Fear(s) of the Dark is probably not playing at a theatre near you. It played for a one week run out here in L.A., then promptly disappeared. It's a French black & white animated collection of short films that has some of the most dazzling animation I've seen in awhile. This isn't polished Pixar stuff. In fact, it seems so homemade, it's almost as if you can see the grain on the paper it was drawn on (which is probably a digital effect).
The stories themselves are disappointing because most of them lack an ending, but the animation is so vivid and hallucinatory, it's as if it is being ripped straight from the authors' imagination and thrown onto the screen.
The bookend story has no point, really, other than to show various people being eaten by a pack of rabid dogs in various scenic locales before their master becomes their last, and most viciously mauled, victim.
Other stories include a Japanese girl having hallucinations of ghosts in her midst, and a barrel chested man wandering an isolated mansion in the woods during a thunderstorm. The best two are the ones with a definite beginning, middle, and end. One is about a seaside town ravaged by a monster that preys on its children in the night, and the town's efforts to hire a hunter to kill the monster. It's a mood piece of mist over the water and fog in the air and shots in the night.
The best of the bunch is about a teenage boy's obsession with a bug he finds out in the woods. He hides it under his bed in a jar, and returns home one day to find the jar empty. But he keeps on hearing the chirping noise the bug makes at night, and he has a feeling it is living in his bed. Things get really interesting when he brings a girl home and sleeps with her, and finds a slit in her wrist in the morning. And he has a feeling the bug crawled in.
It only gets creepier from there.
Splinter is exactly what it set out to be: A low-budget, blood and guts thrill ride. It's a one hundred percent suspense vehicle, with wall-to-wall dread, and it had me squirming in my seat. It's one of those monster movies like The Thing or that plant from space growing on your skin episode of Creepshow where there isn't really a monster, but more the fear of being infected that plagues its characters.
Of course, once the monster gets under your skin, your bones start snapping the other way, and first your hand gets taken over, then your arm, and you better hurry up and chop it off, or it'll take over your whole body. And after you chop off your arm, it gets up and crawls right after you. Yeah, it's one of those kinds of movies.
Now, if that had been it, it would have been an effective gross-out film, but there's more to it than that. What begins as a happy couple on a weekend getaway turns into a carjacking, with a mean bad guy (played brilliantly by Shea Whigham) and his strung-out girlfriend along for the ride. The bad guy's back story is more fleshed out than a horror movie character's needed to be, and over the course of the film, this foul-mouthed gutter trash gained my sympathy to the point where, at the end, I was rooting for him.
It's not often you have sympathy for anyone in a low budget horror film. It's not often there's a character at all to root for. It's mostly just guys and girls getting ripped apart.
And now for the third film. But first let me start off by saying, Who would have thought the best film of the year would be a Swedish vampire film?
I had all but given up on the vampire film. I've seen every angle, every tragedy of lost love and eternal life and youth lasting forever, blah blah blah. I thought there was nothing left to give.
Well, forget Twilight, THIS IS THE ROMANTIC VAMPIRE FILM YOU NEED TO BE SEEING:
Let the Right One In tells the story of a friendless, clueless high school boy named Oskar who lives with his parents in an apartment building in a snow-laden Swedish town. One night, while standing out near the playground cursing the world and threatening to stab to death an imaginary bully, Oskar meets Eli, a sallow but hauntingly beautiful girl who is introduced standing atop the jungle gym behind him.
The first thing she says to him is "We cannot be friends." That's a hell of an introduction.
Oskar finds out she lives with her father and has just moved into the apartment next door, and it's not long before they're exchanging morse code messages through the wall. But there's something wrong right off, if Eli's stance on the jungle gym wasn't an indicator, because their first night there, Eli's "father" goes out for a stroll, and ends up slitting the throat of a stranger in a park and hanging him upside down and collecting his blood.
Oskar is one strange bird. With his platinum blonde hair, his alabaster skin, and his haunting blue eyes, he could pass for a vampire himself. He isn't much liked by anyone, and is the odd man out at school, where he is picked on endlessly by a schoolyard bully. But at home, when in the presence of Eli, he slowly opens up his shell.
The budding romance of the two is intercut with the various subplots involving the murder of townspeople by Eli's "father", and the growing suspicion by the local drunk that this strange man and his haunting daughter may have something to do with it.
Now what makes Let the Right One In special is the way the romance is handled by the director, Tomas Alfredson. Patience is the name of the game here. The film is leisurely paced, matching the slow fall of snow and the languid, sleepy attitudes of the town. He doesn't push for effect or trump up the hormones. He doesn't have the two kids jumping into each other's arms. Rather it's Eli's hesitancy to involve Oskar too much in her life that draws you into the picture.
There's something very subtle going on in this picture, and neither Alfredson nor his two young actors (Kare Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli) spell it out for you. Who is this man pretending to be Eli's father? Where did he come from and how long has he been around? Why does Eli want to get to know Oskar at all? Why does she encourage his hostile attitude toward the bullies at school?
It is so subtle, some of the people I've talked to about the picture didn't even get it. The undertones went right over their heads.
See it. It's haunting and violent and it'll stay with you long after it's over. I doubt very much Twilight will do the same thing.
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