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Probing the Icky Essence

Posted on: Tuesday, 4 April 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Tirdad Derakhshani, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Apr. 4--The horror, the horror.

There's one indelible image from The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, one of the 15 horror films (as of today, 12 can still be seen) featured in the must-see Danger After Dark series at this year's Philadelphia Film Festival: a close-up of the heroine's face as she uses an eyeliner pencil to explore a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead, then slowly, deliberately, pushes the slug further into her brain.

Beyond the cool gross-out effect, the unnerving scene transgresses the sacred line between inside and outside, between where our thoughts -- our selves -- reside, and the world, where we're nothing but a weak organism. Name it: blood, guts, brains, bone -- ripped out of their hiding place, viscera remind us that we're nothing but these intestines, this pool of blood.

That's the kind of question good horror asks: What makes me human? My body? My words? My desire? My love?

What if some one element were horrifically transformed -- as in Danger After Dark's low-budget Scottish entry, Wild Country, where those lips you'd use to kiss your lover become a wolf's snout (a non-CGI one, made with American Werewolf in London-type animatronics). An homage to '70s and '80s slashers, Craig Strachan's film is about a group of teens on a church-sponsored camping trip who bond, just in time to be ripped away -- and, well, apart -- by a nasty lycanthrope.

Although Asian horror has been dominant, Wild is part of a new wave of great flicks from the British Isles, which includes Billy O'Brien's old-school monster feature, Isolation. Ridiculous, but genuinely scary, the plot is about that other quintessentially human trait: greed. A biotech company experiments on an Irish farmer's cow, which then gives birth to genetically mutated, carnivorous fetuses who, you know, do whatever it is that meat-eating bovines do.

English movies The Descent and Evil Aliens round out the Brit offerings. Neil Marshall's ravishingly photographed The Descent is the best all-out scarefest seen in a couple of years. Five female spelunkers are hunted by melatonin-deprived humanoids in the Appalachians. One by one, the women let go of all that gooey good stuff Donahue and Oprah embrace, like empathy and kindness, and are reduced to a bundle of flight-or-fight (and-fight-some-more) reflexes.

If The Day the Earth Stood Still and Dead Alive produced a cinematic baby, it would be Evil Aliens, director Jake West's hilarious meditation on how best to kill bad guys using methane from a septic tank. There are sex; decapitations; a UFO; ugly inbred-farmer guys; a pimple-bursting, nerdy would-be scientist; and aliens with fantastic, scary faces and headgear but with goofy, black-tights-clad legs. It even has an alien-on-a-banana-peel pratfall.

But the film festival, which, over the years has turned Philly on to the best of J-horror, doesn't skimp on Asian films. Three of the most respected J-directors are represented: Ju-On mastermind Takashi Shimizu follows up his dreamlike and deeply disturbing quasi-vampire story, Marebito, with Reincarnation. Considered his most accessible flick, it's a classic ghost story that delivers delicious chills within a self-referential format: A crew of filmmakers use a hotel to make a horror flick about a real mass murder that occurred at the same place. Needless to say, one sensitive soul is haunted by memories of mayhem.

Korean film maestro Park Chan-wook returns with the final installment in his extraordinary Vengeance trilogy, Lady Vengeance, which includes the visually arresting and deeply disturbing Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. The fragmented narrative follows a woman who was framed for murdering a preschool boy. Out of prison after 13 years, she recruits former inmates to seek revenge on the real bad guy.

And Tale of Two Sisters helmer Kim Ji-woon's A Bittersweet Life reverses the horror convention: Suddenly overcome by empathy, a heartless mob assassin discovers his humanity.

For my money, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is Danger After Dark's most noteworthy, and difficult, piece. Mitsuru Meike's political-satire/body-horror/Japanese-pink film is not for delicate sensibilities: It has graphic sex scenes -- and equally graphic citations from Noam Chomsky, Kant, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. No footnotes.

Sachiko is a prostitute who is transformed into a philosophical genius, equally obsessed by metaphysics and sex, when she's shot in the head. Through a complicated and absurd set of events, she comes into possession of the cloned finger of President Bush -- the literal finger on the button -- which North Korea wants to use to launch a nuclear attack.

But this is a finger with a mind of its own. In a hilarious scene, staged in front of a TV set showing Bush's speeches intercut with scenes from the Iraq war, Bush's finger ("I do not need the U.N.'s permission to invade!") sexually assaults Sachiko.

Imagine a porn producer who hires David Cronenberg to remake Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and you get the idea. The satire may be broad and crude, but it's a lot of fun to watch.

ONLINE EXTRA

Philadelphia Film Festival reviews and schedule

are online at http://go.philly.com/movies

Contact staff writer Tirdad Derakhshani at 215-854-2736 or tirdad@phillynews.com.

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Kazakhstan:KANT,

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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