Once in a while,
I like to pick out a pair of rarer titles from my film library, films I’ve been
sitting on for a while, films that seem to deserve a glimpse despite their
relative anonymity. It was just one of those nights, when I decided to indulge
in a very unlikely double bill: John R. Hand’s super-8 exploitation dazzler Frankenstein’s
Bloody Nightmare (2006) and fussy Canadian thriller Neverlost (2010). I’d been expecting miracles from the latter ever since Donato Totaro (an
old professor of mine) called it “one of the most tightly scripted and boldly
designed Canadian genre films since Vincenzo Natali’s Cube”, but I had never sat down to see it. I guess I was afraid
to find it lacking in either tightness or boldness. Being a fan of Cube, despite its clear inferiority to Natali’s later Splice, I could hardly bring myself to think that Chad Archibald’s oneiric
hodgepodge could surpass it. And I was right. Flawed if not outright
pretentious, Neverlost boasts far too pedestrian
aesthetics to adequately support its intricate, nearly metaphysical screenplay. That said, it would've greatly benefited from Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare’s
experimental feel, which itself is plagued by mundane narrative elements. In
the end, I found that each of the two films possessed the exact qualities that
the other was lacking. Unfortunately, seeing them back to back didn’t help them
merge into something more meaningful than what they are individually.
Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare
From what I can
ascertain from the obscure mumblings of the protagonist and the synopsis
provided on the DVD’s back cover, the premise of Frankenstein’s Bloody
Nightmare concerns the good doctor’s efforts to
rejuvenate his dying girlfriend by harvesting human parts with the help of a
monstrous automaton. Being an experimental film in
nature, its narrative tenets are actually not that important. In fact, they often prove
detrimental to our enjoyment, as they justify some truly abominable exposition
scenes featuring the atrocious dubbing of all onscreen characters. Personally, I believe that the use of dialogue greatly lessens the film's efficiency. Not only is it
fragmented and annoying, but it ruins the otherworldly quality of the images,
which continually elevate the mundane locales and characters to a level of
artistry unmatched by the vast majority of similarly budgeted efforts. The
grainy film stock, saturated colors, moody lighting and crafty visual effects
hence vie to create a mesmerizing impressionistic landscape that instills
horror in our very soul. Unfortunately, the protagonist’s shrill voice often
cuts through that thick impressionistic fog to forward some useless narrative
information. And that is the film’s greatest failing. Aside from that, I was
entirely satisfied with my experience, which reminded me equally of 1970s
American exploitation and the cinema of Shojin Fukui, complete with all their frankly disturbing undertones and undeniable cult potential.
3/5
 |
| Otherworldly colors and grainy stock help transcend the film's mundane decors and situations. |
Neverlost
Opposite of Frankenstein’s Bloody
Nightmare is Neverlost, a shockingly mundane “alternate universe” thriller in dire need of
the former film’s experimental quality. Plagued by both college aesthetics and a college mentality, the film features a plain protagonist called Josh Higgins, whose endless lumbering around the diminutive scenery proves not only redundant, but quite uninvolving given his abrasive teenage mindset. Obsessed with his dead high school sweetheart, who perished
in a shady house fire years ago, he has now settled down with a curvy, but
bitchy new girlfriend, whom he obviously doesn’t like. Josh doesn't like his new life either, plagued as he his by a spell of insomnia that prevents his daily escape into dreams. Only when he is prescribed a potent sleeping
drug does he finally manage to sleep, only to wake up next
to dead ex Kate, miraculously restored to life by the power of screenwriting.
From then on, it’s back and forth between the “real” world of binding
domesticity and the “nostalgic” world of carefree love in which the cause of the
deadly house fire is finally revealed.
The premise and story structure are quite intriguing here, but they're sunk by all the usual suspects, boring decors, simplistic characterization and a seemingly tacked-on sub-plot featuring Kate's father. As for its greatest flaw, one that nearly brings the film to the level of infamy, it lies in some jaw-dropping gender representation. For the umpteenth time, we are thus given the
binary opposition between the “good” and the “bad” woman, understood almost
directly as the Christian opposition between Mary and Jezebel. One is blonde
and kind, flawless in her reverence to the male hero while the other is
dark-haired and rebellious, the direct source of the male hero’s angst. Even
the decors play to this Christian split as Josh’s current apartment is
stuffy and cluttered contrary to his dream house with Kate, which is vast and luminous. Such idiotic iconography is matched only by the idiotic nature of the
hero’s nostalgia, who constantly wallows in self-pity and ascribes both his former bliss and his current woe strictly to his girlfriends, thus reducing the entire experience of manhood to that of amorous relationships.
In the end, it is all of Chad Archibald's screenwriting prowess that is marred by dubious iconography, making his first feature film a sophomoric metaphysical essay at best. At the risk of being impaled by Mr. Totaro and other advocates of the film, I will even say that I found Antisocial (2013), which he wrote and produced, to be a step up from this lame effort, certainly not as original in narrative terms, but certainly more timely and relevant as a whole.
1.5/5
 |
| Happiness is white linens and a blonde bride? Get real, Chad... |
