THE CULT OF KIM NEWMAN
The critic and novelist on this month’s weirdest straight-to-video picks
TWO NEW RELEASES address the perils of leasing suspiciously affordable apartments in Los Angeles, and furthermore target the Californian culture of cults, gurus and self-actualisation through submission to crackpottery.
Vivieno Caldinelli’s Seven Stages To Achieve Eternal Bliss By Passing Through The Gateway Chosen By The Holy Storsh — an aspirant successor to Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness? in the trying-too-hard title business — is a slight but intermittently funny satire. Claire (Kate Micucci) and Paul (Sam Huntington) are just settling into their new home when a crazed man bursts in and cuts his throat in their bathroom. As a weary cop explains, the late visionary Reginald Storsh (Taika Waititi) decreed that the path to a happy afterlife includes self-slaughter in this specific spot, and a succession of similar loons bent on killing themselves will be along soon. At first appalled, the couple get involved in the gruesome mini-dramas playing out in their bathroom — then see opportunities afforded by the parade of deaths, in which it’s easy to hide a few murders. It’s all over the place tonally, but has some splendid moments and a stew of simmering, wicked notions.
David Marmor’s Apartment 1BR (formerly just 1BR) is straighter-faced but also skewers current mores in a suspense-horror framework. Meek Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom) lucks into a flat in a friendly if bland complex, partly by lying about whether she has a cat. She warms to the eccentric, subliminally sinister neighbours while ignoring many warning signs (weird night noises, threats to the cat, something nasty in the oven). When a stalker invades her space, she realises she’s a prisoner in an extended social experiment which has a mind-breaking initiation process. The system delivers supposed security and utopian communal living, but has serious downsides like arranged marriage, euthanasia, and an obligation to sucker in the next convert. Interestingly cast with unusual faces — Taylor Nichols from Whit Stillman’s films, Naomi Grossman from American Horror Story — its paranoid fantasy is all the more chilling for drawing from the practices of well-known real-life cults.
Shot in Cumbria, with stunning location work, George Popov’s The Droving is set around a town whose local festival supposedly gets out of hand as “nutters in squirrel masks” run riot, with dark mutterings about a diabolical merchant lurking in the vicinity. Besides an obvious debt to The Wicker Man, Popov plays with ideas from Dead Man’s Shoes and The Kill List, as deceptively mild-mannered outsider Martin (Daniel Oldroyd) tries to track down his missing sister. Like Popov’s Hex, it’s an essay on the British folk-horror tradition — intense, slow-burning and atmospheric, with low-key chills. It also gets closer to home in an all-toocredible life-ruining Christmas dinner where Martin, a military interrogator by profession, can’t turn off his compulsion to ask needling questions — turning cracker riddles into an all-out assault on his sister’s new boyfriend.
More spectacular scenery features in Lukas Feigelfeld’s slow-paced but terrifyingly beautiful Austrian art-horror movie Hagazussa . In the Alps in the 15th century, outcast Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen) turns to ritual magic and goes on a voyage into insanity that leads her to hurt herself and her family as much as it results in doom for those who cross her. A cruel yet ravishing vision, contrasting widescreen vistas of misty mountain landscapes with grimy close-ups of plague boils.