Worth Mentioning - Fear Is Only the Beginning

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A Nicolas Cage thriller, a South African horror film, and '80s stars playing hockey.

LOOKING GLASS (2018)

Director Tim Hunter's Looking Glass seems to have been released directly into obscurity; I haven't seen many people talk about it, and several of those who have seen it have scored it so low that it currently has a 4.6 out of 10 rating on IMDb. Blog contributor Priscilla and I both had a very different reaction to the film than the viewers who gave it a low score, because we both thought it was a solid thriller.

Nicolas Cage and Robin Tunney star as Ray and Maggie, a married couple who have decided to purchase a small motel in an effort to move on from the death of their young daughter. Problem is, the motel was the site of a bloody death (suicide? murder? depends who you ask) right around the time they first stopped by to check the place out, and now the aftermath of that tragic event is theirs to deal with. The previous owner drops out of contact, suspicious auto shop workers across the street keep a close eye on them, the place is vandalized, and someone dumps a bloody pig carcass into the swimming pool. A police officer played by Marc Blucas is always lurking around the place, and may or may not think Ray committed the murder when he was in town before. Viewers are more likely to suspect one of the regulars who are booking rooms in the motel all the time.

Things get even weirder when Ray finds a secret passageway that leads behind the wall of one room, where he discovers there's a two-way mirror that allows him to spy on the occupants of that room. And he does spy on them, and seems to enjoy it.

Priscilla and I were both very interested in the story Hunter and screenwriter Jerry Rapp were crafting here. We were invested in seeing how the story was going to play out, and guessing at how the mystery was going to be solved. That's not to say that it isn't easy to predict the ending, but even if you do solve the case before the characters do, the ending still works.

It's a shame that Looking Glass is apparently destined to be underseen and underrated. It's not bad at all, despite what its ratings suggest.

THE SOUL COLLECTOR (2019)

When I hear that a movie is called The Soul Collector, it immediately makes me wonder if it's going to be about a sub-par Freddy Krueger knockoff. Thankfully, that's not what director Harold Hölscher's feature directorial debut is - this wasn't an attempt to follow in the footsteps of any '80s slashers, this a slow burn, arthouse style horror movie, twisted and strange, and with a focus on character. As generic as the title The Soul Collector sounds, at least it's better than the title the film had when it first played at festivals. Back then it was simply called 8. No wonder it got a title change on its way to distribution.

The setting for The Soul Collector is South Africa in 1977, and while a lot of genre movies are filmed in South Africa for budgetary reasons, it's rare that one is set there because the filmmakers are interested in digging into the local culture. It was nice to find that the setting here was not incidental; Hölscher and co-writer Johannes Ferdinand Van Zyl built the story on African folklore and mythology. That makes this film feel fresh and unique.

At the center of the story is a young orphan named Mary (Keita Luna), who accompanies her uncle William (Garth Breytenbach) and his wife Sarah (Inge Beckmann) to the old, remote family farm that William has inherited. There they meet Lazarus (Tshamano Sebe), a homeless man who offers to help around the property. Lazarus seems to be a friendly guy, but Sarah distrusts him from the moment she meets him, and we know from the start that she's right to not want him around. That's because the sack Lazarus carries around contains a hideous little demon with a voracious appetite for souls. 

Lazarus could have been presented as a heartless monster, as some of the locals believe him to be, but Sebe is able to make us care about his character and feel sympathy for him. When we find out exactly how Lazarus came to have this demon in his life, the back story is heart wrenching. We see the torment he feels about the things he has to do in service of this demon - and yet he does them, and his actions cannot be condoned.

Sebe isn't the only cast member who delivers a wonderful performance. All of the leads do quite well in their roles, with Luna proving to be a terrific child actress in this, her screen debut. She was given heavy material to work with, she's playing a child who ponders the afterlife after losing her parents, and while Mary doesn't have any intense breakdowns over the grief she feels, Luna brings a soulful quality to the character. Luna and Sebe have some great scenes to play together. Beckmann stands out as the concerned Sarah, who tries to be a good female figure in Mary's life while hurting over the fact that she can't conceive a child of her own. William is mainly there to ignore his wife's concerns, but Breytenbach makes the character feel real. Chris April and Luxolo Ndabedi have fascinating supporting roles as locals who know Lazarus is to blame for deaths in the area.

The Soul Collector is an exceptionally well made film, and cinematographer David Pienaar ensured that it looks great. There is a very melancholy feel to the entirety of its 99 minutes, with the score composed by Elben Schutte enhancing that feeling. It's a film that deals heavily with loss - the loss of Mary's parents, the loss of Lazarus's daughter long before, the deaths of the people whose souls Lazarus collects - and the sadness of it all is palpable.

With his first feature, Hölscher has made something that's impressive in both technical achievement and in how emotionally engaging it is. It will require some patience for some viewers to get through The Soul Collector, it doesn't move quickly and doesn't lay out all the answers in an easy way, but those who can go along with the pace, tone, and style of storytelling will find it to be a rewarding experience.

The element I had the biggest issue with was the inclusion of some cliché supernatural jump scare moments, but I suppose filmmakers feel that they're required to put that sort of thing into a movie like this.

The film originally known as 8 gets an 8 to me. And on a personal note, it made me smile that Mary had a pet (a silkworm in this case) that she called Mr. Grumpy.

The review of The Soul Collector was originally posted on ArrowintheHead.com

YOUNGBLOOD (1986)

When I was a kid, we had a copy of the sports drama Youngblood on VHS, recorded off of one of the cable movie channels. I made a couple attempts to watch the movie, but for some reason I could never really get into it. I watched far enough to see 17-year-old American farmboy Dean Youngblood (Rob Lowe) try out for - and earn a place on - the Hamilton Mustangs hockey team, I saw him get put up in a boardinghouse where he's instantly seduced by Miss McGill (Fionnula Flanagan), the 40-something woman who runs the place, but for some reason I have no recollection of watching beyond that point, which is about 20 minutes into the 110 minute movie. Maybe the quality of the recording was bad. Whatever the case was, when I finally got around to watching the entirety of Youngblood many years later, I found that it's actually a really good movie.

Directed by hockey player Peter Markle, who also crafted the story with John Whitman, the film follows Youngblood through a season of playing for the Mustangs, a team coached by Murray Chadwick (Ed Lauter), with characters played by Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves among Youngblood's teammates. Youngblood is hazed by his teammates, forms a bond with them, butts heads with Chadwick, and risks his place on the team by striking up a romance Chadwick's daughter Jessie (Cynthia Gibb), who runs the Zamboni at the Mustangs' home rink. Other than Youngblood's personal struggles over whether or not he should continue to pursue hockey as a profession, the main conflict in the film is between Youngblood and fellow hockey player Racki (George Finn), who tried out for the Mustangs the same day Youngblood did. Racki had earned 378 minutes of penalties for being rough with other players before he tried out for the Mustangs and would have been good to have on the team to knock around opponents, but Chadwick decided to go for Youngblood's speed rather than Racki's brutality, even after Racki knocks Youngblood to the ground with a gash on his face that requires six stitches. Racki ends up on a team called Thunder Bay Bombers, and his violent playing style causes trouble for the Mustangs when they play against the Bombers.

My knowledge of hockey, like most other sports, is slim, but Youngblood made me care about how things would turn out for the lead character and the Mustangs, and the game footage held my attention. This was a good movie that doesn't get mentioned often enough.

It also really warmed my heart that Jessie goes to a theatrical screening of The Slumber Party Massacre, a movie that was already four years old when Youngblood was released, and later mentions that the only things there are to do in her hometown are ice skate or go see The Slumber Party Massacre. I don't know why that movie gets such attention in this one, but I appreciated it.