The Skin I Live In

The Skin I Live In is a full-blown gothic horror movie by Pedro Almodóvar.

I’m just gonna let that sink in a moment.

Almodóvar’s films invariably place among the best movies of any given year.  He tells carefully constructed and observed stories with humanity and an impeccable eye for composition.  Films like Volver and All About My Mother offer not just an evening’s entertainment, but full-blown aesthetic experiences.

And here, in The Skin I Live In, he gives us a full-blown aesthetic experience that’s also a ‘mad scientist’ movie. 

Antonio Banderas, reminding us that he was an actor before he became a personality, plays the mad scientist - mad in both senses of the word.  His faithful assistant (and Almodóvar regular), Marisa Paredes, enables and supports him as only a faithful assistant in a mad scientist movie can.  The nature of his madness I’ll leave for you to discover.

The really interesting part of all this, however, is what Almodóvar does with Banderas’s madness.  He uses it to investigate and question our sense of self, of sexuality, of our relationships with the most important people in our lives.  What are they founded upon?  Are they malleable?  If so, how much?

And he does all this with the thoughtful, compassionate gaze and impeccable eye for beauty that marks all his work.  He takes a ‘mad scientist’ movie and turns it into something different, better, more.  He makes us think, and he makes us really see, and he gives us beauty at 24 frames per second.

Pedro Almodóvar can do no wrong.  The Skin I Live In marks yet another fine example.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Growing up in America, my sense of Santa Claus had been that of a nice old fat guy who brought kids presents as Christmas time. That is, that was my sense of Santa Claus until I spent one Christmas in Germany with my extended family. Their Santa Claus was more serious figure. Sure, you could count on nuts, tangerines, and chocolates if you'd been good. If you'd been bad, however, expect a thrashing.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is very much about that second sort of Santa. When excavators find Saint Nick encased in ice under a Lapland burial mound one December, they scoff at rules like "no cussing, no smoking, and wash behind your ears." But they learn. Oh, how they learn. As far as this Santa's concerned, everybody's naughty.

So begins an original horror adventure that stays true its premise without losing the twinkle in its eye. There's a scary Santa. There's a protective father. There's a naughty boy who just might be more good than he thinks. Best of all, there's a real sense of place. Rare Exports feels like a movie about actual people in an exotic setting, dealing with something terrifying and quite outside their experience. Its story develops naturally, with no left-field moments and characters that stay true to themselves. Best of all, it's exciting and horrific and a great time at the movies.

So if you're looking for something a little different this Christmas, see Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Its Santa is the baddest of them all.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

My 12-yr-old has been badgering me to let him watch some classic slasher movies just so he can see what they’re all about.  I’m thinking of caving, if for no other reason than to prepare him for Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.

Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) are a couple of well-meaning best friends.  They’re also hillbillies.  They dress like hillbillies, they talk like hillbillies, and they’re thrilled to be spending their vacation at their newly-purchased vacation home, a creepy cabin on a lake in the woods decorated with old news clippings of ancient horrors, wind chimes made of bone, and deadly booby traps.  Something tells me they bought the place sight unseen.

The College Kids are your stock group of College Kids off for a weekend of camping, drinking, dope, and sex.  Had they been Norwegian college kids, they’d have wound up contending with Nazi zombies in the snow.  As it is, all they have are Tucker and Dale.  When they see the two pulling one of their own into their canoe and paddling off, they assume their friend’s been abducted by evil hillbilly psychos and the fight’s on.  Tucker and Dale, of course, had simply been out fishing, saved the girl from drowning, and were taking her back to their new cabin to nurse her back to health.

And so begins a surprisingly funny, surprisingly gory horror-comedy in the vein of Evil Dead 2 and Slither.  The College Kids think they’re fighting for their lives and go about creatively killing themselves through oddball accidents, the hillbillies think they’ve stumbled upon some weird murder-suicide cult, and the recovering girl just wants to help sort things out.  By the time Actual Evil rears its ugly head and literally binds the girl in a sawmill, we’ve laughed and cringed and grooved along so happily that we’re actually sorry the climax is upon us.  The underappreciated Tudyk is just great, Labine hits all the right notes, and damsel in distress Katrina Bowden is lovely as the sweet College Kid with a surprising background.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is charming and gory and funny and altogether successful.  My 12-yr-old may not yet be ready for this kind of film; when he is, I look forward to sharing it with him.

The Innkeepers

Fun, suspenseful, and genuinely scary, The Innkeepers is a great time at the movies.


Here’s the story.  It’s the last weekend for The Yankee Pedlar Inn before it closes and gets razed for a parking lot.  The Inn, established in 1891, has been around long enough to generate at least one good ghostly legend, and employees Sara Paxton and Pat Healy mean to get to the bottom of it before they shutter the place.


That’s  a fine premise for a “haunted hotel” picture.  Now, it’s all about the execution.  The Innkeepers executes well by creating an appropriate atmosphere, putting interesting characters in the middle of it, generating suspense, and delivering on the big scares.  The Yankee Pedlar actually exists (and it’s still in business – here’s its web site), and it’s everything one could want in an old hotel: quirky, lived-in, and comforting in one light while sinister in another.


Paxton and Healy are relatable and interesting.  They’re kinda aimless, kinda dorky, and not very bright; but they have an awkwardly sweet dynamic that plays well against the horror to come.  The tension begins to turn when that sweet dynamic starts to stress under the duo’s mounting fear, even as we wonder whether they’re witnessing an
actual haunting or just psyching themselves out.  It grows as we come down on one side or the other and realize that either conclusion is equally rich with possibility.  It hammers down in the best ways when they explore the basement or try to make contact or go after a mysterious guest.  And when the time comes for the big scares, man, they’re big and graphic and scary and earned, because the movie took the time to build up to them.


So it works.  It all works.  The Innkeepers is as fine a modern ghost story as you’re going to find, and I dare you to try and go right to sleep just after switching it off.  As for me, I wish I hadn’t seen it in a hotel.

Pontypool

Pontypool does great stuff for nearly its entire running time.  It kinda blows it right there at the end, but you’ve got to give this picture credit for how much it gets right.

Stephen McHattie plays Grant Mazzie, a has-been shock jock relegated to reading the school closings listing at a third-rate AM station in the sticks somewhere outside of Ontario.  He has a deep, gravelly voice, perfect for radio; and a tired, weathered face, perfect for film.

Mazzie is settling in at his new gig when the first reports of something very disturbing start trickling in.  There’s a gun battle at a nearby lake.  A mob surrounds a doctor’s office.  People start killing each other in particularly nasty ways.  Everything’s quiet in the church basement where radio station’s studio is tucked away, but it sounds like the end of the world out there.  What’s going on?

Pontypool nails this.  McHattie gives a virtuoso performance as a man going from depressed, angry, and a little drunk to skeptical, worried, then scared.  Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly, as his engineer and assistant, respectively, give him people to bounce off, to fight, to work with, but it’s his show.  His reaction to the offscreen threat makes it real, and it shows us how the anticipation of horror can be scarier than horror itself.

It’s at the end there, when the revelations and realizations hit, that Pontypool falls apart.  But right up ‘til then, when it’s all mystery and dread, this movie is fantastic.  Pontypool may be a qualified winner, but it’s a winner nonetheless.