This year’s Tribeca Film Festival was the biggest yet in my hometown New York, the fest showing over 150 movies playing in 17 different theaters throughout the city. Of course, me being a journalist for our beloved Arrow in the Head, I got to skip the 3 hour foreign films and documentaries about mildew and went straight for the horror. The result was being exposed to some little gems that we’ll be hearing alot about in the near future.
MULBERRY STREET
Directed by Jim Mickle
Written by Jim Mickle and Nick Damici
Rat-people. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live… well, you just can’t live with ‘em (and us New Yorkers will put up with a lot). The best movie I saw at the fest, and the one most likely to collect a fervent fanbase, MULBERRY STREET is a sober and very intense flick that’s about 10 times better than you’d expect from a movie about a rat-induced zombie plague that breaks out in New York.
The lead character, Clutch (nobly played by co-scribe Nick Damici), a tough-guy with a big heart, anxiously awaits his daughter’s return from Iraq, when anoutbreak of bizarre rat-attacks begins to sweep over the city. Unexplained, but still frightening, the bitten undergo a nasty transformation into a slobbering, pointy-toothed rat person, and the city is soon hell on earth, with an unknown number of uninfected hiding in their tenements (this is very convincingly portrayed through news and radio reports, as we’re basically watching the chaos through the eyes of Clutch and a handful of his neighbors). Meanwhile, Clutch’s daughter Casey (Kim Blair), now a hardened, scarred veteran, has only just gotten back to her home, and is immediately, hopelessly, plunged into a chaos not far removed from the one she just left.
The influence of George Romero is easily felt in MULBERRY STREET, not so much for the zombie hordes with a taste for blood (although there’s that too), but because of its allegorical, subversive nature (the War, September 11, and Hurricane Katrina haunt the proceedings – although not heavy-handedly). It also has a flair for the darkly comic (the funniest bits involve the seen-it-all New Yorkers’ almost deadpan acceptance of the situation), and a tendency to simultaneously disturb and thrill with its grisly violence. It’s the first post-9/11 cannibalistic-rat-zombie movie, and it’s a must-see.
8 out of 10
BLACK SHEEP
Written and Directed by Jonathon King
Like MULBERRY STREET’s irrepressibly wacky cousin from overseas, Jonathon King’s BLACK SHEEP shares a similar plot-hook yet precious little else in terms of tone, characterization, and resonance. That’s okay though, it’s just a good ‘ol comedy about killer sheep, after all.
A slimy farmer is performing genetic experiments on his sheep with the help of some shady scientists, and on the day his sheep-phobic brother returns home after a 15 year absence, some bumbling environmentalists accidentally release a toxic mutant-sheep upon the flock, turning them into an organized army of pissed off sheep with a hankering for human flesh. Oh, and the people who get bitten and survive don’t last very long before growing wool and saying “baaaaaaahhh ”
BLACK SHEEP’s biggest claim to fame so far has been the fact that its special make-up effects were done by King’s fellow New Zealander Peter Jackson’s WETA team, and Jackson’s influence on the project is obvious beyond that: the film’s offbeat, juvenile humor (not juvenile in the sense of sophomoric, but in the sense that there’s almost an adolescent innocence to it), the murky interiors, the quirky music (and let’s not forget a disgusting/hilarious attack scene straight out of DEAD-ALIVE) all smack of early Jackson. Predictably, the sheep are more entertaining than the human characters, who are just barely charming enough to survive jokes and puns that would make a kindergartner roll their eyes.
Overall, I’m not predicting huge cult status along SHAUN OF THE DEAD lines, but it’s light-hearted and diverting enough… Let’s just say it will amuse people who like to giggle while watching a sheep eat off a businessman’s face… I know there are many of you out there.
7 out of 10
THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES
Written and Directed by John Erick Dowdle
“Throughout the 1990s, a serial killer terrorized upstate New York. After a decade-long crime spree conducted largely under the radar of law enforcement, the killer left behind the most disturbing collection of evidence homicide detectives had ever seen hundreds of homemade videotapes that chronicle the stalking, abduction, murder, and disposal of his victims.”
… or so pretends THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, a faux-documentary in the Errol Morris vein – charting the “Water Street Butcher’s” reign of horror – complete with talking heads, dramatic re-enactments, maps, charts, dreamy music, beautiful aerial shots, and of course, the raison d’etre – the footage itself, which is comprised mostly of a tied-up girl whimpering and gasping while her masked captor instructs her to call him “master,” and do some unspeakable things.
The film isn’t particularly violent, a lot more happens off-camera than on. That said, some of the footage is skin-crawlingly disturbing, as in one scene where the killer stalks around the house of a teenage girl, spying on her and her boyfriend. The sequence plays out exactly like a slasher film, from the killer’s P.O.V., and while the concept isn’t exactly brand new, there’s a real creepiness at work (especially when he hides in the closet). Another queasy scene has two girl scouts innocently visiting his home, and perhaps the most chilling involves him playing police officer and giving a stranded woman a ride. The culmination of this is sure to send hands flying over faces.
It may sound exploitive, and of course, it is, but there’s no getting around the fact that the tapes are the best thing about this movie, as the fake professors, criminologists, detectives and grieving parents all feel forced and inauthentic.
7 out of 10
UNEARTHED
Written and Directed by Matthew Leutwyler
I’m a big fan of monster movies, always have been. I even like those Sci Fi channel efforts that get churned out every single friggin’ week. Matthew Leutwyler is obviously a fan of monster movies too, as his UNEARTHED seems to be utterly beholden to every convention of the genre. In fact, the movie takes care of business so dutifully and humorlessly that it forgets to inject much fun. It’s like a stuffy businessman checking off his daily planner, nodding sternly at every requirement satisfied before moving on…
An obsessed archeologist (Luke Goss) “unearths” artifacts from a long-vanished tribe, and discovers, much to his chagrin, that the drought always thought responsible was not the reason for its extinction, but rather, it was a alien worshiped as god. Unfortunately, at the same time the buried creature – the love child of an H.R. Giger drawing and one of those creatures from ALONE IN THE DARK – wakes up and begins attacking the various cliched characters unlucky enough to be within its proximity: the sheriff with an ugly past, the smart-alecky black guy (a curiously unanimated, underused Charlie Murphy), the wise old Native American, the blond babes on their way to Hollywood, and random others who have to navigate their way through the dark desert.
What I’m leaving out is pages upon pages of exposition and back story detailing the alien’s history: its love-hate relationship with the dead tribe, the complicated measures that are necessary to kill it etc. It spends endless minutes explaining all this, and the more it was explained, the less I understood.. The movie mistakes our interest in all this information, while we’re just waiting impatiently for another blurry, hard-to-make-out monster attack. UNEARTHED isn’t terrible, it just fails to inject anything new in this old song, and has an all-too-serious attitude. If you demand nothing more than the bare minimum of inventiveness and spirit, then you might have an adequate time.
5 out of 10
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