chiller blog

Posted Sep 14, 09 12:39 PM

Passport to Terror

I’ll never forget backpacking across Europe.

Watching a Steven Segal movie with scratchy Czech subtitles (choose your own lesser evil). Seeing fourteen - or was it fifteen - millennium-old streets converge in Rome. And then sleeping outside in the cold at a train station in Austria, where the hotels - and public restrooms!!! - close for the night at 8 p.m.

But we left our mark. Ohhhhhhh, yes...

I digress.

Pseudo-intellectuals lumbering around java houses slighting American cinema in favor of international titles conveniently forget the principle of exports: Only the cutting edge gets crated up and transported stateside. China and India, for example, annually produce literally hundreds more movies than this country - without the presence of Gong Li, Chow-Yun Fat or any Bollywood game show contestant in The Hot Seat. And, crucially, many simply lack the production standards viewers here don't realize they're accustomed to: Editing continuity, pin-drop clear sound mixing...and keep moving down the below-the-line. Check with customs: There's no junket sailing a junk full of their junk our way.

But the world's shrinking - and the entertainment world's not exempt. For as technically bumpy as the works of last generation's trifecta of Italian horror directors - Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci - what's emerging from Europe, in particular, has polished-smooth packaging, even if their end results - like that non-continental bitter soda, to whet the appetite - are acquired tastes (I'm still trying to figure out that spicy hot Yucatan snow cone I wolfed down at the ruins in Chichen Itza).

So let’s do a little unpacking and see what we’ve brought home. Hmm…

Aside from the hear-all-evil, see-very-little-evil They, French genre pics are getting nastier, almost as an offshoot continuation of torture porn. I've always purported maintaining tone in horror. Be my guest and push the envelope - but most audiences will check out at the first sign of revulsion. Take Irreversible, its plot twisted backwards to forwards, which questionably centers around the ugly revenge of a brutal rape, and the preceding humanity which follows. A Cannes Film Festival nominee, it's potent, but (in my opinion) pointless. Better - but relentlessly bloody - is Inside, a Christmas Eve pregnant-woman-in-jeopardy shocker that (**SPOILER ALERT**) provides a villain no American studio exec would ever touch. Martyrs is a labored exercise in plotting, shifting between resounding ultra-violence, schizophrenic reversals, and back to resounding captive ultra-violence. Its grotesque denouement, although ingenious, seems a full-on labor at which to arrive.

I admired, however, I Stand Alone, the dire tale of a life-loathing Paris butcher whose seeds of hate voiceovers are so impassioned yet so love-lacking that it's chilling to even begin to comprehend his point of view. If there's one film that didn't deserve a shred of redemption via a rather forced ending, it's this one: The most nihilistic work I've ever seen.

After that, anything's cozy. I looked to Belgium and Calvaire, which earned allusions - oh, I wouldn't go that far - to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Its narrative is wicked: A road show actor runs afoul of a seemingly kind innkeeper with more than his share of closet skeletons. But the single greatest find from abroad wasn't from Asia - those Japanese remakes deserve their own article. It was - holy shmokeys - from Sweden. Let the Right One In is a gentle vampire deconstruction - an artful, incredibly effective hybrid of the sacred bonds of childhood friendship colliding with the absolutely real terrors of bullying. It's been too long since Frankenstein's monster handed that little girl a flower…er, before heaving her into the river.

Global likes and disses are a game of "love me, love me not." To the French, Jerry Lewis is an auteur. In Brazil, where carefully veiling crucial plot twists may be regarded as a strange concept, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was released as The Man Who Was His Mother. The brutal London critics rallied around Michael Cimino's studio-killer, Heaven’s Gate.

But let's talk TV, where hit imports - like Mexico's Ugly Betty and Britain's Millionaire Mountain turned Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - sometimes lend to Americanized remakes. But that's no longer the crossover prerequisite it once was. As part of "Culture Shock" (Sunday nights beginning at 8:00pm ET), CHILLER happily keeps the inn open late (aha...), keeping the light on for international guest series Hex and Sea of Souls.

Both shows are British imports. Sea is a lesser the known commodity - a Scottish turn on parapsychological investigators - with a very grounded scientific angle, not to mention all the brogue accents. Naturally, there are comparisons to The X-Files. But at the risk of upsetting its fan base, better not mention any parallels with Hex - especially that one about it being an English knock-off of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

Personally, I'd have likened it to Charmed...right down to the opening credits smash-montage set to the tune of a rock ballad ("I would die for you-ou..."). The audience target is clearly the high school set, with the de-emphasis on villain foreboding at the expense of relationship woes. Here, the handsome on-location setting is Medenham, a stately British boarding school. We meet outsider Cassie and her even-more-of-an-outsider pal, Thelma (who none-too-secretly loves Cassie). The intrigue deepens when our heroine unlocks the manor's secret: An unspoken love affair involving voodoo sacrifice. Soon, evil forces in the shape of fallen angels led by Azazeal cross over, pulling an emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual tug of war with old Cass.

The requisite otherworldly soap opera plot twists ensue. Demonic offspring, cavernous rooms forever lit by well-stocked candelabras, and jackal-like soul eaters abound. But where the series truly breaks ground is in the relationship corridor. How often do you find a mainstream program where a lesbian ghost fawns over her flattered, well-adjusted straight gal pal?

Only not in America.