ATTACHMENT (2022)

 

(Shudder Original/streaming film. Director/screenwriter: Gabril Bier Gislason)

 

Review

Danish actress, Maja (Josephine Park), meets Jewish academic (Leah, played by Ellie Kendrick) in a bookstore, and they quickly fall in love. When Leah, who has strange seizures, returns to her mother’s home, Maja goes with her. Chana, Leah’s mother, is a strict practitioner of Jewish black magick. Furthermore, the serious older woman doesn’t seem to like Maja, driving her to figure out the changes in Leah’s personality, her relationship with her rigid mother, and the Kabbalah-related objects hidden around Chana’s house.

If you view director Gislason’s feature debut for what it comes off as—a barely R-rated made-for-television, initially fun and romantic drama with occasional PG-13 horror moments—it might be a good viewing choice for you. If you’re one of those sensitive souls who sincerely use the phrase “elevated horror” and doesn’t get the joke (all horror work has inherent subtext, it’s not meant to be worn as a fan-badge of arrogance and/or ignorance), ATTACHMENT could easily be your vaguely, occasionally horrific check-it-out flick as well.

If you’re an Old School/traditional horror fan looking for a well-edited film that effectively, continually builds up to a satisfying, suspenseful horror-flick ending, you might want to skip it. ATTACHMENT‘s first twenty or thirty minutes are promising, relatively fast-paced, a steady-build work. Then it hits a drawn-out, glacial-paced thirty or so minutes, where Maja, initially smart, becomes so love-dumb and gormless that she strains believability. By the time all is spoon-fed, er, revealed to her, it’s a moot point—experienced horror viewers will likely have sussed out the film’s lacking-in-suspense storyline and upcoming shots early on and, like me, just wanted the movie over with already.

On paper, I see where ATTACHMENT might’ve worked as an hourlong television/streaming horror show episode. It builds like an unedited novella (one can almost see which scenes would be dramatic chapter endings), but as a feature. . . Gabril Bier Gislason, his cast and crew are clearly able to put out part of a good movie. It’s a shame that its snail-crawl middle-to-end section relies on its lead (Maja) being excessively dumb, even for someone newly in love, and scenes recycling (without building on) previously established plot points.

 

Standout actors include:

Sofie Gråbøl (THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, 2018) as Chana, Leah’s intense, black magick-practicing mother;

David Dencik (DEPARTMENT Q: THE ABSENT ONE, 2014) as Lev, a bookstore owner and Ellie’s uncle.

 

If you don’t like gore, suspense, violence, good editing, or anything darker than weak milk chocolate in your movies, ATTACHMENT could easily be your cinematic kick for an hour and forty-five minutes. If you’re not, feel free to skip it.

DON’T LISTEN (2020)

 

(a.k.a. VOCES; streaming/Netflix movie; director/co-story source: Àngel Gómez Hernández. Co-screenwriter: Santiago Díaz. Co-story source: Victor Gado.)

Review

LISTEN is an overlong and mostly by-the-numbers Spanish spook house-possession film. A couple (Daniel and Ruth), with their nine-year-old son Eric, move into a house to renovate and sell it. When Eric starts hearing voices and drawing disturbing pictures, his parents become concerned. They hire a child psychologist, kicking off a number of unnatural deaths. This prompts Daniel and Ruth to hire two paranormal specialists, an old man (Germán) and his daughter (Sara) who have their own tragic pasts they’re dealing with.

LISTEN is a decent flick if you’re not looking for anything original, with laid-on-thick drama, spooky camera shots, solid acting, bold-not-shocking-deaths, and one effective twist near the end that may floor those not paying attention to what’s going on. It also helps if you don’t mind a film with lots of lag scenes, story-effective pacing sacrificed for the sake of atmosphere. If you’re not sick of this movie by its finish, stick around to the end of its credits for the crappy-looking sequel it leaves an opening for.

LAKE OF THE DEAD (1958)

 

(a.k.a LAKE OF THE DAMNED; director/screenwriter: Kåre Bergstrøm)

Review

In August 1958, a group of longtime friends head to a lakeside cabin to visit another friend, Bjørn Werner, who’s disappeared. Bjørn’s sister (Liljan), in this group, fears something has happened to him. Others, whose professions range from psychoanalyst to lawyer, dismiss Liljan’s fears.

When they arrive at the lake and cabin, Bjørn and his dog (Spot) are nowhere to be seen. The cabin door seems to open as if of its own accord, but the friends shake it off. With them is a local constable (Bråten), who helps them investigate Bjørn’s disappearance. Bråten tells them about the legend of the lake, cabin and the cabin’s former occupants, a hundred years ago─Tore Gråvik, a man with a wooden left leg, lusted after his sister, and when she took up with another man, he killed them before drowning himself in the lake. Since then, the story goes that whoever stays in the cabin will become possessed by Gråvik’s malevolent spirit.

The friends debate what to do next, each of them representing and stating their professional outlooks and making accusations, even as further weirdness occurs, e.g., a recurring, distinctive footprint around the lake and several characters’ efforts, some sleepwalking, others hypnotized, to drown themselves in the lake.

Is someone puppet mastering the situation to hide something about Bjørn’s disappearance? Or is the lake (whose idyllic shots are paired with Gunnar Sønstevold’s melancholic, restrained soundtrack) and its surrounding area haunted by Gråvik and others?

This seventy-seven-minute, black and white Norwegian film, based on André Bjerke’s 1942 mystery-horror novel (he wrote it under the name Bernhard Borge), is a visually striking, excellent work, with sharp, moody cinematography (courtesy of Ragnar Sørenson) and equally sharp editing (Olav Engebretsen). Arne Holm’s well-timed sound effects further LAKE’s effectiveness. Its use of well-acted characters-as-avatars-for-debate-points helps elevate LAKE to greatness, placing it next to spook house films like Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING (1963) and John Hough’s THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973), as does Bergstrøm’s screenplay and direction.

LAKE’s players include source-novel author André Bjerke as magazine editor Gabriel Mørk.

LAKE is worth your time if you appreciate black and white films that ably mix atmospheric, lots-of-talking mystery punctuated with spooky events and elements, striking visuals, and offbeat endings. You might figure out what’s going on─it’s not difficult to do─but there are enough red herrings that, with a changed scene or two, it could’ve logically gone other ways as well. This is one of my all-time favorite spook house films. Director/screenwriter Nini Bull Robsahm’s remake was released in 2019.

DEATHBED (2002)

 

(Director: Danny Draven. Screenplay by John Strysik, based on George Barry’s 1977 film DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS.)

 

Review

A young couple─children’s book artist Karen (Tanya Dempsey, SHRIEKER, 1988) and photographer Jerry (Brave Matthews, AMERICAN ZOMBIELAND, 2020)─move into a Los Angeles, California flat, unaware that it has a murder-haunted bed in its upstairs room. They find it and begin sleeping on the quaint-looking, metal-framed bed on which the deaths took place. The couple experience waking and sleeping nightmares about the 1920-30s psychosexual killings (shown in black and white flashbacks) of “Ghost Man” (Michael Sonye, billed as Dukey Flyswatter, HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS, 1988) strangling two of seven women (including Louise Astor, played by Meagan Mangum) with silk neck ties.

The effect of Jerry and Karen’s nightmares bleed into their work and relationships─particularly their dealings with their on-site landlord, Art (Joe Estevez, SOULTAKER, 1990).

Produced by Stuart Gordon, Charles Band (Full Moon Pictures founder) and others, DEATHBED is a loose remake of George Barry’s way-different 1977 flick DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS PEOPLE. This remake is a good, makes-great-use-of-its-low-budget work. The production design/art direction (courtesy of Johnny R. Long and others) is mood-consistent with its spare-but-effective soundtrack (composer: James T. Sale, THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY, 2008) and relatively restrained gory special effects (Mark Bautista, MANK, 2020). The direction, Hollywood(land)-centric story (which slyly references H.P. Lovecraft) and flow of the movie is tight as can be, given its mostly well-acted characters and their personalities/histories.

Sonye/Flyswatter, an actor, screenwriter, and lyricist/lead singer of several horror punk/metal bands, primarily Haunted Garage and Penis Flytrap, is fun and ghoulish as “Ghost Man,” the spectral creep/killer whose crimes and spirit continue on well beyond his death. Film nerds may appreciate the brief appearance of Constance Estevez,  billed as Constance Anderson, as a “Maternal Model”─according to IMDb, in 2004 she married Joe Estevez, Martin Sheen’s younger and equally prolific brother.

DEATHBED is a worthwhile movie if you don’t mind its solid-for-its-limited-budget effects, occasional lapses into questionable acting (by supporting players) and its overall low budget. The filmmakers achieve what they set out to do─create a solid, tightly shot and edited minimally funded film─and that's all any reasonable viewer can expect, given the filmmakers' resources.

DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS (1977)

 

(Director/screenwriter: George Barry)

DEATH, whose idea came to director/screenwriter George Barry in a dream, is appropriately surrealistic and unique. In it, a demon possesses a four-poster bed after his true love dies on it. He continues eating people (via the bed’s hellish ability to transform from a regular bed to a bed-framed, yellow-lit vat of digestive acid). Various people break into the abandoned mansion where the bed is and most of them are consumed by the bed. These devourings are punctuated, sometimes narrated by, The Artist, whose spirit is trapped within/behind a painting, tells viewers about the bed’s history, intermingled with his. DEATH is broken into four segments: Breakfast; Lunch; Dinner; and The Just Desert.

After one of the victims, Sharon, becomes a meal for the demon, "Sharon's Brother" (William Russ, billed as Rusty Russ) comes looking for her. One of the most hilarious scenes of this low-budget, dark-humored and slow-moving film involves the brother and skeletal hands.

DEATH is not a good movie by most standards: its narration takes the viewer out of the movie, as do the interior monologues of several characters; there are padded scenes, lots of lag time.

What makes DEATH worthwhile (for intriguing bad flick enthusiasts) is how Barry makes the most of his limited budget, creating an out-there, artsy work (especially during the intensely yellow-bright scenes where the bed dissolves its victims).  What also works is Barry’s intuitive jump cut edits, which add to the natural, odd feel of this standout cult classic, which was started in 1972, but not widely released until 2003 on DVD.

According to IMDb, DEATH was mostly filmed in “Gar Wood mansion on Keelson Island in Detroit[, Michigan].” This setting is gloomy and Gothic, furthering the mood of the flick which mostly eschews a soundtrack. Love it or hate it, you're not likely to forget it. Danny Draven's loose remake, DEATHBED, was released direct-to-DVD on September 24, 2002.

MALASAÑA 32 (2020)

 

(a.k.a. 32 MALASANA STREET; director: Albert Pintó. Screenwriters: Ramón Campos, Gema R. Neira, David Orea and Salvador S. Molina.)

Storyline

A family, used to country living, moves into a big-city haunted house.

Review

Set in 1976, MALASAÑA starts off as a promising, drenched-in-dark-filtered-spookiness flick. Its building, exterior and interior, is baroque with long shadows and corners where one  expects creepy fingers to wrap around them. The acting is all-around good─their sense of desperate poverty and alienation with their surroundings is palpable.

Unfortunately, it’s only a few minutes before MALASAÑA meanders into annoying flash-cut-image moments, ineffective scenes that only pad out the film’s running time, and a few jump-cuts too many. When it becomes an EXORCIST-lite possession flick, it’s a by-the-numbers work. (I initially liked the twist involving Clara’s identity, but the film’s meandering script watered down her character, making her another bland ingredient in its soupy mess.)

MALASAÑA, a deeply flawed work, has talented people involved in it. It would have been better with a tighter script that was less choppy and capitalized on its Clara-related uniqueness (and given her character more depth and humanity). As it is, the hour-and-forty-four-minute flick feels like an empty exercise in sometimes-creepy style.

LAKE OF DEATH (2019)

 

(Director/screenwriter: Nini Bull Robsahm)

Storyline

A year after her twin brother’s mysterious death near their family cabin, Lillian and her friends return to the lakeside abode where he expired. Weird events and an expanding black rot─real or imagined?─impel the fragile sister toward another edge.

Review

DEATH is a loose remake of Kåre Bergstrøm’s 1958 Norwegian film, LAKE OF THE DEAD (based on André Bjerke’s novel, published under the nom de plume Bernhard Borge). In this slow (a generous viewer would call it “slow burn”) remake flick, a young woman (Lillian, played by Iben Akerlie), haunted and traumatized by the mysterious drowning death of her brother (Bjørn), returns to the lakeside family house where it happened.

Of course, she has friends─who bring their own bickering, weird energy to the trip─and strange things occur. Someone─nobody seems to know who─makes and sets out a big breakfast for them; Lillian’s dog (Totto) is found tied up in a barn; the friends discover a hidden basement with creepy photos and dolls, revealing Lillian’s family cabin to be that of a legendary old man in the 1920s who killed his family and drowned himself after staring at the lake for hours; Lillian, who sleepwalks, sees a black, disease-like rot spreading on everything, especially the temperamental Harrald, one of her friends who almost drowns in the lake when an unseen something tries to pull him under; doors open by themselves while several characters watch.

Director-screenwriter Robsahm creates a strong atmosphere of distrust and eerie unease, and the actors range from good (Akerlie’s Lillian) to solid (most other actors). The old man’s multi-language, pictures-of-creepy-wet-people diary is especially effective in adding a supernatural nuance.

Unfortunately, the film is overlong, with too many Lillian dream sequences and too much lag time between worthwhile scenes. By the time Lillian faces her fears─embodied, real or not, by Björn─it’s underwhelming, a too-little-too-late climax, with a sequel-friendly, typical ending. While the ending fits theme and set-up, it feels too overt, too pat, given the often-nuanced events that precede it. If you’re a fan of languid, mood-piece cinema, DEATH may appeal to you. If you prefer your horror to be faster paced, more plot- and character-driven, you may want to pass on this one.