Satchmos_Chillun Reviews

High Tension (2003)

Ghoulish film rises above its flaws to be a superior horror

[6/10 · 22 July 2014]

"High Tension" aka "Haute Tension" aka "Switchblade Romance" is a minor gem of horror cinema. The second feature film by writer-director Alexandre Aja packs both brutal scenarios and an elaborate concept into its roughly hour-and-a-half running time. Its ambitious approach is a refreshment in this era of trite and warmed-over horror film efforts.

Marie (Cécile De France) and Alexia (Maïwenn) are two college students who venture to Alexia's family's remote farmhouse so that they can do schoolwork in a peaceful setting. They get anything but peace when, that night, the house is broken into by a psychopath in a mechanic's jumpsuit who wields a straight razor. The resulting murders are vicious and photographed to vivid effect, in part thanks to cinematographer Maxime Alexandre's expressionistic colors. There's enough gratuitous gore in this sequence to make most horror fans gleeful. Alexia is then kidnapped by the killer, so Marie climbs into his truck, hoping to try and rescue her.

As it turns out, the killer of Alexia's relatives is Marie, who imagines him in order to excuse her crimes, and possibly her desire for her friend. Much of the film is told from her imaginary viewpoint. Perhaps this explains why Marie's acting during the murder and kidnapping often seems a bit fake: it's totally contrived to try to justify her true identity as le tueur (the killer). It can be somewhat useful if you read the film's scenes as the killer literally being Marie, but still there are ambiguities. Here lies the main fault of the film -- its lack of a credible reality that we can see through most of its running time hurts it.

"High Tension" delivers with a sure technical hand in many areas. This is not to say it is excellent, but it is one of the better horrors put out in the last ten years or so. The dubbing of the dialogue, like in almost every dubbed film ever made, is dreadful. The story, once it's all figured out, is serviceable to the film's scares and not much more than that. But one can easily see why director Wes Craven dubbed Aja "the future of horror" when the film was released. It's a daring effort that far exceeds many of its contemporaries in horror, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

Film's dialogue conveys surrealistic magic & mayhem

[7/10 · 15 June 2006]

Mexican movie-maker Luis Buñuel, well-respected for his surrealist films, outdid himself with this. "The Exterminating Angel" fits the bill of a movie that distorts reality, or a surrealist film with an effortless quality. The story is simple: some dinner guests strangely find themselves unable to leave the house where they have eaten.

Rather than indulge in outlandish visuals to create an effect as Buñuel frequently did, this film conveys its surrealistic magic chiefly through dialogue. Many Buñuel films are chock full of words, and "Angel" is no exception. What happens is one realizes the dialogue is off-kilter. It is mostly totally incoherent. After about an hour of reading the movie's subtitles, the effect feels almost drug-induced. The resolution is what one might expect from such a film, but it's Buñuel's beefy execution of his M.O. that makes this a treat. How do the actors deliver such lines with so much conviction? "The Exterminating Angel" is brilliant.

Deep Cover (1992)

Deep Cover & the Emerging Black Aesthetic

[8/10 · 19 October 2005]

Where to begin in commenting about this film? Deep Cover - the low-budget motion picture that captivated moviegoers on its release in 1992 and thereafter with its multifarious blur of conventions - has become irreplaceable in this cineaste's film-loving career.

It seemed indistinct enough at the time of its release. Like so many other films about cops and bad guys, Deep Cover promised little else from what we were used to. Since movie culture primed filmgoers for stories about police who kill to attempt justice, we expected little else from it. Actor Laurence Fishburne, perhaps best known for his roles in School Daze (1988) and Boyz N the Hood (1991), didn't seem out of place here (in his first lead role), while actor Jeff Goldblum definitely did.

I missed the film in theaters.

The film's storyline owes its uniqueness to the subversions it pulls off. Deep Cover builds into the mythical from what seems like a simple cop story, while laying the psychology of its protagonist Russell Stevens, Jr. (Fishburne) bare with its madcap plotting. A proper reading of it is facilitated by the words of a passing character early in the film: "That's the problem these days. People have no imagination." Imagination is exactly what is needed to absorb the narrative of a cop pretending to be a drug dealer, who eventually realizes he's a drug dealer pretending to be a cop. Russell, renamed John by DEA agent Gerald Carver (Charles Martin Smith) to engage his undercover operation, braves misadventure and danger to work his way into the mid-level drug operation of David Jason (Jeff Goldblum). The idea explained by Carver is to work through and ascend a pyramid topped by a high-level cocaine supplier and take him down via the operation. But John must brave Hell to reach his goal, which is introduced to him by the superior agent Carver who says he's "God." A truly fascinating scene in the film comes due to masculine grudgery between Jason and drug dealer Felix Barbosa (Gregory Sierra). It is the birthday party of Barbosa's aide Gopher (Sydney Lassick) and Felix is more than ready to question David's criminal toughness. Before the eyes of the assemblage gathered around a table, Felix taunts David until he loses his cool. Felix then requests that David play a "game" of hand-slapping with him. John's vocal objection falls upon deaf ears. David goes along with the brutal sport until he is injured and humiliated. As John and David leave the small gathering, John notes by voice-over that one of the men will eventually kill the other.

John is brought aboard Jason's operation. While John argues that Jason needs a partner, Jason says he wants him as a courier. Jason explains his goal to John of introducing a practical synthetic cocaine to the market - a fitting ambition for a white husband who habitually lusts after younger black women and learns to murder for vindication. (The issue of interracial sex is given no short shrift in Duke's theatrical sci-fi film, by the way.) John finds a trustworthy friend in African art dealer Betty (Victoria Dillard), but only travels further along the path of righteous outrage. David's path to Nirvana is paved with black and Latino bodies. It should seem that John's moment of realization of killing a man with impunity might serve as a wake-up call. It doesn't. Only when John's neatly constructed role collapses before him, at Carver's behest, comes his awakening. Out-powered and frustrated, John realizes that he's acted as a puppet to the Feds. Fishburne rocks the screen with this mercurial persona of his creation. John takes his very first drink and leaves the sputtering Carver behind. Russell/John's rebirth is soon to come.

The best term to describe John's resolution of the conflict between social hierarchical manipulation and spiritual salvation is vigilante justice. John must rewrite the rules of the game and reclaim Russell before it is too late. And he must do it while dealing with high-level drug suppliers and the Feds.

Probably the most compelling aspect of Duke's film on its 1992 release and to date is its avant-garde form and content. David Jason's worldview could best be described as forcedly Edenic, whereas John Hull's plot at the film's end shows thought of Utopian character. The confusion that the John/Russell character suffers toward the film's climax is reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man. In each work, a black male protagonist struggles against a disturbingly fluid identity put upon him by society. This perhaps intentional "homage" to Ellison's classic waxes especially rhapsodic when John delivers free verse poetry on the spot and quotes crime writer Iceberg Slim when his luck runs out.

Jeff Goldblum's David Jason is a product of genius, a brilliantly crafted greed warrior similar to, and better than, the one limned by Al Pacino's Satan in The Devil's Advocate. This is white liberalism gone psychotic. And as for Bill Duke's direction, it was never better realized as it is during Deep Cover's macho dog-fights, stark realizations, and camera tricks (the shot wherein a man walks across a frame and wipes it away to the next one has since become standard in black film), and it may never be again. Deep Cover ushered in the fragments of an emerging black film aesthetic. Maybe some day it will receive the critical overview it deserves.