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Reviews
The Leech (2022)
A big dose of deranged Yuletide fun!
This was a very entertaining ride with great performances all around! The contrasting personalities of Father David and Terry created some hilarious moments and lots of great tension ("I was just crankin one out!"). I laughed out loud a lot during this! It was a hoot seeing Father David's slow descent into madness and depravity and him trying to save the souls of these two agents of chaos. I loved how Terry and Lexi become this corrupting force in his well-ordered life and bring it all crashing down. Father David's transformation throughout the film is fantastic. His unhinged rant at the midnight mass was a great scene. I loved how the film explored and twisted the theme of "help thy neighbor" in hilarious and dark ways. Overall this was a super entertaining blast of twisted Christmas cinema!
Don't Run (2019)
Cool premise for a horror movie
My wife and I had a blast watching this movie. We love indie horror flicks, and this one delivered the goods. It has a charming quality to it that is difficult to describe. Despite its modest budget, the movie kept us engaged, and it had a really unique plot device. The main character Peter really carries the film, and he was very believable as an awkward, loner 15 year old trying to deal with this insane scenario. I liked that they went for an underdog protagonist who is battling not only the demonic monster in his closet, but also trying to navigate the war zone of adolescence, and the various nosy authority figures who keep showing up at his house. This kid is in over his head, and it makes for a fun and unique little horror film.
A couple thoughts: I feel like the storyline deviated from the rules it established from time to time. Like there were a couple times where Peter was not in bed before sundown and the monster did not immediately kill him. Also, I wanted Peter to try to figure out a way to fight back against the monster, rather than trying to just survive it or run away.
*spoiler warning:
Also, the ending is pretty abrupt, I wanted some kind of epic showdown with the monster.
Overall very fun indie horror film, looking forward to seeing what this crew makes next.
Mandy (2018)
Chainsaw Shaman: The Mythic Symbolism of Mandy
*Spoilers- some key scenes are discussed.
"...people go to the movies and they may be going through something in their own life and they see a movie and it correlates with their own life experience and they get an answer."
- Nicolas Cage
Mandy is a beautifully, intensely, ferociously *human* film. Sitting in a darkened theater and diving into this hallucinatory experience, a strange kind of connective magic forms between director Panos Cosmatos, star Nicolas Cage, Cage's character Red, and the film viewer.
In several interviews Cosmatos describes how creating Mandy and his previous film Beyond the Black Rainbow were ways for him to work through the feelings of rage and helplessness he experienced after losing his parents. The extreme arc of emotion that both Red and the film viewer experience is informed by Cosmatos grappling with his own difficult emotional journey.
Rather than creating a more literal and grounded exploration of loss, Cosmatos instead crafts a bold and shocking mythical world populated by demon bikers, chainsaw wielding cultists, mind-melting drugs, and strange magical artifacts.
Mandy follows a home invasion/revenge plot structure that we have seen many times before in films like Death Wish, Rolling Thunder, and others: a parable for the sacredness of the loved ones in your life and the importance of valuing them above all else. Cosmatos filters this familiar narrative through a psychotronic blend of dark fantasy, 80's horror, and 70's surrealism.
The characters in the film exist as archetypes from an epic fantasy novel: Red evolves into an armored warrior hero wielding a mystic blade, self-appointed messiah Jeremiah Sands is the evil warlock king, the Black Skull bikers are monstrous orcs, the LSD manufacturer becomes a guiding oracle/wizard, and Mandy herself is elevated to a mysterious and powerful goddess. Cosmatos utilizes these mythic forms to tap into the same realm occupied by tales like The Minotaur, The Oddysey, and Beowulf: stories where heroes must leave the world of the familiar and venture into the terrifying, murky underworld of the unknown and face the monsters they find there.
Mandy's bloody and bombastic midnight-movie aesthetic might make it appear to be a superficial love letter to cult movies of the past, but I argue that it is a masterclass in symbolism; an exploration of the pain of the subjective human experience in a powerful poetic fashion. Psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson says of myth and fantasy, "The Mythological landscape is the landscape of human experience. In this world, there is nothing more real than pain". Cosmatos utilizes this symbolic realm of fantasy to explore his very real grief and fury.
This is a movie about emotional intensity: the value of being intensely passionate and accessing the primal warrior instincts you have locked deep down in the dark, seething abyss of your psyche. Nicolas Cage describes his acting style as 'nouveau shamanism', a process in which he journeys inward into the recesses of his own mind, and utilizes what he finds there to embody a character. His goal is not to pretend to be something, but rather to access his most powerful emotions, memories, dreams, and experiences in order to genuinely feel something, and express it via a performance. In interviews Cage shares that he utilized his shamanic practice to access the powerful pain of his most recent divorce in order to bring the character of Red to life.
It's fascinating to see how Cage evolves his character through the remarkable visual communication of his acting. He utilizes his face, voice, and body language to depict the transformation of Red *visually*. In many scenes Cage doesn't speak a single word: he reveals everything through his face with expressions both subtle and wildly erratic.
Red evolves further and further away from the calm, gentle man he was at the beginning of the film. Cosmatos has his character undergo several stages of mutation through 'rites of passage' that plunge him deeper and deeper into madness and the realm of the fantastic. As the film opens Red and Mandy have achieved a sort of heaven together. Red sees Mandy as an angel, a sacred being: she is his divine and she brings him peace. Cosmatos communicates this through lush scenes of visual fluidity focusing on Mandy's haunting, beautiful gaze.
Mandy exists as a powerful symbol of that which we hold sacred. She is the amalgamation of those we love: a symbolic wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, or dear friend. Those who, if they were to be lost, would plunge you into an unimaginable hell of despair. Red's transformation begins when he experiences this loss. He evolves into a primal beast of retribution; a dark force of nature whose sole objective is to right a wrong and restore balance in the universe.
Captured by the psychotic cultists, Red undergoes a sadistic 'crown of thorns' treatment as his hands and face are bound tightly in barbed wire, and he is forced to watch his beloved immolated before his eyes. And so begins his descent.
Following this is Cage's spell-binding melt-down in the bathroom. This scene functions as a kind of 'crossing the threshold' moment for the character where he takes his first voluntary step into the strange unknown. The bathroom set is designed to act as a visual manifestation of Red's mental state: the shocking orange patterns of the wallpaper and bright lighting make it seem like a perverse prison cell or microcosm of hell in which Red is trapped.
Cage wails in anguish, desperately chugging a bottle of vodka, oscillating wildly through the spectrum of emotional torment. The vodka becomes a symbolic elixir; something that numbs his physical pain and transforms his despair to burning, skull-crushing rage.
In the layer of the demon bikers, Cage endures another Christ-like act of suffering when his hand is nailed to the floor. He undergoes a horrific baptism when he slashes the throat of a giant orc biker and a waterfall of blood drenches his face. Cage's maniacal laughter as he gargles demon blood made the theater audience and I laugh out loud in crazed disbelief, reveling in the sheer insanity of it all. Mandy provides many such surprising moments, shocking and delighting even the most jaded film-junkies among us.
After an impromptu snort of coke, Red dips his finger into a mysterious jar and mutates even further when his tongue touches the mind-warping "skull juice" LSD concoction. It liquefies his reality and rockets him to another primordial plane. This is followed up by another gleefully psychotic scene of Cage lighting a cigarette from the flaming, decapitated head of a demon biker. He takes a long drag off the cigarette and shows us visually through his wild, nerve-shredding, electric stare that he has somehow journeyed even further into madness. What is amazing about this series of wild scenes is that Cage manages to change his character's state of mind incrementally after each threshold of violence and depravity is crossed.
Red becomes an avatar of our own rage against the injustices we've experienced in our life. Through him we fight back; eviscerating with savage fulfillment all the dark forces that have harmed us. His mystic blade, forged from grief, is a symbol of the act of psychologically fortifying ourselves, taking our pain, growing stronger from it, and facing that which we are afraid to face.
It's often said that the appeal of horror and violence in films is that it allows the viewer to achieve a sort of emotional catharsis: a chance to vicariously act out and thus purge our darkest impulses. Mandy is one of the few films I've seen in theaters where I did in fact achieve this catharsis. As the end credits appeared, I found that my nervous system was shot--my brain cells blasted to another dimension. The blood red text rolled silently past and I sat back in my seat, staring up at the theater ceiling. I suddenly felt intensely relaxed, and just sat there enjoying the swirling haze of emotions I was experiencing in the moment.
Mandy made me think about a lot of things related to the pain of the human experience, surviving tragedy, and honoring that which we hold sacred. The credits dedicate the film to the late composer Johann Johannsson, which creates another poignant layer of loss within the film. Johannsson's uniquely haunting and powerfully monstrous score breaths sonic life into Mandy exploring both the fragility and intensity of human life through sound.
If you experience tragedy, it is easy to sink into nihilism. In your grief and pain it can seem like there is nothing good or worthwhile in the world...everything is just chaos and death. The film seems to say that we must have a powerful commitment to that which we value most in life: a ferocious commitment. Like the many heroic myths it draws upon, Mandy shows us the value of not shriveling away from the demonic, but instead tapping into the primal strength that we have within and battling fiercely for what is meaningful in life.
As always, the viewer brings their pain with them to the theater. Through the alchemy of film we can experience our pain from a unique perspective, reflect on it, and perhaps find answers.