| Movie | Rating | Review | Date | Your Rating | Match | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Secret Garden - G | December 29, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| U-571 - PG-13 | December 28, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| K-19: The Widowmaker - PG-13 | December 28, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Blackbeard the Pirate - Unrated | December 28, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - PG | December 28, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Subject Two - R |
SUBJECT TWO (2006) WRITTEN BY: Philip Chidel and Philip Chidel DIRECTED BY: Philip Chidel DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Rich Confalone FEATURING: Christian Oliver, Dean Stapleton, Courtney Mace, Jürgen Jones, Thomas Buesch, and Philip Chidel GENRES: HORROR, SCI-FI TAGS: GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED PLOT: A medical student gets more than he bargained for when upon accepting an experimental internship, he discovers that immortality comes with a steep price. Subject Twois a fresh twist on the Frankenstein plot. It envisions being reanimated from the undead's perspective. It is deeply disturbing and every bit as repellent and hellish as one could hope. COMMENTS: A misanthropic medical student named Adam who flunked his ethics exam receives a cryptic email from a Dr. Fanklin Vick. It offers him an opportunity to assist in unusual medical research and subsequently to share in the revolutionary scientific advances in medicine that result. He bites on the lure, but to accept the position, he must wait on an icy mountain road in the middle of nowhere to be offered a ride by a stranger. The alluring and mysterious chauffeur obviously knows more about what is going on than he does. His journey to meet the elusive Doctor Vick is itself a snowy odyssey into the isolated, surreal drifts and folds of the Colorado Rockies. When Adam and his driver reach a landmark beyond which the driver is no longer allowed, Adam must hike up a snow covered mountain to the doctor?s laboratory. Now he is stranded, beyond the point of no return. The research facility turns out to be a converted chalet, reminiscent of Nikola Tesla?s Colorado Springs retreat in The Prestige. He meets Vick, who tells him that the research is very unusual and important and that Adam is uniquely qualified. Vick avoids going into much specific detail. Adam accepts. What Adam doesn?t understand is that what uniquely qualifies him is that he is now a captive. Nobody knows where he is, he has no means of departure, and his particular background makes him someone nobody will ever miss if he disappears. On this isolated, snowbound mountain peak, Dr. Vick is indeed performing very unique research. He is experimenting with life, death, and reanimation. In combination with makeshift cryogenics, he is using a bizarre recombinant DNA serum that alters and restarts the process of cellular respiration. The problem is, because the serum, timing and method of administration are as yet unperfected and misunderstood, the process has some very unpleasant side effects. Guess who gets to be the new test subject? VIck murders Adam, and not very nicely. Instead of shooting him up with an overdose of Seconal, he sneaks up behind him a violently strangles him. Then he reanimates him. He ruthlessly butchers and reanimates Adam repeatedly, trying to get the serum component balance, dosage, cryogenic, and temporal factors just right. There isn?t an objective control group. Adam is both subject and control group, which is to say that as Vick and Adam perfect the research, they proceed via trial and error. As Subject Two, Adam is captive to a continuum of horrible and invigorating side effects, continuously oscillating between two extremes of mortal perception. Subject Two experiences his new reality as a twisted psychedelic nightmare. It is simultaneously clarifying and hellish. While continuing to inhabit the world of the living, he is now intellectually in the bizarre plane of the beyond. Unsettling developments alter Adam?s experience when he discovers the frozen, bloody remains of what was apparently once Subject One buried in the snow. In a state of suspended animation, Subject One?s head is riddled with an octopus of gruesome serum tubes. Subject One does not look pleased about it, but he is going nowhere for the time being. Then matters become complicated when a trespassing poacher stumbles onto the proceedings and Adam ?corrects? him. The film has been criticized on two counts. Adam?s character is allegedly not well enough developed so that we care about him, and the film was shot in digital video. I emphatically contest these assertions. Regarding character development, there isn?t time in a standard movie to address every potential nuance. Subject Two is about a dreadful, inescapable cycle of perpetual violent death and reanimation. The film is a horrifying psychological thriller about the human condition in states of animation and morbid destruction. It grimly depicts what it means to be alive. It explores the existential nature and paradoxes of undeath. Subject Two is about the curse of immortality. With cerebral horror paradigms like this to contemplate, I couldn?t give a dead lab rat?s ass about Adam?s hopes and dreams, his life and loves. He is an unethical, bright, curious, but naive foul-up. I want to see how he handles the situation and what becomes of him, nothing more. While the cinematography has been accused of giving the piece the cheap feel of a soap opera, I dispute this as well. The cinematography is as sharp and precise as the frozen alpine air. It enhances the rarefied, ionic ether of the crystalline subzero setting. One can almost feel the thin, icy atmosphere paralyzing the lungs, the sting of snowy crystals against bare skin. Direct to digital bypasses the gloomy, dreary look of televised productions once shot on video tape. True, direct digital tracks movement the way video tape does, and lacks the lustrous detachment achieved by film stock. It is perfectly suited, however, to the white, snowbound, blue-skied clarity of the locale in Subject Two. The precision of digital is blissfully married to the stark, cold reality of this severe story. Subject Two is mostly a mental and physical dialectic between two actors. There is a cold calculation about their dispositions, rather than the emotionally overwrought yelling and screaming standard to other horror scenarios of its type. There is no dramatically shrieked, ?Give my creature life!? Subject Two is pure science fiction and squeamish dread. The appalling nature of the irreversible psychic and physiological mutilation inflicted on Adam combines with Vick?s amoral descent beyond unorthodoxy into pure evil. This profane combination provides all of the excitement and turmoil that one can endure. WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: "Set against the bright, breathtaking world of the snow-peaked Rocky Mountains . . . Subject Two is as much a clever inversion of the resurrection horror genre as it is a profound and ethical examination of the value of life and immortality." - Sundance Film Festival  Subject Two - CLIP
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December 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Event Horizon - R |
The Event Horizon (1996) WRITTEN BY: Philip Eisner DIRECTED BY: Paul Anderson FEATURING: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, and Kathleen Quinlan GENRES: SCI FI, HORROR TAGS: GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED PLOT: A star ship that can bend time goes beyond our universe and opens the door to Hell. The film features a wonderfully heavy, dark, stifling visual footprint. COMMENTS : Well, well it would seem that Pam has just discovered The Event Horizon and needs to tell everyone. Not exactly. I gave it a rewatch and had mixed feelings. Since almost everyone is already familiar, I'll make this quick and dirty. Not! I adore this film, but I have some issues with it. Similar to Hellraiser: Bloodliine , (1996), but not as slickly executed The Event Horizon is about Hell in outer space -literally. And I'm not talking about having to put up with DOS-pun cybergeek humor from your shipmates, a female astronaut's abundant long hair in your face in zero gravity, or the pains and embarrassments of the vacuum toilet. The Event Horizon takes the horror of the fire aboard the Mir and amps things up about a thousand notches. Sam Neill, who always does a great job at portraying sinister and sophisticated creepy people, plays Dr. William Weir, an engineer who designs a new gravity drive star ship in the future. The concept is that a special, complex 3-ringed gravity reactor core (which looks suspiciously like a glorified gyroscope) can create a mini-black hole. The resulting super gravitational field can be harnessed to fold the fabric of space. The wormhole it produces allows the ship, named The Event Horizon, to instantly travel many, many light years. It works! It works too well! The ship it turns out, overshot its mark and went someplace awful (Theramin music, please) and brought this awful back with it. And we're not talking rap music and Ebonics, or Harley culture and line dancing here. It went to Hell and brought Hell back. Oh, and the ship is now alive and can read your deepest fears and materialize them for you -this last one is a bold, new, highly original paradigm, that has never before been used in sci -fi or horror . . . (joking!). So in a nutshell, the frozen, hibernating ship is discovered seven years after it departs, drifting aimlessly and dead in the orbit of Neptune. A scout ship is sent to investigate and salvage. (The ship has to be sent, otherwise there would be no movie, just a scribbled high concept in producer Jeremy Bolt's disorganized desktop paper stack.) The crew of the scout ship, which includes Dr. Weir, discovers evidence that all hell broke loose on The Event Horizon and before they can get away, the ship begins to exert its evil influence on them. They start to go nuts and weird, bad things happen. Then Weir goes mad and wants to take the ship and her new crew back to hell. It starts to look as though nobody will escape the mess. I loved The Event Horizon but it is full of dreadful cliches. In so many of these hack space flicks, outer space is depicted as being conducive to the propagation of sound waves. The crews of multi-trillion dollar space cruisers behave like a pack of drunken teenage camp counselors at a roadhouse free-for-all. Rainbow coalition stereotypes abound. (There is usually the logical guy, the jock, the tough cookie righteous gal, the black guy engaging in minstrel show humor, the mad scientist who will sacrifice everyone for knowledge, the vapid gung-ho kid, etc. etc., This is typical of the cast in the Alien franchise and every corny space movie that came after it. The crew in The Event Horizon isn't quite that bad, but it still follows the cliche. They are emotional and confrontational. One of them has tattoos, that's typical of astronauts, right? The intense, street smart Laurence Fishburne is the flight commander. He'd make a believable Naval skipper, but an astronaut leader? C'mon. How about Al Gore. That would be more like it, but I suppose not as entertaining. I 'm not sure when I observe the casts in these films whether I am seeing the portrayal of astronauts or the characters from A Chorus Line. I mean all some of these flicks need to do to complete the "all walks of life" theme is add Marcy from Peanuts and a tortured nerd. But I don't want to give The Event Horizon a black eye for the extremes of other movies in this regard. While reminiscent of them, it wasn't as bad as some. At one point, Dr. Weir is asked to explain the ship's reactor, which leads to one of the most redeeming and interesting parts of the script -the idea of using a black hole for space travel. The explanation, while fictitious, is fascinating and of course, fairly understandable for the benefit of the movie audience. Then the crew asks him to dumb it down more. Weir does. But the answer still isn't Sesame Street Pablum enough. The black street guy (a triple Ph.D. of course) shouts at Dr. Weir in a racially stereotypical voice, "Hey Doctor, don't give me none of that physics sh*t!" Um, yeah. Last time I checked, most astronauts and even fighter pilots have mandatory degrees in a pertinent physical engineering field, right up to the doctoral level in some cases. These people are all about physics. Real astronauts are also carefully screened to be slow walking, slow talking, unemotional, steady nerved, calm, collected, masters of quiet understatement. They have the same patience and emotionally flat responses that the military requires of snipers, only much, much more so. In other words, they don't lose their cool in a crisis. In fact real astronauts are so logical that they seem to border on being idio-savants. This is essential to prevent fights and stupid mistakes in a closed and critical environment where one has only a single chance to do things the right way the first time. These professional technicians are responsible for handling an unfathomably expensive piece of delicate technology under precarious circumstances. By contrast the crew in The Event Horizon is a careless, impetuous and reckless mob. Out of juvenile negligence they callously cause severe damage to the craft they are in charge of salvaging. Astronauts are total eggheads and emotional dullards, but then a movie with a bunch of logical, boring quiet people wouldn't be very exciting would it? Yes, it would too, if Kubrick had done it. He could have made The Event Horizon a masterpiece. However this film was marketed to be a widely accessible money maker, so we get fistfights, tattoos, street talk, shouting, a rainbow coalition unisex crew, and sound in outer space. Obviously a major malfunction as far as realism and quality are concerned. On the other hand, the sets and special effects are absolutely fabulous for the die hard sci-fi fan. There is some use of CGI to depict weightless objects. I have no problems with CGI or any other method of achieving special effects AS LONG AS IT LOOKS REAL! CGI was well utilized in The Terminator films, but it looked like animation in some parts of The Event Horizon. The twp spacecraft are cavernous. This provides entertaining visual imagery, but is logically ridiculous. Room and size are an expensive liability in space. They are an unaffordable and impractical luxury. Furthermore, the futurists overdid the layering and surface detail. Nearly all surfaces in the sets have important looking electrical grid patterns, piping, or just plain Aztec style designs. It is visually stunning and imaginative. I loved it! But it is not realistic Neither is the idea that the crew would remain emotionally stable living in a ship that resembles a Gothic nightmare about dark, leaden, medieval torture chambers. Most of The Event Horizon's onboard bridge and crew areas look like they were designed by Vlad the Impaler. Furthermore, everything appears to be made of steel or iron, if not lead. A little aluminum, a lot of plastic and a generous amount of Velcro would be more like it. However unrealistic they are, the interiors are absolutely stunning, very creepy, and highly entertaining. The stills I captured will make great profile page decorations and desktop backgrounds for years to come. One last criticism has to do with the date in the future in which the events unfold. The story is set about 50 years from the time that the film was released. Given the fact that most of the money that could go to scientific research of all kinds is corralled instead into the coffers of the military industrial complex, the war contractors and the oil companies, try about a thousand years in the future, well past the point of civilization as we know it. (Given the fact that the US is collapsing like the Roman Empire, try never.) As Carl Sagan pointed out, if it had not been for the dark ages, the first star ships would now be returning. We lost 1600 years. I'd say that reasoning is about right, but for the events depicted in The Event Horizon to occur, we would also need to have governments and societies dedicated to enlightenment and not ones that reinforce their populations' stupidity for social control and profit. All of this aside, The Event Horizon is a must see for that handful of avowed sci-fi and horror fans who have not already gotten to it. If one can get past the cliches and stock production conventions, the redeeming factors are worthwhile. These include the production design and the imaginative concept of making a star ship that can fold space by creating its own black-hole. The idea that The Event Horizon overshot its destination, went to Hell, then brought Hell back is a bonus, if not a variation of an idea used the previous year in Hellraiser: Bloodline. The story is rife with suspense, horror, and captivating twists and turns. A number of bizarre and colorful incidents keep the viewer squirming and attentive. "This ship has been beyond the boundaries of our universe, of known scientific realities. Who knows where its been, what it's seen...and what it's brought back with it? "Where we're going we won't need eyes to see. I created the Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much much farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure evil. When she crossed over she was just a ship . . . but when she came back, she was alive. Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?" -Dr. Weir.  The Event Horizon - trailer Anatomy of a Black Hole and The Event Horizon - CLICK TO VIEW 3 of 6 different documentaries about the Universe and Us, comment by Sam Neill. - CLICK TO PLAY - |
December 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Eye of the Devil (13) - Unrated |
Eye of the Devil (1968) GENRE: Occult WRITTEN BY: Dennis Murphy Based on the novel by Robin Estridge DIRECTED BY: J. Lee Thompson FEATURING: Sharon Tate, Donald Pleasance, David Niven, David Hemmings, and Flora Robson. PLOT: A happy marriage descends into an odyssey of terror when a woman's husband is called to his ancestral estate by pagan heretics. COMMENTS: Vineyard owner Marquis Philippe de Montfaucon (Niven) is called back to his castle when a drought withers the crop upon which the entire region depends. His wife and children are supposed to remain in London, but of course she becomes curious and is compelled to intrude. Catherine de Montfaucon (Deborah Kerr) subsequently discovers that her husband is behaving in a secretive and peculiar manner. His personality has undergone a distinct change and he seems dreadfully grim and preoccupied. Why? There are many mysterious comings and goings, some heavy-weight clergy are milling around who appear to be legitimate, but why are the Marquis' young cousins shooting medieval arrows at her, casting spells on her children and trying to hypnotize her into leaping off of the castle parapets? And who the devil are those troublesome dark characters in black Franciscan monk's robes, menacingly chasing Catherine about in the deep dark woods? As Catherine snoops, she discovers mounting evidence of heretical pagan practices and that an extraordinary number of the Marquis' antecedents met untimely deaths. Could there be a relation between the deaths and some profound event that her husband seems to be preparing for? Flora Robson (The Shuttered Room) is creepy and aloof as always in her role as the Marquis' Aunt. Sharon Tate (in her film debut) plays a sinister and threatening witch who turns frogs into doves and seems to perversely enjoy taking a good old fashioned horse whipping from the Marquis. David Hemmings (Blowup, Juggernaut) cavorts as her delightfully menacing, archery-happy brother. Eye of the Devil features crisp, striking, artful black and white cinematography be Erwin Hillier.  Eye of the Devil - trailer Eye of the Devil - (1995) - CLIP - CLICK TO PLAY |
December 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Eden Log - R |
Eden Log (French, 2007, English language) WRITTEN BY: Pierre Bordage and Franck Vestiel DIRECTED BY: Franck Vestiel WITH: Clovis Comillca, Vimala Pons and Zohar Wexleser GENRE: SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY TAGS: WEIRD PLOT: A man named Tolbiac (Cornillac) awakens with amnesia alongside rotting corpses in a high tech underground wasteland. He must find his way out of a massive labyrinth that is very deep within the earth. In order to do so he has to collect and assimilate data and unravel clues to the bizarre circumstances in which he finds himself. Shot entirely indoors in an underground setting, this unusual science fiction film blurs the line between supposed reality and apparent fantasy. Told visually, with minimal dialogue, the viewer is disoriented by the bizarre circumstances and setting. One must see through the protagonist's eyes to decipher his otherworldly experience. The challenge is heightened by the fact that he has no memory and his world seems just as alien to him as it does to us. COMMENTS: Eden Log is told mainly with pictures. It is set in the near future. There is refreshingly little exposition. There are no long and grandiose on-screen paragraphs or narration at the inception telling about a land far, far away in a time long ago. As a result, the story is a bit murky. The viewer must piece the action together from the protagonist's experiences, which unfold from his point of view. The meaning of some events is not clearly delineated, and the beholder must learn how to interpret them. Due to the fact that one must suspend disbelief in order to accept certain aspects of the plot, one is never sure until the end how to understand some of Tolbiac's impressions and experiences. It is at first hard to tell what is real and what is fantasy. Tolbiac starts out at the bottom of a ruined, high-tech subterranean maze in pool of muddy water among dead bodies. He must quickly assimilate himself to his dark, cold, wet environment by scavenging clothing and equipment from a plethora of cadavers. As he does so he gradually begins to make his ascent through the hellish terrain. He encounters some frightening characters and a sequence of bizarre threats as he unravels his way through this post apocalyptic tangle. Along the route he collects and tries to translate odd clues. Gaining insight into his plight is his best chance for planning each succeeding step. Tolbiac must dodge savage humanoids and Orwellian storm troopers who may be hunting him, while he tries to decipher mysterious technological data. Tobiac encounters cryptic evidence that a totalitarian elite society controls the depths and the workers who once inhabited them. Promising sanctuary in return for "sacrifice," there seems to have been a program in place to reward the troglodytes with acceptance into a Utopian society on the surface. He finds a departure depot from which the workers would leave, ascending in illuminated cubes. Strange speaking holograms of people guide him and advise him, but they are sinister and their presentation is suspicious. Tolbiac soon digs up other holographic date elsewhere which indicates the the workers who ascended in the cubes were never heard from again. What became of them? Will he share their fate or find a way to navigate the strange and terrible gauntlet obstructing him from deliverance? And what of the gargantuan and possibly carnivorous root structure that ubiquitously pervades every level of the complex? Tolbiac's only hope seems to be gaining the acceptance of a sole surviving technician who once worked in the maze, and who is now clinging to survival herself. After she captures Tolbiac, she uses him as a diversion to save herself and abandons him. He must find her and win her trust. But how?  Eden Log - trailer
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December 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Beaufort - Unrated |
 Beaufort (2007) WRITTEN BY: Joseph Cedar and Ron Lesham based on the novel by Ron Leshem DIRECTED BY: Joseph Cedar FEATURING: Alon Abutbul, Alon Ben David, Daniel Brook, Oshri Cohen, Eli Eltonyo, Gal Friedman GENRE: WEIRD WAR TAGS: GRIM PLOT: Israeli soldiers occupying a medieval era fortress in southern Lebanon endure constant shelling and T.O.W. missile attacks while they await an evacuation order that never comes. Some kind of structure at the site of Beaufort Castle may date back to Roman times, but not a lot is known about it. The location of the current structure, or rather its remains, is at the crest of a 2100 foot hill with a commanding view of the surrounding area, It includes southern Lebanon and northern Israel. Beaufort was captured by the Crusaders in 1139. From 1976 to 1982, the PLO used it as a base for rocket attacks on Israel. In 1982, the Israelis captured it and remained there until 2000. Beaufort is a fictitious account of the final weeks of Israeli occupation. The film begins with a bomb expert being choppered in under mortar fire. His task is to seize and defuse a new type of I.E.D. found placed on the access road. Instead of destroying it, the Israelis want to capture it and find out how it works. Of course it blows him up. With this cheery beginning, the film launches into its study of the irony of holding a fortified position: long stretches of mind numbing, bleak boredom interspersed with sudden moments of sheer terror. The cynical occupation force is demoralized. They have been there too long, and the occupation has become a stalemate. All they can do is prevent the enemy from using the position against them. There is no way to win within the situation in which they find themselves. Living in Spartan conditions, the soldiers endure continual mortar attacks and harassing fire. Each man is counting the hours that he must serve there, maintaining his sanity by dreaming of the personal plans he will pursue upon his release from the IDF. There is some vague prospect that the army may soon receive permission to evacuate the dreary stronghold. Any morale that exists is broken when the enemy acquires T.O.W missiles and turns one of the parapets and the soldier manning it into dust. The T.O.W. is capable of penetrating the thick concrete barriers that had heretofore offered semi-adequate protection. Now the men all feel like sitting ducks, and the elusive evacuation order becomes of utmost importance to them. They wait and wait, and while they wait, rumors circulate that the fort wasn't supposed to have been captured in the first place. Allegedly the commander in charge of the 1982 assault had been ordered to pull back, but proceeded and managed to take the position anyway, dooming soldiers for years to come to be assigned to the boring and very hazardous duty of guarding it under continual attack from incoming ordinance. The IDF is perpetually whittled down and replenished. The soldiers spend all of their time keeping their heads down and dodging shrapnel. Detached, iconoclastic crew chiefs sit in a CCTV command center deep within the fortress, droning out verbal alerts every time rocket or mortar flashes are detected, and confirmations when the projectiles strike the encampment. PA speakers drone on, "Incoming, Incoming," and then "Impact, Impact." in an ever present monotone. The announcements and attacks reverberate throughout the compound with tedious regularity. Then the much anticipated order to evacuate finally comes . . . But is it for real?  Beaufort - CLIP |
December 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| In My Skin (Dans ma peau) - Unrated |
In My Skin ( Dans ma peau) (2002) WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Marina de Van FEATURING: Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas, and Léa Drucker GENRE: HORROR TAGS: WEIRD, GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED PLOT: Esther is a nice yuppie girl who enjoys her office job. She also enjoys dismantling and consuming her own body. After disfiguring her leg in an accident, Esther develops a necrotic fascination with herself and begins to self-mutilate. She engages in auto-cannibalism while having hallucinations of limb disassociation. In My Skin is a different kind of horror movie. It plays on those grisly nightmares about things like inexplicably sudden tooth and hair loss, parasitism and other subconscious fears centering on uncontrollable bodily damage. There are no phantoms or monsters in De Van's film, no outside threat. The horror comes from within as a woman slowly sinks into insanity and demolishes her body. COMMENTS: In My Skin is a study of morbid preoccupation with the physical nature of the human condition. It explores dissatisfaction with body image, and the finding of a decadent delight in its destruction. The lead character seeks a deep psychological satiation through bodily deconstruction and self-consumption. She tries in vain to attack inexplicable and inexorable anxiety via the demolition of the human vessel. Esther (De Van) falls on some construction debris in back of a friend?s house and gashes her leg open. Oddly insensitive to the pain, she does not sense the severity of her ghastly injury. She discovers the extent of the damage later, but even then, she goes to a bar before seeking treatment. When she finally does obtain medical assistance, she perversely declines measures to prevent disfigurement. At this point, her psyche undergoes a sinister change. In My Skin is reminiscent of a Ray Bradbury story entitled "Skeleton" (one of two he wrote with the same title, and bundled together in a short book entitled, Skeletons, published by Subterranean Press in 1945). In the story, a man suddenly becomes preoccupied with and disturbed by his own bones. A quack doctor convinces him that his skeleton is indeed the source of the problem, and that his is not a unique condition. The man begins a gruesome journey into madness. Feeling invaded by his own skeleton, he finally cuts out his own bones. He feasts on the marrow and fashions one of his femurs into a flute. Like the Bradbury character, Esther becomes similarly self-destructive. The film never offers a clear explanation for the progression of her horrifying degeneration, but Esther derives a twisted, repulsive fulfillment from disassembling herself. Esther is at first ambivalent to her leg injury, but soon becomes obsessed with it. She fixates on the cuts on her legs. She is fascinated with their disfiguring nature and with the healing process which she compulsively strives to defeat. Esther stares at, caresses and picks at her wounds. Then she decides to deliberately exacerbate them. She slowly, sardonically slices her damaged leg repeatedly with a jagged shard of metal. She becomes engrossed by her disfigurement, repeatedly and violently abusing herself throughout the film. Interspersed with these gruesome episodes are scenes of her otherwise normal, daily professional and personal life. Her boyfriend and office companion become concerned for her, but are unaware of the full extent of her burgeoning psychosis and self mutilation. At a business dinner, Esther quietly breaks down at the table. First, she becomes absorbed with the meat on her plate. She impulsively and uncontrollably reaches into it and wads it up several times. It seems as if the arm and hand performing this action are beyond her control. She must grab them with her other hand to stop them. So far, the other diners don?t notice. Then, in a chilling scene, Esther hallucinates that her arm is completely detached from her body and lying on the restaurant table. It appears neatly severed, though no one else can see it. Esther gazes at it in horrified fascination. She is having some sort of psychotic delusional episode regarding her limbs, yet she is still more or less in touch with her surroundings. She suffers mental turmoil, becoming increasingly agitated and focused on her arm and her injured leg. She cruelly stabs her arm with a fork under the tablecloth. Her tension mounts and finally she can?t restrain herself anymore. She sneaks off to the establishment's wine cellar and begins to attack herself with a knife and fork. As Esther's downward spiral gains momentum, she isolates herself from the world in a hotel room. Then, she engages in an all out orgy of atrocious self mutilation. Not only has she developed an obvious fetish centered around her own living tissue, she seems to be compelled to separate it from herself and then eat it. Perhaps she is trying to rid herself of something else. Excising skin and muscle, then consuming it offers some sort of deliverance. Esther is the main subject of the film and she is the center of most of the shots. This centrism on Esther forces the viewer to inhabit her and to see her delusions from her self absorbed perspective. Esther takes delight in her twisted descent and seems unbothered by her incapacity for self control. Her actions are appalling and repulsive. One wants desperately for her to stop. Sheer horror is created when the viewer is forced to experience her acts from this first person perspective. Esther is driven to cut and, finally, cannibalize herself, biting into and devouring her own arm, sucking her own blood. She smears her blood all over herself and revels in it as if deriving sexual ecstasy. Then she starts in on her face. Her macabre obsession snowballs into further mutilation and playing with her detached flesh. She cuts off a lengthy swath of her skin and tans it to make a grisly souvenir. Watching a woman's profane satiation and release via her self destruction is an excruciatingly difficult endurance contest. The viewer may feel as if he is going to go mad, perhaps as mad as Esther. The scenes of Esther hacking, slicing, scraping, and eating her own flesh are depicted as non-sensationally as if the director was documenting a tourist on a Sunday stroll. The film's visual footprint is foreboding and darkly claustrophobic. It makes the viewer feel caught in a horrible stifling trap. In My Skin is a shocking spectacle, but not a blindly gratuitous one. Neither is it a profound art film. While it could have had more complexity and depth, In My Skin is not lacking in characterization or purpose. The film is an examination of morbidity. It is a superficial exploration of a unique psychotic rejection of the normal human condition and a resulting narcissistic obsession with gruesome body modification and perverse self-cannibalism. By avoiding a grandiose quest into the sources of Esther's anguish, de Van allows In My Skin to pass right to the terror element like scissors through paper. In its simplicity it creates substantial, distilled horror that is more than skin deep.  In My Skin - CLIP
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December 27, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Zombie Women of Satan - Unrated | December 27, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| One Dark Night - PG |
This is the best of the sorority pledge spending initiation night in a mausoleum movies. I seem to recall hearing an anecdote about damage being done to Hollywood Mausoleum resulting from the filming that was concealed just in time for a celebrity funeral, but I can't find the source now. Anyway, not a bad 80's spook film. Nothing ingenious, but a few innovative and memorable moments. |
December 26, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Satan's Whip - Unrated | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Seven Women for Satan - Unrated | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Satan's Black Wedding - R | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Brotherhood of Satan - PG | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Satan's Slave (Evil Heritage) - R | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Asylum of Satan - PG | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Devil and Max Devlin - PG | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Dust Devil - R | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Dance with the Devil (Perdita Durango) - R | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Devil Commands (The Devil Said No) - Unrated | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The House of the Devil - R | December 23, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Otoko-tachi no Yamato - Unrated | December 23, 2009 | N/A |
4525 ratings
345 reviews
