Suitable Flesh

Flesh, M’Lady

Suitable Flesh
Directed by Joe Lynch
USA 2023 Eyevox Entertainment
Screened 24 August 2023 at FrightFest, London
 

I’ve only seen one other film directed by Joe Lynch (Everly, reviewed here) but I would have expected a film based on H. P. Lovecraft’s The Thing On The Doorstep to be something right up my street. Alas, although Suitable Flesh can claim that it’s a, loose at best, adaptation of that tale... the other main target of the film does actually preclude me a little, in terms of being the target audience. I went to see this one because it was opening FrightFest, has Heather Graham in it and also I was kinda hoping Barbara Crampton would turn up (alas, she was originally expected but had to send her apologies due to the writers/actors strike in the US at the moment... and good for her, that’s a pretty good reason for not coming, I think).

Okay, so the main target was for this to be a Lovecraft adaptation in the style of one of Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations of the mid to late 80s. Now, I have only, as far as I know (and not including TV episodes... I’m assuming he directed one of the excellent Masters Of Horror episodes a while back), ever seen one Stuart Gordon movie. I rented it from the off licence over the road on VHS in the late 1980s, when I was in my late teens. The movie was Reanimator and, I’m sorry, I was incensed throughout the whole film because the composer was ripping off the opening titles to Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho. I stayed enraged throughout the whole movie and... yeah... still to this day so, I never watched another Gordon movie (I’ve never revisited the original Total Recall again either, since being greatly angered in the cinema on its first release that Goldsmith had presumably been asked to copy Basil Poledouris’ iconic title music for Conan The Barbarian and, looking around me in the cinema, my heart sank when other people weren't standing up in their seats to voice their displeasure at this temp track plagiarism).

Anyway, I say all this by way of demonstrating that I’m not the most sympathetic target audience for this movie and I also don’t have the preferred point of reference to fully appreciate this film on its own terms.

However, I do have a couple of positives I can give you about the experience... and then I guess I’ll do some of the negative stuff because, yeah, I have to be truthful I suppose.

Okay, so the film was nicely shot, switching seamlessly between smooth camera moves, hand held camera, a few iris shots to focus on specific details the director wants you to catch and even a couple of swirly camera shots embracing chaos which were, it has to be said, a little reminiscent of something Brian De Palma might do (at least that’s the way I felt, I don’t know if the director was influenced by his stuff or not).

Another good thing about the movie was the actors. They’re all pretty great and do a terrific job of nailing what is quite a hard mix of comedy juxtaposed with horror in tone. Barbara Crampton had a smaller but significant role and Heather Graham is always good... although, at 53 years old already, I still can’t figure out how she always looks like she’s in her early twenties. Is she a clone? Also a big shout out to the obnoxious brat of a sometimes villain, sometimes damsel in distress (it’s a mind swap plot so that damsel thing is literal), played by Judah Lewis. I hated him in this but... yeah, I think that was the idea. So job well done.

Okay, I’ll leave one last positive for the end of this review but I will say that, I really didn’t enjoy this movie. There were no real surprises in it at all (and, again, there maybe weren’t supposed to be). It kind of hangs together but I did feel it was kinda dull. The gory scenes of violence weren’t particularly shocking or anything you’ve not seen before... which is fine but it didn’t keep me interested either. 

What should have kept me interested were the many sex scenes in the film but... wow! Is there something in everyone’s contracts now that states you can’t have any real nudity in sex scenes. I mean, there’s just a dash but, honestly, there’s nothing gratuitous in here at all, which, doesn’t make it a good advert for the 1980s Stuart Gordon thing, I’m guessing. I mean, an 80s sex scene would have had naked people performing a ‘Hollywood perfect’ version of people getting passionate. This had people getting passionate for no apparent reason half the time (it seemed to me). I was honestly surprised at Heather Graham only exposing a breast or two for maybe a second and a half because, after all, one of her many great roles was as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights. But in terms of sex scenes, this film is ‘Boogie Light’.

So, yeah, the film is a little prudish, the violence didn’t have a real lot of shock value either and, the stuff which I suspect will keep a lot of people happy would be the Stuart Gordon vibes they might be getting from it... I just don’t have the right reference point to pick up on that stuff, I’m afraid to say. Although I will say that, for the most part, the FrightFest audience were behind this and it seemed to get a good reaction from them.

So, one last thing... Steve Moore’s score was great. At least, I thought it was Steve Moore. I thought that’s who was listed on the credits but I can’t find his or any composer’s name listed on the IMDB for this film (at time of writing). It was admittedly owing a debt to certain sections of John Carpenter’s score for The Fog (reviewed here) at times but, yeah, I’d buy this on a proper CD release if it ever came out (but not on a dodgy download or scratchy vinyl).

Other than that, not much more for me to say about Suitable Flesh. It wasn’t a big hit with me and I almost regret buying a ticket but, it wasn’t a terrible movie and it went down well with the audience, I thought. I have some other FrightFest films lined up this week so I’ll hopefully be able to let you know how those went over the course of next six days.

Everly

Everly Bothers

Everly
USA 2014
Directed by Joe Lynch
Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve been wanting to see Everly since I first saw the soundtrack CD advertised, put out by La La Land records. It’s not a movie I’d heard of but one of the more interesting composers of the early half of the 21st Century, Bear McCreary, did the score and I really wanted to hear it. However, rather than just blind buy, I decided to wait until the movie was released in UK cinemas before I ordered it. After all, I could afford to wait and it had a machine gun toting Salma Hayek on the cover... so it was definitely going to be a film I wanted to see.

But then the usual thing happened... the soundtrack was going out of print towards the end of last year and still no sign of a movie release in this country... actually the IMDB says it was released in the UK in cinemas in June 2015 but it must have been a very limited release for me to have missed it when I was actively watching for it to come out. Also, given the nature of this movie, it seems really weird to be releasing this in any country in a month that isn’t December but... I’ll get to that in just a minute.

So, anyway, I liked Bear McCreary enough that I wasn’t going to miss out on the score before it went out of print, so I ordered a copy and then checked the Amazon listings to see if it was also on there... and that’s when I found that, not only was the movie already out on Blu Ray over here, it was also going for a very cheap price. So I figured... okay, I’ll order the movie too then and, low and behold they both came in January.

Then came my next surprise...

Glancing at the track listing I soon came to realise that this movie was, in fact, a Christmas movie. So, although both the score and the film had arrived in January... I had to wait all year until December came around before I could both watch the movie and listen to the CD. Because those are the rules of Christmas movie watching/listening... you don’t knock the universe out of alignment because you want to watch a movie before its proper time. So, yeah, after almost another year of waiting I was finally able to watch and listen to Everly last week. Yay!

So was it worth the wait? Well... yes and no.

The movie stars the always watchable Salma Hayek as a prostitute locked into a slave contract and trapped in an apartment for the best part of five years, unable to see her mother or her new born daughter in all this time because she is enslaved by a yakuza boss who also has the police in his pocket. However, she has finally had enough and after her latest batch of horrendous treatment at the collective hands of the "villain of the piece’s" men, she goes nuts and kills them all. The movie then becomes all about trying to get her mother and daughter to infiltrate the building she is in and to give them the money to disappear with, while trying to stay alive in said apartment, under siege conditions and constant attacks from various interested contract killers, once a suitable reward has been offered for her death.

That’s the whole plot and that’s all you need. However, while there is a lot to be recommended in this movie, there’s also some down sides to it too so, ultimately, it’s not quite the movie I was looking for, or even expecting. It does have it's fair share of good moments though...

For example, the use of smooth, fluid camera movements to capture the essence of any situation and to present it nicely framed, it seems, is the MO of the director and the crew do a really good job at getting some fine compositions on screen. Even the use of damaged walls where bullets, bombs or bazooka shells have peppered them with large holes are made use of as the camera weaves in and out of the these concrete exit wounds in its quest to allow us to track along with the central character. It’s really nice stuff and, although I hate to throw up comparisons to other directors here, it reminded me of the professionalism and consummate skill of somebody like Luc Besson so... yeah... this director might be worth looking out for in the future, methinks.

There are some really nice touches too, such as one of the corpses Everly’s stashed in a tub having a cell phone which uses the opening jingle from Danny Elfman’s score to Edward Scissorhands... it’s a cool moment. Another quite spectacular sequence shows Everly blowing one man exiting a lift filled with lethal henchmen back into said elevator with a shotgun burst and then lobbing a grenade to follow him in as the lift doors start to shut on them all. This is accompanied by an explosion just as the doors are finishing closing on the filled up lift, throwing out a giant sized, rectangular slit of high speed blood into the corridor. Nothing as drastic as Kubrick’s celebrated ‘blood and elevator’ shot from The Shining, for sure but, like I said... nice stuff.

The acting by some of the people in the film is not all that brilliant, truth be told, but somebody who really is, of course, is Salma Hayek. I’ve thought a lot of her since I saw her playing both The Muse in Kevin Smith’s Dogma and artist Frida Kahlo, in Frida, and she really doesn’t let herself down here. Quite simply, as well as being obviously quite sexy, I’ve never known why she isn’t in more high profile projects because, if you know her work, you’ll know she is a really great actress.

However, like I said, there’s also some bad stuff here and, for me, the movie loses impetus in the final third. A one room bullet fest sounds like a good idea (even now, to me) but I think this one could have done with just a little more variation in its DNA, I suspect. The amount of intrusions Everly has gets a bit boring and there’s a scene where she is being tortured by a character called The Sadist which is truly sick and fairly harrowing, I would say. That being said, because the threat of death and mutilation in this scene is so real, it kind of nullifies any belief that the character might not survive it and you are basically just waiting for the deus ex machina interventions to show themselves, one at a time... which, of course, they do.

So yeah, it dragged through the last third and was a bit overly grim, I think, for something which might be considered Christmas viewing and I can maybe see why it possibly didn’t do so well with audiences when it was released. I think if the writers/director could have possibly pushed it into a slightly different direction for the last 25 mins or so, it would have truly been a much loved movie and found its audience a lot quicker.

That being said, I still haven’t mentioned the music yet which, as I expected, is well worth the price of admission. If you like composer McCreary in his full-on Battlestar Galactica mode then this is a movie score for you. He does some great, percussion heavy, sustainable action cues here which are just what I was hoping would be the case. The CD album has five Christmas songs on it in addition to McCreary’s score; three sung by his brother Brendan and two sung by his wife Raya Yarbrough. Funnily enough, although the three Brendan McCreary performed songs are listed on the credits, alongside the various other songs used in the movie, I couldn’t actually detect much, if any, trace of them in the finished film. The two Raya Yarbrough songs are definitely in there, though, and her version of Silent Night is an especially powerful/haunting version of the song.

All in all, the film is an interesting piece of action cinema but, for my money, it gets a little bit too mean spirited in the last half an hour or so to entice me back for repeat viewings. I am glad I saw it though because, if nothing else, it means I’ve got another cool CD soundtrack to put in my Christmas spin rotation and I got to see Salma Hayek proving how good she is... even in roles like these. Ultimately, though, Everly is not exactly a big recommendation from me but if you’re a die hard action movie fan then you should probably check it out at some point. The movie itself isn’t particularly festive either, apart from the time setting, so I wouldn’t necessarily wait as long as I did to see it, either, if you do feel like giving it a go.