Bliss (2019)

Night Of The
Living Pez

Bliss
USA 2019
Directed by Joe Begos
Eureka Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers here be... you were warned.

I missed Bliss a couple of years ago when... I think it played FrightFest over here in the UK? I think it was a case of really not liking the poster design (I still don’t) and having other movies on my priority list that year. The only reason I came back to this is because the writer/director, Joe Begos, made another movie I saw recently called The Mind’s Eye (reviewed here) which was... well it was kind of an unofficial sequel to Cronenberg’s Scanners, to my mind. The stand out of that movie for me was the score by Steve Moore, which sounded a lot like early to mid phase John Carpenter by the finish of it. Anyway, astonishingly, I managed to find a soundtrack CD to that movie (which is great, by the way) and when I was looking at the website of the company that put the CD out, Relapse Records, I came across a couple of other CD scores by the same guy including this one, Bliss, which was for the same director. So there we are... I wasn’t expecting too much but I gave it a go and... wow.

I really wasn’t expecting to be as impressed by this movie as I was (so much so that I’m going to order a Blu Ray copy of it real soon... and the CD, of course). A certain amount of that is down to the director and crew. I don’t know who Begos is but it’s like, since The Mind’s Eye, his confidence and boldness with what he is trying out with the camera and editing has matured and grown to the point where he really delivers something which demands your attention. The crucial part of this movie for me though, was the absolutely brilliant, tour-de-force performance by an actress I’ve never heard of called Dora Madison, who plays the films central protagonist Dezzy.

Okay...the plot is extremely simple. Dezzy is an artist, working on a big piece on canvass for an exhibition but has been ‘blocked’ for months. She can’t seem to get the painting done and it’s got to the point where she has no rent money and is dumped by her agent. So she goes to one of her drug dealing friends, played by Graham Skipper from The Mind’s Eye and gets something called Diabolo, which is the drug ‘Bliss’, referred to in the title. The effect is marked and immediate and Dezzy is out of it until she wakes up at a party and then has a threesome with two friends... Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield). Because she’s riding the effects of the drugs and booze she doesn’t notice when, during the sex session, Courtney delivers a vampire bite to her neck and sucks her blood and then gives her some in return. The effect on her painting, however, is beneficial and the rest of the film is about her getting paranoid, getting drugs, finally realising she’s a vampire and then killing people to drink their blood (in some fairly graphic ways) so she can finish the painting... because she will stop at nothing to complete the painting and, that’s kind of my way into the character because I can kinda sympathise with that. Anyhow, that’s the film in a nutshell, if plot is your kind of thing but it's the performance and direction which really make this one of the true vampire masterpieces of our time.

Now, most people who know me know that the quality of the performance in a film rarely comes up but, this one’s hard to ignore as Madison gives her all to the role and really lets go of herself to deliver one of the grittier and gutsier acting jobs I’ve seen in a movie for a long time. And it works in spite of the character she’s playing. I mean, honestly, she’s a hard person to like. She’s bratty, antagonistic, generally unsympathetic and, normally, this would be more than enough to turn me off a movie but, somehow, the actress finds a little of the light of the character to keep me interested in this one (even though she wears a Death Waltz t-shirt and, honestly, vinyl is not my thing... give me a CD any day of the week). I think, for me, the absolute obsession of her to finish the art at the cost of everything and everyone in her life is the glimmer of empathy I needed to get me into the character. I used to love doing ‘fine art’ before I became a graphic designer and the obsessive ‘art trumps people’ kind of attitude you kinda need as part of your psyche to pull this stuff off was something I’d forgotten about but was happy to be reminded of.

And a lot of the scenes in this are wordless, as she gets naked in front of her canvass (both physically and spiritually) and just tears into it with paint and, yeah, sometimes blood. It’s astonishing stuff and the way the camera works in this, totally focused on her character the whole time, really pays off. Such as when the camera is doing 360 degree turns in a bar with a swirl of noise and music before we are suddenly jarred out of it with an overhead shot of her naked on the floor, back in her studio.

Indeed, the way her performance is captured is inevitably a big contributing factor towards the success of the movie too. There’s a party scene where various conversations are chopped up and cross cut to give a real naturalistic feel of people dipping in and out of conversations, fuelled by booze and drugs. My favourite thing, though, is there seems to be almost an absence of establishing shots for most of the film. So instead of going to the next scene, we’ll suddenly be surprised by already being in a different location in the next scene without any preliminary visuals to give us a location fix and this works really well as an on screen indicator of the level of paranoia and the drug/blood heightened sense of dislocation of the character. There are even a few of those shots where the camera is connected directly onto the actor so the front or back of her is static in the middle of everything else she’s moving around... it’s not done often these days but it’s a trick that never really gets old, it seems to me. It’s great stuff and, all the while, Steve Moore’s very different but still kick ass score punctuates the splintering visuals with something which lifts them even higher.

Also, in addition to all this (as if this wasn’t enough), there are some great new takes on the old school vampire legacy. Such as, when a vampire is staked in this... instead of crumbling to dust they just kind of melt away like ice cream (which I suspect is possibly how the practical special effect of this was achieved). Ditto, when a vampire is exposed to sunlight, it’s not a disintegration, it’s a full on blood splashed explosion of flesh. And some of the kills are really memorable too... in addition to seeing George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) come up very close and personal with Dezzy’s new vampiric blood lust... there’s also a scene where she literally pops a guy’s head back like he was a Pez dispenser, leaving the head attached by a hinge of flesh while she dives into the bloody stump of the neck for her next, urgent fix. It’s a memorable moment for sure.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Bliss (until I watch it again which, well, which will be when the Blu Ray arrives and I take an evening off from writing). This feels like one of the best vampire movies in the last ten years and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who has an affinity to films that portray obsession, horror, vampirism or, like this one, the thrilling intersection of all three. If you like that kind of stuff... go seek this one out now, it’s truly phenomenal.

The Purge

Like A Purging

The Purge 
2013 USA/France
Directed by James DeMonaco
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There will be spoilers purging themselves 
randomly in this review. You have been warned.

I really like Ethan Hawke but there aren’t that many movies I actually get to see with him in these days. All his best ones are directed by Richard Linklater and the horror movie Sinister, which he toplined last year, kinda disappointed me somewhat (my review here). However, I’d seen some people on twitter talking about a new movie called The Purge which, somehow, I was completely unaware of. I checked out the trailer online after this and thought I’d give it a go.

Now there have been a lot of negative reviews on this one over the last week or so, which makes me kinda grateful that the two people on twitter who had the conversation I was watching were among the few people who'd taken a relatively positive experience away from this movie... otherwise I probably wouldn’t have bothered to pursue this one, if I’m being truthful. As it stands, I did have a fair few problems with this movie myself but I do think it’s being unfairly criticised at the moment by people maybe expecting something different from what it delivers and although there was some not great stuff going on with it, it also had some really strong points to it as well so... I think this is really going to be a little bit of a defence of the movie too, to an extent.

The appeal for me on this one for example, apart from Ethan Hawke being a cool dude in most of the films I’d seen him in, was that the basic idea for the movie, of having an “all crime including murder goes legal” for 12 hours a year event, was exactly the kind of gritty conceptual science-fiction concept that Hollywood used to make so well back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You know the kinds of movies I mean. I’m talking stuff like Planet Of The Apes, Rollerball, The Omega Man, The Ultimate Warrior, Soylent Green, Westworld, Demon Seed... stuff like that. Often they’d have someone like Chuck Heston or Yul Brinner running around in them... but not always.

Well I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised that this movie managed to maintain that kind of high concept, early 70s atmosphere for a lot of the movie. It’s not just a mindless bunch of action scenes thrown together... it does throw out questions about this near future society who choose to have an annual purge of savagery to keep the crime rate down and forces you, very simply, to question the moral dilemma of the main protagonists of this movie in a speculative setting which you wouldn’t be able to realistically explore in the confines of real life to this degree. And, of course, this is one of the main tenets of the best kind of science fiction... to explore basic questions, problems and dilemmas of the human condition in just this kind of speculative setting which allows you to scratch deeper into the surface of an idea than mere real life could.

So I was really happy that this film does confront certain questions of basic right and wrong and, frankly, very respectful of the decision of the writers/filmmakers to not take sides and draw their own conclusions for you. There’s no judgement held here, except for maybe the US constitution’s right to bear arms and, though this is firmly encapsulated into various character’s ways of life here, it rightly pails before the bigger questions like... is it right to sacrifice one human life in order to save your own and that of your loved ones? Happily, as I said, the film does not spoon feed you anything and lets the various visual calms between action sequences wash these kinds of ideas over you in a way that forces you to confront them yourself.

The downside of this is that like many high concept science fiction films where that simple idea is the driving force around the narrative, there’s not a heck of a lot else in the way of storyline to get to. The main meal is the concept and some people in today’s audiences, I suspect, are going to find it just a little too simplistic in comparison to what they’ve come to expect from a modern screen entertainment. It’s actually got a lot more meat to it than most celluloid dished these days but, because it just goes from A to B in a straightforward, linear fashion with no real surprises... I think a lot of people might switch off to this movie. I thought the basic plotting was fine though, precisely because it allowed the moral dilemmas to come to the fore and force you to think on your feet.

However, I did have massive problems with this movie too.

The first problem was predictability. There’s a character introduced very early on in the film and you just know that she and the local neighbours are going to come back towards the end of the movie and wind up trying to kill the main protagonists. She gives the wife, played by Lena Headey, a tin of home made cookies right at the start of the picture and already I was thinking... “Are those cookies going to turn out to be poisoned or something?” because you could tell by the way these characters were highlighted for just a little too much screen time that there was going to be some clash between them later on in the movie. This was a really obvious set up and I’d rather they would have introduced the concept of the neighbourhood second hand from the main protagonists and slowly revealed the jealousy and hate that was lurking there through the eyes of the family, rather than hit you on the head with it at the start of the picture.

The other two obvious things were that you knew Ethan Hawke’s daughter’s “forbidden boyfriend” would try to kill Hawke at some point and the fact that Hawke's young son had a mobile camera on tracks that he’d just upgraded to be equipped with night vision, meant that this gadget would also come back at some point as some kind of heroic rescue component in the latter stages of the film. And yeah, bingo, it did. It was like they wanted to be really obvious about spelling out all the traps and aids which the main family could ether fall into or use to their advantage later in the film and get it out of the way within the first 20 minutes of the running time. It all seemed so obvious and fake.

But, even with all that telegraphing in the earlier scenes, the film still went along and tried to “have its deus ex machina and eat it too” because there’s a sequence, a really intense  sequence actually, where the home invasion battle of the movie begins proper, and there was a kind of repeat motif going on about building up expectations of death and then swooping in to save the day. I honestly couldn’t count the number of times, but it was maybe four or five, when a family member got within an inch of death before somebody else walked into a room and instantly removed the danger with a few spare rounds of plentiful ammunition. Seriously people? I mean, yeah, you can maybe get away with it once if you’re going for that kind of “on-the-edge-of-your-seat” bluff but not four or five times a row in quick succession. After time number two, you stop getting worried... either something will happen to stop character Y killing character X or it wont... and it doesn’t matter anymore because it just feels like one big repetitive cheat. Which is a shame because a lot of the film is quite strong.

The cast are terrific, firstly... with special shout out going to some guy I’d not heard of before called Rhys Wakefield who played the main, lead villain as a kind of well spoken yuppie who you really want to see killed off as quickly as possible. Known in the cast as only “polite stranger” the juxtaposition of rich, well mannered breeding and unconcealed blood lust leaves a nasty taste on the tongue and this guy is obviously someone to watch out for in future movies... as long as he doesn’t manage to get himself typecast as playing villains all the time.

Asides from Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey, there’s also a “bloody stranger” who is played by a guy called Edwin Hodge... unfortunately his character is merely there as a catalyst for the problem our main protagonists are in and it’s so very obvious that he is going to end up shrugging off the treatment he suffers at the hands of these people (which is where the movie really starts to wallow in its shades of grey, quite successfully and mostly unflinchingly) and living up to his own moral code and turning up again like the cavalry in the last act. I wish the character hadn’t done that, in fact, because again it was so predictable but, predictable or not, he played the character well and made him someone likable to the audience... so you can at least emotionally invest in him when you need to. Job done on that count by a great little actor.

What I will say about the last half an hour or so, which is for me when the film really loses its moral edge for a little while (but makes up for it in bloody carnage), is that the stealth action sequences which mostly make up the climax of the movie are quite effective in their actual shooting and intensity... asides from the fistful of miracle rescue moments I was talking about earlier. There was one little sequence where Ethan Hawke ends up in hand to hand combat with about five of the “bad guys”, for example, which reminded me of that first, intense fight sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1... the editing and sound design made it all quite brutal and in your face... well until the inevitable “quick save” moment.

The music, too, was pretty interesting. I remember it being fairly minimal and it blended nicely with that “final days of old Hollywood” sci-fi ambience which I believe it was half trying to emulate. I don’t think it’s going to be getting a stand alone release on CD which is a shame because I’d quite like to have a listen to this one properly, away from the movie. It serves it very well though and resists the temptation, in most places, to overstate the on-screen action too much.

The Purge is, frankly, not as great as it could have been but certainly not deserving of the flack it’s been getting from some quarters. If you are going there because it’s being sold almost as a horror film (from the producer of Paranormal Activity and Sinister, as the UK poster screams) then you’re probably going to be a little disappointed... but if you’re looking for a simple but strong conceptual sci-fi film and you don’t mind about the obligatory modern mass carnage element which the film inevitably builds up to, then it might be worth a smidgeon of your time to check this one out and purge a little.