You've Become a Real Populist!

That was what my unabashedly Commie adult friend Len Doncheff told me once, after I let slip that I'd seen Con Air ten times and From Dusk 'Til Dawn twenty times in the the-ayta. And maybe it's true, because last week I saw Alexandre Aja's universally shit-on Mirrors and quite liked it, while this week I was halfway through Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race, turned to Steve and muttered: "Was every person who reviewed this high? Or am I just that stupid?"

If you want, you could call both films "good [, for] trash" and have done with it, but I'm not sure I'd even add that much of an easy-out qualifier. I enjoyed them both...Death Race more, though not by a lot. So if you didn't, you can probably stop reading right about here, before I go into some of my observations (lj-cutted for spoilers):
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So yeah, I'm a populist, albeit within an extraordinarily narrow range. Sue me.;))

But Let's Try This Again

In case you should walk away from this thinking: Man, Gemma's gone soft! She likes ANY sort of crap!, I will point out that I also rented Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter, and found it excellent. Probably the least experimental or overtly "indie" of Fessenden's films thus far, it enlarges on ecological themes found in Wendigo, as well as (in a far more global way) the man-as-addict backbone of Habit. The effects are clean and well-used, the initial character-building pays out, the central reading-the-notebook sequence recalls some of the frenetic montage-work in Pi...we get a genuinely scary reveal or three, expert use of landscape, a hallucinatory climax followed by the bleakest anticlimax I've seen in years. Any fan of Ron Perlman who wants to confirm what he looks like without makeup should absolutely seek this out, along with all those who love good horror generally.

Oh Yeah:

...I also finally got around to finishing off Mulberry Street, the Noo Yawk rat-zombies movie which Rue Morgue put on its cover last year. Very fun--it's real old-school 'sploitation, the sort of thing which would have ended up in a drive-in somewhere, what with the overt politics, the indie punch and the general nuttiness. Mise-en-scene and doomy pacing reminded me somewhat of The Signal, but without the occasional "I'm-all-that!"-ish indieisms; this is a ground-floor flick about ground-floor people in which a man suicidally chooses to fight his way through crowds of infectious maniacs by punching them in the face over and over, basically because he knows that's what he's best at. I loved the portrait of the neighborhood itself, the unshowy and fairly realistic way that people reacted to what was going on ("What the fuck are these rat-zombies?" "They're fuckin' rat-zombies!"). The scourge itself was an interesting combo of metaphor and vague possibility (sections reminded me of Rats!, a wonderful nf. book I read in 2007). Someone needs to give these guys more money, soon, and see what else they can come up with.