Short Film: Harvey (Australia, 2002)

No 6-foot-tall invisible white rabbit here. Harvey is the name of the man down the hall, peeking through his mail slot... 

This obscure short Australian student film, entitled Harvey, was written and directed by Peter McDonald, who seems never to have done anything else since this brief excursion into the deeper backwaters of Lynchville. Clocking in at a little less than ten minutes, the surreal and disturbing film is less a full narrative than a series of related vignettes telling a disquieting tale of loneliness, desire, obsession, love, hate and loss.
Nudity and blood abound in shadow-drenched B&W when the lonely Harvey (Nicholas Hope of the equally odd Bad Boy Bubby [1993 / trailer] and, somewhere, the turkey Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid [2004 / trailer]), who is seriously less than a full man, decides he needs his female neighbor (Lisa Angove) to make him a complete person. Director McDonald took full advantage digital compositing technologies when he made his film, and the effects hold up remarkably well even today.
Harvey isn't exactly a film you want to show your kids, and while some of the visuals could even be disturbing for adults I figure that if you're here at A Wasted Life you should know what to expect. Virtually silent with an oddly creepy background melody, Harvey is an intensely symbolic film – enough so to be labeled an art horror film.
So whatever happened to Peter McDonald? Hard to believe that someone who creates a film so weird, so one-of-a-kind, so unique has never gone on to do something else...

 

Soylent Green (USA, 1973)

OK, we'll admit it: there are films out there that we here at a wasted life have problems watching simply because of the creative personalities involved. We really find it difficult to watch a Leni Riefenstahl (22 Aug 1902 – 9 Sept 2003) film, be it one she made or one she acted in, without feeling repulsed by the fact that we're being mesmerized and amazed by an unapologetic major player in the propaganda machine of the Third Reich and a close friend of Adolph Hitler – hell, had he but snapped his fingers, she probably would have given him a blowjob with feeling. (Who knows, maybe she did.) Likewise, Lex Barker (8 may 1919 – 11 May 1973) sort makes us feel nauseous: We can't see a film he's in without thinking "That child molester!" (See: Crane, Cheryl: Detour (1988), pp. 182–187.) If he did it once, he surely did it again – and that concept sort of makes even his six-pack repulsive. And then there's Charlton Heston, a liberal in his youth who became a brain-boiled and vocal right-wing conservative once he got too old to get an erection; it's hard to watch any of his films – even the more than occasional classic he took part in – without feeling at least an occasional pang of disdain and disgust.

 

Trailer to

 Soylent Green:

But who are we to let personal opinions get in the way of our viewing choices – particularly when it comes to viewing a new release of one of Chuck's three seminal science fiction films. Alongside the original Planet of the Apes (1968 / trailer) and Omega Man (1971 / trailer), Soylent Green is without a doubt one of the highlights of the twilight of the man's career as a headlining box-office draw. (Many people also see Return to the Planet of the Apes [1970 / trailer] as additional highlight, but aside from the fact that film starred more of James Franciscus's sweaty and leanly muscular torso than it did the aging and bad-toothed Heston, the film is way too fanatical to be any good – we can't watch the flick without thinking that Bin Laden would probably do the same thing they do at the end of the film today, too, if he could.*)

* This review was written before he was supposedly killed and his body was flown to Afghanistan for burial at sea. As we all know, Afghanistan has such nice beaches.

Soylent Green is rumored to be on its way to remake hell, so a second viewing seems in order – especially since the first (and last) time we saw it was the year it came out, way back before we even knew what men and women really do when they take a shower together naked.

What can we say but that the film has aged well and is still as good as we remembered it to be...

Loosely based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, Soylent Green is set in the distant future of 2022 NYC in a world where the greenhouse effect has long burnt the world brown, progress has bled the world dry, and mankind has played bunny rabbit to the point of total overpopulation – a point well conveyed in what is probably one of the best opening credit sequences ever made: a 2-minute long masterpiece of editing and montage created by Chuck Braverman. In 2022, fresh food is a luxury of the rich, as is running water, cigarettes, electricity, clean clothes and virtually everything else we of the western world take for granted today...

Of course, the 2022 in Soylent Green looks remarkably retro now: when they made the film, the now-dead director Richard Fleischer (the son of Max Fleischer and the director of Conan the Destroyer [1984 / trailer], Mandingo [1975 / trailer], The Boston Strangler [1968 / trailer], Fantastic Voyage [1966 / trailer], Compulsion [1959 / trailer], 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [1954 / trailer] and The Narrow Margin [1952 / trailer] – to name but a few of his better films) went for a future-like-now look, but now the now-look of the film is already almost 40 years old. But this outdated look rather helps, for Soylent Green is as much a dystopian science fiction film as it is a crime thriller, and the oddly retro look of the film suits the detective aspect well.

Likewise, Fleischer never gets to flashy or too staid in his direction, and instead simply keeps the film moving smoothly and quickly along, pausing only long enough to occasionally offer embellishments that assist in making the world and events more believable and tragic, making the events hit closer to the bone, making the given character more fleshed out. OK, the blood does look incredibly fake even for the 70s, and the night-time streets and alleys are oddly noirishly empty for a world in which stairwells are overcrowded with sleeping itinerants and cars are used as homes, but the film is so involving and enthralling that such flaws are easily overlooked. Particularly critical folks might bitch that the film has absolutely no special effects, but hell, it really doesn't need them.

Charlton "Spare the gun, spoil the child" Heston does an exceptionally effective and believable job playing Thorne, a typically overworked and corrupt but also observant and intelligent cop sent to investigate the murder of a retired businessman named William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten of Citizen Cane [1941 / trailer], The Third Man [1949 / trailer], Lady Frankenstein [1971 / trailer / full film] and Guyana: Cult of the Damned [1979 / trailer], amongst others). Thorne is assisted at home by his roommate research assistant Sol (E. G. Robinson of Key Largo [1948 / trailer], The Stranger [1946 / full film], Scarlet Street [1945 / full film], The Woman in the Window [1944 / trailer] and many other classics, in his last film role), and though they bicker like a couple heading for divorce their deep friendship is apparent.

Over the course of his investigations Thorne ends up developing feelings for the "furniture" named Shirl at Simonson's apartment (a delectable Leigh Taylor-Young of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!* [1968 / trailer] and Looker [1981 / trailer]) and becomes convinced that Simonson was not killed in a bungled robbery but assassinated. And ain't it odd that Simonson’s bodyguard/chauffeur Tab (Chuck Connors of Tourist Trap [1979] and The Butterfly Revolution [1987 / trailer]) can afford to buy his furniture Martha (Paula Kelly of Cool Breeze [1972 / trailer], Tough Guys [1974 / trailer] and Drum [1976 / trailer]) 150-dollar jars of strawberry jam?
* Go here for the real recipe for Alice B. Toklas fudge, not brownies. It tastes great!

When Thorne asks too many questions, he gets told by his boss Chief Hatcher (Brock Peters of Slaughter's Big Rip-Off [1973 / trailer] and To Kill a Mockingbird [1962 / trailer]) to lay off the case, but that only makes Thorne more determined to find out the truth, especially after someone tries to kill him. Sol, however, is the first to discover the truth, and realizing that he can no longer live in the world as it is, he decides to "go home," a euphemism for taking advantage of the state-supplied and -assisted suicide services. Thorne arrives too late to save his friend, but for the first time in his life he sees (on film) the beauty the world once was.

And then, Thorne decides to find out what exactly happens to the body...

Soylent Green: a classic sci-fi detective film from the 70s, intelligent and well-made, thought-provoking and intriguing, that remains ageless even as it ages. Well worth watching if you have not yet seen it, and well worth watching again if you have...

[REC]2 (Spain, 2009)

The curse of the sequel strikes again: a very good film begets a very crappy one.
Not that, per se, there is really that big of a difference between part one ([REC]) and part two ([REC]2), the latter which starts within moments of the end of the former, but seldom has a film proven itself so pointless, so unnecessary, so obviously an attempt to simply milk more money from the success of the first than [REC]2. With two more follow-up films in the planning – parts 3 ([REC] Genesis) and 4 ([REC] Apocalypse) – Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's [REC] franchise seems on its way to becoming the least-needed and disappointingly uninteresting viral-evil franchise since Paul W.S. Anderson's money-making but dreadfully uninteresting Resident Evil franchise, a franchise that likewise began with an unexpectedly interesting first film – Resident Evil (2002 / trailer) – and then devolved into pointless idiocy quicker than the average American (North, Central and South) loses an international geography quiz.
[REC]2 is very much the Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) to Piranha (1978 / trailer), the Alligator II: The Mutation (1991 / trailer) to Alligator (1980 / trailer), the An American Werewolf in Paris (1997 / trailer) to An American Werewolf in London (1981 / trailer), the Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995 / trailer) to Candyman (1992 / trailer), the Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977 / trailer) to The Exorcist (1973 / trailer), the Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985 / trailer) to The Howling (1981 / trailer), the The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985 / trailer) to The Hills Have Eyes (1977 / trailer). In other words, [REC]2 fails in any way to be even a smidgen as interesting as the film that inspired it, and really should have been entitled Been There, Done That instead of [REC]2. (To give credit where credit is due, however, some of the previously mentioned crappy sequels are at least laughably enjoyable; [REC]2 isn't even that.)
Balagueró, like Stephan King, never misses the chance to add even the most banal indication of the supernatural, so possibly taking the cue from the numerological fun of King's 1408 (2007 / trailer), [REC]2 starts exactly – GASP!! – 13 minutes after the end of the extremely effective part one. (OK, that the film starts 13 minutes later could be just the imagination of the reviewer over at Arrow in the Head, but I for one find the film, as a whole, so half-assed that the concept becomes believable.)
Now, however, instead of a bubbly bonkable babe with enough of a prior introduction to provide a core character to care for (and a variety of other quickly dead fodder that are at least given some introduction and likable traits), we just get a bunch of interchangeable SWAT team members and a doctor/priest with a broomstick up his ass. And instead of one camera to supply the disorienting but at least centralized Blair Witch eye, we get 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 different cameras to jump around between – the result is less disorientation than total confusion and, eventually, a headache and total alienation. By the time [REC]2 finally ends, the retinal relief felt makes one as happy as one is pissed at having wasted one's time on such a piece of cinematic mierda.
Halfway through the film, Balagueró and Plaza seemed to have realized that the small group of SWAT members was decimating much too quickly and that more fodder was needed, so they came up with an additional five dead-to-be, three of which are pulled into the story from so far out of the left field that it would have made about as much sense (and been equally believable) to simply beam half of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise into the story.
And the result of adding more fodder? More running around and attacks and blood and virally infected, all in the exact same manner of the first film; without an iota of the audience's sympathy, however, it all becomes boring and disinteresting, if not simply aggravating.
[REC]2 does clarify a few things from the first film. The priest that supposedly headed for the hills after creating the virus is revealed to have never left the house: he drops into the picture at one point in a highly dead and mummified form. The boy in the attic, seen for all of five seconds in the first film, proves to be but one of many: the mummy priest seems to have had a whole trove of pre-pubescent kiddies in his attic as playthings – er, I mean, as lab rats – and they don't just inhabit the attic, but the air ducts as well (an architectural feature I don't think I've ever seen in an old multi-floor European apartment house before).
Oh yeah: [REC]2 also introduces a new aspect which is surely to be of importance in parts 3 and 4: the evil is more than just a viral form of possession, it is also a worm-thing that can inhabit the body – sort of like the mother cockroach in They Nest (2000 / trailer). That three-second scene is perhaps the only truly effective money shot of the film, but by the time it happens you really don't give flying fuck anyway.
Unlike, say, with Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978 / trailer) or Cameron's Aliens (1986 / trailer) or Robocop II (1990 / trailer) or Blade II (2002 / trailer) or Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981 / trailer) or Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987 / trailer) or even Final Destination II (2003 / trailer), Balagueró and Plaza do very little in way of trying to make [REC]2 stand alone as a film with personality of its own: for all intents and purposes, it is a simple and uncreative regurgitation of part one, but without most of the non-visceral features that made part one work so well such as all character-introducing aspects (or even characters) or unpredictability. If you've seen part one, part two is unnecessary in all respects; it's a bit like drinking, say, a glass of Paul Masson after a nice glass of Reserva – theoretically, both wines are made from grapes, but the same ingredients simply don't amount to the same final result.
[REC]2 is a film made for the brain dead, the undiscerning and easily pleased, for those who think a regurgitated steak and lobster with a side of Cheez Whiz is the culinary highlight of the world. [REC]2: to be avoided at all costs – unlike the film that preceded it, [REC], which is unadulterated steak and lobster without any Cheez Whiz.

Doghouse (UK, 2009)

After stumbling badly with Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes (2006 / trailer), director Jake West returns to the horror comedy genre with Doghouse, and though the film never reaches the same delirious and gore-drenched heights as Evil Aliens (2005 / trailer), Doghouse is definitely a step back in the right direction and mostly a lot of fun.
A bunch of blokes – or is that lads? – get together to help one of their own regain his joie de vivre following his divorce. Vince (Stephen Graham of Snatch [2000 / trailer]), it seems, has been in the dumps since his ex-wife divorced him. Neil (Danny Dyer of Severance [2006 / trailer]) organizes a trip to the town of Moodley where women should outnumber men 4 to 1 and Mikey (Noel Clarke of Centurium [2010 / trailer]) has an aunt at whose house they can crash. The plan, as Neil puts it, is: "When we get to the country, we are gonna piss up all the trees to mark our territory, then we are gonna find a pub and get so drunk we can't remember how to speak, and we'll communicate in grunts like Neanderthals, before passing out in the woods!"
All the lads seem to have with less than stellar relationships with their gals (with the exception of the happy lad Graham [Emil Marwa], who has less than stellar relations with his [obvious] bottom other half), but luckily the aspect of all the significant others is simply used for some introductory humor and not dwelt upon again after it serves as an expedient later on to have everyone leave their mobile phones in the van.
The chartered van from West Tours (as in "Jake West," the director) driven by the sexy driver Candy/Ruth (Christina Cole of Surviving Evil [2010 / trailer] and The Deaths of Ian Stone [2007 / trailer]) shows up and off it is to the middle of fucking nowhere. Once in Moodley, the lads head off to the local pub of the oddly deserted town for a beer, but before long they come to realize that all the women in the town have mutated into murderous, man-eating zombies – "Zombirds" – and, having killed all other men in town, now have their sights on the interlopers. The guys head for the van, but Candy has gone zombird, too, and with no way to escape they must fight for their survival. (That she even goes zombird is a flaw in the story: it is revealed somewhere along the line that the chemical agent causing the mutation requires extended dosage over time and is not viral – and therefore not in the air – so Candy's changeover after simply entering town is illogical.)
Yes, Doghouse is funny despite its overt misogyny and occasionally noticeable dislike of women, an accusation that the film could have easily avoided simply by making its lads – especially Neil – a tad less obviously sexist and so totally disrespectful of woman – although, let's face it: we men do often talk like that when alone on the range. (In the same vein, with the exception of Candy, who is actually the funniest [and sexiest] lad of the lot until she changes over, all the non-zombie women – the various significant others – are spectacular bitches.* Good for a laugh, perhaps, but a tad one-sided... although, keeping Graham in mind, one could argue that it is less women who are pains than simply "significant others" as a whole.)
The gore is present but low in comparison to the almost baroque excesses of Evil Aliens, which was, in comparison to Doghouse, extremely equal opportunity in the direction of its jokes, but for that there is still enough body fluids and visceral to satisfy the average gorehound. The group of friends does lack certain credibility – perhaps they might once upon a time have been friends, but they are too broad in type and thoroughly different to conceivably still be best buds that still enjoy each other's company – but were the group not so large and wide, there would have been far fewer jokes to laugh about. Every introduction of a new zombird, stereotypes one and all, but for Candy, is also good for a cheap laugh of recognition, and not always due to sexist or misogynist reasons. On the whole, however, the film leaves the feeling that it could have been so much more, been so much better, been so much funnier.
Doghouse particularly loses steam at the end: pretty much once Vince gives his (in the eyes of every man, truth-based) rant about sexist assholes and women, Doghouse begins to fall apart, and the ending is both forced and mildly groan-inducing. Luckily, however, up until then the visual gags and dialog and situation comedy are often and fast enough to make one's beer and the film flow quickly and easily. But unlike Evil Aliens or even the far less mean-spirited Shawn of the Dead (2004 / trailer) or the ten times gorier and funnier goldie-oldie Brain Dead aka Dead Alive (1992 / trailer), you probably won't find yourself thinking "Gee, I really want to see that again!"

* With the exception of the one-night stand Neil tactlessly disses and dumps at the start of the film – she is less a bitch than justifiably enraged.