Yellow Cake (Canada, 2010)

Yellow Cake from Nick Cross on Vimeo.

In 2010, Canadian independent animated film maker Nick Cross made two excellent Flash animated films, Pig Farmer and this one, Yellow Cake. Both are excellent little films more than worthy of being presented as the latest Short Film of the Month here at A Wasted Life; Yellow Cake is the chosen film only because it is the first of the two that we saw, and therefore gets first rights. The filmmaker himself explains Yellow Cake as "a lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth," which is as good as description as any. (Cross seems to like short and sweet descriptions; for Pig Farmer, he is equally curt: "A simple tale of a wayward soul, awash in an ocean of tragedy and regret.") But Yellow Cake offers a lot more than its simple description promises: both funny and tragic, it touches upon happiness, greed, revenge and more, putting all its themes within a spiraling tale that leads to an inevitable tragic conclusion. It's a good film, and much, much darker than its pleasant and cute animation style would indicate.
Nick Cross, who tied the knot with Marlo Meekins on 1 October, 2009, was born on August 17, 1971, in Brampton, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. A 1994 graduate of Sheridan College, where he studied illustration, he got his first job in the animation field in 1996, a field that he is still active in. He has a nice blog at which one can take a look at the various projects he has worked on.
On his own – as in not as part of a job – Cross is currently working on completing his first full-length animation film, and independent production entitled Black Sunrise. Going by the trailer embedded below – and by the quality of his past short films – it should be a truly interesting film once finished. A Wasted Life looks forward to the day it is finished – but until then, enjoy Yellow Cake, the Short Film of the Month for January 2012 here at A Wasted Life.

Trailer to Black Sunrise:

R.I.P.: James Farentino

James Farentino
February 24, 1938 – January 24, 2012

A career review shall follow shortly.

The Child (USA, 1977)

This late-career Harry Novak release, The Child – aka Zombie Child, Children of the Night and Kill and Go Hide – is an odd find indeed. A super-low-budget film – according to popular (and most likely true) legend, it was shot on short ends (that is, re-canned film stock leftover from other productions) – the film features a cast and crews of total unknowns, most of whom seem to lack any ability of note. For a film produced in the US with a fully US crew, the film has a surreally Italian feel: one could easily imagine that some Italotrash master – Bruno Mattei, for example – made it while on vacation in California, for it shares the unbelievably lousy post-dubbing, notably bad acting, inanely elliptical plot development and overall shoddy production common to so many of the Italo-trash horror films that were foisted upon the unsuspecting public as "American" productions during the Golden Age of Grindhouse. But no, The Child is a 100% Californian independent film by an American director – Robert Voskanian – who, like most people involved in the project, has never made another feature film since. (Scriptwriter Ralph Lucas, however, did supply the screenplay to Planet of Dinosaurs [trailer] the same year that he wrote The Child.)
On the University of Chicago website, the film is referred to as "a sublime Gothic classic." The terms "sublime," "Gothic" and "classic" are all extremely malleable and, actually, not necessarily wrong when talking about the film. Not only does narrative follow the traditional Gothic concept of a single woman without family who goes somewhere remote to tend the child of a family with a secret, but the film as a whole is sublimely bad and thus, likewise, is a true if under-appreciated classic of bad film.
But to say the last doesn't mean that the film has no redeeming qualities – some redeeming aspects of The Child are the noteworthy beauty of the lead actress, Laurel Barnett, and the transcendental surrealism that infuses more than one scene and some of the dialogue – it just means that the film needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt to be appreciated. Of course, it is possible that less salt is needed the better the quality of the film transfer; the quality of the DVD we viewed was wretchedly dark and murky, thus castrating the concept of "cinematography." But while a better transfer might make the film more visually pleasant, it won't improve the acting, and that is what perhaps does the film the most damage.
The Child, which seems to be set around 1940 in the middle of rural Buttfuck Nowhere, has a streamlined if somewhat schizophrenic and bizarre plot. A young woman named Alicianne (Laurel Barnett*) returns to the rural region of her birth to become the live-in housekeeper of an unpleasant, widowed farmer (Frank Janson) who lives with his mostly silent adult son Len (Richard Hanners) and his obnoxious pre-pubescent daughter Rosalie (Rosalie Cole). Rosalie is an anti-social loner with telekinetic powers whose only friends are the zombies inhabiting the nearby graveyard where her mother is buried; when the zombies aren't out and about eating animals in the woods, they do the bidding of their young friend and violently mutilate and kill those she feels are responsible for the death of her mother. This includes the slightly batty neighbor Mrs. Whitfield (Ruth Ballan), the thieving Asian gardener (Slosson Bing Jong) – whose presence would indicate that WW II had not yet started or was long over – and, eventually, her own father. Alicianne and Len try to escape, but end up trapped inside a nearby mill where Len valiantly tries to fend off the killer zombies as Alicianne collapses into a screeching, quivering and totally helpless mess...
Though the zombies are always lurking in the background throughout the whole movie, the first half definitely has a more supernatural and threatening feel, while the second half flips into 100% pure zombies on attack. Thus, the last half of the film definitely brings to mind the much more successful classic Night of the Living Dead (1968 / trailer / full film), which works in every way that The Child fails. To put it simply, Night is a good and scary film; The Child is not.
Although a roadkill of a movie lacking even one real scare, in the end The Child is also relatively difficult to totally hate for, as big of a fuck-up as the movie is, it is not entirely unredeeming: unfailingly grim, it also often achieves an unusually unreal otherworldliness and, as mentioned before, is likewise interspersed with some truly leftfield, totally bonker interludes, scenes and dialog that are undeniably memorable. The soundtrack "music", by computer-game music composer Rob Wallace, is likewise from outer space: it alternates between a relatively routine piano score and an excessively grating, atonal moog-dominated aural attack that brings to mind the worst of the "computer music" LPs once so prevalent in undiscerning, low-grade thrift shops.
The Child – another bizarre, bad film that should have been better than it is while simultaneously actually being better than it is. Fans of early gore – as in: no CGI – will definitely find the film satisfying, as will purveyors of cinema obscura. Everyone else might be well advised to watch something else... like the original Night of the Living Dead, perhaps.

*Laurel Barnett, by the way, contributed a piece on her experiences while filming The Child to the book Gods in Polyester, or, A Survivor's Account of 70s Cinema Obscura (Succubus Press / 2004). What she said, we know not, but it would surely be interesting to read...

The Locals (New Zealand, 2003)

We went into this unknown Kiwi flick with less than high expectations, assuming that it would simply be yet another body-count movie but populated by folks with nice accents. Soon enough, we came to think that it might instead be yet another low budget, community-of-backwood-psychos film ala 2008's Australian Dying Bread (trailer), which is populated by fewer nice accents... But somewhere along the way, we suddenly found ourselves no longer trying to second-guess the film's intentions and, instead, simply got lost in a relatively modest but clever (if flawed) and surprisingly well-made horror movie. True, an astute viewer can predict most of the twists in advance – especially if they have an eye for skin tone – but The Locals nevertheless manages to keep the viewer perched tensely in interest all the way to its memorable ending. Odd that the film is, to date, the only feature film of music video and commercial director Greg Page, who also wrote the script. (M. Night Shyamalan, for example, has managed to make a viable if no-longer-respected career out of making far more expensive and indefinitely worse "surprise ending" films.)
The Locals opens with a beautifully done aerial shot that glides across the fertile, green farmlands of rural New Zealand, inter-spaced with occasional shots of deserted, forlorn houses and the rusty carcasses of cars and machinery. Then a tractor rolls up to the edge of a wood and an armed man disembarks to begin digging up an unmarked grave, but before he can finish he is knifed from behind and falls dead in the shallow hole he has dug. After this rather eye-catching opening, The Locals moves to Auckland to introduce its two male leads, Grant (John Barker) and Paul (Dwayne Cameron) – and between the two, it's pretty easy to guess who the "Final Guy" will be.
Grant has been dumped by his squeeze for not like The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), and Paul manages to convince him to leave for a shared weekend of surfing somewhere on the Waikato Coast. At this point, the film almost begins to drag, but the interlude is needed to establish the depth of their friendship; in any event, just at the point when one begins to think "get on with it," night falls and the classic shortcut is taken – but plans for the beach get tossed aside with the sudden appearance of two girls, Kelly (Kate Elliott) and Lisa (Aidee Walker), both sporting oddly outdated outfits, who invite the lads to join then at a party. Before long, the girls are nowhere to be seen and the boys crash the car, forcing them to search for help. Instead, they witness a murder and suddenly find themselves on the run from the murderer and his gang of back-land thugs....
If the film does drag a tad initially, once the main bad guy Bill (Peter McCauley, also seen in Perfect Creature [2006 / trailer]) shows up the film takes off and tension and twists definitely increase. Grant and Paul quickly get separated: Paul loses his car keys but hooks up with Kelly and Lisa, while Grant is forced at gunpoint by a man named Martin (Paul Glover of The Ugly [1997 / trailer]) to finish digging up the grave seen at the start of the film. Between the various terrifying events they experience, it soon becomes very clear that the people of the area have remarkable regenerative powers...
The Locals never actually answers the question why those in that specific area of New Zealand keep coming back to life, but then, the film is not out to explain the supernatural but to present the supernatural, which it does successfully. Regrettably, it is hard to really talk about the film's slight narrative flaws without giving away too much of the plot, so we'll rest here by simply stating that there are some glaring illogicalities in the events that transpire, but the game cast, sure direction and constant movement manage to gloss over them well enough to keep the film gripping. The Locals also hides its modest budget well, and even manages to pull on the heart strings without becoming maudlin. In general the actors (particularly the younger ones) do a top job, and the direction is amazingly mature, occasionally even dipping into arty without ever becoming too obtrusive – the scene of Grant driving the car through the countryside close to the end, like the opening aerial shot, is particularly fine.
In the end, though dotted with the occasional horror shock, The Locals is less a dead-teenager or horror film than a supernatural suspense film. For a modern B-film, it is a bit light on the blood and violence, but at least both are effective when utilized. It might not be a masterpiece, but it does make for an enjoyable viewing – as such, The Locals is thus well worth giving a shot.

Ong Bak III (Thailand, 2010)

At least we now know the slim strand that connects Ong Bak I with Ong Bak II & III: the Buddha statue that has its head stolen in part one is actually made in part three. Well, at least the filmmakers (as in Tony Jaa & Panna Rittikrai) managed to interconnect the flicks to each other somehow, however tangently... But other than that, the less said about part three, probably the better. As abruptly and out of the blue as Ong Bak II ended, it was at least an exciting, enthralling and memorable film; with the exception of the first ten minutes, Ong Bak III is anything but exciting, enthralling and memorable, and very much feels and plays like, well, a disjointed religious tract and a stretched storyline.
If you happened to read the review to Ong Bak II here at A Wasted Life, then you know that we found the flick almost as good as a blowjob. But we also pointed out that the movie felt like a wanna-be epic that ran out of time and thus ended out of the blue. Ong Bak III, on the other hand, feels like a half-hour's worth of narrative that had to be stretched to fit the what seems like a ten-hour running time (in fact, it is only around two hours long – which is still about 1.5 hours too much).
Ong Bak III starts up more-or-less where Ong Bak II ends. Tien (Tony Jaa) is now a prisoner of the evil Lord Rajasena (Sarunyu Wongkrachang of 13: Game of Death [2006 / trailer]), who first has him beaten to pulp and then has every bone in his body broken. It is an intensely painful episode that is perhaps the most successful segment of the film, but nonetheless not at all enjoyable to watch. Before Tien can be put to death, however, a dues ex machina in the form of a messenger arrives with a pardon from the King and rides off with the near-dead Tien. Thereafter, for the rest of the film, most of the time when Tien shows up it is to lie around half-dead, feel miserable as a cripple, hug trees, straighten his bones and karma, and learn to dance before, finally, he takes part in the mandatory showdown. Almost any scene in which he is in up until the end is drawn out and numbingly dull. In-between, realizing that an action film needs some action, the filmmakers introduce the subplot of how Lord Rajasena is first slowly driven crazy by bad, karma-born nightmares and then deposed by one of his supernaturally evil henchmen, Bhuti Sangkha (Dan Chupong of Born to Fight / Kerd ma lui [1984 / Thai trailer], Dynamite Warrior / Khon fai bin [2006 / trailer], Muay Thai Giant / Somtum [2008 / trailer] and The Tsunami Warrior / Puen yai jon salad [2008 / Thai trailer]). More padding follows, and then the film finally ends peachy keen with happy, good Buddhists meditating in front of their statue, Ong Bak.
Ong Bak III suffers dreadfully due to the fact that the filmmakers seem to forget that they are making an action film and not a Buddhist tract. The occasional mondo highlight like a bodiless head lying in the dirt sputtering out curses or the cool nightmare sequences offer brief seconds of respite, but they do not make the film pass any quicker. The fight scenes of the subplot might be well staged, but they nevertheless come across as padding – as does 90% of the film. And as for the big showdown, it is so mind-bogglingly "what-the-fuck?!?" in such a bad way that the viewer really feels as if they're having the piss taken out of them. Normally in films like this the oft-laughable acting and bad wigs adds an endearing aspect, but that is not the case here, because when added to the non-existent drama and snail's pace narrative, it is all simply too much bad and not enough fun.
Ong Bak III is not just a disaster, it truly sucks feces. Imagine a Buddhist Jack Chick pamphlet with as many pages as Moby Dick and you can well imagine what this film feels like. Do you really want to do that to yourself?