Sunlight

Shenoah Allen and Nina Conti

Nina Conti's Sunlight is the best sleeper comedy I've seen since Hundreds of Beavers. Produced for peanuts and filmed along the back roads of New Mexico, the film is an affable road movie and comedy oddity. The closest parallel is Albert Brooks' Lost in America, in which a couple also drive a Winnebago across the American West, but Sunlight is raunchier than the earlier film and more desperate. Conti is British and works primarily in the UK as a ventriloquist. Now I usually find ventriloquism as funny as a crutch, but Conti overcame my prejudice. Her routines, usually involving audience interaction, can be found on YouTube. She wrote the film with Shenoah Allen, her frequent collaborator, who co-stars.

Conti has her couple meet cute with Jane (Ms. Conti) thwarting a suicide attempt by Roy (Mr. Allen). Both are in dire straits emotionally and financially. The film's motivation for their road trip is a watch, worth $20K, buried with Roy's hated father. Roy agrees to split the proceeds with the equally strapped Jane if she will accompany him and assist him on his perverse pilgrimage. The twist is that Jane remains in a monkey costume for nearly the entire film. The reason why is partially explained by her back story, but the real reason is that this is Ms. Conti's schtick. The monkey functions, as all ventriloquists dummy's do, as a raging id, venting the comedian self-rage through a device that does not betray vulnerability. This could grow tiresome, but Ms. Conti had the sense to limit her rants and provide the distancing effect of an absurd accent. There are enough hijinks to lift this slight feature until the inevitable romantic clinch and trip to the clink.

The film is not merely a two hander. Both Bill Wise (as Jane's sleazy stepdad) and Melissa Chambers (as Roy's mom) create indelible characters that help flesh out the leads' back story. Both provide wonderful screwball moments without being too cartoonish in their characterizations. Sunlight is modest in its scope, but exact in its portrait of a very human comedy. It is currently streaming on Tubi. 

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.