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nigelparkin6
Reviews
Necropolis: Legion (2019)
A delirious hit of sensual melodrama!
Chris Alexander takes the concept of the original 'Necropolis' and transports it to his own cinematic world. Anyone familiar with his 'Blood' films will know his style and his settings - he crafts trance-like, lingering studies of women in isolation, on the edges of cities or in remote rural scenes. Here, the hauntingly beautiful farm house in which the central character encounters the ancient evil is perhaps Alexander's most striking setting yet; the film is like an Andrew Wyeth painting animated by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin!
Much of the success of the film comes from the way in which Augie Duke's Lisa seems to merge organically with the farm house interiors. There is a hypnotic and indeed subtly erotic interplay of body and space, achieved through Alexander's almost fetishistic focus on her hair, the colour and tone of which is reflected and extended in walls and fabrics. This compelling aesthetic scheme highlights the main dramatic theme - the house, as an extension of Eva, is a sensually vampiric environment, drawing on Lisa's essence, consuming and possessing her.
Until now Alexander's films have been largely free of dialogue and it is a joy to hear richly melodramatic speech being such a key element in this film. The wonderfully emphatic notes hit by the actors are echoed in the music, much of which is, as usual, by Alexander himself, but with the glorious complement here of a lush main theme by the great Richard Band.
A significant concluding thought at the time of writing is that the film works as a powerful fever dream of isolation...and infection - an infection that spreads across distance and time. Eerily topical...
Queen of Blood (2014)
To Whet Your Appetite for Blood...
Chris Alexander's Queen of Blood opens with an extraordinary image. The female vampire from Alexander's first film, Blood for Irina, crawls through the shallow part of a lake towards a muddy bank, a trail of blood extending away from her like some sort of umbilical cord, gradually disappearing. The music sounds as if it is being played backwards, adding to the sense of something being wrenched back in time. We'll return to this – in more ways than one. There is something primal about the way Irina crawls out of the water, as if she is being born. Just as we think this we cut to a title card – BIRTH.
This feral, bloodied, naked female figure crawls and claws at the muddied earth as if discovering it for the first time while we see feet in leather shoes approaching her. Civilization and wild humanity are about to meet. The figure in shoes stands over the naked Irina. He is dressed in a professorial grey cardigan and a hat. His grey beard recalls Ginsberg, his round-rimmed spectacles Lennon but the staff he is carrying conveys a more ancient, mystical, Shamanic feel – a Prospero, perhaps. She stares up at him, reaches out to him, stroking his clean hand with her soiled fingers, smearing it with her wet earth. As he stands feeling this, facing ahead, we look at the dark lenses of his glasses and consider that perhaps he is blind – the staff may be for support, stability, guidance. Perhaps he is less Prospero and more Tiresias.
He carries her home
to a cabin in the woods. We know what kind of world this is.
We see him beginning to 'tame' her, dressing her in a gown that is held over her, filling the screen as if it is about to smother her, and cutting her hair with scissors that hover menacingly over her head. There is something sinister, controlling in all of this. We realise he is not blind but the earlier suggestion must have been there for a reason.
He brushes her hair as if she is his doll, his possession. He offers her a mirror and she caresses it in an extraordinarily fetishistic way before taking it and gazing at herself, her face frozen in an expression of surprise and curiosity, as if she is viewing herself for the first time.
And now he kneels in front of her and she raises her hand but it freezes. Is she in some way aware that she might harm him? He certainly does not seem to sense this. Perhaps he is indeed truly 'blind' – unable to see what he really has in front of him, a vicious, predatory creature. Too late. Her hand plunges into his throat, puncturing it, squeezing it, tearing it. She gazes at what she is doing with the same wide-eyed intensity that she regarded herself, as if she is surprised by what she is doing.
Once she has had her fill of the man's blood, Irina stands in the open doorway of his cabin looking out at a sunlit world. Another image of birth. She steps out, walks ahead, towards us, away from this rural idyll. She is making an important journey – it is the journey Little Red Riding Hood makes, covered in blood, away from her grandmother's cottage in the woods having triumphed over the wolf and it is the journey Eve makes from Paradise. In all cases we are dealing with a woman who has lost her innocence and has the marks to show for it.
Indeed, the Eve connection is crucial. Irina has just committed the ultimate act of rebellion against a guiding, God-like figure. Paradise has been corrupted. As if to confirm this we now have a whole series of images juxtaposing beautiful images of nature with images of death and decay, climaxing with an image of a grand oak standing in the sun but with graves leaning against it. And in the midst of all this we encounter a new woman, dressed in black as if in mourning but also caressing her pregnant stomach. Birth and death. Sunlight and graves. Paradise and decay.
We're in a Miltonic world of fevered spiritual fear. A gaunt priest approaches a forbidding church door. He looks frightened. He looks to the skies but there is no comfort there. He looks out at us and we look into him – his fear, his despair, the darkness in his face. The abyss. And as we stare into this abyss the image dissolves into tangled woodland. Here again is our corrupted paradise, at the centre of which is the bloodied figure of Irina. She walks through an increasingly autumnal landscape, the dying trees reflected in sludge like something out of Poe, until she finds a beautiful girl whose tawny ringlets carry a complex sense of innocence, sensuality and autumnal decay and who stands mesmerised by this red-handed Angel of Death, as if she cannot see any danger, only a transfixing sense of beauty.
To discover more of this wonderful film you really must see it for yourself
Blood for Irina (2012)
Passion of a Vampire
We are told that Chris Alexander's Blood for Irina is a portrait of 'three people living life on the fringe
trapped in a world of literal and figurative decay'. The credited inspirations are Herzog, Franco and Rollin but there is more going on here. With its intense focus on a woman's psychological and physical disintegration, its repeated images of blood and suffering and the almost spiritual concentration on close-ups this works as both chamber piece and meditation on a Passion. The Passion of Irina, if you like. We're in the company of Bergman and Dreyer.
There is a lot of Lynch here too – we think of the initial, hypnotic shots of smoke and fire in 'Wild at Heart' as we watch the swirling blood in water set to classical music, of 'Twin Peaks' as Irina draws back red curtains to reveal her city (her stage?), of 'Eraserhead' as we travel through her quiet, desolate urban/industrial landscape. But the most interesting reference to Lynch is surely the large stone resembling a human ear that lies in the lake next to an eerily staring baby doll. We think of 'Blue Velvet', of images of innocence in a 'strange world' of degradation, but this stone is also Alexander's original touch, an indication of the way we need not only to watch but to listen to this film. The stone and the doll are both partially submerged and as we look at them we reflect on the way in which all of the staring but essentially lifeless figures in this film appear to be strangely submerged, as if they are decaying bodies suspended in formaldehyde. When Irina stares at her first victim through a café window she could almost be looking into an urban fish tank. Equally, all the grim interaction and individual agony of the characters is made to sound submerged by Alexander's expressive, experimental and highly expressionistic score, as if we are listening to an ultrasound scan. The tragic significance of this particular sound is made poignantly clear in the closing moments of the film.
Alexander creates many moments of dark visual poetry. The motel's sign hovers in a cloudy night sky like a sad, sordid neon moon, a beacon of decay and death. The black blood running from Irina's mouth as she claims her prey is mirrored by the black water running from a drain mouth, creating an overwhelming sense of rot, erosion, putrescence and sickness. And in one brilliant shot, a close up of the chipped paintwork on the bottom of the door to Irina's room appears at first to be the outline of a cityscape filmed at sunset. It is the perfect image of Irina's world – everything reduced to this flaking point.
Alexander's microbudget film and his central character are similar beings. This is a fringe film, an outsider standing in a small room looking out at a city in which it might expect to pass almost unnoticed, finding only a few intense companions. Be one of them. Irina will give you a night you will not easily forget.