A Coen Brothers Cross-Section: A Later Peak

I’m nearly out of Coen Brothers movies in my collection, and that means my deliberately incomplete cross-section of their work is nearly done. I’ve covered some of their early breakthroughs and their first really big peak, now it’s time to cover their second peak from the mid-2000s.

No Country For Old Men

One day whilst hunting in a remote spot in West Texas, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) encounters a bizarre sight – a circle of pickup trucks, with corpses scattered around them. Investigating, it becomes apparent that he’s stumbled across the sight of some sort of organised crime rendezvous gone horribly wrong; the slain men died clutching their weapons in the midst of a hideous firefight. Tracking down the one that got away, Moss finds him having bled out under a tree where he’d sought shelter, along with the thing he fled with – a thick briefcase stuffed with cash.

Moss thinks he’s got it made – just leave with the suitcase and there’s nothing to connect him to the incident, at least as far as any law enforcement investigation is concerned. Yet his conscience tickles him – for there was one survivor left at the crime scene, too wounded and incoherent to walk or drive away, begging him for water. Moss makes the fatal error of returning to the scene with water – only to find that the survivor is dead, and to get himself spotted at the scene by some interested parties. The backers of that deal want their money back – and to get it they hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a hitman who unleashes all the hideous violence he is capable of for the sake of finishing the job – beginning by killing his employers so he can ultimately keep the cash for himself. Is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) equal to the task of taking down Chigurh? Has the modern world become too depraved for Bell’s folksy values? Or is it the case that the American West has been haunted by generations of cyclical violence, that facing it is a young man’s game, and this is No Country For Old Men?

Folk Horror Festival Part 6 – Dooms From Down Under

It’s time for another episode for my ongoing trawl through All the Haunts Be Ours, Severin’s massive compilation of internationally-sourced folk horror obscurities. The first time around, I touched on Alison’s Birthday, an Australian piece which is a big load of early 1980s cheesy nonsense – entertaining, for sure, but perhaps not in the manner intended. However, the Australians aren’t out of the game yet! There’s no less than three other Australian offerings here, all of them from 1988-1989; will any of them turn out better than Alison’s Birthday did?

Kadaicha

A high school girl dreams of a mysterious Aboriginal figure, who presses a crystal painted with esoteric patterns into her hands – as she realises to her horror that the flesh has been stripped from his face, leaving a gruesome skeletal visage. The next day, she and her friends learn in class about the lore of the Kadaicha stone – a traditional Aboriginal curse, entailing a shaman passing a crystal to the intended victim. Gosh! Could this mysterious stone from out of a dream, in fact, be the mysterious stone of folklore? And could it unleash a fairly generic series of Poltergeist-esque phenomena with occasional Aboriginal aesthetic touches and more appearances from the shaman? If you have seen literally any horror movie, you know the answer to all those questions is “of fucking course”.

This is, shall we say, one of the shakier offerings in the set. Despite being a fairly recent piece – it’s from 1988 – Severin weren’t able to get a nice source than a rather murky-looking 4:3 aspect ratio version intended for TV broadcast, and it looks like that was on VHS. It basically mashes up a Nightmare On Elm Street-esque inciting incident (figure who has been the target of communal violence appears in high schooler’s dream, hijinks ensue) before settling into being a Poltergeist-alike, right down to having the exact same backstory (modern homes get built on indigenous population’s burial ground, hijinks ensue).

Whilst this does at least engage with the Elm Street idea of the crimes of the past being avenged on a new generation, it still entails presenting Aboriginal figures and culture as a source of horror. This can be pulled off with nuance – Clearcut in this very set did it masterfully – but this is just cheesy and simplistic enough to make that unlikely.

The overall effect is a lot like Alison’s Birthday – same general area and time period, same Neighbours-tier acting – with added racial tension and colonial themes. That’s no surprise, because it was written by Ian Coughlan, the writer-director of Alison’s Birthday; in that, he at least avoided doubling down on colonialist racism, and in fact arguably offered a critique of colonialism by having the evil be a cult originating in Europe and coming to Australia to do their evil in peace and quiet Down Under. Here, alas, he grabs the high-voltage power line running through Australian history and goes and gets himself electrocuted.

The film’s poor state of preservation also means that what you get here has very shaky picture quality and a near-constant audio hiss which makes it difficult to follow some of the dialogue. This is the first feature film in the set that I simply couldn’t get into; Alison’s Birthday is at least funny, but this is too shoddily presented for me to derive any amusement value from.

The Murphiad, Part 6: 2004-2015

Here we come to the end of the story of Michael J. Murphy, micro-budget filmmaker extraordinaire who started out knocking out amateur productions for personal gratification in the 1970s, broke into the home video market, navigated the shady world of distribution, and had reached a peak by the late 1980s and early 1990s. The years running up to 1999 were a little patchier, in part because of a perhaps misguided decision to shoot the Tristan and Iseult legend for a third time, but there was every reason to expect that he’d continue into the 2000s working on much the same basis as he had previously.

It was not to be. Disaster struck in 2001, when the master material from Skare disappeared after being popped in the post to get developed. Cutting corners wherever he could, as was his instinct, Murphy had just put it in the ordinary post without tracking, a blunder which changed the entire course of his career. Having lost some £10,000 on the venture – a sum it would take him much of the next decade to make good – and sorely disappointed the cast and crew on that production, Murphy was deeply embarrassed and hurt by this setback, and it would not be until 2004 that he’d find his way to recovering his mojo…

Roxi

Roxi (Mary-Anne Barlow) is the much younger new wife of business tycoon Charles Logan (Jeff Lovelock); she spends her days in a beautiful Greek tourist town, operating a bar named for her, whilst Charles jets around the world. Charles has a son by his previous marriage, Sean (Ross Maxwell), who’s not much younger than Roxi. Sean and Roxi have never met – he’d been a little estranged from his father, having been raised by his mother (June Blake) and then traumatised when she died five years ago in what the police wrote up as a burglary gone wrong. Now, however, all that is about to change, with Roxi expecting Sean to accompany Charles the next time he comes to Greece. However, when the day comes Sean is all on his own, saying that Charles no-showed at the airport.

Sean suggests that Charles is just being selfish and letting his business plans take priority over his family yet again; Roxi theorises that Charles ghosted them on purpose so Roxi and Sean can get to know each other without him around. Well, maybe that’s wishful thinking on her part. She certainly isn’t sad to see Sean swanning about the house shirtless – and is more than keen to get hands-on about applying some sunscreen to him, and getting him to return the favour.

However, there’s something just a bit off about Sean. It’s perhaps no surprise that in unguarded moments he is bothered by flashes of his mother’s gruesome fate… but his mood swings certainly suggest he’s not processed that well. And why does he have these vivid intrusive thoughts or dreams centred around harming Roxi? Why, for that matter, does Sean deliberately pretending to be much drunker than he is when they go out drinking? Where is Charles? The answers to these questions may be a matter of life and death for Roxi…

The Murphiad, Part 2: 1980-1982

Last time we dipped into the deep bench of work left behind by micro-budget director extraordinaire Michael J. Murphy, we went on a quick tour of his surviving work from the 1970s (and some fragments hailing from even earlier), much of which would have been simply impossible to find prior to Powerhouse releasing Magic, Myth & Mutilation, a comprehensive full-career retrospective.

Now let’s plunge deeper into that boxed set and tackle Murphy’s work from the early 1980s. Here, we’re starting to enter the realm of projects which more than a tiny few might have actually seen before, because at least one production from this era got picked up in the home video boom and got more exposure than any of Murphy’s other early works…

The Cell

In medieval times, a condemned man (Russell Hall) is imprisoned, accused of being a serial killer – though he insists on his innocence, naturally. On the night before his execution, his jailer (Michael J. Murphy) lets a prostitute (Carol Aston) into his cell, the local tradition permitting a final conjugal visit. The prisoner is not interested in her services, so they talk, and she becomes convinced that he is innocent. Moved by his story, she is determined to help him – but the jailer won’t let her out of the cell until the morning…

This is a short film that was actually constructed as one. The 1970s movies I covered last time mostly have runtimes of 50-odd minutes – Secrets being an exception at 88 minutes – though it is perhaps tricky to tell how long those were meant to last; the movies this time around, aside from this one, also have runtimes in that under-an-hour range, but we can be more confident that they are in more or less complete forms.

This one, by comparison, comes in at a lean 14 minutes, and benefits from it – it’s basically a small character-driven piece, elevated by how well Murphy and the gang are able to realise its atmosphere through low-budget costume and set design. It’s got the same sort of “medieval costume by way of LARP gear” aesthetic which Tristan and Iseult had and which put me in mind of Hawk the Slayer when I watched that, and perhaps the passage of time meant current tastes started to align with the style of Murphy’s historicals and fantasies.

Indeed, it’s with The Cell that Murphy started to actually get some recognition outside of his immediate social circle – it got a four-star award from Movie Maker magazine, a UK periodical aimed at the amateur filmmaking hobby, a pastime which Murphy was likely one of the most advanced practitioners of.

Murphy himself appears more prominently on-camera than we’ve seen him before, and his performance is a bit hokier – though as the jailer it’s not a central role, and he does manage to get across an air of sleaziness. There’s a bit where he tells the prostitute that if she has trouble with the prisoner, she can call him in and he’d finish the job, and it’s genuinely unclear whether he means he’d fuck her or the prisoner, so if you’re looking for LGBT+ readings of his work, there you go.

Of course, one of the reasons Murphy was able to produce these results was because of his coterie of regulars. Carol Aston was a regular of his late 1970s works, of course, and Caroline MacDowell, another frequent collaborator of the era, has a minor role here. The Cell also commences a run of appearances from Russell Hall, who would move on after Invitation To Hell. The short hinges on the interaction between Hall and Aston, and whilst their performances often veer more into amateur dramatics territory than the type of performance we’re used to seeing in movies, there’s something to it which elevates it to being more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps that’s why Murphy’s next movie put the chemistry between Aston and Hall at centre stage.

Volcanoes, Vampires, and Herzog

So far in my gentle, far from completist exploration of Werner Herzog’s back catalogue, I’ve covered his eccentric early efforts and his first significant successes. For this article, I’m going to go over some shorts and movies he released in the mid-to-late 1970s, which saw him further hone his craft and secure his place at the top rank of arthouse cinema directors.

Along the way, we will meet terrors ranging from natural disasters to societal collapse to personal alienation, and grapple with Klaus Kinski not once but twice. But first, let’s sell some cattle…

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck?

This is a 47 minute piece in which Herzog captures the action at the World Lifestock Auctioneer Championship contest, and if you think that sounds like a niche, esoteric subject for a documentary you would be completely right. Herzog dials back his editorialising to a mere minimum, and uses an absolutely basic structure: there’s some introductory stuff at the start in which we meet some of the competitors and get some quaint shots of an out-of-the-way part of rural America, there’s some bits from the award ceremony at the end, and then in between there’s around half an hour of auctioning off cows.

The rapid-fire patter of the auctioneers is certainly an intriguing niche skill (and one I imagine the march of technology has rendered nigh-pointless, since I can’t believe it’s a more effective auction system than an electronic system), and there is admittedly a certain hypnotic quality to listening to them go, but really this self-indulgent piece could have got across all its points in about half (or even a third) of the running time.

The Disast-MRA Artist

So in one episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia the gang make their very own Lethal Weapon sequel, and naturally Frank in his growing-old-disgracefully mode insists on his character having an uncomfortably explicit and absurdly long sex scene. It may well not be specifically parodying any specific source – the basic idea of an egotistic financial backer of a project using it to indulge their prurient interests is a reasonable joke in its own right – but in some ways it’s the perfect parody, intended or otherwise, of the production process behind The Room.

Not only is it the ultimate symbol these days of the vanity project, with Tommy Wiseau writing, producing, directing and starring in it, not only does it exhibit all the ways in which ego can override talent in all those areas, but it also has Wiseau subjecting the audience (and his co-star and crew) to multiple overlong, self-indulgent sex scenes that take all the joy out of the act. (Even Frank’s weird grunting in the Sunny episode is reminiscent of Tommy’s odd vocalisations during the act.)

The Room’s become a cult movie ever since Tommy and his colleagues shat it out in 2003, with The Disaster Artist giving its production process the Ed Wood treatment. It’s particularly easy to laugh at, given its extensive production shortcomings, incoherent plot, poor performances, and the figure of Tommy Wiseau himself – by far the least natural actor in the entire ensemble, trying desperately to look as cool as possible and delivering lines as though he learned his portion of the script phonetically – which can’t possibly be the case because, remember, he wrote it. In an age when it (rightfully) isn’t cool to laugh at people’s accents, it’s still hard not to crack a smile at Wiseau’s, not least because it sounds fake as hell and often seems to be dubbed.

However, sex – and more specifically, men’s attitude to women and sex – is kind of at the heart of the movie. As well as being bad in amusing, hilarious ways, it’s also bad in some much more serious ways; The Room is basically a toxic masculinity manifesto, a depiction of human relationships predicated on the age-old Men’s Right’s Activist/Incel talking point of basically decent men and intrinsically unfaithful women.