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| Images courtesy of Unearthed Films |
Just the name and moniker Unearthed Films is sure to make
most potential viewers shudder at the thought while gorehounds start
salivating. An infamous sublabel of MVD
Visual specializing in extreme or graphically disturbing and transgressive
horror films behind A Serbian Film, the August Underground trilogy,
Deadgirl and Feed, they’re not known for playing nice with others
in the sandbox so to speak.
But every
now and again they sometimes dabble in classier if not artier fare as with Nicolas
Roeg’s Full Body Massage or the Soviet serial killer drama Evilenko
and one time they even tried out musical animation with Rock & Rule. Which brings us to their latest acquisition:
the 1997 New Zealand directorial debut of Scott Reynolds with The Ugly. Boasting visual effects work from the Oscar
winning team behind The Lord of the Rings trilogy Weta Digital and
drawing loosely from The Ugly Duckling, the film is a fully cocked and
loaded shocker which inexplicably fell under the radar for years before being
dumped on video. Strange considering the
film’s success in New Zealand caught the attention of Miramax Films which
financed the director’s next picture.
Restored in 4K and presented with 2.0 LPCM stereo audio as
well as the unusual use of 4.0 DTS-HD surround sound, The Ugly zeroes in
on a squalid decaying insane asylum in Auckland where serial killer Simon Cartwright
(Paolo Rotondo of The Rule of Jenny Pen) whiles away his time
incarcerated and tormented by orderlies who look like pro-wrestling rejects as
well as a group of demons simply known as The Ugly which compel him to
kill. Summoned before the asylum in a
kind of The Silence of the Lambs setup is Dr. Karen Schumaker (Rebecca Hobbs
of The Brokenwood Mysteries) who is tasked with interviewing Simon to
determine whether or not he’s fit for release back into the free civilized
world.
Over the course of the doctor’s
line of questioning, we learn of Simon’s childhood abuses suffered at the hands
of his domineering mother Evelyn (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) who drives away any
and all potential friends including a young girl named Julie, leading to her
own eventual murder by him. What it
doesn’t explain, however, are the latent psychic powers Simon somehow seems to
possess. Moreover, Simon bumps into a
now-adult Julie (Vanessa Byrnes) and he can’t decide if he still has feelings
for her or if she needs to die too.
A movie where many throats are slit and blades are plunged
into abdomens but everyone bleeds dark deep black instead of crimson red,
implying everyone Simon kills isn’t actually human, The Ugly is a film
that gets into a headspace and continues to descend into madness and
mayhem. With blue-ish, sickly grain-heavy
looking cinematography by Simon Raby and a thoroughly moody and downbeat score
by Victoria Kelly, capturing the squalor and ruin of the asylum whose walls
look bloodier than the actual bloodletting onscreen, the world of the film
looks and feels past the point of death.
Paolo Rotondo and Rebecca Hobbs play excellent off of each other while
flashbacks with the child actors dealing with psycho mother Evelyn played by a
witchy Jennifer Ward-Lealand have a lot of heavy lifting. Makeup effects work in the film is good
though for many the sight of black blood will be jarring. There’s also ample room for the effects team
to conjure up hallucinatory ghostly images right around the time Weta Digital
was also cranking out Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, another spirit
heavy scare comedy of sorts.
Scanned in 4K from the original 35mm interpositive and
featuring an isolated score as well as a commentary with the two lead actors moderated
by Nathaniel Thompson and including two short films from the writer-director
and a collectible booklet with reversible sleeve art, Unearthed Films’ disc of The
Ugly is pretty good. Clean and free of blemishes or scratches with a healthy grain structure, the transfer looks nice despite not having access to the original camera negatives.
An unlikely
little number with more than a few startling fake-outs sure to make some of the
nightmare fake-outs in An American Werewolf in London blush, some good
psychological horror and striking visual design, the film which garnered
somewhere around fourteen award nominations and earning seven official wins was
a hit at film festivals but somehow didn’t get its theatrical due in the
US. Despite this, the new disc under the
Unearthed Classics banner restored to its former glory more than makes up for
the film’s lost time over the past twenty-five years or so. Not the typical Unearthed Films fare in a
stylish and inspired picture made just as the New Zealand film industry was
kicking into high gear.
--Andrew Kotwicki