The Hunger

 Year:  1983

Director: Tony Scott

Screenplay: Ivan Davis and Michael Thomas, based on the novel The Hunger by Whitley Strieber

Starring:  Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Susan Sarandon

Running Time:  97 minutes

Genre:  Horror

New York City, the 1980s:  Miriam Blaylock (Deneuve) is a vampire who has existed since at least Ancient Egypt, her first encountered her current partner, John (Bowie) in the 18th Century, when he became the latest in a long line of lovers.  However, while Miriam doesn't age, all of her lovers, however, while their ageing process is delayed, they do eventually begin to age very suddenly and at a highly accelerated rate, leaving behind dried out husks.  However, they do not die, but Miriam, who refuses to kill them, condemns them to a kind of living death, locking them up forever in coffin-life boxes.  This time, however, Miriam and John set their sights on research scientist Dr. Sarah Roberts (Sarandon), who is engaged on research to delay ageing.  However, the question is whether she will be able to save John, or if she will become Miriam's latest companion. 

The Hunger is a stylish, sensual vampire film, based on the novel by horror writer Whitley Strieber, who is probably best known for his book Communion (1987) which describes his allegedly true encounters with aliens.  While this is a vampire film, the word "vampire" is never mentioned in the film, and the vampires are different to the more commonly depicted bloodsuckers: John and Miriam feed off blood, but instead of biting their victim's necks with fangs, they cut the throats with daggers hidden in the ankh pendants that they both wear.  They can also survive in sunlight, and their main power is that they are stronger and harder to kill than humans, and also that their ageing is stopped or at least delayed.  This is the debut film from Tony Scott, brother of director Ridley, who went on to direct stylish action films and thrillers such as Top Gun (1986), True Romance (1993) and Man on Fire (2004).  The film feels very much a product of its time, with the stylish visuals, and the film is stylised to a fault.  Characters are often filmed backlit, so they appear as silhouettes, there are constantly billowing, diaphanous curtains and drapes, there are doves flying throughout John and Miriam's cavernous New York town house (full, of course, with antiques), there is slow motion, fragmented editing, and most of the interiors are filmed in half shadow, with shafts of light illuminating the characters.  The problem is that the film is so stylised, it never really gets scary, and despite the amount of sex and blood, there is very little actual passion, it feels like everything comes second place to the visuals.  Before making The Hunger, Tony Scott had been interested in making a film of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire, and the film does have something of an Anne Rice feel to it, with it's focus on the loneliness of immortality and the angst of becoming a predatory vampire.  Even the hospitals and research laboratories seem to favour mood lighting.  Catherine Deneuve is impressive as statuesque, bisexual vampire Miriam, David Bowie is effective as the increasingly desperate John, acting under layers of increasingly heavy make-up, and Susan Sarandon is good as the scientist Sarah, who becomes drawn into the Blaylock's world.  Willem Dafoe makes a brief, early appearance as one of a pair of teenage thugs who harasses Sarah at a phone booth.  The film had mixed reviews at the time of its release, however it has become a cult film, particularly among Goths.  The song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by the band Bauhaus, which is sometimes cited as the first goth rock record, plays over the opening credits, and Bauhaus appear as a band in a night club.

David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger
  

Barbarian

 Year:  2022

Director:  Zach Cregger

Screenplay:  Zach Cregger

Starring:  Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long

Running Time:  107 minutes

Genre:  Horror

In town for a job interview, Tess Marshall (Campbell) arrives at a rental house she has booked in a run down area of Detroit.  However, when she arrives, she discovers that the house has been double-booked and that there is already a man staying there, Keith (Skarsgård).  Despite the initial awkwardness, Tess decides that she trusts Keith enough to spend the night in the house.  However, when Tess discovers a secret passageway in the basement, it becomes clear that they are not alone on the house.

Barbarian is a film that seems to be going one way, before veering off sharply into other directions.   It takes time to build up, allowing the audience to spend time with the characters, before the horror kicks in, and when it does, it does so with some of the most surprisingly gruesome images seen in mainstream cinema for a long time.  The film boasts some fine performances from Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, as a charismatic actor who becomes embroiled in a sex scandal.  There is also a strong message about the threat men pose towards women.  The nervous interplay between the suspicious Tess and the friendly Keith, who can't understand why, if their places were reversed, she wouldn't have let him in out of the rain.  As well as AJ, the actor played by Justin Long, who after being accused of assault by a fellow actor, doesn't see what he did wrong, in his words "she just took some convincing".  Being played by a likeable actor such as Long, makes the character all the more disturbing.  The film also doesn't skimp on exciting horror thrills, making this one of the best new horror films I have seen this year.

Georgina Campbell in Barbarian

Censor

 Year:  2021

Director:  Prano Bailey-Bond

Screenplay:  Prano Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher

Starring:  Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Michael Smiley

Running Time:  84 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Britain, the 1980s:  The country is in the midst of a moral panic over so-called "Video Nasties".  Enid Baines (Algar) is a film censor who takes a hard line on cutting or banning violent films.  One day Enid is assigned to classify a horror film called Don't Go in the Church which brings up distressing memories of her sister's unexplained disappearance when they were both children.  Enid becomes convinced that one of the actors in the film is her sister, and as she investigates finds the line between reality and on-screen illusion dangerously blurring.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s home video took off in Britain in a very big way, partly due to the amount of people who were being laid off from their jobs at the time, finding themselves with redundancy money and an unexpected amount of time to fill.  All the films shown in cinemas had to be classified by the British Board of Film Censors (latterly the British Board of Film Classification), but video was exempt from that, and so a lot of films that had either been cut, banned outright, or had never even been submitted to the BBFC were released uncut to buy or rent on video, often with lurid covers.  Before long, the Conservative government, right-wing media and other self-appointed moral guardians whipped up a furore over what they called "Video Nasties" resulting in notoriously strict censorship in Britain.  This is the context in which Censor takes place.  It is an effective, quietly disturbing horror film, set mostly in dull, half-lit offices and homes, with characters dressed in beige and cheap suits.  it also captures the look of the cheap horror films that were often deemed "video nasties".  Niamh Algar gives a powerful performance as Enid, who views her job as censor as a moral mission to "protect" people.  She has few if any friends, and Algar does very well with a mostly silent performance, particularly as her stern detachment starts to crack.  Prano Bailey-Bond directs with real style, although the film leaves us with more questions than answers, the ambiguous conclusion refusing to tie up the loose ends, a choice which may be tantalising to some viewers, while frustrating to others.     

Niamh Algar in Censor

Naked Lunch

 Year:  1991

Director:  David Cronenberg

Screenplay:  David Cronenberg, based on the novel Naked Lunch by William S, Burroughs

Starring:  Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider

Running Time:  115 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction, fantasy

New York City, 1953:  Pest exterminator William Lee (Weller) discovers that his wife, Joan (Davis), has become addicted to the yellow powder he uses to kill bugs.  Lee is contacted by a giant talking insect that claims that he is a secret agent and that the bug is his boss.  It further informs him that his wife is a non-human agent of the sinister Interzone Incorporated.  Lee accidentally kills Joan while attempting to shoot a glass off her head.  Lee flees to Interzone, a "notorious free port on the North African coast", and finds himself in a surreal nightmare of giant, talking bugs, shapeshifting typewriters and monstrous "Mugwumps".

William S. Burroughs' controversial novel, Naked Lunch, was first published in 1959, and has baffled, appalled and fascinated readers ever since.  The "novel' (for want of a better term) is a bizarre and often incoherent mishmash of vignettes and stories without any conventional structure or plot, and had been widely considered unfilmable.  However directors such as Stanley Kubrick had attempted to crack it.  In the 1960s experimental filmmaker Anthony Balch attempted to make a musical adaptation with a script written by Burroughs himself starring Mick Jagger, and, at one stage, Dennis Hopper.  Cronenberg solved the problem by largely jettisoning the book.  The film instead is more structured around Burroughs' life and the writing of the novel, mixed with various elements of Burroughs writing, not all of which come from Naked Lunch.  Cronenberg stated that the difficulty of making a film about a writer, is that the act of writing itself is not particularly exciting to watch.  He solved it by merging Burroughs' life with his fantasies.  The name William Lee was often used by Burroughs as his alter ego, and sometimes a pseudonym on some of his books, and Burroughs did kill his wife while trying to shoot a glass from her head, and Burroughs considered this incident the start of his life as a writer.  Some of Burroughs friends, such as writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Bowles, appear in thinly disguised portrayals.  The cadaverous, pale-eyed Peter Weller, who is probably best known for RoboCop (1987), is well cast as in the  lead role, looking and sounding a lot like a 1940s film noir gumshoe.  Judy Davis plays the dual role of Joan Lee and Joan Frost, a double of Lee's wife who he meets in Interzone.  Ian Holm plays Joan Frost's husband, the sinister writer Tom (based on American writer Paul Bowles), and Roy Scheider plays the evil Doctor Benway, one of Burroughs' most memorable characters.  Interzone itself was a frequent setting for Burroughs' writing, and was the title of 1989 book of short stories.  It's based on the International Zone of Tangiers, where Burroughs lived for a time.  The fact that Interzone is very obviously created on soundstages, helps make it seem less a place than a state of mind.  The film features some startling special effects and creatures.  As bizarre and graphic as the film is in places, it is still much more restrained than Burroughs' imaginings, which displeased some fans.  Certainly the film is more David Cronenberg than William Burroughs, in it's tone and style, reducing the novel's themes of drugs and particularly toning down the novel's sexual elements, and making it more a film about writing, however Cronenberg's detached style of directing, chimes well with Burroughs' dry, dispassionate prose style.  It is also possibly the best introduction to Burroughs for a mainstream audience.

They were both disappointed with their Tinder date:  Peter Weller and friend in Naked Lunch

  

The Parallax View

 Year:  1974

Director:  Alan J. Pakula

Screenplay:  David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr., based on the novel The Parallax View by Loren Singer

Starring:  Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Paula Prentiss

Running Time:  102 minutes

Genre:  Thriller

Three years after a politician is murdered at the Seattle Space Needle, the witnesses seem to be dying of apparent accidents or natural causes.  Television journalist Lee Carter (Prentiss) who witnessed the murder is convinced that the witnesses are being deliberately killed, and that she is next on the list.  She contacts her ex-boyfriend, hard-bitten newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Beatty) for help.  Joe doesn't believe her at first, until Lee dies of an apparent drug overdose.  Joe starts to investigate and finds himself drawn into a complex and dangerous conspiracy, centred around the sinister Parallax Corporation.

 As American as apple pie

Based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, with an intelligent and sometimes darkly funny screenplay by David Giles and Lorenzo Semple Jr., The Parallax View is a surprisingly bleak work, with a genuinely shocking conclusion, but it still has all the ingredient of an exciting thriller: fights, chases (including an impressive car chase), and a desperate race against time.  Warren Beatty gives an impressive performance as the tough, but surprisingly vulnerable reporter, whose silver tongue and quick fists do little to top him quickly getting out of his depth.  Director Alan J. Pakula, who had previously made Klute (1971) and would go on to make All the President's Men (1976) creates an atmosphere of chilly menace.  Throughout the film there is this constant sense of a vast conspiracy, even the way the film is photographed, with many scenes being viewed from a distance, or from overhead, putting the viewer in the place of a spy observing the proceedings.  The film's most impressive set-piece is the striking assassin training sequence where a series of fragmented still images and words are flashed in quick sensation.  Following the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, not to mention Watergate and Richard Nixon, the 1970s were an era of bleak political thrillers, but the theme of paranoia, alienation and conspiracy still feels very much of the moment.  

The Parallax View