Richard Stanley is a drastically-underrated director and Sergio Leone enthusiast from South Africa whose work is ripe for rediscovery. I’d seen his 1992 film DUST DEVIL before, but not his debut feature, HARDWARE, which I happened to finally get around to during the same weekend I saw the new DREDD movie.
From where I’m sitting, there aren’t many movies as true to the post-punk 2000 AD aesthetic as these two movies, DREDD and HARDWARE, although my friends in the UK will definitely have more trustworthy opinions on the matter. HARDWARE is based on a short strip from 2000 AD, the same series from whence Judge Dredd arrived. It actually is derived from a Judge Dredd storyline!
This is the basic pitch: A trenchcoat-rocking soldier named Moses (Dylan McDermott) purchases the wreckage of a robot found in a post-apocalyptic desert, and brings it back to his sculptor/artist girlfriend Jill (Stacy Travis). While Mo is out, the robot activates and attempts to murder Jill in her apartment. It may visually call to mind the Terminator of 1984, but this guy’s got some even nastier moves than that cyber-Arnold had.
The deceptively-cheap movie — it’s stylish and relentless and looks like plenty more than a million bucks – is almost entirely about this battle, although it makes time for awesomely bizarre and/or disturbing performances by John Lynch (BLACK DEATH), Mark Northover (WILLOW!), and most unshakably, William Hootkins (STAR WARS, BATMAN, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) as maybe the grossest movie pervert ever. Iggy Pop and Lemmy also briefly contribute their talents, but with all that craziness surrounding, it all comes down to Jill and her fight to stay alive under attack by that freaky, ferocious robot. It plays out, under Stanley’s direction, as an intensely tangible experience, despite springing out of a totally bonkers sci-fi set-up.
HARDWARE is available for purchase from Severin Films.
Now here’s a strange duck: A hard-R horror-comedy adult cartoon feature from musician/director Rob Zombie, featuring the usual voice suspects and a couple surprise voices. The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto is a filthy, funny, deranged mess of a kitchen sink of a movie that will please a certain kind of person, ideally in a certain state of mind (if you get me), and will turn off the straight-laced. For my part, I’m just glad that something like this exists – it’s comfortable knowing that there’s a place in the world for adult animation, even if it’s not exactly my flavor.
The story, as much as I can collect it all in one column, goes a little something like this: El Superbeasto (voiced by comedian and co-writer Tom Papa) is an insanely horny luchador – somewhere between Santo and Dirk Diggler – who is the big cheese in the titular Haunted World, a geek-dream dimension where zombies and werewolves and strippers coexist in constant hysteria. As soon as El Superbeasto falls for the town’s alpha-stripper, Velvet Von Black (voiced by Rosario Dawson!), she is abducted by the misleadingly named Doctor Satan (voiced by Paul Giamatti!) and his long-suffering gorilla henchman. El Superbeasto is aided in his rescue attempt by his younger sister, Suzi X (Sheri Moon Zombie) and her hopelessly infatuated robot sidekick (Brian Posehn.) At the end of the day, this is all about high school: Doctor Satan was the school nerd, in love with the head cheerleader (Suzi X) and constantly tormented by the school bully (El Superbeasto.) Doctor Satan will have his revenge, and hump it too!
El Superbeasto is fairly described as Heavy Metal meets Ren & Stimpy (the design, pace, and much of the voicework is heavily indebted to John Kricfalusi’s surreal/absurd classic series.) It’s also probably fairly described as Rob Zombie’s most fun movie, even his best. I’m on record as saying that I root for Rob Zombie’s cinematic endeavors – he loves a lot of the same things I love (rock n’ roll, old horror movies, pretty girls, badass character actors, monsters, and mayhem) and he brings a competitive energy and enthusiasm to the horror genre – but his movies have thus far turned out unnecessarily unpleasant, even sadistic, in finished form. (Haven’t seen his Halloween 2, but that goes back to the old cliché about not wanting to put my hand back on the hot stove that burned me once before.)
El Superbeasto, thankfully, plays out differently. It has its excesses – who am I kidding? It’s ALL excess! But there’s a sense of gleeful anarchy and a swinging swagger that permeates the whole thing and makes it never less than watchable. For me, there were two elements to elevate it:
1) The voice work by the unconventionally wonderful movie stars Paul Giamatti and Rosario Dawson is unconventionally wonderful. If I didn’t see from the credits that they’d be featured, I might never have guessed. Is there such a thing as Method voice acting? Giamatti and Rosario are completely and unrecognizably committed to their wackadoo characters, and the results are weird and funny, truly superior voice acting.
2) The movie features several original songs by Hard N’ Phirm, the comedy team of Chris Hardwick and Mike Phirman. The songs are by far the funniest part of the movie – they’re exactly the right tone and vibe and they smartly comment on the action and the more blatantly exploitative parts of the story. It makes certain scenes that might have been creepy to watch hilariously creepy. I’ve seen these guys do their thing before live and they’re great – it was a fun surprise to enjoy their contributions here.
So whatever it says about me, I watched the whole damn thing. I probably wouldn’t watch it again but I’m happy to have watched it once. It’s crazy in its own very specific way and I can respect that. However: If you’re the kind of person who is offended by cartoon boobs or cartoon sex, be forewarned. Stay away. It’s understandable, but you won’t want to see what happens here. As for the rest of you maniacs? Eat, drink, and be merry.
You guys know me pretty well at this point, so you can probably guess where I’d stand on the remake without even reading a word from me. It’s relatively simple. If this movie truly wanted me to love it, it would have called up the Jessica Lucas character to take on the role of “the new Ash.”
Since they didn’t, I not only need to start up a new tally for 2013, but I also had to get a little vicious.
I’m never happier than when I’m writing about old horror movies. Hopefully that’s true for you too, because as of today, you can read what I wrote about a pair of old horror movies over at Daily Grindhouse!
Well, the conceivable happened, and I fell behind on my 31-day horror project. No drawn-out equivocating here: A real writer makes deadlines, even the ones he sets for himself, and a real man doesn’t make excuses, but then there’s the whole matter of reality to contend with, and the way that each one of us handles our particular reality with a variety of temperaments. Life doesn’t stop punching you in the gut just because you took on a writing project in your spare time, and as I should have expected, life punched me in the gut a few days back and I didn’t much feel like writing about anything for a while after that.
But I’m getting back on that old gray horse and mounting up for a ride through the last week of this thing. Y’all will have your thirty-one, I promise it, and I may not even stop there, but don’t let me go making promises. The point is, I’m back on it. Good thing the subject is horror. It fits the mood. See, I think what horror aficionados know deep down is that this entire passion for the genre comes out of wrestling with the idea of death. I spend a lot of time looking for connections between stories, looking for the common themes and the deviations. Well the one thing you can always reckon on with a good horror tale, whether it be about ghosts or vampires or zombies or werewolves or man-eating animals or monsters of the more human variety, is that they all have something to do with death. Sometimes death is victorious at the end, and sometimes death is kept at bay. Either way, whether it’s sooner or later, that one truth is for damn sure: Ain’t none of us getting out of this thing alive. Best we can do is reconcile ourselves to that fact, enjoy it as long as we can, and watch a shit-ton of movies if that’s among the things we enjoy most. It is for me.
A recommendation: If you want daily updates and engaging commentary, please check out my friend Ryan McNeely at his site — he’s been writing about a movie a day straight through since January and it’s really great.
Any survey of worldwide horror cinema, even one as haphazard as mine has been, would be incomplete without mention of the Hammer horror films, so let’s give them their due:
Hammer Film Productions was a British production company whose heyday was the late 1950s to the late 1970s. The Hammer brand has actually returned recently, under new management, but for the purposes of this article I’m going to stick to the old-school. Hammer made all kinds of movies – from science fiction to comedy to prehistoric adventure – ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., with Raquel Welch and Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs, is a personal favorite – but they are most renowned for the series of horror films that they churned out with methodical regularity.
Hammer was something of a repertory company for those years. You see many of the same names cropping up from film to film: Terence Fisher (director), Jack Asher (cinematographer), Jimmy Sangster (writer, who passed away in August of 2011), Anthony Hinds (writer), Michael Carreras (producer), and most famously, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, the stars who topline the Hammer film I’d like to discuss today…
HORROR OF DRACULA, originally released under the more simple but often-used title of DRACULA, is one of the earliest and probably best Hammer horror movies. It is the one that introduced Christopher Lee and the late Peter Cushing to their most famous roles – Count Dracula and Professor Van Helsing, respectively – and in doing so, made them kings to future generations of brilliant film fanatics as diverse in talent and influence as George Lucas, Joe Dante, Peter Jackson, and Tim Burton (all of whom cast either of the two repeatedly, in their own films). HORROR OF DRACULA also co-stars a young Michael Gough, who later appeared in Burton’s BATMAN and SLEEPY HOLLOW.
Horror Of Dracula is considered by many horror fans to be one of the truer adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel, which is ironic because it takes so many liberties with the original plot in order to adapt it to film. As in the novel, the story begins with Jonathan Harker travelling to Transylvania to meet with the mysterious Count, but under the guise of starting work as his librarian, not handling his real estate affairs. Harker is really there with the intention of killing the evil Count (already a huge change from the book), but when given the chance he inexplicably chooses to stake the Count’s Bride rather than the Count himself. Big mistake: Dracula kills Harker. (A massive change from the book.)
Van Helsing tracks down Dracula’s castle, arriving to find Harker turned into a vampire. He dispatches his friend off-camera (though the Hammer films didn’t shy away from blood and murder on screen, they also used a fair amount of class and restraint) and heads back to London to inform Mina, who in this telling is not Harker’s fiancée. Instead, Lucy is. (More changes!) As in the novel, Lucy is turned vampire by Dracula, although by the time she appears in the movie, she’s already been bitten. She eventually becomes a full-on vampire and Van Helsing has to handle that also.
I could go on and on about the changes from the book – Dr. Seward’s role is reduced to a couple cameos as the family doctor, there is no Renfield, etc. – but I think what the scholars mean when they applaud HORROR OF DRACULA and its fidelity to Stoker’s novel is that the spirit of the adaptation feels right. Dracula is the most compelling character in the movie – with a surprising minimum of dialogue, Christopher Lee plays him as a tall, dashing figure; ominous and threatening to men yet somehow magnetic to women (maybe he’s threatening to men because of that magnetism for women).
Moreover, Van Helsing is the true protagonist of the film, and a perfect counterbalance to Lee’s Dracula. Dracula in this film is like a coiled snake or some other dangerous animal – he’s silent and still, bereft of emotion until he flares up and strikes at his victims – while in contrast, Van Helsing is an emotional figure, constantly fighting a horrific battle and laboring under the weight of constant loss, but he carries himself with the most English reserve. I like the scene where Van Helsing sits in his babe lair, propped up with the most rigid posture, listening to audio tapes of his own voice, dictating vampire-killing methodology. It’s a lonely life.
Also, a lot of the changes make sense, at least for a movie not much longer than an hour. Van Helsing is always the most important of Dracula’s arch-enemies, and this particular story doesn’t suffer too much from the absence of Dr. Seward or the American, Quincey Morris. Michael Gough’s character, Mina’s husband, is named Arthur, so in that way he’s a stand-in for the novel’s Holmwood. Since a team eventually assembles by the novel’s latter half, it makes a kind of sense that Van Helsing and Harker were a vampire-fighting team. At the very least, it’s a creative, thoughtful change rather than a travesty. I could have done without the extra-long, extra-shticky scene at the shipping clerk’s office, but maybe that’s a mid-century British cinema thing.
Overall, HORROR OF DRACULA is a cool, classy Dracula film, and a great gateway into the Hammer world.
This essay originally appeared here last year, but I’m re-running it because Turner Classic Movies is showing HORROR OF DRACULA this evening. Also airing will be 1957′s THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1959′s THE MUMMY, and 1964′s THE GORGON, all starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. It all starts tonight at 8pm! (Check local listings just to be sure.)
THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN is a phenomenal oddity, even amongst the ranks of indie-horror and little-known cult movies. Producer/director Charles B. Pierce and his writing partner, Earl E. Smith, crafted the story from a real-life occurence, the “Texarkana Moonlight Murders” committed by a serial killer who was never caught. Pierce and Smith are slightly better known for their 1972 Bigfoot movie, THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, which took a similar halfway-a-documentary approach to material even less rooted in fact. Pierce also worked as a set decorator on films like COFFY, DILLINGER, BLACK BELT JONES, and THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. He reportedly became friendly with Clint Eastwood, to the point that he supplied the story for SUDDEN IMPACT (the Dirty Harry movie with Sondra Locke) and arguably even the line, “Go ahead, make my day.” So we’re talking about one of those mildly-obscure but noteworthy figures — not everyone can be Eastwood-famous, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of filmmakers with stories to tell, both onscreen and behind-the-scenes.
What makes THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN such an endearingly bizarre curiosity is the tone of the movie. It plays something like a prehistoric America’s Most Wanted episode, only spookier, sillier, and way weirder than any straight-faced reality-TV true-crime documentary ever. It also falls in an interesting zone on the continuum of essential horror films of the 1970s, coming two years after THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE — with its deadpan John Larroquette narration — and two years before HALLOWEEN, with its unforgettable masked killer. Either inspiring or predicting the canny casting choices of HALLOWEEN, THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN is filled with unknown actors, with two significant exceptions. In HALLOWEEN, the veteran character actor pursuing the killer was Donald Pleasance. In THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, it’s sturdy Western star Ben Johnson — oddly enough, playing a Latin character, Captain Morales of the Texas Rangers. In HALLOWEEN, the ingenue with an attention-getting name was Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. In THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, it’s Dawn Wells…. You know, Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island. I think I mentioned this movie isn’t entirely serious. (Mary Ann is actually not at all bad in the movie though!)
THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN shuttles through genres and tones frequently throughout its brief running time. Some parts, the ones that establish the towns where the killings took place, are as dry yet nostalgically appealing as a 1950s educational film. Occasionally, the tone veers wildly into ridiculous farce, such as when a deputy (played by Charles Pierce himself) draws the short straw and is forced to dress as a woman in an ill-advised attempt to draw out the killer.
But the actual horror-movie scenes are by far the most memorable. The scenes where the masked killer stalks and attacks his victims have a sloppy, unpredictable energy and a weirdly-detailed specificity. There’s a scene where the hooded murderer straps a woman’s arms around a tree face-first, ties a knife to a trombone, and starts stabbing her in the back as if he’s playing an instrument. It’d be funny if it weren’t so absurdly horrible.
Oddest of all, the climactic scene of the film recalls nothing so much as a Western. (The film’s title has that vague vibe also, come to think of it.) Towards the end of the movie, Ben Johnson’s Captain Morales and his sidekick Ramsey (Andrew Prine) spot the Phantom Killer in broad daylight and chase him through the woods until they reach train tracks. They get a few shots off, but the killer uses the passing train to escape. I don’t know about you, but the last time I saw Ben Johnson near a moving train it was in THE WILD BUNCH. And that was based remotely off of real life too. What’s so intriguing about the invocation of Western tropes is that, THE WILD BUNCH excluded, many Westerns ended in triumph for their heroes. This surely doesn’t. The Phantom Killer escapes, and as the movie tells us, he was never caught. While the movie takes its liberties with fact, this part of the account of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders is resolutely true.
Somehow, even after decades of true-crime accounts since, the experience of watching THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN manages to make the knowledge of this cosmic injustice feel haunting and eerie. It’s one of the most oddly genial serial-killer movies you’ll ever see, but that ingratiating quality can be disarming. It’s still a pretty damn freaky little movie.
THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN is coming to Blu-Ray soon, courtesy of Scream Factory (the horror division of the DVD label Shout Factory.)
Breeze through my small town on Twitter: @jonnyabomb
BLACK DEATH is a few different kinds of the best kind of movie. It’s a movie that constantly surprises. Just when you think it’s one thing, it becomes another. It’s relatively short and simple, but just try to predict where it goes. More profoundly, it’s a movie that is brave and willing to challenge its audience. If you let it, it will make you think — maybe even make you reconsider what you think you believe, if only briefly. But last and best of all, BLACK DEATH is a true horror movie. Director Christopher Smith has already amassed an impressive curriculum vitae of creature features and creepfests (read my reviews of CREEP, SEVERANCE, and TRIANGLE!), but BLACK DEATHis next-level shit. It’s a movie that is viscerally unnerving and intellectually disturbing. It’s a canny, vital, destined-to-be-overlooked piece of work.
BLACK DEATHtakes place in 1348,at a time in real human history when the Black Death plague was decimating half the population of Europe. In one monastery, a young monk named Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) is carrying on a secret affair with a sweet young woman named Averill (Kimberley Nixon) while carrying all the guilt and shame that this crisis of faith might bring. Osmund sends Averill away in an attempt to protect her from the plague, and he prays for a sign to give him some reason to leave and follow her.
As if on cue, an intense knight named Ulric (Sean Bean) arrives at the monastery, with a papal sanction to investigate rumors of a wicked necromancer who rules a distant marshland village and defies all civilized religion by bringing the dead back to life. Osmund volunteers to serve as guide to Ulric and his men, in the hopes that he can slip away from them and rejoin Averill. Of course, things don’t go as planned, and Osmund is drawn deeper into the violent outside world of Ulric’s warlike nature, along with the upsetting sights that are encountered along the way. By the time the small group of warriors and their monk guide arrive at the remote village of the necromancer, Osmund will see some things that will challenge everything he knows.
I spent more time than usual on the setup because I’m so impressed with it – credit to screenwriter Dario Poloni – BLACK DEATH starts out as a period men-on-a-mission flick, like last year’s CENTURION, but quickly descends into the nightmarish scenario of a ’70s film such as THE WICKER MAN. Sure enough, THE WICKER MAN was a point of reference for Christopher Smith and his crew, but I’d argue that BLACK DEATH is the better movie, eve,n than that long-acknowledged classic of British cult cinema: THE WICKER MAN has that horrific and haunting ending, but what precedes it is not nearly as memorable. By comparison, BLACK DEATHis the more consistent (and consistently enjoyable) film, and the reason for that is the excellent character work done by Poloni and Smith and a thoroughly terrific cast.
Sean Bean’s character is the central figure of the film, depending on how you interpret the tale, he’s a determined man of faith or an all-too-recognizable monomaniac. That’s not the first impression, by the way: The first impression he gives is of very traditional heroic iconography. Sean Bean is one of the more famous British actors – we know him best here in the States as Boromir from the LORD OF THE RINGS films, and he’s currently ripping it up in HBO’s Game Of Thrones series. This guy does with a medieval tunic and cloak what Pam Anderson did for red bathing suits (well, not exactly that, but you get my point I hope). You see Sean Bean all duded up in chain mail, and you start getting all optimistic, like BLACK DEATH is going to be a swashbuckling, somewhat smaller-budgeted FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, without all the wizards and little people and pipe-smoking.
The first cue that suggests that this is a much different, far darker scenario is when we start meeting Ulric’s crew. Outside of the dignified and level-headed Wolfstan (John Lynch, the terrific Irish actor from Richard Stanley’s HARDWARE), the men who Ulric commands are mercenaries at best and near-monsters at worst – there’s the vicious and uncouth Mold (Johnny Harris), the way-too-into-his-work and poorly-groomed torturer Dalywag (Andy Nyman), the grim and doom-eyed Griff (Jamie Ballard), the flippant and venal Swire (Emun Elliott, a doughy dead-ringer for Colin Farrell), and the mute, looks-exactly-like-Klaus-Kinski Ivo (Tygo Gernandt). Seriously, I’m not sure where BLACK DEATH’s casting directors dug up a guy who looks that much like Klaus Kinski, but good work by those folks: This is one surly-looking bunch. And these are our heroes.
Add to that mix Eddie Redmayne as the supposedly naïve and unworldly Osmund. Right from the beginning, due to the secret affair, he’s not the innocent all of the other characters would like to think he is. Also, I hope this doesn’t sound mean, but he’s a strikingly odd-looking figure. The performance is terrific, but almost from the start, Osmund, the audience identification figure in BLACK DEATH, isn’t quite right – in a quite perfect way. We don’t really know which way Osmund is going to go, which is why the end of the film is so perfectly unexpected and uniquely unsettling.
I’m deliberately leaving out the last few key characters, including the formidable (and extremely lovely) Carice Van Houten from Paul Verhoeven’s BLACK BOOK and Tim McInnerney (previously from Smith’s own SEVERANCE) as suspicious members of the marsh-bound village that is Ulric and Osmund’s ultimate destination. I don’t want to even identify which characters they play, because the less you know about BLACK DEATH going in, the more power it will have. And I strongly urge you to see it. BLACK DEATHdeserves all kinds of accolades for its convincing production design, atmosphere, and period detail, and its cast is uniformly terrific. Not for a moment do we doubt the realism of the world that Poloni has written and Smith has brought to screen, and that’s exactly what makes it so haunting and impossible to forget.
The next movie in the Christopher Smith filmography, TRIANGLE is as different from SEVERANCE as SEVERANCE was from CREEP. CREEP was a solid freakout and SEVERANCE was most ways a comedy. TRIANGLE is a big brainfucker. It’s a gigantic artistic leap forward. It’s not so outwardly scary, as it is disorienting and unnerving. It’s a much more philosophically unsettling film than either CREEP or SEVERANCE would have suggested.
TRIANGLE is about a troubled single mother (Melissa George) who has a special-needs child at home. She is invited by a friend to get away for a day with some of his friends on a sailing trip. Out on the open seas, the wind dies out, and then a freak storm comes up out of nowhere to blow their boat to shreds. The luck of the five survivors changes when they happen upon a mysterious ocean liner, upon which they are stalked by a hooded figure who aims to kill – when I tell you that what ensues is like a cross between TITANIC and THE SHINING (and MEMENTO and GROUNDHOG DAY), I am ruining no surprises and absolutely under-preparing you for the mind games and creepy moments which TRIANGLE has in store for you. I’d really like to get into intricate plot recapping and involved discussion, but this is such an under-discovered movie that I’d love to encourage horror fans to seek it out and then come back to talk it out with me.
This movie reminds me of that feeling you get when you fall asleep with the DVD menu on (and/or stare at it for too long): It’s strangely tranquil, yet the loop of the visuals and music makes you constantly reassess what you’re looking at until a vaguely eerie mood starts to sink in. That metaphor won’t make much sense to you until you see the movie, which I highly recommend that you do.
This movie is for fans of sophisticated narrative concepts and more intellectual, ideas-based horror — though there are a few good jump-scares and a fair sprinkling of gore. The script by Christopher Smith is uncommonly smart – and, I think, water-tight – and his direction is confident and seamless. The bright, super-saturated cinematography by Robert Humphreys and the brisk, clear editing by Stuart Gazzard, not to mention the excellent score by Christian Henson and the strong performances by the deliberately unfamiliar cast (all Australians tasked with Florida accents); all of these are tools in Smith’s toolbox which are perfectly employed. This isn’t a movie I want to watch again anytime soon, because it was legitimately disturbing, but if I did, I’m sure I’d be even more impressed by its construction. You guys don’t have to worry about all of that film-major stuff, just trust me that if you want to see a genuinely creepy little flick that might even blow your mind a little bit, this one is a good choice.
There’s not much of a through line to Christopher Smith’s filmmaking career so far, except for the fact that all of his movies will be stocked on the horror shelf (some more obviously classifiable as such than others), all of them are cast perfectly, all of them look nice (except in the parts when they’re not supposed to), and they all show a robust interest in new storytelling challenges and techniques. A twisted sense of humor occasionally pokes through as well, but only where it suits the story. The one constant that has clearly emerged, in my opinion anyway, is that this is a filmmaker to watch. So please do that.
Nothing against SEVERANCE, but there’s a big part of me that can’t help but wish it were a documentary about Joan Severance, the actress and model who starred in many late-night cable movies of the 1980s and 1990s.
Instead, SEVERANCE is a horror-comedy-horror movie from director Christopher Smith, whose movies are well worth catching up on for horror fans. What I like about what he does is that you can’t quite pin down what he does. He works under the general banner of horror, but between his previous film, CREEP, and this, it’s already clear that he isn’t interested in repeating himself. CREEP is a deadpan account of a young woman being terrorized in an underground train station. SEVERANCE is gory gross-out horror that also is more than halfway a comedy.
The tone of SEVERANCE is grim but very, drily, arch. The story involves a group of British and American businesspeople on a company team-building getaway, which is really a flimsy excuse to get a bunch of white-collar uptights up into the woods at a remote cabin where they can eventually get picked apart by an assailant of mysterious origins. You probably wouldn’t recognize many of the cast members, besides THE FACULTY’s Laura Harris and Toby Stephens (the ‘young Clint’ from SPACE COWBOYS), if any, but everyone involved all manage to hit the perfect tone. SEVERANCE is much more serious than The Office (which the cover art and posters work hard to associate it with), but much less serious than HOSTEL or whatever other torture-horror it might get compared to.
It’s a fun late-night watch, but SEVERANCE feels more like a tonal exercise for its talented director, rather than a major work or a new cult classic. It has crisp, appealing cinematography by Ed Wild, snappy editing by Stuart Gazzard, and a superior score by Christian Henson. It’s a well-made movie, but it doesn’t ultimately resonate too strongly. The movie has a fun, gleefully anarchic tone at the beginning, but the pace slackens at the middle, and the last third is solidly-done but rather standard — even if the idea for the villain is relatively original, and certainly indicative of Smith’s thematic and satirical goals. Overall, I liked it but I didn’t love it. That’s not in any way to say that I’m not still extremely enthusiastic about seeing Smith’s next films, because I am.
