strong horror based on a successful short film
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“The Undead” by Alberto Corredor was released, which grew out of a short horror film about the dangers that await those who long for contact with the world of the dead, but primarily those who do not want this at all.
Having rushed from London to Berlin to identify the body of her father (Peter Mullan), who died in a fire, Iris (Freya Allan) learns right in the morgue that she has inherited from a parent who has not been in touch for a long time a dilapidated pub called “The Queen’s Head” with almost four hundred years of history. . It soon turns out that in addition to the “Queen’s Head”, an integral part of the inheritance is “she” – a creature of supposedly female gender with long, creepy fingers that bend where they please, and with a bag with slots on her head, like the one worn by Jason in ” Friday the 13th” until I got my hands on a signature goalkeeper mask. All you have to do is perform a simple but effective ritual, and under the bag you can find anyone you want on the “other” side. But only for two minutes.
In the little over an hour and a half that “Unclean Spirits” is running (in the original the film is called much more specifically – “Baghead”, that is, “baghead” or in this case still “baghead”), all the most fashionable “concept horror” of recent times – from Parker Finn’s “Smile” to Zach Cregger’s “Barbarian”. But most persistently I remember, of course, “Two, three, demon, come!” Philip’s brothers. At some point, the similarity of the film by British director and screenwriter Alberto Corredor with the main genre sensation of the last season becomes so obvious that even among the first audience and critical reviews there were direct accusations of plagiarism. They are understandable, but hardly fair: Corredor shot his short film of the same name, in which all the most important things were already invented and shown, back in 2017 (and as a result, it collected twice as many awards at festivals as “Two, three…”), so it is much more likely that it was Philippou’s brothers who saw the first “Evil Spirits” earlier.
But if in the sense of originality the presence of a primary source provides a 100% alibi, then in the artistic field it becomes more of a hindrance. Films – and horror films in particular – based on short films almost never surpass the original. In the exceptional case of “Saw,” which grew from an amateur “tiny” into one of the most powerful franchises on the planet, there are countless averages like Bryce McGuire’s “Cursed Waters,” a feature-length version of a ten-year-old short about a cursed swimming pool, which this January, at least collected good money for the world, but immediately became one of the first films on the list of disappointments for the year that had just begun. McGuire is also listed as one of the screenwriters in the credits of Unclean, which ultimately seems much more significant than his solo project. Something, of course, raises questions (among other things, it is completely unclear why it was necessary to transfer the scene of action to Berlin); at times you can, perhaps, get bored (those who crave a lot of blood in the basement, it is better to rewatch “The House on the Edge of the Cemetery” by Lucio Fulci or at least the above-mentioned “Barbarian”), but in general the curse of the “remake of the short film” is the team of “Unclean” happily escaped and coped with the utmost dignity. The work of the artists, most notably Mark Beetz and Mariana Vasconcellos, deserves special mention. Their previous collaboration was last year’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter by Andre Øvredal, and it was the spaces they imagined and furnished aboard the doomed sailing ship that were the most impressive thing about this rather dreary side note to Dracula. In “Unclean Spirits,” their attention is focused on a much less exotic setting, but, as it turns out, no less spectacular. The gloomy decor of a dilapidated pub; floating centuries-old brickwork, a dark spot on the parquet floor in the place where Iris’s father collapsed engulfed in flames, the felt cage of a threadbare home sweatshirt, an antediluvian kitchen stopwatch, with the help of which the treasured meeting time is measured, and, of course, the torn burlap on “her” head… The completely masterful handling of all this repulsive, unsanitary belongings makes one remember nothing less than David Cronenberg’s “Spider.” And in the end, it’s no less frightening than the corresponding special effects.
In theaters from February 22
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