Bulcsú lives underground and avoids the world topside. The folks in the underground are often mean and hassle him when he's just trying to do his job. His cohorts are a newbie, a narcoleptic, a combative old man, and a regular chum. Bulcsú does have competitors in the underground and he plays a dangerous game, called "railing" with them. Competition, however, from the world topside is what drove him into the underground. There's also a killer on the loose, and Bulcsú meets a cute teddy bear, one day, who changes his life completely.
Nimród Antal's Kontroll (2003) begins with a prologue by someone looking official and addressing the viewer that the film he/she is about to witness is not a realistic depiction of subway workers (the "Control") in Budapest, Hungary but rather a symbolic depiction of life. Antal, however, gives a very realistic depiction of his story of "control," or rather the illusion of it, set completely in the underground subway lines of Budapest. Kontroll is wonderfully absurd while also being quite relevant and beautiful-looking as it is thematically rich.
Beyond the prologue and at first blush, Kontroll begins looking like a giallo, as a tipsy young woman is making the long descent into the subway via escalator. Standing at the platform in her red high heels, a figure steps out of the shadows and pushes the woman right out of those red high heels and onto to the tracks, as the train rattles and rushes by. The lights of the platform illuminate, after a period of darkness, to reveal Bulcsú, sleeping alone on the cold, bare floor. An old man tells Bulcsú that his nose is bleeding, and Bulcsú hurriedly chases him down. Bulcsú pulls his armband from his pocket, revealing that he is a member of the "control," and asks to see the old man's ticket or pass. Apparently, very few people actually purchase or possess one.
In an abrupt shift in tone, Kontroll becomes comical. An old man smoking a cigarette is commenting on his table partner's breakfast cuisine: why are you having french fries for breakfast? You know all of that grease will clog your arteries. Then...if you're going to have french fries why are you drowning them in all that ketchup? The young man eating cannot put a fry into his mouth without a comment from the old man and becomes angry that he cannot eat in peace. Stress induces a narcoleptic fit and he passes out face first into his ketchup-soaked plate. Leave him be, says the old man to the crew's newbie, he'll be fine. Bulcsú meets up with his crew, and the viewer is treated to a series of comedic sequences involving mishaps with ticketless passengers. The newbie attempts to coerce tickets from foreign tourists; a transvestite attempts to seduce one ticket-checker; and the old man gets into a semantic argument with someone as cantankerous as him. Bulcsú is calm and collected and doesn't let the absurd people and excuses faze him; that is however, until a beautiful absurdity sitting on the train, makes him speechless.
Not all is happy or lite in Kontroll. One worker, who remained sitting unusually silent and sad after the Control crew morning meeting, is lent a very sympathetic ear by Bulcsú. The worker refused to to talk about what's going on inside of him but later he explains to Bulcsú very powerfully the emotions within him. Accompanying his powerful emotions, the worker is bleeding profusely from his nose, the wound given to him by a rude passenger's punch, who is now in the worker's clutches with a knife at his throat. I was just doing my job, the worker says, and just asked him for his ticket. In another, which is a very succinct and compact rendering of Bulcsú's topside life, Bulcsú meets an old colleague on the platform and quickly hides his armband. His colleague asks him where's he been and what has he been up to. Bulcsú gives evasive answers. Eventually, his friend with a surprising amount of candor says simply that he was the best and most creative in his business and the topside misses him. Bulcsú replies that having to live everyday trying to be the best brought him down and he couldn't keep that pace up. Sound familiar?
With Kontroll, Nimród Antal shows himself as a very creative and talented filmmaker. Antal would subsequently make his U.S. debut with Vacancy (2007), a horror/thriller well-above the dreck in the genre, highlighted by a very sensitive portrayal of a couple in the waning days in their relationship (Kate Beckinsdale and Luke Wilson) who are forced to unite with the horrific circumstances. Like Vacancy, Kontroll has some fantastic visual sequences, like the "railing" game which Bulcsú plays, a surreal sequence from one of Bulcsú's platform dreams, Bulcsú's first encounter with the killer, and the opening sequence with the tipsy young woman, for example. The authentic location looks as real as real can get but the situations within are totally from a creative mind. The human touches have a resonance when they're in the foreground of an absurdist background. I cannot find fault anywhere in this production, and all of the performances are terrific.
Finally, Kontroll is about control. The idea that he has a pre-determined fate or a free will, Bulcsú abandons. He knows that it is better to just to surrender to his life as it is, in front of him. See it.
Italian genre director, Duccio Tessari, like his contemporaries, made films in multiple genres and his work, today, is perhaps underappreciated. Tessari directed two of the finest Italian Westerns ever made, both with Giuliano Gemma, A Pistol for Ringo (1965) and The Return of Ringo (1965) (both scripted, incidentally, by Fernando di Leo, perhaps the finest director of Italian crime films). Tessari made a terrific giallo in 1971, The Bloodstained Butterfly, before Tony Arzenta. Subsequent to Arzenta, Tessari made the excellent and entertaining Tough Guys (1974), with Lino Ventura, Isaac Hayes, William Berger, and Fred Williamson. Tessari's action choreography, his compositions, and his pacing are all extremely well-done in Arzenta, and arguably, this film is his finest accomplishment as a director.
[Rec] begins with the pushing of the record button by its camera man, Pablo. He's filming Ángela (Manuela Velasco) at a fire station for their television program "While You Were Asleep," as the sun begins to set. Discovering that life for firefighters is fairly mundane and boring during the evening (dining, sleeping, movie-watching, and pick-up basketball games), Ángela hopes and prays that the alarm will go off, allowing Pablo and her an opportunity to film the firefighters in action. Ángela gets her wish. She climbs aboard a truck with firefighters, Manu (Ferrán Terraza) and Álex (David Vert), who are going to an apartment building in the middle of Barcelona to come to the rescue of an older woman, locked inside of her home. As Ángela, Pablo, Manu, and Álex enter the building, the residents are huddled in the lobby, and two police officers are already there. Inside the old woman's apartment, the old woman is disheveled and moving like a caged animal. A police officer attempts to provide some care and is rewarded with a bite attack from the ravenous woman. She is subdued by the crew, who quickly exit to attend to their wounded comrade, only to be stopped at the building's entrance by the local police force, who has locked down the building in a quarantine. Ángela and Pablo, filming all the while, seemingly have gotten the action they so have desired.
[Rec] is focused: no clunky expository dialogue; no peripheral characters; no ridiculously over dramatic music accompanying the action; and nothing glaringly artificial to take the viewer out of the experience. The lack of exposition gives [Rec] real credibility towards creating its "live-on-the-scene" atmosphere and creates also a disorienting effect: the viewer doesn't know anything until its revealed (no foreshadowing), so almost everything is unexpected. Álex and Manu are both characters which seem like real people (the types of folks who would grow up to become firefighters); the apartment building's residents are a diverse crew of tenants (each standing out as his/her own unique character); and Ángela and Pablo are amazingly credible as a professional couple (a true sense of these two working together for quite awhile is apparent, as each seemingly knows what's on the other's mind). Of course the lack of music only heightens the tension, and Balagueró and Plaza are able to focus their audio on more interesting touches, such as a very interesting use of audio when a character falls from the stairs to the screams and screeches of the antagonists and the victims to the sounds of bones crunching, feet pounding up the stairs, the loud report of a gunshot, and the clamoring of steel doors. In [Rec] the primary location of the very real-looking and large apartment building creates a excellent sense of claustrophobia to make the film almost a perfect rendering of survival horror. 
Manuela Velasco, as Ángela, gives a terrific performance, and her character carries the film: it is really through her eyes that the viewer experiences [Rec] and not through Pablo's camerawork. Balagueró and Plaza use a filming technique that's rarely employed effectively and execute it nearly seamlessly. [Rec] is also an excellent blend of atmospheric and gore-laden horror, enough of each to satisfy the modern horror fan. The red of the blood looks like it's from a recent crime scene, and the old Spanish architecture of the apartment building looks as if Erika Blanc could sashay downstairs at any moment. The directorial duo also effectively knows when to slow down the action to punctuate the extremely intense horror sequences, and when [Rec] goes into its final act, the film flies to a nail-biting conclusion. Above all, [Rec] reveals at the end and revels in its most enduring quality, so lacking in today's modern horror cinema: creativity. See it.
With the credits glowing in neon characters upon gravestones with a throaty narrator quoting from the book of sayings which Confucius did not say about vampire/ghost lore in a rambling fashion, I knew that The Vampire Who Admires Me was going to be a treat. Cut to a couple in the cemetery laying in front of a headstone, with the portrait of a distinguished-looking older gentleman at its head, and the two are about to do the deed. Unfortunately, the young lady cannot proceed any further, because "someone" is looking. The young gentleman, in truly gentlemanly fashion, tosses a coat over the portrait for her comfort. Compounding problems for both is the cut on the young lady's hand, deep enough to draw a stream of blood, which lands smack on the grave and into the corpse below. The young lady's blood gave a little frisson to the corpse which is now reanimated. The two decide to leave and while walking away, the young woman gets pulled into the ground by a rotting hand rising above.
Cut to the awakening of lovely Macy, who's late for her appointment this morning. Her equally lovely friend Bibi arrives and the two depart to their photo shoot, where top model and diva, Chelsea is about to burst on to the scene. Young, handsome and wealthy Mr. King is running the model shoot, under the coordination of lovely Kimchi and the flamboyant photographer, Roman (
There are three police officers, Wayne, Mann, and Fine, on East Dragon Island, and save Uncle Faye's pissing in front of the police station, there is no crime to speak of on the island. The models and crew arrive via ferry for their photo shoot. Wayne and Mann are quite excited about that but not really excited about their new boss, the lovely Ms. Chui. She's by-the-books and stickler for the rules. Upon arrival at the villa, Mr. King wonders where his servant, named Victor, has gone. Victor appears and looks sickly. He is also the young gentleman from the coupling in the cemetery at the beginning. At the police station, while Ms. Chui chews out the officers for their lackadaisical style and poor investigative techniques, a older woman arrives with a complaint. Her daughter, Jill, has been missing for the last three days. Good, says Ms. Chui, the officers have a crime to solve. Jill is the young lady from the coupling in the cemetery at the beginning. Let the hijinx ensue.
The script of The Vampire Who Admires Me is from the brain of HK film maker, 
In Rule #1, Yue plays Lee, a young cop working the beat. One evening in a parking garage, Lee stops a speeder and cites the speeder for not wearing his seat belt. Cut me a break, says the speeder, I'm late for my son's birthday party. Lee steps aside to let the man drive on but stops him again. The tail light on his vehicle is out, and Lee asks him to pop the trunk. Noticing that there is blood coming from the trunk's seal and the trunk pops open, revealing a corpse, Lee unclasps his pistol. However the driver is faster with his pistol and kneecaps Lee. The driver, now maniacal, stands over the wounded Lee, firing shots in his other joints, such as his elbows, in preparation to give him the final bullet. Out of the open trunk pops the corpse, distracting the driver, and Lee shoots the driver in the head. 
Lee, after a lengthy recovery, returns to work. Check this report of the parking garage incident, says his superior, and see if there are any changes that need to be made. No changes are necessary: Lee is not wavering that he saw a bloody corpse rise up from the trunk. Perhaps because of this admission, Lee gets reassigned to the "Miscellaneous Affairs Division," appropriately located through a door in a garbage-strewn alley. Inside, Lee meets a man in a wheelchair, who says nothing but gives him a piece of paper, telling Lee that it's his first assignment. Lee arrives at a public swimming pool, where an old man tells him that since the drowning death of a little girl about a month ago, everyone has been hearing these loud moans coming from the building. Lee checks the location and finds only his new boss, Wong (Cheng), who says get to work, rookie. A bunch of hair is clogging the pool's filter, perhaps the cause for the wailing sound inside the building. Hong Kong police receive about a hundred and eighty-five calls a day, says Wong, and one hundred and eighty of them, robbery, murder, kidnapping, and the like, are handled by Hong Kong police. About five of those calls, a day, are unexplained, like mysterious noises and bizarre phenomena, which the "Miscellaneous Affairs Division" handles. Just remember Rule #1 cautions Wong: there are no ghosts.
I had only previously seen Kelvin Tong's supernatural The Maid (2005). While The Maid wasn't overall completely satisfying, Tong made an interesting film which had both creepy supernatural sequences combined with some very human touches. He succeeds and improves on this dichotomy in Rule #1. A truly creepy sequence involving a laughing young girl, who is hanging herself, gets juxtaposed with cute sequences involving a young delivery girl on a bicycle, who becomes Cheng's only friend and confidante. Tong smartly adds romantic subplots to both Yue and Cheng's characters, giving the film an emotional depth and richness to the characters. Around the forty-minute mark, Tong introduces a very unexpected and well-handled sequence, which really launches Rule #1 into its thriller plot line. Nearly all of the supernatural and action sequences of Rule #1 are exciting and very well-done, especially a sequence at a school. 
Shawn Yue is an up-and-coming HK actor, whose previous performance in Pou-Soi Cheang's Shamo (2007) was appropriately icy and nasty. Like Cheng, Yue is extremely good looking yet, more often than not, mostly wooden. Yue is good in Rule #1, like Brad Pitt's character in David Fincher's Seven (1995), and Yue plays Lee as not-to-sharp, impulsive, and passionate. As for Cheng's performance, my hat has to go off to him, but I'm not ready to start throwing dollar bills at him anytime soon. Cheng's Wong is an alcoholic in the film and Cheng, seemingly, put on about fifteen to twenty pounds or so for the role. I suppose that's as far as his vanity will allow him to go. Cheng labors through his only Pacino-like speech in the film and while it didn't move me to tears, Cheng did the best that he could. This role is a good change of pace for Cheng, and in the comedic and human touches that Tong provides in the film, Cheng shines.
I love a good thriller, and Rule #1 delivers on this front. Tong also provides enough creative flourishes to elevate Rule #1 above most recent thrillers. I've grown a little closer to Ekin Cheng through Rule #1, and I'm glad that I broke that recent rule about him.
I awoke this morning groggy but was perked up immensely when Neil from The Agitation of the Mind awarded me these four:
...and I would like to award Neil at his excellent blog,