Viking Night: Stanley Film Festival II
Stanley Night Fever, 2014 Edition
By Bruce Hall
April 29, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This is the second year in a row I’ve attended the Stanley Film Festival. This works out well, because it’s also the second year they’ve had it, making this one of the longer commitments in my life. I got my first cavity last year and had my first car accident last week. So, this is one of the last streaks I've got left.
Speaking of driving, the trip up the mountain was different this time, making me feel guilty for forgetting about last year's flooding so soon. A long stretch of highway just down the mountain from Estes Park overlooks (and briefly intersects) where the waters rushed through. Trees as thick as professional wrestlers were flattened like grass. Rocks big enough to crush a car had been knocked around like billiard balls. The walls of the canyon were stained and torn ten feet higher than I've ever seen before. A few houses are still laying around, one or two of them considerably to the left or right of where it used to be.
It looked like a goddamned kaiju attack.
On a slightly less depressing note, our hotel wasn’t much better. In fact, we’re still debating whether it wasn’t just a moderately upscale international shipping container. I concede it was a step above having to build my own shelter, but only one step. I tried not to think about the teeming colony of life behind the walls and to just be grateful they steamed the chalk outlines out of the carpet. For the second year in a row, there seems to have been a problem with my exclusive VIP press credentials.
Oh well, we’re not here to hang around our battered hotel room, looking like a life size urban decay diorama. After dinner at the fabulous Stanley Hotel (a dinner which cost me more than the rental car, by the way), it was off to catch our first feature.
What We Do in the Shadows
Maybe you got sick of reality TV just in time to get sick of vampires. And maybe getting sick of super heroes made you forget how completely over vampires you were. And of course now that the zombie thing is so played out, it feels like there aren't enough hours left in the day to hate super heroes. It’s a glorious time to be alive if you’re sick of things, because God knows there’s a form of oversaturation out there for everyone. Whether you've had it with redneck duck hunters, self-important celebrity activists, movies where a single teenage girl in tight pants brings down a sprawling dictatorship, or you just hate shows about little people making cupcakes in pawn shops - your options are almost unlimited.
But sometimes, great minds see windows where others see walls. Sometimes there’s a brief cultural pause where you can turn back the clock and put together a goof on reality TV, vampires, hipsters and Goths - and somehow nail all your targets. What We Do in the Shadows does all of these things and it does them so well that it’s already one of my favorite movies of the year. It is the brainchild of Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement and longtime collaborator Taika Waititi. It is much, much closer in tone to Best in Show than it is to Meet the Spartans. So if you like a savvy, offbeat comedy that can take a tired concept and rip on it until it's special, then this is probably your movie. If not, then I assume you enjoy light beer and prop comedy almost as much as you loved Scary Movie V.
Please enjoy your inflatable furniture.
For everyone else, the premise behind What We Do in the Shadows is simple – three vampires rent a house together in New Zealand, where they fight about who has to do the dishes and how many victims per week it is permissible to slaughter in the living room. Viago (Waititi) is a 17th Century dandy who fusses over his frilly clothes, fine wines and antique furniture. Vladislav (Clement) is an 800-year-old sado-masochist who doesn’t want much from life; only to have sex with many beautiful women, and then kill them. Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) is the rebellious youth of the group at the tender age of 183, and Petyr (Ben Fransham) is an 8000-year-old arch-fiend whose hobbies include being a bat, chilling out in his sarcophagus, and killing puny humans.
A documentary crew follows the vampires around (think of them as a glorified plot device) as they fight over chores, try to get into nightclubs (the Anne Rice look is so 90s), and of course - lure victims back to the house for a delicious late night snack. The problem is that each of them is stuck in the past, unable to shed old habits for the new routines that could make them culturally relevant - and who wouldn’t be after a few centuries? It’s only with an infusion of new blood (yes, a pun) that the gang can find their way forward. And when it finally happens it brings new roommates, new dangers, new victims and new laughs. Just when you think there aren’t more bad vampire jokes the movie can somehow make perfectly hilarious anyway, apparently there ARE.
But do you have to be the first to try something for it to be worth trying? It’s not that they’re new gags; it’s the wry, inventive treatment and timing that works. Vampires don’t have reflections, so what do you do when you’re going out for the night and you want to make sure you look good? Vampires can’t touch silver, so how much would it suck if all that remained of the one true love in all your immortal years was a silver locket? Vampires can’t enter a building without being specifically invited, so guess how hard it is to get into a nightclub? It’s the precise execution and unfettered, faintly intellectual glee this movie takes in deconstructing its many targets that truly makes it funny.
Shadows really goes over less as a feature film and more as a series of insane vampire sketches made by people who are really into vampires. They’re all joined by the thinnest of plot threads – a kind of super bloody ‘80s teen dramedy about acceptance and the fickle pleasure of love. It’s not perfect, of course (speaking of things that are 800-years-old, there’s a Matrix joke in the movie), but it IS just straight up insanely, stupidly, incredibly funny. And not just any funny - it’s the kind of funny that actually reminds you that most of the time we laugh, it’s at things that are merely amusing. When you see something that’s so hilarious you wouldn’t mind if it killed you, the curve gets redrawn, and the world is new again.
If that’s not enough praise, let me tell you that Waititi was standing outside when we left, and I thought briefly about letting him know what a great time I had. Then I realized that my thoughts might dirty him and make him less funny. I determined my input was not needed, and I moved on. If anyone can condense that into useful DVD copy, you have my permission to use it.
Blood Glacier
If you’re going to make a scary movie, one of the first things you need to come up with is an awesome title. Creative use of the word “blood” is always a plus, and the creators of Blood Glacier have done us one better by using it to modify one of nature's most majestically boring spectacles. Sure, it sounds a little cheesy. But if you’re not interested in what a Blood Glacier looks like, I’m not even sure why you're still reading. Austrian Director Marvin Kren wisely detected the non-awesomeness of his original title - “The Station” - and acted accordingly. Giving your monster movie the title to a Gwyneth Paltrow movie is not what puts butts in seats.
But the user-facing edge of a kick ass title is that now, people are going to expect a kick ass story. And in that regard, Blood Glacier is a mixed bag. The film opens on title cards declaring that the world climate has collapsed, and the survival of humanity is at stake. Antarctica has completely melted, the Northern glaciers are retreating, seas are rising and naturally, cats and dogs are living together. But somewhere in the German Alps, scientists at a remote climate station are studying ways to reverse the damage. And among them is a lowly technician named Janek (Gerhard Liebmann), a grizzled, middle aged sourpuss who – like all great heroes - is running from something. So he loves his solitude, his heavy metal, his moonshine and his dog, Tinni (short for Tinnitus, which he no doubt got after hearing an awesome title like Blood Glacier).
With Janek are a group of climate scientists, their personalities covering a range of horror tropes: Brilliant Scientist, Computer Genius, Mr. Practical, and of course, Squirrely Guy Who Eventually Turns on Everyone Before Dying an Ironic Death. They're preparing for the arrival of a key government minister, whose approval is needed for continued funding. Everyone is already on edge when Janek, on routine field maintenance, discovers an unusual glacier colored red by a mysterious substance. The color is later found to come from a new kind of microbe, one that turns out to have a very unfortunate effect on animal life. A series of violent encounters with the newly altered wildlife confirms this, meaning the Minister is in danger when she comes. And did I mention that an old flame of Janek's is the Minister's escort?
Yes, I know. This is a fairly rote, openly derivative thriller that struts its influences proudly, but it also honors them smartly. In fact, you could be forgiven for assuming you're seeing a spirited salute to John Carpenter's The Thing. But unlike that movie, I never really bought into Blood Glacier’s backstory. There aren’t more than a handful of locations in this movie and they’re against landscape that won’t look much different the day after the apocalypse, anyway. And while the movie initially suggests that human activity was to blame for this, aside from a mildly ironic rant late in the film, the story never pushes that theme particularly hard. Elements of the story are meant to portend the end of humanity but having already failed to convince us with words, the film also fails to show us with images.
But the bigger issue for me was that I never got the intended sense of isolation the characters were supposedly experiencing. This time, our heroes are not in Antarctica, a place we have no trouble visualizing as remote. They’re just in the mountains, evidently where a pair of old people stuffed with ham and horseradish can reach on foot in a few hours. Most of the drama in this story comes not from the location, but from the fact that everyone keeps losing track of the satellite phone, which they could easily use to call for help. It’s definitely harder to root for stupid people, so I’m not sure why this compromise was made.
Benjamin Hessler is the writing credit on Blood Glacier, and I will credit his work with capturing the tone of the movie that so clearly inspired it. A lot of his cornball dialog works as intended simply because the actors delivering it also understand that tone. Liebmann’s performance is nothing less than evocative of RJ MacReady, 15 years older and twice as bitter. In fact, I’m comfortable saying that across the board, the acting in this film is one of the best things about it. And how often do you get to say that about a horror film? Blood Glacier could easily have been a shamelessly derivative knockoff, but instead it comes off as a lovingly crafted homage and a pretty damn solid thriller on its own merit.
That is, all the way up to the new frontrunner for the prestigious M Night Shyamalan Double Facepalm Ending award. Obviously I can’t say much more than that, but I'm willing to say that a movie I'd just invested a fair amount of time being impressed by now felt a little like a fart joke. I did my best to be forgiving, but most of my fellow audience chuckled openly – and not in the way that says “Wow, that’s really clever!” No, it was in the way that says “Did you seriously just give me a birthday cake made out of bat droppings?” I’m comfortable assuming the scene in question was not meant to feel that way.
But look at it this way - if all you have to do is chop three lousy minutes to produce a successful homage to one of the greatest horror films of all time, then the movie works. This is not a must own, or even a must see. But if you enjoy scrappy, inventive low budget horror movies even a little, consider Blood Glacier a big win for audience and director alike.