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[Review] Presentation Only Goes So Far In ‘Condemned’
They say that you’ve got to start somewhere in your film career. For many actors, it’s the horror genre. Kevin Bacon got his break after Friday The 13th, as did Johnny Depp after A Nightmare On Elm Street. Granted, those are classics of the genre, so it was a no-brainer. Other well-known actors such as Jennifer Aniston and Leonardo DiCaprio got their breaks by being in stinkers, so it just goes to show you that horror helps, regardless of the film’s quality. Now, Sean Penn’s daughter Dylan is taking the leap into acting with director Eli Morgan Gesner’s Condemned, which is also coincidentally the former skateboarder and fashion designer’s first film.
After experiencing her parents fighting one too many times, Maya (Dylan Penn) leaves the squabbling behind to go stay with her boyfriend, Dante (Ronen Rubenstein). Dante is currently living with a couple of his bandmates in a run-down apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which is also home to a variety of unsightly characters who engage in various illegal activities, including drug production. Reluctantly, Maya agrees to stay with the group. Naturally, her decision to stay is shown to be a mistake, as the building’s sewage system causes more than just a sanitary concern. An infection originating from the occupants’ collective waste starts causing the inhabitants to become insane, murderous crazies. Now Maya and Dante have bigger problems.
Thumbs up to Gesner on creating the look for this film. The apartment building definitely fits the definition of condemned, with trash, grime, graffiti littered throughout the halls and rooms. Accentuating the grimy feeling is the decision to primarily shoot in low light, not only mimicking the run-down conditions of the apartment, but also heightening the tension. I loved the shots that were seemingly lit using the reds from a neon sign, or sickly yellows and blues that light Cookie’s (Perry Yung) apartment. I also dug some of the shots Gesner used, such as the camera travelling throughout the apartment using the plumbing. Coupled with the distorted sound of water running through pipes, it’s a pretty cool idea. Coupled with some good choices in music (a mix of punk, organ and ambient), the presentation is great.
When it comes to the acting, it’s mostly average. Dylan does alright in her debut as Maya, turning in a believable performance as a lovestruck teen that makes typically bad teenager decisions. Ronen Rubenstein has one of the better performances of our protagonists as Dante, who does a good job of selling the relationship his character has with Penn. Highlights of the kooky characters in the apartment include Perry Yung as the drug cooker Cookie, acting paranoid, hallucinating and generally insane. Jordan Gelber as Big Foot is scary, regardless of whether he’s infected or not. Speaking of the infected, gorehounds will get a kick out of the effects, which are appropriately gross and fit perfectly with the surroundings. They’re indie level of quality, but kudos to Kristen Alimena, Pete Gerner and their crew for making them count.
The biggest problem Condemned faces is it’s first half. While it’s great that Gesner takes time to establish the characters and the setting, the film moves at a glacial pace, spending its time mulling over character interactions and doing all of these interesting shots. Sure, it’s great to have development, establishing the crazies that live in the apartment and showing off some neat shots, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. It takes forever for things to really start happening, and literally by the 40 minute mark of the film’s 83-minute runtime, things start to get interesting. By then, the film starts to turn up the gross-out factor with infected characters covered in pustules puking and acting crazy in an over-the-top and hardly believable way. At the same time, the film degenerates into a poor indie version of Quarantine, with Dante and Maya running around, avoiding or battling the infected. Whatever tension was created in the first half of the film is reduced, as well as the sense of terror.
While there are some cool visuals and appropriately gross effects, Condemned suffers greatly in its pacing. The film takes an eternity to get traction, and once it does, the film slowly rolls along, and never really builds itself up to a consistent speed until the end. It’s not quite the debut that Gesner or Penn wanted, I’m sure. Those looking for another take on the [REC] or Quarantine idea will glean a bit of enjoyment from this film, if they can stand waiting until things finally get going. The rest will probably pass.
Night School, director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon‘s tale of a headhunting slasher on the streets of Boston, arrived in the early Golden Age of the slasher film and never quite broke through the endurance test that other films in the subgenre, like Friday the 13th, managed to pass with flying colors. Blame it on a more cerebral tone, a crowded market, whatever you like, but saying it’s a shame that the film didn’t break through doesn’t begin to cover it.
Night School isn’t just an underrated slasher, or an underseen one. For my money, it’s one of the best films the subgenre has ever produced, full stop, and Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K UHD restoration, arriving just in time for the film’s 45th anniversary, is must-have proof. Stacked with special features highlighting the craft of the film and its place in slasher history, and headlined by a gorgeous restoration showcasing the wonderfully textured production, this is Night School as it’s meant to be seen for slasher devotees everywhere.
So, what makes the film so effective? It starts very simply, with the revelation that a killer with a very cool knife and a motorcycle helmet as a mask is murdering young women in Boston, taking off their heads, and dropping those heads in the nearest body of water (no matter how small).
Solving the case falls on Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), a detective with an academic background who traces all of the victims in one way or another back to a local night school. There, suspicion falls on a womanizing professor (Drew Snyder) who sleeps around on his research assistant and romantic partner, Eleanor (Rachel Ward), whose own death could be right around the corner.
I’m doing my best to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, not just because I think plenty of slasher fans still need to see Night School, but because the film is quite determined to be a whodunit in the classic Italian giallo sense. The kills are brutal and elaborate, the killer deliberately covered head-to-toe in leather and a gleaming black helmet, the knife and the headhunting a disturbing signature. Avergon’s script is well-versed in the trappings of exactly this kind of story, complete with red herrings galore. And yet, by the time it’s all wrapping up, there’s also the sense that the answer was right there in front of you the entire time, something the very best films by legends like Mario Bava and Dario Argento could also achieve.
But on to the restoration: Like the best of the gialli, Night School is also a beautifully engineered film full of colors and delicate camera compositions and sound design. The opening kill, which takes place on a playground carousel outside of a daycare, is rich in exactly this kind of thing, from the cityscapes that lead into the scene to the sound of a motorcycle slowly rolling forward, its engine already dead. Cinematographer Mark Irwin, best known for his many collaborations with David Cronenberg, paints the film in rich reds, absinthe greens, and haunting, chilled blue-white light on wet Boston streets, all of which are preserved beautifully by the restoration team at work on this one.
It’s a movie that very deliberately evokes a specific place – the aging streets of Boston in the 1980s, and the halls of relatively low-level academia – and then takes that place into haunted territory, saturating every frame with color and shadow that suggests a killer lurking just out of view.
Night School is not a massively gore-heavy film, but it does deliver the slasher goods with a series of tense, often unpredictable kills and body discoveries that range from the darkly comic to the flat-out jaw-dropping. That’s thanks to the sound design, the score, the editing from Robert Reitano, and more, all of which add to the film’s giallo soul.
In every case, the scene’s geography is outstanding, and it’s easy to see where the simplest possible kill shot might land, but the film never goes for the obvious. Throw in a surprisingly (for 1981, anyway) feminist bent to the storytelling and some very progressive moments for an early slasher film, and this one fits right in with Black Christmas and The Slumber Party Massacre as a film with depth you can just keep unpacking.
That depth, helped along by a load of featurettes and two new commentary tracks featuring members of the crew, is what stands out the most in this new 4K set. Night School may be a niche film recognized mostly by horror addicts and the slasher faithful, but it deserves to be something more, a landmark on the roadmap of slasher cinema history. It’s one of the best in the genre, and this restoration highlights, underlines, and shouts that from the rooftops.
Night School is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome.
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