A Rundown of the 13 (plus) Best Horror Movies I've Seen in the Past Year
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The Serial Killer Thriller Slot

I find it interesting that I saw a surfeit of exceptional serial killer features in this past year, just as Hannibal Lecter and his gruesomely fascinating brethren are about to descend on the small screen in a very big way.

On tap for this season’s freshman TV titles are: Bryan Fuller’s take on Hannibal, Carlton Cuse’s Psycho prequel, Bates Motel, and Kevin Williamson’s The Following, while Dexter is winding down, on its way towards its last two seasons.

There’s also Clarice, in development at Lifetime, about Clarice Starling, which will cover the period of time between the film adaptations of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. I can only assume, if this show comes to fruition, that she’ll be running into other serial killers who she may or may not become bizarrely attracted to.

So, yeah, not since the serial killer-of-the-week heyday of shows like Millennium and Profiler have we had this much TV attention on the serial killer

So in that light, let’s take a look at the best of their big screen brothers.

And when I said “surfeit” above, I wasn’t kidding. This is the category that’s got four runners-up.

And the big kahunas tied for the top slot?

SNOWTOWN 
(May 2011)

As a feature debut, Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown--which chronicles the crossing of the paths of “Australia’s worst serial killer,” John Justin Bunting, and young James Spyridon Vlassakis--is an astoundingly self-assured piece that is a particularly difficult cinematic experience to sit through.
And I mean that in the best possible way.
This one has a profound sense of disquiet and unease that permeates its nearly two-hour running time, with riveting central performances by Daniel Henshall as Bunting, and Lucas Pittaway as Jamie Vlassakis. The fact that this is Pittaway’s acting debut (he was spotted at a shopping center and asked to audition for the role) makes his on-screen achievement even more noteworthy.
Fair warning though, as I said earlier, this one’s tough to get through, but what Kurzel manages to capture here is a level of disturbing that many straight-forward horror films never even come close to.

Parting shot: Snowtown was known in its US release as The Snowtown Murders, actually the title of one of the books Snowtown’s script was inspired by.

CHAINED 
(August 2012)

Now, for those of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.

“But what about his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.

Fine.

The Jennifer Lynch Scorecard:

I wasn’t overly fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena, but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance, so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror! 2009 list.

While I appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still waiting to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production, Despite the Gods.)

And now, we come to Chained.

In the past year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial killer thrillers, Chained stands out because while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing Carl Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply just wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the child’s mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance star, Julia Ormond).

There’s a searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s 94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’ oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.

As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping into the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re witness to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of their motivations.

This is a disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.

Here’s hoping Lynch keeps on keepin’ on…

(Snowtown OS’ courtesy of impawards.com; Chained OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

¡Qué horror! 2012

Candidate # 31

CHAINED

(August 2012)

Now, for those of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.

“But what about his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.

Fine.

The Jennifer Lynch Scorecard:

I wasn’t overly fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena, but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance, so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror! 2009 list.

While I appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still waiting to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production, Despite the Gods.)

And now, we come to Chained.

In the past year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial killer thrillers, Chained stands out because while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing Carl Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply just wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the child’s mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance star, Julia Ormond).

There’s a searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s 94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’ oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.

As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping into the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re witness to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of their motivations.

This is a disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.

Here’s hoping Lynch keeps on keepin’ on…

(Chained OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

SURVEILLANCE
(Review)


If you’ve been to the Iguana before, you’ll probably know that I’m a huge David Lynch geek. So it shouldn’t be surprising that when Jennifer Lynch’s Boxing Helena came around in 1993, I was on tenterhooks to see it, wondering how much of the bizarre could be passed on through the generations.
But, whether it was because I expected too much since she was Lynch’s daughter, or whether the production itself took an early (and unrecoverable) bad step in the whole Kim Basinger casting brouhaha, I came away from the film a sad, disappointed man.
The younger Lynch then fell off the cinematic radar till last year, when her Surveillance began to stir up much praise, winning the top prize at Sitges. (It also won the Best Director and Best Actress awards at the NYC Horror Film Festival; Lynch being the first female director to take the prize in the festival’s history, and Ryan Simpkins, the first child to win Best Actress.)
And now that I’ve seen it, I’m a very happy man, extremely glad that after all these years, my disillusionment with Boxing Helena has finally been washed away by this involving thriller.


The film centres on a violent incident along a stretch of highway in the Santa Fe desert and the three witnesses to it. An a$hole cop (Surveillance co-writer Kent Harper), a junkie (Zodiac’s Pell James), and a child (Simpkins, also seen in Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road) are asked to recount the incident (and their respective journeys leading up to that point), by the FBI agents (Julia Ormond; and Bill Pullman, who’d of course previously worked with David Lynch on the stunning Lost Highway) who’ve arrived to investigate the crime.
The fractured storytelling (three points-of-view; discrepancies between what is being said and what actually took place) affords much of what makes Surveillance so involving in its early section, with the witnesses’ convergence during the incident in question a bloody, violent, and unrelenting set piece.
Then…
Then we’re privy to what comes next…


There is much here that is Lynchian, particularly the characters and characterizations that are slightly off-centre, and it’s actually an element of the proceedings that Lynch uses to good effect, acting as partial camouflage for the twists the narrative takes during its course.
To everyone’s credit, the clues are there, and even if you suspect the nature of the shoe you’re just waiting to drop, the reveal is still brutally effective, the finale suitably bleak.


Though this is nominally a thriller, as with most of her father’s work, Lynch’s Surveillance does what the best horror movies should do, unsettle, disturb its audience.
Central to that aspect of Surveillance are the performances of Harper and French Stewart (who plays Officer Jim Conrad), who are the worst sort of cop you’d ever have the misfortune of meeting.
It’s the fact that most of the cops we see in the film range from flaming a$holes to annoying incompetents, that the departmental rivalry between the local law enforcement and the FBI becomes a wryly amusing sight.
The third act reveal then makes it positively perverse.


Lynch, like her father, knows a good musical moment, and gives The Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up” a neat spin during the proceedings. (Aside from executive producing, Daddy Lynch also provides the creepy-a$ “Speed Roadster,” portions of which are heard in the film’s main body, then heard in its entirety during the end credit crawl.)
She also knows how to visually captivate, and she’s ably assisted in this respect by DP Peter Wunstorf and editor Daryl K. Davis.
All in all, this is a stunning return for Lynch, and the fact that she chose her next project to be the Bollywood production Hisss (about a nāginī—a female nāga, or snakewoman), makes me grin even wider.
Whatever flaws I may have perceived in Boxing Helena, Surveillance is a cold, calculated diamond, proving quite decisively that the younger Lynch is a capable and rather gifted storyteller.
Hopefully, she has more bizarre cinematic jewels up her sleeve.


Parting shot: A double feature of Surveillance and David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would be a blast, if only to showcase two very different sides of Ormond.

(Surveillance OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by Jeremy Saunders]; images courtesy of latimes.com & shocktillyoudrop.com.)

INLAND EMPIRE
(Review)

If you are—as I am—a David Lynch devotee, you’ll understand when I say that sometimes, to even attempt a brief synopsis of his films is sheer folly. Well, Inland Empire is one of those times.
The best I can say is, Nikki Grace (Lynch collaborator and co-producer Laura Dern) is an actress poised for a career-defining role, via the project On High in Blue Tomorrows, directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons).

Now, since this is a Lynch film, this is hardly the only thing Inland Empire is about. Lynch’s latest is a three-hour odyssey that twists its way deep into one of the director’s labyrinthine cinematic constructs where the terms “time” and “linear narrative” are meaningless.
All things Lynchian are here: the odd tangents in conversation; characters moving and dancing backwards; the eerie, unsettling soundscapes; the set-up from his bizarre sitcom Rabbits; the dream logic; the strobes; the beautiful women. All these and more keep us company as the film’s narrative slips and slides across the screen in that peculiar, surreal hopscotch way that is vintage Lynch.

Inland Empire is also a chance to spend time with some great performers, from more past Lynch collaborators—Twin Peaks’ Grace Zabriskie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’s Harry Dean Stanton, Mulholland Drive’s Justin Theroux, and Wild At Heart’s Diane Ladd (also Dern’s mother)—to newcomers to the Lynch universe like Cabin Fever’s Jordan Ladd and a nearly unrecognizable Julia Ormond. (There are also some great, but brief cameos that I’ll keep under my hat for your maximum, delighted surprise.)

Additionally, this is, hands down, one of the scariest horror movies I’ve seen in many a moon.
That could be an odd statement, but if you consider that many of Lynch’s feature films function like art house horror movies—they expertly rivet the audience to a place of pure dread and foreboding, without resorting to masked killers, long-haired contortionist ghosts, or psychopathic torturers—I think it’s a fair assessment.
The fact that Inland Empire can, in some sections, both scare and unsettle, while in others, move emotionally, is testament to Lynch’s artistry and genius (and Dern’s amazing turn).

The beauty of a storyteller like David Lynch is that, I know I can give him my hand and my complete trust, certain that no matter how dark things become, no matter how strange and uncertain the turns the tale takes get, that the end point will always be a place where things will make some sort of bizarre sense.
The feeling I get with Lynch is that he will always take my hand and allow my fingers to feel the edges of the narrative, and from there, give me enough to intuit the story he is telling, to feel the tale’s geography so I can fathom it in its entirety and make of it what I will.
As clumsy as my attempts are to convey my feelings of a Lynchian experience, film critic Michael Atkinson puts it in these terms, “[Inland Empire is] one of the rare films that teaches you—obliquely—how to watch it.”
I think Atkinson’s sentiment is the same thing I was talking about, but put in his words, and I think it’s a common characteristic of all of Lynch’s films. It’s all in there, hidden in the shadows of the creepy, surreal bits, all there for us to find, so long as we’re alert, and aware, and willing to look towards the dark for the answers.

Watching Inland Empire is like stepping through a massive cobweb. Walking away, you still feel the strands and shreds clinging to you, and try as you might, your mind still tells you they’re there, on your skin, even after you’ve frantically brushed yourself off.
Actually, the best of Lynch’s ouevre can leave you with that feeling. The fact that Inland Empire is a three-hour mainline of Lynchian sensibilities just makes it stand out all the more.

Now, given that one of Inland Empire’s backdrops is the equally surreal world of Hollywood film-making, it cannot help but recall Mulholland Drive. But there are also elements and flourishes that hearken back to Lost Highway, as well as Satoshi Kon’s brilliant anime mindf*ck, Perfect Blue.
If you loved any (or all) of the above, chances are, you’ll love Inland Empire too.

Parting shot: And if you thought Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever cast rabbits in a sinister light, well think again…

Parting shot 2: This is the first film Lynch chose to shoot on digital, and the results are just as visually arresting as his previous works.

(Inland Empire OS and UK quad courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art of Limited Edition Two-Disc Set courtesy of amazon.com; image courtesy of ifc.com.)