Cynical Cinema

Saving Grace is a show on TNT in the States and on Showcase here in Canada. Season Two kicks off tonight, at 10 p.m. Eastern, and it’s solid. Holly Hunter stars in her first TV series as Grace, a hard-drinking, smoking, promiscuous detective in Oklahoma City. In the first season, she apparently has a string of one-night stands, an affair with her partner, and she kills a pedestrian in a hit-and-run with her Porsche. An angel appears to her and tells her she has a chance to do right again. I say “apparently” because I had not seen this show before. And I’m disappointed that I haven’t. Showcase specializes in the type of shows that you don’t normally see, with flawed characters, dark humour and creepy situations. And Saving Grace certainly qualifies.

I got a chance to see the first episode of season two today, and this really is a remarkable show. In the season opener, Grace has managed to capture and kidnap the priest who molested her as a child. While she is keeping him a prisoner in her house, she manages to kill a man who was on the FBI’s most wanted list. The internal affairs department begins an investigation after that shooting, because it gets reported that she was drunk at the time. It’s a powerful, dark and troubling episode to begin season two of a series that is better than most. Check it out tonight.

The Riches is a TV series that airs on FX in the States and on Showcase here in Canada. The first episode of Season Two airs on Showcase tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern time. It’s very good. The show stars Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, the parents in a family of traveling con artists. In the last season, they got into a car accident that killed a wealthy couple named the Riches. Rather than going back to the itinerant lifestyle to which they are accustomed, the Malloys decide to upgrade their status in life by assuming the identity of the Riches. Izzard pretends to be Doug Rich, a lawyer, and the con is going successfully. At the end of season one, their scheme is discovered by Pete (Arye Gross) who is a friend of the real Riches. Pete is threatening to blow the whistle when Dale (Dahlia’s cousin) bludgeons him to death. Izzard and Driver are very funny, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.

The series is compelling and unusual. It is certainly like nothing I’ve seen before. Season two opens with Wayne (Doug Rich) discovering that Pete has been murdered by Dale, and a tense confrontation ensues involving a security guard, a gun, a lot of booze, Dale, Wayne, and Hugh Panetta (Gregg Henry). Hugh is a real estate mogul with a massive amount of money, a substance abuse problem, a wife who has just left him, and a gun. Wayne is now forced to accept Dale as a partner in crime, while Dahlia and the family are away and on the run. Season Two of The Riches is starting off, tonight, with a tense showdown and a lot of good old fashioned grifter fun.

When I first started watching The Babysitters, out today from Peace Arch Entertainment, I was worried.  It’s the story of a bunch of high school girls who get together and form a prostitution ring through babysitting.  Their adult clients hire them for lots of money, they look after the kids, and then they have sex.  I was worried that it might be dumbed-down, and not very sexy, because it’s high school girls.  Then I was worried that it might actually be sexy, which would be creepy because it’s high school girls.  I was also worried about the casting.  Much as I enjoy the works of John Leguizamo, I just didn’t see him as the attractive father who sleeps with his attractive babysitter and gets this whole ball rolling.

I was wrong to be worried, at least about Leguizamo.  He is actually very believable, both as a father who is losing touch with his wife (played by Cynthia Nixon - the one who was pregnant on Sex And The City), and also as an older man who might well fall into the arms of a young teenage girl and who may well have that girl throw herself at him as well.  And there isn’t a lot of sex actually shown, so it isn’t too creepy.  But it’s not dumbed down either.  It’s fairly smart, in terms of the dialogue, and well-acted.  Katherine Waterston is very convincing as the proprietress of this organization of ill repute. 

The big problem with the movie, however, is that it’s very one-sided.  It is (sadly) very easy to believe that all these creepy men would exist in the city, willing to pay for sex with young teenagers.  But this movie also seems to make the supposition that just about any high school girl would be willing to sleep with a forty-something father for money.  And although I have never been a high school girl, and I know very few of them these days, I would like to hope this isn’t the case.  If it is, it’s rather disconcerting.  And that sense of unease stayed with me for the rest of the movie.  I couldn’t really shake it, and that made the movie difficult to enjoy.

Dark City is a dark movie.  Amazing, eh?  Go figure.  But the filming is dark, the scenery is dark, and for that reason I found it very confusing when I first watched it.  It was really difficult to follow the action and to figure out what, exactly, was going on.  I still enjoyed the movie, and I realize that it was intentionally obscure and difficult to follow.  But the constant darkness ended up, by the end of the film, being oppressive.  And the action scenes don’t need to be so difficult to follow.  Which is why a movie like Dark City is one of those movies for which Blu-Ray was created. 

I recently picked up Dark City on Blu-Ray from Alliance Films, when it came out on July 29th.  It is a remarkable movie from Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and I, Robot, about a city that never sees the sun, and it’s controlled by a mysterious shadowy group of pale-faced men in trenchcoats who mess with the inhabitants in some kind of bizarre science experiment.  The story is decent, the action is decent, but it’s the setting and the atmosphere that make this movie fantastic.  Everything about this movie, even Keifer Sutherland’s over-acting as a weirdo doctor, is unsettling.  Jennifer Connelly, who plays a nightclub singer, is sultry, sexy, smoking hot, and still - unsettling. 

And everything about that atmosphere and the setting comes through twenty times clearer and freakier with Blu-Ray.  What was already a really cool, strange, creepy movie is just that much cooler, stranger and creepier.  It was already very good, but on Blu-Ray it verges on classic.  Now we just wait for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to come out on Blu-Ray as well.

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite directors in the world.  He is the man behind the best of the Blade movies, Blade II, the incredible recent film Pan’s Labyrinth, and of course the first Hellboy film, which I really liked.  The thing that made Hellboy great was that it didn’t look like other superhero or comic book movies.  It looked like something totally new.  Dark, spectacular and imaginative, the world occupied by the characters was vivid and appealing.  And Ron Perlman as Hellboy was perfect.  A completely new type of comic book hero.  The spawn of hell, a creature who existed to protect the world from the supernatural creatures that threaten to destroy it, who at the same time has the emotional maturity of a 19-year-old.  He smokes cigars and drinks beer and basically lives the life of a young adult, only he lives it in isolation, separated from the world by the government which uses him to do their dirty work.

Hellboy II:  The Golden Army is very similar.  The set designs are once again vivid and wonderful, the creatures and monsters Hellboy has to face are once again interesting and really cool looking, and Ron Perlman is as good as ever.  (Perlman, I should add, has worked with Del Toro twice before - once in the original Hellboy, obviously, and once as the coolest bad guy in Blade II.)  However, the creatures are not quite as cool as they were the first time around.  Partly because they remind me of a lot of other creatures.  Guillermo del Toro creatures.  There is a bizarre creature with no eyes in it’s head, but rather in it’s wings, that at one point helps to heal Hellboy.  And it really reminded me of the creature with eyes in it’s hands from Pan’s Labyrinth.  The bad guy, an elf prince named Nuada, played by Luke Goss, reminds me very much of the bad guy in Blade II.  Perhaps that is because, now that I’ve done my research, in Blade II the bad guy Nomak was played by…Luke Goss.  But he seems to be made up the same way in this one - he’s just Nomak with hair - and it’s a little disconcerting.

I really don’t want to rag on Guillermo del Toro for ripping off…himself.  Once you’ve created such memorable stuff in your career, it’s not such a bad idea to revisit the things that worked once before.  After all, we all want to hear the new AC/DC album, knowing full well it will be exactly the same as every other AC/DC album.  But the story in Hellboy II is a little weaker as well.  This movie could have been a much deeper commentary on the “nature of heroism” and so forth.  Not that I’m asking it to be The Dark Knight, which would be an unreasonable expectation, but this sort of thing is hinted at so often in the movie that it’s disappointing not to see it fleshed out.

Hellboy is of course, being a young adult at heart, eager to escape from the close confines of the government lab where he is housed.  He now lives with his girlfriend from the first movie, played by Selma Blair, a woman who can control fire.  And he’s constantly at odds with the government management, represented ably by Jeffrey Tambor.  Hellboy wants to be a hero, beloved in the city, and wants the public to recognize him for his good deeds.  Basically, he feels he deserves to be a celebrity.  And perhaps he’s right.  The government wants to keep him under wraps.  They want to relegate “Hellboy” sightings to the tabloids, creating a “bigfoot” or “loch ness” aura around him.  And perhaps they’re right.

There are a few scenes where Hellboy IS seen by the public, and even though he has clearly just helped them out, they are afraid of him and assume he’s a bad guy, because, well, he looks like the devil.  All of this stuff would be really interesting if the movie was willing to go into it, but it never really does.  Also interesting would have been the real motivation of the elf prince, Nuada, and his relationship with his twin sister.  He wants to resurrect the Golden Army, an unstoppable force, to take over the world from the humans.  He points to the fact that the elves and mystical creatures have abandoned the world to the humans many years ago, and human beings have just screwed it up.  Unless these supernatural creatures reclaim the world from the humans, the Earth will be destroyed.  And it’s their Earth too.

This could be a really fascinating debate.  Is it worth killing the humans if you know they are in the process, inadvertent or not, of killing you?  Does the word of the elf king, given to the human race many thousands of years ago and forgotten by today’s people, mean more than protecting your environment?  I could see this movie becoming a serious ethical dilemma for everyone, but it never goes there either.  Nadua is the villain, he wants to destroy all human beings, and he must be stopped.  He is evil.  End of story.  It;s too bad, because Hellboy II is every bit as visually impressive as Hellboy, the cast is equally terrific (although I do miss David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien), there is still a lot of good humour and the energy is still fantastic. 

But Hellboy II does not reach the level of Hellboy simply because it sets up some interesting stuff that never pays off, in favour of throwing even more impressive and stunning visuals at us.  And all of that is great - Guillermo del Toro is one of the directors who can make the best use of a massive budget - but it’s a little overwhelming while the story ends up being a little underwhelming.  The first one was a must-see.  And if you liked that one, this one is a should-rent.

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.

Persepolis is the story of a young girl named Marjane growing up in Iran, under the regime of the Shah.  She is precocious, cute, and to a degree bilssfully unaware of the repression that surrounds her.  Her family is a fairly forward-thinking one, with strict ideas of honour and morals, but not one of those crazy-religious repressive families that have become the stereotype.  Her mother is a free-thinker and a stong, independant woman, as is her grandmother.  Her father and his brothers are tough-minded, and willing to take their beliefs to the limit.  When the war with Iraq begins, however, and the Islamic revolution takes over, Marjane’s world view is drastically altered.

 An outspoken girl, there are some scenes which resonate powerfully.  There is one where she speaks out in her university about the new rules that are all of a sudden penetrating into higher education.  If girls can’t wear makeup, because it might arouse the boys, why can’t they wear baggy pants either?  Baggy pants are the fashion right now, and they hide the female form, whereas tight pants show it off.  So is mandating tight pants a decision that was made based on the proper way for girls to behave, or is it because they are against fashion in principle?  A simple, yet powerful scene in a movie that is absolutely crammed with simple and powerful scenes.

The cartoon is almost entirely in black-and-white, which is terrific.  It creates a sort of oppressive atmosphere in a place and time where oppression is the order of the day.  As Marjane grows into womanhood, and starts to question the world around her more and more, she starts to listen to music.  Music that has been banned by the government - it starts with ABBA.  Then ABBA sucks, you gotta hear the Bee Gees.  Eventually this grows into a love for Iron Maiden, perhaps informed more by a form of conscious rebellion at the oppressive society than by an actual love for heavy metal.

Marjane moves to Europe to escape the Iranian craziness, and quickly finds that the nuns she lives with there are, in their own way, as repressive as the Iranians.  A real fish out of water in Europe, she finds that it is tougher to be a stranger in a free land she doesn’t know than it is to live in oppressed land that she does.  Upon her return to Iran, she reconnects with her family, especially her grandmother, who imparts many wise life lessons, and enables Marjane to define herself in terms of her heritage and sociocultural identity. 

Since the whole movie is told through the eyes of this young girl, and then the young woman, hers is the only perspective we see, and it is fairly bleak.  Her perspective, in turn, is informed only by her own personal history, and the cultural and religious background of her upbringing.  Through war, turmoil, executions and horrible oppression, we get two stories, both of them harsh, but both of them fantastic.  The one of the horrors visited upon Iran by the Islamic revolution, and one of a young girl trying desperately to find her place in the world - her world and also a foreign world. 

Something I feel I should add - she has a few experiences with men throughout the film, and I felt, in watching it, that the end could be irritating.  Like, one of those endings where if she just finds the right man, everything will be OK.  And thankfully, the movie does not go down this obnoxious path.  It remains as constant in it’s themes and purpose as Marjane would herself hope to be.  Persepolis is based on the autobiographical graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi, and she collaborated on the screenplay as well.  She shows herself to be a very courageous woman, laying her sould completely bare, warts and all, up on the screen to tell a story.  A wonderful, smart, funny, poignant and powerful story.  Rent this movie.

The first 20 minutes of In Bruges are absolutely hilarious. Minutes 20 through 25 are heartbreaking and suddenly, crazily brutal. And the last 82 minutes are hilarious and brutal. And all 107 minutes of this movie are joyously, darkly, utterly fantastic. In Bruges has got to be an early candidate for best movie of 2008. It’s beginning to end fantastic, it never stops being side-splittingly funny, and at no point does it ever half-ass anything, shy away from offensive subject matter, or compromise itself in any way. And this movie could well be considered offensive. To everyone. Blacks, whites, natives, Irishmen, Americans, Belgians, and especially the Vietnamese. Fat people, pregnant people, Christians, tourists and especially midgets and dwarves. And boy, is it ever funny.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as Ray and Ken, two Irish hitmen who have just carried out an assignment in London that has gone horribly wrong. Their employer Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has sent them to lay low in Belgium, in a tiny town called Bruges. Bruges is actually a real town in Belgium, one of the prominent “World Heritage Sites” of UNESCO. It’s a famous town because most of the buildings and structures from the medieval era remain intact, and because, like Venice, it is one of the few canal-based cities in the world. There are roads and plazas, but for the most part people get around on the canals. Bruges features dozens of museums, concert halls, festivals, theatres, and sightseeing locations. And that makes the town an absolutely wonderful place to set a movie filled with such coarse language, gratuitous drug use and graphic violence.

Brendan Gleeson gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance as Ken, the hit man who is completely enamored with this quaint little antique town. His glee at seeing the sights is as charming as Bruges itself. Farrell, on the other hand, absolutely hates the place. He hates the tourists, he hates the sights, he hates the quaintness and the charm. And he has never been funnier in his life. On top of his hatred of Bruges, he has an obsession with midgets, (and their tendency to commit suicide in disproportionate numbers), abuses many substances, and is himself suicidal. There is real pathos in his character, and through all the jokes and the ridiculous situations and the violence, he manages to convey a real sense of pain, loss, and heartbreak in his character.

There is certainly violence in this film, but it’s all first-rate violence. And by that I mean that it’s violence played for laughs, then violence done to tear-jerking effect, then violence for the sake of violence, and then violence for the sake of emotional effect. And it’s all letter-perfect. In fact, just about everything in this movie is done to perfection. The recurring themes - suicide, dwarves, honour - could have seemed very contrived in lesser hands. But in this case, every theme fits perfectly into the scope and tone of the movie. A tone which is sometimes dry, sometimes ironic, sometimes totally insane, and always, always, totally ballsy. This movie does not hesitate to break any taboos, to push any limits, to test any outrage the audience might feel.

Gleeson and Farrell are amazing together. They have the sort of relationship Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega had in Pulp Fiction. And many parts of this movie - especially the dialogue and the drug use and the violence - are very reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. And these two Irish hitmen are every bit as funny and interesting as Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta. And then - Ralph Fiennes shows up! Fiennes, one of the great actors in movies, is playing a psychopathic character that is unlike any other he has played in his career. And yet, he is perfectly cast for the role. While his arrival on the scene seems to forecast a darker, less humourous turn to the movie as it reaches it’s bloody peak. And it certainly does get even darker once Fiennes enters the picture, but amazingly, it actually gets funnier too!

In Bruges is that rarest of movies that manages to be dark, comedic, dramatic, violent, charming, sweet, bad-ass, action-packed and clever all at the same time. It even throws in a little romance. This is the first great movie of 2008, opening in limited theatrical release in February. It made a total of 8 million dollars in North America, 21 million worldwide. The Love Guru, which by all accounts is an absolute pile of crap, made 14 million in it’s first weekend. But then, how many people watch the great films at the box office? In Bruges was the film debut for writer and director Martin McDonagh, who is one of the great talents to watch in movies. Some day, In Bruges will be remembered the same way people remember Reservoir Dogs. As the brilliant first film that launched a brilliant career. And you can pick up this wonderful movie today, July 1st, thanks to Alliance Films.

The Flock is the first American effort from Hong Kong film maker Andrew Lau, who is famous for his excellent Infernal Affairs triolgy, the movies which were made into the Scorcese masterpiece The Departed.  However, with The Flock he falls a little short.  The movie is about Richard Gere, who is basically a parole officer for sex offenders.  When we meet him, he is being forcibly retired from his job, since he seems to have lost his mind a little bit.  He is going to be replaced by Claire Danes, and he’ll be teaching her the ropes before he’s done.  But he’s so over the edge that she is not only afraid of the sexual deviants with which they deal every day, she’s also afraid of Gere because he’s clearly a maniac.

When a girl goes missing, the two of them attempt to solve the crime, even though they are not the police, based on the sex offender registry and interviews of Gere’s “flock”, which is how he describes his group of criminals.  The people who took the girl appear to be targeting Gere himself, based on a clue they left just for him at the table where he always sits at the diner where he always goes.  They are sending HIM a message - but why him, why that message, what the abductors hope to gain from it - we never find out.  Why?  Who cares.  Here are some people doing awful things to other people.  Isn’t that awful?  Now let’s get to the end of the film.

Andrew Lau’s previous movies have been brilliant in their depiction of cops and cop culture, as action and drama intersect with double crosses and informants, and complex stories are made to seem much simpler.  However, in The Flock, he makes a fairly simple, straightfoward story seem much more complex than it has to be.  In the end, we get Gere being a tough-guy lunatic, Claire Danes crying a lot, and weird sexually deviant behaviour in rooms in the background.  And that’s about it.  The final scene with the abducted girl is tawdry and contrived, although it does convey an appropriate level of creepiness.

Oh, and one more thing - when you have the credits at the beginning of the movie, with the five main actors who are going to be in the film, and one of those actors is a name people will recognize (in this case Avril Lavigne), you have to understand that you are setting them up already.  Say you’re watching a film, and the first six names that flash at you include, say for the sake of argument, Christopher Walken.  And he appears for about four seconds, ten minutes into the movie.  And then you don’t see him again at all.  But at the end, when the mystery is unraveling, you kind of think to yourself - Christopher Walken got third billing in this movie…I bet he’s the killer…and of course you’d be right.  In this film, it doesn’t happen exactly that way, and it’s a little better done than that.  But still, the end came as absolutely no shock to me based on the opening credits and the rest of the movie.

Nightmare Detective opens with a scene of a man sitting at a table. Behind him, on the wall, is some super-long, disembodied hair, hanging from a hook like a hat. It takes a while to notice the hair, but when you do, and you realize what it is, you become instantly creeped right out. And that feeling will not leave you until this film is over. It’s the latest offering from Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, who has been called Japan’s answer to David Lynch or David Cronenberg. And that description is certainly apt. This man knows how to create a mood so creepy that even if nothing at all happens, the sense of foreboding resonates within the viewer. In Nightmare Detective, two things are constantly sources of fear and malice. Bridges and bicycles. They don’t sound so creepy thinking of them now, but these are the scariest bikes and bridges I’ve ever seen in a movie. And that includes that brilliant Emilio Estevez classic, Maximum Overdrive.

We are introduced to the Nightmare Detective almost immediately. You see, the guy with the hair on his wall is having a nightmare. And the Nightmare Detective is able to enter peoples’ dreams in order to explain them to those people, and perhaps they will not be so frightened. However, this man having this dream decides he would rather remain in the dream than wake up, and he chooses to die. This screws up Kyoichi Kagenuma, the Nightmare Detective. He has lost the will to live, after seeing so many scary and creepy things in his life. In fact, we are not sure he has ever had the will to live. And this ties in nicely with the theme of suicides. A series of incredibly brutal suicides have been taking place in the city. Each of the victims have stabbed themselves to death, in bloody and gory fashion, while having nightmares. And just before they do, they have all called the phone number “0″. Which I assume in Japan does not connect you with an operator.

Japanese horror movies love this kind of stuff. Something anyone could do - like playing a VHS tape in Ringu, or dialing 0 on a cell phone. Simple things that are accessible to regular people are scary when all of a sudden they become supernatural. It turns out that the guy at the other end of the phone sucks the people who call into suicide pacts with them, and has the supernatural ability to enter their dreams and go after them. Which is always creepy, scary and gory. The cops go after him, but anyone who calls him ends up committing suicide in their sleep. So they enlist the help of the Nightmare Detective, who is legitimately suicidal himself. The hot-chick cop who convinces him to help is played by Reiko Hitomi, one of the sexiest Japanese actresses in the world, but a relative newcomer to movies with international distribution. She eventually sets up the obvious Nightmare On Elm Street style showdown where she confronts the killer in her sleep, with help from the Nightmare Detective.

The final showdown, while it is obvious from the beginning, is bonkers and difficult to understand, and it goes on for a very long time. But somehow it works. After all, it is a nightmare, and all kinds of strange things can happen in a nightmare that don’t have to make sense. The fact that Tsukamoto is able to sustain terror and tense creepiness for a solid half-hour without making it tedious is a testament to his skill. Nightmare Detective is a solid, frightening horror film that is worth seeking out. It arrives in stores tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.