While unearthing gems or trash champions of yore is fun, i also want to cover more modern films in this rubric, and today we remedy that by reviewing a film that i feel somehow was ignored or put to the sides, more due to its unfortunate release timing than anything else.
I mean, if 2020 didn’t hit the world with a pandemic, maybe this and the Invisible Man remake/reboot would be better known, not that they’re “obscure” or were treated as pariahs by the press.
“This” being Possessor, a sci-fi horrot thriller by Brandon Cronenberg, yes, the son of body horror maestro David Cronenberg, who’s still making movies of varying quality, like the more recent The Shrouds (and the 2022 Crimes Of The Future movie that isn’t actually a remake of his older film of the same name).
The premise is immediatly gripping, set in a cyberpunk-ish future where an assassin, Tasya Vos, carries over her murderous assignment by possessing other people bodies, but finds herself fighting for control of her lastest host body, belonging to a man named Colin, the boyfriend of a wealthy CEO’s daughter, whom is also being forced at his data mining company in a menial role.
After premiering at last year’s Cannes, David Cronenberg new movie, The Shrouds. is finally out in most countries.
The plot sees Karsh, a man that lost his wife Becca 4 years ago, now finally having found a way to handle his grief… by creating GraveTech, a company that makes high tech shrouds to conserve and look upon the bodies of your beloved ones via a system of cameras and displays integrated into the tombstones. Mostly though Karsh can look upon his wife Becca even after death. As you do.
That is, until Karsh notices some strange matter growing on Becca’ remains, then acts of vandalism and hacking hit Gravetech, apparently by some Irish ecoterroristic groups, but discussing and searching for the culprits leads Karsh into a rabbit hole of potential conspiracies…
And i will have to say i’m a bit disappointed, i am, for reasons that might seem odd, as in, the director isn’t trying to shy away from the style of film he’s known for in its old age, quite the opposite, but even more than with 2022’s Crimes Of The Future, here it’s almost like he decided to crank up “the Cronenberg” to borderline parodical degrees.
But it’s so done in earnest (Cronenberg himself said this is most personal film) it’s hard not to be intrigued, to wanna see where things will go, even with the constantly slow pacing and the body horror/romance challenging itself to go even darker and weirder, i was into into it despite the issues.
… until the kinda abrupt ending, while thematically coherent it just kinda stops, i don’t mind slow burn thrillers at all but there’s no proper pay-off to stuff that maybe should have been answered.
Still decent and absolutely worth a watch if you remotely liked any of Cronenberg’ works.
David Cronenberg is back on the big screen with a… remake of his early film Crimes Of The Future. “Remake” in name only, as it just shares the cyberpunk setting, his passion for the pleasures of mutated flesh, and the idea of a future where human bodies can create new organs (often without apparent function), alongside a new kind of sexual perversity steeped in medical science.
That aside, it’s pretty much its own thing, fully befitting the style of directing Cronenberg would master later, but instead of a pederast ring obsessed with perverse secretions and strange malodies, the plot here focuses on the aspect of the human body spontaneously producing new, strange and wonderful organs, to the point surgery has been repursosed as a method of performance art, encouraged by an unexplicable disappearing of pain and sicknesses for the human race as a whole…
The movie follows two world famed “body artists” Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his assistant Caprice (Lea Seydoux) as they perform artistical surgery sessions by removing the new tumoral organs that keep growing in Saul’s body, but the duo it’s approached by a weird goverment wing that wants to establish a legal, official list of the new organs, and a father that’s willing to give the body of his dead son so the duo can perform a public autopsy on him..
While one might argue that Cronenberg here is revisiting an old cyberpunk concept two decades later…. i’d say the premise still feels intriguing and novel, and because cyberpunk itself has aged into almost irrilevancy and hasn’t moved forward… this doesn’t feel as dated as it could.
Despite that and suffering from some abrupt sequences, it’s still quality Cronenberg, not him as its best, but good stuff, overall, even if this future feels less so today.
You might or might not celebrate the upcoming festivity, be indifferent, but in the spirit of the holiday, let’s take a break of sorts and on this today go away from the non-budgets or the endless parade of director-actor-producer-writer one-man homegrown created film featuring either a giant or man-sized rabbity thing (NOT of Purcellian’s descent) going around killing people.
We already “did” Beaster Day/ The Beaster Bunny, and i will have that as a representative of the “ rabbit horror movies” subgenre, with 90 % of these belonging to the “no budget” category and often more than not just being more about rabbits than Easter, see for example the previously covered Bunnyman trilogy, which at least doesn’t pretend to be themed around the holiday (as it isn’t).
So instead we’ll talk about the 1999 crime thriller Resurrection, about a detective (played by Christopher Lambert) and his partner (Leland Orser) hunting down a serial killer emerging in the weeks preceding Easter, with the blasphemous plan of creating a new Jesus Christ by sawing together body parts taken from his victims, carefully selected by following the canon, literally.
I’m honestly surprised how – aside from the tired zombie jokes – there’s barely anything in terms of actual horror movies using a similar or the same macabre idea of “my very own flesh boy, JC”, or the theme of resurrection that’s the main point and what this holiday celebrates/it’s about.
And for a nice festive surprise, it’s actually a pretty decent detective thriller, and a solid film overall, the horror element is strong, the idea of the “DIY messiah” is quite grisly and unsettling, with some good gore effects, and yes, you get to see the final frankensteined flesh conscruct, quite the thing.
Sure, it ain’t too original in terms of characters (and the flashback of the incident involving the main detective’s son it’s so trite that becomes unintentionally kinda funny, given how cheesy it is), but it’s well acted, it has a recognizable cast with great actors, even David Cronenberg acting as the red herring creepish pastor, and Russell Mulcahy’s direction (with this movie marking his continuining collaboration with Lambert after the first two Highlander movies) it’s fairly gripping, hitting all the expected beats of the detective thriller flick, with the fake outs, the religiously obsessive serial killer leaving fittingly themed Bible references on the victims, supported by the great cinematography of Jonathan Freeman and decent dialogues with a few memorable quotes.
It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a really robust offering, definitely in the decent-to-good tier of detective thrillers, it has a very young looking Christopher Lambert in it, and to seal the deal, it’s most likely streaming on Amazon Prime Video in your neck of the woods too, so if you like the premise and-or don’t want to bother with crappy Easter themed horror movies, this is an easy recommendation.
I don’t have much to say about this, in all honesty, but in this case i’d say it’s a good sign, and i’m not gonna inflate this review for the sake of it.
Wise Cafe (International) 