The suffocating debut film from writer/director Panos Cosmatos tells the story of Elena, a girl with fearsome telepathic powers held captive by a deranged psychologist. To some, Beyond the Black Rainbow is a Tarkovskyan masterpiece of glacial dread; to others, it's 110 interminable minutes of pretentious audience torture. I think it's a little of both, actually. The best thing about the movie is Michael Rogers, who plays the villainous Dr. Nyle as a kind of evil Carl Sagan, contemptuously hissing his dialogue like Agent Smith from The Matrix. The core idea—drippy Boomer acid spirituality rotting into a slow-motion Kenneth Anger nightmare—is rock solid, and at times (especially in the second half) you can just make out the great horror hidden behind a thick haze of obscuring pastiche. That's the worst thing about Beyond the Black Rainbow: too often, it feels more like a checklist of references than an actual movie. Still worth a look for those with properly attuned psyches and fully loaded bongs, and I wouldn't rule out Cosmatos doing great work in the future. Hilarious trivia: the film was financed with DVD residuals from Tombstone, which was directed by Cosmatos' father—who also made Rambo: First Blood Part II!
At a remote cabin, Michael (Peter Cilella) tries to help his best friend (Vinny Curran) kick his methamphetamine habit by handcuffing him to a pipe. As withdrawal sets in and Michael has to fend off curious locals, he begins to suspect that someone else is watching them. Resolution creates a fantastic sense of skin-crawling eeriness without any of the usual tricks (gore, jump scares), making it a perfect film for viewers who think that all modern horror is torture porn and found footage. Resolution has been compared to Cabin in the Woods, but it's a much more subtle and provocative film, with an even more effective metacomment on the genre. It actually reminded me a lot of Lovely Molly, capturing the same numinous sense of helplessness as something uncanny and terrible descends on you. Special recognition is due to Bill Oberst, Jr., for a brief but profoundly unsettling part as an eccentric French hermit who may or may not know what's happening.
Cabin in the Woods is the ultimate horror movie for people who don't like horror movies: a snarky satire that gives people who look down on the genre permission to enjoy it. But the premise is a fun one, with a sinister control room (Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, giving new meaning to the banality of evil) watching as a group of teens fall victim to a carefully arranged horror movie scenario. Unfortunately, the youth segment of the cast (including a de-Thor'd Chris Hemsworth, handsomely wooden as ever) leaves a lot to be desired—and the notion that they're "supposed" to be forgettable victims is a bullshit cop-out. I guess it just goes to show: they can't all be Scoobies. There's also one visual early on that totally spoils what could've been a terrific shock later in the movie; this bugged me in the theater and it still bugs me now. Despite these problems, Cabin in the Woods is a lot of fun—and ironically, viewers who already know their deadites from their cenobites are the ones who'll get the most out of it.
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