Like Rob's controversial opinion of Blade Runner 2049, I quite liked the first half of the film, and thought the second half sucked. It takes a great premise and beginning and ends up just kind of repeating the same actions over and over until one particular character does something after which the film focuses on that one character instead of switching around from the perspective of all the people trapped in the room. Once that happens, the mysterious nature of the film peters out into just being a big lynch-aping bore. Much more competently put together than something like the AVGN movie or the godawful Nostalgia critic """""movies,""""" but he's better as a reviewer and an idea man.
2 Reviews
Real potential and good ideas dragged out to fill a feature length
Uridon4 December 2017
Warning: Spoilers
Rob Ager is a born filmmaker
WriteJoe7225 October 2015
Underground independent films can sometimes signal the coming of a born-filmmaker. I believe writer/director Rob Ager and his kind of avant-Garde psychological opus, TURN IN YOUR GRAVE to be a beacon of hope for indie cinema in a pretty barren wasteland. And Mr. Ager has indeed shown that he is in fact, a born film-maker.
His film is about as David Lynch-ian as you can get without ripping off any of Lynch's films. The structure is a complete mind-meld. It tosses together different time lines and states of being to disorient the viewer and take them on a journey which is ambitious; loaded with hidden meanings and filled with entertaining jabs at politics and psychology by means of both art and cinema as a process of terrifying discovery and also a disguise of something else altogether.
I don't know if Ager has ever seen Vincenzo Natali's CUBE (1998) but he takes a page from that brilliant debut feature and begins his flick with 7 people trapped in a room. As they slowly wake up and try to put the pieces together as to how they got there; who they are and why this is happening to them -- they become stalked by a horde of strange creatures with even stranger interactions. Trying to find a way out of the maze-like structure eventually characters discover that the cryptic clues and hints available are as much for their own use as ours the viewer in deciphering what we are seeing.
Something like this is akin to pure cinema. Even though it has an unconventional narrative structure and I won't spoil the big reveal in the third act. This is rock solid low-budget film-making using amazing editing techniques; mise-en-scene and clever sound effects to register an emotional and almost subliminal effect to the viewer. The cast is uniformly excellent for such a budgeted effort and having made most of my own underground features on a shoestring I know how hard this can be to find performers who ADD complexity to the story rather than subtract with amateurish talent. The last movie I saw which was anything like this in tone and structure was the French film AMER (2009) that showed a woman's perspective shift from childhood through adolescence and adulthood in a nearly wordless trilogy of visual tricks and treats created after the 1970's Italian giallo films. Ager does it one better here by paying homage to many of the 1980's horror flicks - primarily John Carpenter's THE THING, Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING and just about anything frightening David Lynch has ever done. The "zombies" in the film are quite an intriguing mix of prosthetic make-up and masks. While some may call this amateur I beg to differ. They come off as so damn creepy and nightmarish that they work. Like a fever dream the movie creates a great deal of atmosphere that will replay in your mind long after you are done viewing it.
TURN IN YOUR GRAVE is not an easy movie to find - but you can buy it for digital download off Ager's own website COLLATIVE LEARNING.com where he has amazingly solid videos of cinema which inspires him and their many layered subtext and hidden meanings uncovered. You won't be disappointed if you have an open mind and enjoy dissecting cinema.
I am glad to see somebody else in the indie circuit creating art instead of just a bunch of noise and flashy cuts when it comes to modern horror film-making. Scary movies should be weird and unconventional -- like a nightmare they should take you a place which is not realistic. And that is exactly what this movie does. With of course plenty of re-watch value!
His film is about as David Lynch-ian as you can get without ripping off any of Lynch's films. The structure is a complete mind-meld. It tosses together different time lines and states of being to disorient the viewer and take them on a journey which is ambitious; loaded with hidden meanings and filled with entertaining jabs at politics and psychology by means of both art and cinema as a process of terrifying discovery and also a disguise of something else altogether.
I don't know if Ager has ever seen Vincenzo Natali's CUBE (1998) but he takes a page from that brilliant debut feature and begins his flick with 7 people trapped in a room. As they slowly wake up and try to put the pieces together as to how they got there; who they are and why this is happening to them -- they become stalked by a horde of strange creatures with even stranger interactions. Trying to find a way out of the maze-like structure eventually characters discover that the cryptic clues and hints available are as much for their own use as ours the viewer in deciphering what we are seeing.
Something like this is akin to pure cinema. Even though it has an unconventional narrative structure and I won't spoil the big reveal in the third act. This is rock solid low-budget film-making using amazing editing techniques; mise-en-scene and clever sound effects to register an emotional and almost subliminal effect to the viewer. The cast is uniformly excellent for such a budgeted effort and having made most of my own underground features on a shoestring I know how hard this can be to find performers who ADD complexity to the story rather than subtract with amateurish talent. The last movie I saw which was anything like this in tone and structure was the French film AMER (2009) that showed a woman's perspective shift from childhood through adolescence and adulthood in a nearly wordless trilogy of visual tricks and treats created after the 1970's Italian giallo films. Ager does it one better here by paying homage to many of the 1980's horror flicks - primarily John Carpenter's THE THING, Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING and just about anything frightening David Lynch has ever done. The "zombies" in the film are quite an intriguing mix of prosthetic make-up and masks. While some may call this amateur I beg to differ. They come off as so damn creepy and nightmarish that they work. Like a fever dream the movie creates a great deal of atmosphere that will replay in your mind long after you are done viewing it.
TURN IN YOUR GRAVE is not an easy movie to find - but you can buy it for digital download off Ager's own website COLLATIVE LEARNING.com where he has amazingly solid videos of cinema which inspires him and their many layered subtext and hidden meanings uncovered. You won't be disappointed if you have an open mind and enjoy dissecting cinema.
I am glad to see somebody else in the indie circuit creating art instead of just a bunch of noise and flashy cuts when it comes to modern horror film-making. Scary movies should be weird and unconventional -- like a nightmare they should take you a place which is not realistic. And that is exactly what this movie does. With of course plenty of re-watch value!
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