THE cult OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks
Returning front and centre this month we have that old stalwart, the zombie movie. As The Walking Dead announces multiple films and its two TV strands continue to thrive, so too do zombies of a more eastern flavour in writer/director Billy Senese’s The Dead Center , which successfully evokes the uneasy feel of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Japanese supernatural mysteries. A struggling hospital takes receipt of an anonymous corpse (Jeremy Childs) who gets up and walks away from the autopsy table, prompting parallel investigations by a puzzled medical examiner (Bill Feheely) and a stressed psychiatrist (Shane Carruth). This John Doe is also a Jonah, given to breath-sucking attacks that cause incidental deaths, but when the zombie begins to remember his previous life, he becomes more afraid of whatever it is he’s got inside him. Many J-horror elements creep in, including scratched spirals, crk-crk-crk noises, and a sense of the world spinning off its axis.
A rare horror film where every incidental death hurts, though Senese is sparing enough with the atrocities so that his key shocks are shattering. It pulls off a feat that ought to be standard practice but is sadly rare: characters and setting are interesting enough that the film would be gripping as a straight drama about the overworked staff of a straining hospital even if demonic entities didn’t manifest to turn it into a horror movie.
Toby Jones has the knack of commanding the screen with essential wimpiness, but also projects a nicely sinister side. In Kaleidoscope , written and directed by Rupert Jones (the star’s brother), he plays a mild-mannered gardener living a selfgive contained life in a high-rise housing estate. He tries to put together the pieces of his past — amnesiac protagonists are all over the show this month — to determine whether he’s a total innocent who’s fouled up his first date in years or a bungling serial killer who’s on his way back to jail. It’s a deliberately small film, with a deliberately drab look, but deeply felt. Though it’s Jones’ show, Anne Reid and Sinead Matthews interesting, vivid (and commingled) performances as the women around him, a smothering mother and an outgoing love interest who broadly represent death and life.
Chad Archibald’s I’ll Take Your Dead is one of the freshest genre films of the year, progressing from hardboiled crime to all-out horror. On a remote farm, meticulous widower William (Aidan Devine) — the sort of character Ingmar Bergman might have created if he’d been born Canadian — raises his bright, lonely daughter. Given the desolate landscape and bitter cold, it’s no surprise that he augments his agri-income with criminal practice. Rather than growing weed or cooking meth, the so-called ‘Candy Butcher’ uses bonesaws and acid to make corpses disappear (no questions asked). Only the latest package (Jess Salgueiro) delivered to his doorstep by gangbangers turns out not to be completely dead. It has a high concept, great character writing/ acting, a satisfying storyline (with twists that are cannily set up), gore (when it turns into a siege movie, that acid bath comes in handy), frightening apparitions, and a depth of feeling.
Young Ava Preston is outstanding in I’ll Take Your Dead as the girl whose only friends are the living dead. She also gives a winning performance in the less-distinguished Critters Attack! , an okay low-key reboot of that alien furball franchise from the ’80s. With the critters back, can a Ghoulies revival be far off?