The Night of the Virgin

the_night_of_the_virginNever realized how much vomit looks like polenta. Or maybe it’s the other way ’round. Regardless, The Night of the Virgin (Spanish title: La noche del virgen) features a plethora of puke and a bevy of other bodily fluids that’ll put you off your dinner.

This is one slippery movie that should come with a sign, CAUTION: Wet Floor.

The setup couldn’t be more simple: a buck-tooth trollish fellow (Nico) whose advances are being repeatedly turned down in a Bilbao bar on New Year’s* finally gets lucky — or so it would seem — when he connects with an enticing older woman (Medea) in a green dress after the stroke of midnight.

They head back to her sprawling apartment as young Nico gets Snapchat “granny f-er” ribbing from his larrikin pals back at the bar who demand pictorial evidence of his soon-to-be-conquest, or else it never happened.

Medea’s pad is a real dump. It’s riddled with cockroaches (that alone should be an impediment to romance), but when Nico finds a vial of menstrual blood in her bathroom, he starts asking questions – the answers to which include an involved tale of Nepalese fertility rites (no really) and a budding romance that’s interrupted by her thug boyfriend, Spider, banging on the door.

the_night_of_the_virgin-_movieDirected by Roberto San Sebastián, The Night of the Virgin won Best Horror Comedy Feature at the Atlanta Horror Festival (2016) and Best WTF Feature at the 2016 Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival. WTF indeed.

It’s always a pleasure to see things you’ve not only never seen before, but also cannot be reproduced here without running afoul of Google search engine propriety. Let’s just say that something’s stuck where the sun don’t shine and leave it at that.

The Night of the Virgin (hard not to think of Andy Warhol’s Dracula and its “wergins” when you read that word) is one eccentric and inspired, gory candle-lit horror, blacker than black and as charming as it is unpredictable.

While not reaching the same heights of, say, Baskin, it’s richly deserving of its accolades, and probably one of the better horror films of 2016, marred only by over-length.

***3/4 (out of 5)

[*Editor’s note: Interestingly,a TV host counting down First Night festivities, offhandedly jokes that 2016 claimed David Bowie, Prince, but not George Michael. Not so. RIP George.]

Capture Kill Release

capture_kill_release_movieCapture Kill Release is manipulative as hell. But in the best possible way.

Every fright box is systematically checked off to produce something that rises above its found footage conceit.

From the city that brought you the Ken and Barbie Killers, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, comes this tale of Toronto lovebirds looking to lose their “kill virginity.”

Jennifer and Farhang do this by first going about the banal business of choosing who to snuff out, striking off from their list gays (don’t want it to look like a hate crime), the young (don’t want to look like a pervert), the old (that’s just wrong), the disabled (ditto)…

There’s gruesome gallows humor aplenty as they whittle away their choices before settling on a victim, a local vagrant who is far from his first choice, and not exactly hers either. (Jennifer has her sights set on a loudmouth stockbroker-philanderer type, but lets impatience get the best of her.)

True to life, there’s a dominant partner in this sociopathic duo, and they’re both very bright, playing nicely into the (wrong) though relatable serial killer with a surfeit IQ stereotype (This is a pretty talky, whip-smart flick, and might not have worked as well with a Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer lunk-head twosome dynamic.)

It’s pretty Jennifer (a dynamite Jennifer Fraser) who’s wearing the pants, leading a reluctant Farhang (Farhang Ghajar) through hardware store purchases, trial-by-cat and prepping for the grisly business at hand by testing out whether their tub is large enough for a proper human bloodletting.

capture_kill_release

And Jennifer’s directing things in other ways as well.

Yes, this is found footage, with her behind the camera for the most part, and yes, there are some hiccups associated with that as a device. However, much like the maligned sub-genre’s better exemplars (America’s Deadliest Home Video), the self-filming doesn’t overstay its welcome and is quickly forgotten, possibly because it’s not the viewer who’s made nauseous as much as our antiheroes. Case in point: the painstakingly deliberate, smelly, and very thorough disposal of their first victim’s body.

It appears easy in Dexter and is played for laughs on The Sopranos (see, the Cold Cuts episode), but disposing of a body is a tough grind and is shown here in vivid and very bloody detail.

But where Capture Kill Release really shines is in the mind, through psychological choices. Jennifer’s adorable mother is brought in early on for contrapuntal irony, and there’s a certain sweetness to their rapport. The same can be said of savage Jennifer’s encounter with the poor homeless victim, the all-around mensch, Gary.

For further audience investment, there’s some relentless pet-abuse too, and some related factoids that’ll give you shivers if you live in a high-rise.

Proof that there’s lots you can do with a little, Capture Kill Release was understandably well-received at Toronto’s Blood in the Snow Festival.

***1/2 (out of 5)