A stellar cast that includes Peter Mullan, David Caruso, and the movie’s co-screenwriter, Stephen Gevedon, ventured into an inherently frightening location, and relied on cinematographer Uta Briesewitz to approximate the naturalistic, filmic look of low-budget 1970s genre pictures, while they all told the story of an asbestos-removal crew affected by the history of madness at their worksite. In the spirit of all those independent horror filmmakers who’ve exploited whatever resources they have on hand, in 2001 well-regarded indie-dramedy director Brad Anderson brought some relatively crude (compared to today) digital-video cameras into a crumbling, decommissioned Massachusetts mental hospital, and made his first and best scary movie. The baffled security guard standing in their way? David Lynch. When Nadja senses that her father has been killed, she and Renfield (Karl Geary) head down to the morgue and demand to pick up the body. This is one of the lost gems of mid-1990s indie cinema. It isn’t a terrifying film by any means, but Nadja has a richer sense of history than most modern vampire tales, while being playfully experimental and surprising in its themes of family and relationships. ![]() (Nadja talks about Brooklyn as if it were as distant as the Carpathian Mountains.) Nadja has a sensibility in line with Hal Hartley-the great college-rock soundtrack, led by My Bloody Valentine and Portishead the archly witty dialogue the casting of Martin Donovan in a prominent role-but Almereyda is a much more expressive visual stylist, mixing the minimalist black-and-white of nocturnal Manhattan with Pixelvision flurries in certain dramatic sequences. Murnau’s silent classic, and the entire film is shot in black and white-but he updates it to New York at its hippest. Almereyda has a plain affection for the Dracula of old-the flashbacks to Transylvania have the hard shadows of F.W. And that’s just one of the revisions to Almereyda’s deadpan twist on Bram Stoker, which follows the Count’s daughter Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) as she turns a new victim (Suzy Amis) and tries to reunite with her twin brother after Van Helsing stakes their father. In Michael Almereyda’s revamping (pun intended) of Dracula mythology for modern-day Manhattan, Van Helsing hunts vampires on his bike and is played by Peter Fonda in hippie-burnout mode. For spoiler-related reasons, it’s best not to discuss the details, but director Robert Hiltzik’s decision to cut immediately from the dramatic reveal to the closing credits, leaving the fates of the surviving characters unclear, is a particularly bold and memorable choice. The film’s gender politics have been interpreted in myriad ways-some call it regressive, others argue it’s actually a knowing subversion of slasher-film stereotypes-but either way, there’s no denying that there’s a lot more going on in Sleepaway Camp than in standard-issue exploitation fare. ![]() ![]() Angela is borderline-catatonic after the death of her father and brother many years before, and the other campers tease and pick on her until, one by one, her tormenters start winding up dead. The main characters are a pair of cousins-outgoing Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) and shy Angela (Felissa Rose)-sent to summer camp by Ricky’s eccentric mother (Desiree Gould). The deaths in this film-a child molester gets boiled alive, a bully is stung to death by an entire hive of bees-are no joke. Some of the performances are so over-the-top, they suggest the title refers to the film’s goofy aesthetic rather than its setting, but the hilariously dated early-1980s fashions and heavy Noo-Yawk accents only lull viewers into a false sense of security, and make the startlingly intense violence that much more upsetting. Much has been made of its ending-one of the most shocking in cinema history-but Sleepaway Camp is full of surprises from top to bottom. ![]() Sleepaway Camp’s basic elements -unknown killer systematically picks off the staff and campers of the titular locale-were already derivative in 1983, but this lurid indie possesses a gonzo energy all its own.
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