The Overlook Theatre Reviews: DEADSIGHT, Jesse Thomas Cook's

A man with partial blindness and a young pregnant police officer must work together to escape from a deadly virus that has spread across Grey County.

5 of 7 viewers "Liked" "DEADSIGHT" (2019, USA)

Creature reviews have been minimally altered in an attempt to maintain their voice:

Lord Battle - "Zombies populate a cinematic world created by George Romero. Other filmmakers may explore this world and even change it to suit their needs. Deadsight chose not to retread Romero's water by explaining rules to a savvy audience but instead used this extra narrative time to set a tone with dilapidated rural homes and colorfully lit underground mazes populating our unlikely survivor's 90 minute journey. Zombie fans may not enjoy the gore (especially a couple of CGI headshots that stand out) but may enjoy the strong cinematography, bleak storytelling, and post-apocalyptic exploration." - 3.5 Stars

Huntress - "Deadsight follows two rationally unskilled, extra vulnerable people as they make their way through a zombie ravaged world. Most of their run-ins with the infected felt like they were won simply due to dumb luck, which I really liked. But the overactive background music smothered the potential for tension to build. Deadsight simultaneously felt like several movies smashed together as well as its own thing, which is becoming increasingly uncommon in a genre that's been through as many renditions as zombie movies have. Our leads had the uncomfortable chemistry of an arranged marriage, which also adds to the authenticity of their relationship." - 3 Stars

Wandering Panda - "Deadsight is full of hits and misses for me. If the characters were not fumbling in the dark or in an actual dire situation the film would be so much better. The two characters at times feel like they have complete mastery of what they're trying to do. I also love the joke of "let's hand the blind guy very dangerous things." Like seriously, he was handed an axe and a shotgun. A frickin' shotgun!!! He's blind!!! Also, he had perfect aim for some reason or whatever." - 2.5 Stars

Eddie the Gamer Ghoul - "I made the mistake of taking it seriously... and the start of the movie sold its seriousness. Too soon I was laughing with the others at the blind swordsman/gunslinger rolling 20's with weapons he'd only used once (of which there were several). All in all, a great zombie comedy! That no one should suffer more den once... I was left with so many questions. Why did some zombies require headshots and some didn't? What happened to Patient Zero? She was like, 'I once was an infected like you, till I took a bullet to the knee.'". - 3 Stars

Math Mage - "Fargo + 28 Days Later sounds promising but goes nowhere, explores nothing, and is full of lame tropes (especially all weapons are single-use, zombies spawn in front of you, aim for the head, etc). Also, the blind guy rolls nothing but 20's." - 2.5 Stars

Greyranger - "It's cheap, none-too-original, but it's surprisingly affecting! Far from perfect, but it's sticking with me. Stellar opening, too!" - 3.5 Stars

KillDozer - " I appreciate a film made by filmmakers who want to make a film. A beautiful score and some moody atmosphere make for a watchable independent film that will remind you of minimalistic 28 Days Later." - 3 Stars

The Overlook Theatre Final Rating*

(Below is for after you've seen the film)

I decided to play Deadsight first on this particular Overlook Theatre Thursday and it was the first time in years that the reviewers questioned my choice. I was surprised by this since the film paired to play with Deadsight was Iron Sky 2: The Coming Race, which had a lot of baggage and was a ridiculous comedy. I knew if I had reversed the two that the audience would be less open for a slow-paced film, which I was only guessing Deadsight would be.
I should mention that the Thursday screenings that have been going on for over 3 years now take place at 6:30PM to give people enough time to eat/change or whatever before coming over. If you open up a double feature with a thoughtful/deliberately paced film, you are catching people just as they are unwinding. I found this to be a great spot for a film that demands attention. The only problem is if it's really "heavy" or just really good you may be kneecapping the following film. Also, keep in mind 99% of the films screened on Thursdays are unvetted.
Deadsight started strong and held the audience's attention completely until the beginning of the 3rd act. As the action amped up and we got a couple of "How the hell did the blind guy..." comments accented by some CGI head explosions, cross conversations broke out.
I will say that we had a couple of strong outliers during the film who continued to focus through the chatter, so the conversation can be considered mostly rude.

~💀~

After this screening, we were joined by Deadsight director Jesse Thomas and co-writer/co-star Liv Collins for episode 149 of The Overlook Hour, where they elaborated on their stylistic choices with the film and talked about the entire filming process. There were some slight technical issues we had no control over, which we talk about in the intro, but if you just want to skip directly to the interview, it starts at 1:08:43.

Also available on 
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Thanks again to RLJE for sending us an early screener of DEADSIGHT!

- Lord Battle

The Overlook Theatre materialized in a Residence for a screening on 6/27/2019

*Based on the star ratings turned in by character reviewers, others viewed and got to "Dislike" or "Like" but that does not affect the rating.

Math Mage Reviews: "The Hateful Place" Table Top RPG

Through a common love of horror films, I ended up befriended Dave Mitchell (creator of THP) over Instagram. When I found out he had a Lamentations of the Flame Princess style tabletop game I had to buy some of the books. I got 2 Core rulebooks and 2 copies of No Rabbits in Rabbit Wood. One set was for me and the other was for the Math Mage,he trade-off being he had to write up his thoughts on the product. Below is the honest neutral opinion of a mad wizard with 20+ years of Dungeon Master experience. Enjoy.

-Lord Battle

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“The Hateful Place” is an RPG that hates you, and not just in a narrative sense with its bleak setting and unfair odds.  “THP” hates you on a mechanical level.

If you play this game your character will die.  I don’t mean that in the “I hate you but secretly I love you” Dark Souls way; your character will die miserably and permanently and that’s the point.  The system is a very simple 3 stat system* that can be covered in a single page.  This makes character creation (relatively) quick and easy.  Which is good since you don’t want an emotional investment in someone who’s going to die in half an hour (or sooner, more on that later).  Here’s why you’re going to die: all attacks deal 4d10 damage (except demons, they do 5d10 damage), PCs have ~30hp, monsters have 40, and demons have 100. Attacks include everything: thrown rocks, dagger in the face, laser cannon, stubbed toe, and way more.  Assuming the scenario doesn’t simply begin with you bleeding to death already, any conflict at all will lead to your gruesome demise.  This is not a game of heroic adventurers battling evil, or even underdogs struggling against impossible odds.  This is a game about watching your character die in horrible and (hopefully) entertaining ways.

"A map from the upcoming VICTIMSHIRE"

The setting is the real selling point.  Left intentionally vague so that the system can be applied to a variety of genres, the whimsical and horrible dark fantasy comes through in both mechanics (as explored above) and in the prose and advice.  Except not really.  All of the books read like the notes an improv-loving GM would write to himself**, and there does seem to be a default setting if one reads between the lines.  It’s North-Central Europe in the age of pike and shot and if you told me that this was intended to be a campaign resource for Lamentations of the Flame Princess I would believe it.  The simple monster/demon rules would be an excellent solution to LotFP’s general lack of monster support.  This setting seems eerie and grim and I would love to play in it, but I can’t with just the info provided.  To paraphrase the title page, the Hateful Place only exists in its creator’s mind.

Additionally, as much as I praised it above, the system’s simplicity is also its biggest weakness. There’s no real way to differentiate between a toxic plant spraying acid in your face and a werewolf eating your leg if both deal 4d10 damage.  You can, of course, make up new rules for those specific situations, but if you’re doing that, why use these rules at all.  Even worse, as simple as they are, the character creation rules still require rolling stats and choosing classes such that character creation could take longer than the scenario.

"Rumor Table from the upcoming VICTIMSHIRE"

So should you buy this system? Emphatically yes! Although as I can’t recommend it as a game system, it is a wonderful campaign resource for any GM looking to inject some whimsical horror into their game.  The random tables especially help fire up the imagination, with entries like: STARTING PLACE (burning an innocent person alive as a witch) and YOU ARE (bleeding to death).  I’m planning to send my ACKS campaign to the Red and Pleasant Land very soon and these books will be a great resource.
I would recommend “3” especially.  Although it reads like random ideas on post-its rather than a sourcebook, most of those ideas are good ones.  And the random tables could sell the book on their own.  Providing creative answers to questions like WHAT’S IN MY MOUTH and WHOSE HANDS DO I HAVE?

*which makes me nostalgic for Big Eyes, Small Mouth but that’s another story.  

**I know because my notes look like that :)

Keep an eye out for VICTIMSHIRE which should be released the end of September!
And check out all of The Hateful Place books at Dave Mitchell's page on Lulu.com.

-Math Mage

Some Much Needed Attention to Nicolas Pesce's PIERCING

Piercing (2019) 

81 minutes 

Directed by: Nicolas Pesce

Written by: Nicolas Pesce (Adapted from the novel by Ryu Murakami)

Starring: Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowska

Available:

Amazon DVD/Blu Ray Rent/Buy Streaming 

PIERCING tells the age-old tale of a man, Reed, who must face his fears head-on. For Reed, that fear is that he might stab his infant daughter with an ice pick. 

To confront that fear, Reed realizes that he must murder a prostitute with an ice pick. 

That's how we begin Nicolas Pesce's follow-up to his debut arthouse horror flick THE EYES OF MY MOTHER. If that sounds bizarre, you’re on the right track. PIERCING is an immensely strange movie, but if you’re familiar with the director or the source material, you should already have a good idea of what to expect.

PIERCING is an adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s (AUDITION, IN THE MISO SOUP) 1994 novel of the same name. For those uninitiated, Murakami follows in the footsteps of Edogawa Rampo (The Human Chair, Moju: The Blind Beast) and Japan’s peculiar tradition of erotic-but-rarely-sexy-thrillers (See: Pinku films). Murakami’s own psycho-sexual thrillers explore Japan’s sleazy underworld, Tokyo’s paranoid nightlife, and the odd characters within. 

PIERCING is no exception. The novel takes the profoundly weird setup described above and uses it to comment on the overworked Japanese businessman, escort services, fetishes, and fatherhood, all while delivering heaps of wry, pitch-black humor.

Pesce comes into the film with large shoes to fill. As the second director to adapt Murakami, he follows in the footsteps of Takashi Miike’s 1999 extreme J-horror classic AUDITION. Knowing the book and Murakami, I came into the film with no idea how a director could adapt it into something palatable, coherent, or successful. 

Then, I remembered that Nicolas Pesce made THE EYES OF MY MOTHER, a grisly movie that pulls no punches and is boldly stylish, presented in harsh black-and-white with a great deal of the dialogue in Portuguese. In his debut film, Pesce demonstrated an ability to expertly marry style and strangeness in a way that suits the surreality of PIERCING.

Going into PIERCING, I hoped Pesce’s short but impressive track-record would prove to be a perfect starting point from which to adapt a book that would otherwise be unadaptable. As much as anything, I at least hoped Pesce would present the story in its delightfully perverted whole.

My hopes were mostly met.

Before diving into the film, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how goddamn stylish it is. 

Unlike the greys of his previous film, Pesce paints the frames with vibrant reds, yellows, and blues, and combines them with striking angular arrangements of set-design and lighting. Vertical and horizontal lines stripe the frame and make it feel like a film noir collided with a Mondrian painting. The result is reminiscent of the films of Argento and Bava, with more than a splash of De Palma, all swaddled into a beautiful cubist nightmare.

The interiors, on the other hand, feel straight out of ERASERHEAD. Props and set-pieces seem to be pulled out of 70's and 80's Eastern Bloc states, then dyed bright colors and jammed into a hotel that would only exist in noir films and sleazy Italian slasher flicks. 

The world of PIERCING is an anachronistic mix of art-deco and baroque fixtures that would feel out-of-place anywhere but inside the impossible architecture of the movie’s miniature cityscapes. 

Did I mention the miniatures? To accentuate the visual style, the exteriors in PIERCING are comprised entirely of miniature sets, with towering walls of skyscrapers that often take up the full frame as we float up to the appropriate apartment. Toy cars fill the streets. At times, paroxysmal birds jitter past the buildings, seemingly cut from cardstock and animated with stop-motion.

Pesce combines the striking visual style with a unique, wonderful, and at times jarring choice of soundtrack. PIERCING uses music that’s almost entirely borrowed from Giallo films. Most notably Goblin’s main theme from DEEP RED, and another piece from TENEBRAE. While they’re used to great effect at times, they can also take the viewer out of the movie.

These, combined with gratuitous use of De Palma-esque split screens, lend to an acute awareness that what’s happening on screen is somehow not real, and lends the film a dreamlike quality. The style itself makes the viewer so aware that what they’re seeing is a movie that it’s almost surprising that the characters don’t know they’re in a movie.

PIERCING'S frequent references to De Palma, Argento, Fulci, Bava, and others, serve as an homage to the glorious sleaze of the 70's and 80's. The references are overt and amusing, and while they might evoke the overeager mimicry of a film student, it’s clear that the director comes from a loving, reverent place. As a fan of said sleaze, I was giddy every time I caught a glimpse of the aforementioned filmmakers’ distinct styles.

Now, on to the film itself. If you haven’t watched, spoilers are to follow but are mostly limited to the first act. If anything I’ve said above interests you, go watch the damn movie, then read.

~💀~

PIERCING begins with a pseudo-helicopter shot of the miniature skyscrapers. 

We zero-in on an apartment and quickly meet Reed (played by Christopher Abbott) as he watches over his newborn daughter and runs an icepick across the infant’s cheek. For some, this may be an uncomfortable scene, but I appreciated its boldness. It’s an unpleasant image that’s highly evocative and serves to foreshadow the grotesquery to come. 

It becomes clear that Reed has a dire need to stab something, or someone, with an icepick. This is evidenced by his own infant telling him so, in the first of a number of hallucinatory scenes that are some of the movie’s highlights. Reed narrates the requirements of his victim: a prostitute who must also speak English so he can understand her screams.

Reed quickly kisses his wife and infant goodbye and takes his murder plots to an upscale hotel, where he meticulously runs through his plans in one of the film’s most powerful scenes. 

We watch Reed (in a fantastic feat of physical acting by Abbott) mime through his plan, as he drugs his victim, drags her to the bathtub, stabs her with an icepick, then dismembers her. All his mimed actions are accompanied by the sound of the actions, such that we hear the squelch of the stabs and the grinding of the bone saw, followed by the oozes and rips as he mock-removes her head.

We next meet the prostitute he’s hired to be his victim. Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) wakes up from a halcyon binge to a call from her pimp, letting her know she’s got a job. She packs a duffel-bag of sex toys and catches a cab. Her cab ride is presented alongside Reed’s plotting, in a moment pure De Palma style split-screen that left me wide-eyed and giddy.

Jackie and Reed meet, and we quickly learn that Jackie isn’t all there. We get a sense that she’s not just uninterested in her work as an escort, but in human interaction altogether. After an extremely awkward introduction, followed by an even more awkward attempt at seduction. Jackie asks to take a shower and disappears into the bathroom of Reed’s hotel room.

What follows is a gruesome comedy of errors, filled with blood, gore, and weirdness. PIERCING takes you on a wild ride that will leave you saying “what the fuck” throughout. 

I wouldn’t want to spoil more than that. Although I can say for sure that the film holds up even knowing beat-for-beat what happens, I can almost guarantee that the film works better as a blind watch, or an introduction to the book, followed by a rewatch afterwards.

Abbott and Wasikowska do a fantastic job embodying the leads. As Reed, Abbott expertly portrays a socially abysmal weirdo. His affect and manner almost recall Christian Bale in American Psycho, but without a shred of the charisma. 

Wasikowska plays a different type of lunatic. Her body language, tone, and mannerisms are straight out of the uncanny valley, and the effect resonates. She moves like she doesn’t belong in her skin, mumbles half her lines, and at times hefts herself around like she’s carrying an invisible weight. 

Together they have an excellent dynamic. Throughout the film, both characters play cat-and-mouse like roles, however, being a comedy of errors, neither character seems sure which is the cat and which is the mouse.

~💀~

I omitted something when I described PIERCING-the-book. Murakami’s novel spends far, far more time in the characters heads than it does on their actions. Both characters, on the page and the screen, suffer from dire mental illness. Thus, the motivations range from baffling, demented, to outright psychotic.

Pesce’s adaptation reproduces the novel almost exactly, but he omits a great deal of the internal dialogue that both characters entertain. This leaves us with is a movie about maniacs pursuing vaguely defined, self-important goals, doing absolutely insane things to achieve them. 

A lot of the themes are lost between the novel and the film. Fear of fatherhood slips away, as does the plight of the businessman, and only minimal commentary on sex-work remains. Instead, Pesce has created a movie about roles of power in a relationship, and of dominance and submission. 

As the film progresses, we see Reed and Jackie swap roles. Reed begins as a cold psychopath ready to control and murder Jackie, but he degrades into a sniveling whelp. Jackie, on the other hand, constantly sucks agency away from Reed, and by the end becomes the dominant force in their relationship. Although in ways, it’s a divergence from the novel, it feels completely natural and fits into the strange world that Pesce has crafted out of Murakami’s source material.

~💀~

For some, the utter surreality of the film will be a turn-off. For others (including yours truly), it’ll be a joy to watch. Even knowing what to expect, the leads portray their insane roles so well that I found myself constantly on edge, wondering what the hell will happen next. Reed and Jackie are unstable power-kegs that could explode at any moment.

For me, I loved the utilization of absolutely bizarre flashbacks, some great phone-call gags, random acts of violence, and bizarre, but understandable character decisions. It misses some of the wry humor of the novel, but replaces it with new elements of visual weirdness, and introduces new humor while exploring the same themes.

Should you watch PIERCING? I’d sure-as-hell say so. While it’s not a perfect movie, it’s a hell of a ride, and if you’re anything like me, I suspect you’ll learn to love its weirdness. 

It’s a feat of style, with good performances to back it up. The soundtrack is clever, even if it’s out of place at times. The make-up effects are impressively gross, and it’s got some flawed but still awesome CGI.

Pesce is slated to direct the reboot of the American adaptation of THE GRUDGE(Ju-on). Who knows what that’ll look like, but I’m excited to see what he does with it. It’s a series with a lot of bizarre mythology, and I think Pesce’s style-followed-by-substance approach will fit it excellently.

-Listener Sam