Without Black Christmas, a groundbreaking 1974 Canadian horror film there might never have been a Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. These characters owe much to one film made in Toronto, a movie Film Threat magazine calls “the first modern slasher movie.”
The film enters its fourth decade this year, a milestone celebrated with the release of Black Christmas, the Season’s Grievings Edition in late November. The story of a sorority house terrorized by a murderous stranger has been given the deluxe Blu-ray treatment, packed with a Santa’s sleigh of new features. It is one of the great Christmas horror movies, but it isn’t the only one.
Here’s a look at holiday films without an ounce of tinsel treacle.
Silent Night, Deadly Night
Originally called Slayride, this movie about a teen who goes on a murderous rampage dressed as Santa after his parents are killed, changed its name for release. In its first weekend it out-grossed Nightmare on Elm Street, but then parents angry at Santa’s portrayal as an axe murderer picketed theatres, and the box office dried up.
Santa Claus
K. Gordon Murray was a film producer best known for snapping up the rights to foreign films, dubbing them into English for American audiences. His best-known pick-up was Santa Claus, a strange Yuletide flick about St. Nick and Merlin doing battle with Lucifer.
Originally produced in Spanish and featuring a Santa Claus who doesn’t live at the North Pole, but above it, in a magic castle in outer space, it isn’t exactly scary, but may be the weirdest movie on this list.
Elves
When most people think of Dan Haggerty visions of the gruff but kind-hearted mountain man from the 1970s TV show The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams come to mind. B-movie fans, however, remember him as Mike McGavin, a down-on-his-luck department store Santa who does battle with a bloodthirsty Nazi elf in Elves. It suffers from cheesy dialogue — “I had a rough day at work… Santa got murdered” — and the fact that a movie called Elves features only one elf, but it’s so ho-ho-ho-horrible it’s fun to watch.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Imagine if our collective image of Santa Claus had been shaped by Allegory of Gluttony and Lust painter Hieronymus Bosch instead of some nameless commercial artist at Coca-Cola and you’ll get an idea of the dark edge of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The jolly fat man in the red suit is gone, hijacked by a skeleton in a pinstriped suit. The story of the mayor of Halloweentown who kidnaps and impersonates ‘Sandy Claws’ to bring his own brand of good will to the world is a Disney release but it is one of the rare ones that isn’t meant for the entire family.
Silent Night, Zombie Night
Walking Dead fans might get a charge out of Silent Night, Zombie Night, a Christmas viral outbreak movie so realistic a concerned citizen called the police during filming, citing gang violence. The LAPD showed up by foot, car and air only to find movie zombies battling with prop weapons.
Christmas Evil
Christmas Evil is the best of the Santa as serial killer movies and before you ask, there are quite a few of them. In this one a boy is traumatized after walking in on his parents in flagrante with dad dressed as Santa. He develops daddy issues and a Santa fixation and one Christmas Eve brings murder home for the holidays.
In “Legend,” a new true crime drama about Britain’s most notorious gangsters, Tom Hardy plays the dual roles of Ronnie and Reginald Kray. Identical twins, the violent thugs ruled London’s underworld during the 1950s and 1960s and became celebrities of a sort, even being photographed by David Bailey and featured on television. Question is, will Hardy’s mirror imaging of the guys be like Wrigley’s “Double your pleasure! Double your fun!” gum or too much of a good thing?
“Legend” begins with voiceover from Reggie’s wife Frances Shea (Emily Browning). “London in the 1960s,” she says. “Everyone has a story about the Krays. Walk into any pub and everyone had a lie about them.” The film strings those romanticizes those stories in a genre-friendly tale of two men on the rise through London’s underworld.
Reggie is a slickster, a thug with a soft spot for Frances and the prestige of owning nightclubs. Ron is unpredictable, a psychopath prone to beating people with a hammer. The brothers are a unit, but two very different cogs of the same wheel. Reggie is straight, Ron is gay, openly so, which in London’s 1960s underworld was an enlightened stance. Reggie tried to work within the system; Ron tried to dismantle it. The thing that bound them was blood, theirs and that of their victims. “My loyalty to my brother is how I measure myself,” says Reggie.
Told from Frances’s point of view, the movie paints a vivid picture of her relationship with Reggie—he sweet talks her with, “The center of the earth can be anywhere you’d like… even the east end of London.”—and Swingin’ London with nightclubs and violent scenes that play like Scorsese with an English accent. On the personal side of the story the downside to being married to a gangster with a blood-is-thicker-than-water connection to his volatile brother quickly becomes apparent and brings the story to a film noir conclusion.
Written and directed by “LA Confidential” and “Mystic River” screenwriter Brian Helgeland “Legend” is a companion piece to the 1990 biopic “The Krays,” which starred actual twins, Spandau Ballet’s Martin and Gary Kemp as Reggie and Ron. The new film is less gritty—there is nothing that comes close to the brutal horror of Gary Kemp using a sword to give a stranger a gruesome “permanent smile”—choosing instead to play up the glamour of the period and the legend of London’s gangland.
It’s a less sensational portrait of the brothers but just as gimmicky in its own way. Special effects allow Hardy to play both brothers and while his performances are frequently impressive, it often feels like a trick to distract from an underwritten story. He effortlessly nails Reggie’s toxic mix of charm and brutality but as Ron seems to be trying too hard. Pulling faces that wouldn’t be out of place in “Reefer Madness,” Hardy strains to perform through facial prosthetics, occasionally to unintended comic effect.
“Legend” is aptly titled. More Kray Bros lore than nuance, it provides a glossy but glossed over look at the violent men behind the bespoke suits.
“For six years we’ve been cloistered,” says Princess Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon).
“Like nuns,” adds Princess Margaret (Bel Powley).
Its May 8, 1945, VE Day in England, the biggest party London has ever seen and P1 and P2, as the princess sisters are called, want in on the action.
The slick talking Liz manages to convince Mom (Emily Watson as the Queen Mum) and Dad (Rupert Everett as King George) to let them mingle with the real people, listen to the King’s victory speech and report back. Early on they manager to dodge their chaperones, embarking on what Lizzie would later call “the most extraordinary night of my life.” The princesses get separated early on with the naïve Margaret on the prowl for fun, stumbling through an east London boozecan, a wild celebration in Trafalgar Square and a fistfight on a dance floor. “It’s all getting a bit fraught,” she says. Elizabeth, the responsible sister, spends her night trying to catch up with Margaret, aided by Jack (Jack Reynor), a cockney airman who has no idea he’s escorting royalty.
In this case truth is duller than fiction. “A Royal Night Out” is VERY loosely based on real events. In truth the princesses went out, accompanied by an entourage of 16 people and were home by curfew. The movie livens things up with a healthy dose of slapstick and gentle humour. It’s part royal rom com, part urban adventure. Imagine an English “After Hours” without the suicide, murder or treachery. Instead it’s a good-natured romp with some laughs and a splash of romantic tension. There’s no real drama—I was always quite sure Mags and Liz would be OK by the time the end credits rolled—in this slight story but Powley’s hilariously deadpan take on the clueless Margaret coupled with the charisma that pokes through Gadon’s posh demeanour makes for an enjoyable footnote of a movie about a historical footnote.
Imagine “Desperate Housewives” without the soap opera storylines or “The Real Housewives of Anytown U.S.A.” with an unhealthy dose of self-destruction. “I Smile Back” is a portrait of a woman in crisis that spares no details in its depiction of despair.
Comedian Sarah Silverman is Laney, a suburban mom with a loving husband (Josh Charles), two kids, Eli (Skylar Gaertner) and Janey (Shayne Coleman), a hidden, but crippling drug and alcohol habit and sex addiction. It’s a seemingly perfect upper-middle-class life marred by behaviour she can’t get under control. After a bender that sees her find new and disturbing uses for her daughter’s teddy bear she agrees to a thirty-day stay in rehab. Question is, will thirty-days be enough time for Laney to explore the gaping hole in her life and come to grip’s with whatever it is that causes her to self destruct?
My question is, Can 85 minutes be enough time to get to get under the skin of this troubled woman enough to care about her plight? Silverman and director Adam Salky aren’t prides, they give the viewer an up-close-and-personal look at Laney’s problems, but little time is spent actually addressing her depression. Instead the film spotlights her bad decisions and self medication. It’s startling stuff and will certainly spark conversation but near the end of the scant running time it’s hard tio understand exactly what the movie is trying to say.
Silverman is getting lots of notice and it’s not hard to see why. Her take on Laney is as emotionally raw a performance as we’re likely to see this year on the big screen. Like Miley Cyrus stripping it down to make us forget all about Hannah Montana “I Smile Back” should mark the beginning of a new phase in Silverman’s career.
“I Smile Back” is not a movie you enjoy. It’s a film you can admire for its bare and brave central performance but words like “enjoy” don’t apply.
The story of “Life,” the new Robert Pattinson movie, begins with an assignment for LIFE magazine but the film isn’t about LIFE, it’s about the shared life of two very different men.
“Life” is told through the lens of Dennis Stock, a struggling photographer played by Pattinson. He’s a New Yorker slumming it in Los Angeles red carpets with dreams of returning to the Big Apple to do more important work.
James Dean (Dane DeHaan) is on the cusp of stardom, just months away from the release of “East of Eden.” After a chance meeting with Dean the photographer is convinced the actor is the perfect subject. The two have an undeniable bond but Dean is hesitant, leery of exposing himself to the publicity machine. “I lose myself in my roles,” he says. “I don’t want to lose myself in all this other stuff.”
The actor reluctantly agrees to allow Stock to photograph him for LIFE in the days leading up to the New York premier of “East of Eden.” When Stock’s early attempts to capture the actor’s “purity and awkwardness” don’t yield anything usable the two leave for Dean’s Indiana hometown. The resulting photos, coupled with a throwaway shot taken in Times Square, become a document of Dean’s last few moments of real life before he was overwhelmed by fame.
“Life” is a deliberate, thoughtful movie that details the heady days just before stardom consumed Dean. The story is uneventful, this is really a character study about two young men—in real life Stock was 26, Dean 23 years old—who find a way to define their relationship outside the parameters of photographer and subject. It’s about building trust, it’s about the connection between the press and the stars they cover and it’s about the bond between the photographer and the photographed. “Photography is a good way of saying, ‘I’ve been here, you’ve been here,’ says Stock.
It’s no surprise that “Life” was directed by Anton Corbijn, a photog-tiurned-filmmaker best known for taking iconic pictures of rock bands like U2 and Joy Division. He deeply understands the give-and-take necessary to capture interesting images and his experience bleeds into “Life’s” story.
It’s an interesting portrait of an exciting time. It’s too bad then, that there isn’t more to it. When Stock isn’t peering through his viewfinder the movie tends to fall flat.
DeHaan’s portrayal of Dean suggests the actor may have been an insufferable prat, self-absorbed and yet hiding behind a shroud of cigarette smoke. He mumbles his way through the first half of the film and doesn’t really transcend caricature until the story moves to his Indiana hometown. Its there Dean becomes a person and DeHaan seems to let go of the shackles of playing a legend. It is there the script allows him to be a person and not “the symbol of a new movement.” It is there we begin to understand why Dean is in no rush to let the public get to know him. Before that he is a ready-made rebel and not a particularly interesting one.
Pattinson continues his streak of taking on challenging roles that distance him from the heartthrob status that marked his “Twilight” years. As Stock he takes a backseat to DeHaan’s Dean, but makes a impression with a much less showier role.
In the end “Life” isn’t so much about Stock or Dean but about those moments captured on film that become legend.
Today Alfred Hitchcock is a pop culture icon, a man revered for his mastery of the cinematic form. Films like “Vertigo,” “Rear Window,” “North By Northwest” and “Psycho” helped redefine what movies could do. More than thirty years after his 1980 death the “Daily Telegraph” said he “did more than any director to shape modern cinema.” High praise indeed but he wasn’t always so highly regarded.
In 1962 Hitchcock and French director and all-round cinephile François Truffaut spent a week talking, dissecting each of the Master of Suspense’s movies. The sessions were recorded and eventually became the1966 book “Cinema According to Hitchcock,” one of the best texts ever written about film. Truffaut’s enthusiasm for his subject and the book’s success changed popular opinion and soon Hitchcock was seen in a different light, as a true cinematic artist and not simply a director of thrillers.
The new documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut” brings the original 1962 audio interviews to life using still photos, clips from Hitch’s films and storyboards. Interspersed with the source material are new interviews with acolytes Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, David Fincher and Olivier Assayas.
Taken as a companion piece to the book the doc acts almost as a DVD extra, a backstage glimpse into the content that sheds light on the original document. Fans of the book will find the experience of the book enhanced by hearing the two men (through a translator) getting down to the nitty gritty of cinema nuance. Newcomers should gain a new understanding of Hitchcock as the author of his films as an auteur whose personality is imprinted on every frame of film he ever shot.
On December 10, 2015 Richard will host a Q&A with director Gail Harvey and singer Rickie Lee Jones after the screening of “Rickie Lee Jones: The Other Side of Desire” at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
An intimate portrait of poet, musician and “Duchess of Coolsville” Rickie Lee Jones, featuring extensive interviews and footage of the rock star at home, in studio and on stage.
