12/31/2022 0 Comments The vatican tapes review![]() ![]() Take, for example, an early scene where protagonist Angela cuts herself while slicing her birthday cake at her party. That said, even cliché horror scenarios are staged with such formal bravado that it’s easy to forgive the film’s drawbacks. There have been plenty of master directors who’ve fascinatingly created a disjunction between how a piece is written and the way it’s directed (see: last year’s Maps to the Stars), but here the results are simply jarring, and not in an interesting way. ![]() Neveldine’s style is all about bombast and over-stimulation, which works damn well when he’s making movies whose primarily pleasures are visceral and intellectual, but this screenplay calls for a more straightforward emotional engagement and sense of creeping dread. In other words, The Vatican Tapes feels like a movie written by a workman and directed by a madman and this creates an uneasy tension. Fortunately, though the script (written by entertainment journalist Christopher Borrelli) is paint-by-numbers, Neveldine’s visual style is as intoxicating as ever: a fragmentary collage of embedded media ranging from Skype sessions to CCTV inexplicably ravaged by digital noise, Cassavetes-style close-ups obscured by out-of-focus objects dipping in and out of the foreground – the elliptical editing switching erratically between extreme angles and focal shifts for no other reason than because Neveldine wants to fit in as many great shots as possible. Like most entries in the sub-genre, a substantial portion of the running time is taken up with dull, lengthy discussions trying to determine whether the main character’s behaviour is the product of mental illness or something otherworldly. Considering how easy the genre lends itself to cartoonish extremes, it’s surprising how straight Neveldine plays it – the tone is dour throughout, and the narrative sticks to all the usual rules regarding character development, rising action and dramatic catharsis. What’s key to his approach here is that he doesn’t deny us the pleasures of the traditional genre piece but screws around with their conventional functions, and in the process says a lot about spectatorship, class, and surveillance.įollowing a string of unrealized and compromised studio projects ( Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Jonah Hex) Neveldine is back with his first solo feature, the low-budget exorcism movie The Vatican Tapes. Working in a style that I can only describe as some bizarre combination of Tony Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Lewis, Neveldine took post-continuity aesthetics to their logical extreme the results are almost avant-garde in their fragmentation and frequent lapses into outright abstraction. Directing alongside his frequent collaborator Brian Taylor, Mark Neveldine helmed three of the finest and most original action movies of the century thus far: Crank, Crank: High Voltage and Gamer.
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