Josh Bell
Demons abound in this week’s fringe VOD releases, possessing a grieving woman, impregnating a lesbian, attempting to take over the world, and springing to life from a screenplay.
Son of Sara (VOD July 31): Being served raw milk is a red flag even if your dinner hosts don’t turn out to be incestuous Satan-worshipers, but Sara (Chloe Van Landschoot) has already ignored so many signs of danger by that point that it’s just another step on her ill-advised journey. To be fair, she’s probably not thinking clearly because she’s nine months pregnant with some kind of hell baby, puking up hair and experiencing intense cravings for raw meat. Cursed pregnancies are a horror staple, and writer-director Houston Bone follows many of the expected beats, but he gets more creative as he goes, leading to a delightfully deranged finale. Although she’s now in a relationship with level-headed bartender Carol (Tymika Tafari), Sara accepts an invitation from her one-night-stand baby-daddy Troy (Garrett Hnatiuk) to have dinner with him and his mother at their remote farmhouse. Jane Moffat is entertainingly unhinged as Troy’s devil-loving mom, and there are some fantastically nasty practical effects as Sara goes into an extremely unconventional labor. Grade: B+
The Chronicles of Libidoists (Film Movement+ July 31): It takes quite a while to work out the personal relationships in this elliptical Taiwanese erotic drama, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions by the end. That’s clearly by design, since director and co-writer Ya-che Yang is more interested in mood than plot, and he often succeeds in evoking a visceral response. It helps that the movie is full of graphic sensuality, centered on the sexual explorations of friends Lu (Chu-Ping Liu) and Queenie (Xiang-Hua Liang). Lu is a trans woman who works for the police department and starts hoping for more than hook-ups with a lonely single dad (Kang-Ren Wu). Queenie is a corporate executive who prefers intense BDSM sessions with a masked dom (Will Or) over fancy outings with her class-appropriate fiancé. Both of them have past traumas that are presented in impressionistic interludes, and the hazy, fragmented style offers diminishing returns. Although it’s not quite as daring as it first appears, Yang’s film still provides enough bursts of pure pleasure. Grade: B-
Evil Follows (VOD and BloodStream August 4): Given how painfully generic nearly everything about this listless demon-possession movie is, you’d think that writer-director Brendan Rudnicki would make the slightest effort to accurately reflect its sole somewhat distinctive element. But despite specifically designating the central demon as a dybbuk, a figure from Jewish mythology, Rudnicki has two separate exorcists brandishing the same old crucifixes, Bibles, and Christian prayers in their attempts to vanquish it. It’s not like this is a commentary on religion, either — it’s just emblematic of the laziness of this tossed-off cheapie, which can barely sustain its 72-minute running time. Just hours after moving into their new home, Liz (Grace Maddux) and Ethan (Stuart Maxheimer) have already inadvertently freed the dybbuk, which goes right from the standard haunted-house routine into taking over Liz’s body. Cue the ineffectual exorcist, whose awkward assertions about why the couple can’t leave the house sound more like excuses for saving money on the production budget. The perfunctory character development is as sloppy as the attention to religious details. Grade: D+
Big Baby (VOD August 7): Like his older, more famous brother Rob Zombie, Spider One has pursued careers as a heavy metal musician (with the band Powerman 5000) and a horror filmmaker, and he’s come up short in both areas. He even has his own Sheri Moon Zombie in his wife Krsy Fox, who plays Kate, the girlfriend of insecure screenwriter Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott), in this weak meta-slasher movie. Spider One may be channeling some of his own frustrations into Adam’s rage at snarky podcasters who rip into his latest release. The tormented Adam conjures up Big Baby (Adam Marcinowski) in a dream, and then seemingly brings him to life via his screenwriting. The movie never explains how or why the baby-masked killer has taken corporeal form, and Adam’s method of vanquishing him is to write a bunch of repetitive kill scenes, which are then painstakingly presented onscreen. The title character is a mildly threatening villain who seems designed for faux-iconic status rather than narrative value. Those podcasters were probably right. Grade: C
Demon Hunters (VOD August 7): Touted as the first-ever international co-production between Taiwan and India, this supernatural thriller/comedy/action movie seems like it’s determined to throw together every major element of cinema from both countries. The story is a team-up between slacker Taiwanese live-streamer Tommy (J.C. Lin) and serious-minded Indian engineer Sanjay (Arjan Bajwa), whose grandfathers worked together decades earlier to vanquish Asura, an evil Indian demigod. When Asura returns in the body of a gangster’s nephew, they have to find a way to combine their latent mystical abilities and save the world. Director Mei-Juin Chen relies heavily on garish special effects that are mostly just swirls of CGI dust, and the tone lurches from goofy comedy to martial-arts action to somber metaphysical reflections, with a couple of Bollywood-style dance numbers added in for good measure. Tommy tells his girlfriend Alumi (Regina Lei) that his videos are inspired by the work of Stephen Chow, and Demon Hunters gets the frantic mugging of Chow’s films without any of their charm. Grade: C
