Cultural Mining

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

TIFF may be over, but Toronto’s fall film festival season is on right now, with lots of new movies popping up all around us.  Toronto Palestine Film Festival is on for the next week, featuring the documentary Edward Said: Between Worlds, and Annemarie Jacir’s drama Palestine 36. The Windrush International Caribbean Film Festival will be showing films throughout October, about the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora. Toronto After Dark offers five nights of genre movies — horror, sci-fi, action and cult — from October 14th-18th, including Whalefall about a scuba diver swallowed by a sperm whale. And starting this weekend you can see a piece of Toronto history with the documentary You Had to Be There about the legendary production of Godspell that brought together Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, and Jayne Eastwood — great doc.

But after the 50+ serious highbrow movies I saw at TIFF, it’s nice to lean back and just watch some schlock. So this week, I’m looking at two new genre movies — a mystery and a monster-thriller — that open this weekend. There’s a famous author in Vermont who finds herself the subject of a mystery, and a woman in the Amazon who finds herself the object of a dangerous creature.

Verity

Dir: Michael Showalter (Spoiler Alert, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Big Sick)

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson: Splitsville, A Bigger Splash, Our Friend, Suspiria) is an aspiring young author, but not a successful one.  Her book signings attract only a handful of fans, and her financial situation is dire. She sleeps on an old mattress, and is about to be evicted from her New York apartment. So when her agent calls her to a secret business meeting, she’s dubious but agrees to attend. On the way, she witnesses a violent traffic accident that covers her with blood! A random  passerby named Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) helps her clean up and offers her the shirt off his back — literally. She arrives at her meeting flustered and late. It seems she has been chosen by international bestselling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway: The Odyssey, Serenity, Mother Mary, Colossal, Armageddon Time, The Hustle, The Dark Knight Rises, One Day, Love and other Drugs) to help her finish her next three novels. Everything Verity writes flies off the shelf, so her publisher can pay Lowen a substantial sum of money to serve as her editor. Why does she need an editor? She was in a terrible accident that left her with limited mobility. And who else is at this meeting? Jeremy, the man who came to her rescue on the street that day… and just happens to be Verity’s husband. 

She agrees to the job and he drives her up to their home in rural Vermont to start work. It’s a modernist mansion made of glass, wood and rough-hewn rock overlooking a placid lake. But she soon discovers that her “editing” job is actually ghost writing. Verity’s notes are haphazard and disorganized, just scribbles on scraps of paper. And though her office is not far from Verity’s bedroom, the author can offer no advice. She can’t move, speak or understand anything. She’s basically comatose, attended by a full time caregiver. It’s up to Lowen to do the writing. When she starts delving into Verity’s notes she discovers a hidden diary, that reveals a monster as bad as the villains she writes about. She’s repulsed by the evil Verity even as she’s increasingly attracted to the kind and generous Jeremy. Are their feeling mutual? As their passion grows, Lowen suspects Verity of faking her illness and that she knows exactly what’s going on behind closed doors. What secrets have yet to be revealed?

Verity is a psychological suspense thriller flavoured with a hint of a love triangle.  It’s mysterious and a bit erotic. But it relies on a far-fetched, cornball  plot verging on the ridiculous. It’s based on a novel by wildly popular author Colleen Hoover, and is directed by the always entertaining  Michael Showalter (The Big Sick and The Eyes of Tammy Faye), which makes me think the campy melodramatic atmosphere is intentional. What bothers me is the amount of time wasted showing Lowen (or Verity) reading and writing, with words and sentences floating across the screen. Words are not interesting!

It’s the images and stories they evoke that moviegoers want to see. Josh Hartnett is good as the affable Jeremy — and as the object of female desire. Anne Hathaway is great as a scheming writer (but is wordless for most of the film). Then there’s  Dakota Johnson. What can I saw? She’s not a very good actor, but she’s good enough for this unbelievable mystery, which swings wildly between erotic psychological thriller and laughably awful soap. 

Verity is best enjoyed with a jaundiced eye.

Beware Boiúna 

Dir: Mike P. Nelson (Silent Night, Deadly Night)

The jungle in southern Colombia is a dangerous place, and hospitals are hard to fine. So a group of medical professionals are plying the Amazon’s tributaries in a ramshackle riverboat, offering help to the people in the villages. A doctor and two interns, including an American woman, Alli (Jessica Rothe). She wants to prove to her famous father that she can live up to his reputation. The ship’s captain, Jorge (Sergio Hererra) navigates the treacherous waters, and his hard-ass mechanic Lena (Kiana Madeira) keeps the rinky-dink engine running. She’s mainly on board in hopes of finding her long lost brother, said to be somewhere in this area. But their dangers aren’t only medical in nature.

Foreign miners are indiscriminately tearing up the land and polluting the water in the hope of striking it rich, and watch out to anyone who gets in their way. There’s also a resistance group burning down foreign camps to save the jungle.  There are razor-toothed Caymans —  alligator-like reptiles —  lurking just beneath the water. And finally, there’s a danger no one has ever actually seen, but everyone knows what she looks like. It’s Boiúna, a giant snake goddess, who’s said to live in these waters. She protects the jungle and decides who lives and who dies. She’s the size of a small train covered in black scales, with huge fangs, and a maw big enough to swallow a human in one gulp.

Things heat up when the medics encounter gold miners face to face, led by their boss, Brennan (Logan Marshall-Greene). And when their meeting ends in a fatal accident, the miners vow death to the medics. But watching all is the enormous snake who forces even sworn enemies to work together to stay alive. Can anyone survive a meeting with the terrifying Boiúna? 

Beware Boiúna is your basic monster thriller/horror about a giant snake. That said, it’s not bad at all. Lots of suspense, some gross-out scenes, and the typical fears in a jungle — bugs, predators, quicksand, and bad hombres —  in great abundance. I like the fact it was actually filmed in Colombia, and knows what it’s talking about. And is told from the point of view of the locals, not the Yankees. Is it scary? If you have a snake phobia it will terrify you, but it didn’t scare me much. But it was different enough from most monster movies to keep me interested. And I actually like director Mike P Nelson’s work — he always injects a bit of humour into his horror 

If you’re looking for a fun monster movie, you could do a lot worse than Beware Boiúna.

Verity and Beware Boiúna both open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings.

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