Canuck Horror and Canuck Comedy offer up distinctive shrieks- Reviews By Greg Klymkiw - BERKSHIRE COUNTY ****, MANGIACAKE ***

In the middle of nowhere, on All Hallows Eve:
THERE WILL BE PIGS!!!

Berkshire County (2014)
Dir. Audrey Cummings
Starring: Alysa King, Madison Ferguson, Cristophe Gallander,
Samora Smallwood, Bart Rochon, Aaron Chartrand, Leo Pady, Robert Nolan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Pigs get a bad rap. They're gentle, friendly and intelligent creatures. Alas, in the parlance of western culture, since time immemorial, really, the pig has been synonymous with a variety of grotesqueries such as filth, greed, gluttony, violence, corruption and most decidedly, just plain uncouth behaviour. With that rather unfair but common understanding of piggishness, it seems only appropriate that the damnable porkers abound malevolently in Berkshire County, the dazzling first feature by Canadian filmmaker Audrey Cummings. On the surface and at its most basic level, it could be seen as a simple, straight-up babysitter-in-peril-during-a-home-invasion thriller.

Sure, it most certainly is that, especially if that's all you're looking for. However, it's not quite as straight up as one might suspect. The reason it works so superbly is that the simple premise is successfully mined to yield several levels of complexity which add to the picture's richness. Most notably, there's the matter of the movie's virtuosity. Cummings directs the picture with the kind of within-an-inch-of-her-life urgency and stratospheric level of craft that, with the whiz-bang cutting of editor Michael P. Mason and Michael Jari Davidson's evocative lensing, yield a horror suspense thriller that infuses you with creepy-crawly dread and one astounding scare set-piece after another.

That, frankly, would be enough to spew laudatory ejaculate right in the face of the whole affair, but on a deeper thematic level, Cummings and screenwriter Chris Gamble offer up a delectably sumptuous and varied buffet for an audience to gobble up with the ferocity of snuffling hogs at the trough. Berkshire County is an intense, topical, nasty, darkly funny and even politically-charged feminist horror picture in the tradition of other leading Canadian female genre directors like the Soska Sisters, Karen Lam and Jovanka Vuckovic.

It's proof positive, once again, that Canadian WOMEN are leading the charge of terrifying, edge-of-your-seat horror-fests that are as effectively drawer-filling as they are provocative and politically astute. It's unabashed exploitation injected with discerning observational power.

The film begins during a Halloween party in the rural enclave of the film's title. The gorgeous teenage girl-next-door Kylie Winters (Alysa King) arrives adorned in the sexiest Little Red Riding Hood costume imaginable. Heads swivel in her general direction, but none more so than that of the handsome Marcus (Aaron Chartrand), a hunky stud-horse-man-boy from the local high school. He, like the other small town, small-minded fellas is swine (of the male chauvinist variety) incarnate.

In what's possibly one of the more disturbing acts committed in any genre picture of recent memory, Kylie is plied with booze, coerced - essentially date-raped - into blowing Marcus. Unbeknownst to her, she's captured on his smart phone movie camera which he promptly uploads to cyber space for all to see.

Though the film has previously opened with a creepy Kubrickian traveling overhead shot of the county's forested, isolated topography (a la The Shining), Cummings and Gamble plunge us into very unexpected territory. Initially, the horror is neither supernatural nor of the psychopathic variety, but a monstrous act of sexual abuse, followed by the insidious cyber-dissemination of pornographic images of said abuse and then the teasing, bullying and shame experienced by Kylie who was the target of the abuse and subsequent derision levelled at her by peers.

Ripped from the headlines of a veritable myriad of similar cases involving tragic sexual abuse, we are privy to one of the more abominable aspects of contemporary teen culture. In Canada, the most horrific example is that of Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons who, plied with booze and gang raped on camera, committed suicide when the images went viral. What faces Kylie is so debilitatingly nasty that she's the one made to feel like a pariah - as if she were to blame. Even Kylie's repressed dough-headed mother blames Kylie for bringing scandal upon the family.

To add insult to injury, Kylie is further estranged from those who should be offering support when she is practically forced by her mother to take a Halloween night babysitting gig at an isolated mansion on the outskirts of the community. That said, Kylie seems to welcome the peace and isolation the job might afford, far away from the piggish behaviour of her abuser, his stupid friends, her idiot mother and everyone else who teases and/or affixes blame upon her. A gorgeous mansion with all the amenities and two sweet kids has Heaven on Earth written all over it. Or so she (and we) think. She (and we) are wrong about that.

Pigs, you see, are lurking in the woods. Not just any pigs, mind you, but a family of travelling serial killers adorned in horrifying pig masks. And these sick fuckers mean business. Happily, Cummings and Gamble have fashioned a terrific female empowerment tale within the context of the horror genre. By focusing, in the first third, upon the teen culture of abuse and bullying and then tossing their lead character into a nail-bitingly terrifying maze of sheer horror, they, as filmmakers and we, as an audience, get to have the whole cake and eat it too. The final two-thirds cleverly and relentlessly presents one seemingly impossible challenge after another and we're front-row passengers on a roller coaster ride of mostly unpredictable chills and thrills until we're eyeballs-glued-to-the-screen during some deliciously repellent violence and, of course, a bit of the old feminist-infused empowerment.

Joining a fine tradition of home invasion movies like The Strangers and You're Next, it's a film that, in its own special way exceeds the aims of those seminal works because it places the horror in a context of the kind of horror which has become all too real in contemporary society. In a sense, the film's target audience, teens and young 20-somethings (and middle-aged horror geeks who've never grown up) will get everything they want out of the picture - and then some.

And just so we're not feeling too warm and fuzzy after the film's harrowing climax, Cummings spews a blood-spattered shocker upon us - one that horror fans have seen a million times before, but when it's served up right, we're always happy to see it again. So take a trip to Berkshire County. It's a fork in the road (and blade in the gut) worth choosing.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Berkshire County, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the esteemed Shriekfest Film Festival in Los Angeles will be released in Canada via A-71 and is being sold to the rest of the world by the visionary Canadian sales agency Raven Banner. Playdates so far are as follows:

OPENS Theatrically – JUNE 5, 2015
TORONTO – Carlton Cinema, 20 Carlton St.
OTTAWA – Landmark Kanata, 801 Kanata Ave
WHITBY – Landmark Cinemas 24 Whitby, 75 Consumers Drive

More cities to follow

Mangiacake (2015)
Dir. Nate Estabrooks
Scr. Christina Cuffari & Estabrooks
Starring: Melanie Scrofano, Christina Cuffari, Jocelyne Zucco, Paula McPherson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Mangiacake takes the cake for being one of the most perversely entertaining ethnic family comedies I've seen in quite some time. It's not perfect; the film's ultra-low budget sometimes betrays it in the production-value department with spotty sound, flat lighting and spartan production design, BUT, if you can overlook those elements, then you'll probably have a good time.

Two early-20-something Italian sisters (Melanie Scrofano, Christina Cuffari) move back home with their mother and grandmother. They're major-league squabblers and sparks fly right from the beginning.

One sister has suffered a massive concussion and suffers from memory loss, an especially inconvenient state of affairs since she's studying for finals in traditional Chinese medicine. (There are a couple of knee-slappers involving acupuncture needles and fresh produce.) The other sister, a not-too-successful actress is fleeing responsibility, auditioning for roles she'll probably never get and embroiled in a very odd text-only romantic relationship.

Mom (Paula McPherson), unprepared for being assailed by the squabbling sisters is hitting the sauce a bit too heavily and Grandma (Jocelyne Zucco), devoted to Jesus and the Virgin Mary, attempts to broker peace with her endless looks of displeasure and nonsensical old world sayings.

A good chunk of the movie is devoted to the bickering twixt the sisters. This is pretty easy to take since both actresses are easy on the eyes and acquit themselves especially well -- they've got to spit out lines at each other faster than a gatling gun and often, at the top of their considerable Italian lungs. In fact, this is what I found especially insane -- the movie is an almost non-stop screamfest with plenty of good insults hurled back and forth and eventually building to a chaotic everything but the kitchen sink climax of madness and not without hilarity.

Watching two young, hot Italian babes screaming at each other and engaging occasionally in cat fights is probably what I responded to most of all. At times I couldn't believe how intense their jousting got, but the bigger it got, the more I thoroughly appreciated it.

At times, the pace of the dialogue (courtesy of the oddball screenplay) is a kind of Speedy Gonzalez version of Howard-Hawksian back and forth (courtesy of direction, cutting and performances) and that, almost in and of itself offers considerable pleasure. The writing feels like it comes from a real place, even though much of it is overwrought -- it's overwrought in ways I've witnessed in many ethnic family dynamics.

Estabrooks' coverage as a director, is usually spot on. He shoots simply for the laughs, and production value aside, it's nicely directed. A dinner table scene is especially well done and, believe it or not, scenes around tables can often be the most difficult things to properly do. Hell, they can sometimes be more challenging than a bloody car chase. Happily, it and a number of other comedy set-pices are nicely covered and cut. Oh, and yeah, the dinner table scene is especially grotesquely funny (as is much of the movie).

I'll admit to spitting up my Chinotto on more than one occasion.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** Three Stars

Mangiacake is in limited theatrical release across Canada and also available via VOD. It opens July 19 at the Magic Lantern Rainbow Carlton Cinemas in Toronto.

IN HER PLACE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - One of the year's 10 Best Films as selected by The Film Corner begins its Canadian Theatrical Premiere at the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas in Toronto. A GREAT FILM that quietly rips our hearts to shreds. AN ABSOLUTE MUST-SEE!!! ***** 5-Stars Highest Film Corner Rating

WINNER of numerous Accolades from Critic Greg Klymkiw
in The Film Corner Awards (TFCA 2014)
One of the 10 BEST FILMS of 2014
Best Canadian Feature Film: Time Lapse Pictures
Best Supporting Actress: Ahn Ji-Hye
Best Musical Score: Alexander Klinke
WINNER of numerous Accolades from Critic Greg Klymkiw
in the Film Corner Canadian Film Awards 2014
Director Albert Shin
Screenwriters Pearl-Ball Harding, Albert Shin
Actresses Yoon Da-kyung, Kil Hae-yeon, Ahn Ji-Hye
David Miller, A71 Entertainment,
Top 10 Heroes of Canadian Cinema

A daughter,
whose child
can never be hers.
A mother,
whose daughter
is everything.
A woman,
who comes
between them.
A baby,
that binds
all three
for eternity.

In Her Place (2014)
Dir. Albert Shin
Script: Shin
& Pearl Ball-Harding
Prods. Igor Drljaca, Yoon Hyun Chan & Shin
Starring: Yoon Da Kyung, Ahn Ji Hye, Kil Hae Yeon, Kim Sung Cheol, Kim Chang Hwan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Now and again, I find myself seeing a movie that feels so perfect, so lacking in anything resembling a single false note and so affecting on every level that I'm compelled to constantly pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. In Her Place, enjoying its Canadian Theatrical Premiere at Toronto's Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas is a dream, but most decidedly of the dream-come-true variety. This is exactly the sort of film that restores my faith in the poetic properties of cinema and how the simplest of tales, at their surface, allow its artists to dig deep and yield the treasures inherent in the picture's soul. When a film is imbued with an inner spirit as this one is, you know you're watching something that hasn't been machine-tooled strictly for ephemeral needs. In Her Place is a film about yearning, love and the extraordinary tears and magic that are borne out of the company and shared experience of women. And, it is exquisite.

A childless couple nearing the early stages of middle-age, cut a private deal to adopt outside the purview of an official agency, which, they're convinced, will be the ideal no-muss-no-fuss arrangement. The Wife (Yoon Da-kyung), having been previously afflicted with serious health issues, especially wants the world to think she's the biological birth-mother of the adopted newborn.

She and her Husband (Kim Kyung Ik) concoct a cover for friends and family that she's waiting out her pregnancy in America instead of Seoul. In reality, she's not left South Korea at all and is staying on an isolated farm. Her hosts are The Mother (Kil Hae-yeon), widowed and forced to run the sprawling acreage on her own and her daughter, a shy, pregnant teenage Girl (Ahn Ji-hye). For a substantial sum, this financially needy rural family agrees to give up the baby to the well-to-do couple from the big city. The Wife stays in modest digs originally meant for onsite farmhands while her Husband returns to Seoul to work. From here, she can maintain the optics of being away from home during pregnancy but also take an active role in nurturing the young lady carrying "her" child. The arrangement seems too good to be true and sure enough, complications slowly surface and threaten to scuttle an otherwise perfect plan.

In Her Place is director Albert Shin's stunning sophomore feature-length outing. Working with co-writer Pearl Ball-Harding and co-producer Igor Drljaca (director of 2012's dazzling Krivina and Shin's old York University film school pal and partner in their company TimeLapse Pictures), Shin and Drljaca seem to have pulled off another miracle in the relatively short life of their seemingly perfect partnership. Evocatively photographed by Moon Myoung Hwan, wrenchingly and beautifully scored by Alexandre Klinke, featuring a cast as perfect as any director (or audience) would want and edited by Shin himself with the pace and deep sensitivity that's reminiscent of a Robert Bresson film, you'll experience as haunting and touching a film as any of the very best that have been wrought. This is great filmmaking, pure and simple.

What I love about this movie, aside from its emotional content, is just how Shin trusts in the beautiful writing and employs a mise-en-scène that allows his actors to inhabit the frame (always perfectly composed) for the kind of maximum impact that can come from holding steady on narrative action and only cutting when absolutely necessary to spin things forward in subtle ways - parcelling out information so that we are allowed to take in both information and the affecting layers of very palpable impression and subtext.

A perfect example of Shin's assured direction occurs right off the top. The film opens with a fade up from black into a perfectly composed fixed shot of a well-worn gravel road. Flanked by lush, green trees, an unassuming, slightly worn farmhouse sits deep in the centre background, while a car makes its way into the frame and moves with purpose onto the property. All is swathed in a strange grey light from the overcast sky and as the car reaches a halfway point on the road, Shin cuts to place us in a reverse as the vehicle comes even closer to the house. It's as if the point of view was not so much from that of a character, or even from the inanimate house as if it were personified, but rather taking the perspective of an omnipresent observer. This won't be the first time Shin delivers such a POV. From this point and onwards, he allows us, the audience to participate with a kind of fly-on-the-wall scrutiny.

This second shot of the film is masterful on several important fronts.

In both the writing and staging, the camera lets action play out in the time it takes and in so doing, always keeps us guessing (in all the right ways) as to who is in the car, who the people are once we meet them as they exit the vehicle, get an immediate sense of character from how the two people are positioned in the frame and also by their actions and finally, a very subtle dolly back as the two characters move forward and encounter a sweet, friendly, but sad-eyed dog, chained next to an empty food bowl as it observes the visitors.

This image of a chained dog resonates incalculably as the film progresses.

Another important element here is that these two people become identifiable as a married couple because the shot takes its time and is so perfectly blocked. Even more extraordinarily, the shot allows enough time for one of the people to notice something in the distance and move towards it before the next cut.

This entire shot is a brave and bold stroke so early in the proceedings. The shot lasts for two minutes of screen time, setting the mood, tone and pace of how the tale will unfold, but also establishing how we, as viewers, are observers. And we are not passive viewers. It's as if we were actually in the frame, unseen by the characters, but participants in the narrative nevertheless, almost complicit in the actions of the story. Complicity is indeed a key thematic element at play in the film and Shin does not let us off the hook.

Finally, though, the shot also gives us the sense that this will be the story of The Husband. He is, after all, the most active half of the couple. This is essential at this point, especially since we soon find ourselves within an interior shot set back from a table where the Husband, his back to us, continues to be the most active character in terms of his domination of the conversation and by his declarative statements regarding the heat and stuffiness of the interior.

The notion of being able to breathe, to feel the sort of freedom this natural, rural environment should inspire, to not be hemmed in by circumstance, a lack of communication and/or connection to the outside world is also an element that is established and will reverberate throughout the film with great force.

The other vital component here is that the position of the camera allows us to see all three women very clearly. Though their interaction seems tentative compared to that of the husband, the very length of the shot allows Shin to establish trinity between these women and we're soon plunged into their story - which ultimately, the film is. The Husband seems a mere appendage or, if you will, the chauffeur. He gets his wife there, he even gets us there, but when his job is done, he's dispensed with save for a few key moments later on wherein he still, strangely, feels more like an instrument of mere conveyance.

The dynamic between these three women is so powerful, so telling and finally, so devastating, that Shin's subtle control of his film is at once invisible and yet always present because we are where we have to be for every single emotional and narrative beat.

In Her Place so quietly rips our hearts to shreds. We are included in the emotional journeys of a daughter whose child can never be hers, a mother whose daughter is everything to her but comes to this realization when it's too late and a woman who has come between them because her own desire to love and nurture is so strong and true.

Finally, it's all about a baby - a new life that binds all three women for what will be an eternity.

This is a great picture. See it.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

In Her Place enjoys its Canadian Theatrical Premiere at the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas in Toronto via A71 Entertainment.

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BERKSHIRE COUNTY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Hot babysitter-in-peril thriller superbly directed, intelligently written and laced with female-empowerment undertones.

In the middle of nowhere, on All Hallows Eve:
THERE WILL BE PIGS!!!

BABE IN PERIL: FROM DATE RAPE
TO HALLOWEEN HOME INVASION!

Berkshire County (2014)
Dir. Audrey Cummings
Starring: Alysa King, Madison Ferguson, Cristophe Gallander,
Samora Smallwood, Bart Rochon, Aaron Chartrand, Leo Pady, Robert Nolan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Pigs get a bad rap. They're gentle, friendly and intelligent creatures. Alas, in the parlance of western culture, since time immemorial, really, the pig has been synonymous with a variety of grotesqueries such as filth, greed, gluttony, violence, corruption and most decidedly, just plain uncouth behaviour. With that rather unfair but common understanding of piggishness, it seems only appropriate that the damnable porkers abound malevolently in Berkshire County, the dazzling first feature by Canadian filmmaker Audrey Cummings. On the surface and at its most basic level, it could be seen as a simple, straight-up babysitter-in-peril-during-a-home-invasion thriller.

Sure, it most certainly is that, especially if that's all you're looking for. However, it's not quite as straight up as one might suspect. The reason it works so superbly is that the simple premise is successfully mined to yield several levels of complexity which add to the picture's richness. Most notably, there's the matter of the movie's virtuosity. Cummings directs the picture with the kind of within-an-inch-of-her-life urgency and stratospheric level of craft that, with the whiz-bang cutting of editor Michael P. Mason and Michael Jari Davidson's evocative lensing, yield a horror suspense thriller that infuses you with creepy-crawly dread and one astounding scare set-piece after another.

That, frankly, would be enough to spew laudatory ejaculate right in the face of the whole affair, but on a deeper thematic level, Cummings and screenwriter Chris Gamble offer up a delectably sumptuous and varied buffet for an audience to gobble up with the ferocity of snuffling hogs at the trough. Berkshire County is an intense, topical, nasty, darkly funny and even politically-charged feminist horror picture in the tradition of other leading Canadian female genre directors like the Soska Sisters, Karen Lam and Jovanka Vuckovic.

It's proof positive, once again, that Canadian WOMEN are leading the charge of terrifying, edge-of-your-seat horror-fests that are as effectively drawer-filling as they are provocative and politically astute. It's unabashed exploitation injected with discerning observational power.

HALLOWEEN BABYSITTER
VS
PIGGLY WIGGLIES GALORE!

The film begins during a Halloween party in the rural enclave of the film's title. The gorgeous teenage girl-next-door Kylie Winters (Alysa King) arrives adorned in the sexiest Little Red Riding Hood costume imaginable. Heads swivel in her general direction, but none more so than that of the handsome Marcus (Aaron Chartrand), a hunky stud-horse-man-boy from the local high school. He, like the other small town, small-minded fellas is swine (of the male chauvinist variety) incarnate.

In what's possibly one of the more disturbing acts committed in any genre picture of recent memory, Kylie is plied with booze, coerced - essentially date-raped - into blowing Marcus. Unbeknownst to her, she's captured on his smart phone movie camera which he promptly uploads to cyber space for all to see.

Though the film has previously opened with a creepy Kubrickian traveling overhead shot of the county's forested, isolated topography (a la The Shining), Cummings and Gamble plunge us into very unexpected territory. Initially, the horror is neither supernatural nor of the psychopathic variety, but a monstrous act of sexual abuse, followed by the insidious cyber-dissemination of pornographic images of said abuse and then the teasing, bullying and shame experienced by Kylie who was the target of the abuse and subsequent derision levelled at her by peers.

Ripped from the headlines of a veritable myriad of similar cases involving tragic sexual abuse, we are privy to one of the more abominable aspects of contemporary teen culture. In Canada, the most horrific example is that of Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons who, plied with booze and gang raped on camera, committed suicide when the images went viral. What faces Kylie is so debilitatingly nasty that she's the one made to feel like a pariah - as if she were to blame. Even Kylie's repressed dough-headed mother blames Kylie for bringing scandal upon the family.

To add insult to injury, Kylie is further estranged from those who should be offering support when she is practically forced by her mother to take a Halloween night babysitting gig at an isolated mansion on the outskirts of the community. That said, Kylie seems to welcome the peace and isolation the job might afford, far away from the piggish behaviour of her abuser, his stupid friends, her idiot mother and everyone else who teases and/or affixes blame upon her. A gorgeous mansion with all the amenities and two sweet kids has Heaven on Earth written all over it. Or so she (and we) think. She (and we) are wrong about that.

THIS LITTLE PIGGY
CAME HOME!!!
He has a butcher knife
. . . and friends!

Pigs, you see, are lurking in the woods. Not just any pigs, mind you, but a family of travelling serial killers adorned in horrifying pig masks. And these sick fuckers mean business. Happily, Cummings and Gamble have fashioned a terrific female empowerment tale within the context of the horror genre. By focusing, in the first third, upon the teen culture of abuse and bullying and then tossing their lead character into a nail-bitingly terrifying maze of sheer horror, they, as filmmakers and we, as an audience, get to have the whole cake and eat it too. The final two-thirds cleverly and relentlessly presents one seemingly impossible challenge after another and we're front-row passengers on a roller coaster ride of mostly unpredictable chills and thrills until we're eyeballs-glued-to-the-screen during some deliciously repellent violence and, of course, a bit of the old feminist-infused empowerment.

Joining a fine tradition of home invasion movies like The Strangers and You're Next, it's a film that, in its own special way exceeds the aims of those seminal works because it places the horror in a context of the kind of horror which has become all too real in contemporary society. In a sense, the film's target audience, teens and young 20-somethings (and middle-aged horror geeks who've never grown up) will get everything they want out of the picture - and then some.

And just so we're not feeling too warm and fuzzy after the film's harrowing climax, Cummings spews a blood-spattered shocker upon us - one that horror fans have seen a million times before, but when it's served up right, we're always happy to see it again. So take a trip to Berkshire County. It's a fork in the road (and blade in the gut) worth choosing.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Berkshire County, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the esteemed Shriekfest Film Festival in Los Angeles, enjoys it's Canadian premiere during the 2014 Blood in the Snow Film Festival at the Magic Lantern Carlton Theatres in Toronto. It will be released in Canada via A-71 and is being sold to the rest of the world by the visionary Canadian sales agency Raven Banner.

IT WAS YOU CHARLIE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Sad & Funny First Feature By Indie English-Canuck Shirinian

NOTE: The Film Corner's Star Ratings will now appear at the end of the review.

Bittersweet comedies always need BABES. This one has two!!! Good deal!!!

Brothers and Doormen make great cinematic bedfellows.

It Was You Charlie (2013)
Dir. Emmanuel Shirinian
Starring: Michael D. Cohen, Aaron Abrams, Anna Hopkins, Emma Fleury

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"You was my brother, Charlie. You should'a looked out for me…I could'a had class, I could'a been a contender. I could'a been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it. It was you, Charlie." -Elia Kazan, Budd Schulberg's On the Waterfront

Any low-budget independent movie that mixes-up its approaches to both comedy and melodrama (sometimes perfectly, at others, not so seamlessly) as this one does, but also has the audacity to overtly reference the sibling relationship of Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront and then toss in some subtle shadings of The Last Laugh, F. W. Murnau's tragic tale of an old doorman played by Emil Jannings, is a movie, that in spite of occasional stumbles, is well worth seeing. It's one flavourful cinematic kishka.

It Was You Charlie explores the lonely life of Abner (Michael D. Cohen) a short, schluby, suicidally-depressed former teacher-artist turned graveyard shift doorman and the fierce sibling rivalry he endures (if not imagines) with Tom (Aaron Abrams), his tall, handsome, lady-killing brother. Abner also harbours a tragic secret that has debilitated his professional and personal life while Tom not only seems to have everything going for him, but also scores with Madeleine (Anna Hopkins), the babe our haplessly loveable schlemiel has long held a torch for. Seemingly round the corner and under his nose, though, is Zoe (Emma Fleury) a kookie female cab driver who meets cute with him as he's trying to access a suicide help line on a speaker phone when the lovely blonde comes into the front lobby looking for a fare.

Sounding whimsical? Actually, none of it - thank CHRIST!!! - plays as such and is one of the film's gifts to those of us who become deeply nauseated by even the mere thought of whimsy. Shirinian and his first-rate cast careen comedically like a pinball blessed with a bonus-bumper in the gutter to keep the silver orb in play - from straight-up human comedy to pitch-black guffaw-grabbers and (less successfully) broad comedy (Abner's first suicide attempt is played in the latter style and lays a rotten egg rather than a golden one.) The dramatic/melodramtic aspects of the film, however, play superbly. Shirinian is wisely never afraid of indulging in glorious sentiment (a scene with Abner and an infant is a heart-tugger of the finest order).

The film has an especially brave and intelligently-wrought structure involving flashbacks which mesh beautifully with the present-tense dramatics. Alas, there's one almost-horrendously obvious plot element within this structure which is as glaringly obvious as a boil on a fat whore's ass. Thankfully, it's liveable since so much of the film clicks in its delectably oddball fashion.

Working with Luc Montpellier (The Saddest Music in the World, Take This Waltz), the best living cinematographer in Canada (English and French), and surely one of the best in the world, Shirinian is blessed with a look that plays gorgeously with his offbeat mise-en-scene. The lighting is always evocative of both the natural settings and emotional core of every scene and when the camera moves, it's as if we're allowed to cascade with both the narrative and emotional beats with pure fluidity.

That said, there are a few moments where we're begging for either a medium two-shot or closeup and in one case, during a scene between the brothers in a cafe, where we're waiting - nay, emotionally demanding a dolly shot from behind Abner as the camera is perched over his shoulder on Tom so that it swings around to give us a reveal on Abner's face and then swinging back again on Tom, just before a non-existent (but needed) cut to a nice medium two-shot profile of the brothers facing each other in the booth.

This, and a few other salient moments are lacking the kind of panache which, admittedly, are imagined from my perspective, but not, I suspect, because we sense that it hasn't been planned for by either the director or cinematographer, but because of, perchance, exigencies of production as they relate to the budget. (As well, there do seem to be a few too many under-populated settings that betray the film's budget, but chances are, they'll only drive a nit-picking cinema-curmudgeon, like me, crazy.)

Other technical credits are equally impressive as Montpellier's. From Aren (Modra) Hansen's deft cutting (especially so given the strangeness of the storytelling structure), to a fine score from Ryan Latham that beautifully captures the film's spirit, but also works in tandem with the very cool selection of songs by Emma Carbone Fleury, Roger Clown and Sugar Brown and last, but not least, loving production design by Nazgol Goshtasbpour that creates very real interior worlds rooted in both tone and character.

As noted, Shirinian's principal cast is first-rate. Abrams is delightfully sexy, handsome and a perfect brotherly straight-man to Cohen's dervish-like Abner. And speaking of sexy, it's so nice to see a Canadian feature film that casts babes like Hopkins and Fleury, as opposed to the "naturalistic" dish-rags shoved-in as drain-stoppers into the sinks that are so often Canadian films. These ladies are not only, uh, babes, but terrific actresses with great comedic and dramatic range.

The revelation here, though, is made-for-the-movies character actor Michael D. Cohen who's given a shot at being a delightfully sexy-ugly leading man. With his shiny pate adorned with goofy locks of hockey-helmet-hoser-hair, Cohen bravely runs a gamut of emotions - from whiny to wisecracking, from bitter to sensitive and finally, the kind of screen mensch we want to embrace wholeheartedly. This guy's the real thing. In a real country, with a real movie business, he'd be rightfully ubiquitous on the screens small and large. Let's hope his role here brings him the kind of cache he deserves. (I'd give my right nut to see Cohen and another one of my favourite Canadian character actors, the insanely intense Robert Nolan, together as leads in some perverse genre film.)

So just do it.

High-tailing it down to the TIFF Bell Lightbox or your local art cinema and/or VOD'ing this sucker will be a decent 80 minutes of your life to fork over. Best of all, it'll allow you a chance to get in on the ground floor of a promising English-Canadian director who, prior to this feature debut, delivered two of the country's finest short comedies, The Last Bang (involving an old Jewish man's dalliance with a heart-of-gold hooker) and Song of Slomon (a frothy, feel-good comedy about a Rabbi who discovers disco dancing, the fellowship of gay men and over-indulging in his weakness for crispy, fried bacon). Though It Was You Charlie is not without occasional missteps, it's more often than not on the right track of being naturally skewed without feeling like it's being quirky just for the sake of being quirky.

Me, I'm putting my money on Shirinian's sophomore effort to be something that smacks a major league leather Rawlings clear out of the park. I mean, really: Murnau and Kazan shoehorned into a wonky sentimental comedy? The sky's gotta be the limit next time out.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** It Was You Charlie, from 108 Media and A71, is in limited platform release across North America and is currently unspooling at the majestic TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

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