Ever since I finally signed up for
Netflix, my attitude towards movies I don't necessarily expect to
like has changed sharply; instead of waiting for them to present
themselves in a form I can financially rationalize (second-hand, on
sale, late-night TV), I can just search for them or stumble on them
randomly, load them, press a button and hey presto: instant
gratification. If I don't connect within ten minutes, I turn them off
or drift away, leaving them on in the background while I do other
things. I tell myself it's free (sort of) and it's research (more
likely, but not always). The good part is that I've definitely found
some gems this way, films I later “back up” by buying on
DVD/BluRay, but the baddish part is that I've also added
substantially to my roster of not-so-guilty pleasures.
I call these movies my Indefensibles,
but are they really? (The obvious answer: No.) They tend to be films
with a lot of grimy grindhouse flair or vaudeville creep, often
low-budget yet very physically beautiful, at least for me—appealing
mis-en-scene, well-integrated production design, fine and/or
eccentric casts doing good work under pressure. They give me great
repetitive pleasure, even as they otherwise violate some standards of
objectively “good” horror. I often end up calling them
“accidental gialli,” regardless of their country of
origin, because you sure don't expect a giallo to be anything
other than what it very palpably is, for God's sake, nor do you
penalize it for performing that exact same function...or possibly
“yarn monster” movies, cf. The Werewolf Ambulance horror film
podcast, on which host Katie once gave that as her rating for Don
Coscarelli's inter-dimensional ghoul vs. stoner fantasia Phantasm,
perhaps the most heavy metal movie I've seen aside from the Canadian
werewolf law enforcement comedy WolfCop
(which would also go on this list).
Like
most gialli, an
Indefensible has to have the total courage of its convictions,
however batshit—to operate by a very specific internal logic of the
sort we usually call dream- or nightmare-, yet not ever break that
logic in ways which kick us completely out of the viewing experience.
For example, I am a big fan of Mirrors,
the gothically crazy Alexandre Aja film with Kiefer Sutherland that
mostly takes place inside the world's most gorgeous burnt-out
department store, a movie that almost all critics and a lot of
audiences consider completely ridiculous, given it contains all of
the following: ghostly entities that pursue their victims from
reflective surface to reflective surface, a woman wrenching her own
jaw apart with both hands like she's doing the gore version of that
body-modification scene in Beetlejuice,
a back-story involving demonic possession and confrontative
psychiatric therapy, a climax set in a flooded underground hallway
during which Sutherland punches an elderly nun in the face.
But to
me, Aja himself has already demonstrated the place where ridiculous
slides into truly inept with his film Haute Tension
(also known as Switchblade Romance),
one of the cornerstones of the New French Extremity movement, in
which...spoiler alert...a woman and the friend she wishes was her
girlfriend visit the friend's family cabin, only to have a grimy,
hulking serial killer descend on them, slaughter the family with
delirious inventiveness and kidnap the friend. Our heroine takes off
after him, eventually managing to run him down and “rescue” the
object of her affection, at which point the sort of twist only two
French dudes in their early twenties would think is cool kicks in:
turns out, our heroine was
the psycho all along! Thus forcing me to sit back and wonder,
baffled: Okay, so you just chased yourself
for miles through the French countryside, apparently while driving
two separate vehicles, then had a fight with yourself
in the middle of the road while wielding a concrete saw? Both the
truck and the van have to exist, since your friend was tied up in the
back of one of them as you were driving the other, but if they do
then who was that masturbating with a severed head in the truck's cab
while you and your friend drove by in the background in the other
van, right at the beginning of the movie? Was that you just thinking
about doing that, or what?
“No,
no,” Aja and his creative partner Gregory Levasseur want to assure
me, mainly because they really don't want to go to the trouble of
ret-conning all the unreliable narration they've already laid in thus
far. “It looks so good, none of that matters! This twist will be
the shit!” But as we all know, or should, the line between “the
shit” and just “shit” is a very fine one indeed, subjective as
all hell, hard to quantify except in hindsight...and crazy as they
undeniably are, none of the Indefensibles actually manage to cross
this line far enough to undercut themselves beyond salvaging, at
least in my opinion.
So:
Now all that's been established, I'm going to kick this series off
with a film I would never have discovered if not for Netflix—The
Collection, ostensibly a sequel
to 2009's home invasion/spider-trap slasher extravaganza The
Collector, directed by
first-ever Project Greenlight
winner Marcus Dunstan (the Feast
trilogy, Saws 4 to 3D)
and co-written with his own longstanding collaborator, Patrick
Melton. Both films star the lugubriously handsome Josh Stewart, a
career supporting/character actor probably best known for his role as
Bane's right-hand man in The Dark Knight Rises,
but for my money the original—much like The Purge
vs. The Purge: Anarchy—plays
more like a 90-minute thesis statement than a necessary adjunct,
especially since everything established in it can be (and is) readily
reduced to maybe three minutes' worth of newscaster exposition at the
top of the opening credits sequence.
Said
thesis is that there's this guy, see, known as the Collector, a buff
dude in a gnarly looking plasticized skin-leather mask who
turns up at people's houses or places of work, fits them out with
Rube Goldberg death traps, then collects(!) one survivor at the end
of the massacre, who he totes away in an antique banded trunk to some
other place as yet unseen and torments them for a while. He will then
commence this next massacre by dropping the latest survivor and their
trunk in the middle of the scene, like a human warning system. By the
end of The Collector, this last person not exactly standing
was a thief, Arkin O'Brien (Stewart), who came to rob the house in
question but ended up managing to save at least one person, sort of
by accident, before becoming Collector-fodder himself.
The Collection, meanwhile,
begins on a new protagonist entirely, deaf rich girl Elena (Emma
Fitzpatrick), who visits an after-hours club with friends and finds
Arkin's trunk in the bathroom. She frees him as the Collector makes
literal mulch out of everyone else in the place with a
ceiling-lowered thresher, then gets trunked herself after Arkin,
having had enough of heroism for the nonce, jumps out the window
using Elena's cheating boyfriend's not-quite-dead body as a human
shield and breaks his arm badly on impact, but manages to limp away.
He ends up at a hospital, where corporate mercenary Lucello (Lee
Tergesen, playing a sort of good guy for once) tracks him down on
behalf of Elena's dad and offers to make his legal problems go away
if Arkin leads him and his team to wherever the Collector's been
keeping him, so they can rescue Elena.
Arkin thinks this is an ass-stupid
idea, but soon enough they're breaking into the old abandoned
"Argento Hotel," which the Collector has obviously spent
some time fitting out H.H. Holmes style, turning it into a
triple-story murder palace that mimics the interior of his own
overheated death-fetishist's brain. It's full of torture victims so
drugged up they're like living zombies, starving attack dogs, a
permanent girlfriend in sad Barbie doll clownface makeup whose
Stockholm Syndrome makes her utterly untrustworthy (Erin Way, from
the lamentably short-lived SyFy series Alphas) and the usual
roster of death-traps, plus a whole wing full of crazy murder
displays of a low-rent Hannibalian nature. The Collector has a thing
for insects, so there are bugs made out of people, people full of
bugs, and a whole elevator shaft full of random mutilated body parts
that people fall down, twice.
What's great is that Elena manages to
rescue herself several times over, holding her own until Lucello
arrives, and that she and Arkin also manage to rescue each other
during the final conflict. In a highly satisfying denouement, she
shatters all the murder display cases to put out a fire Arkin's about
to burn to death in, after which Arkin manages to track the Collector
down on his own and stuffs him into his own personal trunk, swearing
to do everything the Collector did to him a couple of times over
before he finally lets him die. The Pack AD's "Haunt You"
plays over the credits.
The whole film is inventively cruel and
gruesome in a very Grand Guignol body horror way, with a great colour
scheme and a hundred tiny twists. After three emotionally ambiguous
seasons of Hannibal, meanwhile, I somewhat love what a sheer
dick the Collector is allowed to be right from the get-go, all
kill-crazy ego and theatrical emptiness—Dunstan and Melton refuse
to empathize with him even a little bit, never dignifying him much
beyond his obviously strong work ethic, characterizing him on their
shared BluRay commentary track as “a thing that lives in the dark,
just totally complacent about all the harm he does, like a shark:
'this is my function.'” There's this wonderful moment in the third
act where he suddenly kicks open a door in a dark room and literally
strikes a pose, dog on either side, brandishing a huge machine-gun,
like: TA DAH!!! Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my
name...
And I love the utterly satisfying way
that nobody else in the movie has any time for his bullshit,
either—they make him pay for every wound, constantly spitting and
kicking at him, giving at least as good as they get in a frantic,
raging, feverish rush of refusal to end up on his walls or in one of
those display cases. (It turns out he actually is an entymologist,
and has a gruesome back story that's later reduced to a single line
of news commentary as well, 'cause frankly, nobody gives a fuck.
Screw your pain if you even have any, dude, and screw you!)
All too often in horror, the monsters
get to triumph; it's become a bit of a cliche in itself, perhaps a
knee-jerk reaction to the old Hollywood Code Universal horror
restorative model, or a reminder that the trouble with “normal”
is is always gets worse. But sometimes it's nice to see total
bastards get laid on their asses, especially when the victory's
particularly hard-won. The Collection delivers on that
promise, and in spades.
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