Kaurismäki’s “Hamlet Goes Business” Takes the Bard Into Bizarro Territory

Aki Kaurismäki’s films were bizarro before bizarro became a thing. I can think of no other auteur who has done for the motion picture what authors like Kevin L. Donihe have done for alternative fiction—consummately married the mundane to the peculiar.

If there’s one thing that our readers will find appealing about Hamlet Goes Business, a film that could otherwise be summarized as a black-and-white arthouse melodrama, it’s the depths to which it goes to highlight the absurdity of ole Anonymous‘s play.

The high contrast black-and-white photography feels less like an homage to Shakespearean theater and more like a tip of the hat to Kafka fans who have relished cinema’s adaptations of the same (think Orson Welles’ production of The Trial). Indeed, the entire film feels less like a Shakespeare tragedy and more like an exercise in lampooning industrialism and Capitalism, and the people responsible for both.

Where the play starts out with two watchmen convincing Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, to stand watch with them so as to catch sight of the King’s ghost, Hamlet Goes Business opens on a tight shot of a puppy yapping, his cries falling on deaf ears.

Instead of the Prince’s friend becoming convinced that a specter spells bad things for the future of Denmark, Kaurismäki’s story finds Klaus (the Claudius character of the Shakespeare text) poisoning the King before sucking face with the widow Gertrude in a shot yanked straight out of Gone with the Wind.

In a first act reveal that would have likely drawn belly laughs from John Kennedy Toole, Prince Hamlet himself (played sublimely by Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is shown to be a paunchy, greasy-haired brat.

The other men populating this adaptation are profoundly dense, their actions motivated by the basest of fears and desires. An early scene involving ham is laugh-out-loud funny but, also, symbolic of the flick’s central theme—man’s voracious appetite for amassing things. Wealth describes not only money but anything that can be horded and/or devoured.

As Polonius (Esko Nikkari) explains early on, the porky prince has the controlling shares of the family company with the rest belonging to the banks. Polonius takes for granted that Prince Hamlet will be too stupid to object to a modest allowance in lieu of a promotion. It’s his firm belief that the little bastard is so dumb that he won’t realize that the role of company president is his birthright.

At the King’s funeral, Klaus tells Hamlet that he has something he wants to show him. The next very abridged sequence is introduced by an intertitle reading, “Satan and Jesus on the Mountain.” It consists solely of Klaus showing the prince around the company’s factory as if introducing him to the nuts and bolts of Capitalism.

The intertitle seems to suggest that Klaus is the Devil, tempting the son with the fruits of other people’s labor. It’s a captivating metaphor, particularly in what is an otherwise pretty silly film. That Hamlet is then quite literally thrust upon Ofelia (Kaurismäki perennial Kati Outinen), the daughter of a “good family,” furthers this rather blunt metaphor.

The Finnish director behind this short and defiantly sloppy re-imagining is fond of calling his films dog shit, pointing out that they are failures when held up against the works which inspired them. In Kaurismäki’s eyes, even his masterworks—the Oscar-nominated ‘Man Without a Past‘ and his faithfully rendered film of La Vie de Boheme—are garbage compared to the Art of Bresson’s Mouchette or Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

Many would read the director’s comments as self-deprecation, but that’s only if you aren’t hip to the artist’s rather wicked sense of humor. This is the same guy who jarred David Lynch at Cannes by allegedly whispering, “Who are you?”

Silly and haphazard as much of Hamlet Goes Business is, it’s still a cinematic marvel and a well-crafted one at that. As a filmmaker notorious for his economy with dialogue, Kaurismäki never fails to deliver sparse lines that fester in one’s brain. Example:

[After rebutting Hamlet’s advances, Ofelia sits, slouched, on the bed, staring up at him timidly.]

Ofelia: You know I can’t. Not before marriage.

Hamlet: That’s blackmail, darling.

[Moments later, Hamlet advances towards her again, this time to the sort of melodramatic strings of a Douglas Sirk film.]

Ofelia: No, don’t. We’d both regret it afterwards.

Hamlet: That’s what you think.

Ofelia: What did you say?

Hamlet: Leave me now. I promised to dine with my mother.

[Ofelia gets up to leave as Hamlet exhales cigarette smoke and broods. As she leaves, Hamlet turns off the source of the melodramatic music—a reel-to-reel recorder—and turns to a vintage jukebox sitting against the wall of his bedroom.]

The mise-en-scène here is a key component of Kaurismäki’s signature brand of bizarro. On one level, it can be read as a meta-fictional detail bordering on parody, but on another it’s representative of the anachronisms that make his films so unique. I dare any viewer to name another artist working in motion pictures who better juxtaposes such incongruous elements.

After Ofelia leaves, Hamlet kicks the jukebox in anger, compelling it to skip to a 45” whose chorus commands, “Hush! Hush! You’re talkin’ too much.”

Unlike much of the 69-year old’s ouevre, Hamlet Goes Business was not well-received here in America. Of the few reviews that one can dig up on the Internet, nearly all of them agree that the flick is short, stilted and anything but representative of Kaurismäki at the height of his powers.

This strikes me as hilarious since the picture shares so much in common with an American film that suffered the same critical fate upon its release. There are aspects here that will call to mind The Hudsucker Proxy, a screwball comedy directed by the Coen Brothers and co-written by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, A Simple Plan).

The most obvious similarities are the the ridiculously long dinner table and Polonius’s central hypothesis that Hamlet will be too stupid to succeed. It’s worth noting, however, that The Hudsucker Proxy didn’t come out until 1994, a full five years after ‘Hamlet‘ was released on our Shores.

Like the Coen Brothers, Kaurismäki has an affinity for the village idiot, a character that often propels his narratives forward (see: Leningrad Cowboys Go America). In ‘Hamlet,’ it is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are the big, dumb goons while Kaurismäki’s favorite male lead, the late-Matti Pellonpää (Ariel, Night on Earth), fills the ancillary role of The Guard (a conglomeration of the three guardsmen from the Shakespeare text).

The Guard and his young ward are obviously simpletons of the sort that are often found in the periphery of a Coen Brothers flick. Think Steve Buscemi’s Donnie in The Big Lebowski or Ryan Hurst’s Lump Hudson from their 2004 remake of The Ladykillers.

This correlation drew itself in my mind when I was less than a quarter of the way into Hamlet Goes Business. And the more I dwelt upon it, the more it made sense. For all of the credit that we give the Coen Brothers for their signature style, it’s impossible not to see Kaurismäki’s work in almost everything of theirs.

The way that Hamlet gobbles a thick slice of ham over his father’s dead body reminds one of nothing so much as George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer messily gobbling hors d’oeuvres in Burn After Reading. Just when this theory begins to feel far-fetched, ask yourself what made Fargo, the Coens’ 1996 original film, so “original.”

At the time, cosmopolitan American audiences were widely unfamiliar with that distinctly Scandinavian Midwest populated by pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and loser car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). What’s more, the laconic deadpan humor typical of Scandinavian countries was foreign to their ears.

It was this deadpan comedy and the way that the Coens portrayed Minnesota as a bleak winter tundra that got American viewers’ attention. Here was something that was rather eccentric and undoubtedly one-of-a-kind…except it wasn’t.

One could easily picture the Coens’ silent, stone-faced killer, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Storemare), meeting one of Pellonpää’s sad sack working class characters at a pub in Kaurismäki’s Loser Trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, The Match Factory Girl). And that bleak winter tundra has been well-represented in the auteur’s canon, from Ariel all the way up to Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses.

This is not to slight the exceptionally talented Coens in any way, simply to state for posterity that the Finns did it first, Kaurismäki in particular. Here we are given one of the most indescribably odd adaptations of any classic volume. It’s equal parts Orson Welles drama and Three Stooges-style slapstick.

The incongruity I mentioned earlier pops up again when we arrive at one of the director’s perpetual live music sequences. Here it’s a raw punk rock performance of “Rich Little Bitch” by Melrose, one of Lapland’s greatest bands, whose rhythm section consists of a spiky-haired kid with a giant stand-up bass.

While most reviewers are probably right when they say that Hamlet Goes Business is an imperfect film, they neglect the fact that it is still head and shoulders above the hackneyed productions of Hamlet that are rolled out on the stages of International theaters on a near-constant basis. If there’s one thing going for it it’s the director’s obvious restlessness with the source material.

The resulting picture succeeds by virtue of its almost perverse refusal to acknowledge the play’s underlying concerns. The preternatural relationship between Prince Hamlet and his mother is reduced here to a throwaway line of dialogue that reduces the heir’s Oedipal complex to nothing more than the co-dependence of any sexless geek.

If it’s not a masterwork on the order of the director’s later port city stories (La Havre and The Other Side of Hope) then it’s definitely a worthy sizzle reel, demonstrating Kaurismaki’s knack for rendering the boring wildly compelling. If nothing else, it’s surely a worthy stocking stuffer for someone who loathes the Bard.

If you’re familiar with the Shakespeare play then you already know this one doesn’t end well, at least not historically. But in Hamlet Goes Business nothing goes according to plan. Don’t be surprised if the film’s ending finds you smiling. This is just part of what makes it so bizarre.

February 1, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Films That Fell Through the Cracks: “Aaltra” (2004)

“Aaltra”

(Film Movement Series; Delépine et K/Vern)

Some films have the ability to leave you in awe while others are in possession of something capable of driving you mad. Delépine and Kervern’s directorial debut, the nebulously titled Aaltra, is in full possession of both.

Described as a darkly comic road movie, this French-Belgium co-production came and went from European arthouses, collecting warm if largely pedestrian praise from native critics, ultimately landing on our shores only after New York City’s Film Movement launched their e-commerce distribution model in 2003.

The relative obscurity that it has existed in is unfortunate, first and foremost because discerning audiences deserve to see it but, furthermore, because American independent filmmakers could learn a lot from its style and structure.

Aaltra‘s plot seems tailor-made for the sort of broad bromantic comedies that Tinseltown loves to turn out like a cheap escort…at least on paper. To wit: After finding out that his neighbor’s lazy farmhand Gus (the hulking, disheveled de Kervern, credited here as K/Vern) has been screwing his wife, a nerdy motorbike enthusiast and failing company man (French funnyman Benoît Delépine) speeds out into the fields and instigates a haphazard fistfight.

As the two men wrestle, their bodies land in the gaping maw of Gus’s combine harvester. The machine swallows them up, leaving each of them paralyzed below the waist. After realizing that they are both F.U.B.A.R., they begrudgingly decide to team up to take on the corporate bigwigs at Aaltra, the manufacturer of the offending combine.

Naturally, a sort of stand-offish camaraderie develops between the two, one that would be easy to picture drowning in saccharine if placed within the wrong hands. Fortunately for us, Delépine and Kervern are not the wrong hands and Aaltra is not that sort of movie.

Eschewing the buddy comedy formula in favor of something at once more realistic and more surreal than anything most of us are used to, pic presents us with the kind of story that often plays out among modern men in the real world; emotions are stifled, feelings left unexpressed and base urges rule supreme.

Instead of the faux-meditative scene that would find Delépine’s Ben confiding in Gus about the disintegration of his marriage and the laughably awkward details of his sex life, Delépine and Kervern never speak of Gus’s covetous tryst or Ben’s wife at all.

This left quite the impression on me when first I saw it since it flies in the face of our collective understanding of narrative composition. And it’s this kind of ultra-realistic detail (or lack thereof) that gives Aaltra its charm. Of course Ben and Gus never engage in some contrived heart-to-heart about marriage, infidelity or divorce.

Why bother? No use squabbling about yesterday when tomorrow is gonna be lousy enough. After all, each is now half a man in their own eyes, but together they form one mean son of a bitch.

Those seeking an escape from the hypostatized universe of Hollywood cinema would do well to seek this one out. It provides viewers with a slightly askew realism that hasn’t been seen since Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessan or, at least, Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America (fitting that Kaurismäki should cameo in Aaltra‘s denouement).

There is much of the Theater of Cruelty on display, almost all of it more comical than anything Alejandro Jodorowsky ever committed to celluloid (save, perhaps, for select bits of Fando y Lis). From the way the male nurse fucks with them once he’s confirmed that they cannot feel their legs to Ben’s surreptitious theft of a barfly’s drink when he’s not looking.

There is also something of American vintage here in the particular physical comedy that both men employ. Gus’s slow ascension while lying in an automatic hospital bed feels like it was engineered to be an homage to the age of Keaton and Chaplin. And that’s to say nothing of Ben’s Harold Lloyd-worthy pratfalls.

We know from early on that Aaltra‘s journey will have its end in Finland, so it is appropriate that our dyspeptic duo manage to illustrate that country’s aversion to arbitrary loquaciousness. When an old sod at a pub talks relentlessly at a laconic patron, going on and on about something as seemingly mundane as air conditioning in a tractor, we can feel the collective pain of the Finns.

Subtle touches of physical and visual humor soon give way to an extremity that’s every bit as amusing and confounding. The flick is especially effective at juxtaposing the average person’s veneer of samaritanism with the patina of short-tempered prejudice simmering under the surface.

This paradox is first displayed in a worker’s removal of Ben and Gus from a motocross track. “You guys can’t stay here,” he exclaims. “It kills the dream.”

Just when you might begin to feel pity for them, pic reminds us how wrong that sentiment would be. As it turns out, these two scabrous individuals work well together, effortlessly pulling grift after grift on the proud fools in their path. These are guys who think nothing of stealing popcorn from a little boy and threatening to slit his throat if he snitches.

Their primary victims: Every bourgeois idiot who dares to count themselves as well-meaning do-gooders when, in reality, they treat the handicapped as anything but equal. Their encounter with a British motocross star and grade A wank (Jason Flemyng) is almost as riotous as the psychological havoc they wreak on an uptight German couple (Brrring! Brrring!).

It’s the wealthy and entitled Brit who gets one of the flick’s most quotable lines: “It’s people like you that give fucking people in wheelchairs a bad fucking name!” This emerges as one of the only lines worth mentioning in a film whose economy with the verbal gives every line weight.

Like all of the best comedies, Aaltra is also a tragedy, one that opts to impress its poignancy through stark and random images and penetrating silences instead of overwrought pathos.

The beach sequence, featured prominently in the DVD release’s artwork, leaves an indelible impression not only for its blackly comic tableau but, also, the austere beauty of the same. No other director has ever made such effective use of the Lord’s prayer, certainly not in such a perfectly literate fashion.

One of the funniest scenes in the entire picture is also one of its most tense. A stocky Finn with a greasy pompadour sings a flamboyant rendition of Bobby Hebb’s R & B classic “Sunny” while our cripples sit back eating sausage and a room full of mean-looking skinheads seethe.

It’s in moments like this that Delépine and Kervern’s message comes through loud and clear: You need not fear for the well-being of these antagonistic protagonists, but you should worry about everyone else around them.

According to IMDB, Aaltra’s worldwide box office amounted to little more than $6,000 in sales. This may be discouraging if film fans equate financial success with artistic success. Personally, I choose not to.

Part of me believes that true art has no monetary value, only a kind of spiritual one. But as a gambling man, my money’s on this one finding the audience it deserves on streaming platforms.

As for its directors, they have gone on to make a number of unique projects including their Aaltra follow-up Avida. It’s my intention to check that one out sooner than later. I have it on good authority that it made at least seven gs.—Bob Freville

January 29, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

What a Bunch of Assholes: The Scatalogical Satire of Peter Vack

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

dir. Peter Vack

“I’m not fucking a fucking sober bitch pussy, and I’m not having sex like a..no…nobody else would have sex with me because how are they gonna do it? This day and age, all y—, the only way you fuck is if you go for a drink with someone.”

This is how Peter Vack’s 2017 indie addiction comedy Assholes opens, and it’s exactly the kind of irresponsible but fundamentally true diatribe that has become a red diamond in American cinema of late. The films of the 2000s are increasingly homogenized with even the so-called independent films bearing little resemblance to those made in the Seventies, Eighties or even Nineties.

With the exception of Harmony Korine’s tonal prose-poem The Beach Bum, I can think of few, if any, examples of recent movies that allowed their characters to be human, warts and all. Even long-form narratives aren’t permitted to be this honest or ugly. My mind immediately goes to the Hulu series Difficult People which focused on a duo of hopelessly despicable protagonists.

It’s worth mentioning that said show was canceled after its second season. So much for the artistic freedom of streaming services. I’ve gotta wonder if the Billy Eichner series was given the ax, at least in part, because of its equal opportunity insults. Indeed, nothing seemed to be off-limits in Difficult People, whether it was jokes about 9/11 being an inside job, the proliferation of pop-up restaurants or the obnoxious and out-of-control hipsterdom of 21^st Century Manhattan (see: John Mulaney as Old Timey Cecil whose breakout line is, “My family invented the jelly bean. Fuck you!”).

Difficult People would have been a fitting and admittedly more mature title for Peter Vack’s directorial debut. In another universe I could even see the two being paired up for a retrospective. But not in 2020, not even if you’re Todd Solondz or John Waters. The former is relegated to the back pages of Amazon while the latter has to write books in lieu of directing motion pictures.

All “get off my lawn” nostalgic yearning aside, I’ve gotta commend Vack for the bold choices that he makes from frame one. A lot of ink has been spilled about Assholes being a “gross-out” movie, but it’s not the crassness of the dialogue or the hideous sight gags that are really so jarring. Instead it’s Vack’s keen attention to detail that other millennial filmmakers would be unlikely to think of.

In the very first sequence of the flick, as Adah Shapiro, pic’s girl in begrudging recovery, complains about how much she hates sober people we are treated to subtitles that cannot be removed by remote. These subtitles aren’t in another language other than our own. In fact, they are all too familiar to some of us.

“When I was not a sober person and I looked at ber people, I wod be like, whoa, like, you are li, lame. Like, I never gonna be like you. And now that I have crossed over to the sober fe, I stil feel that way, I do! I just still feel that way, and I, I jt, you know, nothing’s changed, and just, and it makes me feel incredibly lonely. Like, incredibly alone in this world because now I forced to hang out with people who I relateero…”

This is just a taste of Adah’s lament and the accompanying subtitles read like nothing so much as a regrettable text message that you send to a former lover at four in the morning before crashing on a park bench and waking up in your own urine.

It is this sense of authenticity that gives Assholes its real power. And it is this power that makes this more than what can fairly be referred to as a “gross-out comedy.” For every feculent fluid that’s highlighted on-screen there are a handful of exchanges that underscore the seriousness of the subject matter.

This acute authenticity extends far beyond the frankness of Adah’s sexual frustration to the way in which she projects her sickness onto her brother, something that virtually every addict has been guilty of at some point in their downward spiral.

I feel like I need to point out that Adah is played by Vack’s real life sister and that Adam Shapiro, her on-screen brother, is played by Vack himself. The actor-director’s birth name was Peter S. Brown. He and his sister’s parents are Ron and Jane Brown, a screenwriter and producer, respectively.

If one were to venture a guess as to the origins of Assholes‘ plot they would probably assume that it’s a work of autobiography. Fortunately for Vack and his sibling, this was never the case. The pair were raised on the Upper West Side by an entrepreneurial father and a mother who earned a living as a psychoanalyst.

While Vack has copped to the fact that they drew upon “past animosities” toward each other, this was not the crux of his idea for the story. In fact, the characters were originally written as ex-lovers and Vack only decided to alter the script after his sister performed the part of the ex-gf during a table read.

People can talk all they want about how “disgusting” this film is, but I dare anyone to name another recent American film that has so lovingly paid homage to the composition of International arthouse pictures. From the off-kilter framing and overbearing lighting to the stilted dialogue and random outbursts, there is little here that could be compared to the likes of the Farrelly Brothers or a Judd Apatow flick.

Maybe Peter Vack isn’t the real asshole, maybe it’s people like me who get off on seeing something that so brazenly thumbs its nose at narrative convention and domestic cinematic structure. I suspect this was at least a consideration of Vack’s if not his full intent.

While I was watching Assholes I was reminded of a quote by Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki in which he complained about the state of modern cinema, saying, “In the old days you had one murder and that was enough for a story. Now you have to kill 300,000 people just to get the audience’s attention.”

If any quote explains the necessity of Assholes‘ verbal and visual excesses it’s this jeremiad. In a world that’s become increasingly desensitized to sex and violence on camera, the only logical next step is for a male and female protagonist to suck each others’ assholes and cold sores. Not because it’s particularly beautiful or artistic, simply because there’s nowhere left to go. How else will you get anyone’s attention?

While it can easily be argued that subtlety would be a better and craftier weapon against mainstream cinema’s excesses, it’s impossible not to acknowledge a certain brilliance in Vack’s politically incorrect presentation of drug-induced insanity.

One extended sequence in the first half hour feels so painfully real that it’s difficult to imagine it being filmed without the cast and crew landing in NYC’s infamous Tombs. And that’s before the birth of the shit-smeared demon woman from the mortal asshole.

It’s fitting that Vack and his sister grew up with a mother who specialized in psychoanalysis because the entire film could be read as one protracted 74-minute therapy session. This is not lost on Assholes‘ creator who makes it a point to include an analyst as a central character, one that seems perpetually put upon by his neurotic patients.

That the analyst is himself so desperate for a connection that he considers himself friends with these assholes reinforces the notion that Assholes isn’t merely about assholes and their obsession with assholes but, more importantly, about how we all have our heads wedged firmly up our assholes.

In short, Assholes is a family film that everyone should be able to connect with. One character sums the madness up quite succinctly: “It’s gender blind, it seems to be directed at all of us.” At the end of the day, these assholes are us.—Bob Freville

January 28, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Pistachio Kid – Sweet Remedies: The SMM Review

Here at SMM, we like the unique, the lone ranger, the poor bastards clawing and crawling to make their mark in the world.

You may not guess it at first glance, but this doesn’t just include the bizarre, horrific and weird. It includes all of those less heard and known.

Before this review, I had never heard of Pistachio Kid. Not surprising considering this is the Pistachio Kid debut album.

Singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist Charlie McKeon takes you on a calming journey in this debut album. The songs play as though he were sitting in the room with you, telling you the story of his life, stolen bikes, fields to play in, and the good times he spent in his home town of Liverpool or attending Leeds College of Music.

The music is clear and crisp, something I’d listen to while writing or working. It isn’t distracting and I could simply tap my foot to the beat while chilling, a lemonade in hand on a warm summer, or a warm drink in a mountain lodge between snowboarding runs, or a tavern in a fantasy world.

I imagine Mckeon as a bard, singing songs of his adventures to tavern patrons. Traveling from town to town in search of fame and fortune with only his guitar and laptop computer strapped to his back.

My personal favorite of the album is Vistabella Road. The acapella intro leading into guitar and piano is like warm butter to the ears. Honestly, I have no idea what the lyrics mean. And Christopher Columbus was a bit of a monster… so… there’s that… But the song is great.

The album is also surprisingly dark. One song sings about a lover and her family and friends hanging from a tree. It’s reminiscent of Doki Doki Literature Club. If you haven’t played that game, you should. Cute and cuddly at first glance, with morbidity and death buried beneath the surface waiting to spring and give you anxiety and nightmares.

Despite my enjoyment of the songs, there are a few songs that left me wanting more. They simply felt too short, not in length, but in story, the endings felt clipped and a bit rushed. The song would feel like it was picking up for something big, or a continuation, then.

There were also a few songs that I felt needed a bit more editing. I’m not sure if it was intentional, missed, or what, but the breath and click at the end of some of the songs, or the sound of what could have been a computer mouse was a bit distracting for me. It’s something I’d expect from the early stages of music recording, not today with fancy editing software. Again, maybe it’s for affect.

Overall, if you’re into chill, folky music, you should check out this album. It’s a good first installment for a great artist.

 

January 24, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Chad Ferrin, Genre Auteur Goes Deep in New Cult Horror Film

Chad Ferrin has made seven feature films over the last two decades, each of them a celebration of the Grotesque. All of these movies shared a certain DIY ingenuity along with an obvious obsession with the limits of sanity.

Despite their collective preoccupations, no two of Ferrin’s flicks were alike. The director brazenly leaped from the no-budget social satire of The Ghouls (2003) to the festive revenge film Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (2007)

It was there, in a seemingly threadbare narrative with one primary location, Ferrin found his footing as a filmmaker. The tale of a disabled kid and his doting single mom provided the director the opportunity to explore difficult subject matter such as child abuse, Munchausen by proxy and more, all within the snug confines of the exploitation genre.

Not two years later, the promise on display in the bloody bunny pic would reach a new apex with Someone’s Knocking at the Door (2009). Produced, in part, by actor/star Noah Segan (Knives Out, Deadgirl), ‘Someone’s Knocking’ is a positively bugfuck psychological horror film about a group of med students who stumble upon a drug that resurrects two sexually voracious thrill-killers.

In the years since ‘Someone’s Knocking,’ Ferrin has seen several of his projects fall apart in various stages of pre-production. First there was the widely announced Dances with Werewolves which made it into the pages of Fangoria before financing fell apart.

The oddball horror western hybrid was ultimately retooled by other filmmakers and released to zero fan fare in 2017, by which time Ferrin had seen a number of other concepts collapse in his wake. After dealing with years of frustration and false deals from bogus money men, Ferrin decided to return to his roots.

In 2016, he took to the fetid streets of downtown Los Angeles to make what should have been the guerilla filmmaking triumph of the decade. Parasites was to be a gritty modernization of Colter’s Run with the action transplanted to the culverts, underpasses, back alleys and reservoirs of LA’s homeless population.

After facing down violent protest from real life street addicts and a flurry of problems typical of shoestring productions, Ferrin managed to successfully execute the film he set out to make. The result is a mean little picture with balls as big as the bone it’s got to pick with society.

Boasting a ferocious performance by chameleonic character actor Robert Miano (Donnie Brasco, The Funeral) as the central heavy, Parasites exemplified Ferrin’s talent for taking a familiar trope (the middle class take a detour and end up in a place they don’t belong) and amplifying it to 11.

What should have been a breakout hit for the genre auteur ended up going the way of countless other direct-to-DVD flicks when Ferrin discovered that his domestic production partners had gone behind his back, secretly releasing the pic on streaming platforms in the United States and quietly selling off International territories.

After he managed to wrest his film from the greasy hands of his rapacious partners, Ferrin found another distributor who had some ideas of their own. A full two years after principal photography was complete, Parasites bowed out on Amazon Prime under the uninspired title Attack in LA.

Situations like this one are hardly remarkable in the film industry where handshake deals are regularly reneged upon and distributors frequently betray a director’s vision by re-cutting a movie. What is remarkable is Ferrin’s perseverance. Lesser artists would have thrown in the towel, but Chad understood something that’s lost on others—keep yourself busy and, sooner or later, someone’s gonna be knocking on your door.

As a gun for hire, the man has been presented with many an opportunity to work from other people’s source material. In some cases, such as the Mexican investor who tapped him to shoot a B-movie south of the border before slashing his director’s fee in half without warning, things don’t pan out, for good or ill. In others, such as 2019’s Girls & Corpses-produced horror-comedy Exorcism at 60,000 Feet, things end up going another way.

Working from a script by Robert Rhine (son of famed All in the Family scribe Larry Rhine) and Daniel Benton, Ferrin used ‘Exorcism‘ as yet another golden opportunity to flex his stylistic muscles. As with Someone’s Knocking at the Door and Parasites before it, ‘Exorcism‘ illustrated the director’s knack for utilizing woefully underutilized actors and subverting genre expectations.

In 2020, he is poised to take this subversion one step further with The Deep Ones, the first of his films to be inspired by an existing intellectual property. The Deep Ones takes the tired framework of a couple on vacation among strangers with dark motives, and thrusts it into territory that has yet to be explored in cinema.

Fans of H.P. Lovecraft will be thrilled to learn that Ferrin has grafted the insidious influence of Rosemary’s Baby onto a plot revolving around the summoning of Cthulhu by a cult undergoing the Innsmouth transformation.

Many in the horror community have professed love for Lovecraft’s work and some, like Jordan Peele, have produced work that pays homage to said influence. What nobody has done is unleash the Cthulhu mythos on characters of their own creation.

Few would have the guts, but it would seem that Ferrin has intestines for days. Something smells fishy at the Solar Beach Colony when Petri and Alex arrive at the Air BnB of Russell Marsh, a charismatic naturopath with a powerful hunger for clams.

What follows is a terrifying 24 hours beside the dark depths of Cthulhu’s oceanic abyss. Filming for The Deep Ones begins this month in several seaside locations with Robert Miano returning to play the picture’s villain and Deadgirl‘s Jim Ojala on board as makeup effects coordinator.

 

Robert Rhine, Johann Urb and Kelly Maroney (Night of the Comet) will also star with Underworld‘s Kurt Carley appearing as none other than Dagon.

After a sneak peek at the shooting script, I can definitely tell that this will be Ferrin’s most ambitious project to date. As with everything else he’s directed, I have no doubt that he’ll knock it out of the park.

And I’m not the only one, actor Johann Urb (Resident Evil: Retribution) is also confident. “Super excited to be working with this team of talented people and to explore the depths of darkness,” he says.

The cast’s enthusiasm is understandable given the meatiness of each role. It’s one salty or sinister character cropping up after the other, many of them receiving the rare chance to deliver their lines in a particularly obscure tongue.

The plot itself and the turns it takes may seem hackneyed to those who grew up on Polanski and Larry Cohen flicks, but suffice it to say that this one is going to take some gnarly turns. The fundamental theme is freaky enough in and of itself.

As cast member Silvia Spross (Someone’s Knocking at the Door, Mysteria) says, “The horror of brainwash is that good people do horrible things, thinking they are doing something great!”

The Deep Ones was developed from an original screenplay by Ferrin himself. What this tells us is that Ferrin is back where he belongs, behind the keys and at the helm. Veteran actor and frequent Ferrin collaborator Robert Miano is inclined to agree. As he puts it, “Nothing can stop an idea that’s found its time.”

Keep your bloodshot eyes peeled for more on The Deep Ones as news oozes in.

—Bob Freville

January 4, 2020October 28, 2021 by Silent Motorist Media