JUG FACE – A mysterious pit demands human sacrifice and Toby Jugs from the inhabitants of a small community in the woods. Don’t get me started on Toby Jugs. Why put a face on a jug? So it can sneer at you whilst you dribble your milk? In the film, getting your mug on a jug also means you end up bled out from the throat beside the aforementioned mysterious pit, so perhaps things could be worse for me and my little world. ‘Jug Face’, despite stylistics that seem plain, is an imaginative indie that plays in a consistent and convincing off-key. It features good performances from stalwarts such as Larry Fessenden and Sean Bridgers, not to mention sad-faced Lesley Carter, whose efforts to avoid jug-face motivate the film’s dramatics. Its weird, hobbled world feels real, and it’s well done, even the cheap fx-y bits. I’ve seen it before. I liked it then, and I like it now.
BLOOD QUANTUM – Salmon are returning from the dead – don’t laugh, the zombie apocalypse is around the corner (again). ‘Blood Quantum’ distinguishes itself by bringing in ideas about Native American oppression and ecology and welding them to the ‘Walking Dead’ type framework we’ve all had to get used to over the last ten or fifteen years. It’s ponderous in that moody, well-shot kind of way, and there’s reasonable gore to be had alongside questionable detours into animation that somehow culminate in a someone’s granddad going Rambo. Scores slightly up because of its themes and the doomy atmos, even if it’s more of the same.
A BANQUET – A young woman, taking a breather from a party gone bad, encounters a red moon in the woods and slides into… madness? Possession? One as a metaphor for the other? Something else? There’s obviously a lot in there about warped families and control dynamics, but it’s the first film I’ve seen that pushes the theme of eating disorders towards Lovecraft. Nothing’s very clear in the end, but it doesn’t have to be. I found ‘A Banquet’ absolutely mesmerising. Most of that had to do with the way it looks – austere, in the Euro art manner that has frosted up many genre movies over the last five years or so, and it’s done really well here, conjuring a slow-motion haze of alienation and abstraction. Again, soulless modern houses seem key, but so does witchy Leslie Ash. A winner.
 |