Editorials
Cannibals and Midsummer in Russian-Finnish Found Footage Movie ‘Shopping Tour’ [Horrors Elsewhere]
Horrors Elsewhere is a recurring column that spotlights a variety of movies from all around the globe, particularly those not from the United States. Fears may not be universal, but one thing is for sure — a scream is understood, always and everywhere.
Retail therapy has a high cost in Mikhail Brashinskiy’s Shopping Tour. This 2012 movie begins in Russia before shortly taking off for neighboring Finland. Teenage Stas and his mother are spending two days abroad after a lousy month back home. Yet as their tour group deviates from the original itinerary, the main characters realize the locals are not as nice as they were led to believe.
With the runtime being a little over an hour, Shopping Tour skips basic formalities; the protagonists, Stas Polansky (Timofey Yeletskiy) and his mother (Tatyana Kolganova), are already on their way to Finland at the movie’s start. Of course, this is after Mrs. Polansky gives her son the means of filming this found footager; Stas uses his new cell phone to capture what will soon be a terrifying trip. Once everyone is aboard the bus to Finland, they learn about the taxes on goods and other procedures. What Stas and the other tourists are not told, however, is what to do in case of cannibals. The tour guide is informed of an opportunity from a random Finn; a new store will close itself off to the public so only the group can shop. Unfortunately, this is all part of a fiendish plan to corral the unsuspecting Russians into a locked space and celebrate the region’s most disturbing of Midsummer traditions.
Before that first bite into Russian flesh ever takes place, Shopping Tour sets up the complicated dynamic between the main characters. Stas is a garden variety, angsty teen who likes Eminem, eats saccharine candy, and loves to test boundaries. He lies to his mother about getting food at a stop along the way and instead buys a beer because he feels grown up now. This minor betrayal triggers the silent treatment from Mrs. Polansky up until they reach the foreboding Gigantti store added to the tour schedule at the last minute. Stas’ mother is tightly wound for her own reasons, and unlike her son, she respects authority and rules. So once everything starts going down, she panics not only because there are cannibals, but because the systems in place — for her life and this trip — are entirely gone.
Mrs. Polansky is inherently compliant because of her upbringing, and she understands what happens when authority is challenged. So to someone like Stas’ mother, peace is ensured as long as the rules are followed. She watches incredulously as another tourist commits a petty crime and then acts surprised when the same person is released from custody with minimal penalty. Of course Mrs. Polansky figures the outcome would have been worse back home, and the Finns are simply kinder and more reasonable. When it all turns into a vacation from hell, Stas’ mother is shaken to her core. Her idea of relaxation was leaving her motherland of Russia behind for somewhere tranquil like Finland. To her and everyone else’s surprise, though, these particular Finns are nothing like their reputation would suggest. Other filmmakers would have the Russian characters be the cruel ones, but Brashinskiy flips the script and satirizes a country normally seen as idyllic and harmless.
Horror movies are usually forthcoming about the dangers in store for the hapless characters. Vacationers are trapped in a desert town where nuclear testing once took place. A driver pulls over at a creepy, run-down gas station during a thunderstorm. Teenagers stay overnight at an amusement park where people have since gone missing. The genre’s tendencies are transparent. Brashinskiy instead does what other found-footage filmmakers do; he insists everything is absolutely normal until it is not. A standard horror narrative clues its viewers in as early as the opening credits, whereas found footage and first-person horror thrives on surprise. The veil between ordinary life and the bizarre has to be ripped off rather than pulled back inch by inch.
At the first sign of trouble — the Polanskys discover the dead body of a fellow tourist in the store’s stockroom — Stas calls his girlfriend Katie back home for help. When asked to first explain his whereabouts for the last month, Stas reveals to both Katie and the audience his father recently died. So as it turns out, this trip was not about Mrs. Polansky looking for bargains or taking in the sights of Finland. No, she wanted a break from her grieving and, above that, a chance to reconnect with her son after having lost the other most important person in her life. Grief can go two ways in horror — it can either be the catalyst or the monster itself. Shopping Tour has the luck of being shot in the style of found footage, a subgenre not alien to unfiltered depictions of fear, grief, and trauma. Although Brashinskiy’s movie never comes close to the emotional depths of its peers or stokes the flames of physical anguish with supernatural influences, the small yet emotional moments between Stas and his mother countervail the story’s overall absurdity.
Shopping Tour is micro-budget horror done right. This $70,000 movie has more humor to spare than actual carnage, so fans of splattery cult classics like Braindead will have to look elsewhere for their bloody set pieces and exposed innards. Even so, the effort put in by critic-turned-filmmaker Brashinskiy — whose one man show includes writing, directing, producing, and editing a movie shot in a mere eleven days — is impressive. Other shoestring horrors are frugal with their entertainment, but Shopping Tour is a fresh approach to found footage and is rich with satire.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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