Psalm 21 (2010)

First of all, a serious warning: there will be a lot of superlative's in this review. No, it's not a review. It's a tribute.

Sorry, my hands are shaking. I have genuine problem writing down what I feel about Psalm 21. I was SO skeptical before watching this movie, really. Because Swedish horror movies generally sucks big time! But what I think we have here is THE best Swedish horror movie made. Yes, I would say so. It has some faults, some minor problem – but that occurs during the first 15-20 minutes of the story. I’m not gonna go into those details, but if you have problem with the beginning (which I’m sure only will be for Swedish viewers), just wait and let the movie take you into a very, very dark story. A story which holds no punches what so ever with its message.

Jonas Malmsjö, son of famous Swedish actor Jan Malmsjö (Fanny and Alexander, Scenes from a Marriage etc), plays Henrik, a priest living a, on the surface, a happy wonderful life. He’s divorced and feels that the relationship with his son is cracking up. But that’s the least of his problem when his father, also a priest, dies in a drowning accident. They haven’t had contact for many years, but Henrik goes up to Hammerdal, the small town where his father had his church, to find out what really happen. A dramatic incident makes his car break down, and he’s stuck on a small road out in the deepest forest. He finally finds shelter in a remote house. The family that lives there are odd, and they seem to have some connection to his father. At the same time he starts to get visions, terrible visions…

Here we have a genuine Swedish horror movie, but for once it either tries to imitate US production or trying to be TO Swedish. And with “to Swedish” I mean very correct, very clear, very boring, silly, crappy and shallow. There’s stuff that are in every Swedish drama production – cello music, saliva when people yells or cry and very small towns – but thankfully director Fredrik Hiller never once falls in the terrible fucking pit of normality, “lagom” was we say in Sweden. “Lagom” means that something is either too much, too little, too bad, too good, too funny, too scary, too tasty and so on. A very normal mentality in Sweden, which is very sad.

But Psalm 21 delivers, for once. I can’t say it’s a gory movie, but it has it fair share of very effective shocks and special effects – all very well-done. The visuals of the movie are stunning, and the cinematography together with Hiller’s direction is among the best I’ve seen in our cinema for a long time. But where it’s most powerful is in its story, which I really don’t want to say so much about. But as ex-Christian, raised in a very nasty religious environment, this movie comes as a revelation. It’s like I, for once, counts in this sick thing we call religion and what that form of spiritual powerplay has done.. I’m sure some more emotionally sensitive people will be disturbed by the story that unfolds, but I’m also sure that a lot of people will take this to their hearts. But make no mistake, Psalm 21 is a supernatural (not some silly “It’s all in his mind”-shit) horror-thriller.

I also want to mention the actors. Jonas Malmsjö has never been a favourite actually, and he does some of his old acting-tricks – but does them very well. Per Ragnar, who plays his father, has always been an excellent actor, specialised in creepy, dark characters. He’s marvellous here. Görel Crona, I haven’t seen much for her lately, so it’s great to see her do such a low-key, but very fine-tuned part has the mother of the family. Her husband is played by Niklas Falk is downright fantastic. Their grown-up son is played by Björn Bengtsson, and he still has some theatrical mannerism in his acting, but handles the part very well – I’m impressed. Josefin Ljungman plays the teenager daughter, Nora, and makes it a realistic performance – totally superior to a lot of actresses in her age. Ok, I could mention everyone, so fuck it.

Psalm 21 is a – insert random superlative here – movie, and probably the best Swedish horror movie ever. Sorry for my ramblings, I need to buy a kebab now to calm me down.

Bangkok Knockout (2010)

Do you remember kung fu-movies from the eighties? They always ended with a spectacular fight inside a warehouse or a factory. Panna Rittikrai’s latest movie is more or less that for ninety minutes. I’ve been a long time fan of Rittikrai, both his über-low budget VCD-masterpieces to his later work with the awesome Tony Jaa. During later years he’s always been in the background, doing the stunt- and fight choreography for tons of fun action movies from Thailand. With the exception of the absurdly violent Born to Fight (starring Dan Chupong) he’s stayed away from big mainstream directing. Until now. Bangkok Knockout is very similar to Born to Fight, but with lower budget and less blood – but don’t worry, it delivers!

A group of hopeful fighters, stuntmen and athletic actors gathers for an audition. It’s an American production and behind it all is a bearded, rude, cigar-smoking Farang. So all the good guys gets chosen, invited to a party… and next day they all wake up in a big industrial area (with never-finished houses, garages, warehouses etc) after been drugged! They never tried out for a movie, but for a deadly game where rich foreign fuckers bet money on their survival against a gang of ruthless killers! Let the action begin!

Like Born to Fight we first have to suffer thru around half an hour of pointless character development before the fun can begin. It’s actually quite similar to BTF, with a small gang of heroes forced to fight killers in a secluded area – but this time the movie ends with the fight on and around the truck. The cast is young and cute, but most of them seem to be skilled fighters and handles the action very well. The only stand-out performance is living legend Sorapong Chatree, who looks almost too fresh for being 60+ years old. He don’t have much to do, but is always a welcome guest in any Thai movie. Panna Rittikrai, who looks f**king brutal, acts as one of the bad guys and is fantastic. He even has a fight, even if he doesn’t move around much, mostly blocking hits and breaking one or two legs. The worst performance is from one of the western actors, he sounds Russian and he can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag.

But the action, you ask? First of all, it’s not as creative or innovative as in Chocolate or Raging Phoenix. This is more balls-to-the-walls brutal action, with quite straight-forward fights with a lot of neck-breaking stunts. It slowly gets more and more spectacular the further the movie goes and offers a lot of fights. It won’t change your world, but I guarantee you get entertained. My favourite scenes is has quite little fights. It’s with a mute, tall killer with an iron mask and a big axe, like a Jason Voorhees! He’s impossible to take down and even fights being totally on fire! Except this you’ll get action with motorcrosses, a truck, different fight-techniques, a car or two and in-between some stupid Thai comedy. The only really bad thing (and I don’t count a thin storyline bad, it’s just a frigging action movie man!) is the extremely homophobic depiction of one of the bad guys, who are so stereotypical that it leaves a damn bad taste afterwards. This is a common thing in Thai movies, but here it’s a bit too much even for me.

Bangkok Knockout (aka BKO) will turn some people away for being very thin, a bit cheap and very uneven as all of Rittikrai’s work as a director. Personally I was very entertained by it and just loved the fights and stunts. Because in the end, that’s the reason for the existence of BKO: kicking the ass of brave stuntmen, nothing else.

The Redeemer (1978)

The Redeemer could have been a normal pro-slasher if it wasn’t for that it begins with a boy walking up from some kind of lake, walks into a mans bedroom and uses his power to make that man grow an extra thumb. Except for that, it’s quite a normal slasher with some violent deaths and a very ambiguous twist. Normally I wouldn’t care much to write about a movie like this, but it has a special atmosphere and an interesting cast of characters with more depth than usual.

Maybe this is because it came before the big slasher-boom and allowed the script to be more interesting than demanded from the bodycount-hungry audience. The problem is that it has problems making everything come together in the end. Is the killer doing a good thing, if so this is clearly a extremist right-wing movie with no redeeming qualities what so ever? Or is a demon using a priest to perform evil deeds in the form of divine punishment? Yeah, the question actually makes me feel more and more unsure how to interpret the message. Maybe it doesn’t have a message? Maybe it’s just a silly slasher movie with some ideas that looked cool on paper but didn’t work out in the editing? Really, should I care?

Because the movie could just be a way to show people getting killed in creative ways, I and choose to see it that way. Not that it’s extremely gory, but it has its share of blood – which the knife in head is the showstopper. The other killings are more visual than gory, like a very drawn-out beating in toilet or the well-made burning man. The atmosphere is nice and the direction is competent, but you never sense danger. Its way to easy to escape the house and outside its just pure stupidity that makes people run right in the arms of the killer.

In the end The Redeemer is a flawed movie, but well worth watching for a couple of creepy moments and bloodshed. The DVD from Code Red is a bit rough, but adds to that Grindhouse-feeling the kids like so much nowadays. It’s just sad that Code Red themselves seems too loath the movie by putting to very negative quotes on the cover and name their own trailers “pointless”.

For us who loves movies like this, it’s never fun to be told that our taste suck directly from the distributor. But even because of this, Code Red is one of my favourite companies and I recommend everyone to buy their releases and support a small company that releases movies only a few of us really enjoys.

A Name for Evil (1973)

The weirdest movie of the weekend, A Name for Evil, is an oddity produced by Penthouse (yes, THE Penthouse) starring no other than Robert Culp and Samantha Eggar. Marketed as a haunted house-movie, I’m not sure that’s a correct label on this movie – but it has a haunted house, but it’s at the same time so much more than that. And I will at the end of this little text make a statement of a more modern movie that could have been inspired by this one.

Robert Culp is an architect, John, tired of constructing boring office building. He throws out his TV from the apartment window and takes wife Joanna (Samantha Eggar) and their life and moves out in the nature, to an old run-down old house belonging to the family. But not long after John arrive he’s starts seeing “stuff”. Hauntings, visions. Warning’s from someone that could be an ancient relative of him. The remote location of the house starts to get to his and his wife’s nerves, and soon he’s drawn into a dark, sexual game…

This is a very odd movie, one of the oddest I’ve seen in a long while. It’s not bad by any means, but cheap and maybe a bit crude when it comes to some of the visions that appear. We’re not talking special effects here, just shadows and “ghostly” voices. But the ghost-stuff is really not important, because it’s probably just in his head anyway. It’s the how the nature, the location, suffocates them. Such a beautiful place creates so much paranoia and violence. In one of the best scenes of the movie John is drawn into the sexual games that the local people are involved in. If it’s real or not, or partly, is hard to tell. But everything culminates in a huge graphic orgy out in the forest. Everyone is one with the nature.

Yes, this feels – especially when you see it – a lot like Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Antichrist is also a name for evil, which is never explained in Von Trier’s movie. Not in this movie either, but somehow it feels like the nature, the woman holding John back, is the evil. It also has the same feeling of claustrophobia, even if both of them are set in wilderness where it’s easy to escape. It ends with sudden and surprising violence, like Antichrist, but A Name for Evil is of course a lot tamer. In the end only one is alive, and nothing will be the same again…

I’m not trying to convince you that A Name for Evil is a masterpiece, but it’s a nice little movie which is far more ambitious than I expected from the beginning. It has tons of nudity – including Robert Culp’s holiest of holies – a weird musical number (which make it resemble The Wicker Man) and a couple of very cryptic twists and turns. Pity the DVD is crap, but I hope maybe someone like Code Red would release a proper version of it in the correct ratio and better picture quality.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982)

Finally I can throw away my old crap-deluxe DVD version of The Dorm That Dripped Blood and erase every memory of all the even crappier VHS-versions I’ve seen, because the new Synapse edition is so good it’s just not worth watching any other version. The cool thing is that the directors dug up, without knowing it, their original uncut version of the movie – before distributors and other idiots raped the movie with their bright ideas. Not that the movie itself offers anything new, but it’s an ambitious and very gritty slasher which carved itself a nice place in slasher-history.

A bunch of students volunteers to stay behind before Christmas vacation to clear out their old dorm. It’s one of those high rise apartment buildings and not the typical picturesque villa with some silly Greek letters on the front. So this means there’s a lot more places for a serial killer to hide, which is exactly what happens – and one by one the students fall victim for the sadistic unknown killer!

It’s a by-the-numbers slasher-story, but it works a lot better than most of the others because it has a very gritty, well-shot, cinematography, realistic and natural sets and a cast of actors that might not be the best crop from the local acting school, but gives us someone to root and care for. The two directors make an excellent job with a very small budget and inject a lot of life into the scenes, with intelligent use of the camera and atmospheric lightning. I really enjoy the small and cramped locations, which make everything so much dangerous. You can’t just escape from the house that easy, not without going up or down dark stairs, taking a short-cut thru creepy basements and knowing that if the killer chases you up on the roof, there’s no chance in hell you can jump down from there. It’s just a very smart and fun place to film a slasher movie.

How about the gore then? Yes, it’s cheap and very effective. From a nice hand-slicing, some stabbings here and there and of course the main show-stopper, a drawn out drill to the head-kill which is damn gory and graphic. The spiked baseball bat-kill is very nasty too. But compared to, for example, Friday the 13th part 4 or The Prowler it’s not much of course. Even if the effects aren’t that realistic the editing and composition of the shots make them a lot better than if less talented people should have done it.

The Synapse DVD/Blu-Ray combo is excellent. The print (which bears the even better title, Death Dorm!) is grainy, but with nice colors and sound. Every frame looks like something from Eli Roth’s Thanksgivning or Edgar Wright’s Don’t, gritty and nasty and with a lot of great shots which all fits perfect in a Grindhouse-trailer. Maybe the finest and most loving genre-release so far in 2011!

Buried Alive (1990)

Hey, I had NO idea Edgar Allan Poe wrote a slasher about semi-nude babes with mental problems getting killed off one by one at a psychiatric clinic! You learn something new every day, because Buried Alive is really – if you believe the title card – “Edgar Allan Poe’s Buried Alive”! And even better, with these few words I wrote down the entire story of the movie and I don’t need to do that in the next segment.

Instead I can start with making one of my well-used clichés: this is better than some people claim it to be. Not that it’s any kind of masterpiece, not even close. It’s actually a crappy movie pretending to be quite entertaining, which is better than a boring movie that is… boring. I have no idea what I’m rambling about here, just “ordbajs” as we say in Sweden. Any way…

The director, Gérard Kikoïne, directed Edge of Sanity in 1989. A shallow, but gorgeous-looking take on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Anthony Perkins in scen-chewing mega-mode. I actually like that movie a lot, and I can see a lotof Kikoïne’s style in Buried Alive, but this one is way more generic and lacks the extreme exentricity of his earlier adventure in horror. But what it lacks in personality it gains in visual excess – just on a smaller scale. The set-pieces is ambitious and filled with wacky angles and odd editing, reminding me a lot about Argento and similar visual directors.

The killer is actually cool, with something that looks like an inside out Ronald Reagan-mask on his head, which predates David Arquette’s The Tripper by a number of years. He’s a brutal and violent guy, but except a bizarre scalping with an electric mixer there’s no real gore to cheer about. Most of the time he just hits his victims over their head and buries them alive (Poe! See! See!).

But Buried Alive has good pacing and if the story bores you, the nice cast won’t. Robert Vaughn, not exactly at the height of his careeer, are making the best of his part and seem to have quite a lot of fun. Donald Pleasence is old and don’t have much to do, but he seem to enjoy a funny and goofy character which is very innocent. John Carradine also has a part, which must have been one of his last (the movie is also dedicated to his memory) and it’s classic The Bard of Boulevard-material with a fun scene-stealing sequence at the end. Arnold Vooslo and William Butler belong to the younger generation genre-actors doing small parts – and the women? I have no idea, they all look the same to me.

No, Buried Alive is not a good movie. But it’s an entertaining movie and that’s enough for me.

Battle of Los Angeles (2011)

Isn’t strange, every time The Asylum releases one of their mockbusters, which is no different from all the fantastic rip-offs from Italy, Indonesia, India, Turkey etc, 90 percent of the worlds cult-movie fans unites in the defence for boring, crappy, 100 million dollar budget blockbusters! Yes, that’s the only time it’s OK (except when Uwe Boll makes a movie) to protect the artistic sensibilities and qualities of Battle: Los Angeles and similar movies.

Can it be so that making a commercial “blockbuster” with one million dollars is more controversial than spending a small country's national budget on one crappy, nationalistic mess? I think so, at least for those that think a low budget movie must look like Al Adamson (bless him by the way, a genius) or Fred Olen Ray (not sure I want him to be blessed, but what the fuck!).

What we have here is a case of international Jante Law (“Jantelagen” in Sweden). Let me quote from Wikipedia:

The ten rules state:

Don't think you're anything special.

Don't think you're as good as we.

Don't think you're smarter than we.

Don't convince yourself that you're better than we.

Don't think you know more than we.

Don't think you are more important than we.

Don't think you are good at anything.

Don't laugh at us.

Don't think anyone cares about you.

Don't think you can teach us anything.

That’s what it’s all about, nothing else. The Asylum make low budget action-fests, monster-mayhems and disaster-flicks, using digital explosions and one or two washed-up has been-actors – and they’re proud of that, because they manage to make movies instead of whining like some catholic school girl stuck in Anton LaVey’s pool-party!

So why is Battle of Los Angeles better than Battle: Los Angeles? Here the reasons:

• Big scale battles. Where the blockbuster effectively transforms a fun invasion-flick to another of those Iraq-dramas with claustrophobic shots and boring let’s sacrifice ourselves for the humanity, the mockbuster offers nice wide-angle shots (steady shots too) of the action, big houses exploding – cheap effects of course – with around the same amount of lead actors like the blockbuster.

• The 1942 battle of LA! One of the things I was looking forward too when I first saw the trailer for the blockbuster was the connection to the 1942 incident. Which in the movie is more or less nada! The mockbuster, on the other hand, has a close connection to that incident and uses in a fun way with a few twists and turns.

• The blockbuster clearly has more aliens, but the mockbuster has one big-ass motherf**king alien which actually looks very cool and well-made. It stays in its ship, but if they ever make a sequel I hope they would unleash it on some poor city! Hell, just use the computer model in another production, it’s a damn fine monster!

• The mockbuster have a chick with a samurai sword. The blockbuster doesn’t.

Battle of Los Angeles is a cheap movie. It’s hard to say it even has a battle of LA, because most of it is set on a base outside LA and when they finally enter LA it’s more of an industrial sandpit. But it keeps up the pace and never, which should be banned in these kinda movies, divulges itself in pretentiousness and pretending to have a message or have something important to say.

But before I let you go, let me first explain that with “washed-up has been-actors” I mean actors that I love and care for a lot. Check them out in The Asylum’s movies and you’ll see that they’re giving it all! They playing a big role again, a hero or a bad guy, and they’re the star again – so they just don’t give a fuck about what movie it is, they makes the best they can and work hard for the little money they get.

That’s movie magic, friends.