Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

February means it’s cooold outside, the best time to watch a chiller-thriller inside. So this week I’m looking at three very different horror movies. There’s runaway fungus in Kansas, a murder that looks like witchcraft in the Cotswolds, and college friends trapped in a horror movi e, two hours from Jakarta. 

The Draft

Co-Wri/Dir: Yusron Fuadi

It’s present day, in a forest a few hours outside of Jakarta, Indonesia. Five friends in their early 20s are staying in a crumbling mansion that dates back to Dutch colonial rule. There’s Iwan (Adhin Abdul Hakim) the tough guy with a long beard and a black headband; Wati (Anastasia Herzigova) a fashionable woman with long hair; Ani (Putri Anggie) a tomboy with sad eyes; Amir (Winner Wijaya), the resident nerd who never puts down his camera; and Budi, the prankster who is always telling jokes. The holiday is meant to be fun, but everything about the place shouts creepy: a tarnished mirror, old radios and photos, and a locked room upstairs they’re forbidden allowed to enter. Add to this a dead little sister, the glimpse of a ghost, an old cemetery right next to the house, a well where a cat once fell in and drowned — it feels like all the cliches of a cheap horror movie. But when one of them is horribly murdered, the rest are wondering who will die next… Until Amir points out that something is not right, here.

And when he climbs into the car and starts to drive away, he finds himself at the edge of a cliff — where there’s literally nowhere left to go. And that’s when he realizes the five of them are characters trapped in a horror movie, the victims of a hack screenwriter who kills them at will, and later brings them back to life in his next rewrite, as if nothing ever happened. Can the five friends outsmart the writer and end the horror? Or are they trapped in limbo, tormented by endless zombies, ghosts and serial killers until the unseen writer finally finishes his draft?

The Draft is a low-budget horror/comedy about five people who find themselves in a meta-movie world, manipulated by an unseen, godlike being. It’s a horror movie about being in a horror movie. More funny than scary, since it’s revealed early on that it’s not “real”, even within their reality. And when I say low-budget, I mean low: they replace one of the main actors halfway through!  But I find the concept really cool and appreciate the social satire, skewering an entire movie genre. 

While far from a masterpiece, The Draft does push the boundaries of experimental horror.

The Last Sacrifice

Wri/Dir: Rupert Russell

It’s Valentine’s Day, in 1945. Charles Walton is an elderly farmworker, and a bit of a loner, who lives in a village in the Cotswolds in Warwickshire. He is found brutally murdered by someone using Walton’s own pitchfork and slash hook (sort of a heavy pruning shears). The mystery surrounding his death attracts tabloids and rubberneckers, and a celebrity detective from Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Robert Fabian, is summoned to investigate the crime. He floats theories ranging from simple robbery to hidden motives but all in vain; no killer is caught. Another expert, the noted Anglo-Indian egyptologist and ethnologist Margaret Murray has a different theory: witchcraft. The people in these villages still perform ancient pagan rituals and strongly believe in witches. Did a visiting cabal kill Walton in a ritual blood-letting to bring fertility to the land? (The harvest has been poor for a number of years.)

Though the crime is never solved, the killing — and the suspected rituals surrounding it — is the inspiration for countless books, articles and horror movies about witches and the supernatural in small, isolated English villages in the 1960s and 70s. The popular genre of Folk Horror could be traced back to this murder.

The Last Sacrifice is an interesting documentary that looks at the case that spawned an explosion of occult crime, witchcraft, and folk horror in British popular culture. It uses brief clips from dozens of such films, but above all the Wicker Man. And it interviews experts — journalists, pundits, academics and practitioners — well-versed in these topics. What’s interesting is how it’s put together, using non-stop grainy film clips, narrated by the talking heads, who appear only in dark rooms with red lighting to keep the mood going. It also looks at the rise of the occult and Wicca in pop culture in the 60s and 70s. It’s all done in a somewhat kitschy style, with blurry footage and period psychedelic images, along with countless B&W news clips and vaguely titillating period photos of people dancing in circles in the nude. (Witches insist that while they do dance naked, the rumoured orgies are just a myth.)

The Last Sacrifice offers a very unusual combination of half a dozen fields and genres: cultural anthropology, cinema studies, true crime, penny dreadfuls, soft-core vintage porn, and the occult, all brought together in one fascinating doc. 

Cold Storage

Dir: Jonny Campbell

Teacake (Joe Keery: Stranger Things) is a young ex-con who works at a self-storage warehouse in an isolated spot in Kansas. He’s a bit bedraggled and talks a lot but has a good heart. His boss, Griffin (Gavin Spokes) is a total douche, but luckily Teacake rarely sees him on the night shift. Instead he works with the newly- hired Naomi (Georgina Campbell) a single, divorced mom working her way through medical school. She’s smart, pretty and no-nonsense. But something unusual is happening this night — there’s a high-pitched, squeaky sound — like an alarm — coming from somewhere deep inside the building. The two decide to investigate, and break through a plaster wall to find its origin. Their explorations take them to a top secret area, four storeys underground, filled with strange smells, flickering red lights, and something disgusting and green seeping through the cracks. 

What they don’t know is the storage locker was built over an old military base that stores potentially dangerous bio weapons, including an experimental fungus that fell to earth when Skylab crashed decades earlier. And the alarm they’re hearing means there’s a leak. They also don’t know how lethal this fungus is: it’s aggressive, intelligent and adaptable, and takes over the brains of any creature it comes in contact with, leaving a gang of murderous but rational zombies, their heads and bodies oozing with green slime, whose driven goal is to spread and infect. And unless it’s contained, it could wipe out a continent in just a few days. Luckily, the alarm also triggered contact with the military officers Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville) the ones who put the  sample there in the first place. And they’re on their way to save the day. Except there are a number of people — and creatures — inside the site already infected, as well as a motorcycle gang coincidentally trying to traffic stolen goods from the same storage lockers. Can Teacake and Naomi hold the fort and stop the fungus until the army arrives? Or is humanity doomed?

Cold Storage is an action/thriller/horror/comedy about the dangers of biological weapons. It’s cute, funny and a lot of fun to watch. It’s far from the first fungus horror movie — that’s becoming almost a sub-genre these days, but it didn’t effect my enjoyment.  The script was written by the prolific Hollywood writer David Koepp, who I consider hit-and-miss, but this one — based on his novel — lands on the hit side. 

I liked the special effects — lots of exploding heads, and projectile vomiting — and the production design: long sterile hallways falling prey to the fungus-infected people and animals. And the acting is good all around, including a cameo by Vanessa Redgrave.

Cold Storage is pure fun.

Cold Storage is now playing; check your local listings. The Draft and The Last Sacrifice are both streaming now on the horror site Shudder. 

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com