Movies
The Oregonian (VOD)
“There’s so little substance to be found here, it makes for a difficult movie to discuss at length. The only aspect of importance is the lingering emotional impact. And the lingering emotion is annoyance. The biggest problem with The Oregonian is that Reeder seems to have made a film with the express purpose of frustrating his audience. It leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.”
It’s rare to see a movie as intentionally abrasive as The Oregonian. The soundtrack hammers at your senses with migraine-inducing screeches, tinny music, and the overloud garble of a half-tuned radio. (At the Sundance Film Festival screening I attended, several members of the audience were forced to repeatedly plug their ears.) With no narrative to speak of, the movie is virtually impossible to connect with. It’s like an Alzheimer’s sufferer took over story hour. A woman (Lindsay Pulsipher) wakes up after a car crash, wanders the back roads of Oregon for 81 minutes, and encounters a bunch of random shit. The End. The screenplay must have been all of one paragraph long.
Having seen (and loved) writer/director Calvin Lee Reeder’s trippy short film Little Farm, I felt like I knew what to expect going into his first full-length feature. Like The Oregonian, Little Farm’s “story” was skeletal, to say the least––Sister’s head explodes after incestuous relationship with Brother at their Uncle’s goat farm–– but the 8 minute short had a surreal, darkly funny vibe. I assumed The Oregonian would be a full length movie that shared the same vibe, except with a, you know, plot. I suppose that Reeder introduces what you’d call “characters”––a snaggly-toothed old woman in a red coat, a bearded van driver, some person dressed in a green, googly-eyed furry costume––but there aren’t any character relationships. These random folks just appear out of nowhere, scare the living shit out of the woman, and then vanish. The whole movie is like a nightmare sequence from a really, really bad David Lynch movie.
Now I’m worried that the above description makes The Oregonian sound more intriguing than it actually is. There’s so little substance to be found here, it makes for a difficult movie to discuss at length. The only aspect of importance is the lingering emotional impact. And the lingering emotion is annoyance. The biggest problem with The Oregonian is that Reeder seems to have made a film with the express purpose of frustrating his audience. It leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. Not due to content that’s especially violent or abhorrent, but because making an annoying movie appears to have been Reeder’s sole intention.
A contemporary reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story Herbert West: Reanimator is on the way, and Deadline has unveiled the first look at the new Herbert West and the pathologist drawn to his orbit.
The original screenplay and storyline come from Jade Sandberg Wallis.
Michael Grossman (“The Originals”, “Pretty Little Liars”) directs.
The new images introduce star Joseph Morgan (“Vampire Diaries“), who plays “brilliant surgeon and scientist Herbert West, who is obsessed with creating a serum to reanimate the dead.” Katie Cassidy (Speed Demon) stars opposite as the pathologist with a troubled past who joins his efforts.
Together, they prove that conquering death may be the ultimate sin against life itself.
The film’s official synopsis: “As a child, Herbert West watches his father Peter reanimate his dead mother Judith in a secret basement lab — only for Judith to mortally wound Peter and nearly kill Herbert before Peter shoots her. The trauma leaves its mark on Herbert, but so does one final image: his mother’s finger, twitching after death. Thirty years later, Herbert West is a brilliant, secretive surgeon still chasing his father’s obsession.
“Pathologist Kate Locke arrives in town and is drawn into his orbit — first through a spark at a hospital fundraiser, then through his secret lab, where he reveals a serum capable of reanimating severed tissue. Kate, hiding a dark past of her own, is thrilled rather than horrified, and moves into West’s mansion to work alongside him. Their early experiments on a cadaver succeed only briefly. West concludes that dead tissue is the problem — they need something fresher.”
Supporting cast includes Scott Aiello, Ira J Amyx, Randall Newsome, Emma Reinagal, James D. Bryce, Kathryn A Bentley, Jack Lancaster, Amy Holland Pennell, John Pierson, Mindy Shaw, Eric Dean White, Tristan Wilder Hallet, Adrienne Lamping, Aaron Crippen, and Drew Patterson.
Makeup artist Jeff Lewis (“Star Trek: Voyager,” “Star Trek: Enterprise”) and cousin Roger Lewis are heading the production via their newly established Woodlake Entertainment.
Lovecraft’s short story, first serialized in Home Brew magazine in 1922, is the first among his works to mention the fictional Miskatonic University. It was most famously adapted into a 1985 horror movie from Stuart Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West.
Herbert West: Reanimator is set in Alton, Illinois, where production is now underway.
Herbert West: Reanimator. Photo credit: Matt Lief Anderson
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