Here Comes The Devil

I was just having a conversation with a friend about the current resurgence of late 60's early 70's style filmmaking. It started with grindhouse and a new found love of exploitation flicks. I can see the appeal. i can completely understand how people crave the absurdity and extremism that grindhouse offers. What I haven't yet pinned down is the emerging love for the more esoteric, underground art film style of surrealism that seems to be cropping up.

This underground genre is characterized by obsessive attention to detail, disjointed timelines, strange or poetic dialogue, bold and unsettling imagery, use of many production tricks (like slow-motion, unsynched sound and picture, unusual camera angles, etc.), quirky characters, seemingly unsolvable mysteries, unclear or non-linear plot lines, and unflinching confrontation of every taboo topic imaginable.

I've managed to sit through a few of these modern gems (Beyond The Black Rainbow & Kiss of the Damned) and have yet to fall in love with anything the way I love the classics (anything Jodorowsky did, Warhol's catalog, any Kubrick flick, the bizarre world of Ken Russell, the list goes on and on).

Because I am a true movie masochist - I keep watching crap - even when I know that's what I'm going to get. On that note, here's my latest self-indulgent torture effort (courtesy of Magnet Entertainment, again).

Here Comes The Devil

Part surreal epic, part rape revenge movie, part extreme murder-porn, these guys really wanted to capture the entirety of underground cinema in just one movie. Allow me to describe the opening scene:

The movie starts, unceremoniously, with a lesbian sex scene.
Then!
There's a knock at the door.
One woman leaves to answer it, the other follows when she suspects something is wrong.
Wrong indeed.
A crazed man with a machete is beating her lover. He cuts off his victim's fingers just as the woman cracks him in the head with a lamp.
He grabs the severed fingers and runs away to the mysterious hillside where he strips naked, throws a box of severed fingers to the ground, and begins fucking a hole in the ground.
Cut to black.

What comes after that moment has very little connection to the opening scene. Because why would it?... Fools! This is a surrealist art film.

What else do we have?
Weird musical score? Check.
People behaving enigmatically? Check.
Obsession leading to murder and then bloody shower sex? Check.
A mysterious hill-side cave that appears to metaphorically represent female genitalia? Check.
Dream sequences filled with flashing lights, colors, and water? Check.
Devil-possessed incest? Check.
Zombies? Check.

All of that said, have you ever watched a Spanish soap opera? This movie has the same overall aesthetic of one. It's a combination of the production values and the actual cinematography.

I'm certain that this movie will never achieve cult status. As sure as I am that the filmmakers took themselves very seriously and truly believed they were creating an artistic, frightening, thought provoking, life questioning masterpiece.

You can watch the trailer here:

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i'm kael's ghost

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