Reviews

We Are What We Are begins with a desperate, bedraggled tramp of a man, the very picture of Poverty, lurching through a Mexican outdoor mall, leering at lingerie-clad mannequins through a store's plate-glass window. The store's manager (owner?) chases Poverty away and polishes his window back to a shine, wiping away the drool. Poverty sees his reflection in the window as if for the first time, or the first time in years and the sight stuns him like an electric shock. Stumbling to the ground, spitting out black bile on the polished mall floor, Poverty falls and dies.

The film pauses for a second, as if to ask if there is room in this Mexico for sympathy, rescue or hope. Then two mall security guards arrive and efficiently carry the body away. Behind them a mall maintenance man arrives with a mop to wash away Poverty's bile. In this Mexico, the poor are so wretched that they can not even leave behind their stains.

We come to know this man through the family that he leaves behind. We come to understand that he was neither a good man to his community, nor a good husband to his wife, nor even a good father to his children. But if this man's family lived lives of quiet desperation and hopelessness while he was alive, with him dead they are doomed.

We become so invested in the survival of this family, that we begin to not just condone almost unspeakable acts of evil that this family plans to commit. we begin to cheer these atrocities and root for the family to succeed and get away with it.

There is a moment in Psycho, when a detective comes calling at the Bates Motel, looking for the Janet Leigh character. After the detective is killed, Norman Bates places the P.I.'s body in his car and pushes the car into the murky swamp behind the Motel. The car sinks and sinks and sinks and then... pauses... half-buried and half-exposed, teetering between secrecy and exposure. When the car slips under the surface with a breathy gurgle, most people guiltily realize that they have been holding their breath, suddenly Norman Bates' silent accomplices. We Are What We Are is like that without the guilt.

Imagine that you are standing in front of a lake on a blistering hot, sunny day. The lake is fed by mountain springs and you know that the water will be bitterly cold, but you will feel better in the lake's icy water than out in the sun. You stand torn between diving quickly into the lake and getting it over with, or walking slowly, gradually into the cold of the lake. Imagine further that the water of the lake is suddenly removed and you walk out into the middle of the suddenly dry lake bed. It begins to rain: cold, cold, cold teardrops all around you. The rain falls slowly enough that the cold water is refreshing in the hot sun, but fast enough that the lake quickly refills and before you know it you are floating in the icy water at the center of the lake.

That is what We Are What We Are is like only rather than icy cold water, you are gradually being immersed in evil.

Watching Somos lo que hay is like drowning in Evil - one teardrop at a time.

Inglorious Basterds is a dark and violent comic fantasy, gloriously so. Built on the framework of The Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Basterds ditches the elongated training sequences of The Dirty Dozen to plunge into the action right away. In the process, Tarantino fixes one of The Dirty Dozen's major flaws by giving the bad guys screen time to remind us just how bad the Nazis were. The Nazis with the most screen time end up becoming the most completely human characters in the film, which ironically makes them even worse monsters.

Bu ditching the training sequences, Tarantino is also able to give us a picture of the entire war, showing us not only British, American and German soldiers, but also giving us glimpses into the world of French and German civilians, both collaborators and Resistance.

It goes without saying that any Tarantino film is going to have fantastic dialogue, but when Tarantino made the decision to have the French characters speak French and the Germans speak German, beyond adding a level of authenticity, Tarantino also somehow ensured that his dialogue in French was as sharp and funny and clever as his English dialogue.

Case in point, during the opening sequence the Nazi "Jew Hunter" SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christian Waltz) is interrogating French dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet). Landa suspects that LaPadite is hiding a family of Jews. While subtly pressuring LaPadite, Landa asks for a glass of milk. After greedily gulping it down, Landa compliments LaPadite on his daughters and his cows, "à votre famille et à vos vaches, je dis bravo." The thing of it is, in French "vache" means cow, but it is also a vulgar name for the vagina. If reprimanded for this vulgar pun, Landa could quite convincingly claim not to understand French well enough to have meant it that way, but Landa does mean it that way and he means it as a threat. And LaPadite understands his meaning all too well.

That is a really subtle piece of acting and word-play that many audiences would never catch, or at least they might understand the subtext without knowing the exact nature of the threat. The film is rich with that kind of detail. All of the French and English dialogue is chosen with that same attention to detail and while I can't swear to the German, I would suspect that it shows a similar level of craft.

Inglorious Basterds opens with the phrase, "Once Upon a Time... in Nazi-Occupied France." Personally, this reminds me of the opening of every Asterix book and movie, another comic fantasy in a war-torn occupied France. Like Asterix, Inglorious Basterds is howlingly funny in places, although the film also turns darkly serious.

In its more serious moments, Inglorious Basterds reminds us that the first casualties of war are compassion and the ability to relax, as in almost every elongated sequence of the film, Tarantino finds a new way to build cruel tension to almost unbearable levels.

Tarantino also reminds us that film is dangerous, even inflammable and that its power deserves respect.

If you can see this film as I did in a packed theatre filled with knowledgeable fans who get every joke, that you will see this masterful film the way that it was meant to be seen. If you are not that lucky, all that you will see is a great, great film that delivers a darkly funny punch.

If the producers of this film were smart, they would deny that Ti West wrote and directed this film and claim that it was a lost film of the early eighties that they found in a drawer at Paramount. Say a lost Tobe Hooper film that Tobe did right before doing Poltergeist. Something that Steven Spielberg bought to keep from competing with Poltergeist and shoved in a drawer somewhere.

Because it's that good. The House of the Devil feels like it should have been released back in 1982, from the feathered hair of the leads, to the Walkman, to the music and sound, to the slow build of the suspense, to the vintage titles. It is even a mash-up of the late seventies obsessions with baby-sitters in peril (When a Stranger Calls) and satanism in the suburbs (The Omen). Most importantly, it has all the slow-burn intensity of the great horror films of that period.

The baby-sitter in peril is Samantha (Jocelin Donahue). A college student, she is doing baby-sitting gigs because she needs money for a new apartment and desperately wants to get out of her dorm. Her roommate is a sex-addict and a slob and Samantha as a neat-freak germaphobe finds both behaviours repulsive. The job that Samantha ends up taking, on the night of a full lunar eclipse, is obviously (cue Admiral Ackbar) a trap, more obvious to the audience than to Samantha because we know that the name of the film is The House of the Devil, because her employer is Tom Noonan, the original Red Dragon from Michael Mann's Manhunter and because Samantha is too self-absorbed to notice that she is in danger.

There is a danger to read too much into it, but there is a very real sense that this film is pitched perfectly at the divide between the sex and drugs disco party lifestyle of the Seventies and the money-obsessed, self-absorbed Eighties.

There is even a sense in which the film (with the benefit of filmmaker hindsight) acts as a horror metaphor explaining how the drugs and sex excesses of the Seventies led to the health catastrophes of the Eighties, especially AIDS. Samantha may not know exactly why she is a germaphobe, nor why she is so freaked out by the house she is sitting at, but her anxieties are well-placed.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming.

Lee Demarbre and Ian Driscoll are a team of Ottawa film makers and Fantasia Film Festival veterans who have previously created Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter & Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace . In 2006, they started following around Ian Hodgkinson aka Vampiro to make a documentary film about his life going from a Thunder Bay kid - homeless on the streets of Montreal, eating out of garbage bins - to being the "Hulk Hogan of Mexico". While they were shooting the documentary (due out later this year) Vampiro told Lee and Ian an idea that he had for a film Within a month, they had a script, a budget (pennies) and were shooting The Dead Sleep Easy, a "Mexican Wrestling Gangster Movie" in Guadalaraja with many actual Guadalaraja gangsters in key roles because, "our Line Producer had never made a movie before and when he read the script and saw Gangsters described in the script and instead of hiring actors to play gangsters, he hired real gangsters!" -Lee Demarbre.

When Lee and Ian came to Montreal to deliver a sneak preview, I HAD to be there. Vampiro? Acting? In a Mexican Wrestling Gangster Movie? Filmed by Canadians? The mind boggled.

Here is what I was expecting: A train wreck. A glorious train wreck. A bad movie that revelled in its badness. (Which is as good a description for their first two films as any.) I didn't get my train wreck.

And I couldn't be happier.

This film is so dirty, so gritty, it is like a lost 70's film (including the obligatory 70's psychedelic scene.) Every one in the film is a son-of-a-bitch. The nicest character in the film, the one who has been saved, the one who wears white? He got there by shooting his best friend in the face with a shot-gun. This is a film about the damned.

Remember the scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch where the kids are forcing two scorpions to fight a group of fire ants before setting them all on fire? This film might as well take place in that fire.

Vampiro plays "The Champ", a broken-down, drugged-out former wrestling champion barred for life from wrestling because he killed a man in the ring, now earning his drugs as a mob enforcer. Martin Kove (the evil Karate master from the Karate Kid series) is his psychopathic, Peckinpah-obsessed part-time Videographer, full-time assassin, quasi partner.

While stumbling through life like a drunk lurching from lamp post to lamp post, a cross between Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and Stacy Keach in Fat City, Vampiro bumps heads with most of the Wrestling Society X roster including notably Joey Ryan, KAOS, Alter Boy Luke and Aaron Aguilera.

A few quick caveats for wrestling fans:

While the film is set in Mexico, don't expect to see high flying Lucha Libre action. The style used is more like a dirty bar room bastardization of Mixed Martial Arts, which fits the tone of the film perfectly.

Oddly, the Champ's fall from grace hinges around a rigged fight that he was supposed to lose and didn't, echoing the story of Daredevil's Dad Battlin' Jack Murdock and countless film noir boxing films. Only where Jack gets killed for costing his mob boss money, the Champ becomes the indentured servant of Dave Courtney's Tlaloc. For me this matched the 70's vibe of the rest of the film in that it hearkened back to the days when kay-fabe was still alive and people could believe that someone would actually bet money on a pro wrestling match. .

Wrestling fans will also note the odd echoes of the lives and tragic deaths of Rikidozan and Bruiser Brody.

The one place where the film falls down a little bit is in the editing. The pacing and the beats just seem a little off like an out-of-shape fighter with a bit too much flab. And I really don't need to be told that you are flashing back to "Then" when you are also giving me the flash backs in black and white. It is also somewhat redundant to tell me that I am looking at the Day of the Dead celebrations. Not only is the information unnecessary and redundant, but it works against the more subtle vibe of the rest of the film.

But that's quibbling. Ultimately, this is a quantum leap forward for both Director Lee Demarbre and Writer Ian Driscoll and easily the best English language wrestling film ever - ranking only behind The Foul King and The Calamari Wrestler for the World Title.

Most shockingly? Vampiro can act! "One reviewer told me it was the best performance by a wrestler in a film since Roddy Piper in They Live. -Lee Demarbre.

Granted, it's not a terribly crowded field, but I would argue that it's the best acting performance by a wrestler in a film ever.

This film will not be easy to find, but it will be well worth the search. Expect it to make the Festival circuit before a DVD release.