THE DEMOLISHER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Strange Canuck Vigilante Thriller unveiled at 2015 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL in Montreal

The Demolisher (2015)
Dir. Gabriel Carrer
Starring: Ry Barrett, Tianna Nori, Jessica Vano

Review By Greg Klymkiw

After policewoman Samantha (Tianna Nori) suffers a near-fatal attack (after attempting to rescue a baby in the midst of a devil worship ceremony, no less), she's crippled for life and forced to haul about in a wheelchair. Her angry hubby Bruce (Ry Barrett), a cable repair technician goes completely bunyip. (Where have we heard about el-sicko cable guys before?) Night after night, he dons mega-protective armour, a creepy helmet with a stylish visor and armed with a nice selection of weaponry, he stalks the late-night streets looking for scumbags - any scumbags - that he can take down and send straight to Hell.

Seems reasonable enough, yes?

Eventually, however, it becomes obvious that Bruce is no longer bunyip for mere revenge, he's just plain bunyip and desires to kill, period. After getting a taste of murder pure and simple (an enjoyable murder as it's perfectly justified), he targets Marie (Jessica Vano), an innocent young jogger who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Thus begins a terrifying night for her as she's stalked by a madman bent upon snuffing her lights out.

Okay, so The Demolisher is clearly one of the strangest, most perverse vigilante movies I've seen in quite some time, possibly ever to be honest. Audiences looking for carnage will get more than their fair share, but I suspect that the only killing they'll enjoy in any sort of traditional Death Wish or Walking Tall manner is the one horrific murder of someone who is not a criminal (though like I said earlier, the fuckwad clearly deserves it).

Audiences will also be surprised and possibly delighted with the clear thought that's gone into the screenplay in terms of examining a diseased mind under pressure. There are clearly and deliberately paced moments within the oddball domestic set-up which proceed with very little dialogue and mostly some extremely effective looks and silences. This is probably a good thing since some of the dialogue proves a bit clunky in these moments, the lion's share of clunkiness wafting out of poor Samantha's mouth and occasionally affecting Tianna Nori's otherwise good work.

There's also one ludicrous scene where crippled Samantha manages to crawl into the bathtub with her brooding hubby. In theory, I'm all there. In practise, not so much. If you're going to have a babe join her hubby in the tubby, why the fuck would she be wearing her goddamn nightie? I can understand not getting a nice glimpse of dick, though I'd have been most appreciative of the view myself, but seriously, to not have the hot cripple doff her garments for a loll-about in the tub is tantamount to B-Movie heresy. (And frankly, seeing anyone in a bathtub with clothes on is just plain dumb.)

My fetishes aside, Ry Barrett is effectively stalwart and brooding throughout and what can be said about Jessica Vano other than her fine performance? Well, uh, she's, like, a babe, and we get to see her running around in fear for half the movie. Vano's hot running around rivals that of Penelope Ann Miller tear-assing about in The Relic. That takes some doing. Seriously, hot chicks running around in terror is a blessing, not a curse. Ain't nothing sexier than that. But enough of my fetishes.

I loved the look of this movie. It's just plain ugly for much of its running time, but intentionally so. The lighting and compositions expertly capture both the seediness of its locations as well as the cold, impersonal, almost dank qualities of the interiors. The score by Glen Nicholls is especially dynamite, evoking an eerie blend of 80s funk-drone and just plain effective thriller cues.

And there is a definite 80s feel to the picture (for some, this is better, for others, it'll be worse), but I found the entire tone of the movie fascinating. Once again we have a Canadian genre film with its own distinct indigenous style. Yes, it's clearly inspired by an American tradition of such pictures, but its narrative, look and pace are Canadian in all the best ways - proving again that having a diametrically opposed north of the 49th parallel aesthetic allows for a wholly unique take on genre cinema.

Director Gabriel Carrer might have pulled off the near impossible here by creating a film that shares aesthetic DNA twixt the sad ennui of Atom Egoyan's best work and famed 80s schlockmeister James (The Exterminator) Glickenhaus. It's a film that revels in its exploitative roots whilst examining them also, but without being moralistic. Only in Canada, you say? That's a good thing!

That said, if a movie is going to have some devil worship involving a baby as a sacrifice, could it not at least have the good taste to show the little nipper being hacked open? But, enough of my fetishes.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Demolisher enjoys its World Premiere at the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. For dates, times and tix, visit the festival website HERE. The Demolisher is represented world wide by the visionary Canadian genre specialists Raven Banner.

CASH ONLY / SLUMLORD - Reviews By Greg Klymkiw - Landlord Movies X 2 invade FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2015 in Montreal

I love the fact that there are not one, but two movies enjoying their World Premieres at the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal which have landlords as the main characters. We all know landlords and mostly, we hate them, so to have a couple of familiar entities for us to relate to and/or fear, goes a long way in rooting genre cinema in the best territory imaginable - worlds we're all too familiar with, at least from our end of the spectrum.

Each film in its own fashion, seeks to present unique perspectives of their respective landlords to fill in blanks which, our common experiences might not be all that familiar with. Alas, to steal the title of an Agnes Varda film in order to present a sweeping critical summation of both pictures, one sings, the other doesn't.

SODOMY - Albanian style (above)
MASTURBATION - Surveillance Cam style (below)

Cash Only (2015)
Dir. Malik Bader
Scr. Nickola Shreli
Starring: Nickola Shreli, Stivi Paskoski, Danijela Stajnfeld

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Cash Only is one of the best low budget independent indigenously-produced regional films of the new millennium. It's also a damn fine crime thriller rooted in worlds we've seldom experienced.

It's a story ripped from the contemporary hell-hole of Detroit, Michigan. This once great burgh (America's genuine "Motor City" and the birthplace of the Motown sound) has continued to crumble into an inner-city nightmare that brings us closer to the notion of the Third-World existence that's been increasingly plaguing much of the United States, one of the world's richest, most powerful nations. (If you haven't seen the great documentary Detropia, feel free to read my review HERE, and of course, see the movie to fill you in more on this sorry state of affairs.)

Cash Only begins with a ticking time clock for landlord Elvis Martini (Nickola Shreli, also the film's screenwriter), one which seems challenging, but not insurmountable. As the film progresses, however, that clock starts ticking triple-time. Not only does he need to stave off the bank from foreclosing, but he's in deep with a variety of friends and loan sharks.

However, once he's plunged into a fathomless pit of debt with a vicious Balkan pimp, all bets are off. Additionally beleaguered with haunting memories of accidentally (and drunkenly) causing the death of the woman he loved, as well as trying to fulfill his myriad of duties as a landlord, he's soon in the maddest dash of his life to both attain redemption and rescue his little girl who's been kidnapped and held for ransom so that he'll cough up the usurious demands of the villain.

Cash Only is a character-driven descent into a milieu with its own rules and levels of brutality that many of us can't even begin to fathom. Writer Shreli and director Malik Bader plunge us into a grungy and brutal world in ways that only indigenous, regional filmmakers seem capable of doing in these otherwise dark days of American cinema. The neighbourhood and its denizens all have the foul whiff of reality. Joining forces with last year's astounding British crime drama Hyena, Cash Only immerses us in an ethnic crime world that gives both Italian and Russian mobs a run for their money. (Gotta love the Albanian Mob! These guys leave the rest behind as so much dust in the wind!)

The movie is replete with solid performances right across the board, though Stivi Paskoski as Dino the dogfight-promoter/pimp is especially brilliant - one look at the guy scares the shit out of you, but once he opens his mouth, you know our hero (and we, the audience) are in for some major, harrowing carnage.

Malik Bader's taut direction delivers increasing levels of edge-of-the-seat suspense and the searing savagery that's inherent in Shreli's grungy, realism-infused script. The picture is expertly shot and cut, all of which contributes to a film that expertly uses the crime genre's tropes to hit a few familiar satisfying beats whilst maintaining a tone of freshness and originality from beginning to end.

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

Slumlord (2015)
Dir. Victor Zarcoff
Starring: Neville Archambault, Sean Carrigan, Brianne Moncrief, Sarah Baldwin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Slumlord begins promisingly enough with banks of surveillance monitors and the chilling statistics of just how many people are being illegally spied upon without their knowledge. We then meet creepy Gerald (Neville Archambault) in a "spy" store where a sleazy salesman is detailing all the joys of owning surveillance equipment to which Gerald responds most favourably. In short order, Gerald is outfitting a lovely suburban home with an elaborate series of cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny which can yield as many good views as possible.

So far, so good, though one is wondering when he'll be installing the equipment in the sleazy properties that a slumlord would actually be presiding over.

Well, it doesn't take long to realize Gerald is not a slumlord (other than the fact that he lives in a dank, dark dwelling himself). He shows a young married couple the suburban home and they happily take it. Our focus, often mediated via Gerald's surveillance equipment, shifts to the couple. Wifey is preggers and hubby seems like a cold, distant prick. Eventually he ends up having a torrid affair with one of his employees, a babe-o-licious creature who keeps pressuring him to leave his wife.

The lovely suburban dwelling, however, is meant to be a second chance for the couple's on-the-rocks marriage and hubby soon comes to his senses and decides to break the affair off. Alas, his lover starts turning into Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction.

Adding insult to injury, Gerald keeps secretly entering the house; he knows when the couple is going to be gone and for how long since he appears to not do much of anything save for spying on them and masturbating. In the house, he snoops around, puts a toothbrush in his foul mouth to soil it, then installs even more surveillance equipment (include a poopy-cam in the toilet bowl). He also constructs a secret prison/dungeon deep in the bowels of the basement.

Eventually this all leads to a variety of carnage and middling suspense until the picture delivers a "surprise" ending one can see coming pretty early in the proceedings. The performances are decent (Archambault especially delivering the sicko goods with considerable aplomb), but much of the film's promise, which we're set up with by both the title and the evocative opening, pretty much goes the way of the Dodo and we're left with little more than a typical low-budget thriller set mostly in one location, but sans the truly demented layering of a Polanski or Hitchcock.

Poor Archambault is clearly a terrific actor, but he needs to work overtime here to create some semblance of a character. Not that we'd even need that much: Norman Bates in Psycho had Mother, Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom had his childhood of psychological torture at the hands of his Dad and even the three brothers and Grandpa in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had the evocative backdrop of shifting slaughter-methods at the nearby abattoir.

Here though, we have a lonely guy (who's not even a slumlord as the title suggests) whose fetishistic desires allow him to show a tiny bit of compassion to the woman who's being abused by her husband's neglect and infidelity. This could have been interesting, but it's simply used as an excuse for eventual carnage and by the end, we still have no sense who this person really is.

And, of course, there's the hackneyed, all-too-forseeable "surprise" ending which the movie leads up to.

Non-discriminating fans will get some decent gore for their money and a genuinely grotesque killer, but beyond that, they're not going to be getting much more. Even the ambitions of the character-driven elements of a marriage in crisis has little appeal since most of the juxtapositional suspense elements hit their marks so predictably.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars

Cash Only and Slumlord are both enjoying their World Premiere at the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. For Tix, times and playdates, visit the festival website HERE.

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.

CAST NO SHADOW - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Horror of abuse leads to…HORROR!

Cast No Shadow (2014)
Dir. Christian Sparkes
Starring: Percy Hynes-White, Joel Thomas Hynes, Mary-Colin Chisholm

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Creepy is good, and there's more than enough creepy creeping creepily about in Christian Sparkes' creepy feature length directorial debut, the, uh, well, you know, creepy Cast No Shadow. Set against the isolated, and yes, creepy backdrop of Canada's mega-inbred capital of baby seal mass murder, the picturesque province of Newfoundland, it's a film infused with the kind of horror that was pioneered by legendary producer Val Lewton when he headed up the genre division of RKO Pictures in the 40s.

Now, don't get me wrong, movie geeks, though Sparkes' picture flirts with occasional shards of greatness, I'm not saying it holds a candle to the best Lewton work, for instance: The Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh Victim, I Walked With a Zombie and The Body Snatcher, but it's definitely on a par with Lewton's lesser entries (for Lewton, "lesser" means pretty goddamned good) like, for instance, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam, The Leopard Man and The Ghost Ship. The bottom line is that Cast No Shadow isn't the kind of picture you're going to kick out of the sack for eating crackers, if you follow my drift.

Val Lewton, of course, pioneered the notion of finding chills in the modern world and, in fact created near-fairy-tale like shockers which plumbed the depths of what scared people the most - mental illness, religious cultism, poverty, infidelity, loneliness, ignorance and, among other transgressive assaults on humanity, superstition. Visually, his work found monsters, not so much literal monsters, but those created by the imaginations of both the characters and audiences - often nestled in pure darkness, shadows and shades of grey.

Not that I saw any direct influence and/or Lewton-esque homages in Cast No Shadow, but it's definitely dipping its Newfie toes into similar black lagoons of horror. (Thank Christ no rotting, waterlogged baby seals bent on vengeance pop out of the murky waters surrounding "The Rock", otherwise I might have genuinely needed a few trips to the water closet.)

On the surface we're handed the simple, but compelling tale of Jude (Percy Hynes-White), a young boy living in a squalid shack masquerading as a home with Angus (Joel Thomas Hynes) his mean, abusive single Dad. Jude whiles away his time exploring the forests and craggy shorelines, mostly alone, but sometimes accompanied by a fair-weather friend or two.

What seems to really scare Jude to his bone marrow are the things which lurk in the dark woods and caves of his not-so idyllic rural environs. There are, you see, witches and trolls galumphing about. Given that the picture's set in Newfoundland, this isn't at all hard to swallow. The beatings Jude suffers at the hands of his Dad or the town bullies (future baby seal hunters, no doubt) seem like kid's stuff to our young protagonist. His waking moments alone in the woods, as well as his life-like dreams are fraught with grotesque creatures of the night.

To most of the local citizenry, including a smug, annoying constable, Jude's just plain apple-don't-fall-too-far-from-the-tree bad, not unlike, for example, his nasty Pappy. If truth be told, when the lad isn't tripping out in the wilderness or his secret lair of magic and make-believe in the crawlspace below the rickety, old family home, he is indeed up to all manner of "no-good". He is, more often than not, lashing out at the redneck bullies who make his life miserable by bashing his slender frame to a pulp. In a particularly satisfying moment, Jude even makes use of a pair of brass knuckles that he's stolen. (If anything, I personally hoped he'd be using them more than once.)

When Dad is inevitably hauled off to the hoosegow, Jude is rightly terrified that he'll be snapped up by the Child and Family Services creeps (which, we all know, don't do a whole lot of good other than shoving at-risk kids into even more vile at-risk situations). He runs off deeper into the maw of the neighbourhood and hangs out at the home of Alfreda (Mary-Colin Chisholm) a craggy, creepily-friendly and highly literate hermit who once was the region's trusted midwife, but now lives in lonely exile within her ramshackle shack - a kind of inbred Newfie Miss Havisham.

Here, for a time, Jude finds solace.

Alas, the secrets of the night, the deep, dark tragedies best forgotten (or better yet, repressed), begin to rear their ugly heads as horrifically as those of the trolls and witches populating the dense corners of the terrible beauty surrounding all who live in this alternately bucolic heaven on earth and roiling, ever-churning pit of hell.

Life in rural Newfoundland is no tray of tea and crumpets, let me tell you.

Though Cast No Shadow has a few misses which negate its hits, the picture has one of the best scripts in a Canadian film in some time. Written by Joel Thomas Hynes, the film's co-star (and real-life father of the film's child-star), it's a script that keeps you constantly guessing. Everytime you're about to wade into familiar waters, Hynes tosses in a big stone which causes the kind of ripples that keep you in a state of never quite knowing where you're going or what you're looking at. When a picture veers in directions I don't expect it to, I always get a nice tingle of happy gooseflesh since this is a rare treat in the movies these days.

I loved the tone, pacing and overall trajectory of the film's style and narrative. I especially appreciated that the movie seems to not be targeted at any specific demographic, confounding all notions and formulas one is normally inspired to yawn over. Whether or not Sparkes and/or Hynes were influenced by the aforementioned Val Lewton seems less important to me than the fact that their picture is mucking about in a similar sandbox.

As a director, Sparkes approaches the material simply and cleanly, as well as garnering phenomenal performances from his entire cast. I have only two major nitpicks. Firstly, the "monster" elements can't really live up to the picture's low budget. I wish he'd gone for even more shadow, more darkness and more fleeting glimpses of the troll than he does. (His witch "action" is far more successfully rendered.)

I do understand why he (or whatever boneheads in the creative process that he was forced to listen to) might have avoided going the distance in this fashion, but I think it would have been more in keeping with the overall mise-en-scene.

And speaking of "going the distance", my second nitpick is that the movie seems a few hairs short of upping the ante on the more violent and yes, even blood-soaked-potential that's inherent in the picture. It tries a bit too earnestly to be tasteful when there are a couple of perfect instances for the movie to have been pitched into the Cronenberg territory of unsavoury viscera.

This is not a contradiction of my first nitpick, either. The fantastical elements rightly needed to be a bit more muted in the realm of darkness and shadow, but the realistic elements of the film's true "horrors" are practically begging to be unleashed. (Even my 14-year-old daughter, who loved the film and related strongly to the character of Jude, felt the movie needed to up the ante on a few of the deep-rooted elements inherent in the story.) That all said, I noted that the credit-crawl included a few of the usual Telefilm Canada-like suspects attached to so many Canuckian endeavours, so I'm happy to place far more blame in that direction than the filmmakers themselves.

One of the nice things about Cast No Shadow is that it manages to exceed, in terms of overall quality, originality and genuinely muted horror, a similar recent release, the ludicrously overrated Aussie film The Babadook. Jennifer Kent's limp psychological chiller, is hampered by a clunky on-its-sleeve feminist bent, an underwhelming screenplay (predictably tarred and feathered with a big old brush of been-there-done-that) and annoyingly adorned with the kind of preciousness that gets pseuds (of all persuasions) hot and bothered that they're seeing something resembling an art film dabbling in the off-the-well-worn-genre-path.

Ugh! There's nothing original about The Babadook and the only and truly horrific thing about it was how the movie features a child who is nerve-gratingly annoying and then, tables turned, a Mom who is even more aggravating than her son. (Throw in an annoying dog and the film's Trinity of Cumbersome Afflictions became even more egregious.)

Not so with Cast No Shadow. You never really know where it's headed. When it does get there, you kick yourself a bit for not predicting it, but it feels good to stuff a few boots in your own ass on that count because you know, deep-down that you've been served up a cool picture from a writer and director who have all the potential in the world to eventually knock you flat.

It's a cinematic cold cock I look forward to with baited breath.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

Cast No Shadow is currently in limited theatrical release via MCE. The picture opens April 3 in Toronto, Halifax and St. John's with a bevy of attached special events:

TORONTO – Carlton Cinema
April 3 – post screening Q+A w/ actor Joel Thomas Hynes, actor-writer Percy Hynes White and producer Chris Agoston
April 4 – post screening Q+A w/ director Christian Sparkes, actor Joel Thomas Hynes, actor-writer Percy Hynes White and producer Chris Agoston

HALIFAX – Scotiabank Theatre
April 3 – post screening Q+A w/ actor Mary-Colin Chisholm
April 5 – post screening Q+A w/ director Christian Sparkes

ST. JOHN’S – Cinema Mount Pearl
April 3 – post screening Q+A w/ director Christian Sparkes, Allison White

JUGGERNAUT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Gritty 70s Disaster Film, Richard Lester - style!!!

Juggernaut (1974)
Dir. Richard Lester
Starring: Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, David Hemmings,
Anthony Hopkins, Shirley Knight, Ian Holm, Clifton James, Roy Kinnear,
Freddie Jones, Roshan Seth, Caroline Mortimer, Simon MacCorkindale, Cyril Cusack

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Director Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night) could always be counted upon to sweep away every vile, matted clump of dust bunnies amassing and fouling all the nooks and crannies of pretty much any traditional approach to cinematic storytelling. What he does for the moronic disaster film genre of the 70s in Juggernaut, is nothing short of a miracle. With the force of an entire army of Hoovers, he sucks every vile particle of cliche, leaving only the barest bones of necessary structure to build something altogether fresh, funny and exciting.

With the full support of executive producer David Picker, Lester took writer-producer Richard Alan Simmons' screenplay (inspired by the real-life hijacking of the QE II luxury liner) and polished it within an inch of its life with a brilliant uncredited rewrite with his old pal and favourite script doctor, the legendary British playwright and television writer Alan Plater. (Simmons was so upset, he took his name off the film and chose the onscreen monicker Richard DeKoker, itself a cleverly sarcastic play on the word used to define a standardized shipping container which could handily transport its contents from one conveyor of carriage to another.)

Thick skin, however, is a prerequisite for moviemaking and Simmons/DeKoker can be grateful to Lester for initiating the superb on-the-page rethink of the material. Deftly and efficiently dealing with a huge cast of characters against the backdrop of a major disaster on the high seas allowed Lester as a director to fashion one corker of a pulse-pounding thriller.

The "juggernaut" of the title refers to a couple of key elements. First and foremost is the obvious use of the word to describe the massive cruise ship SS Britannic which is ably commandeered by dashing Captain Omar Sharif (Dr. Zhivago) as it plunges through the dangerous waters of the Atlantic. Secondly, though, the word has been nicely co-opted by the Irish-lilted voice belonging to a mad bomber psycho (the great character actor Freddie Jones, whom many will recall as the vicious sleaze bag in David Lynch's The Elephant Man). Juggernaut has nefariously outfitted the full ship of innocent passengers with several metal drums, all containing timed explosives which have been booby-trapped to explode if tinkered with.

The ship's chief executive officer (Ian Holm) is keen to pay the ransom, but the Government of Dear Old Blighty will have none of it as they refuse to negotiate with common miscreants engaged in criminal/terrorist behaviour. It's up to the head man at Scotland Yard (Anthony Hopkins) to race against time to track down Juggernaut on land and the British Navy's top explosive experts (Richard Harris and David Hemmings) and their formidable team to be dropped into the icy, turbulent waters to board ship and defuse the bombs.

Though the movie pays a bit of lip service to the Grand Hotel-style melodrama of disaster movie trappings (Shirley Knight can't seem to get a commitment from her lover and Anthony Hopkins' annoying wife and children are on board the ship), Lester focuses on the nail-biting mechanics of the bomb squad and Scotland Yard. Adding gloriously to the mix is the character of the ship's entertainment coordinator (played by Lester's good luck charm, the good humoured, roly poly Roy Kinnear) who insanely keeps arranging dances and bingo tournaments, etc. for the ship's passengers who become well aware of the dire circumstances when one of the bombs is ignited as a show of force.

The film includes a perfect thematic subtext involving the shoddy treatment of Britain's war veterans and how this narratively dovetails into an intelligently-wrought bit of cat and mouse twixt the mad bomber and the bomb expert who share a very close connection.

Juggernaut is a magnificent suspense thriller which suppresses its disaster film roots and always keeps us gnawing at our fingernails until we begin ripping away at the cuticles and fleshy bits, all this tempered by some delectable dollops of gallows humour. Amazingly, there's nothing in the film on any level of both art and craft which feels dated and frankly, one could imagine it opening theatrically today as a brand new film and playing quite perfectly (especially given contemporary political and social strife).

Then again, that's Richard Lester - always ahead of the curve and his time.

God bless, Richard Lester. God bless him, everyone!

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

Juggernaut is available on a nicely transferred Blu-Ray disc via Kino-Lorber. Alas, it is bereft of any extras which, given the film's importance within Lester's canon, could have at least used a solid essay booklet or even commentary track. For now, though, the film's so terrific, it alone will more than suffice.

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.

THE GUEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - New Wingard Thriller opens theatrically in Toronto

Good thrillers ALWAYS have
BABES & HUNKS
(in addition to being, uh, good).

The Guest (2014)
Dir. Adam Wingard
Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This creepy, edge-of-you-seat thriller is a cool contemporary take on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. It ain't Hitchcock (what is?) and The Master would never let scribe Simon Barrett get away with the disappointing, too-predictable "shocker" reveal that slides its way into the proceedings, but director Wingard more-than-ably puts his terrific thespians through decent blood-soaked gymnastics.

David (Dan Stevens) is an old army pal of a young fella who bravely died in Afghanistan. When he returns after his tour of duty in, David pays a surprise visit to the lad's grieving family to convey his sympathy, but also to relay verbal messages croaked out during his friend's death rattles. The family is so charmed by the handsome, but kind of "off" David, that he's invited into their home to stay.

Caleb's little sister, the babe-o-licious Anna (Maika Monroe, also leading the casting charge in It Follows) is certainly enamoured with David's buff, hunky good looks, but as the film progresses, she's able to see there's something not all together right with The Guest. Danger looms, as does the bloodletting.

When it's revealed that David might not entirely be telling the truth, she keeps her eye on him and eventually realizes her family might be at risk of being iced. This is not only a good deal for thriller fans, but it's a nice contemporary spin on Hitch's classic by utilizing the whole backdrop of psychos-in-the-army, post-traumatic stress disorder and, of course, America's ridiculous waste of human life in their moronic "war on terror".

Wingard's direction here is more taut and assured than You're Next, his previous outing and even when the plot veers into please-don't-go-there territory (a similar problem that afflicted the aforementioned 2011 thriller), it's still a sheer delight to see how well he manages the carnage, action and suspense. No need to be a total grumpy-pants about the disenchantment with the turns eventually taken by the plot, as The Guest is a corker of a thriller that'll more than satisfy one's need to accidentally expunge waste matter in one's panties.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Guest is a Dfilms release opening theatrically in Toronto with, hopefully, a wider release to follow.

COHERENCE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Dinner discomfort yields deep terror @TiffBellLightbox

The stunning Emily Foxler leads a superb ensemble cast.

Coherence (2013)
Dir. James Ward Byrkit
Starring: Emily Foxler (aka Emily Baldoni), Nicholas Brendon, Maury Sterling, Elizabeth Gracen, Lauren Maher, Alex Manugian, Hugo Armstrong, Lorene Scafaria

Review By Greg Klymkiw

When Mike (Nicholas Brendon) hosts a dinner party amongst his coterie of attractive thirty-something friends, an emotional cloud hangs over things, threatening the gathering to go slightly awry when the current beau (Maury Sterling) of beautiful Emily (Emily Foxler) brings his ex-girlfriend (Lauren Maher) along as a gesture of kindness/pity to this woman who's recently been shut out of activities she was once a part of. Mild discomfort, however, slowly descends into terror when a passing comet knocks out the power and opens a creepy door into a parallel universe.

James Ward Byrkit's directorial debut from his fine screenplay, cleverly focuses on the characters and their interplay so that by the time the astronomical event occurs, we're not only invested in these people, but the threat of their immediate universe colliding with a parallel doppelgänger universe takes on implications of the most malevolent kind.

There's little need to reveal more of the actions as they unfold since a great deal of the shivery fun are the occasional revelations of jigsaw pieces that seem to connect, but never quite do until the harrowing climax.

Even then, you'll be tempted to partake of repeat helpings, since what you think you do know, nags at you long after as perhaps, not being what you know at all. This is an especially admirable element of Byrkit's writing. Ambiguity is fine, but it's so much better when it creeps up on you after you see the film than while you're watching it (where said ambiguity risks being annoying).

Much as this is an original, keenly observed picture with a superb ensemble cast and sharp writing, I was a trifle distracted and disappointed with the directorial preponderance upon handheld camera work. None of the shots or selections are bad, all the compositions are first-rate and certainly rooted in the dramatic action, BUT, I longed for way more static shots so that the handheld would have far more impact in terms of the picture's suspense.

The mise-en-scene occasionally loses its power. Given that there's no specific reason for the handheld since (thank Christ!) this isn't a found footage piece it's especially distressing. One assumes that exigencies of budget and schedule might have contributed to this decision, but the interior lighting is often so effective that it feels like there were options to either mount the camera on sticks or deliver more subtle floaty-cam-styled handheld.

Hopefully this approach will only mildly detract from one's enjoyment of this piece, as there's so much to genuinely respond to and it's definitely a film that's guaranteed to raise the hackles and instil mega-goooseflesh.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Coherence is a D Films release in Canada which begins its theatrical run exclusively at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Oscilloscope is releasing the film in the USA.

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THE GUEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF MIDNIGHT MADNESS - TIFF 2014

Good thrillers
ALWAYS have
BABES & HUNKS
(in addition to
being, uh, good)

The Guest (2014)
Dir. Adam Wingard
Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This creepy, edge-of-you-seat thriller is a cool contemporary take on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. It ain't Hitchcock (what is?) and The Master would never let scribe Simon Barrett get away with the disappointing, too-predictable "shocker" reveal that slides its way into the proceedings, but director Wingard more-than-ably puts his terrific thespians through decent blood-soaked gymnastics.

David's (Dan Stevens) an army pal of Caleb, a young fella who died bravely in battle. Returning from his tour of duty in lovely Afghanistan, he pays a surprise visit to the lad's grieving family to relay the verbal messages croaked out in his friend's death rattles. The family is so charmed by the handsome, but kind of "off" David, that he's invited into their home to stay as a guest.

Caleb's little sister, the babe-o-licious Anna (Maika Monroe, also leading the casting charge in It Follows) is certainly enamoured with David's buff, hunky good looks, but as the film progresses, she's able to see there's something not all together right with The Guest. Danger looms, as does the bloodletting.

When it's revealed that David might not entirely be telling the truth, she keeps her eye on him and eventually realizes her family might be at risk of being iced. This is not only a good deal for thriller fans, but it's a nice contemporary spin on Hitch's classic by utilizing the whole backdrop of psychos-in-the-army, post-traumatic stress disorder and, of course, America's ridiculous waste of human life in their moronic "war on terror".

Wingard's direction here is more taut and assured than his previous outing You're Next and even when the plot veers into please-don't-go-there territory (a similar problem that afflicted the aforementioned 2011 thriller), it's still a sheer delight to see how well the filmmaker manages the carnage, action and suspense. No need to be a total grumpy-pants like I was about the predictable turns eventually taken by the plot. The Guest is ultimately a corker of a thriller that'll more than satisfy one's need to accidentally expunge waste matter in one's panties.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Guest is a Dfilms and Picturehouse release launching in TIFF's 2014 Midnight Madness series.

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THE REACH - TIFF 2014 - Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Reach (2014)
Dir. Jean-Baptiste Léonetti
Starring: Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine, Ronny Cox

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Reach offers up happy corroboration that filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s astonishing dystopian science fiction masterpiece Carré Blanc was no first feature fluke. Léonetti is the real thing and he can direct rings round most contemporary genre helmers. Instead of all the tin-eyed boneheads who keep directing any number of visually challenged studio abominations, Léonetti has ‘go-to guy’ written all over him.

Based on Deathwatch, a hugely popular boys’ adventure novel written by the prolific author Robb White (who also toiled as William Castle’s screenwriter on such exploitation delights as The House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, The Tingler, Macabre and Homicidal), it was competently adapted by Stephen Susco. Updating the late 60s setting of the book, the script invests it with the right amount of macho existentialism, ultra-violence, hilariously nasty black humour and up-to-the-minute social commentary involving the haves and have-nots of the world.

I have to admit, however, that I originally went into the picture knowing only that it was Léonetti’s sophomore feature starring Michael Douglas, and it was only while watching the movie that I realized its literary pedigree. That it was based on one of many White books I read as a kid (and still proudly own some 40-plus years later) turned out to be extra layers of icing on this very rich cake. (Pathetically, I even remembered seeing the fine ABC Movie of the Week entitled Savages, which starred Andy Griffith and Sam Bottoms in the lead roles.)

This stirring mano a mano variant on The Most Dangerous Game faithfully sticks to the original main characters of White’s book, and for good reason – you can’t beat a winning formula. Madec (Douglas) is a disgustingly rich cell-phone-tied dealmaker who hires the impoverished Ben (hunky Jeremy Irvine of War Horse fame) to be his guide in the deadly Mojave Desert so he can bag a new hunting trophy (he boasts having many), the rare bighorn sheep. The two men are clearly oil and water, but their time together eventually yields a father-son-like bond. Alas, Madec accidentally shoots something he shouldn’t. When it’s clear Ben won’t go for a whopping bribe, the sportsman in Madec sends Ben into the desert so he can hunt him down, but also gives the lad a fighting chance. Ben proves to be a formidable adversary. This fuels Madec even further.

Léonetti keeps the suspense taut, the action blistering and his exquisite eye for placing man against imposing backdrops has not at all wavered since Carré Blanc. His delightfully grim sense of humour is also set to overdrive, especially since Michael Douglas is remarkably game to chew the scenery and spit out one nasty line after the other. The only place Léonetti is let down by Susco’s otherwise fine script is during the climactic moments, which feel like a perverse bargain basement Fatal Attraction.

Given Michael Douglas’s involvement in that film, this could have been a cool borderline post-modernist touch, but the action is rendered far too straight up and oddly, and one can feel Léonetti not quite at ease. You can’t blame him. He’s handed gold, then when it counts the most, his producer (Douglas) and screenwriter toss him a smelly bighorn sheep turd. Luckily for us, we don’t have to smell it for too long and its aroma doesn’t overpower the rest of the film’s smells of victory.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

The Reach is an official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival 2014 (TIFF 2014). For further information please visit the TIFF website HERE.

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THE CAPTIVE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Egoyan Thriller exposes parental fears

The fetishization of our greatest fears

The Captive (2014)
Dir. Atom Egoyan
Script: David Fraser & Egoyan
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson, Mireille Enos, Kevin Durand, Christine Horne, Alexia Fast, Peyton Kennedy, Bruce Greenwood, Aaron Poole, Jason Blicker

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Spanning eight years in the life of Cassandra (Alexia Fast/Peyton Kennedy), a child kidnapped from her father Matthew's (Ryan Reynolds) car while he pops into a roadside bakery to bring home a treat, The Captive focuses upon both the Stockholm-Syndrome-like effects upon the girl and the devastation her disappearance wreaks upon the family and cops looking for some closure (positive or negative) to the mystery. It's subject matter that hits all the chords most of us want to eradicate from our world and as such, perfect material for the masterful Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan.

Egoyan's meticulously complex films have almost always been tinged with creepy thriller-like elements, darkly droll humour and deep humanity buried beneath layers of existential disconnect and deliberate puzzle-like manipulations of time and space. His superb 1999 adaptation of William Trevor's novel Felicia's Journey is still one of the best serial killer movies made in the last two decades. I'd even place it far above such fake "A"-picture studio exploitation items making thrills palatable to the mainstream like Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. Featuring Bob Hoskins' finest performance (ever) as Hilditch, the gastronomically-obsessed and even somewhat banal psychopath, Felicia's Journey struck me as being a kind of demented play on Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy as if that 70s classic had been pumped full of deliciously near-lethal doses of lovely lithium. It was sickeningly terrifying and oddly, deeply moving. I longed for Egoyan to make another thriller and even now wish he'd do nothing but thrillers or maybe even a flat-out horror.

The Captive is nothing if not downright shudder-inducing. Set against the overcast snow blanket of Southern Ontario's Niagara region, the film taps directly into every parent's greatest terror - the disappearance of a child without a single, solitary trace. It's a surefire starting point, but Egoyan and David Fraser's twisted, ominously fetishistic screenplay provides a solid framework for the film to go well beyond merely tapping into the fear everyone harbours. It's as much a genre picture of the highest order as it is a harrowing exploration of faith, family and the soul-sickening sense of hope that drives all those touched by the horrendous violence perpetrated against children.

The Captive's potential to anger audiences (especially, it seems, quite a few boneheaded, know-nothing film "critics") is not unlike that of Lars von Trier's AntiChrist (sans, of course, that film's genital mutilation). I feel strongly, though, that neither film seeks to intentionally raise ire, but rather, to dive into all sorts of places that most people simply don't want to go, places that are so necessary and vital to confront, grotesquely dark corners of existence to reflect upon and/or expose.

The Captive achieves this in two brilliant ways. First of all, Fraser and Egoyan set up a number of familiar narrative tropes of the thriller genre and give them a decidedly shaken, not stirred, quality. What's structurally mundane becomes extraordinarily abhorrent, creepily unnerving. Inherent in both the narrative and the aesthetic are the especially horrendous fetishistic qualities of perspective which place us as observers in the pain of the film's victims/subjects.

Visually and stylistically, Egoyan's rich compositions, supported by cinematographer Paul Sarossy's delicate shadings and painterly dappling of light capture the very essence of white-grey exteriors and the (mostly) clinical interiors. When the visual palette includes warmth, it comes in the unlikeliest of places like the psychopath's lair, the victim's prison, Nicole the cop's (Rosario Dawson) office and, of course, the roadside bakery which is where the horror really begins.

There's so much I admire about this movie. Ryan Reynolds continues to prove he's one of the great living actors and here he taps emotional depths he's yet to uncover - his despair is so palpable we can't help but walk in his shoes. Mychael Danna's score is a marvel - tapping both the moving power and jangling force of Bernard Herrmann. Witness the opening movements of the score - so lushly bucolic, but as the camera slowly reveals more and more snow and bush of the isolated setting, we hear ever-so slight tinges of unease. Then, of course, during moments of pulse-pounding suspense (two sequences during the film's climactic moments in particular had me rendering my fingertips to bloody, pulpy stubs), Danna slams us with everything he's got and then some.

Kevin Durand as the full-on sicko ringleader of an online community of pain-fetishists is slime-incarnate and there isn't a moment he's onscreen that we don't feel like vomiting. His performance is bravely in sharp contrast to Hoskins from Felicia's Journey where the late British bombast actually tapped into human aspects that allowed us to care for him. Durand does something even more difficult, he taps into humanity - and yes, it IS humanity - that we never hope to experience, but indeed exists. This is no Snidely Whiplash villain, but the kind of sick, venal, mind-numbingly banal and even pretentious evil that's finally more the reality of these sick freaks.

Though the film has its share of universal qualities, the manner with which Egoyan explores the dark-net subculture of predators is also rooted in truly indigenous qualities of Canadian culture. The country has long had a history of monsters infused with the vapid desires of such empty vessels as Bernardo-Homolka, Clifford Olson and, amongst many, many others, Dennis Melvin Howe. Unlike Hannibal Lecter, serial criminal psychopaths are not brilliant, they're petty, pretentious and boring.

This, for me, might be the scariest, most sickening element of The Captive. So much pain and wasted time in the lives decent people comes from the actions of a trite, haughty dullard. Thank Christ Egoyan shoves our faces in the faecal matter of this reality. Doing so manages to expose terrible truths and give us one hell of a thrilling ride.

The Captive is in theatrical release across the country via eOne.