Triangle (2009)

Director: Christopher Smith
Writer(s): Smith
Starring: Melissa George, Joshua McIvor, Jack Taylor and Liam Hemsworth

Look up a list of the best horror movies of the 2000s, and you just might find Triangle amongst other well-known classics. Yet it’s virtually unknown here in the United States, despite a fairly well-known cast (Melissa George is one of those actresses that you might not know her name, but chances are you’ve seen her before; a pre-fame Liam Hemsworth also has a supporting role), and unique storytelling structure. This is mainly because it inexplicably never received a theatrical release in the U.S., despite theatrical runs in the U.K., Belgium and the Netherlands.

I suppose it makes sense that it never reached U.S. shores in theatrical form, because it’s exactly the type of movie that only would have made it to the arthouses: It’s a twisty, sometimes confusing, but always engaging film that defies description. In other words, it's the exact antithesis of American cinema, which tends to require straightforward, linear stories that are neatly tied up by the end. 

In what seems to be the norm for me as of late, it is yet another film where discussing the plot at virtually any length risks spoiling many of the surprises; actually, I would say this film virtually demands you to go in without any former knowledge. 

Melissa George is Jess, an overwhelmed single mother with an autistic child. She clearly needs a break - something that’s painfully evident from the way she handles her son accidentally spilling some paint - and so a getaway on a sailboat with some friends seems to be just the thing she needs to help clear her mind. Only, things aren’t right from the start: she seems dazed and out-of-it from the very beginning…maybe this trip wasn’t so good for her after all.

A few minutes into the groups’ sailboating expedition, a sudden storm seems to come out of nowhere. Far from shore and caught off guard by the inexplicable change in weather, death seems inevitable for the group. That is, until a large ocean liner happens to virtually appear before their very eyes. The stranded group boards the large ship, expecting to find some people that can help them; they are shocked when they discover the vessel is completely abandoned. But Jess’ behavior only gets weirder from there…

Ignore the simple, mundane setup, because Triangle is anything but mundane: Once the story gets going, it’s one virtually unrelenting twist and turn right after the other. I always harp on how many genre films lack originality and are cliched in one way or another, but Triangle is one of the most unpredictable movies I’ve ever seen, with a story that grips you and never lets go. Everything seems resolved within the first 40 minutes, leaving the viewer wondering where the plot can even go for the remaining hour. it seems backed into a corner, with no way out. But not only does it keep chugging along, but it does so without a narrative misstep, or any over-the-top scenes that cast the viewer from its spell.

The “feel” of the film has been compared to the works of David Lynch, but that feels more like a copout than anything else. Why do people always feel the need to lump unique things into categories? It feels like a coping mechanism for critics to deal with something that they can’t fully understand. Triangle has a feel all its own; not once was I reminded of Lynch, or really anyone else for that matter. It has shades of Memento (a film which writer/director Christopher Smith acknowledges was a main influence), but it’s not even content with taking that film’s unique storytelling structure, without deconstructing it and turning it on its head. 

For being a “horror” film, it does manage to touch on some pretty weighty themes, such as the difficulties inherent of raising a special needs child, and how we as humans fall into seemingly unbreakable cycles, to name just a couple. Through one woman’s story, it summarizes a lot about the darker side of human nature; at the risk of offering up a very minor spoiler, I will say it’s certainly not a film for anyone who favors happy endings.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not a film for anyone looking for an ending, period. I mean, sure, the movie ends, in the way every film has to. In just about the only cliched scene, it even ends the way most films do: with a cut to black and credits rolling across the screen. But, just like the events that precede that, the ending is ambiguous, with even the writer/director himself stating that there is no “right” answer: We are presented with clues, and then formulate our own opinion based around those clues; that’s often the mark of challenging, thoughtful cinema.

And challenging, thoughtful cinema has no place in cinemas here. 

RATING: 9/10

CHRISTMAS CAPSULES: Santa Girl (2009)

Director: Blayne Weaver
Writer(s): Patricia Harrington
Starring: Jennifer Stone, Devon Werkheiser, Barry Bostwick, and McKayla Witt

There are retarded plots, and then there's the plot of Santa Girl, which threatens to usurp them all. Blending Amish and other religious customs, with Christmas (?), it tells the story of a girl, who is allowed to leave her home to go to college. That doesn't sound too bizarre, does it? Well, as the title implies, that girl is Santa's daughter, and the heir to his sleigh when he retires...which is pretty overboard, but also just the tip of the iceberg.

Complicating matters is the fact that our girl, Cassie Claus, is being forced to marry Jack Frost's son, the cleverly named Jack Frost, Jr., as a way to strengthen the image of both families, despite her clear reluctance to do so. This reluctance becomes even stronger when she meets Sam, a fellow classmate who takes an immediate liking to her. Oh, and she also meets JR, another good-looking classmate who also seems to be very interested...and so the “love” triangle begins. But is everyone who they say they are...?

Honestly, we both went into this expecting to hate every minute of it, but it's really not half bad, thanks to some inspired touches (like making Santa Claus a complete dick to everyone around him), and some likable performances from Jennifer Stone, as Cassie (who basically just gets to be as over-the-top as she was on “Wizards of Waverly Place”), and Devon Werkheiser, as Sam, who comes off as the more grounded character. There are even some genuine moments of humor, Jack Frost is legitimately creepy, and the chemistry between the two leads is charming.

It just wouldn't be a holiday movie if there weren't some annoying downsides, and as usual, the obligatory “fight between the two love interests” is one of them, where a minor situation that could easily be explained blows up into ridiculous proportions, unnecessarily separating our two lovers simply for the sake of drama (and at the expense of logic, though I suppose if you're watching a movie about Santa Claus's daughter going to college for a dose of reality before taking over the family business, then logic really needn't apply). Joshua Cody as Jack Frost, Jr. is terribly miscast, delivering his lines with the same conviction as a piece of lumber, and sharing no chemistry with Ms. Stone whatsoever; it's clear he was hired based solely on looks (or as a favor for a friend).

At any rate, this turned out to be an unexpectedly enjoyable romp through the holiday season, and while its overbearing stupidity won't win over any non-fans of this kind of Christmas fluff, it's a worthwhile watch for the millions of fans who eagerly suck in this type of holiday junk.

RATING: 6/10

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Bled White (2009)

Director: Jose Carlos Gomez
Writer(s): Jose Carlos Gomez
Starring: North Roberts, Matthew E. Prochazka, Colleen Irene Boag, and Bruce Spielbauer

I was perusing through the movie collection on hoopla (basically a Netflix for certain library systems) when the artwork for Bled White caught my eye. There was something about its minimalistic approach that appealed to me, featuring only a person with a bloody face lying in a bed of snow…it was really quite striking. Well, on a late-winter’s eve, I was terminally bored, and randomly picked this out of my “favorites” list to watch.

It doesn’t take long to realize that Bled White wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The most obvious example of this is in the way its story is told—the chronology jumps around, and the story is even broken down into titled vignettes, much in the same vein as Quentin Tarantino's seminal crime-caper Pulp Fiction. The main problem with that is that director Jose Carlos Gomez doesn’t have a hundredth of the talent that Tarantino has, and probably has even less than that fraction of the budget. This means the narratives are only loosely interwoven, and it makes it feel more like a gimmick rather than a necessary story device.

It all takes place in a future world where the dead have overrun the living. I suppose wisely, given the obvious budget restraints, the zombie attacks are few and far between, with Gomez instead filling the film with a countless shots of barren, snowy landscapes that are meant to evoke the mood of a lonely, solitary landscape. I surmise that if these shots were removed, the movie would only end up running somewhere around 60 minutes. Also working to pad the running time out even further are the random zombie attacks, which are usually poorly edited, and feature lots of close-ups of bloodied zombie faces as they move forward for the kill.  There's not much in here that works.

Ed and Matt are two guys who survive by robbing, killing, and looting. They trade some of the canned goods that they find (which seem to be the main currency of this future) for rent in a nearby motel, and survive off the rest. They also donate the lifeless bodies of their victims to Sam and Mary, a couple who still occupy the same house that they lived in with their son, Victor. Mary is desperate to get out of there, but Sam refuses, because their son is still in the house with them, chained in the upstairs attic and kept alive by the corpses Ed and Matt give to them.

At some point, they get into it with the owner of their motel, the wife of whom Matt has a thing for. Matt also keeps a zombie in his bathtub, though I’m pretty sure it’s never explained why, though of course it ends up moving the plot forward by attacking someone at one point. Meanwhile, Ed dreams of leaving the town and looking for Melissa, a woman on an old VHS tape that he just randomly found on a street, something he eventually heads out to do. I think this story marker is trying for irreverence, but it just comes off like a bad, half-baked idea that never goes anywhere, both literally, and figuratively.

There are also some other things that happen, but none of them are really worth getting into, and it all leads up to an overwhelmingly stupid ending that seems to suggest that our surviving heroes are only in for more of the same (a fate that we are gratefully spared). The worst part about it is that it just seems to come out of nowhere—I was expecting the final scene to be a lead-up to some kind of revelation, but it just stops and the credits started rolling.

The experience of watching Bled White is quite a drag—it’s pretty boring, amateurishly shot, and not even remotely shocking or surprising—but I do have to at least give it some credit in that it doesn’t try to be like every other zombie movie. Multiple angles of the zombie outbreak are explored, such as the family who keeps their zombified son in the attic because they don’t want to let him go. Granted, stories like that have been done many times before, but I can at least appreciate that they were trying to do something a little bit different with the overdone zombie subgenre. The makeup effects are what I could consider “standard”—just a lot of extras covered in fake skin and blood and growling up close at the camera—but gorehounds will be very disappointed, as there’s really not a lot of the red stuff.

The acting is fairly decent, for the most part, though I have to confess I was really impressed with North Roberts’ performance as Ed. He successfully walks the line between wannabe tough mob type, and sensitive father figure to Matt, his partner in crime, and does well with the range of emotions he has to display. The rest of the actors are pretty much what you would expect to find in a movie with such a small budget, though none of the performances are terrible.

As I said, I popped in Bled White because I was bored, and while it didn’t alleviate my boredom, it at least managed, for the most part, to take my mind off of how bored I was for about an hour and twenty minutes. And that has to count for something, right?

RECAP: It won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s anything other than a low-budget film, but Bled White does benefit from some good performances, and the ambitions of writer/director Jose Carlos Gomez, no matter how incapable he is of matching them. The film is broken down into several vignettes that jump back and forth in time, making it an ultra-low budget zombie version of Pulp Fiction, but with half the imagination and very little of the (writing) talent. It’s all pretty bland, with shots of a barren, snowy landscape taking up what feels like a quarter of the run-time, but it's also mercifully short, another little detail that works greatly in its favor.

RATING: 4/10

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The House of the Devil (2009)

Director: Ti West

Writer(s): West

Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, and Greta Gerwig

Ti West’s House of the Devil is a slow-burn horror film that never even simmers, let alone burns.  It’s a short film, at best, blown up to about seventy minutes too long, a mind-numbing exercise in abject boredom.  In some films, like Takashi Miike’s excellent Audition, a gradual increase in tension can work wonders if the payoff is strong enough; between the film’s title, and its opening title card, we know exactly where this film is headed before it even starts, eliminating any chance of being caught off guard by any of it.

Samantha Hughes is your average college student: Broke, and with a lousy roommate.  She’s looking to get out of her stuffy dorm room, but that’s kind of hard to do with no money.  Of course, she finds a perfect apartment and agrees to take it; the only problem is, she only has five days to get a couple hundred more dollars together to pay the first month’s rent.

Looking for some financial assistance, she answers a “Help Wanted” ad for a babysitter.  Red flags are raised almost instantly; the man, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), admits that he doesn’t have a child.  It’s actually his ailing, private mother that needs help.  Samantha at first refuses, but when he quadruples his initial offer (giving her $400 instead of the initially agreed-upon $100), she reluctantly accepts, much to the chagrin of her friend Megan.  She reasons that $400 for just four hours of work is too good to pass up, while Megan counters that it’s probably too good to be true.  Either way, Megan agrees to pick her up in four hours, and then Samantha heads back into the house to start her shift.

That’s when the terror begins, assuming your idea of terror is watching a woman walk around a house for an hour.  In the beginning, it’s understandable; she’s getting acquainted with a place that is completely foreign to her.  Then she starts hearing noises upstairs, something that’s unsettling to her, even though she’s completely aware that there is a woman staying upstairs.  You know, the entire reason that she’s getting paid to be there in the first place.  So she grabs a weapon and walks through houses, opening every door, except for the ones that will actually reveal that something is up…those she leaves shut for some inexplicable reason.  Then she goes downstairs, listens to music really loud while dancing around the house, breaks something, hears more noises, and walks through the house again, looking for the cause.  There, just saved you an hour of your time.

That takes me to the main problem I have with House of the Devil, and that's that is that Samantha is stupid.  Actually, let me elaborate on that a little bit:  Everyone in this entire movie is pretty dumb.  There’s the obligatory “person with gun vs. person with knife” battle, in which the person with the gun somehow thinks guns only work if they are fired at point-blank range; characters believe that running upstairs and hiding is a much safer plan than running out the front door; and so on, so forth.  And if your only defense is that the characters are supposed to be stupid because this is an homage to ‘80s horror films, then why make a movie like that in the first place?  There were plenty actually made in the ‘80s.

The one thing this gets right is that it’s modeled to look exactly like an early ‘80s horror flick; on those grounds, the aesthetic is perfect, from the film itself appearing to take place in that period, to the look of the film, and even on down to its score.  This was clearly a labor of love for West, and he must be commended for his attention-to-detail.  This isn’t just some half-assed homage:  Even the opening credits look like something out of the Halloween- ra (which is technically late ‘70s—same difference), which is very impressive, especially given its modest budget, which was under $1 million (sad that anything under a million is considered “modest”, but so it is).

Unfortunately, it manages to get pretty much everything else wrong. 

RECAP: Looks exactly like a film from the early ‘80s, which is the visual style it was going for.  Aside from that, pretty much the rest of this film is a bust:  Poorly written, painfully slow, terribly boring, and with an ending so bad, it cancels out none of those things.  Go ahead and see it if you’re curious, but when you wake up just in time to see the end credits, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

RATING: 2.5/10

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