lightbox and/or a decent Cineplex screen is beyond me. It's worth seeing as soon as possible, but I suspect its astounding picture and sound will shine ever-beautifully once the film is released on Blu-Ray.

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Interstellar (2014)
Dir. Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There isn't one single Christopher Nolan movie I've ever liked. He's humourless, pretentious and worst of all, he's a veritable Blind Pew when it comes to directing action scenes (which is a bit of a problem since three of his pictures are superhero movies). However, Interstellar is cause for a thimble-sized celebratory quaff o' bubbly since I was able to actually sit through the movie and not hate it - too much. Basically what we're dealing with here is an almost 3-hour-long cerebral-style sci-fi soaper involving a dying Earth and a whack of astronauts searching for habitable planets beyond a black hole that opens up into a faraway galaxy.

First of all, the movie has no major action set-pieces for Nolan to screw-up. The handful there are genuinely have an accent on suspense and Nolan handles them reasonably well. Also, the picture is replete with low-key dialogue scenes in a claustrophobic spaceship which allows for some fine acting from Matthew McConaughey as the ship's captain, Anne Hathaway as the science officer (and daughter of Michael Caine, the back-on-Earth mastermind of the endeavour to save the human race) as well as the always astonishing Jessica Chastain as McConaughey's back-on-Earth scientist daughter.

For such a long, humourless picture, it almost never feels dull and offers a compelling-enough journey to keep us in our seats. There's one humungous problem, however. The ride provided is decent enough, but there isn't a moment when we don't know where the movie is headed. The predictability-factor is disappointingly up there.

I defy anyone to not figure out the big secret in the early going when McConaughey's daughter (as a little girl) begs him not to go on the journey. I annoyingly tried to explain to my wife where the movie was headed and she asked me politely to keep my mouth shut. "Oh come," I insisted, "It's going to have worm holes and time travel elements, so how can it not be . . . " At this point, my daughter sharply cut me off with an aggressive finger to her lips and a loud, "Ssssshhhhhhh!!!!!"

I also defy anyone to not figure out from the very moment we meet Matt Damon that he isn't all he's cracked up to . . . oh, I'll shut it!!!

The movie is perfectly watchable, though, and based upon its relative competence I'd suggest that maybe, just maybe, Nolan has figured out how to make movies. Interstellar still bears the Christopher "One Idea" Nolan imprimatur - he'll never shake that, but at least you'll not be checking what time it is every five-to-minutes.

THE FILM CORNER RATING:
**½ Two-and-a-half-stars.

Interstellar screens the world over via Paramount.

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It's time to make room for some visitors.

IF YOU DARE DOUBT,
YOU'RE A FOOL!

Ejecta (2014) dir. Dir. Chad Archibald, Matt Wiele
Screenplay: Tony Burgess
Starring: Julian Richings, Lisa Houle, Adam Seybold

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In a world replete with eyewitness accounts detailing UFO sightings and contact with extraterrestrial (or at least, unidentified) life forms, all the stuff so many individuals and groups have testified to seeing and/or feeling, are those which tend to be discounted by ascribing said testimonials to mental illness. Though I have no doubt that many such experiences are indeed the bi-products of more than a few of the aforementioned folks being completely out of their respective (or collective) gourds, I still get the willies when I realize that some of them are most probably not crazy, that they've seen and experienced things I hope to never be unlucky enough to witness and/or feel.

Furthermore, I genuinely believe there's stuff out there that can never be adequately explained and probably won't be since an elite exists that's all too aware of certain realities, but keeps them veiled in secrecy for a variety of social, cultural, religious, political and economic reasons. The only people who would tend to dispute this, to doubt it beyond all that is reasonable, are those who would be quick to dismiss such notions, both genuinely and surreptitiously.

My own beliefs on this matter are not, I suspect, only due to years of tuning into very some very strange stuff on shortwave radio, eons of listening to Art Bell and George Noory on late-night talk radio and poring over as many books, articles and internet blogs on the matter as I've been able to pore over. Nay, I accept without question that some truly weird shit's going on out there (or, at the very least, I take it seriously enough to question it).

As for the poor souls who've become targets of derision for experiencing the unexplainable, it's clear they've been through something that's so cerebellum-brandingly real, so horrific, so indescribable and so nerve-shreddingly painful that they can only respond in ways that some would term as insanity. I have no doubt, however, that a goodly number of these people are not bonkers. In fact, those who absolutely refuse to believe are more likely to be the crazy ones.

Oh, and in case you're convinced that I am a few bricks short of a load on this, allow me to reveal, in defence of my sanity, that I've been mulling over the Drake Equation for several years (which, for some, might well be proof of my potentially schizophrenic nature). In any event, the equation provides an excellent basis for thought and discussion on the possibility of life existing beyond Earth and within our very own Milky Way and as such, has its fair share of champions in the scientific community. Radio Astronomer Frank Drake first came up with it in the early 60s and while it's impossible to use as a purely mathematical equation due to several unknown variables, it's still quite a brilliant series of questions to consider when searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. In fact, the Drake Equation is indeed the very foundation upon which the science of astrobiology was founded. (Feel free to do your own research on this, there's plenty of great stuff out there for further illumination.)

As well, we would be fools to ignore the wealth of historical artifacts, etchings and fossils that can certainly provide a solid bedrock to allow for a huge degree of healthy speculation that we, are not, alone, or, as expressed by the central character in the terrific film Ejecta:

"We were never alone."

All the aforementioned conundrums I've expressed tie directly and indeed form a great deal of the content of this extraordinary feature film triumph from the visionary Collingwood Crazies known to genre fans as Foresight Features. Ejecta is, without a doubt, one of the scariest science fiction horror films you're likely to see this year.

Buoyed by intense, intelligent writing from Tony Burgess (Pontypool, Septic Man) in a screenplay that induces fingernail-ripping-and-plucking (biting nails to the quick is "pussy", anyway), plus an astonishingly riveting performance by one of Canada's greatest actors Julian (Hard Core Logo, Cube, Man of Steel) Richings, Ejecta is a movie that plunges you into the terror of one utterly horrendous night in the lives of those who make contact with aliens. All of them experience a series of close encounters of the third kind, though be warned, they're as far removed from the benevolence and joy expressed in Spielberg's grandaddy classic of the genre.

There are no happy-faced hairless alien midgets gesticulating Zoltán Kodály Hand Signals whilst smiling at a beaming Francois Truffaut in Ejecta. No-siree-Spielberg, these mo-fos are super-ugly and their presence induces the sheer horror that inspires drawer-filling of the highest order. That said, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is worth noting here, because Ejecta shares one very important element with Spielberg's bonafide masterpiece.

Obsession.

Close Encounters took its title and three-act structure from a system of extraterrestrial classification as posited by the late astronomer Dr. Josef Allen Hynek – the close encounter. According to Hynek, a close encounter of the first kind is seeing unexplained phenomena, while the second kind involves hard proof of some sort of physical manifestation from what was originally witnessed and, finally, the close encounter of the third kind being contact. I'd argue that experiencing even one of these encounters would be enough to drive someone obsessively to seek subsequent levels of encounter or, in the case of Ejecta, we have three characters equally fraught with obsession. One seeks answers to stopping his pain, another will inflict pain to secure answers, while yet another brings the obsession of an artist seeking answers in his subject. And forgive me if I get all eggheaded on you here, but there is a sense of Trinity that Ejecta shares with Close Encounters - both pictures have a kind of Father, Son and Holy Spirit manifestation coursing through them and it's this level of spirituality and obsession that bind the pictures.

Close Encounters, of course, charts the journey of everyman Richard Dreyfuss who experiences the unexplained appearance of something other-worldly and abandons his life, his job, his family – everything he holds dear – to obsessively track down the meaning behind this occurrence. In a tale steeped in Judeo-Christian resonance – from Moses to Christ – Roy makes a perilous journey, climbs Devil’s Tower and comes face-to-face with the answer to his visions until he, along with twelve (trinity existing within the square root) apostolic “pilgrims” ascend to the Heavens, arms outstretched in what is surely the most benign crucifixion-image (trinity) imaginable.

This sense of spirituality is almost divine in nature and makes perfect sense considering the aforementioned Hynek’s own belief in the notion that a technology must exist which blends both the physical and psychic. Furthermore, it's important to note that Paul Schrader wrote the first pass of Close Encounters and though he didn't take a story credit (something he regretted almost as quickly as he agreed to it and more so in the years to follow), Spielberg's film feels, deep-down, like a Schrader narrative - especially the combination of obsession and spirituality.

This is an unbeatable combination that Ejecta flirts with at every turn.

The journey Burgess's screenplay takes us on begins quite evocatively with some cold, impersonal Ascii-text being typed onto a hazy computer monitor:

Tonight the universe is no bigger than my head.
It's time to make room for some visitors.

Yes, visitors indeed. William Cassidy (Julian Richings), a conspiracy theorist living off the grid in the middle of some godforsaken Ontario hinterland is inundated with unwelcome guests - a filmmaker, an interrogator and a mean-ass alien.

Joe (Adam Seybold) is the most benevolent of the three visitors Cassidy receives. This ultra-indie one-man-show documentary filmmaker believes he's been invited by Cassidy to engage in an interview. When he gets confirmation that he'll be granted an audience, he's ecstatic since Cassidy is considered the "Holy Grail" of UFO experts. Upon arriving, Cassidy seems confused as to why Joe is even there, but as things progress, we understand all too well why the wiry, jittery recluse is occasionally addled. Unlike the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters, most of Cassidy's adult life has been fraught with the obsession an alien encounter instigates. At least Dreyfuss had tangible things to lose, but poor Cassidy appears to have lost everything before he could even get a chance to amass it. What he's amassed is a life of questions, pain and endless, seemingly futile attempts to let the world know about his experience. He's lost a life he could have had. That's scary enough, but happily, the movie delivers its share of visceral chills to complement those of the philosophical variety.

We are privy to some of Joe's interview footage which reveals Cassidy's credentials in the UFO field. At first, Joe makes the mistake of referring to the alien abduction Cassidy suffered almost forty years ago, but is sternly corrected that it was not an abduction. The aliens came to Cassidy:

"They met inside my mind. I could feel them, I could hear them inside. They pretty much ignored me, but they had this meeting and then they left. They left something behind, something inside of me, and it's been there ever since. When I'm awake it hurts, but when I'm not, it floods me with these nightmares. No, no, it's not nightmares, it's not a thing, it's a feeling, it's not pain, it's not fear, it's something else, something much, much worse."

And damned if we don't believe him. This, of course, is one of the scariest things about the film. Burgess has written a character that allows Richings to invest with such intensity, that many of the creeps and shudders we get come directly from Cassidy's brilliantly scribed (via Burgess) and executed (via Richings) dialogue.

It's often been erroneously suggested in a kind of knee-jerk screenwriting 101 fashion that it's always better to show in movies than tell and those who ascribe to this strictly are too quick to dismiss the cinematic power of telling. In the case of Ejecta, so much of the film's power is in the showing of the telling and believe you me, the telling via the words Burgess provides to Richings borders on the poetic and it's these flights of fancy rooted in the unknown that not only wrench the bloody bejesus out of you but are one of the contributing factors to the film's overall achievement as a genre film that utilizes the tropes it must, but does so with the oft-neglected poetry inherent in cinema itself.

When Cassidy explains the feelings he has because of the intrusive alien presence within him, he notes in desperation, that it's "the fear of the anticipation of this feeling [which] eats away at my life." Well, Jesus H. Christ, Almighty! Hand me an extra large pair of Depends Adult Diapers because this statement and the chilling manner of its delivered was easily just as shit-my-drawers scary as a beautifully directed set piece which happens at another juncture in the film where Cassidy and Joe hide in the shed from the alien that prowls malevolently just outside.

Structurally, the film benefits from yet another trinity in the three-pronged approach to capturing the narrative of this night of horror. Firstly, there's Joe's documentary footage, then there's the perspective of the military through various helmet-cams and finally, the present-tense unfolding of Cassidy's interrogation at the hands of the malevolent Dr. Tobin (Lisa Houle). The movie skilfully bounces us throughout these perspectives, yet we seldom feel lost in the proceedings beyond the manner in which the characters themselves feel lost.

The film is co-directed by Matt Wiele and Chad Archibald and while it's difficult to ascertain the nature of the collaboration from the finished product, the bottom line is that there's a consistency to the film's overall snap, crackle and pop which renders a picture that almost always grabs you by the balls (or, if you will, vulva), squeezing, scratching, scrunching and twisting until you feel you can bear no more.

My only quibble is with certain elements of the interrogation scenes. There's an automaton quality to the military personnel which is no doubt intentional, but often feels too "play-acted" to gel with the elements in the film which seem rooted in docudrama-like reality. I was also mixed on how the blocking played out during these scenes as they seemed almost by-the-numbers plotted-out, not unlike that of series television.

Lisa Houle's performance, however, is one of the weirdest I've seen on film in a long time and that's quite a statement considering that she plays opposite Julian Richings who is eccentricity-incarnate. At first, I was not sure of her performance and thought I'd have to repress it in order to enjoy everything I loved about the picture, but it eventually grew on me because it really is so out-to-lunch. Houle delivers many of her lines with a kind of sing-song quality and at times she came across like some genetically mutated pollination twixt a happy host on children's educational programming and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is an achievement. My hat is off to her.

Then again, my hat is off to the entire Foresight Features team. They keep delivering the goods and Ejecta is as strange, perverse, thoughtful, scary and darkly funny as their best work has proven to be. The film also gives new meaning to the old movie tagline "Watch the Skies" because here, it's not the skies you need to watch, it's the universe implanted in your brain and goddamn, it hurts. And worst of all, you can't necessarily see it. Short of sawing the top of your skull off and gazing at your glistening brain in one of those cooking show mirrors, there's nothing to "watch".

Everything is feeling. And that, is really fucking scary.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

Ejecta is an official selection of the Blood in the Snow Film Festival 2014 at the MLT Carlton Cinema in Toronto. The film is being released by Anchor Bay Entertainment Canada.

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HOMAGE TO PRETENSION!!!

Queen of Blood (2014)
Dir. Chris Alexander
Starring: Nivek Ogre, David Goodfellow, Shauna Henry, Carrie Gemmell

Review By Greg Klymkiw

So, not only is Queen of Blood a Canadian movie, eh, but it's a horror movie and an art movie, eh. This means it's artistic, eh. You know it's artistic because there are many scenes of people staring - at what, you never really know, eh, but that's what makes it artistic, eh. Did I mention yet that it's Canadian? And you know how you can tell it's Canadian? Well, because it is artistic, eh, but most of all because it is underpopulated and shot in a rural location, eh.

And goddamn it, this movie is just so bloody artistic, eh. There are lots of scenes with people walking across fields and through the woods, eh. It takes them a long time to walk. Sometimes they are moving in slow motion, eh. Actually, they're moving in slow motion a lot, eh, but you know, that's okay, eh, because it's like, artistic, eh. Oh and Jesus H. Christ, Mary and Joseph, I plumb forgot to mention that the movie has lots of fades and dissolves to mark the passage of time, eh. And I'm telling you, this is mega-artistic, eh.

The movie is not only artistic, but it is what they call an homage. Yessiree-Bob, it's a right, royal artistic homage. The whole kit and caboodle is in the spirit of movies directed by Jesus Franco and Jean Rollin. These Euro-Trash dudes were super prolific in the 60s, 70s and 80s and even though most of their movies were godawful (but artistic, eh), the sheer volume of their output actually generated a handful of cool movies. None of them were actually good, eh, but they were cool (and artistic), so that's good, eh.

The only problem with homaging dudes like Franco and Rollin - I mean, aside from the fact that their movies were awful - is that they were completely and utterly bereft of humour. There is nothing deadlier than artistic Euro-Trash horror movies that are humourless.

Queen of Blood, it must be said, is true to its roots. It's artistic, kind of awful and humourless also. It is, however, in the noble tradition of Canadian filmmakers referencing other movies. God knows, Guy Maddin, John Paizs, Astron-6, the twisted Soska Twins and among others, Lee Demarbre, all do this homage thing. The difference is that the movies they reference are not humourless and as such, their own movies are not bereft of humour.

Queen of Blood, however, is not only missing quite a few brain cels, but it has no funny bone - kind of like Jesus Franco and Jean Rollin, eh.

Now, if I had to tell you what Queen of Blood is actually about, I'd probably have to say that I really have no fucking idea, but that won't stop me from trying, because it's artistic, eh and I sure as fuck don't want you to think I'm what they call a Philistine, eh. I might be from the North End of Winnipeg, eh, but we're no dummies, eh. The North End gave the world Burton Cummings, David Steinberg and Monty Hall, eh.

So, here's what you're in for, eh. The movie begins with some chick crawling out of a pool of swamp water. A title card comes up and says: BIRTH. Heavy, man, heavy. Then, some bearded dude shows up wearing a sweater he probably bought at Target Store and carries some chick into the woods. I think it's the same chick who crawled out of the swamp, but I don't think it really matters. Eventually, we find ourselves in a cottage, or a farm house, or something. A chick, I think it's the same chick, is inside and the dude offers her a white dress, then proceeds to cut her hair. He's no Vidal Sassoon, but upon completion of the follicle shearing, he presents the chick with a mirror. With extremely wide-eyes, kind of like those creepy fluffy puppy dog velvet paintings, she stares at herself in the mirror for what seems like a very long time. Before tedium really begins to set in, we cut to a bunch of bees buzzing around and then the dude with the beard kneels before the chick who tears his throat open in slow motion with her phallic thumb, then licks the blood off her hand. She exits the cottage, marching into bright sunlight and directly into the camera lens. I accept this.

As the movie crackles along, we get ourselves some nice slow motion camera moves in the empty cottage. And then, another chick shows up. As this is an artistic movie, we need some more shots of people staring at stuff, so the chick stares at some horses while stroking her preggo-belly. We need more staring, so luckily we encounter a dude adorned in black at some church and he stares directly into the camera lens. At this point, the filmmaker astutely realizes we need a shot of someone aimlessly walking and in an extreme long shot a chick in white wanders - very slowly - through the woods. She gets closer and closer to us, but it does take a fairly long time. To break shit up, we're treated to a slow dolly shot along a creek with the deep woods in the background and leaves are slowly fluttering to the ground. The white dress chick finds a blue dress chick and smears blood upon her face, then turns and very slowly walks back into the woods.

I hope you're following all this.

Now the dude in black is staring at a field. Good deal, eh. Staring at fields is very artistic, eh, but alas he must stop staring and do some wandering. This was probably a good idea because he finds a chick lying dead on the ground. He does what anyone would do, he covers her body with foliage. Our filmmaker manages to infuse a few frissons into the proceedings by focusing on a spider dangling from a web whilst the pregnant chick stands in a barn with a horse and stares out the window. We get some throat tearing action followed by a really long shot of a barn which the chick in the white dress eventually and slowly walks towards. Upon entering the barn, she lies down on the straw and takes a nap.

Regardez! Regardez! Regardez!

A new title card is upon us: "DEATH".

Oh, by the way, we're only about 30-minutes into this thing.

The next section serves up a variety of walking around and staring in addition to some strangling, some endless Terence Malick-like staring up at the tops of trees, some dude in a stovepipe hat having the life drained out of him, a chick slowly crawling along the ground, the dude in black breaking his thumb and having some kind of epileptic seizure whilst a geyser of blood spews out of his mouth.

And guess what? A new title card: "REBIRTH".

Things are really heating up now.

The Sun is shining. The pregnant chick is staring. The chick in the white dress walks really slowly to the barn. She meets up with the pregnant chick, rubs her belly, kisses her, then appears to shove her hand into the belly and extract blood from it. Now the chick in the white dress is pregnant. She stares at a whole lot of stuff and walks into the woods slowly. Hell, she even walks into the water, whereupon she gives birth to some grotesque looking baby with its umbilical chord still dangling and smeared in bloody afterbirth. With babe in arms she walks through a yard full of junk and meets up with some old bearded inbred hillbilly dude who kind of looks like Santa Claus. The poor fella's just trying to whittle like Uncle Jed on The Beverly Hillbillies and the chick rips his throat open and feeds the blood to the baby, smiling like some psychotic Blessed Virgin Mary.

I won't ruin the ending for you, but it's a surprise shocker. It's not quite the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes, but by the standards of this ludicrous film, it might as well be.

The bottom line is this: If you can hack the absolute worst Jesus Franco and/or Jean Rollin Euro-trash horror films, then you'll probably have absolutely no problem sitting through Queen of Blood.

Besides, it's artistic, eh.

The Film Corner Rating: ONE PUBIC HAIR
*Note* The "One Pubic Hair" rating is hallowed ground at The Film Corner. Only two films before this have ever received this worthy accolade: Son of God(zilla) and Sharknado.

Queen of Blood is an official selection of the Blood in the Snow Film Festival (BITS 2014) at the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas in Toronto.

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In the middle of nowhere on All Hallows Eve: THERE WILL BE PIGS!!!

BABE IN PERIL: FROM DATE RAPE TO
ALL HALLOWS EVE HOME INVASION!

Berkshire County (2014)
Dir. Audrey Cummings
Starring: Alysa King, Madison Ferguson, Cristophe Gallander, Samora Smallwood, Bart Rochon, Aaron Chartrand, Leo Pady, Robert Nolan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Pigs get a bad rap. They're gentle, friendly and intelligent creatures. Alas, in the parlance of western culture, since time immemorial, really, the pig has been synonymous with a variety of grotesqueries such as filth, greed, gluttony, violence, corruption and most decidedly, just plain uncouth behaviour. With that rather unfair but common understanding of piggishness, it seems only appropriate that the damnable porkers abound malevolently in Berkshire County, the dazzling first feature by Canadian filmmaker Audrey Cummings. On the surface and at its most basic level, it could be seen as a straight-up babysitter-in-peril-during-a-home-invasion thriller and yes, it most certainly is that, especially if that's all you're looking for. However, it's not quite as straight up as all that. The reason it works so superbly is that the simple premise is successfully mined to yield several levels of complexity which add to the picture's richness. Most notably, there's the matter of the movie's virtuosity. Cummings directs the picture with the kind of within-an-inch-of-her-life urgency and stratospheric level of craft that, with the whiz-bang cutting of editor Michael P. Mason and Michael Jari Davidson's evocative lensing, yield a horror suspense thriller that infuses you with creepy-crawly dread and one astounding scare set-piece after another. That, frankly, would be enough to spew laudatory ejaculate right in the face of the whole affair, but on a deeper thematic level, Cummings and screenwriter Chris Gamble offer up a delectably sumptuous and varied buffet for an audience to gobble up with the ferocity of snuffling hogs at the trough. Berkshire County is an intense, topical, nasty, darkly funny and even politically-charged feminist horror picture in the tradition of other leading Canadian female genre directors like the Soska Sisters, Karen Lam and Jovanka Vuckovic. It's proof positive, once again, that Canadian WOMEN are leading the charge of terrifying, edge-of-your-seat horror-fests that are as effectively drawer-filling as they are provocative and politically astute. It's unabashed exploitation injected with discerning observational power.

HALLOWEEN HAVOC 4 BABYSITTER
PIGGLY WIGGLIES GALORE!

The film begins during a Halloween party in the rural enclave of the film's title. The gorgeous teenage girl-next-door Kylie Winters (Alysa King) arrives adorned in the sexiest Little Red Riding Hood costume imaginable. Heads swivel in her general direction, but none more so than that of the handsome Marcus (Aaron Chartrand), a hunky stud-horse-man-boy from the local high school. He, like the other small town, small-minded fellas is swine (of the male chauvinist variety) incarnate. In what's possibly one of the more disturbing acts committed in any genre picture of recent memory, Kylie is plied with booze, coerced - essentially date-raped - into blowing Marcus. Unbeknownst to her, she's captured on his smart phone movie camera which he promptly uploads to cyber space for all to see.

Though the film has previously opened with a creepy Kubrickian traveling overhead shot of the county's forested, isolated topography (a la The Shining), Cummings and Gamble plunge us into very unexpected territory. Initially, the horror is neither supernatural nor of the psychopathic variety, but a monstrous act of sexual abuse, followed by the insidious cyber-dissemination of pornographic images of said abuse and then the teasing, bullying and shame experienced by Kylie who was the target of the abuse and subsequent derision levelled at her by peers. Ripped from the headlines of a veritable myriad of similar cases involving tragic sexual abuse, we are privy to one of the more abominable aspects of contemporary teen culture. In Canada, the most horrific example is that of Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons who, plied with booze and gang raped on camera, committed suicide when the images went viral. What faces Kylie is so debilitatingly nasty that she's the one made to feel like a pariah - as if she were to blame. Even Kylie's repressed dough-headed mother blames Kylie for bringing scandal upon the family. To add insult to injury, Kylie is further estranged from those who should be offering support when she is practically forced by her mother to take a Halloween night babysitting gig at an isolated mansion on the outskirts of the community. That said, Kylie seems to welcome the peace and isolation the job might afford, far away from the piggish behaviour of her abuser, his stupid friends, her idiot mother and everyone else who teases and/or affixes blame upon her. A gorgeous mansion with all the amenities and two sweet kids has Heaven on Earth written all over it. Or so she (and we) think. She (and we) are wrong about that.

THIS LITTLE PIGGY CAME HOME!!!
He has a butcher knife . . .
and friends!

Pigs, you see, are lurking in the woods. Not just any pigs, mind you, but a family of travelling serial killers adorned in horrifying pig masks. And these sick fuckers mean business. Happily, Cummings and Gamble have fashioned a terrific female empowerment tale within the context of the horror genre. By focusing, in the first third, upon the teen culture of abuse and bullying and then tossing their lead character into a nail-bitingly terrifying maze of sheer horror, they, as filmmakers and we, as an audience, get to have the whole cake and eat it too. The final two-thirds cleverly and relentlessly presents one seemingly impossible challenge after another and we're front-row passengers on a roller coaster ride of mostly unpredictable chills and thrills until we're eyeballs-glued-to-the-screen during some deliciously repellent violence and, of course, a bit of the old feminist-infused empowerment. Joining a fine tradition of home invasion movies like The Strangers and You're Next, it's a film that, in its own special way exceeds the aims of those seminal works because it places the horror in a context of the kind of horror which has become all too real in contemporary society. In a sense, the film's target audience, teens and young 20-somethings (and middle-aged horror geeks who've never grown up) will get everything they want out of the picture - and then some. And just so we're not feeling too warm and fuzzy after the film's harrowing climax, Cummings spews a blood-spattered shocker upon us - one that horror fans have seen a million times before, but when it's served up right, we're always happy to see it again. So take a trip to Berkshire County. It's a fork in the road (and blade in the gut) worth choosing.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Berkshire County, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the esteemed Shriekfest Film Festival in Los Angeles, enjoys it's Canadian premiere during the 2014 Blood in the Snow Film Festival at the Magic Lantern Carlton Theatres in Toronto. It will be released in Canada via A-71 and is being sold to the rest of the world by the visionary Canadian sales agency Raven Banner.

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Drunktown's Finest (2014)
Dir. Sydney Freeland
Starring: Jeremiah Bitsui, Carmen Moore, Morningstar Angeline Wilson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"They say this land isn't a place to live, it's a place to leave, so why do people stay?" With these words, intoned matter-of-factly by Nizhoni (Morningstar Angeline Wilson) over the shimmering lights of Dry Lake, New Mexico, writer-director Sydney Freeland announces her thematic concerns right off the top. Drunktown's Finest will be a film about a place many of us will never know, but as the sun rises over a dusty highway and the evocative strains of "Beggar to a King" by the legendary 60s Native American band Wingate Valley Boys, we're drawn into an alternately haunting and vibrant montage of a Navajo reservation where life ekes itself out with the dull drip of molasses - a place of aimlessness, alcoholism, repression, violence and for some, hope that a future imbued with promise will be a dream come true.

Workshopped at the Sundance Institute and executive produced by Robert Redford, Freeland's screenplay focuses on three Native American characters: the aimless petty criminal SickBoy (Jeremiah Bitsui) who is trying to keep his nose clean until he needs to show up for duty as an Afghanistan-bound soldier, Felixia (Carmen Moore), a transgendered hooker looking for both acceptance and a way out and Nizhoni (Wilson), a young Native American woman raised by affluent white parents, but searching for her cultural identity. The script paints indelible portraits of real people and bravely tells their stories as seemingly disconnected pieces of an anthology. Freeland coaxes fine, naturalistic performances and her mise-en-scene presents a strong sense of place.

Alas, the script eventually takes a too-pat turn when the three characters' lives intersect and the film starts to feel too conventional in all the wrong ways. It veers from a compelling slice-of-life to shoehorned by-rote indie melodrama which, in spite of occasional moments of truth, falls short of the promise it displays in its first half. In spite of this, the film is well worth seeing for all the elements which do work beautifully. It signals a burgeoning talent and a close look into a lifestyle and cultural backdrop that seems all too familiar, but one in which we're still imbued with a sense of freshness and vitality.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **½ Two-and-a-half Stars

Drunktown's Finest is the Nov19 Opening Night Gala at the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival (WAFF 2014).

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SCREENWRITER - Robert Riskin DIRECTOR - Frank Capra

FRANK CAPRA'S MASTERPIECE
gets the glorious Criterion Collection
super-deluxe Blu-Ray makeover!

It Happened One Night (1934)
Dir. Frank Capra
Scr. Robert Riskin
Starring: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Jameson Thomas, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Arthur Hoyt, Blanche Friderici, Charles C. Wilson, Ward Bond, Irving Bacon, George Breakston

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"What she needs is a guy that'd take a sock at her once a day, whether it's coming to her or not."

So says hard boiled reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) to multi-millionaire Alexander Andrews (Walter Connolly), biliously referring to the magnate's spoiled heiress daughter Ellie (Claudette Colbert). Ah, how did it come to this? Then again, this is quite near the end of Frank Capra's romantic comedy It Happened One Night and Big Daddy doesn't flinch one bit over Peter's woman-walloping assertion. You see, near the start of the picture, Father Dearest responds to one of his grown-daughter's petulant temper tantrums by slugging her squarely in the kisser. A fat lot of good that did, though, since Ellie deftly dashes onto the deck of Daddy's yacht and plunges into the water, swimming away quite ably in her tight gown to join King Westley (Jameson Thomas), the dandy playboy she's eloped with and to whom Pappy Big Bucks is desperately trying to buy off with an annulment.

GABLE - at his MANLIEST
COLBERT - at her SEXIEST
Comedy & Romance - at its FINEST

But it ain't gonna happen. Ellie's bound and determined to be reunited with her man and nothing's going to stop her. Nothing, that is, unless she falls in love with someone else.

Enter Peter Warne (Gable) the booze-swilling, tough-talking, two-fisted star reporter who's just been fired from his job for guzzling more hootch than making deadlines. Our star-crossed couple soon find themselves together on a milk-run bus from Miami, bound for the city that never sleeps, that glorious dirty town, New York.

They detest each other. At first. They are, however, more than willing to use each other. Ellie needs a smart cookie to get her back to consummate marriage to Westley before Dad scuttles it and Peter, knowing Ellie's elopement and mad dash is big news, needs a lollapalooza of a story to get his job back. Their cross-country road trip, fraught with all manner of peril, offers up the biggest of all - they're falling in love.

Seriously folks, could anything be more perfect in its simplicity? Well, uh, no. However, let it be said that Frank Capra, one of the most untouchably great directors of all time, here displays every conceivable iota of his gifts with the ferocity of a whirling dervish on a never-ending supply of crack cocaine. The equally legendary screenwriter Robert Riskin (who wrote eight - count 'em - eight films for Capra) creates two of the most indelible, loveable characters in any romantic comedy - like, EVER! - and generates dialogue and conflict that's seldom been matched and never been beaten. Capra's trusty cinematographer Joseph Walker (who cut his teeth on Canadian Nell Shipman's Arctic-shot Back to God's Country and eventually lensed twenty - yeah, count 'em - twenty films for Capra) delivers some of the most astonishing compositions, camera moves and lighting ever committed to celluloid. Eugene Havlick, no slouch in the editing chair (having cut two of Howard Hawks greatest pictures, His Girl Friday and Twentieth Century and, yup, count 'em, seven pictures for Capra), sliced and diced the footage with an impeccable sense of both comic and dramatic timing.

The bottom line is that for all the picture's inherent simplicity, Capra and his collaborators brilliantly imbued the picture with levels of sophistication and artistry few romantic comedies have ever (nay, will ever) achieve. The movie is as rooted in the comedy of Shakespeare, as it is in the fresh and contemporary well it draws from and hence, is both universal and never dated, especially in its astonishing portrait of class differences (and how they can come together), the clear divide between man and woman (plus where their paths do cross) and the lovely, sumptuous forays into the beauty of nature under the stars of night where romance yields itself up.

It Happened One Night is perfect. Not a frame is wasted, not a gesture is superfluous, not a single word uttered by any character any less than sheer poetry and visually, few films have come close (and even fewer have matched) the delicate shadings, the magical pools of shimmering light and the utterly dazzling chiaroscuros that are as tantalizing to the heart, to the very core of human emotion, as they are to the naked eye, one which is gently forced to remain wide open to dine greedily upon the love, humour and sheer romance of this genuine masterpiece. One that lives forever.

THE FILM CORNER RATING for the Film and the Criterion Blu-Ray production: ***** 5-Stars

It Happened One Night is, beyond even a shadow of a doubt, one of the most compelling arguments against anything less than home consumption of cinema on the Blu-Ray format and, perhaps most importantly, how the very medium of home entertainment continues to be raised to the highest levels of artistry - yes, ARTISTRY - by the Criterion Collection. Not only is the brand new 4K digital restoration with uncompressed monaural sound lightyears ahead of anything generated for this masterpiece, but the utter care and dedication of the entire Criterion CREATIVE team in terms of the overall package is one they will need to use as their own internal bar to match, if not exceed. I can still remember watching the historic American Institute Lifetime Achievement Award TV special honouring Frank Capra (and hosted, no less, by Jimmy Stewart) when it was first aired. It's stayed with me for over 30 years. To see it again on this home entertainment edition of the film was sheer magic. The somewhat conventional 1997 feature length documentary Frank Capra’s American Dream is still, by the sheer force of its interviews and clip selections, as fine a cinematic biographical portrait of Capra as we're likely to see - at least for now. Watching Capra's first-ever film, the radiant and moving 1921 San Francisco-produced silent short Fultah Fisher’s Boarding House, so astonishing in its new digital transfer (with a gorgeous, evocative new score composed and performed by Donald Sosin), that I needed to see it again immediately after my first helping to prove to myself I wasn't dreaming. In addition to a lovely 1999 interview with Frank Capra Jr. and the de rigueur inclusion of a trailer and essay booklet (along with a gorgeous new cover design by Sarah Habibi and Jessica Hische), the piece de resistance is clearly the magnificent all-new conversation between critics Molly Haskell and Phillip Lopate, both of whom engage each other and us in their love and near photographic recall of the picture. It's beautifully shot and cut. We get a sense of this lovely piece being an exquisite short film unto itself - a kind of My Dinner With Andre-like conversation with a narrative arc, if you will, of complete and utter adoration (and the sort of egg-head-isms about the film that are neither full of the usual bushwah inherent in such tête-à-têtes and proving to be as vital and wholly understandable to movie nuts, eggheads and real folk alike). This is a GREAT Blu-Ray. You need to own it. Believe me, you'll watch the movie and your favourite extra features over and over and, yet, over again. If you own the disgraceful Columbia Pictures DVD (so ludicrously overpriced when it first came out), just turn the disc into a coaster and use the keep case for some DVD-R of your home movies. Oh, and if you don't own a Blu-Ray player and High Def monitor - get them - NOW! It's the only way you'll be able to see It Happened One Night when you buy the Blu-Ray (which you must do - NOW!)

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BUY IT HERE FOR CHRISTMAS FOR SOMEONE YOU LOVE!

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THE MANY FACES OF FRANK

Frank (2014)
Dir. Lenny Abrahamson
Scr. Jon Ronson, Peter Straughan
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Scoot McNairy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Francois Civil, Carla Azar, Tess Harper

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Give an actor something to obscure their best feature and then see what they can deliver. I had occasion recently to recall Jack Nicholson in Tony Richardson's 1982 The Border where he was forced to wear sunglasses in virtually every exterior shot. Given that Nicholson was playing a Texas border guard, this not only made sense in terms of his character, but it shielded us from one of Nicholson's most expressive facial features. This resulted in one of his all-time best performances. Given that by 1982 Jack's eyes and what he could do with them had already began to border on the cliched, we the audience were afforded the opportunity to see him render work that felt as fresh and vital as it had always been. It's as if the shades rendered the character even more internal - we had to work hard reading him, which made the proceedings rooted in a kind of reality it might not have otherwise had. Nicholson's movements became stiffer, slower and as he was playing someone who was on a slow burn, especially as he began to respond to the horrendous corruption and unfairness with respect to Mexicans sneaking across the border for a slice of America's pie of opportunity, we were able to almost put ourselves inside the character. Most importantly, we had to respond to what he saw without necessarily having a full picture of how to read him.

Michael Fassbender is easily as great an actor as Nicholson, yet he's not quite crossed over into rendering performances rooted in cliches, so it's all the more astonishing to witness his work in Frank.

Co-writer Jon Ronson had been in Chris Sievey's Oh Blimey Big Band once the eccentric musician-comedian frontman of The Freshies had established his "Frank Sidebottom" persona for stage and television. "Frank" was a kind of Pee Wee Herman-like persona who wore a humungous fake head that resembled characters in the early cartoons of the legendary Fleischer Brothers (Betty Boop, Popeye). Though the screenplay for Frank is ultimately fictional, it's based in part on Ronson's journal entries during this period.

The first hour of Frank is especially lovely. It focuses on Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) a young keyboardist/songwriter who is miraculously swept out of his suburban ennui by Don (Scoot McNairy), a taciturnly amusing road manager and plunged headlong into a band led by the title frontman played by Fassbender. At first, Jon's ignored and/or reviled by Frank's eccentric band members (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Francois Civil, Carla Azar), but when he invests his "nest-egg" inheritance into the recording of a new album, their disdain transforms into guarded acceptance. Gyllenhaal even grudgingly prongs herself upon Jon's root, claiming disgust, but partaking of it with relish nonetheless. Jon, unbeknownst to the others, has been tweeting his adventures and even uploading clips to YouTube. Eventually, the band develops a sizeable cult following and is invited to launch themselves at the famed SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.

Both the screenplay and Abrahamson's solid direction keep us delighted and enthralled in the odd creative process, and once the band heads to America, we're equally tantalized by the juxtaposition twixt the bucolic Irish cottage they're initially holed up in and the Big Sky of Texas. Though success looms, the film successfully shifts gears and we're plunged into the reality of the title character which, up until this point, has been mysterious to say the least. What's been funny and borderline (thank Christ for "borders") whimsical, becomes deeply and painfully moving.

Fassbender is the engine which ultimate drives the film. Saddled with his fake head, which he never removes, is what forces the great actor to utilize his innate gifts. With both his oft-muffled voice and body (as well as eventual sign language and verbal descriptions to convey his facial expressions under the mask), Fassbender extraordinarily delivers a myriad of emotions.

For anyone who discovered the world of true musical iconoclasts like Captain Beefheart, David Thomas of Pere Ubu fame and the multitude of genuinely alternative musicians during the punk and new wave phases in the late 70s and early 80s will especially be filled with a nostalgic glow that occasionally borders on epiphanies of the most hallowed kind. Frank is a film that seems featherweight, but its depiction of both the creative process and mental illness creeps up slowly and grabs you. Most of all, it doesn't ever really let go, long after the movie is over.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

Frank is a Magnolia/VSC Blu-Ray release that features a gorgeous sound and picture transfer. The disc comes equipped with a variety of bonus features including a variety of interviews with the director and pacifically on the look, sound and music of the film. A decent commentary track could have been far less all over the place with a moderator in tune to the film and its makers. The best special feature on the disc is a superb featurette focusing upon the sound designers and mixers. This is precisely the kind of detail that would have been ideal on the commentary track and even some of the interviews if they had been up to the level of this great bonus material. All in all, the film is so good that the film's ultimately the thing and makes for an ideal keeper Blu-Ray.

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A MAN WITH AN AXE TO GRIND
HAS A DATE WITH YOU
FOR THE PROM!!!

Prom Night (1980)
Dir. Paul Lynch
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Leslie Nielsen, Antoinette Bower, Robert A. Silverman, George Touliatos, David Gardner, Michael Tough, Anne-Marie Martin (AKA "Eddie Benton"), Joy Thompson, Marybeth Rubens, Casey Stevens, Jeff Wincott, David Mucci

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The slasher film exploded on the scene with a vengeance from the mid-70s to the 80s, "vengeance" being the operative word. Often involving a masked and/or fleetingly-glimpsed stalker with a bone to pick, this sub genre of horror was typified by young babes and hunks receiving their violent comeuppance at the hands of said killer. The scares were mostly rooted in shock cuts and the films' plots were coat hangers with which to hang a series of grotesquely gory killings upon.

Though America ended up popularizing the slasher film to almost ludicrously successful degrees during the reign of Rompin' Ronnie Reagan (the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises leading the charge), it was, in fact, the Italians (via the gialli and most notably, Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve) and Canadians (from A Christmas Story director Bob Clark and his viciously viscous yuletide thriller Black Christmas) who hitched their horses to the post first.

Canada's history of transgressive cinema surely begins with horror films whilst working in tandem with a first-rate tax credit during this period and the country was responsible for more than its fair share of slasher epics. Prom Night is one of the very best slasher films ever made. Directed by Paul Lynch, the erudite Liverpool ex-pat in Toronto, Prom Night couldn't have been more far removed (at least on the surface) from his John Grierson/NFB-influenced feature dramas The Hard Part Begins, a gritty dive into tank town country and western bars and Blood & Guts, a journey into the sleazy world of professional wrestling. In many ways, though, Lynch's foray into the slasher oeuvre yielded the kind of anthropological observation of the period and astonishingly iconic images of horror that could only have come from a genuinely visionary filmmaker.

In lieu of hundreds, if not thousands of similar films made since, the simple narrative of Prom Night might suggest something fairly by-rote and even by the standards of the time it might have felt as such, though if truth be told, my own first helping of the picture first-run in 1980 yielded a genuine barrage of gooseflesh upon my then-youthful frame. Watching it again on the sumptuously-transferred Blu-Ray from Synapse Films and VSC, the movie not only sparked fond memories of its almost-religious litany of visual frissons, but astonished me - almost 35 years after first seeing it - by Lynch's phenomenal eye for the details of teen life during that period.

The tale wrought, albeit somewhat familiar now (though being one of the first of its kind, no fault of its own), begins with the accidental death of a little girl at the hands of her peers. It fast forwards six years later to the night of the prom which would have been her first as a junior, if she'd have lived. With enough red herrings to throw us off the scent of the true identity of the revenge-seeker, we follow the rigorously observed preparations, social interactions and mating rituals of teens, parents and teachers alike on the day of the prom. Once the festivities begin proper, we're treated to a chilling check-list of blood-soaked killings until the film's astonishingly choreographed climactic set-piece involving the killer, one of his intended-victims and the ass-kicking gymnastics of 70s/80s scream-queen Jamie Lee Curtis (progeny of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis and star of John Carpenter's Halloween).

HOT BABES & SEVERED HEADS

All the above is courtesy of director Lynch, screenwriter William (The Changeling) Gray and story writer Robert Guza Jr. (30-year-head writer of, I kid you not, General Hospital). Prom Night is written and directed to beat the band and it paid off in spades. On every level, it's a genuine horror classic thanks to its talents off and on the screen.

The casting is impeccable. Though Jamie Lee Curtis herself is slightly long-in-tooth compared to her fellow High School peers, she delivers a fun, smirking, wise-acre sensibility to the role that sets her far apart as the film's genuine and rightful star. In fact, her performance here is so good, it far exceeds her pre-and-post Prom Night work in Halloween and Terror Train respectively. It's here where we discover the beginnings of her sexy, funny and breezy talents that would best be exemplified years later in A Fish Called Wanda, Trading Places and Perfect.

The youthful cast surrounding Curtis, comprised mostly of burgeoning Canuck thespians, in addition to the formidable presence of Vagina, Saskatchewan-native Leslie Nielsen as the principal of the besieged Hamilton High (to be seen soon-after in the Airplane and Naked Gun franchises) and a stalwart roll-call of Canuck character actors as various teachers, cops and townsfolk, Lynch populates his film with a first-rate cast which blows away most of the assemblages of onscreen talent in other pictures of the slasher genre.

Some of the more outstanding members of the supporting cast include the terrific Canadian character actor and David Cronenberg regular Robert A. Silverman, especially great as the cancer-ridden artist in The Brood, and here playing a creepy school caretaker, an absolutely hilarious David Gardner straight-facedly spouting some of the most ridiculous psychiatric mumbo-jumbo captured on film, David Mucci as an utterly repellent unibrowed teen stud, stalwart Canadian TV and stage actress Antoinette Bower as the unhinged Mom of the little dead girl, plus Jeff Wincott, eventual action hero and Broadway star in one of his earliest movie roles.

Last, but certainly not least, the absolutely ravishing, sexy, blonde ice-princess villainess played by a brilliant Anne-Marie Martin (credited as "Eddie Benton" and years later, fulfilling the real-life role as Mrs. Michael Crichton). Hubba-Hubba defines this morsel of erection-inducing evil.

Great Canadian Character Actor: ROBERT A. SILVERMAN
Creepy Caretaker in PROM NIGHT, Cancer Victim in THE BROOD

Given the film's not-so obvious low budget, its look tends to also make mincemeat out of the period's other slasher films. Lynch brings a borderline documentary mise-en-scene to the proceedings which situate us in a time and place that was more than familiar to those who saw the movie in 1980 and astoundingly, brings everyone else back to it via the naturalistic time-machine-like essence of his direction. The varied, somewhat bucolic locations of a long-ago-and-far-away Toronto (albeit adorned with American flags), treat us to the leafy lawns of Canada's first planned suburban environment of Don Mills, actual schools secured by the co-producer who was actually a high school teacher with the Toronto Board of Education and the major setting of the abandoned building of death (a notorious Toronto asylum) from the picture's creepy opening.

Add to this the superb interior details of Rueben Freed's art direction, the perfect-for-and-of-the-period hair (really BIG), the garish makeup (really HORRENDOUS) and teflon costumes (undeniably UGLY) and we know we're in a film made by real filmmakers who know that such details make for a good picture that's also commercial as opposed to jaded market-driven accountants who generate machine-tooled money-grabs bereft of style and artistry.

The choreography on the dance floor, as well as the choreography of the action/suspense sequences is top of the line and most exquisite of all are the makeup and special effects (both sound and picture) which accompany the delectable killings. Given the picture's attention to detail and yes, even character, the body count gets to have its cake and eat it to by being equally thrilling as it is sickeningly horrifying.

And lest we forget that all of this is underscored by the tremendous music from the team of Carl (Black Christmas, Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile) Zittrer and Paul (My Bloody Valentine, Popcorn) Zaza, the former focusing with Zittrer on the virtually Canadian-horror sounds-of-music from the period and the latter solely and astonishingly delivering the remarkable disco score.

Adorning Lynch's miss-en-scene is the piece de resistance of the cinematography by Michael New with its superb compositional qualities, effective lighting and superlative tracking and dolly shots, all without the benefit of today's ubiquitous steadicams. Especially delightful is the film's refusal to be afraid of grain when it rears its beautiful head - as much an effect of the picture's budget as it is the filmmakers clearly anticipating its inevitability and blending those lovely, dancing speckles perfectly within the film's narrative and aesthetic.

The film's iconic imagery, the black snow mask of the killer, the composition involving the slasher gripping his axe in the dark hallways and most indelibly, the never-to-be-forgotten shot of a gorgeous victim-to-be as she raises her head slightly above the top of a black science lab table until we glimpse her terrified eyes as they reflect eerily and murkily upon the surface of the desk, lit only by the exterior street lamps casting their glow upon the lab through the big, smudgy, frost-paned windows.

One of the many great tag lines that accompanied the picture's inspired marketing campaign announced:

"If you're not back by midnight... you won't be coming home."

Don't make the mistake of Hamilton High's victims. Come home, come back to the joy and genius that is Prom Night, the slasher film of a generation, the little engine that could and the one true crowning glory of the entire oeuvre.

THE FILM CORNER RATING:**** 4-Stars (film) ***** 5-stars (the Synapse Films/VSC Special Edition Blu-Ray)

For both fans of the film and eager students of filmmaking, the Special Edition Blu-Ray of Prom Night from the visionary Synapse Films and released in Canada via the equally visionary VSC, you simply can't go wrong with this mega-keeper of home entertainment packages. The 2K scan of the HD transfer in 16x9/1.78.1 is magnificent - so much so I doubt the film has looked this good since its first 35mm prints in theatrical release (in addition to both the original, gorgeously mixed-mono tracks and a 5.1 surround sound mix created just for the Blu-Ray). The extra features are a fountain of delights: Plenty of trailers, TV-spots, Radio-Spots and stills, all providing a glimpse at truly ingenious motion picture marketing; a good half-hour of never-before-seen outtakes, a short, but fascinating glimpse into the footage added to the TV versions to stretch it out when the shower scenes needed to be trimmed for primetime, including some excellent and genuinely humorous scenes involving Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis and Hamilton High's ditzy temp secretary); a decent feature length commentary track which includes some terrific observations by Lynch and screenwriter Graham. Alas, the pathetic non-moderation of moderator Paul Jankiewicz does little to rein things in properly and given Lynch's observations in interviews over the years as well as his moments in the disc's accompanying making-of documentary, there are many missed opportunities to delve more specifically into more practical and artistic aspects of the filmmaking process. The real cherry on the ice cream sundae here is the aforementioned doc. Entitled "The Horrors of Hamilton High", this 40-minute short film is obviously the work of people who know and love the film and it features anecdotal meanderings only when necessary (like Leslie Nielsen's on-set penchant for utilizing a fart-sound gizmo almost constantly during production) and a whole clutch of superb practical information on the aesthetics of filmmaking and storytelling that should have been on the commentary track if it had been properly moderated. That said, the commentary is worth the price of slogging through if only to hear the seemingly gentle-toned Lynch deride "Terror Train" director Roger Spottiswood for scumbaggishly going against his word to Lynch. Amusingly, Lynch refers to Spottiswood as the director of "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot". I could only have been happier if he'd added his own experience at the hands of turncoat Roger to that of poor Sam Peckinpah's when the Ottawa-born filmmaker ended up playing studio hack during the butchering of the masterpiece "Pat Garret and Billy the Kid". Well, we can dream, can't we? In any event, slight disappointment with the commentary track aside, the Blu-Ray Special Edition of Prom Night is easily one of the best discs of the year!

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Macbeth (1971)
Dir. Roman Polanski
Scr. Kenneth Tynan & Polanski
Stars: Jon Finch, Francesca Annis

MY MOM, MRS. RAPPAPORT, MACBETH and ME
a personal memoir & review by Greg Klymkiw

My late mother taught me to read by the age of 5. She did it with comic books. Not just ANY comic books, mind you, but via the wonderful Classics Illustrated series which adapted great literature in comic book form. At the end of every issue were the words: "Now that you've read the comic, read the original."

When Mom signed up a couple of years later for the Doubleday Book-of-the-Month Club - not for her, but for me - one of the "free" (of four) introductory titles she selected was "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare". (The other three were Pierre Boulle's "Monkey Planet", AKA "Planet of the Apes", "The Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson" and "The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe".) Being a sick puppy even at the tender age of 7, I chose to read "Macbeth" first. Of all the Shakespeare plays represented in those comics, it was the one story that ferociously consumed me. As a child, I was Regan in "The Exorcist" and the devil himself was the Thane of Cawdor.

My sweet, darling mother painstakingly read the play with me, both of us taking turns reading aloud to each other and often alternating roles. Through this process we oft-referred to the Classics Illustrated adaptation and Mom even bought a "Coles Notes" book (AKA "Cliff's Notes") to address stuff she herself didn't "get", just so she could make sure I did.

At the ripe old age of 14 I first saw Roman Polanski's film version of The Tragedy of Macbeth which my Mom took me to see when it opened first-run in Winnipeg at the Park Theatre on November 30, 1973, a good two years after it opened in the United States. As a kid, I'd been chomping at the bit to see it. Released in many markets as simply, Macbeth, I was well aware of the picture's existence as I'd started reading the show business trade bible "Variety" at the age of 10 and now, oh happy day, the movie was finally playing in our midwestern Winter City.

There were a whole whack of cool films playing in the 'Peg that weekend. It was the opening day of two amazing drive-in double features. In the west end of the city, A.I.P.'s The Little Cigars Mob featuring Angel Tompkins robbing banks with a gang of armed midgets and the jaw-dropping Ray Milland-Rosie Grier=grafted-together horror-comedy The Thing With Two Heads (both of which Dad took me to see on the Saturday night) and in the north end, Gimme Shelter and Monterey Pop were unspooling, but neither parent would take me to see those movies since the only music they enjoyed were Ukrainian Liturgies, Ukrainian Folk Songs, Nana Mouskouri, Mantovani and the Percy Fsith Orchestra. (The closest they ever got to Heavy Metal was Harry Belafonte.) That weekend in Winnipeg was ALSO opening night of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould, but as I'd already ear-marked it to see alone during my usual Saturday afternoon movie forays downtown, I asked Mom if she could drive me all the way to the south-end Friday night and take me to watch the movie I'd so desperately wanted to see. She agreed.

Let's place this in perspective, folks. My Mother, a nice, polite, North End Winnipeg Ukrainian girl drove her son across town to sit with him and watch The Tragedy of Macbeth, Roman Polanski's blood-soaked, ultra-violent adaptation with, I might add, Lady Macbeth parading about in the nude whilst delivering her madness monologue. I don't know a lot of Moms who would do this for their progeny, but MY MOM DID!!!

By my teen years, I had occasion to read "Macbeth" again - this time within the context of a North End Winnipeg public school English class under the divine tutelage of Mrs. Elaine Rappaport. She was the best English teacher I ever had until my post-secondary years, and even then, she held her own with the best of them. The wife of noted Rabbi Sidney Rappaport from the Rosh Pina Synagogue in Winnipeg (he passed away in 2009), she was one classy, snappy, sharp-witted lady.

That said, and not wishing to toot my own horn, but she soon found herself face-to-face with the Macbeth-like madness lodged within the heart and soul of a teenage movie freak. After the astoundingly brave act of showing a bunch of kids a 16mm print of Polanski's film, I immediately dove in on the picture's violence, linking it to the despair and guilt Polanski must have been feeling over the murder of his beloved wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson Clan. Years later I discovered that every Tom, Dick and Harry had made this same cliched, unoriginal and condescendingly simplistic observation.

So shoot me. I was a teenager. Besides, not a bad observation for a kid.

Though she tried to take issue with my comment, I knew Mrs. Rappaport was always ahead of the curve and I suspected, even at the time, that she mildly and politely disputed my precocious assertion so she could take our discussion away from a sickening murder that many kids in those days, even in high school, had been sheltered from.

I plunged ahead, though, and began recalling the specific date and explicit DETAILS of Sharon Tate's murder, in addition to the approximate dates as to WHEN the writing of the script and subsequent PRODUCTION of the film would have occurred. I then insisted that based upon the aforementioned findings, my point could not be disputed.

I'll never forget the sparkles in Mrs. Rappaport's eyes as she then launched into a brief elaboration of my point and then moved us on ever-so gracefully (and graciously) to discuss the differences between the film and play.

One week after my Mother took her final breath of life after a long battle with stomach cancer, I was reminded of her dedication to a precocious son's desire to read and obsess over all things "Macbeth" and, of course, the movies. I'm eternally grateful to her. My love for cinema, theatre and literature was both encouraged and indeed nurtured by her. She might well have been seen by the world as "only" a mother, housewife and part-time bank teller, but even as a kid I knew how she'd studied violin at the Conservatory of Music and eventually gave up a professional life as a musician to be a loving Mother and dutiful Wife. She had the soul of an artist which she saw in me also and did everything in her power to arm me with the means to never give up on my own desires and talents as she had done in the days when many women felt forced by societal pressures to do so. In the words of the old Russian-Jewish folk song, popularized by the Welsh songstress Mary Hopkins, "Those were the days, my friend".

Indeed they were.

In fact, the thought that we'll ever again see a Shakespeare film adaptation as truly great as Polanski's (and in fairness, I tend to include and acknowledge those elements Francis Ford Coppola borrowed for Godfathers I & II), is not something I take solace in. What I do accept wholeheartedly is that Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth is so "modern", so forward-thinking, so ideally faithful and intelligently interpreted that we do, in fact, have a film for the ages.

Polanski so wisely centres his film firmly and fiercely within Lady Macbeth's successful exertions of influence and then secondarily, that of the witch hags Macbeth encounters on the way home after his victories in war to fling himself into the loving arms of his wife. The good Lady's wifely influence provea to be too successful. Her ambitious husband's subsequent actions of lying, cheating, stealing, traitorously conspiring and committing murder in the coldest of blood is the stuff which all our dreams are made on. (Personally, I've always been aware of my own roiling needs, rooted as they were, and still are, in a kind of selfish know-it-all "quality" so that ultimately, the only possible influence I have to exert them, comes from me and me alone.)

At the beginning of the film, we learn that Macbeth (Jon Finch) has done magnificently in battle. The manner in which Polanski sets this up is simply masterful. Who will ever forget the murky skies overlooking the bodies and blood upon the muck, the poor flailing sod being ball and chained to death and the kind of mad horror in actor Jon Finch's eyes as Macbeth's otherwise poker-face surveys the damage/victory he's wrought.

This is the horror Polanski thrusts us immediately into and it's impossible to unglue one's eyeballs from the proceedings. This tragedy of Shakespeare's is indeed a work of horror and Polanski seems to understand this better than any other filmmaker who tackled the play (including, I might add, the rich, evocative, but fatally flawed Orson Welles version). When Macbeth has been named Thane of Cawdor by King Duncan for leading a successful decimation of the enemy (and capturing the rebel leader who previously bore the title), we get the tiniest glimmer of pride - perhaps even a smidgen of happiness - in Macbeth, this newly honoured young warrior.

Fate has other plans for him though. Encountering a gaggle of horrendous hags - witches of the most odious order - Macbeth hears and is infected with their prophecy that he will be King. Though he attempts to eschew thoughts of such glory, he won't have a chance against the most powerful witch of all, the extremely mortal, but bewitchingly concupiscent, mind-alteringly ravishing Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis).

Polanski's first triumph was in casting these two actors. Finch, many of whom will remember as the strangely unlikeable loser protagonist Richard Blaney in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, is such an astonishing Macbeth I suspect I'll never be able to imagine the face of the character with any other visage. Finch so brilliantly captures the various shades of Macbeth's intensity as it percolates slowly whilst his alluringly magnetic Lady places thoughts of being King in his mind - almost taunting, shaming him into desiring as quick an ascension to the throne as possible - one in which only murder can pave the way to.

Annis, of course, is the ultimate Lady Macbeth. She is not only stunning in every camera-loves-her respect, but she delivers her desires with the deftness of a fox and increasingly with viper-like stings which soon latch unshakeably onto Macbeth's manly psyche.

If murder be the only way, so be it.

Polanski continues to focus upon their relationship throughout until the narrative shifts into Shakespeare's astonishingly wrought parallel descents into derangement of the most fevered order. As Macbeth becomes more tyrannical, Lady Macbeth begins to slip into madness. They both lose their souls - in fact, Polanski emphasizes that it's their deep love, their bottomless pit of passion which is the unholy instrument which undoes both of them. Lady Macbeth's madness causes her to erupt into guilt so appallingly, deeply, debilitatingly and destructively molten whilst the crown-thieving maniac Macbeth fills his dwindling spiritual reserves as his soul pours out paranoia which is as catastrophic in its decimation of his humanity as the guilt is so ruinous to his lady.

When I first saw The Tragedy of Macbeth as a kid, I still remembering how I chuckled out loud, receiving odd stares from both my Mother and audience members. I soon kept my guffaw-bursts in check, but later revealed to my mother in the drive home after the screening that every single time Macbeth looked upon a potential enemy (i.e. murder victim), it reminded me of those fantasy sequences in the Fleischer Popeye cartoons when a starving Wimpy would look at virtually any living thing and imagine them to be a pig, a cow, a chicken - anything he could slaughter and eat. Seeing the movie again on the Criterion Blu-Ray I got the same thoughts. I'm convinced that Polanski intentionally staged, shot and cut Finch's glares at his eventual victims - not in homage to the Fleischer cartoons, but certainly with the same mad, darkly hilarious undercurrent which Fleischer imbued his own films with.

Not only are we tantalized with one blood spattering grotesquerie after another, but Polanski wisely has Lady Macbeth wander buck naked throughout the castle as she delivers her madness monologue. Let's not make the mistake here of downplaying Polanski's genius as a showman - he's the ultimate showman. He dazzles us with both prurience and a veritable rampage of brutality. Shakespeare was a showman, too. Let's not forget that. If anything, Polanski's delectably and suitably exploitative indulgences allow us one HELL OF A GOOD SHOW whilst at the same time, shove our faces in the sheer horror of Macbeth and his Lady's respective madness.

Seeing The Tragedy of Macbeth during one of the most emotionally draining periods of my life was exactly what the doctor ordered. Running parallel to this sentient drainage in my own life were also feelings of sentiment and nostalgia - I couldn't help but do the math as I faced so much of what I loved in a place that reminded me how these things of beauty were either gone or about to go and would soon be relegated, and in fact were actually being consigned to the hallowed place of memory.

The Tragedy of Macbeth as deftly rendered by Polanski did what any great work of art should do. Here I was, watching a work written over 400 years ago and interpreted in a version from over forty years ago and it touched me on a very personal level.

I thought, with the indelible sharpness of crystal that SOME women, like my Mother and English teacher, inspire the sun, moon and stars of the mind, while others, as scribed by Shakespeare, inspired pure NAKED ambition.

Luckily the ambition inspired by the two great women in MY early life was fully clothed.

THE FILM CORNER RATING for Film and Blu-Ray: ***** 5-Stars

The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of The Tragedy of Macbeth is yet another example for me of the genuine art of creating home entertainment for as rich an experience as possible. The 4K transfer was personally approved by director Roman Polanski and as such, both sound and picture are as mind blowing as one could imagine.

The extra features are a pure goldmine of information, insight and education. An all-new one hour documentary entitled Toil and Trouble: Making “Macbeth” includes wonderful contemporary interviews with Roman Polanski which provide a marvellous retrospective glimpse into his film from the position of having to discuss it over forty years after it was made. The doc is fleshed out with appearances by production executives and actors (including Annis herself).

The 1971 Frank Simon documentary Polanski Meets Macbeth delivers a historical look at the making of the film and includes footage of the cast and crew on set. It's thoroughly fascinating.

Two other extra features are so wonderful, they could have been the ONLY value added elements and I doubt anyone would have been disappointed. The first is Polanski's co-screenwriter Kenneth Tynan being interviewed by the great Dick Cavett in 1971. The piece not only allows us the privilege of meeting with the brilliant Tynan to hear his perspective on the process, but as per usual, we get yet another example of just what a great interviewer Cavett was.

Secondly, and perhaps the most vital document is Two Macbeths from the wonderful 1972 British TV series Aquarius. This is must-see viewing for anyone who loves film and theatre as we are blessed with a conversation about "Macbeth" between Polanski and the noted theater director Peter Coe.

In addition to the supply of trailers and a Terrence Rafferty essay within a lovely booklet, this Criterion Blu-Ray is yet again adorned with a stunning cover design from Sarah Habibi whose work is so consistently amazing that I almost wish she could just design every Blu-Ray and DVD cover for every movie I love.

Needless to say, this Criterion Blu-Ray is a keeper folks.

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America is so precious about its border
it kills thousands of people per year.
These are dirt-poor migrant workers.
They'll do work American WhiteTrash
won't do, yet they're murdered.
WHY?

Who is Dayani Cristal? (2013)
Dir. Mark Silver
Starring and Produced By: Gael Garcia Bernal

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I really don't get why America has always been so precious about its border with Mexico. Purportedly, the big reason is to make sure that "furriners" don't steal jobs from good, hardworking Americans. This, of course, is a big joke. No matter how poor they are, the vast majority of unemployed America's potential work force refuse to do the jobs illegal migrant workers south of Mexico's border are willing to do. In fact, a big part of America's economy would be deeper in the crapper than it already is without the underground workforce. Those who refuse to admit it are either lying or ignorant.

And yet, year after year, decade upon decade, America has waged war against virtually incalculable numbers of people who try to cross their borders - not to steal, not to make trouble, not to be a drain on the system - but to work. America is good at waging war. It's what keeps the rich getting richer and the poor to get poorer. It's how the rich dumb down its population. Even worse, it's how the rich cull the population while at the same time exploiting other countries for financial gain. Perhaps America's power brokers are hoping that the dwindling middle class in America will get so desperate that they'll be the ones to take all the jobs Americans (at least for now) refuse to take.

Whatever the reasons - and you can bet the official reasons are spurious as all get out - thousands upon thousands of "illegals" are captured, incarcerated and deported (or worse yet, just plain murdered) with untold millions of dollars spent on enforcing this perverse form of protectionism which is both racist and ultimately ineffective. They keep coming. They're poor, they have no work and America has plenty for them to do. And yes, an alarming number of these "illegals" die. Some are robbed and beaten to death. Most drop dead of thirst and hunger in the vast desert wilderness between the Mexican border and civilization.

Who is Dayani Cristal? is about the dead and I have to admit, this is conceivably one of the saddest and most infuriating films I've ever seen. Working with fine writing by Mark Monroe, filmmaker Mark Silver's stunning, harrowing and genuinely great film is a superbly directed feature documentary that gives us a tale of one such "illegal" found rotting in the blazing sun of the deadly Sonora Desert in Friendly Arizona - a state where many of the (mostly unemployed) American White Trash are the first to complain about migrant workers stealing jobs that they themselves wouldn't even begin to think of taking.

The dead man has no I.D. He is a "John Doe". His body will remain on ice until a dogged American forensic team exhausts every possible avenue to match a name with the body based upon any clues they can find. The doctor and his team who do this work display the sort of compassion that makes one, thankfully, realize just how wonderful the American people are and can be - that many are sick and tired of the horrendous totalitarian policies of the rich - and that if there was eventually some way to break the horrendous attempts to dumb-down most of the country's population that maybe, just maybe, there will be a possibility of genuinely returning the country to the principles and basic decency of its founding fathers.

Until then, "illegals" are treated worse than cattle sent to the slaughterhouse.

The film follows two roads. One involves the attempts to identify the man's body - he has one arcane clue - a tattoo that reads "Dayani Cristal". If the teams can - somehow - find out who or what "Dayani Cristal" is, then they might be that much closer to putting a name to the body and returning it to his family.

The other path involves star and Producer, the dreamy heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal who takes to the open road - travelling with other migrants from Honduras through Guatemala, Mexico and Arizons - hitting the likeliest route, places and activities the dead man would have. These sequences are a brilliant hybrid of drama and documentary that seem less "recreation" or "dramatization", but a genuine journey. The sequences include some of the most hair-raising sequences on moving boxcars I've ever seen, and unless I'm blind, it does not appear as Bernal is using a stunt double.

Though we feel we know what the answer to the mystery will be, it is impossible to be less than enthralled with both the journeys taken by the forensic team and Bernal. It's the roads taken by both that supply us with the reality that faces destitute foreign migrant workers every single day.

And though it IS a film that makes us sad and infuriated, we're strangely elated by the touches of humanity along the way.

The work of politicians and their bureaucratic minions on behalf of the rich are faceless, but it's the faces and spirit of those who struggle on that ultimately move us. That said, there is a sense that the real free and brave of America are those without freedom and whose only real wealth is their bravery.

This is highly polished filmmaking on every level, but it's also indicative of what is still important and truthful about great cinema. And, for that matter, America.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Who is Dayani Cristal? is available on Kino Lorber DVD and can be purchased directly below.

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YUL BRYNNER IS TARAS BULBA
Accept NO OTHER BULBAS!!!

Taras Bulba (1962)
dir. J. Lee Thompson
Starring: Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis
Review By Greg Klymkiw

“Do not put your faith in a Pole.
Put your faith in your sword
and your sword in the Pole!”
Thus spake Taras Bulba – Cossack Chief!
(As played in 1962 by Yul Brynner)

These days, there are so few truly momentous events for lovers of fine cinema and, frankly, even fewer such momentous events for those of the Ukrainian persuasion. However, film lovers and Ukrainians both have something to celebrate. Especially Ukrainians. Ukraine's revolution against Russia that began last year and continues to see Ukraine fighting for its life against the Pig Putin, are indicative of the historical events celebrated in the KINO LORBER BLU-RAY release of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba which recounts the long-ago struggles between Ukraine and Poland. The long-awaited HD release of this classic studio epic is as momentous for ALL Ukrainians as Saddam Hussein's execution and Osama bin Laden's murder must have been to the entire Bush family of Texas.

TONY CURTIS makes a fine Cossack!
Mais non? Mais OUI!!!

Ukraine's new, DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED President Petro Poroshenko should consider using Taras Bulba as a propaganda film for its military and people - this version, of course, not the recent hunk of garbage made in Russia. As a pig-fat-eating Uke of Cossack-descent, I recall my own virgin helping (at the ripe age of four) of Taras Bulba with my family at the late lamented North Main Drive-In Theatre in the sleepy winter city of Winnipeg. Being situated in the ‘Peg’s North End (on the decidedly wrong side of the tracks), everyone of the Ukrainian persuasion was crammed into this drive-inn theatre when Taras Bulba unspooled there for the first time. A veritable zabava-like atmosphere overtook this huge lot of gravel and speaker posts. (A zabava is a party where Ukrainians place a passionate emphasis on drinking, dining and dancing until they all puke. And not necessarily in that order.) On the blessed opening night in Winnipeg, all the men wore their scalp locks proudly whilst women paraded their braided-hair saucily. Children brandished their plastic sabers pretending to butcher marauding Russians, Turks, Mongols and, of course, as per Gogol's great book, Poles. Those adults of the superior sex wore their finest red boots and baggy pants (held up proudly by the brightly coloured pois) whilst the weaker sex sported ornately patterned dresses and multi-coloured ribbons in their braided hair. All were smartly adorned in embroidered white shirts. Enormous chubs and coils of kovbassa and kishka (all prepared with the finest fat, innards and blood of swine) along with Viking-hefty jugs of home-brew were passed around with wild abandon. Hunchbacked old Babas boiled cabbage-filled varenyky (perogies) over open fires and slopped them straight from the vats of scalding hot water into the slavering mouths of those who required a bit of roughage to go with their swine and rotgut.

I fondly recall one of my aunties doling out huge loaves of dark rye bread with vats of salo (salted pig-fat and garlic) and studynets (jellied boiled head of pig with garlic) and pickled eggs for those who had already dined at home and required a mere appetizer. One might say, it was a carnival-like atmosphere, or, if you will, a true Cossack-style chow-down and juice-up. However, when the lights above the huge silver screen dimmed, the venerable North Main Drive-Inn Theatre transformed reverently into something resembling the hallowed Saint Vladimir and Olga Cathedral during a Stations of the Cross procession or a panachyda (deferential song/dirge/prayers for the dead) at Korban's (Ukrainians-only, please) Funeral Chapel in Winnipeg.

Everyone sat quietly in their cars and glued their Ukrainian eyeballs to the screen as Franz Waxman’s exquisitely romantic and alternately boisterous musical score (rooted firmly in the tradition of Ukrainian folk music) thundered over the opening credits which were emblazoned upon a variety of Technicolor tapestries depicting stars Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis in the garb of Ukraine’s mighty warriors of the steppes.

This screening and the overwhelming feelings infused in those who were there could only be described as an epiphany. Like me (and ultimately, my kind), I can only assume there wasn’t a single Ukrainian alive who didn’t then seek each and every opportunity after their respective virgin screenings to partake – again and again and yet again – in the staggering and overwhelming cinematic splendour that is – and can only be – Taras Bulba.

All this having been said, barbaric garlic-sausage-eating Ukrainian heathen are not the only people who can enjoy this movie. Anyone – and I mean ANYONE – who loves a rousing, astoundingly entertaining, old-fashioned and action-packed costume epic will positively delight in this work of magnificence.

The source material for this terrific picture is the short novel Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, a young Ukrainian writer of Cossack stock who is often considered the father of Russian fiction. He was a contemporary of Pushkin and the two of them were both friends and leaders of the Russian literary scene in St. Petersburg over 150 years ago. Prior to writing Taras Bulba, Gogol (this is the popular Russified version of his name which, in the original Ukrainian would actually be Hohol) dabbled in narrative poetry, held some teaching positions and worked in the Russian bureaucracy.

Gogol’s early fictional works were short satirical stories steeped in the rural roots of his Ukrainian Cossack background. Evenings On A Farm Near The Village of Dykanka (Vechera Na Khutore Blyz Dykanky) was full of magic and folklore in the rustic, yet somewhat mystical world of simple peasants and Cossacks. The material is, even today, refreshing – sardonically funny, yet oddly sentimental. It even made for an excellent cinematic adaptation in Alexander Rou’s early 60s feature made at the famed Gorky Studios and a recent Ukrainian television remake starring the gorgeous pop idol Ani Lorak. Gogol’s vivid characters, sense of humour and attention to realistic detail all added up to supreme suitability for the big screen.

Taras Bulba is no different. The material is made for motion pictures. Alas, several unsatisfying versions pre-dated this 1962 rendering. Luckily, this version is the one that counts thanks to the team of legendary producer Harold Hecht (Marty, The Crimson Pirate and Sweet Smell of Success in addition to being Burt Lancaster’s producing partner), stalwart crime and action director J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear, The Guns of Navarone) and screenwriters Waldo Salt (who would go on to write Midnight Cowboy, Serpico and Coming Home) and the veteran Karl Tunberg (Ben-Hur, Down Argentine Way, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and fifty or so other scripts). This, then, was the dream team who were finally able to put Gogol’s Taras Bulba on the silver screen where it ultimately belongs.

For Gogol, Taras Bulba (in spite of the aforementioned literary qualities attributable to his rural stories) took a decidedly different turn than anything that preceded it or followed it in his career as a writer. Bulba sprang, not only from Gogol’s Cossack roots and familiarity with the dumy (songs and ballads of the Cossacks), but interestingly enough, he was greatly inspired by the great Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, of whom he was a big fan. This, of course, makes perfect sense since Scott’s swashbuckling adventures often dealt with Scottish pride and history at odds with the ruling powers of England. And so too with Taras Bulba.

The film (while deviating here and there from the book) maintains much of the structure, characters and spirit of Gogol’s work. It tells the story of Cossack chieftain Taras Bulba (Yul Brynner) and his desire to make Ukraine free from the oppression of the ruling nation of Poland. Though the Poles subjugate Ukraine, the Cossacks are willing (for a price and booty) to fight alongside the Poles against Turkish invaders. In addition to the pecuniary rewards, the Cossacks also get to use the Poles to help fight one of their enemies. When it comes to paying allegiance to the Poles, Taras steadfastly refuses to do this and, after committing a violent act against one of the Polish generals, the Cossacks all scatter into the hills to regroup and prepare for a time when they can go to war again – but this time, against the Poles.

Secured in their respective mountain hideaways, the Cossacks bide their time. Taras raises two fine and strapping young sons, Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Ostap (Perry Lopez). He sends his boys to Kyiv (the Russified spelling is “Kiev”) to study at the Polish Academy. The Poles wish to tame the Ukrainians, so they offer to educate them. Taras, on the other hand, orders his sons that they must study in order to learn everything they can about the Poles so that someday they can join him in battle against the Poles. At the Polish Academy, the young men learn that Poles are vicious racists who despise Ukrainians and on numerous occasions, both of them are whipped and beaten mercilessly – especially Andrei (because the Dean of the Academy believes Andrei has the greatest possibility of turning Polish and shedding his “barbaric” Ukrainian ways). A hint of Andrei’s turncoat-potential comes when he falls madly in love with Natalia (Christine Kaufmann) a Polish Nobleman’s daughter. When the Poles find out that Andrei has deflowered Natalia, they attempt to castrate him. Luckily, Andrei and Ostap hightail it back to the mountains in time to avoid this unfortunate extrication.

Even more miraculously, the Cossacks have been asked by the Poles to join them in a Holy War against the infidel in the Middle East. Taras has other plans. He joins all the Cossacks together and they march against the Poles rather than with them. The battle comes to a head when the Cossacks have surrounded the Poles in the walled city of Dubno. Taras gets the evil idea to simply let the Poles starve to death rather than charge the city. Soon, Dubno is wracked with starvation, cannibalism and the plague. Andrei, fearing for his Polish lover Natalia secretly enters the city and is soon faced with a very tragic decision – join the Poles against the Cossacks or go back to his father and let Natalia die.

Thanks to a great script and superb direction, this movie really barrels along head first. The battle sequences are stunningly directed and it’s truly amazing to see fully costumed armies comprised of hundreds and even thousands of extras (rather than today’s CGI armies). The romance is suitably syrupy – accompanied by Vaseline smeared iris shots and the humour as robust and full-bodied as one would expect from a movie about Cossacks. Franz Waxman’s score is absolutely out of this world, especially the “Ride to Dubno” (AKA “Ride of the Cossacks”) theme. The music carries the movie with incredible force and power – so much so that even cinema composing God Bernard Herrmann jealously proclaimed it as “the score of a lifetime”.

The movie’s two central performances are outstanding. Though Jack Palance (an actual Ukrainian from Cossack stock) turned the role down, he was replaced with Yul Brynner who, with his Siberian looks and Slavic-Asian countenance seems now to be the only actor who could have played Taras Bulba. Tony Curtis also makes for a fine figure of a Cossack. This strapping leading man of Hungarian-Jewish stock attacks the role with the kind of boyish vigour that one also cannot imagine anyone else playing Andrei (though at one point, Burt Lancaster had considered taking the role for himself since it was his company through Hecht that developed the property). The supporting roles are played by stalwart character actors like Sam Wanamaker as the one Cossack who gives Bulba some grief about fighting the Poles and George MacCready as the evil Polish rival of the Cossacks. Perry Lopez as Ostap is so obviously Latin that he seems a bit uncomfortable in the role of Ostap and Christine Kaufmann as Natalia is not much of an actress, but she’s so stunningly gorgeous that one can see why Curtis cheated on Janet Leigh and had a torrid open affair with Kaufmann during the shoot.

Taras Bulba is one stirring epic adventure picture. And yes, one wishes it took the darker paths that the original book ventured down, but it still manages to have a dollop of tragedy wending its way through this tale of warring fathers and their disobedient sons. And yes, as a Ukrainian, I do wish all the great Cossack songs had NOT been translated into English – especially since Yul Brynner would have been more than up to singing them in the original language. But these are minor quibbles. It’s a first rate, old-fashioned studio epic – big, sprawling, brawling, beautiful and definitely the cinematic equivalent of one fine coil of garlic sausage. So rip off a chub or two and slurp back the glory of Ukraine.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

TARAS BULBA is available on KINO LORBER BLU-RAY and can be purchased directly below.

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Student and Teacher: FULL METAL JACKET - as it should be!

"GOOD" is never good enough!
You are a worthless pansy-ass who's now
weeping and slobbering all over my drums
like a nine year old girl!!!

Whiplash (2014)
Dir. Damien Chazelle
Starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Melissa Benoist, Paul Reiser, Chris Mulkey
Review By Greg Klymkiw

"If you deliberately sabotage my band, I will fuck you like a pig." - Teacher to Student in Whiplash

So barks Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a jazz instructor at a tony private music conservatory in the dirtiest of towns, the glorious NYC. Fletcher is a character who makes Gny. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket look like your kindly old Grandma Apple Doll. There's no two ways about it, Fisher's a major-league prick-to-the-nth-degree, but his aim is true.

Do you think I'm fuckin' stupid?
I know you were "the one"!

He believes his students are the best of the best, but frankly, for him, that's not good enough. He demands they push their gifts harder than a prize studhorse slams a mare in heat. He demands true force. He demands self-inflicted pain as well as the infliction of pain. He demands greatness.

Fletcher might be bi-polar or passive-aggressive (accent on aggressive), but he knows damn well that he must be cruel beyond belief to be kind. Inspiration comes to the talented only by slamming their faces repeatedly against a brick wall, and then, like some abusive parent, offering words of solace (when warranted) and continuing the cycle again and again until the student either breaks through or is broken. It's the only way.

And God help you if you're just "good". The Gospel According to Fletcher (and frankly, any such teacher in the real world) is this: "There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job."

I personally believe in this philosophy and perhaps it's why I partially and so strongly responded to Whiplash, the searing story of Fletcher and his cruel, brilliant and passionate relationship with Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), a drumming prodigy who seeks to be greater than great.

Being the greatest musician of the
20th century is anyone's idea of success.

That said, I think my personal connection to this philosophy is a drop in the bucket compared to the nasty, rip-snorting drama writer-director Damien Chazelle has wrought with this relentless sledgehammer-to-the-face of a film. I've not been so charged during a movie in a long-time. In fact, Fletcher's ferocious demands and almost vindictive bashing of students' psyches, and in particular, that of the equally obsessed student Andrew, has the visceral force of a great vigilante picture with equally compelling cat and mice at the forefront - only here, the mouse definitely becomes no mere cat, but a man - all MAN and a real one at that! Simmons's performance knocks you on your ass, but Teller holds his own with the man of iron resolve.

NOT MY TEMPO

Add to the mix, gorgeously gritty cinematography by Sharone Meir (a delicious blend of 70s pulp and colour-tinged noir) and the editing of Tom Cross that has you breathless - almost from beginning to end. I say "almost", only because Chazelle's screenplay wisely settles down with occasional moments of tenderness twixt father (Paul Reiser) and son and the less-compelling, but ultimately necessary doomed romantic relationship between Andrew and a sweet, young thing (Melissa Benoist) who must come last on the lad's list of life priorities.

The climactic sequence Chazelle delivers is a musical equivalent to a great action-suspense set-piece.

The movie is not at all pleasant, but its very disagreeable tone transcends all pathetic notions of palatability and serves up one entertaining and provocative series of cinematic blows to the gut.

The Film Corner Rating: **** 4-Stars

Whiplash is released via Mongrel Media.

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THE 2014 TORONTO-BASED FILM CRITIC AWARDS (TFCA) BY THE FILM CORNER'S GREG KLYMKIW

This will be the first in a series of year-end Film Corner round-ups of cinema in 2014. Below, you will find the citations of excellence from me, Greg Klymkiw, in the form of my annual Toronto-based Film Critic's Awards (TFCA), or, if you will, the Toronto Film Corner Awards (TFCA) for 2014. The most interesting observation is that ALL of these films were first screened within the context of major international film festivals which is further proof of their importance in presenting audiences with the very best that cinema has to offer whilst most mainstream exhibition chains are more interested in presenting refuse on multi-screens of the most ephemeral kind. All the citations here came from films unleashed at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014), the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF 2014), Montreal's 2014 FantAsia International Film Festival and the 2014 Montreal Nouveau Cinema Festival (FNC 2014). In Canada, only two of the films cited have been released theatrically within the hardly-visionary, downright lazy mega-plex chain Cineplex Entertainment and even those films are being allowed to play on a limited number of screens in an even-more limited number of cities while ludicrous numbers of awful movies are draining screen time at the aforementioned chain's big boxes. It's not as if all the films the chain allows to hog screens are doing numbers to justify this combination of piggishness and laziness. Keep your eyes open, though. The films cited here are all astounding BIG-SCREEN experiences, which will hopefully find BIG-SCREEN exhibition before being relegated to less-than-ideal home entertainment venues. And now, here goes, the Toronto-based Film Critic Awards (TFCA 2014) from Greg Klymkiw at The Film Corner. Included are brief quotes from my original reviews and links to the full-length reviews from the past year.

American cinema, more than anything, has always exemplified the American Dream. Almost in response to this, director David Zellner with his co-writer brother Nathan, have created Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, one of the most haunting, tragic and profoundly moving explorations of mental illness within the context of dashed hopes and dreams offered by the magic of movies and the wide-open expanse of a country teeming with opportunity and riches.

Best Feature Film: Kumiko The Treasure Hunter

This is such a great film. I could have watched all seven minutes of it if they'd somehow been elongated to a Dreyer-like pace and spread out over 90 minutes. That said, it's perfect as it is. The fact that you don't want it to end is a testament to director Matthew Rankin as one of the young torchbearers (along with Astron-6) of the prairie post-modernist movement which hatched out of Winnipeg via the brilliantly demented minds of John Paizs and Guy Maddin. Blending gorgeously arcane techniques from old Hollywood, ancient government propaganda films with dollops of staggeringly, heart-achingly beautiful animation - bursting with colour and blended with superbly art-directed and costumed live action - Mynarski Death Plummet takes its rightful place alongside such classic Canadian short films as John Martins-Manteiga's The Mario Lanza Story, John Paizs's Springtime in Greenland, Guy Maddin's The Dead Father and Deco Dawson's Ne Crâne pas sois modeste / Keep a Modest Head.

Best Short Film: Mynarski Death Plummet (Matthew Rankin)

This is exactly the sort of film that restores my faith in the poetic properties of cinema and how the simplest of tales, at their surface, allow their artists to dig deep and yield the treasures inherent in the picture's soul. When a film is imbued with an inner spirit as this one is, you know you're watching something that hasn't been machine-tooled strictly for ephemeral needs. In Her Place is a film about yearning, love and the extraordinary tears and magic that are borne out of the company and shared experience of women. And, it is exquisite.

Best Canadian Feature Film: In Her Place (Albert Shin, TimeLapse Pictures)

Avec le temps/Before I Go is 12 minutes long. Director Mark Morgenstern evokes a lifetime in that 12 minutes. It's proof positive of cinema's gifts and how they must not be squandered, but used to their absolute fullest.

The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer by one of Canada's national filmmaking treasures Randall Okita, takes the very simple story of two brothers and charts how a tragic event in childhood placed them on very different, yet equally haunted (and haunting) paths.

Best Canadian Short Film: Avec le temps - Before I Go (Mark Morgenstern)

-tied with- The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer (Randall Okita)

Witnessing these events as captured by Sergey Loznitsa is a moving document of human solidarity in the face of corruption. Witnessing them as a Ukrainian, however, is to experience every beat, word and action as a series of epiphanies. Maidan is a film that places the revolution in the broader context of what is happening in Ukraine now, but in its simple, beautiful and staggering way, it is a film of considerable importance as it expresses how we must all choose revolution when the criminal actions of very few affect the lives of the majority.

Best Documentary: Maidan (Sergey Loznitsa)

The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow is a thorough delight and comes across as a Korean answer to crossing Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke) with Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles). It's certainly the sort of thing we don't get to see in our soul-bereft North American multiplexes. It's a gem of a movie and I urge all parents and kids to seek it out. They won't quite know what hit them, but when it does, they'll know they want it a lot more than Madagascar 3. That's a guarantee.

Best Animated Feature: The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow (Hyeong-yoon Jang)

Astron-6 have done the impossible by creating a film that holds its own with the greatest gialli of all time. It's laugh-out-loud funny, grotesquely gory and viciously violent. Though it draws inspiration from Argento, Fulci, Bava, et al, the movie is so dazzlingly original that you'll be weeping buckets of joy because finally, someone has managed to mix-master all the giallo elements, but in so doing has served up a delicious platter of post-modern pasta du cinema that both harkens back to simpler, bloodier and nastier times whilst also creating a piece actually made in this day and age. All that said, the following dialogue from the film says it all:

BLONDE STUD: So where were you on the night of the murder?

BLONDE BABE: I was at home washing my hair and shaving my pussy.

Best Horror Film: The Editor (Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Astron-6)

Buoyed by intense, intelligent writing from Tony Burgess (Pontypool, Septic Man) in a screenplay that induces fingernail-ripping-and-plucking, plus a great performance by Julian (Hard Core Logo, Cube, Man of Steel) Richings, Ejecta is a movie that plunges you into the terror of one utterly horrendous night in the lives of those who make contact with aliens. They experience a series of close encounters of the third kind, though be warned, you'll find no happy-faced hairless alien midgets gesticulating Zoltán Kodály Hand Signals whilst smiling at a beaming Francois Truffaut here. No-siree-Spielberg, these mo-fos inspire drawer-filling of the highest order.

Best Science Fiction Film: Ejecta (Chad Archibald, Matt Wiele, Tony Burgess, Foresight)

With plenty of loving homages to George Miller's Mad Max pictures, helmer Kiah Roache-Turner and his co-scribe Tristan Roache-Turner, serve up a white-knuckle roller coaster ride through the unyielding Australian bushland as a family man (who's had to slaughter his family when they "turn" into zombies) and a ragtag group of tough guys, equip themselves with heavy-duty armour, weaponry and steely resolve to survive. Director Roache-Turner mostly nice clean shots which allow the action and violence to play out stunningly (including a few harrowing chases). He manages, on what feels like a meagre budget, to put numerous blockbusting studio films of a similar ilk to shame. It delivers the goods and then some.

Best Action Film: Wyrmwood (Kiah Roache-Turner)

Movies are so often about dreams coming true, especially American movies and though the dreams don't come true for the characters in the Coen Brothers' Fargo, Zellner makes us believe that Kumiko believes that the film itself can, indeed, make her dreams come true.

Best Director: Kumiko The Treasure Hunter (David Zellner)

What the Zellner duo have achieved here seems almost incalculable, especially as they eventually infuse you with joy and sadness all at once during the film's final act. One thing is certain, they have etched an indelible portrait of hope in the face of unyielding madness.

Best Original Script Kumiko The Treasure Hunter (Nathan Zellner, David Zellner)

Screenwriter Matt Rager delivers a grotesque blueprint to director James Franco that plunges William Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness prose into the same lollapalooza inbred territory as Anthony Mann's overlooked masterpiece of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre and Elia Kazan's madcap Baby Doll. And good goddamn, I accept this with open arms.

Best Screenplay Adaptation: The Sound and the Fury (Matt Rager)

Steve Carell's performance as the eccentric billionaire is so extraordinary I managed to suppress Carell was even in the movie until the closing credits.

Best Actor: Foxcatcher (Steve Carell)

Fargo, the movie by the Coen Brothers, is not just the instrument which inspires Kumiko's desires, it's like a part of Kumiko's character and soul and represents an ethos of both America and madness. Kumiko is no mere stranger in a strange land, but a stranger in her own land who becomes a stranger in a strange land - a woman without a country save for that which exists in her mind.

Best Actress: Kumiko The Treasure Hunter (Rinko Kikuchi)

"If you deliberately sabotage my band, I will fuck you like a pig," barks Terence Fletcher, a jazz instructor at a tony private music conservatory. As played by J. K. Simmons, Fletcher makes Gny. Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket look like your kindly old Granny Apple Doll.

Best Supporting Actor: Whiplash (J.K. Simmons)

In Her Place quietly rips our hearts to shreds. We are included in the emotional journeys of a daughter whose child can never be hers, a mother whose daughter is everything to her but comes to this realization when it's too late and a woman who has come between them because her own desire to love and nurture is so strong and true.

Best Supporting Actress: In Her Place (Ahn Ji-hye)

In the ever-accumulating high winds and snow under the big skies of Minnesota, Kumiko gets a bittersweet taste of happiness - a dream of triumph, a dream of reunion, a dream of peace, at last.

Best Cinematography: Kumiko The Treasure Hunter (Sean Porter)

The editing of Tom Cross leaves you breathless.

Best Editing: Whiplash (Tom Cross)

Wrenchingly and beautifully scored by Alexandre Klinke, In Her Place is infused with a deep sensitivity that's reminiscent of a Robert Bresson film.

Best Musical Score: In Her Place (Alexandre Klinke)

The climactic sequence is a musical equivalent to a great action-movie set-piece.

Best Overall Sound: Whiplash

Blasting through hordes of flesh-eating slabs of viscous decay, they careen on a collision course with a group of Nazi-like government soldiers who are kidnapping both zombies and humans so a wing-nut scientist can perform brutal experiments upon them.

Best Makeup/Special Effects: Wyrmwood

In 1941, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were besieged by Russians intent upon ethnic cleansing. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people were rounded up and shipped to Siberian concentration camps.

Best Costumes: In The Crosswind

The visual beauty of suffering allows us to experience the indomitability of the human spirit and is finally the thing that gives the film its heart, which is in sharp contrast to that spirit decidedly lacking in the Russian oppressors.

Best Art Direction/Production Design: In The Crosswind

COMING SOON: THE FILM CORNER PRESENTS A VARIETY OF 2014 10-BEST LISTS BY GREG KLYMKIW

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If this happy fellow was after you in the morgue, it would not be ideal.

See No Evil 2 (2014)
Dir. Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska
Scr. Nathan Brookes, Bobby Lee Darby
Starring: Glenn "Kane" Jacobs, Danielle Harris, Katharine Isabelle

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I couldn't get Alfred Hitchcock out of my head while watching the third feature film by the Soska Sisters. In particular I was forced to recall Hitch's espionage thriller Torn Curtain. His picture has one of the most brilliant, harrowing and excruciatingly violent set pieces in movie history which, I believe, should be every young filmmaker's guide to what makes a movie great (and not just those who are making genre films). At the very least, the scene provides an example of the sort of elements most naturally-gifted filmmakers should always be thinking about.

The scene involves a mathematician and a simple rural housewife forced to kill a deadly East German Stasi agent as silently as possible in a farmhouse kitchen. Neither man nor woman have experience in such heinous shenanigans. The odds of succeeding are stacked against them big time and as such, the hurdles they face are rife with conflict. Even more importantly, Hitch makes the fullest use of the setting for the foul deed to be carried out, thus begging the question: if they're not killers and don't even have the required implements to kill, what do they use? Anything and everything at their disposal in the kitchen. (Just thinking about this probably places any number of horrendous thoughts in your head and yet, none of them will come close to the sheer horror and brutality of what's actually used.) The bottom line is that the scene must naturally use what would be at these characters' fingertips and be the sorts of things they'd need to use with very little time to think it through (hence, the aforementioned notion of not automatically guessing what's used).

Fuelling the scene thematically is Hitchcock's desire to make it clear just how hard it is for a "normal" person to kill someone - taking a life is not an easy thing, even if it's the only thing to do to survive - especially on the levels of practicality and morality. The cherry Hitch places on the ice cream sundae is that the historical backdrop is post-war Communist Germany during the Cold War. The victim is a German. His last breath will occur within a household item that's sickeningly symbolic of what Germans did to their prisoners in concentration camps.

You might wonder why I'm spending so much time discussing this ONE scene in an old (and even quite flawed, save for a few great scenes) Hitchcock film. Well, it serves two purposes. One, it places the Soskas, as filmmakers, in that wonderful sphere of natural born killers - or rather, uh, directors.

Though See No Evil 2, a sequel to Gregory Dark's mediocre slasher film made eight years earlier for WWE is clearly a gun-for-hire picture for the identical twin auteurs, they seem to have been given a great deal of rope to assist in the development of a screenplay that not only includes many of their trademark touches and thematic concerns, but, in so doing, they've also been blessed to employ their natural gifts as genuine filmmakers and as if, by osmosis, have conjured Hitch's spirit in rendering a picture that is sickeningly brutal, but also darkly, grotesquely funny and most of all, employs the most important elements of setting in order to reflect upon character, theme and just plain old terror-inducement.

It's a quiet night night in the city morgue. Good thing, too. Wheelchair-bound boss-man Holden (Michael Eklund) seems happy enough to let his star employee Amy (Danielle Harris, the always gorgeous scream queen) book off early to join some pals at the bar to celebrate her birthday while he and her significant-sniffer-around-her beau Seth (Kaj-Erik Eriksen) preside over the dull goings-on. Ah, but as fate would have it, all three need to hang about since an emergency phone call informs them that the morgue is going to be soon flooded with corpses from a nearby mass-killing-spree. Gosh, golly, gee! They're also going to be blessed with the body of the killer himself, the seven-foot, 300-pound, Jacob Goodnight (former WWE wrasslin' champ Glenn "Kane" Jacobs).

That's a decent stacked deck. To begin with, that is.

Once Amy informs her pals she's gotta work, they decide to bring the party to the morgue. Armed with all manner of booze and hallucinogenic comestibles, Amy's goth-and-death-obsessed party animal bestie Tamara (Katharine Isabelle), babe-o-licious and hunk-o-licious pals (respectively), Kayla (Chelan Simmons) and Carter (Lee Majdoub), plus Amy's dour, obsessive (almost creepily Oedipal) brother Will (Greyston Holt). Needless to say, this clutch of new characters add a number of interesting elements to the mix, but also beef up what will, no doubt be added slasher fodder.

Good, another stacked deck. Oh, and might I remind you, we're in a morgue. Feel free to do the math on what implements (and inmates) this joint will be loaded with to add to the inevitable party games.

Now, we get to the pièce de résistance of stacked decks: all seven feet, 300-lbs of serial killer Jacob Goodnight are not dead at all. The lad's merely been resting. Now he's ready for more naughty horseplay. Let's put those thinking caps back on, folks. It doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out what this bloodthirsty, mightily-engorged-penis-on-two-legs will have at his disposal. He dons a mask used for burn victims. Those, I can assure you, are bowel-movement-inducingly scary. Ah, but what else will this throbbing gristle find? Duh, it's a morgue. All manner of blades are available here and Jacob's only too delighted to pack as many delectable items as possible. He's a crafty S.O.B. so he finds a way of sealing everyone in the morgue - all ways out are locked.

We have a morgue full of babes, hunks and one cripple and a killer on the rampage.

Need I say more?

Not really, save to inform you that screenwriters Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby have imbued the tale with a whack of clearly-Soska-inspired character-quirks including guilt, Oedipal obsession, promise unfulfilled, the same promise buried deep inside and aching to be implemented in surviving, mega-grrrrrllllll-power, unabashed sexual abandon and empowerment-galore.

Danielle Harris has always displayed promise as an actress, but the Soskas manage to coax a performance out of her that's layered, sensitive and yeah, tough and sexy. Harris is always a welcome Scream Queen, but here, she displays acting chops heretofore only hinted at. I hope she never abandons genre cinema, but the Soskas have managed to create an atmosphere wherein her genuine talent shines in ways that a few intelligent producers (mostly an oxymoron, I admit) will be offering Harris a wide bevy of roles in a whole passel of different styles of pictures. (Hell, I'd LOVE to see a contemporary version of the great Greek tragedy The Trojan Women set in the war-torn east of Ukraine and featuring Harris in the haunting, harrowing role of Cassandra.) And let's not forget all the stuff Harris normally brings to the table. There will be kills in See No Evil 2, but there will also be mucho-ass-kicking, tear-assing around and narrow-escapes and rescues, a lot of it from the hot, shapely and physically fit Ms. Harris.

Hot Canuck thespian missy Katharine Isabelle (American Mary and Ginger Snaps) is allowed to go completely into the madcap stratosphere and delivers a performance that taps delightfully into her natural sense of humour, but luckily does not leave either her intensity, nor jaw-dropping-camera-loves-her sexiness behind. (Personally, I'd love to see a Soska remake/reboot/retelling of Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed with Isabelle in the Molly Parker role. If one does a careful analysis of such things, Americans have successfully remade a number of great genre films that wisely placed them within the context of varying political/historical contexts. If any Canadian picture was ripe for this, it'd be Kissed.)

See No Evil 2 is ultimately one scary-ass, intelligent and superbly crafted slasher film - gorgeously shot, cut and, of course, directed. In actual fact of matter, there aren't too slasher pictures even worth thinking about, let alone seeing. The Soskas have delivered one that's at the top of the heap.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

See No Evil 2 is available on Blu-Ray. Sadly, it was not released theatrically save for selected festival showings. But it's out there and definitely worth owning. Avoid digital downloads and streaming, though. It doesn't do the picture justice. Screw DVD too. Same deal. The Blu-Ray is perfection.

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Berkshire County
Dir. Audrey Cummings, Scr. Chris Gamble, Prod. A71 Productions, High Star Entertainment, Narrow Edge Productions
Pigs, you see, are lurking in the woods. Not just any pigs, mind you, but a family of travelling serial killers adorned in horrifying pig masks. And these sick fuckers mean business.

The Editor
Dir. Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Scr. Brooks, Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, Prod. Astron-6
Blonde Stud: So where were you on the night of the murder?
Blonde Babe: I was at home washing my hair and shaving my pussy.

Ejecta
Dir. dir. Dir. Chad Archibald, Matt Wiele, Scr. Tony Burgess, Prod. Foresight Features
There are no happy-faced hairless alien midgets gesticulating Zoltán Kodály Hand Signals whilst smiling at a beaming Francois Truffaut. No-siree-Spielberg. These mo-fos induce horror that inspires drawer-filling of the highest order.

Hellmouth
Dir. John Geddes, Scr. Tony Burgess, Prod. Foresight Features
To both the living and perhaps even the dead, old graveyards are as comforting as they are creepy. Screenwriter Tony Burgess seems to understand this better than most and as such, he's crafted one of the most deliciously insane horror treats of the new millennium.

Honeymoon
Dir. Leigh Janiak , Scr. Phil Graziadei, Janiak, Prod. Fewlas Entertainment
An extrication violates an opening of extreme indelicacy. It inspires, not only horror, but deep shame. Beware the forest. Beware the night. Most of all, beware the light.

Late Phases
Dir. Adrián García Bogliano, Scr. Eric Stolze, Prod. Larry Fessenden
Just after a full moon, there is a period of calm in werewolf country as the glistening orb settles benignly into its last quarter, new moon and then, first quarter phases. It's here, during this month of calm where one can best prepare for the next onslaught of a werewolf attack. Ambrose, played by Nick Damici, one of the best actors working in America today, is a blind man. That won't stop him, though. A lycanthrope must be taken out.

Oculus
Dir. Mike Flanagan, Scr. Flanagan, Jeff Howard, Jeff Seidman, Prod. Lasser Productions
During a disquieting evening, a Hunky Brother (fresh out of the loony bin) and his Babe-o-licious Sister (having prepared both of them for the worst), square off against an antique mirror which, during their childhood, transformed their happy Daddy into a hot-headed abuser and their Hot Mama into a willing victim of torture at the hands of mega-bunyip hubby-pants.

See No Evil 2
Dir. Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska, Scr. Nathan Brookes, Bobby Lee Darby, Prod. WWE Studios
It's a quiet night night in the city morgue, but not for long. Soon it will be flooded with corpses from a nearby mass-killing-spree, including the body of the killer himself, the seven-foot, 300-pound, Jacob Goodnight. The lad's merely been resting. Now he's ready for more naughty horseplay.

Time Lapse
Dir. Bradley King , Scr. King, B.P. Cooper, Prod. Uncooperative Pictures, Veritas Productions
Twilight Zone-like science fiction and horror dips its toe into the film noir territory of a criminal underbelly when a trio of young people happen upon a mysterious camera that seems to have the power to capture images from the future and a malevolent scum-bucket bookie wants his piece of the action. Mounting greed, sexual tension and backstabbing eventually ooze into the buoyant shenanigans. Genre-bending murder and mayhem aren’t far behind.

Wyrmwood
Dir. Kiah Roache-Turner, Scr. Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner, Prod. Guerilla Films
This white-knuckle roller coaster ride through the unyielding Australian bushland focuses upon a family man (who's had to slaughter his family when they "turn" into zombies) and a ragtag group of tough guys, equip themselves with heavy-duty armour, armament and steely resolve to blast through hordes of flesh-eating slabs of viscous decay and careen on a collision course with a group of Nazi-like government soldiers who are kidnapping both zombies and humans so a wing-nut scientist can perform brutal experiments upon them. Scary-ass thrills in the best action film of the year.

These terrific films were launched during a myriad of great film festivals like Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Montreal's FantAsia International Film Festival, TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival and the Blood in the Snow Film Festival. They are officially being released via VSC, Raven Banner, Elevation Pictures, A-71, Anchor Bay Entertainment (Canada), IFC, Relativity Media, Magnet Releasing and MPI. They have all, or will be soon available on a variety of media. They can be ordered by clicking on the various links below

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TRICK OR TREATY? Review By Greg Klymkiw - See Canada continue to hold the lies of the James Bay Treaty as truth in great Alanis Obomsawin film @ Toronto's 2014 PlanetInFocus environmental film festival.

THE OVERNIGHTERS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - FilmsWeLike opens harrowing documentary @TIFFBellLightbox

THE DARK SIDE OF THE CHEW - Review By Greg Klymkiw - ClosingGalaPlanetInFocusEnvironmentalFilmFest2014

SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - A Masterpiece of Contemporary Cinema . . . well, not really, but goddamn this is supremely enjoyable wad o' shark poop!

THE BETTER ANGELS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Malick protege's gorgeous monochrome rural period piece

INTERSTELLAR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Christopher Nolan finally achieves a smidgen of competence.

EJECTA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Solid script anchors alien thriller @ Blood In The Snow Film Festival 2014

QUEEN OF BLOOD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Official Selection at Blood in the Snow Film Festival (BITS 2014)

BERKSHIRE COUNTY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Opening Night Selection at Blood in the Snow Film Festival (BITS 2014) is easily one of the scariest, best directed and intelligently written horror thrillers of the year.

DRUNKTOWN'S FINEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Redford-produced Sundance hit opens WAFF2014

FRANK - Blu-Ray Review By Greg Klymkiw - Poignant, funny indie hit gets terrific Magnolia/VSC Blu-Ray

WHIPLASH - Review By Greg Klymkiw - J.K. Simmons performance and great editing ignite screen in searing drama which proves that "good" is NEVER "good enough" if one is truly gifted. In release via Mongrel Media.

The Film Corner's Greg Klymkiw, the Toronto-based Film Critic Awards (TFCA) in this the year of Our Lord 2014

Greg Klymkiw's TEN BEST HORROR/SCI-FI/FANTASY/ACTION FILMS of 2014 (in alphabetical order)