The Sand

Sandwiches There

The Sand
USA 2015 Directed by Isaac Gabaeff
Frightfest presets DVD Region 2

Why can you never get hungry on a beach? Because of all the sand-which-is there!

Or, in the case of this film, The Sand, the answer is... because you are an unknown, carnivorous creature sitting under a large area of the sand and feasting upon any humans who get even close to making contact with said sand. 

Okay, so this film is another of the free DVDs I snagged at Frightfest some years ago and, again, it’s one of the better ones although, it does have some negative stuff in it too. Now, the first thing I thought of when I looked at the title was that it’s maybe a remake of the old 80s classic Blood Beach (a film sorely in needing of a modern HD release) and, even in Alan Jones’ introduction to the movie, which is an option to play on this DVD, he mentions that particular film. However, this movie isn’t really a straight up remake of that one at all and, although I wasn’t quite as taken with it as Mr. Jones, I did have a fairly good time with it, it has to be said.

The opening ten minutes or so was a little hard to get through for me, consisting of chaotic, shaky cellular phone footage of a teen party taking place on the beach one night, to establish some of the characters and also that the organiser had asked for everyone to put thier phones in a bag (yeah, that’s not going to be a set up for a scene later in the movie now, is it?) and that one of the party goers finds this huge, seaweedy looking rock, which most audience members will probably realise is an egg from early on. The party footage is interspersed with languid shots of an abandoned beach the next morning, in slow and languorous camera movements. Wait... did I say abandoned? No, there are eight people left sleeping from ‘the night before’ (four guys and four gals), all in the same area of the beach. Two on a lifeguard station, four in a car, one on a bench and one stuffed into an oil can by his friends.

As they come back to life and before their feet touch the sand, one of them sees a gull land on the sand, get stuck and then get eaten by it. She tries to warn the others (all are within earshot and sight of each other) but the hungover girl on the beach immediately gets stuck on the sand and shares the same fate as the bird... but not before one of the guys in the car runs to the rescue and gets similarly stuck and eaten himself (in one of the more picturesque and believable pieces of goriness in the movie). It soon becomes clear that the found ‘egg’ hatched at some point and all the other people at the party the night before have been eaten by the beach, in this abandoned strip where barely anyone comes. Once the surviving six realise that they can’t touch the sand and, once various hot dogs have been thrown  to try and ascertain the size and shape of the area of the sand which is hostile, the film consists of the various attempts of these remaining people to escape their fate, as the rules of ‘the sand’ and the monster beneath become more defined and their number gradually diminishes. 

And it is an entertaining movie with some nice performances by the likes of Brooke Butler and Meagan Holder. Some of the sequences, such as when one of the girls is balancing on the back bumper of the car trying to get the trunk open to get to the bag of phones inside, are fairly intense and suspenseful. Which makes it even more annoying when I say that, in some ways, the budget lets the film down a little. I know it’s a low budget horror production (shot in twelve days with the same cast and crew after another movie which fell through... I get it) and that’s often the best kind but, I have to say that much of the CGI in this really lets it down and I kinda wish they’d gone for more practical effects. When a passing policeman (temporarily protected by his non-organic shoes for a short while) who obviously doesn’t believe what’s going on, get his arm chomped off by the beast, the resulting stump gushing blood looks totally unrealistic and just, I dunno, kind of watery. 

Similarly, although the gazillions of small, cotton like tendrils of the creature which raise up from the sand when anything is in close proximity look quite effective but, when they decide to go full on giant tentacle terror towards the end of the movie, the CGI appendages just don’t look like they’re there in the same shot... they literally look like they’ve been cartooned over the top of the film (which they kinda have, I guess).

However, special effects don’t maketh the movie and, though I would have liked more money pumped into the effects work (and I rarely ever say that about special effects because, I usually don’t care anything about them), it was still an entertaining ride of a modern horror B-movie and I think it would play well as part of a an all nighter with friends and liberal amounts of alcohol. The Sand is nowhere near one of the better monster movies I’ve seen but, there’s obviously a lot of love gone into this one and it kinda works. 

Spring

The Shapeshift Of
Springs To Come

Spring
USA 2014
Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
Metrodome Region 2

Slight warning-ish: Okay, there will be a very minor spoiler in here but it’s nothing that the directors don’t make implicit fairly on in the movie and also a main feature of the trailer so... if you’ve already seen the trailer you don’t need to worry too much about this review.

Spring is the second of three feature films from writers/directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and was made by them between Resolution (reviewed here) and their recent sequel to that film, The Endless (reviewed by me here). I was kind of on the fence about those two movies, to be fair but the trailer to this one looked much more engaging so I bought a cheap DVD copy of it and, well, now I wish I’d imported a Blu Ray of the thing from overseas because a) it looks fantastic and b) it's easily, for this audience member, the superior film and something of a minor masterpiece.

The film starts off with some brief, scene setting stuff in America with main protagonist Evan (played really nicely by Lou Taylor Pucci) looking after his mother and watching her die in bed in front of him. It’s a touching moment but the next scene, at a kind of wake after her funeral in a bar, something happens... the consequences of which are that Evan decides to get out of America for a bit. He ends up going to Italy and, for a while, he hooks up with a couple of British ‘townies’ who are almost half charming with their typical combination of football crowd thuggery and witty banter but after they leave for Amsterdam, Evan decides to stay around in Italy for a bit, getting a ‘work for room’ arrangement at a local farm. Some of that decision is based on the interest of an absolutely gorgeous looking woman called Louise (played by the astonishingly striking Nadia Hilker) who seems to take a shine to him.

Of course, as their relationship continues... well... the audience is let into the secret that there’s something not quite right with Louise. There’s something very ancient about her but what is it exactly? Vampirism? Werewolvery? Serpent lady? Well, there are times that you might think all three and each time you try and get a handle on things you are presented with something different. However, the explanation as to what is going on, as you will hear from Louise herself, is a fusion between science fiction and fantasy concepts with little hints of the horror film, all injected into what is essentially a romantic, boy meets girl kinda movie. And it really works at pretty much everything it does. The subtle holding back and tease of the main premise is timed just right and the way this is filmed, with long swooping camera drone shots of Italy used to punctuate the segues between scenes in certain areas, make this a work with more than one kind of eye candy to it.

It’s a beautiful looking film but, as well as that, it’s a great performance piece by the two central leads and it never really veers into ‘too intense to spoil the atmosphere’ territory. Indeed, there’s also a lot of humour and in one specific scene set in church towards the end of the film, the suspense is quite fraught. It’s also, however, a scene laced with laugh out loud humour and the way the directors/performers manage to hold both emotional states for a few minutes is quite special.

Another thing I would take my hat off to the directors for is a shot near the end where we’re looking up at Evan and a plane and its trail as it appears to go through the middle of his head in the background. I wonder how they managed to time that so precisely and whether this was a serendipitous occurrence or whether it was planned out and they somehow knew the flight paths.

The best thing about this movie, though, is the ending. Things are at their romantic best but, without giving anything away, the final shot of the movie, where the camera zooms into Evan’s face before zooming back out to return to the master shot, is absolutely brilliant and things in the tale could go either way at this point. It’s also fairly subtle as it relies purely on sound design and then a pull back into that master to tell the final piece of the narrative... the unconscious biological choice the audience has, by this point, been primed to anticipate. Now, there is another way this could have also ended beautifully utilising the same footage in a different way... by not employing certain sound effects and not zooming back out to the master... but the slightly less ambiguous ending the directors have gone for here works an absolute treat and, honestly, you’ll have to wait until the last few seconds of the movie to find out if you get the fairy tale ending you’ve probably been hoping for... Spring is pretty much an adult fairy tale, to be sure... or whether this is going to be a darker revelation. And I’m certainly not going to spoil anything here.

What I will say is that this is a truly great and, seemingly, hidden gem which deserves much more attention than I’ve seen it getting. I absolutely adored Spring and think more people need to know about it. It’s entirely different, thematically, from the other two films these people have made and if there are Lovecraftian undertones to the story in some respect, they’re altogether different from the hard Cthulhu sympathies of Resolution and The Endless. So there you have it. Spring is an absolutely brilliant movie for lovers of horror but, primarily I think, just lovers in general. I hope these two directors do more of this the next time around because, honestly, the world needs more of these kinds of pieces of art in it. Definitely pick this one up while it’s still around.