Really Awful Movies

“So this is Thailand…”

Three nubile American girls arrive in Siam to “teach kids the alphabet,” but this isn’t typical naïve traveler set upon by nasty foreigners territory — it takes a hard left. But that doesn’t mean it’s any good or that we’ve arrived at the right destination.

Pernicious is dumbly titled (was Deleterious already taken?) but smartly circumvents the trope described above. We meet Jules, Alex and Rachel — the latter two blonde bickering hard-partying sisters and the former the level-headed brunette with a TA boyfriend back home. Unfortunately, that’s the only real T or A we get.

Their digs include a rustic mansion in rural Thailand complete with a creepy gold statue of a young girl.

The girls head out for a night on the town and meet up with a group of foreign scuzzbags, and things get hot and heavy back at their digs.

A flask is passed around and we’re meant to conclude they’ve been roofied — but wait! The tables have been turned and it is the unseemly gents who are in a compromising position, held captive and tortured.

We’re in torture porn land, entrails are laid out, eyeballs are gouged and fingernails are clipped off. But is it all a dream? [Editors’ note: tying someone to a chair and subjecting them to all sorts of terror is to horror films what F-bomb laughs are to comedians. They’re cheap and easy. It’s not hard to generate fear that way and pretty lazy]

Anyway, the girls wake up, surmise they’ve been drugged and instead of being concerned about being raped and/or getting a serious STD (or losing their passports), they obsess over the theft of trinkets they’ve brought along as well as the disappearance of the creepy statue.

They try and track it down at a local shop, thinking it’s a valuable antique (“I’ve watched the Antique Road Show!”) and a phantasmagorical little girl leads them deep into the jungle to the home of a witch doctor.

Pernicious is tonally all over the map: part supernatural, part torture porn, part Travel Channel. There’s a medicine cabinet jump scare (we’re literally sick of those) and it’s gradually revealed that it’s the murdered girl (“the golden girl”) depicted in the statue that’s haunting the girls.

Stunningly beautiful to look at, Pernicious succeeds at being an ambitious failure.

** (out of 5)

“Sleep is the enemy”

So types insomniac aspiring writer Bill, played indelibly and incredibly by indefatigable indie-horror actor Bill Oberst Jr in Coyote. Insomnia, and the physical and psychological effects thereof, has been mined in films as diverse as Taxi Driver, The Machinist, Fight Club, Bringing out the Dead, and of course Insomnia. Anyone that has licked the lollypop that is sleep deprivation knows that it is a right bitch, and in Coyote, writer/director Trevor Jeunger has crafted a nightmarish exploration of the condition that is relentless, bleak, hallucinatory and artful.

When we first meet Bill, we know he’s already a bit mad as he’s frantically trying to compose a letter to his mother, yet is never satisfied by the results. As the discarded piles of paper become mountainous, Bill types out a fabricated letter from his imagined executive assistant. We learn that when Bill does sleep, he is plagued by horrific dreams of crawling insects and homicidal home invasions. “I will die in my sleep”, says Bill. He keeps himself awake by incessantly doing push-ups and duct taping his eyes open a la Alex in a Clockwork Orange.

Things take a decidedly more bizarre turn when Bill hammers the shit out of his finger, passes out and envisions a nude girl sucking the blood before biting off the digit entirely. A proboscis then emerges from the stump where his finger once was. Later, Bill exclaims “I am a pupa” and looks out his visage in the mirror. An alien, fly-like creature stares back at him.

As Bill’s visions and thoughts become even more intrusive and surreal, he descends further into anger, resentment, and paranoia. He attempts normalcy by stumbling into a job as a cameraman at a home-shopping type network, and even asks an older co-worker out on a date. But his constant auditory and visual hallucinations ensure that achieving normalcy is nowhere near forthcoming.

Eventually, the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined collapse for both the protagonist and the viewer. We see Bill engaging in self-mutilation while sitting in a forest wearing only his drawers and an animal pelt on his head. Later, he’s walking around in the same garb, assaulting passers-by with soliloquies from Hamlet. Eventually, Bill’s inner and outer worlds converge in a horrific orgy of rage and violence.

It is easy to apply the adjectives Cronenbergian and Lynchian to Coyote, and indeed, the film contains elements that the aforementioned masters would be proud to employ. But ultimately, Coyote is it’s own entity entirely. Jeunger has crafted a micro-budgeted masterpiece that is oppressively disturbing, and the off-kilter score and sound mix heighten the already unsettling atmosphere. Although thematically different, the film somehow reminded this reviewer of Harmony Korine’s confrontational conquest Trash Humpers, especially the final frame which leads into the most macabre of closing credits.

Well worth seeking out.

**** (out of five)