Who Can Kill a Child aka Quien Puede Matar a Un Nino (1976) Review

Since I haven’t seen any movies this week and I want to move the blog along at a steady pace, I’m going to delve into another old classic, Quien Puede Matar a Un Nino, or Who Can Kill a Child.



An English couple vacationing in Spain decide to make a journey to a tiny island off the coast named Almonzora. It is a quaint little town, old fashioned with few amenities, but perhaps strangest of all is that it appears devoid of adults. After wandering through the quiet streets the couple come across a small group of children, running about playfully. But the children aren’t playing games with adults. Something has happened to these kids and, as the two remaining adults alive, Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) have to find a way back to the mainland.

I’ve always been fascinated by movies with evil children, simply because of the tricky politics that come into play when you intend to kill a child on film. It’s a big red flag, and certainly commercial films are often wont to stay far away from such subject matter. The movies I’ve seen on the subject so far tend to fall into two camps: hokey a la Village of the Damned (1960), where the children have glow-in-the-dark eyes; or they are exploitative, as in Beware, Children at Play (1989) which ends in a montage of child violence that redefines tastelessness.

So it is a breath of fresh air to find director Narciso Ibanez Serrador does not use the children, or the violence that befalls them, for shock value. When the story-proper begins, it is stark and subtle in its cinematography and editing. When the violence occurs, the shock is still there, but it has been earned through the story and characters instead of being the sole reason the story exists. It’s a difficult thing to pull off, an atmospheric horror film, and the tone here is less horror and more similar in tone to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or Hitchcock’s The Birds (which a few scenes in Child are obvious homages to.) Like those films, the slow pacing helps to create the dread rather using violence to telegraph it to the audience.

However, unlike Night, director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador films most of the terrors that occur in Almonzora in broad daylight, and while packs of murderous children are not an everyday sight, the daylight goes a long way towards making it more believable and negating the inherent implausibility of the situation. There is a morbid sort of comedy that arises, revolving around the titular line and the effects it has had on the adults, but in Serrador's world it seems reasonable.

Another interesting decision is to photograph the children acting as naturally as possible. They don’t look evil, they laugh and smile and play like any other children. Who could hurt such innocent beings? Could you? The film begins with documentary footage of real children suffering from war and pestilence, and Serrador seems to be asking people to remember that in the real world, children suffer worse horrors every day.

It’s an uncomfortable thought, and whether or not the film works as a social commentary, it is spooky, uncomfortable and remains a hugely underrated film that has been unfairly marginalized. This was Serrador’s second and last feature; he spent the rest of his life directing television programs in Spain, which is too bad, as this is a far better film than its legacy would indicate.

Deep Red aka Profondo Rosso (1975) Review

We're going way back with this one.

First some background. I'm a huge, huge fan of the Italian giallo genre. It was a genre that started in the late 60's and was sort of the Italian equivalent of the American film noir, though, coming along a good 20 years after noir, giallo often turned to color for style and expression, rather than black and white. This is the most facile of explanations I could make, but its a starting place for those who would otherwise find themselves in the dark. And you can always bulk up your knowledge at good old Wikipedia.

If I'm making my inaugural giallo post, I wanted it to be something I really liked, so I'm opening with director Dario Argento's best film and one of my all-time favorite giallos, Deep Red.



Dario Argento is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the giallo genre. He made 9 blockbuster entries between 1970 and 1987 and though his output now is decidedly less acclaimed, his name is almost synonymous. His debut feature The Bird With The Crystal Plumage was one of the first films to start the craze that ran for almost 20 years, but it was with his fifth film from 1975 that he perfected the formula.

Deep Red starts with the public performance of a psychic, who happens to read the thoughts of a killer in the audience and foresee a murder. An English pianist (David Hemmings) walking home after the performance just happens to see the same psychic being murdered in her apartment through a window as he passes. The little niggling amateur detective in him forces him to track down some clues on his own, and the closer he gets, the more murders that occur.

If that synopsis sounds pretty par for the course, that's okay. Many giallos, and certainly many of Argento's films owe a huge debt to Hitchcock and even Agatha Christie. In fact, the plot of Deep Red is nearly identical to Argento's own Bird With The Crystal Plumage. Like I mentioned earlier, giallos are often more expressive in their camerawork and stylized images than in their plot devices, which might place them squarely in the thriller genre. Here, the camerawork is great: fluid and imaginitive, playing with the architechture and colors of the many locations. Even the music is amazing, with the Italian prog-rock band Goblin delivering a haunting score that ranks among my favorites.

Narratively, what Deep Red does so well is that there is nary a scene that is unnecessary; everything seems to be a premonition in a way, and there’s alot of playfulness regarding the dialogue and subsequent murders. It is with this strange set-up that Argento finally creates a believeable everyday world where evil lurks just beneath the surface. This is a theme that he would explore again and again in later films, specifically the next year’s Suspiria, and would also be popular avenues of thought among modern directors like David Lynch (with Blue Velvet) and David Cronenberg (with Videodrome).

Deep Red was a film that changed the rules of the giallo film, and set the benchmark for those that followed. If you see only one giallo in your life, I would say this should be it.

Teeth (2007) Review

Certainly an interesting film to start on.



You bring all sorts of expectations into a film based on the way it's marketed to you, and often confusion in that department can lead to disappointment, so I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with Teeth. The debut feature from Mitchell Lichtenstein, Teeth seemed to be marketed as a sort-of indie black comedy in its initial run in theaters, which is why I was surprised to find the Dimension EXTREME logo at the beginning of the DVD copy I watched last night. For those that dont know, Dimension’s EXTREME label is largely for unrated gore films, most of them indie or foreign, and in my experience, the hook of these films was the unrated material, over the intellectual material. So ding-ding-ding! Warning bells went off and I was afraid I had been duped by the marketing juggernaut once again.

Though I had been, I was still able to find plenty to enjoy in Teeth, as this is not a serious film in the slightest; this is an over-the-top comedy about a woman with teeth in her vagina.

The film starts off quickly enough that you get the gist and the joke of the film in no time. Dawn (Jess Weixler,) a young motivational speaker for abstinence in young adults, begins to feel stirrings in her nethers for the new guy in class, named Tobey (Hale Appleman.) Though they both share abstinence and purity as an interest, teenage hormones have other ideas, and a meeting at the lake that starts out playful ends up violently sexual. While Dawn was the intended victim of the violence, the real casualty of the encounter turns out to be Tobey, who loses more than his virginity. Rightly astonished by her own genitals, Dawn sets out to get answers and God help anyone who gets in her way.

First off, those looking for any real commentary on the famous myth of the vagina-dentata will be sorely bereft, as Lichtenstein seems content to use the myth as a means to an end. Redeeming values on the side of its writing or pacing are also absent, instead the film bungles its way through the second act, alternating seemingly unrelated scenes of a flustered Dawn with her campy macho brother played with gusto by Nip/Tuck regular John Hensley. It all boils over in an undercooked finale that makes the film as a whole feel a bit flat.

Having said that, what starts out kind of tongue-in-cheek crosses the line into utter absurdity at a certain point, and you just go with it. The deadpan way in which these teens deliver their dialogue is often hilarious, and the cast’s earnest reactions to a tooth-filled vagina make the overall experience a trash film-lover’s dream. Oh, and when the blood starts flowing, it gets pretty uncomfortable. Especially for the men in the audience.

The premise is ambitious and you can’t really fault the film for not living up to any amplified expectations, even if the marketing may have tried it’s darndest to sway you. If you’re willing to overlook some glaring problems, Teeth is certainly a unique ride.

A Fresh Start

Believe it or not, this url is a couple years old. I used to write here from time to time, about music and sometimes comics. My musings were brief and never terribly useful to anyone reading.

ALL THAT CHANGES TODAY!
Ornery-Cosby is going to the movies!

I see a lot of movies, new and old, and I often feel the need to share them with others. But I have no friends, so I'm making a blog. Here you will see reviews mostly, of movies I've enjoyed and sometimes hated, some new and some old. Get ready, cause the post flurry is coming and it's a real blizzard this time!

I'm a nerd.