Spring Breakers review - A break beyond mending

Harmony Korine, who cut his teeth on the very independently spirited likes of Kids and Gummo, returns with the Disney-defiling Spring Breakers. It’s the tale of four young women who decide to cut loose on spring break and take the depraved holiday to new extremes. To set out ones stand early on, Spring Breakers is a turgid mess of a film. On a base level the film is a dirty slate of glaring errors. Korine’s script is an utter shambles only further crucified by dire delivery from the unredemptive female leads. Spring Breakers' lens is that of a pervert making the film a leering exercise in salaciousness that reduces any viewer of decent sensibilities to feeling foul and sullied.

How could that not be a good film?

For a film so throbbing with musical beats, neon colouring and near all that’s considered morally depraved under the sun, it’s criminally boring. Coming in at just over an hour and a half it feels drawn out to well over two thanks to flights of existential fancy in which one of the four hateable youths will repeat the same portentous, badly written lines over and over indefinitely. Korine’s attempt at pastiche is so poorly executed it only further exemplifies the ludicrous pretentions of his venture. There is one singular merit in Spring Breakers and it comes in the form of an utterly brilliant James Franco. Working miracles with the abhorrent script his slimy, cornrowed and grilled gangster rapper, Alien, is a wonderfully vile piece of characterisation but he never transcends being just a great character. His role in the film, like everything else, is ultimately unsubstantial and does nothing to save Spring Breakers from being the burning heap of a misguided project that it is.      

Spring Breakers worst mistake is to believe it’s holding a mirror up to the likes of modern chauvinist trash such as Project X or The Hangover films whereas it is in fact holding up a frame. A frame, which through we see the same trite, misogynist filmmaking that we’ve come to hate and condemn. Pervy, ignorant, filmmaking is one thing. Pretentious pervy, ignorant filmmaking is something else entirely and something even harder to stomach.

Maniac review - Like Brainiac, only with more Scalping

Maniac is a stylish and intelligent re-appropriation to William Lustig’s nasty 1980 slasher film of the same name but that’s not to say it’s a film that works on all fronts. Being shot nearly entirely from the first person view point of Frank, (well played by Elijah Wood for someone hardly visible in the film) Maniac plants us inside the deranged mind of a scalp-hungry killer. We are given front row seats to Frank’s theatre of sadistic expression as he roams the Taxi Driver-inflected streets of a shimmering New York City. Maniac draws as much from the gleaming as from scuzzy recalling Nic Winding Refn’s Drive. The comparisons to Refn’s film are only skin deep however. Drive knew perfectly how to reference and how to innovate, Maniac’s slides into intertextual homage feel wildly out of place with how nasty and witless it is.

A scalpin' good time

Frank's obsession with the still, corpse like mannequins explicitly dictates an underlying necrophilic fascination. This theme of the film isn't dealt with reflectively but exploitatively and becomes a weight pressing down on the audience, a heavy burden of morbid, sexualised and unprecedentedly explicit content. Later in the film we are given reason to question what of Franks imposed reality is actuality and what is his wavering vision of the world. This is when the film is at its strongest, playing on the given perspective to subvert the preconceived expectations of the audience. This is when Maniac is at it’s most filmic and enjoyable, playing with our expectations in a way only cinema can accomplish.

 Maniac doesn't quite hit its mark but it certainly hits hard containing scenes even the most hardened horror fan will squirm at. To watch Maniac is quite an undertaking as the given viewpoint of the violence can only appear voyeuristic and leering. Cinema is, in itself, a voyeuristic, leering experience but through narrative and filmmaking tricks we are manipulated to forget that and be immersed in what we’re watching. While watching Maniac, you are constantly aware that you are seeing through the eyes of someone who finds a fetishistic allure to horrifically deforming women and that is, depending on ones own sensibilities, a draining experience. Maniac is a well crafted, challenging film and one not hard to admire but one hard to like and a film that ultimately leaves you feeling defeated. 

Mama Mia! - Mama review

The key attribute of any horror director is an awareness of the framing of their image. Horror is a genre of audience manipulation more so than any other. When a film all comes together and is actually frightening it is because the director has known just what to show and what to keep away, hidden in the shadows. With his first foray into feature filmmaking, Mama, Andrés Muschietti shows a talent for well-orchestrated scares and an understanding for suggestion but ultimately suffers from overexposing the antagonising spectre, ‘Mama’.

Based on siblings Andrés and Barbara Muschietti’s 2008 short of the same name, Mama follows Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and punk-rocker partner Annabel (Jessica Chastain, in an uncharacteristically unlikable turn). As they take in Lucas’ practically feral nieces, the true scale of their recent acquisition is revealed all too quickly. Really, that’s Mama’s key failing, the lank, floating Mama is shown far too eagerly. The floating figure is at her most frightening when heard moaning and clicking, teasing something far more sinister and unworldly just out of frame.

Mama loosely plays on the idea of fear of parenthood but doesn’t have the conviction or the wit to hold up on an allegorical level in the same way the greatest horror films do. Mama does work as basic shocker in the same vein as Sinister and The Woman in Black. For the landscape of horror, this shift away from torture porn and found-footage films can only be a good sign, given the lack of truly outstanding American horror movies in recent years. Mama admirably paves the way for a return to a higher class of horror and with the likes of Stoker and Maniac on the horizon it is time that bold, innovative and genuinely scary horror films to makes an overdue comeback.