Invoking Yell

  Of the myriad of the more extreme metal subgenres, black metal is probably still the one most people would think of as dangerous. Part of it is the music, part of it is how seriously it takes itself, but to be honest it's mostly going to be about a bunch of church burnings and a high profile murder case up in Norway.

 That reputation casts a shadow over the Chilean found footage Invoking Yell. Set in the 90s, when the events were still fresh in everyone's memory, three young women embark out to a rural area outside of Santiago to shoot a video for their 'depressive suicidal black metal' demo tape. It's almost a running joke for the subgenre that all of its videos, particularly the early ones, consist of the band out in the woods with a shitty camera - so to use that as the premise for a movie is honestly kind of genius.

 There's a few things that the band have in their favour: by their reckoning they're probably the first Chilean Black Metal Band, definitely the first all-female black metal band anywhere, and they use EVP - the voices of ghosts, recorded on magnetic tapes - in their songs.
 Throughout the afternoon and the ensuing night band members - Andrea (María Jesús Marcone), the more serious, pretentious and, prickly one, and Tania (Macarena Carrere), more outgoing, expound on the methods and virtues of their music for a sort of 'making of' documentary of their demo tape, which is shot by Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich), who the girls recruited simply because she has a decent video camera.

 Invoking Yell is not just a found footage film, it's an extremely low-budget footage film, so be aware that most of its running time is going to be devoted to following these goofballs around a stretch of woods as they fool around and talk shit to each other in ways that often seem at least partially improvised. It all but demands to be graded in a curve, almost falling under the 'a bunch of friends go out and film a movie' category of filmmaking.
 Whether the film succeeds or not will not just depend on your tolerance for that sort of thing, but also whether you can stand the characters; Luckily, they all give fine performances and all feel fairly well fleshed out. Having grown in a neighbouring country at around the same time and within some of the same subcultures... well, I'm probably a lot more predisposed to like this than most other people. But I do think the characters are often genuinely funny, especially the recurring dynamic of the surly (but not humourless) Andrea bouncing off the other two more bubblier girls.
 The script (by director Patricio Valladares plus Barry Keating) also has no illusions about just how much of a self-serious dipshit young creative people can be (as a monologue about tapping into 'universal suffering' makes clear), and the characters feel fairly vivid and real.

 It is a horror movie, though, and eventually things take a dark turn during an invocation to the spirits that supposedly haunt the region, the ghosts that Andrea had taped earlier.
 The twist is fairly brutal and threatens, but doesn't quite, edge the film into torture porn territory; It's pretty implausible, but it makes for some uncomfortable and deeply unsettling viewing... so: mission accomplished.
 Sadly it's all capped off by a deeply stupid epilogue which depends on someone behaving in a particularly brain-dead fashion; I really could have done without that.

 As with all found footage films that prioritize making its shit look raw, the film looks like... well, raw shit, without  much in the way of special effects. The pacing will depend on whether you enjoy the characters' company before the invocation - I suspect many people are going to switch this off within the first twenty minutes - but if you're ok with them, you're golden. The finale has all the staples of found footage (running through the woods in the middle of the night!), and while a tight shooting schedule and the lack of budget means that they are forced to keep some of the action off-screen, it still works pretty well thanks to the immediacy lent to it by both the shooting style and the intensity borrowed from real-life associations surrounding its chosen music subgenre.
 There's also a slightly exploitative mental health element as Andrea is implied to suffer from bouts of schizophrenia, so if that sort of thing bothers you... On the other hand, it's truly a minor plot element.

Fist of the Condor (El Puño del Condor)

 While Argentina seems to have the South American horror pretty much monopolized, you'll need to cross the Andes to get good action*. Chilean director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza and martial artist Marko Zaror can take credit for that with a trio of diverse and extremely entertaining action films (Kiltro, Mandrill, Redeemer; there's more, but I haven't seen them... yet).

 The Fist of the Condor is something special, though. It's the rare traditional martial arts movie done outside of Asia... I can only think of Kill Bill or Enter the Dragon (if you ignore that was a Chinese co-production); Both of those seem to stretch the 'traditional' part of the definition, though - I'm thinking something that could be a mainstream Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest picture.

 It's all here, though: wall-to-wall philosophical ruminations, training montages (including a few non-traditional training methods), dramatic zooms, badass posing... varied fights, a monastic protagonist, a wealth of natural settings to frame the action. Stolen martial arts manuals. Ridiculous, themed moves and dialog that threads and weaves throughout the fighting.

 The only thing missing is a terrible English dub, but luckily we've moved on beyond that.

 The plot follows an unnamed warrior (bald-headed Zaror) who's embroiled in a long-running feud with his twin brother (shaggy, long-haired Zaror). Their conflict is over a manual detailing the long-lost martial arts of the Inca; It belongs by rights to the bald brother, who inherited it from his former master Condor Woman (Gina Aguad, Zaror's real life mother!) just before his brother killed her and stole the manual.

 To make things a little more complicated, everyone thinks bald brother still has it - so he gets a couple of challengers coming up to him to try and earn it in combat.

 The movie is fairly straightforward: bald brother takes care of a few opponents, works up the will to go against his shaggy, long-haired brother. Shaggy, long-haired brother sends his first apprentice (a lanky, menacing José Manuel, who also goes unnamed). And because the movie is subtitled Part One, that's pretty much it. There's a lot of voiceover narration as bald brother explains himself and his philosophy, and flashbacks to fill in a little of the sibling's complicated history, lots of glamour shots as people practice or wander in front of some beautiful natural setting or another. Lots of training montages.

 Fights are gritty and relatively low-key (here's hoping they can break out the wire-fu in the next one), but  also quick, brutal and exciting, and they very carefully frame Zaror's physique at all times. They're varied as well, each one pitting Zaror against a different style in an interesting arena of some sort (sandy beach, woodlands, abandoned building). That, and the mythic resonance of Espinoza's knowing, homage-ridden script make it feel a bit more epic than the meagre budget should allow... if you like this sort of thing; Otherwise, you're probably better off watching Mandrill.

 Zaror is an imposing figure and a graceful fighter, but his acting is a little too wooden to anchor the film. Good thing he's got an easy-going charisma going for him; It doesn't make him playing the villain side of the dual role any easier, but it does make up for his monotone narration. There's also a sense of fun running through the film that belies the dead-serious script. It mostly surfaces in Rocco's soundtrack (it ranges from spaghetti western to butt-rock to disco, and is pretty effective), but the glee in each melodramatic reveal, every reversal or dramatic zoom is palpable. "Look," Espinoza, Zaror and co. seem to be saying: "this is what we like, and this is why we like it."

 They make a pretty damn good case.

The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo)

  When I was a kid I used to watch a show that would put on all sorts of eastern European animation shorts. Czech madman Jan Švankmajer was a constant fixture, of course, but they had all sorts of crazily creative, obsessively realised nightmare fuel. One short, which I retroactively identified as an adaptation of Maupassant's The Horla many years later (when I read the short story by chance!), kept me terrified well into adulthood.

 Chilean film The Wolf House would have fit right in that show. It kicks off with a prologue where some narration over archival footage explains that this is a sort of cultural outreach program from an isolated German colony somewhere in Chile, one that despite their protestations seems distinctly cultish. They offer a film from their archives, an incredibly creepy artifact to convince everyone that they aren't creepy at all.

 The film is, of course, The Wolf House. It's a cautionary tale about a girl, Maria (voice: Amalia Kassai), who ran away from the Colony because she wanted to play with her pigs and not work. She escapes through a dark forest, evading a Wolf (Rainer Krause) who keeps taunting her, and finds refuge in a small house where she decides to raise the two pigs she finds as humans.
 That's going to be most of the movie: a dark, surrealist cautionary fable that follows Maria and her new family as they try to build a life in isolation under the constant disapproving gaze of the Wolf, who acts as the point of view of the commune- a deeply troubling, paternalistic presence throughout the film.

Maria, in the process of entering the scene.

 It is almost staggeringly beautiful... in a very ugly way. Cameras effortlessly maneuver through rooms as the story is animated through stop-motion painting on the walls, which sometimes morph into 3D models that extrude out of the walls or floor with a disturbingly organic layering that ends up turning into human bodies (think of a non-biological, papier-maché version of Frank's resurrection in Hellraiser). There's never a cut to a finished model, they're always built before our eyes, accruing layers of cardboard, paper, wires and fabric gubbins until they are wrapped up in first skin, then clothing.

 The characters are crude, but that just adds to the film's ambiance, and the amount of work and care that's clearly gone into every scene in this movie is astounding - that's part and parcel of stop motion animation, but the homemade quality here is really something else. Directors Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, along with Natalia Geisse, have done an incredible job.

 The family Maria creates is at first dark haired and dark eyed, but after an accident, they're recreated 'better' with blonde hair and blue eyes - and later are shown wearing lederhosen. Given all the German accents and a few other details, it's not hard to realize what the subtext is here. That's before you read about Chile's Colonia Dignidad, a Pinochet-era compound that was run by a bona fide Nazi; I had actually known about that, but didn't make the connection until after watching the movie and reading up on it online, since I was looking at it more from a cult perspective. (Or because I'm an idiot, take your pick).
 So... yeah, fun! It works as a fucked-up fable, and gains a whole other load of nastiness from its metatextual elements. It's willfully weird and creepy as hell, but if this sort of madness appeals at all, I'd say it's pretty essential watching.

The Count (El Conde)

  I'll just let the premise speak for itself:

 Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire. Born Claude Pinoche, he was a soldier of the king's army in France during the revolution, and the experience left him with two driving obsessions - becoming a king, and destroying all insurrectionists and revolutionaries.

 Setting his sights on a long strip of a (mostly) desert nation in the ass-end of the globe, he decides to build his kingdom there. He rises through military ranks, stages a coup, and the rest is history. Then he fakes his death and goes off to an island somewhere around Santiago with his wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) and his manservant (and former head torturer) Fyodor (Alfredo Castro). There, in a large, run down manor, he loses the will to live: he can cope with his country calling him a murderer, but a thief? The nerve! (later on, when accused of stealing millions, he casually agrees, but demurs by saying his wife put him up to it).

 When a rash of horrible killings rock Santiago all of Pinochet's children, sensing their father's hand behind it, go to the island to see what's up - and to check if they can wrest an inheritance out of the old vampire. They contract an accountant to help with that, but as it turns out, she's a plainclothes nun (Paula Luchsinger) sent with the mission to exorcise the old demon. Or to kill him.

 And then things get weird.

Watch out, lady! There's a Chilean fascist dictator vampire right behind you!

 Director Pablo Larraín is no stranger to making films about Pinochet's regime -both as straight historical pictures and oblique genre exercises- but this... This is something else. Angry, arch, bizarre, twisted and funny as hell, full of surprisingly violent, gruesome deaths, and a truly out there surreal, satirical edge. All swaddled up in gorgeous black and white cinematography (by Edward Lachman) and timeless classical music.
 It's fucking great, is what I'm saying. I feel I should qualify that by saying that it's for people who enjoy the bizarre and all that, but I think that should be pretty clear by now. It's also got a languid pace, a very slight plot full of out of nowhere developments, and minor characters that are more targets for (very funny) barbs about hypocrisy and obliviousness than actual, you know, characters. If you use the word artsy at all, it applies to this film.

 The script, by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón is full of funny, clever twists and imagery - the funniest of which is probably Pinochet's going out in his full regalia and using his vampire powers to fly out into the night, flowing cloak and all (the narrator describes him as looking like 'a pimp in the hide of a banana republic mafioso', and backs it up with photographic evidence).
 There's some truly audacious ideas here as well (the reveal of the very British narrator's identity got a big belly laugh from me). It doesn't short-change the genre elements, either - it's too ridiculous to ever be scary, but it's got an effective sense of menace, it gets pretty gory, and the film's minor vampire lore variations do inform the narrative and allow for some cool stuff, namely a stunning wire-assisted scene where a fledgeling vamp spreads her wings for the first time.
 The dialog is sharp, with a real ear for how people justify both the most heinous and the most banal of evils - I guess it gets a little too on the nose, politically; Its targets are too obvious, if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, but that's not a criticism I have a lot of time for in this particular case. This shit really is worth getting angry about.