BEFORE: It's only day 2 of October, and already, here's a film that is NOT a horror film, not in the traditional sense, anyway - so what gives? Ah, I have to explain that in order to keep the chain alive, I've had to make a couple of concessions. Last October, I was forced to include films like "Birds of Prey" and "Jumanji: The Next Level", which are fantasy films, but not horror. And the year before that, I had to include "Alpha" and "Loving Vincent" - after years of watching horror films, I haven't really started to run out of them, but connection-wise, it's getting harder to program a month-long chain of them without causing a break.
When programming October 2021, I found I had two clear chains, but no horror film that could connect them - so I'll be watching a documentary mid-month to fuse the two chains together - I'll explain that choice when I get there. "Filth" is being used here to connect "Salem's Lot" to the rest of the horror chain, but how did "Filth" get associated with the horror list in the first place? I have to look back two years to "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", which found its way into the horror chain, and last year, James McAvoy was also in "It: Chapter Two", so I kept this one handy in case I needed to make a connection - but I found another outro film, "Goosebumps 2", so I didn't need "Filth" any more. BUT, I was still waiting to hear when "The New Mutants" would be released, and it wasn't in time for Halloween 2020, so I saved it for 2021.
I guess I thought there was a chance that James McAvoy would show up in "The New Mutants", since having Charles Xavier in that film would make sense, only to the best of my knowledge, he doesn't appear in it. But by that time, "Filth" was kept on the horror list because the plot summary talked about "demons", only it turns out it's one characters inner demons, not the Satanic kind.
BUT, as a film that got bumped two years in a row, "Filth" had some staying power, it turns out, because it connected to other horror films like "Overlord" and "Devil" - but instead, I was able to re-purpose it to connect "Salem's Lot" to the main Shocktober chain via David Soul. What? A guy who's most famous for two things, playing Hutch in the 1970's cop show "Starsky & Hutch" and also having the smash 1970's pop single "Don't Give Up On Us", what's he doing in a 2013 film about a corrupt police officer? Ah, there's a story there, and it will be related below in the form of "Fun Facts about David Soul".
Just be aware that a David Soul link out of Salem's Lot is the equivalent of throwing a life preserver to a drowning man - it's just the thing I needed to save me. See you after the jump.
THE PLOT: A corrupt, junkie cop with bipolar disorder attempts to manipulate his way through a promotion in order to win back his wife and daughter, while also fighting his own inner demons.
AFTER: OK, I've consulted with the imaginary judges inside my brain, and I've determined that because this film has a number of scary elements, such as hallucinations, violent gang killings, a corrupt and possibly insane police officer, and a number of Christmas songs covered by British acts like Shakin' Stevens, the ruling is that this film WILL be allowed to remain as part of Shocktober. (Look, I know just about every channel's pulling out the horror films right now, I'm just going with the flow, I'm not out to buck trends here. Sure, I moved Black History month to late April/early May, but that was just because February gets booked up by romances. What should I do, watch horror films in Janu-EERIE or Febru-SCARY?)
So there are no witches, goblins, ghosts or vampires tonight - an out-of-control cop is still pretty scary, right? Or at least shocking - like everything else in our country right now, the issue of police being corrupt or wielding too much power is a polarizing issue. Either Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, you can't stand up for both of them at the same time. They're the only thing keeping this world from descending into chaos, or they're part of the chaos themselves with their outdated procedures and attitudes toward minorities and the poor and people with mental issues. (Could it be, maybe, sometimes the truth lies somewhere...in-between?).
Anyway, this film is based on a novel by Irvine Welsh, the author of "Trainspotting", and the focus on a corrupt cop losing touch with reality led many to call the novel "unfilmable" over the years. And that may in fact have been the case, but somebody went ahead and made a movie out of it anyway. So, umm, who are we supposed to root for, Bruce Robertson, the Scottish police detective with the mental condition who takes drugs, steals from his friends, discredits his fellow officers to try to get a promotion, and has a number of kinky sexual encounters with those officers' wives? I've heard of anti-heroes, but this takes the concept just a bit too far. Plus, he's starting to have these weird hallucinations... Speaking of here's
DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #1: David Soul appears here in one of those hallucinations, like a fantasy sequence where he picks a woman (Robertson's wife) up in a car, and drives around with her, singing along with his 1977 hit "Silver Lady". This song was a #1 hit in the U.K., but only reached #52 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. Despite (or perhaps because of) the implication that Soul was picking up a prostitute in this fantasy sequence, the song came BACK on the U.K. charts in 2014, and was also used in a U.K. commercial for bus company National Express, and Soul appeared in that ad, playing a bus driver.
Bruce, the Scottish cop, is assigned to solve the murder of an Asian student by an Edinburgh gang - Robertson's wife was seen early in the film, appearing on the scene to chase off the attackers, but too late. (These coincidences make sense later in the film - or do they?). But if Bruce and his rookie partner Lennox can crack the case and solve the murder, then Bruce just might get that promotion. And he feels strongly that if he can get the promotion, then he'll also get his wife and daughter back, even if there's no direct correlation. Gradually, we learn that Bruce's always explaining that his wife is "out of town" is his way of dealing with the fact that she's left him, perhaps for good.
DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #2: David Soul has been married FIVE times, and has five sons and a daughter. While this is not anything close to a record for celebrities - I think Liz Taylor was married what, 8 times? - it's notable, or at least interesting. We like to think that celebrities are just like us, only perhaps more so, but are they? They certainly get divorced a lot - Drew Barrymore was just talking on TV the other day about being divorced three times, and I just don't know if that still carries the same stigma that it used to, maybe they're all easily explained away, or maybe they all just lead to more questions. Soul married an actress in 1964, but the marriage only lasted a year, married another actress in 1968 but divorced again in 1977. Third marriage lasted 1980 to 1986, he was married to another actress, Julia Nickson from 1987 to 1993, and married his fifth wife, Helen Snell, in 2010.
Bruce, the Scottish cop, is also the member of a Masonic lodge, which several of the other officers also belong to. But he takes his friend from the lodge, Bladesey, on a secret trip to Hamburg, Germany, so they can both visit prostitutes, and this way Bladesey's wife won't find out about it. Bruce has also been making obscene phone calls to Bladesey's wife, Bunty, and when the police captain finds out about the calls, he puts Bruce in charge of finding out who the obscene phone caller is. And since Bruce doesn't want to turn HIMSELF in, he instead frames Bladesey as the caller by secretly recording him quoting lines from the Frank Sidebottom show. (This character was seen by me in the movie "Frank" a few years ago, but I don't really get the connection. Is this a real British TV show? More research is required here.).
DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #3: David Soul met his fifth wife while working in a British stage production of "Deathtrap" - it seems that Soul obtained British citizenship in 2004, due to all the theater work he's done across the pond. He moved to England in the mid-1990's, in shows like "Blood Brothers", "Comic Potential" and something called "Jerry Springer - the Opera" (I swear, I'm not making any of this up.). And in 2012, he did a one-week run with Jerry Hall (Mick Jagger's ex) at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, in the Pulitzer Prize nominated play "Love Letters".
Back to Bruce the cop, who starts having weirder and weirder hallucinations, and one represents a session with his psychiatrist, which reveals the knowledge that Bruce's younger brother died when they were children, and Bruce might have been accidentally responsible, through a game of "King of the Castle" (we call it "King of the Mountain" in the U.S.) that took place on top of an unstable pile of coal. OK, Bruce may have some lingering issues - but why is he seeing animal heads on the bodies of the people he encounters? Is this related to the guilt over his brother's death, or just a bad reaction to the medication he's on, or the drugs he takes recreationally? With Irvine Welsh, you just never can be sure.
DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #4: Soul agreed to appear in this movie to lip-sync to his song "Silver Lady" after a drinking session with director Jon S. Baird. This explains a lot - for that director, David Soul's hits are something like his karaoke stand-bys, and apparently Irvine Welsh is also a big fan of David Soul's music. David's daughter, China Soul, also appears in the film as one of the singers in the back seat of his car. Originally in the screenplay, the song featured in this scene was Foreigner's "I Wanna Know What Love Is", but I guess if you can get David Soul, then you get David Soul.
As weird and messed-up as this film is, and it is VERY messed-up (I'm holding back A LOT here, because NO SPOILERS), it could have been even weirder - the book this is based on is partly narrated by a tape worm that's growing inside Bruce. Still, there's a lot here that I just didn't grok, partially because I'm not Scottish. For example, "Stoat the baw" is a Scottish term meaning a child molester, and I'm clueless. I guess you don't HAVE to be Scottish to enjoy this film, but I'm guessing it would probably help. This may be a contender for Weirdest Movie Seen in 2021.
DAVID SOUL FUN FACT #5: David Soul was born David Solberg. Sounds about right.
Also starring James McAvoy (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Jamie Bell (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Imogen Poots (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Brian McCardie, Emun Elliott (last seen in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"), Gary Lewis (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), John Sessions (last heard in "Loving Vincent"), Shauna Macdonald, Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Dolittlle"), Joanne Froggatt (last seen in "Mary Shelley"), Kate Dickie (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Martin Compston (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Iain De Caestecker, Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Okja"), Joy McAvoy, Jordan Young, Pollyanna McIntosh, Bobby Rainsbury, Zack Niizato, Therese Bradley, Robin Laing (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Franziska Altmeyer, Ron Donachie (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Tracy-Ann Oberman, Mitchell Mullen, Jake Wilson, Luke MacDonald, Natasha O'Keeffe, Chidi Chickwe, Sanjeev Kohli (last seen in "Stan & Ollie'), Neil D'Souza, Trudie Styler (last seen in "The Next Three Days'), Megan Finn.
RATING: 4 out of 10 head butts
No comments:
Post a Comment