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Reviews
The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
Amidst some stylistic shortcomings, this movie shines.
The excellent: Truly unsettling use of POV hand-held camera footage, made all the more nauseating given the shoddy VHS-transfer look.
Visionary storytelling with multiple narrators with their own motivations (the Water Street Butcher himself, his victims, their families, law enforcement, etc).
A very masterful amount of restraint in what is actually shown on screen and what isn't. Face it, after the last thirty years of horror movie filmmaking, we as audiences are almost surprised to not see every last drop of blood, inch of skin or swing of the weapon.
The good: Pace, peaks and valleys are really well edited together. Cinematography is smart. And when it's working for the story, the b-roll cutaways and oversaturated time lapse landscape shots really punctuate the narrative.
The less than good: Some actors' performances drag it down. The son of the convicted, the mother of the abducted and a couple of the forensic/FBI guys really come off as cartoonish.
Those same b-roll and landscape shots that gave the film's morose tone and suffocating environment their occasional bursts of almost Gus Van Sant-eque surrealism just appear three times too often. Every time a new cop/authority is introduced, you can literally count the two "before we said action" frame up shots with their voice-over. Same goes for the undercrank landscapes - they're great - but overused.
That all said, the less than good just can't overshadow how brilliant this gloves-off, hyperreal piece of true horror is. Taking cues everywhere from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer to POV type films like Blair Witch to smart approximations of low-budget documentary work, you really do get sucked into the ride. As many have commented, this is not the six-horny-kids-get-slaughtered-off-black-man-first formulaic dirge. And though those movies have their own place and occasionally have some fun or interesting permutations on the recipe - The Poughkeepsie Tapes belongs on a different shelf altogether.
It's excellent, and just a few turns of the screw away from flawless. Given the company it keeps on your Netflix queue, that's saying a lot.
High Society: A Pot Boiler (2009)
like a whitman's sampler of absurd comedy....
trying to pin down this flick is a waste of time. "high society: a pot boiler" moves through non sequitur and cliché-on-its-ear absurdism at its own whim. this is both one of its most admirable traits and its achilles heel for some viewers. good because, much like the hazy cloud that the characters inhabit for the movie's 90 minutes, it is able to shapeshift from stoner references to rapid-fire dialogue to character exposition at a jarring but even keel. not so great at times because most of the movies that bear the inevitable comparisons (this movie has pot smokers and is shot on a camera, therefore it must be compared to every other movie with pot smokers filmed with cameras) cast a mold this doesn't quite fit into.
at times, high society fires evenly on all eight cylinders and is comedically flawless. at others it's not quite everything it could be - that's something that's unreasonable to expect out of a modest budget and a relatively green screenwriter. and even when it's not quite a gel - the promise in the screenwriter's approach is visible.
while all the actors delivered - we'll have to give the W to leading man, Erik for effectively striking a chord between exuberant, comedically overstated zeal and a smart, reigned-in subtlety.
i know this is doing the rounds on a few independent screens and festivals right now - hopefully this gets the distribution that'll give high society a fair crack at sleeper stoner comedy greatness.