Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The Leopard Man (1943)

    The Leopard Man (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I won’t try to pretend that Jacques Tourneur is a forgotten director, but he does seem consistently undervalued, especially given the strength of his filmography. The early-1940s horror films he made for producer Val Lewton seem particularly influential, bridging the atmosphere of gothic horror with the tricks that would soon end up in film noir (including Tourneur’s own classic Out for the Past). Compared to other horror movies of the era, Tourneur was more restrained, more thematically-minded and far less exploitative—qualities that have helped his work survive well into the twenty-first century. The Leopard Man initially seems to have strong ties to the previous year’s Cat People, but that ends up being clever misdirection, as the feline menace suggested by the title ends up being a masquerade for an unusually dark (for the time) thriller about what’s now known as a serial killer. There are plenty of chills and thrills, distasteful deaths (even when suggested), a New Mexico atmosphere and a great use of shadows and sounds in creating an atmosphere more disturbing than the images. It’s handled quite well, and manages to impress even today. The Leopard Man is clearly not of the same calibre as some of Tourneur’s most celebrated works, but it still works.

  • I’ll Take Your Dead (2018)

    I’ll Take Your Dead (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I don’t often say this, but I really wish I’ll Take Your Dead would have focused more on its dramatic and thriller aspects and removed the supernatural subplots. I generally prefer movies with some imaginary components, but they have to fit, and there’s more than enough family drama and crime thriller in the film to power it to its conclusion without adding vengeful ghosts to it all. The setup is as simple as it is unusual: in an isolated farmhouse, a man with butchery skills is on the retainer of organized crime as someone who can make bodies disappear. His young teenage daughter is used to it, but the weight of his forced commitment to the local thugs is leading him to an escape plan. But before he can bolt, they dump a fresh batch of bodies on him—including a young woman who doesn’t turn out to be as dead as expected. So far so good—and once you add the absent mother (dead from leukemia years before), there’s the making of a family drama as well, as the survivor is restrained and takes on the role of a big sister to a teenager solely in need of female companionship. Alas, the young girl also sees dead people, and while the first few sightings may have been interpreted as flashes of fantasy, those ghosts take an increasingly active role in the proceedings as the situation spins out of control. By the time the ghosts are killing the thugs come to settle a score, we’re way beyond what should have been a tight intimate drama/thriller, and the way to the ending isn’t particularly uplifting either. It does make I’ll Take Your Dead disintegrate in the last stretch, though, as it muddles the story with additional elements that take away from its themes and initial intentions. Which is too bad, because otherwise the work of director Chad Archibald is pretty good—clean crisp images driving home this rural Canadian thriller, and good actors: I’ll watch Jess Salgueiro in just about anything (although she’s better with comic material à la Canadian Strain), while Ava Preston does well as the young teenager, and Aidan Devine is solid in a role meant to depend on pure strength. I’ll Take Your Dead is not a bad film, but it would have been considerably better if it had focused on something interesting.

  • For the Sake of Vicious (2020)

    For the Sake of Vicious (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Watching For the Sake of Vicious, I’m reminded of the old complaint against a certain kind of Canadian cinema—that most of it was “kitchen table drama,” in which the low budget and limited ambitions led to stories of low-stake family struggles revolving around the kitchen table. Well, For the Sake of Vicious does spend about half of its duration in the cramped kitchen of a small affordable house, but it’s anything but sedate: The first half has a nurse coming back home and finding two men, one of them clearly intent on torturing the other. As the story unspools, we understand that the torturer is seeking revenge for the rape of his daughter, and that the bound one is an influential real-estate mogul. Much of this first half is an unnerving game between three people, as the nurse wants to make sure that the bound man is guilty of what the other charges. But the film shifts in an entirely different gear once the bound man calls for help, and waves of intruders converge on the kitchen where everything is taking place, intent on leaving no survivors. But then our characters fight back… in a relentless half-hour of bone-crunching, knife-stabbing and head-blasting violence. Tightly directed by Reese Eveneshen and Gabriel Carrer, For the Sake of Vicious ends up being an exemplary piece of how thrilling a low budget can be. I could have used a few wider shots from time to time, but the bloody violence doesn’t let up for quite a while, and even I—who don’t usually like either home-invasion movies or that degree of gore—can’t help but be somewhat impressed by the results. Lora Burke is quite good as the audience stand-in, trying to mediate the violence around her even as it spins out of her control. The story gets thin once the second half begins, and I can’t help but see a Drive reference or two in the subsequent aesthetics, but For the Sake of Vicious ends up being a mean and effective piece of low-budget Canadian genre entertainment.

  • Hall (2020)

    Hall (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) It’s unnerving to see Hall while in the middle of a global pandemic characterized by lockdowns and social distancing, as the film rests on the notion of a respiratory plague running rampant. Against a pandemic background, a woman stuck in an abusive relationship is mustering the courage to leave her no-good husband while they’re off at a hotel during a long road trip. Much of the story is thus clustered around a long hotel hall, with victims of the illness eventually wheezing on the floor as the drama plays out. This is, so far, solid material. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t focus on the essentials, or properly manages to expand beyond the hall itself. The central drama is quite interesting—even provocative in confronting the personal with the grander-scope epidemic given what we now know about domestic violence during lockdowns. I wouldn’t change anything about it. But then Hall tries to expand its material with the story of a Japanese woman in the next room that feels like a sideshow at best: if the idea was to get the film to feature length, it only half-works: a few more subplots featuring more characters in nearby rooms would have been more appropriate in transforming this in an ensemble story. Then the film takes a significant nosedive with a pair of scenes featuring the always-interesting Julian Richings as a plague spreader and then, during the credits, an unconvincing news report delving deep into conspiracy theories. These are steps taken too far, and they feel especially unnecessary for an audience with first-hand experience with a global pandemic. They also contradict other parts of the film, and make the entire thing feel more artificial than it would have been otherwise. (I’m watching Hall as part of the “Blood in the Snow” virtual film festival, and half of my issues with the low-budget horror films presented are “You should have stopped writing the bad parts,” with the other half being “you should have continued writing the good parts”) Hall’s ending simply… ends, with very little resolution other than the main issue of getting out of the hotel—maybe they’re infected; maybe they’re headed to someone already dead; maybe the conspiracy will succeed; maybe they’re all already dead. I do like the concept of a horror film using a hotel corridor as a central hub—but the haphazard way in which Hall develops is just unsatisfying despite a good performance from Carolina Bartczak and some clever ideas along the way. But then again, I’m scrutinizing this film with far more rigour than it expected during its production: as amazing as that sounds, we’ve all become experts at knowing how a scenario set against a global plague would play out.

  • Black Christmas (2019)

    Black Christmas (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Perhaps the best thing a remake can do is to stray from the original, especially if the original has a number of issues. I don’t particularly like the 1974 original Black Christmas, but that has a lot to do with it being a slasher (possibly the first slasher—a dubious Canadian contribution to film history) and me not liking slashers. I haven’t seen the similar 2006 remake, but this 2019 version strikes out on its own, barely holding on to the idea of a sorority under attack from a maniac. This version, written and directed by April Wolf and Sophia Takal, lives and breathes the #MeToo era to an often-caricatural degree, as our heroines are engaged in destroying patriarchy everywhere, from dead men’s busts to the English literature canon. It squarely leads to a feature-film-length denunciation of toxic masculinity that at least takes back some of the misogyny inherent in slasher movies. But the promise of flipping the genre on its head very quickly runs out of steam… if it has any steam to begin with: While Imogen Poots has some innate likability as the lead and Aleyse Shannon looks great, the writing often makes their characters come across as blunt mouthpieces for obvious sentiments. Worse yet is the film’s nosedive into outright supernatural elements in the third act, as if the entire patriarchy wasn’t enough of a formidable antagonist in the first place. Misogynists are clearly the new Nazis, as the film ends with an act of mass murder by the heroines that should at least make anyone pause at the disproportionate retribution of it—but then again those who were killed were eventually going to be nominated as right-wing judges, so the script clearly thinks they deserved it. It’s those excesses and quirks that bother me far more than they should—I should be on the film’s side (and the singing sequence is a great deal of empowering fun), but this Black Christmas overplays its cards in such a way that I’m not left with a lot of sympathy for the characters or the results. How weird is that? On the other hand, well, since I was expecting a straight-up remake of the 1974 original, I was certainly surprised at the twists and turns of the result, even if I can’t quite bring myself to like it.

  • Underwater (2020)

    Underwater (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I’m not the world’s biggest Kirsten Stewart fan (and even less, if you want to be superficial about it, of short-haired blonde Kirsten Stewart, although that’s briefly eclipsed here by bespectacled-in-sports-underwear Kirsten Stewart), but even I have to admit that she’s the linchpin of mean-lean-B-movie thrill machine Underwater. The premise takes us deep on the ocean floor, where a research and drilling facility is severely damaged by mysterious earthquakes and, later, many slimy creatures. As the characters try to escape to safety, the film clearly establishes what it wants to be: a no-nonsense monster movie set in the claustrophobic confines of a deep-sea station. Director William Eubank cleanly juggles the aspects of a special-effects-heavy production, and the script eventually has the heroine punching Cthulhu in the face, which is really all the justification you need to see this film. Steward does pretty well here, and having Vincent Cassel as a grizzled veteran doesn’t hurt. Some great production design subtly highlights the science-fictional nature of the film (wow, those suits!), and there are plenty of suspense sequences to make this one of the best underwater horror movies since The Abyss. It pleasantly reminded me of those almost-extinct 1980s B-movies that weren’t meant to be masterpieces or blockbusters, but were designed to be fun films for a very specific crowd of fans. I’m a bit surprised at how well Underwater works, but it does work.

  • Hail to the Deadites (2020)

    Hail to the Deadites (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) As some of you may guess from the title alone, Hail to the Deadites is a documentary celebration of Evil Dead fans, either in appreciating the film trilogy (the series wasn’t yet broadcast during the making of the film), weaving it into their lives or creating derivative works. It’s… either endearing or embarrassing. Part of the problem is that the documentary refuses to engage critically with the franchise—there’s not much discussion of what it means (perhaps because it’s fun enough that it doesn’t need to mean anything) and perilously little discussion of where the series may have done better (the tree sexual assault scene is mentioned, and then forgotten). Writer-director Steve Villeneuve focuses on fans instead and the result can be uneven: excessive fandom is more concerning than impressive (in my own cosmology, being an outspoken fan of a genre or medium is fine, but being an outspoken fan of a specific work is more troublesome) and the examples unearthed by the series often cross the endearing/embarrassing boundary. But what’s more frustrating is that, aside from having Bruce Campbell turn up for a typically charismatic interview, there isn’t a whole lot here that distinguishes Evil Dead fandom from just about any other horror franchise fandom: Any similar film about, say, the Nightmare on Elm Street series would have felt much like the same, with superfans obsessed by the series in mostly the same ways. I don’t really want to rain on those fans’ parade, though: they’re having fun, so let’s just embrace that fun. Hail to the Deadites, in that lens, feels like the kind of “extra DVD” documentary that you’d include in a series box set: Entertaining, but not essential.

  • Anything for Jackson (2020)

    Anything for Jackson (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Low-budget Canadian Horror is often a hard sell, but there’s enough going on in Anything for Jackson to rival higher-profile filmmaking. The premise does play with genre expectations a bit, as it features elderly villains trying to resurrect their dead grandson through a reverse exorcism. To do so, they kidnap a pregnant woman in order to put the soul of their grandson (the titular Jackson) into her soon-to-be-born child, but, being silly Satanists, they get it wrong and, well, what happens next is the third act of the film. For a prototypical suburban horror film shot in the screenwriter’s own house, there’s quite a lot of imagination and genre savvy on display here. It certainly helps to have the memorably lugubrious Julian Richings as a co-lead. Otherwise, the digital cinematography is crisp, the acting is decent and there’s enough plot in the narrative tank to get us coasting to the end despite a third act that doesn’t quite come up to the expectations left by the earlier sections of the film. Nonetheless, Anything for Jackson is pretty good, and not only by Canadian-horror standards.

  • A Stolen Life (1946)

    A Stolen Life (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) All Bette Davis fans get twice as much for their money in A Stolen Life, considering that Davis here plays twins—a shy quiet artist and a gold-digging firebrand. The sisters don’t get along in the first place, but things get even worse with the shy one falls for a man, and the gold-digger moves in to steal the new guy. The film’s title finds its meaning when a horrible accident kills one sister and allows the second one to step into the other one’s life. As a romantic melodrama, it’s not bad—mostly thanks to Davis acting up a storm for two. In comparison, Glenn Ford merely does fine as the third point in this love triangle. The special effects really aren’t bad at all for a mid-1940s film. The narrative is a bit less impressive, though: Some subplots don’t go anywhere, and the ending is a drawn-out affair. Still, if you’re willing to swallow a few implausibilities, then A Stolen Life is quite entertaining. Davis apparently liked playing herself twice because she did so again twenty years later in Dead Ringer.

  • Carry on Screaming! (1966)

    Carry on Screaming! (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) While Carry on Screaming! is the twelfth of the very silly British comedy film series, you don’t really need to have seen any of the preceding ones to make sense of this—just a passing acquaintance with Hammer-style horror films should be enough to get the low-brow gags that populate the film. The plot is a shrug-inducing bunch of nonsense about mad scientists transforming people into mannequins, but the bulk of the film’s appeal is in the sight gags, double entendres, physical comedy and actors mugging for the camera—this is really not meant to be sophisticated or subtle, even if there’s some canniness in the way the film is overloaded with comic material. It’s funny because of its relentlessness—even if you go into the film unamused, sooner or later a stupid joke will get to you. The Hammer recreation is low-budget, obviously, but Carry on Screaming! occasionally scores a point or two of atmosphere. The lead actors were, by this point of the series, attuned to the effect they were looking for, but there are highlights—if you’re a fan of vampish Morticia Adams (who isn’t?), then Fenella Fielding is nothing short of amazing here. Despite its broad nature, Carry on Screaming! is close to a double must see—for seeing what the Carry on series was all about, for one thing, and then as an affectionate parody of Hammer Horror. Plus, the jokes and Fielding—I mean, why wait any longer?

  • Innerspace (1987)

    Innerspace (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, On TV, October 2020) I first saw Innerspace on VHS at the end of the 1980s, and it was a lot to take in: A scientist, reduced to microscopic size, and being injected into the body of someone else? Wow, those special effects! Of course, I didn’t know about Fantastic Voyage at the time, and it was easier to be amazed in a pre-CGI age. Still, revisiting this amiable Science Fiction comedy remains quite a bit of fun today: Under Joe Dante’s deft direction, the film breezily switches between SF, thriller, romance and comedy (a lot of comedy) as a daredevil test pilot (Dennis Quaid) is injected inside a meek hypochondriac (Martin Short) and a rival organization causes trouble for everyone. What’s more fun than expected here is how the film doesn’t just take the ludicrous premise from Fantastic Voyage, but doubles down on the preposterousness of it all. It’s not enough for an entire exploration craft to be shrunk down and somehow injected—no, in this film the pilot can tap into the optic nerve to see what’s going on, link to the ear to give instructions to the body’s owner, and control his host’s face muscles to impersonate someone else. Sure, why not? Nothing makes scientific sense, but it makes for a full four-quadrant thrill ride—with even some wonder thrown in at the sight of a fetus. Even with such heady concepts, Innerspace never quite loses touch with recognizable reality, as many stunts and comic sequences squarely depend on Short’s physical comedy and the growth of the characters. (Amusingly, Quaid and Meg Ryan met on this film by playing boyfriend-girlfriend, and later married.) The Oscar-winning special effects generally remain convincing today, and even thirty years later, it’s clear that Innerspace still has no equivalent. It’s still well worth a watch, or a re-watch.

  • The Secret Garden (1949)

    The Secret Garden (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Much of The Secret Garden’s specific charm comes from twin accidents of history—having both Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell being the right age to play the child characters essential to the story, for one; but also being at a stage of cinema’s technological development that you could still switch from normal black-and-white cinematography to a Technicolour segment and amaze audiences. This had only been possible for fifteen years at that point (and wasn’t that original, considering the use of a similar device in The Wizard of Oz), but more importantly, it would no longer be possible a few years later due to colour film becoming the standard for children’s movies. In any case—both the actors and the wow factor of a black-and-white film turning to colour remain essential elements in this gentle portal fantasy story, in troubled children discover a maybe-magical garden that eventually makes them better people. I wouldn’t want to discount the weight of the narrative here—adapted from a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it has full redemption arcs for the characters, and even the switch to colour would not have been as effective without laying the groundwork for the garden to be perceived as more wondrous than the baseline black-and-white reality. The script also gives the material for the child actors to excel—the shouting match between the two is their showcase opportunity. All of this makes The Secret Garden an interesting film still. I can’t guess how it plays to the current generation, but it does remain a watchable part of cinema history.

  • The Stepfather (1987)

    The Stepfather (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) Despite my overall loathing of slasher films, even I have to admit that The Stepfather is a little bit more insidious than the usual psycho-with-a-knife movie. The already-uncomfortable idea of a stepfather coming into a family is heightened until the antagonist becomes a ticking bomb of deadly violence just waiting to kill our heroine and the rest of the family. This is, thematically, pretty strong stuff, and the film is never quite as good as when it plays with those ideas from a psychological horror standpoint. I’m really not so fond of the various deaths that punctuate the film on the way to the face-off between psycho-stepdad and plucky teenage heroine—those feel too much like gratuitous kills before the main conflict is addressed. Still, it does end with a good climax, and the film’s pernicious plot drivers never quite stop working. Terry O’Quinn is quite good in the unenviable role of the titular stepfather. The Stepfather is not recommended to any child of recomposed families with a sudden new stepfather in the picture.

  • Scream and Scream Again (1970)

    Scream and Scream Again (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I’d like to be kinder to Scream and Scream Again, but this horror film doesn’t make it easy on itself through false promises, mostly incoherent plotting, wasted opportunities and an indecisive finale. While it’s sort-of-interesting to see the film’s plot strands come together at what’s almost the last minute, it still makes much of the film a slog to get through, as stuff just happens for no reason—and the ending does not solidly tie up those strands. I’ll be more critical of the film’s loose adherence to genre—it feels like horror most of the time, blends in a bit of spy thriller and police action, then touches briefly upon science fiction in time for the hastily sketched ending. (You’ll understand if I don’t even bother with a plot summary.) More disappointment abounds if you pay attention to the cast and see that Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are in the film: their presences are short and largely disconnected: they are in no way leading roles, or even supporting characters. Add to that the lacklustre treatment of its 1970-ish London setting, and Scream and Scream Again doesn’t fulfill its potential. While it’s true that some of director Gordon Hessler’s execution can rise to the occasion, much of it still feels wasted on an empty, near-incoherent script.

  • The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007)

    The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) Horror is a very peculiar movie genre in that you can have a rather wonderful first half of a horror film filled with mysteries, scares and plot hooks, only to lose it all when you actually start to tie together the plot strands. (Or worse, not tie them at all.) The Deaths of Ian Stone falls prey to this decades-old risk, sabotaging an intriguing beginning with a trite conclusion that sucks a lot of energy out of the film. The setup is more elegant than original, as a young man wakes up in a different body every day, and is inevitably killed at around 5 PM. It’s all quite serious and sombre (in keeping with the mid-2000s’ fondness for dark cinematography) and there are several interesting questions raised throughout this opening. But then, alas, come the explanations and while a film with a conclusion is infinitely preferable to one without, the one selected by screenwriter Brendan Hood isn’t quite as strong as it could have been. As The Deaths of Ian Stone sinks into love-conquers-all easiness, the film definitely loses an edge—and I say this as someone who generally prefers love-conquer-all movies. Too bad—director Dario Piana can create an atmosphere, and some of the initial ideas aren’t bad despite working in the overdone time-loop genre. But then there’s the rest…