Starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes. Directed by Pedro Almodovar. In Spanish with Thai and English subtitles. At selected cinemas.
The Skin I Live In
In this Spanish ero-thriller, Antonio Banderas plays Dr Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who locks up a beautiful woman called Vera in his high-security mansion for an elaborate skin experiment whose calamitous outcome we sense from the start, but only get to fully appreciate at the end. As in earlier films by Almodovar, that bishop of high camp, perversion and carnal intrigue seep through the clean lines of the cinematography. Dr Ledgard is at once a perpetrator and the victim of a fatal infatuation; we learn that his wife perished in a horrid car accident years before and that Vera, clearly her substitute, has been kidnapped as part of a grandiose plan that could only have been dreamed up by a mad scientist.
Almodovar's reference seems to be Eyes Without a Face, but he lacks the poetic fluidity that the 1959 French horror film exhibited in turning terror into abstraction. Instead, The Skin I Live In is a melodramatic treatment of Frankenstein, while the gleeful, fleshpot immorality of early Almodovar movies seems strangely detached and non-subversive here. Still, you can rock back and relish Banderas' turn as the obsessive, tragic Dr Ledgard. Elena Anaya, as Vera, is like an otherworldly minx, seductive and inaccessible in her skin-coloured body-suit. In Almodovar's world, the flesh is deception, the comedy dark, the sex weird and the tears real; this time, however, the director just wasn't able to pull off all of these elements.
The Devil Inside
Starring Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmut. Directed by William Brent Bell.
Exorcism flicks can't get much blander than this. The Devil Inside is an ugly gross-fest in the ill-fitting clothes of a fake documentary. In the internet age, The Blair Witch Project seems as old as the Jurassic and if an exhibitionistic treatment of demonic possession is what you're after, William Friedkin's The Exorcist is celebrating its 40th anniversary next year; and its green vomit still stinks more memorably than this junk.
Two minutes into The Devil Inside, the whole scenario becomes so transparent and tasteless that you dream of taking a long walk around a graveyard just to get your fright fix.
The film's disdain for the Vatican is exceeded only by its fetish for gore and women contorting their bodies (Satan is rarely in the mood to possess strapping young men, apparently). Told largely like a home-made, hand-held documentary _ a technique that can get really annoying unless you're European _ the movie follows Isabella Rossi, an American whose mother has been locked up in an Italian lunatic asylum after she murdered three priests who were performing an exorcism on her. Isabella's mother is a mumbling harridan who displays a strong anti-religious streak, which is understandable since at least four demons have taken up residence in her crumbling body. Isabella gets help from two dissident priests who secretly perform exorcisms on girls whose cases have been rejected by the Vatican.
But these two exorcists are so docile, so unpersuasive that you wonder why Lucifer hasn't crucified them on an upside-down cross or, better still, sent them back to learn their trade from Max von Sydow.
The scariest demon flicks aren't really about demons, but about faith and its fragility. The Devil Inside totally misses the point or, rather, it's an utterly pointless exercise from start to finish.
Panya-Renu 2
Starring Chotiwat Polrasamee, Suthida Hongsa and Petchthai Wongkamlao. Directed by Bin Banluerit. In Thai with English subtitles.
Like most sequels, the latest instalment of Panya Renu exploits whatever merits the original had without making the slightest effort to expand on those. I can imagine a longer, probably more fruitful shelf life for these Isan-speaking characters _ chiefly the pre-teen Panya and Renu. But not as a movie franchise; instead, this could be the perfect setup for a TV series that would have a strong regional appeal. What director Bin Banluerit needs is a team of scriptwriters to hammer out situations and jokes while strengthening his best assets, the two likeable and unpretentious young leads who inhabit the skin of their characters with so much ease and honesty.
The new film plays out like a long episode of that imagined TV series, overstaying its welcome by at least an hour. By bringing in Tukky Samcha, the ubiquitous comedienne whose jokes rely mostly on drawing attention to her facial features and short physique, this film shows that it doesn't trust its young cast of Isan boys and girls, who made the original Panya Renu such an invigorating breath of fresh air.
The sequel relies too much on such a weak script that repeats the themes of the original: the feisty Renu trying to coax Panya into loving her; daily life in the Northeast; the water buffaloes; the interaction between urban and rural kids; and, again, the big setpiece of a singing contest at the end. What I expected to see was Panya and Renu dealing with the problems of growing up, the pressures of adolescence and the weight of the future that bears down on children from the countryside. Instead, the two characters don't seem to mature at all, something they have in common with this film.
