Sitges Dispatch. 5.

Bad luck, hard rain and train delays wrecked my schedule yesterday and threw The Lost in my tracks. It's a US indie with a publicity package based on the image of softcore starlette Misty Mundae. I was hoping for a Z-series redeemed only by the guilty pleasure of watching a girl walk nude in the grass, and that's exactly what I found - though only for the first five minutes. An enjoyable mix of neo-noir and horror set in small-town middle America, this film is the directorial debut for May editor Chris Sivertson, and you can see traces of Lucky McKee's absolutely fantastic film in it - the dark humor, the hidden emotion, the stylish image, the fine score (there's even O.U.T.H.U.D. in it) and the nice fragrance of fine B-movie-making.

Screened in the Sitges parallel section Midnight X-Treme, which is reserved for obscure indie flicks, this adaptation of the novel by Jack Ketchum features the talented Marc Senter as a disturbed young man who kills two women on an impulse (one of them, the afore-mentioned Mundae, stays nude for almost the entirety of her performance) - and gets away with it. Everyone around knows that this guy in cowboy boots with crushed beer cans under them is a killer, but nobody does anything. Four years later, cops begin to poke around again, and the pressure, combined with a few difficult romances with young women, leads the guy to take action again. Sivertson (codirector with McKee of 2001's unreleased indie All Cheerleaders Die) tells this tale of rampage with visual flair, great atmosphere and careful editing. Oh, yes, I was lucky being unlucky.

There aren't great things to say about Lemming, though, the only Competition film I was able to get through yesterday. Director Dominik Moll gave us a great Hitchcock-like thriller called Harry is Here to Help, featuring Sergi López in the role of his lifetime. Lemming swims in similar waters - it also tells the story of a model young couple whose apparently perfect life is disturbed by the entrance of an unexpected third party - but the results cannot be more disappointing or frustrating. With the climax hitting too soon, the rest of Lemming is a derivative, painful and cryptic ordeal in search of meaning... If it weren't for magnetic presence of Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg, this would be an even worse slog to get through.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2005 12:06 PM