Lovecraftian Mob Dramas, WWII Gorefests, & Korean Extremity

From Horror to Action-Exploitation, International Genre Films Shined at TIFF ‘22

by Josh Lewis

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This year’s Toronto International Film Festival delivered on all the major titles one would hopes to see, including Steven Spielberg’s therapeutic sound-stage recreation of his own childhood in The Fabelmans, Park Chan-wook’s strikingly energetic new femme fatale noir/perverse Hitchcockian romance Decision to Leave, and Laura Poitras’ moving documentary on addiction, outsider art, and the political act of making private life/pain into a public, visual work of rebellion in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The festival also had many unexpected delights, from Daniel Goldhaber’s white-knuckle thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline to the return of the playfully ugly, farcical Lars Von Trier in a new season of his supernatural medical soap The Kingdom (which in the Nineties got comparisons to Twin Peaks, and by doing a 3^rd season 25 years later has only solidified that).

But there was also one of the most essential parts of TIFF: the Midnight Madness program, the section of the festival dedicated to “cult, action, horror, shock, and fantasy cinema.” This year the program included a new COVID slasher from teen meta-horror scribe Kevin Williamson and underrated direct-to-video action director John Hyams, an Al Yankovic parody biopic, and the queer coming-of-age comedy from On Cinema collaborator—and previous Blood Knife contributor—Vera Drew, The People’s Joker (which due to a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros during its world premiere ended up being pulled from the festival).

Among the more under-discussed offerings in Midnight Madness this year was a stacked slate of international genre cinema including some genuinely inspired work out of Spain, Finland, and South Korea. Here are three that stood out.

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VENUS

Part on-the-run mob crime thriller, part Lovecraftian Lords of Salem, Spanish genre filmmaker Jaume Balagueró’s (known best for his contribution to the REC films) latest film Venus is the kind of midnight movie with a final 30 minutes so go-for-broke ambitious that it’s easy to forgive its shortcomings. Lucía (Ester Expósito) is a go-go dancer looking for a way out from underneath the thumb of her gangster employers who steals a bag filled with drugs and flees to the “Venus” apartment complex–where unbeknownst to her, her estranged sister Rocío (Ángela Cremonte) and niece Alba (Inés Fernández) are being haunted by something much worse than brutish enforcers and mob bosses.

Based in part on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”, Venus is a cleverly designed piece of action horror that lulls you into its claustrophobic pressure cooker crime thrills of neon club chases and gushing knife wounds before very gradually planting its cosmic horror seeds. The generational sisterhood drama that it briefly transitions into once Lucía moves back in with her sister is soon overtaken by nightmare imagery, solar eclipses, and strange paranoid feelings about a creepy demon woman who might be living in the attic and bringing her niece “presents.” (Mostly vials of dead children’s tears.)

The film takes perhaps a bit too long to truly reveal itself for what it is–there are really only so many “Is this place cursed or is she going crazy?” fake outs you can do before inadvertently letting some air out of the balloon–but once it does, it successfully blends its two genres relatively well, escalating both in rhythm with one another so that by the time you get to the bonkers horror-action finale featuring gun-toting building raids crashing into Suspiria witchcraft ceremonies, the meandering setup starts to pay off in unexpected ways. In particular, there’s a gruesome self-surgery scene involving a staple gun and duct tape that is timed perfectly for the audience to figure out what Lucía needs to do just before she does that is just fantastic, and Ester Expósito is as physically committed to being gutted and tortured and forced to crawl through filth as any great action heroine before her.

It’s unfortunately clear by its final moments that Balagueró never really figured out how to resolve his mob movie characters suddenly finding themselves in a cosmic horror story of witch sacrifices, tentacle possessions, and giant Silent Hill monsters (or what it really means outside of an undercooked vengeful female spirit/empowerment angle) but it sustains its blending of the two on a logistical action level for much longer than expected and has an effectively slippery, gory, and comic sensibility about itself. It’s the kind of movie where a sharp object appears in almost every scene, a character (in order to make sense of the movie they’re in) Googles “Venus,” and a perfectly timed, massive hero shot (with “let’s dance” serving as the film’s version of Ash’s “groovy” from Evil Dead II) get the exactly calibrated, satisfied reaction it’s looking for. 

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SISU

“White-knuckle courage” is the Finnish translation of Sisu, the latest film from Finland’s action movie remix artist Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports, Big Game), who’s made a career out of bringing a sly, genre-bending, and crowd-pleasing studio-action quality to his home country of Finland. Where his previous attempts have had a young-adult comic-action quality with a clear reverence for the Hollywood of his youth (think Die Hard and Cliffhanger), Sisu finds Helander in a much leaner and meaner mode of wilderness survival thrills and borderline Naziploitation pulp action. Set during the Lapland War in the declining months of the Nazi regime, prospector Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) wanders the vast wasteland of his country after the Nazis have taken up a “scorched earth” policy during their retreat, and winds up digging up some gold that he plans to cash in at the nearest town. But before he can do so, he runs into a retreating unit run by SS Obersturmführer Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) and finds himself in a head-to-head duel of Spaghetti Western title cards, hysterically grisly violence, and a lot of grunting and growling.

Stripped-down to its base elemental instincts perhaps to a fault—removing any sort of intrigue one might have about its history, folklore, or characters—Sisu essentially lives and dies on its bloodthirsty set-piece logic. Luckily for Helander, he is a pretty skilled engineer of tense decision-making and bodily destruction. Its strongest section is its near-wordless opening half of blood-orange sunset vistas that trace Jorma Tommila’s brooding, muddy, battle-scarred gold miner of ghostly Finnish revenge as if he were a John Wick-type figure of fear, and having him impose his rage on scores of Nazi foot-soldiers in increasingly inventive ways; some highlights include combat knives piercing temples, absurdly chunky minefield explosions (including a gag involving him tossing a mine directly onto an enemies helmet while he’s too busy being careful not to step on one with his feet), and an underwater trachea-slitting in order to suck the oxygen out of the corpse’s throat.The attempt here is to rework elements of Inglourious Basterds and Rambo (perhaps more Rambo 3 and 2008 than the first two, including the former’s wound-cleaning/cauterizing via gasoline and matches and the latter’s chunky, digitally-augmented gore) into a Nazi murder highlight reel of machinegun fire, hangings, exploding animals, and bodies squished by tank treads—all in the name of the physically arduous act of crossing a warzone with some valuable rocks on your back. It doesn’t always work (the big explosive finale on the plane starts to strain both the physicality and budget) and its grisly and elemental qualities would probably be even better served by having some sort of emotionally or morally cathartic framework to accentuate them, but in pure “b-movie that somehow got a studio budget” terms, Sisu is pretty undeniable genre moviemaking.

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PROJECT WOLF HUNTING

Last but not least, no midnight movie program would be complete without a new entry in Korean Extremity, and Project Wolf Hunting does nothing if not scratc

h that itch–one that’s lately been filled by Indonesian and Taiwanese films like the martial arts splatter film The Night Comes for Us or the COVID-shot sadistic zombie body horror film The Sadness. Unquestionably the goriest, crunchiest film in this year’s line-up, writer-director Kim Hong-sun begins things as a prison break film with an absurd comic book premise involving some of South Korea’s most dangerous criminals being extradited from the Philippines on a massive cargo ship by incompetent and brutal police escort. Tensions are high on-board as friction builds between the more psychotically inclined inmates (who at first chance will shove knives into throats and pee on the corpses) and those trying to maintain some semblance of control, resulting in a vicious bloodbath of cops and crooks tearing each other to shreds in shootouts and martial arts combat so wet it borders on slasher movie territory.

That is, of course, before Project Wolf Hunting has both forces on the ship realize they are not the only piece of precious cargo, and transforms into a straight-up military-industrial complex slasher movie (with a backstory that slightly resembles Bob Clark’s Deathdream) involving re-animated super-soldiers turning just about every character on screen into human soup. At 120 minutes, Kim Hong-sun takes a bit too long to get to this setup, but once he does it’s a non-stop litany of bodily destruction that’s an impressive work of sheer sustained gruesome duration with an eye for weird texture and design choices: the camera bolting its way around rusted steel engine rooms and corridors as a zombie combination of Michael Myers (including the jumpsuit and pinning girls to walls with knives) and the Predator (including body temperature vision) punches holes in chests, crushes skulls, tears limbs off, and leaves every possible variation of chunky, leaking viscera you can think of on the filthy floors.

Others have been comparing its ridiculously savage physicality to CAPCOM horror videogames, which might also explain the sudden jarring World War II flashbacks and pulpy exposition about genetic experimentation. Wolf Hunting doesn’t completely justify its length, but it is nonetheless energetically made and cartoonishly violent enough that it eventually builds to a blunt force momentum that works–especially considering the bad-taste nature of the endeavor, shocking moments of death by blowjob, suspense sequences of hiding in piles of frozen corpses, and all matter of body fluid horror and humor. It’s a hellish and energetic piece of action-horror filmmaking, one seemingly built around an idea–suggested in the text of the film itself–that constant exposure to pain could be a solution to PTSD.

If nothing else, writer-director Kim Hong-sun has certainly put that idea to the test himself.

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