Starring Marta Mazurek. Rating unavailable THE LURE
The last horror-musical I remember seeing 2 was 2008’s Repo! The Genetic Opera, in which director Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw II, III, and IV fame brought the worlds of nonconsensual organ transplants and operatic pseudometal together.
In The Lure, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska guides the exploits of a pair of cannibalistic vampire-mermaids to a cheesy ’80s Europop soundtrack.
The latter is definitely the kookier of the two flicks, but the jury’s still out on which one has the crappier music.
The Lure opens with a pop trio—middle-aged singer Krysia (Kinga Preis), drummer Perkusista (Andrzej Konopka), and younger bassist Mietek (Jakub Gierszal)—cavorting on a beach, when mermaid sisters Silver and Golden (Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska) pop their heads out of the water and sing, “Help us come ashore, no need to fear; we won’t eat you, my dear.”
Cut to a sordid Warsaw discotheque/restaurant where the trio Polish up Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” while upscale-looking women dance weirdly by themselves, waiters strut delivering salads and the kitchen’s run by a busty, gyrating floozy named Mrs. Rockets. The club’s lecherous owner (Zygmunt Malanowicz) follows a fishy odour to a backroom where the mermaids have transformed into underaged partiers in human form, sans reproductive organs. We soon find out that, when sprinkled with water, they sprout mermaid tails like Daryl Hannah in Splash, only longer and slimier. “They can do backing vocals and strip,” declares the club owner, as a club owner would.
The rest of the movie is mostly a string of poplite song-and-dance sequences featuring ace cinematographer Jakub Kijowski’s gaudy hues and the nubile sirens with their tops off. Maybe it’s because their tops are off, but they soon take the Warsaw discotheque/restaurant scene by storm, even though their songwriting doesn’t improve much. “Holy moly, bitter tastes can be delicious,” they croon, “so you’re lonely, I know that love is vicious.”
It all leads up to a Little Mermaid–style predicament and one of the freakiest half-body transplant scenes ever, but unless you’re an alternative-film buff with a fierce attraction to the offbeat, the allure of The Lure may be lost.
Starring Dylan Authors. Rated PG
2In Weirdos, famed Canadiana director Bruce Mcdonald (Hard Core Logo, Highway 61) brings an appropriately light roadmovie touch to theatre great Daniel Macivor’s presumably autobiographical tale of teens preparing to leave rural Nova Scotia in 1976. Young TV veteran Dylan Authors is good as ambitious Kit, starting to question his own sexuality, with Wet Bum’s Julia Sarah Stone even better as his ostensible girlfriend, who has ambitions of her own, as well as a sensible head on her shoulders.
Still, the film’s real star, making her feature debut here, is cinematographer Becky Parsons, who captures so much melancholy beauty in her low-contrast black-and-white images of the rural Maritimes. There’s also a raft of Canadian songs from the ’70s, set against celebrations of the U.S. bicentennial, droning on TV and radio news in the background.
The music helps compensate for the screenplay’s odd collapse, less than an hour in, when Kit catches up with his unstable estranged mother, too frantically presented by Molly Parker, playing the part as Tennessee Williams might remember a neurotic parent, not as a believably damaged human being. The Republic of Doyle’s Allan Hawko, on the other hand, is allowed to give Kit’s confused dad a few more dimensions.
Having the spectre of Andy Warhol (Rhys Bevan-john) follow the boy from Antigonish to Sydney was a cute notion that probably should have stayed on paper. Although its last half-hour battles with dramatic inertia, the 90-minute tale ends on a positive note, and veteran Canada watchers will enjoy its echoes of NFB highway odes like Goin’ Down the Road and Nobody Waved Goodbye.
> KEN EISNER