Let's Get Awesome

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After I watched the Deagol Brothers 2008 film Make-Out With Violence this weekend I went back and read what had led me to seeing this film, namely this post by Nat at The Film Experience where he touched upon his viewing of Violence at the Nashville Film Festival this past April (where the film won the Best Of Festival award), and was delighted to notice that the very first comment on Nat's post was by me, highlighting a quote from his review. Here's my comment with his quote:

""... people who tend to respond to unusual takes on horror or dreamy takes on privileged kids (there's a teensy bit of a Sofia Coppola feel going on within the cinematography) will like it a lot more than I did."

WHERE DO I SIGN UP?"

Indeed, Nat made a good call. Make-Out With Violence worked really well for me. It wears its influences on its sleeve but still felt not quite like anything I'd seen before. There are moments of shimmering beauty - it's a beautifully shot film; they made it look much better than I imagine their budget would've normally allowed for - and grungy horror, and it's all told in an arrhythmic stutter from genre to genre, scene to scene, much like the way zombie-ish girl at the center of all the film's drama ambles along. One second it's detailing the angst of these teenagers with a silent, drifting detachment similar to Sophia Coppola or Gus Van Sant, and the next we're wallowing in Romero-esque terrors. I've seen so many zombie films over the past several years but none of them have been so persuasively melancholy, like a pale green blanch of death has settled across the screen.

But I am, as usual, getting ahead of myself here. The film deals with loss, with grieving, with I found to be a particularly clever and singular use of the "zombie" mythology. The story begins with a group of teenagers mourning the disappearance and assumed death of one of them. They hold the ceremony, bowing over an empty casket, and then later that day she reappears. Dead, but not dead. But there will be no infectious bites here, no bullets between the eyes, because the Deagol Brothers have thankfully hearkened back to the Undead as metaphor and aren't all that interested in sticking to the by now worn-down zombie tropes. Wendy, their dead girl (played with an astonishing and awesome sense of physicality by Shellie Marie Shartzer), is back and haunting these people's lives it seems simply because they cannot let her go. She rises out of the shallow water in the opening scene without explanation, neither given nor sought. Their just-begun Summer was stretching before them like a prison sentence with their friend gone, and she comes back almost as if she's the physical embodiment of their terror and grief.

Of course, not everyone knows she's there - she's kept as a secret by the boy who loved her most (and his two brothers) who uses this as his chance to play out a bit of the life they will never get to have together. But just because Wendy's resurrected presence isn't known to everyone we still watch how it effects everyone, and how it spreads as a virus not in the usual sense, but fans out as an emotional rot amongst them. Love both blossoms and curdles in this strange world, this odd after-life place, and no one can escape being colored by it for the better and the worse.

Best in show acting-wise is most definitely Shartzer as undead Wendy, who manages to craft one of the most arresting zombies (not that the film ever uses that word) I've seen in a movie in quite awhile - her body moves with a life (or non-life as it were) of its own, folding in asymmetric patterns, sliding and jerking in soft yet horrible movements. And she's not afraid to get a little rat on her chin in the process! In a film so pretty I give it credit as well for not being afraid to slap some finely-calibrated gore into the mix when its called for. A girl's gotta eat after all. But I thought everyone in the cast was solid, if maybe a wee bit too old for their roles (I think they were all supposed to be in high-school or just finished with high-school but they seemed more mid-twenties).

The film is still playing in festivals right now, you can check out that news and more at the film's website. And here's its trailer. It has its highs and lows - the commingling of genres sometimes works better than other times (I thought the side-character of sing-songy Anne Haran was very funny and the film sometimes needed her humor but she's not really integral to the story), and there were times when the stilted and detached reactions of some of the characters to the goings-on rang a little false - for example I wasn't wholly sold at first on the original decision to keep Wendy hidden and not, you know, report her to the police. But I think once you understand that the film is more about metaphor and mood than it is strictly about the logical actions people would take in the real world then you go along with these moments better.

And since I mentioned the beauty of the film, I had to grab a few screen-captures to momentarily wallow in it.


I would've grabbed more but I didn't want to hog all the prettiness from a film still so largely unseen. So y'all definitely seek this one out if you're interested in atypical horror, and I'll keep my ear to the ground for word of any kind of release of the film. And the Deagol Brothers are definitely a pair to keep our eyes on in the future.
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