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[BD Review] ‘Aftermath’ Fails to Pack a Punch
If you’re going to spend the post apocalypse locked in a basement, your film better be populated with some damn interesting characters. This is not the case with Aftermath, the new film by Peter Engert (The Valley of Tears), which uses 90 minutes to make no statement about humanity or invest in the depth of its characters whatsoever. It’s not a good thing when Edward Furlong is the highlight of your movie.
Aftermath is set a few days after the kick off of World War III. Nuclear bombs have scorched the earth. A resolute doctor named Hunter (C.J. Thomason – Monkey’s Paw) holes up with eight other Texans in a basement while the world goes to hell. All of the characters besides Hunter and Brad (Edward Furlong) are wholly forgettable. A few times I even forgot who a person was, which girl was which, and who was still alive. Brad is the only one who manages to bring some liveliness to the screw with his redneck temper and sudden bursts of anger towards Hunter, the president, and whoever else he deems worthy of his misplaced rage. it’s not a good performance by any means, but it’s the only that offers any kind of entertainment in Aftermath‘s impotent narrative.
The film essentially boils down to scene after scene of people bickering. Sometimes outsiders attempt to break their way into the basement, so Hunter and the crew get some much longed for gun play. I’m not sure if the outsiders are supposed to be zombies per se, but they certainly move and moan like them. Just when it seems like the film is going to shift in favor of a more zombie-apocalypse approach, it comes to a screeching halt and reverts back to quarreling in a dark basement.
There is one brief sequence that helps liven up the monotony. At one point, the survivors decide to bust out of the basement to shoot up the intruders creeping their way across the lawn. There’s some fun visuals during this shootout, with stylish use of freeze frames and zooms. The amusement doesn’t last long, however, and soon Aftermath is limping towards its conclusion.
The morose ending comes as no surprise since it’s shown during the opening minutes of the film. This prologue leaves no room for suspense or interest in the minutes leading up to the climax. Y’know, since we’ve already seen how it ends. It’s this poor decision and several others that make Aftermath a dry, boring film that feels like it wants to say something important, but fails to open its mouth. Unless you really love watching people argue for 90 or so minutes. Then have I got a movie for you!
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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