« July 2013 | Main | September 2013 »
Here's the IMDb note on director Karel Zeman: "Former advertising man, window dresser and poster designer who became a noted pioneer of cinematic live action and animation techniques. From 1955, he produced a series of short fantasy and science-fiction films, which were celebrated for their visual artistry and influenced such later film makers as Terry Gilliam."
Zombos Says: Good
The gimmick sustaining Seth Patrick’s debut novel, Reviver, takes a little something from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and then adds the always popular 'Eldritch Abomination from Beyond' trope: you've seen it; the ancient evil waiting to cross over the line between our here and its there, like in the recent supernatural thrillers Last Days and Red, White and Blood. It's the one conceit catalyzing more television and movie stories than you can ever remember, and it's about as old as that eldritch abomination, or at least the hills. It's an important trope, though at times cyclically over employed in supernatural stories.
There's also the "secret agenda" being executed here, which is usually driven by either a secret organization, a known organization, or a dubious corporation. Here the secret agenda is masterminded by a known organization (that may have been incorporated), and although its use provides enough mass to drive the plot and set up the next two novels in this planned trilogy, it's not handled with enough finesse to make it either quirky or different or vexing enough to warrant more than a good showing for its inclusion. Patrick makes sure to also include a lost love, a possible newly found love, and more pages than he really needs to tell his story.
What's missing, and this goes for much of the coterie of genre writers today, is a less streamlined and formulaic approach to handling his characters, their plot threads, and how the story revelations flow--and they flow somewhere, for comparison, between a stream and a brook, if you're into fishing . If not, but you like cooking (or eating), the best alternative example would be the differences between Velveeta and Parmigiano Reggiano. Both serve a purpose, but one provides much more texture, flavor depth, and savory experience in the same mouthful. (And now I promise to lay off metaphors for a month. Honest.)
A hint of depth and savoriness comes in a few scary moments when Jonah Miller, working as a Reviver for the police department's special forensics unit, makes unexpected contact with a presence other than the revived victim he's talking with. At first he's worried that "ghost traces," a malady that results from overwork and burnout from the revival process, is coloring his mind with false impressions. He doesn't let anyone know about his doubts, not even his closest friend and colleague, Never Geary.
Then Daniel Harker disappears. He's the journalist who revealed the unique ability some gifted (or cursed) people have for reviving the dead. He made a lot of money from his book on the subject, but then found something more sinister going on to investigate for his next book. Jonah's investigation into Harker's disappearance, the revelation of a dangerous drug that can enhance the revival ability, but with serious side effects, and the growing mystery surrounding the motives of a radical group of After Lifers, perks up the narrative at around the 218th page. Until then we get a too-measured build up--and too slow--with digressions from the important building blocks of action events as dialogs take over for long psuedo-scientific discussions or backstory fill-ins in 'real' time with the characters, not flashbacks.
Hinting at a more thoughtfully planned out methodolgy to his horror, Patrick delves into interesting facings for his revival dressing: like what if the military used the revival process as a standard interrogation procedure? Just kill the interrogee, revive him, interrogate his corpse--one important aspect of the revival process is that those brought back can't resist but tell the truth--and be done with it. And then there's a building uncertainty as to what exactly ghost traces are as Jonah investigates Daniel Harker's disappearance with the help of Harker's daughter and the journalist's notebook. This uncertainty leads Jonah to rethink who and what that dark figure following him around really is, and who exactly is whom when he does.
Here's the Mexican lobby card for the movie version of the 12 chapter serial, The Lost City.
Zombos Says: Fair
Chad Crawford Kinkle’s monotonous pace for his Southern pottery folk art inspired Jug Face makes for an excruciatingly boring movie with—and I’m definitely not in agreement with other critics on this point—no tension whatsoever because of it. Whatever intended or implied subtexts of mysticism and the effects of stagnating religious fealty that may be tucked into this simple, stretched thin, script are lost while we wait for something to happen. Close-ups of the bubbling pit where backwoods families sacrifice each other to maintain their community's health, close-ups of Ada’s (Lauren Ashley Carter) big, brooding eyes, and close-ups of those glossy face-bearing jugs made by Dawai the potter (Sean Bridgers), which herald the next sacrificial victim chosen by the omnipresent pit monster, are comatose as the camera moves around them with much more vitality.
Sustin (Larry Fessenden) is the patriarch who easily and righteously slits the throats of his decreed sacrifices to placate the pit monster, thereby maintaining his closed community's social order and keeping its "well" being intact. Ada upsets the balance when she realizes she’s the next sacrifice and buries the jug with her face on it.
Her incestuous relationship with her brother (Daniel Manche) leaves her pregnant; her unwelcomed arranged marriage to a neighbor’s son (Mathieu Whitman) leads her to deception; and her mother’s crude virginity examination (performed by Sean Young with her usual, limited, cigarette-emotive acting skills) leaves her subservient to the expectations of her community and its rules. Kinkle keeps everything so monotone he never elicits the necessary question we should be feeling to engage our sense of terror: what's the truer evil here, the pit monster or the community that accepts its demands?
There is also the Tinkerbell ghost, smoking all dark and ominously, popping up to explain to Ada that she’s toast, no matter what she tries to do. Perhaps Kinkle was trying to evoke a folk tale's worth of supernatural terror with his apparition's presence, but if you're looking for terror watch Deliverance instead; that movie's atmosphere of other-worldliness and alienation is greatly needed here to make Krinkle's folk art horror concoction upsetting and disagreeable for us.
Much throat-cutting and blood dripping ensues as the pit monster grows angry. Eyes turn cataract-white as the pit monster bubbles up and flexes its annoyance. Hillbilly cult slice-of-life scenes and moonshines distracts us from Ada's predicament. Although they provide necessary contrast to her dire situation, they disengage us from that tension because of Kinkle's even-handedness as he doles out each scene with equal tone. The acting is at the correct pitch, but Kinkle never lets his direction open up to generate fear, or despair, or a smidgen of absurdest eloquence through it. Unlike Dawai's pottery, the story is only half-baked and not fired up to its true horrors of circumstance and entrapment within a stultifying society.
The musical interlude helps redeem the dullness, but it doesn’t last long enough. Jug Face is a 60-minute movie shot in 80 minutes of tedium. It suffers from film festival laissez faire: it wastes time on emotionless visuals and empty character dioramas, and presumes the vacuum it leaves is emotively and intellectually engaging and multi-nuanced. It isn't.
