Madness In The Method

Methadone Actor

Madness In The Method
2019 USA Directed by Jason Mewes
screening at FrightFest 24th August 2019.

Okay, so my second feature at this year’s Arrow Fright Fest (now in its 20th year) was a much more positive experience for me than Ghost Killers VS Bloody Mary (which I reviewed here).

Madness In The Method is the directorial debut of actor Jason Mewes, who most people would best know as Jay to director Kevin Smith’s Silent Bob. This one was a blast and though I was initially skeptical of this guys ability to helm something like this, given his on and off screen personae and how easy it is to be fooled into thinking the character created by Kevin Smith based on Mewes,,, and Mewes himself... are one and the same, I found myself very pleasantly surprised at how good this was. Of course, since I am already an admirer of the duo in all their big screen appearances (I even forced myself to watch Scream 3 just to catch their cameo), I am part, of a ready made target audience and, although this movie wasn’t written by Jason himself (I suspect he had a fair amount of input in that process, credited or not), it’s actually a kind of mockumentary fantasy written about him.

Right from the outset, fact is blended with fiction as Mewes fills us in on just who he is and charts both his career path with Kevin Smith (done with some nice animated Jay and Silent Bob inserts) and his various trouble with substance abuse in one form or another. We learn about his former trade as a roofer and how tough it was for him growing up etc. And... I suspect it’s one of those films which Hollywood loves where fact and fiction are blended. The film is full of cameos, some as major roles such as Vinnie Jones and others falling somewhere in between that and what is, in this movie, Stan Lee’s final cameo performance. So, for example, both Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher, the two title character actors from TV’s Lois And Clark - The New Adventures Of Superman, have recurring roles in this.

It’s a bit like Fellini’s great masterpiece Eight And A Half, only filtered through a young Hollywood vibe.... in terms of the central character, Mewes playing a fictional version of himself who very consciously wants to crawl out from his stoner typecasting in which he finds himself trapped and reading a not so mythical book about Method Acting before ‘really’ getting into the ‘killer’ mindset of his latest role. I should probably also mention Paul Mazursky’s 1970 movie Alex In Wonderland as a kindred spirit to this film also... but I haven’t seen it myself (or I have and it's been so long I've forgotten it) so I’ll just drop that here in passing.

Okay, so this is a film which never gets dull and explores Mewes’ ‘descent into the method’ as he turns from accidental murderer to, by the end of the film, something else entirely. This is not a horror movie rather than a comedy thriller with the emphasis firmly on the comedic (so I don’t know why it’s playing at FrightFest but I’m certainly not complaining) but it is quite impressive and I especially liked the way the film is edited. Mewes calls some nice cuts here and, although it annoyed me at first, there’s good use made of a little, rotating, ball of Mewes’ head bouncing off the sides of his computer on a screensaver which shouts his catchphrase ‘Snootchy Bootchies’ every time it hits a side of the screen, used to punctuate the structure of the film and to show time and location shifts in the narrative... which is, by its nature, quite freestyle.

I also loved the idea that Brian O’ Halloran, who played Dante Hicks in three of the Jay And Silent Bob movies to date, plays himself as a director who is about to direct a large budget, major Hollywood production of Homer’s The Odyssey. It was genuinely nice to see this guy again although he is in a somewhat darker story here. And like I said, this film is full of cameos from the likes of Danny Trejo, Judd Nelson and even Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith. There’s also an interesting performance by a modern character actor (future Elisha Cook Jr in the making?) called Mickey Gooch Jr, who plays a handle-barred moustached detective obsessed by his suspicion that it is, indeed, Mewes who is behind the killings in the movie. He’s pretty good in the movie but he was even better in the Q and A before the movie, regaling the audience with his tales of the production, which is obviously set in LA but had its shooting locations split between LA and Derbyshire, here in the UK. A very entertaining fellow, despite his choice of head gear.

Oddly, Kevin Smith himself comes off as a little of a darker version of what I perceive to be his true life persona here. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of a few deliberate deviations from real life, especially when Mewes and Moobs (Smith) do the lion face, lemon face routine from Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Also, it’s kind of a dead giveaway that this is definitely portraying a heavily fictionalised scenario bearing in mind the final fate of Vinnie Jones in the movie, which is actually pretty funny, I thought.

So there you have it. Turns out Mr. Mewes can actually direct pretty well, as well as act and, cannily, put together a movie which, in spite of its free form narrative style, holds together very well as a coherent, linear story. Whether it will actually get any kind of physical home media release over here in the UK is anybody’s guess but, if it does, I’ll certainly be shelling out to have another look at Madness In The Method, for sure. So now looking forward to the next film in my 2019 FrightFest experience, The Banana Splits Movie. Review to follow in a couple of days.

Nurse 3D (aka Nurse 3-D aka Nurse)

Clear As Blood

Nurse 3D
aka Nurse 3-D aka Nurse
USA 2013
Directed by Douglas Aarniokoski
Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Well this is a refreshing little movie. I took a chance on this because I loved the two promotional posters which were put out... painted impressions of the title character, played in the movie by an actress I’d not come across before called Paz de la Huerta. One poster depicted her totally nude, asides from her nurses' hat and high heeled shoes, but not showing too much because the majority of her body is covered in blood. The other shows her in her nurses' gear and riding a giant syringe. Now, neither of these tableaux are quite in the movie, although the first scenario does have a kind of equivalent moment... but I’m happy to say that the two, quite striking pieces, do sum up the spirit of the piece quite well and I was really pleased by this bloody and sugary confection.

And I’m also, it has to be said, quite baffled by the strangely split response from the target audience.

It’s actually a little more like I was expecting American Mary (reviewed here) to be like, to be honest and, while neither American Mary or Nurse 3D have anything like the kind of levels of grotesque shock and goriness implied by both the content and marketing of those two films, Nurse 3D wins out, for me, by having a very strong sense of humour shot through it which I found sadly lacking in American Mary, to a certain extent... although I notice that exactly the opposite conclusion has been drawn by some reviewers.

Let me start by saying that both the beautiful cinematography and the editing of the film hooked me in right away which, bearing in mind it starts off with the old birds eye cityscape kind of opening which I’ve seen gazillions of times in gazillions of movie, is pretty impressive. It’s not like they’ve even added any new camera movement to the effect, but it’s just so sharp and got so many beautiful colours in even this mundane style of  shot, that I was pulled right into the following sequence of the title character talking to herself and the audience, in a voice-over internal monologue, before I even knew what had hit me. It’s a very fluid sense of camera movement throughout the whole film and it has extremely breezy pacing. Honestly, it feels like it’s a Disney movie or something, right from the opening and all the way through. Like a big, toffee lollipop that Disney might have made, if Disney were in the business of constructing movies around the inner thoughts of a homicidal serial killer posing as a nurse and gorily righting what she sees as wrongs.

The rest of the cast, including Katrina Bowden as the main ‘hero/victimised protagonist’, Kathleen Turner in what amounts to a cameo, Judd Nelson (Remember him? “Don’t you... forget about him...”) and, unbelievably, the great Martin Donovan (who should have won every oscar going by now) are all astonishing but the real star of the show is Paz de la Huerta. She’s really interesting and I think maybe the film’s split focus between the obvious Hollywood main protagonist Danni (Katrina Bowden) and Nurse Abby Russell (Paz de la Huerta), may be one of the reasons people have had a kind of torn reaction to it. The tone is uneven because, frankly, half of the time you are on the title character’s side and are rooting for her, even when you know you probably shouldn’t be... but de la Heurta plays her serial killer role with such a sense of fun and cuteness that you can’t help but be split between the two. However, that’s really not a bad thing and I would suggest that maybe the core audience don’t always enjoy examining the way they feel about their reactions to characters in cinema, perhaps?

Anyway, the film opens with a dazzling scene of us witnessing Nurse Abby Russell in action, as she picks up a man who has no qualms about cheating on his wife (with her) and then slashing his femoral artery before pushing him off the roof of a multi-story building. So, right from the start, Russel is set up as a vigilante, avenging sex bomb and, frankly, strong women like that are always hard to resist and, I’m concluding,  a good thing in cinema in general (even if the constant shots of her naked form  suggest the male-gaze motivation behind the way some of it is written).

At first I thought Paz de la Huerta (full name María de la Paz Elizabeth Sofía Adriana de la Huerta) was a bad actress but then I realised the way she was playing the role was actually, given the fact that it gets quite obvious that the character is definitely a few bandages short of a full medical kit, with a kind of unbelievable, projected intensity and investment in the role. She’s actually quite amazing and very deliberate with the way she both reacts and pronounces things... it’s almost as if she’s done what Bela Lugosi used to do and learn the scripts phonetically... which of course, in Lugosi’s case too, makes you prick up your ears and really listen. Now I’m pretty damn sure that isn’t the case with this particular actress but I do know that something about her means I pretty much couldn’t take my eyes off her whenever she’s on screen. It’s like the camera is radiating towards her all the time and I also couldn’t help but think about Marilyn Monroe, and the way she would deliberately project a personae into the camera lens. It’s almost like Paz de la Huerta is channelling Monroes style of performance in the psycho babysitter role from Don’t Bother To Knock (reviewed here) but totally stripped of any vulnerability and in full, self confident mode... and it’s actually quite a dazzling performance which underpins the whole movie, to an extent. So I need to see more films with her in, for starters, to see if she has this kind of presence in other movies or if it was just something that kind of came together for this role.

Either way, the movie is astonishing in terms of mise en scene, which is a big help, and there’s even a nod to the great Dario Argento in the scene where Nurse Abby injects Danni’s step dad, played by Martin Donovan, and we cut to an expressive and audacious fake shot of the action from the inside of the syringe... which is exactly the kind of thing Argento started doing back in the late 1980s and early 1990s in films like Opera, for example. I would be really surprised, actually, if a director of Aarniokoski’s attitude, who shot second unit on films like Resident Evil: Extinction (very briefly reviewed here), wasn’t in any way influenced by Argento but it’s certainly nice to see him putting his influences up there on the screen like that.

Another interesting thing about the movie is the music, which for the first half of the film doesn’t really do much Mickey Mousing or, indeed, even reflect the psychological landscape of the film to any extent than of being in Abby’s mind... so it just kind of plays through in a very light, poppy, ambient way until, suddenly, things don’t go quite Nurse Abby’s way for a while, which is when a little dissonance and sinister vibrations start flavouring the music. Now, if the composer would have only kept the score doing that, then that would have been a noteworthy choice for this artistic voice because it would mean that the score is only reflecting Abby’s thoughts... enhancing the character’s presence on screen through the style of the scoring. Alas, very soon after the score turns into this area, composer Anton Sanko also starts using it to describe the threat to Danni’s character too... which is a shame, I think. That being said, it might not have been the composers choice that the music does this at various points in the movie so I have to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.

All in all, though, I was really pleased by the way Nurse 3D turned out, despite the lack of goriness implied by the marketing. I think this movie should certainly be a little more appreciated than it seems to be and I’m really surprised to find that, since it was actually completed in 2011, it was wallowing in distribution hell for two years prior to its release. This is a movie I would recommend to pretty much anyone who likes a good serial killer movie, especially because the narrative viewpoint of the story is actually from the killer herself... and that’s not all that usual in these kinds of films (although there have certainly been a few famous examples of this in cinema over the years). As a result of this movie, I definitely need to start looking out for films featuring Paz de la Huerta (I think I can see one I’ve not seen sitting on the shelf opposite me as I write, actually) and I’ll certainly give this movie another watch sometime in the future. A charming serial killer movie, as far as I’m concerned.