Celluloid and Whiskey

Just stop it, Tim.

“Delightful” is an odd adjective to apply to a horror film, but it aptly sums u Ti West’s directorial follow-up to 2009’s excellent House of the Devil. Whereas that film was a deliberate throwback to the slasher flicks of the late ’70s and early ’80s, wrapped in a Satanic Panic skin, this effort is a restrained and classically crafted, old-fashioned haunted house story that takes time and care to build up both its characters and its scenario before turning on the terror.

            The plot is thin, but serviceable; cynical hipster nerd Luke (Pat Healy) and perky cool chick Claire (Sara Paxton) are the last remaining staff members at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, an old fashioned bed-and-breakfast kind of place that is closing its doors for the final time in the very near future. Luke runs a website on the hotel’s supposed occult history - allegedly its halls are prowled by the restless spirit of a suicide - and he decides to take the opportunity afforded by the Inn’s impending closure to try and record some kind of proof of the haunting. Claire helps out because, well, she hasn’t got anything better to do. Anyone with a working knowledge of horror has a fair idea how the rest of the film plays out - at least the rough parameters, in any case.

            The thing is, West expects you to know your spook stories. There’s a tacit assumption that the audience is familiar with The Shining (book or movie) and The Haunting (again, book or movie) or at least some of the countless imitators they spawned. West understands that the key to horror is the setting up and meeting of expectations, with the flavour coming from how and when those expectations are met. There are rarely any real surprises in horror cinema, only variations on accepted themes. When failed actor turned psychic Leanne Reese-Jones (Kelly McGillis, in a fun, fearless performance) tells Claire not to go down to the basement, we know that’s where she’s going to end up, and she’s not going to be better for the experience. What makes it worth our while going down there with her is how much we care about her as a character.

            And Claire is a very likeable character: accessible, understandable, relatable. So, too, is Luke. West’s slow, meticulous approach to building atmosphere and delaying gratification means that we spend a lot of time with these two just kind of hanging out as they banter, play around, and generally find ways to occupy themselves as the clock runs out on the Yankee Pedlar. In a way, it kind of plays like a buddy comedy for a good stretch of the running time - Clerks meets Poltergeist. But while we’re getting to know these characters, the film is gently, yet increasingly, amping up the tension, until the brake-lines are cut in the final act and the film goes for broke.  It’s that combination of the banal and the uncanny, where, bit by bit, the viewer comes to apprehend that the unknown can intrude upon the known at any time, that makes The Innkeepers such a deliciously unsettling little chiller.

            As a filmmaker, West has aligned himself with the mumblecore movement to some degree, but it’s clear that he’s a horror aficionado with a prodigious knowledge of the genre, its history, and its tropes. More importantly, his films lack the aimlessness and shagginess that plague so many of the movies under the mumblecore umbrella. True, he likes to spend time getting all his ducks in a row, narratively speaking, but never to ill effect. There’s a sense of deliberateness to his work, of craft. Mumblecore is infamous for its use of improvised dialogue and hands-off direction, which can - and, let’s face it, frequently does - lead to films that are dramatically unsatisfying. If West uses improvisation in his films, its within carefully delineated narrative boundaries that don’t adversely affect his creative aims. Watching his work, you can feel his hand is always firmly on the tiller and it’s that command of tone, pacing, and character that makes his films so interesting. Anyone pigeonholing him as some kind of hipster horror hack is doing both him and themselves a disservice.

            Over the course of a short but very prolific career - this is his fifth feature film as director - West has been carefully refining his narrative voice, and The Innkeepers is where it rings clearest. Creepily unsettling but still playful, it feels fresh even as it goes through the motions of a fairly well-worn scenario. Short on splatter and long on mood, it’s a classy effort from a genre filmmaker who’s clearly on the upslope of his career. Recommended.

Blitzkrieg Bop

Finnish industrial musician turned film director Timo Vuorensola has finally shepherded the long-gestating sci-fi satire Iron Sky into existence. TRAVIS JOHNSON talks to him about it.

In the near future, the long-hidden Fourth Reich strike at a troubled Earth from a hidden base on the dark side of the moon, where they have laid their plans for global domination since fleeing there after the Allied victory in Europe back in 1945. Our only hope for salvation lies with James Washington (Christopher Kirby), a not-too-bright male model turned astronaut. That, in the shell of a nut, is the premise of Iron Sky, a low budget, high concept science fiction comedy.

            So where did all that come from?

            “It all started, like all the good ideas for films, in a sauna.” explains director and co-writer Timo Vuorensola. “We were sitting there having a drink, and a friend of mine said ‘Let’s make a film about Moon Nazis.’ It was really a cool idea because it was not something that I had heard about before - I hadn’t seen this type of film before. And then we started to look into it and we realized that yes, actually there was a big conspiracy theory on the internet, and people do believe that the Nazis went to the moon, which we thought was such a hilarious thing that we just had to make a movie. People don’t like the idea that the Nazis just vanished; that they lost the war and then suddenly nobody was a Nazi any more. It’s a persistent thought that they escaped somewhere.”

            Even with such an audacious core concept, the wheels of production turned incredibly slowly. Teaser images and trailers found their way on to the internet, but the film itself was a long time coming.

            “It took years and years to set up the whole project,”  Vuorensola recalls. “We started in 2006. At first it was going to be just a few million Euros to film it in Finland. Then we got Germany involved and got some German actors and a bit more money. Then we got Australia involved. It was a really long process, but as we went along we realised that so many people in the world want this film, that we have to make it better and better and better all the time, and then realized our budget wasn’t enough, so we had to go further to get more money.”

            But it was the off-kilter concept, not the money, that attracted the attention of horror and sci-fi stalwart Udo Kier (Blade, Johnny Mnemonic) to the project, in which he plays the Moon Nazi leader.

            “He is a genre legend.” Vuorensola says fondly. “I’d never met him before. He got involved, he read the script and really liked it, and wanted to be a part of it. He’s played Hitler so many times, but he’s never played Hitler on the moon, so he wanted to do this. But at the same time I cast him, I started to hear all these stories: strange stories, weird stories about him, and it created a kind of legend in my head, like what kind of person is Udo Kier? And then I met him, and he turned out to be an excellent, professional, nice gentleman.”

Achtung Baby

Directed by Timo Vuorensola

Starring Christopher Kirby, Julia Dietze, Gotz Otto, Peta Sergeant, Stephanie Paul, Udo Kier

After years in development  - and a level of internet-generated buzz not seen since the ill-fated Snakes on a Plane - the tongue-in-cheek Space Nazi flick Iron Sky finally hits our screens. But is it a blitzkrieg or a Barbarossa?

            It all depends on how your expectations are calibrated, really. If you’re one of the netizens who have already proclaimed the film as the BEST SC-FI IDEA EVAR, you’re in for a dose of disappointment; this is a low budget B-movie, and while the effects and production values are quite impressive considering the financial constraints, it was never going to be Star Wars with actual stormtroopers. What it is, when its overly convoluted plot isn’t tripping it up, is a fairly fun and brazenly bawdy sci-fi romp wrapped around a core of political satire.

            In the near future, a moon mission designed to give the incumbent American president (Stephanie Paul impersonating Sarah Palin) a popularity boost instead uncovers the secret lunar base where the remnants of the Third Reich have been hiding out since WWII. The Moon Nazis scramble a scouting mission, headed by the megalomaniacal Klaus Adler (Gotz Otto), to pave the way for a full scale invasion of Earth, but things go awry, and the Aryan astronauts wind up advising the president’s campaign manager (Peta Sergeant), and find that a dose of National Socialist dogma does wonders for the president’s approval ratings. Caught up in all this is the hapless male model turned astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby), who might just be able to save the world if he can convince sympathetic fraulein Renate Richter (Julie Dietze) to help him.

            It sounds packed with incident, but the film is largely dialogue driven, with the limited effects budget largely reserved for the third act, when the epic space battle promised in the film’s promotional material is finally trotted out. What saves the film is not spectacle, though, but a rich vein of audacious black humour. Nods to famous films will keep the cinema-literate smiling - Kubrick in particular gets several tips of the hat - and the cast are gleefully committed to absurd premise and B-grade aesthetic; Udo Kier once again proves he can class up even the cheesiest joint with his turn as the Moon Nazi fuhrer, while the fearless Christopher Kirby displays leading man charm as the African American astronaut who has to cope with being Aryanized by twisted Nazi science.

            At its best, Iron Sky feels like a Heavy Metal comic strip come to life, all big, bold ideas, playful sexuality, cynical politics, and anarchic humour. True, its everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach doesn’t always work, and another script draft or two would have done wonders for its pacing problems, but as a pure display of cinematic audacity, there won’t be another wide release this year that tops it.