Rabbit Trap

  Rosy McEwan        

Bryn Chainey's Rabbit Trap, his feature film debut, is an atmospheric horror film set in the wilds of Wales during the late 1970s. Rosy McEwan plays Daphne, a composer who festoons her electronic compositions with found sounds. Dev Pater plays her husband, Darcy, a sound engineer who scours the countryside recording nature whilst his wife works on her compositions in their cottage. The couple seem to revel in their solitude, alternately chain smoking and making love. Despite little in the way of a back story to provide us a clue, troubles from their past linger. Darcy, in particular, is haunted by nightmares in which he is consumed by a beastly shadow self. After accidentally wandering into a Tywyth Teg fairy circle, as one does in Wakes, their insularity is disturbed by a young interloper (Jade Croot). The unnamed lad says he is drawn by the music that emanates from the cottage, but it soon becomes obvious that the boy desperately craves parental figures in his life. Daphne and Darcy oblige, but only up to a point.

Chainey's casting of a young woman in the role of the boy is a real coup. Ms. Croot gives the role an uncanny feel that is a snug fit for a character who turns out to be more a pagan spirit than boy; a sinister Peter Pan if you will. This helps unsettle a film that feels a little too familiar at times. If I had a dime for every rustic UK horror film that featured magic mushrooms in the last two decades, why I'd have a dollar. Still, the production values of this film are a cut above most of its ilk. The cinematography of Andreas Johannssen captures the topography of Wales and Yorkshire in all its alluring and slightly terrifying grandeur. The film's sound design, by Graham Reznick, and the film's score, by Lucrecia Dalt, are both effectively creepy, helping make the film a chillingly immersive experience. All three leads are superb, though there is little in the way of character or plot development. Moody rural horror, then, and a promising premiere film. Rabbit Trap is currently streaming on Tubi. 

Blood on Melies' Moon

       Luigi Cozzi in the basement of the store he manages, Profondo Rosso              

I ran across Luigi's Cozzi's Blood on Méliès' Moon on Tubi and, expecting little, was pleasantly surprised. The 2016 film is also available on a handsome disc by the fine people at Severin Films. By any reasonable set of standards, Blood... is a piss poor film, shoddily written, clumsily staged and ineptly acted. A home movie with CGI asides. Slipshod direction has been Cozzi's trademark for over five decades, so I was prepared for a complete debacle. His directing credits include such dreck as the Lou Ferrigno starring Hercules and the Star Wars rip-off Starcrash. Nevertheless, the 'amat' in amateur means love and the love Cozzi has for films and film history permeates Blood on Méliès' Moon even when its display of film craft would embarrass a neophyte. Cozzi's quest in the film is noble and heroic even if it resembles that of Don Quixote rather than Galahad.

Besides the goofy directing credits Cozzi has amassed, he was a frequent collaborator of Dario Argento. I joked in an earlier column that I was an acolyte in the cults of various auteurs, but Cozzi really does live his life devotedly promoting the work of the giallomeister. A quick comparison of Cozzi's work to Argento's displays the latter's superiority. Argento's camera placement and use of color put him in another league compared to a camp follower like Cozzi. Cozzi is well aware of this, though, and has kept the flame of his comrade's work alive through documentaries and books. He even runs a horror film gift shop in Rome, a gialloreia if you will, called Profondo Rosso after the Argento film. The shop has a basement in which all sorts of Argento related bric-a-brac  is on display for ravenous horror fans. Inevitably, the basement becomes the setting for a series of gory murders in Blood on Méliès' Moon.

The film has a ridiculous plot, but if you are watching this flick for the plot you will be unrewarded. Anyhow, a seance gone wrong unleashes a soulless killer in Rome and all humanity is threatened. The bearish Cozzi must retrieve a lost Méliès film to avert doom. Makes sense to me! Throughout, Cozzi expresses the joy he finds in physical media. VHS cassettes and book jackets make shout outs to everyone from Philip K. Dick to Dostoyevsky. Cozzi also interweaves footage from a host of films, including his own, into the mix along with cheerfully primitive CGI effects. As he searches for his grail, he meets up with a friendly cohort of film veterans. He visits a special effects studio, a practical effects studio, and has a yummy looking dinner with Mario Bava's son, Lamberto. All this would smack of self-indulgence were it not for Cozzi's sense of self-abnegation. At one point, Cozzi awakens his long suffering wife to recount his latest nightmare: that he has been acclaimed, or is it declaimed, as the Italian Ed Wood. Well, he rationalizes, at least Ed Wood is famous.

Blood on Méliès' Moon is a tatterdemalion film and an affecting mash note to the cinema.

Michael

Jaafar Jackson

I was pleasantly surprised by Antoine Fuqua's Michael. Expecting a hagiographic waxworks, I was never bored by the, for now, all-time grossing biopic. I suspect that even if Michael was terrible, it would have been a reasonable hit given the entertainer's still fervid fanbase. This is due to a discography that will appeal to tots, teens, and other music fans until the earth is obliterated and beyond. John Logan's script covers the years 1968 to 1988, so there is no decline. Logan and Fuqua do a good job of sketching Michael's main musical collaborators: drill-sergeant father Joseph (Colman Domingo), Barry Gordy ( Larenz Tate), and Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson). Those who are omitted are cited in the film's exhaustive end credits. The main omission, besides Michael's sex life or lack thereof, is Janet. She is not listed among the film's many executive producers named Jackson and is absent from the film. Nary a peep about her.

Given the restrictions inherent in an authorized biopic, Logan does a pretty good job at outlining the rise of a pop icon. The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, with Fuqua aligning the visual choreography in sync with the music. Logan has logically constructed his screenplay. Even the gaps in the narrative, the biggest leap is from 1971 to 1978, make some sort of sense. This leap serves to introduce Michael the young man (nephew Jaafar Jackson) as we say adios to Michael the boy (Juliano Valdi). The gap also eliminates a few speed bumps, like the shift from Motown Records to Epic and the film version of The Wiz, to the film's up, up and away trajectory. Joseph (deceased 2018) is the heavy of the film, though I think he was worse in real life, and, not surprisingly, Mr. Domingo threatens to run away with the film's acting laurels. However, the cast is uniformly excellent. Jaafar Jackson is not the disaster one feared and, in particular, moves as adeptly as his uncle. The filmmakers were wise to blend Jaafar's singing voice with Michael's, as the original was singular. I also appreciated the efforts of Nia Long, Miles Teller, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, Laura Harrier, and, playing another gross and comic record executive, Mike Myers. Fuqua keeps the cast loose limbed and focused.

By stopping the narrative in 1988, the picture avoids the Wacko Jacko lowlights like the accusations of pedophilia and his face falling off. The flick ends with the warning, "the story continues", but I don't think anyone is brave enough to tackle Michael 2. Fuqua and Logan plant the picture with cultural touchstones (Peter Pan, James Brown, The Three Stooges) that underpin Michael Jackson's legacy. As with Elvis Presley, that legacy encompasses all that is good, bad, and weird about American culture. Michael is not as contrary to the facts as such traditional Hollywood biopics as Night and Day. It does feature plastic surgery and Bubbles the chimp. However, Michael does not have the audacity to truly portray how weird the subject was. My fantasy version of Michael 2 would include the vignette provided by that undependable narrator Dr. Z (aka Dana Gould): Bubbles, exiled to an outdoor pen after becoming too big and violent to live in the mansion, hurls his excrement at handicapped visitors to Neverland Ranch.