Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 8/11/2012)

Having left girlfriend Clara Voda crying in bed, Puiu impassively prepares food in the kitchen before heading to the metallurgy plant where he works. A distant confrontation with a superior seems to suggest that he has been dismissed and he causes a scene in his office by menacingly demanding the repayment of money loaned to an erstwhile colleague. Stopping off in a workshop to collect the new firing pins for his shotgun, Puiu returns to his apartment and potters around with the blinds pulled before receiving an unwanted visit from mother Valeria Seciu and his detested stepfather, Valentin Popescu.

On discovering a damp patch in his bathroom, he marches upstairs to accuse a neighbour's son of causing the leak that has damaged his ceiling. But, no sooner has he returned to his routine than he is disturbed by workmen who have been detailed to clear his belongings prior to redecoration. Seeking an escape from such domestic ennui, Puiu picks his way across railway lines and muddy fields to spy at a safe remove on a family starting its day. He then endures a miserable shopping expedition that turns the purchase of a new gun and a piece of cake into as much of a battle against hostile forces as the confrontation with his ex-wife's colleagues at the boutique where she used to work. Even collecting his son proves an inconvenience and Puiu billets him with a neighbour before embarking upon his mission of vengeance.

Unlike the shooting of a well-heeled man and his female companion in an underground car park, the murder of an elderly couple occurs off-camera and it's only when Puiu has surrendered himself to the police that his motives become clear. His first victim was the lawyer who had brokered his divorce, while the second pair were the in-laws who had encouraged their daughter to escape from the dead-end existence in which he had entombed her. He makes his statement with the same detachment with which he committed his crimes. But rather than seeming like a curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder or a sinister stalker, Puiu suddenly appears to be a man broken by circumstances, whose actions were a final hopeless bid to regain some control over a life he had lost interest in living.

Keeping Viorel Sergovici's camera at a pryingly discreet distance and adopting the measured mundanity employed by Chantal Akerman in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Puiu succeeds in aggregating the slings and arrows that might drive an ordinary man to such desperation. Moreover, he provides a sobering account of the frustrations and disappointments inherent in the daily grind that says much about Romania's post-Communist progress. But his performance is as crucial as his direction in conveying the muted fury and bitter resentment of a crushed soul with nothing left to lose.

If Aurora demands a degree of patience, Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps requires audiences to piece together meaning from fragments of seemingly conflicting information and then accept a premise that appears ludicrous in the extreme. However, as in Dogtooth (2009) and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg (2010) - in which co-producer Lanthimos also acted - the action has a curious logic that makes its implausibilities all the more intriguing. Indeed, in a world in which reality TV is accepted as authentic, why shouldn't a bereavement amelioration business thrive and why should an organisation taking its name from a European mountain range be any less noble in its highly unlikely interventions in everyday life than a superheroic cabal like the Avengers or the Justice League of America?

Rhythmic gymnast Ariane Labed is perfecting her ribbon technique with portly coach Johnny Vekris. She believes she would be more inspired by a pop tune, but the fierce Vekris insists that she sticks with the classical piece he has chosen and threatens to cave her head in if she dares to defy him again. Meanwhile, paramedic Aris Servetalis and nurse Aggeliki Papoulia arrive at the scene of a car crash, where the former informs 16 year-old tennis player Maria Kirozi that her condition is extremely serious before eliciting the fact that her favourite actor is Jude Law.

Back at the gym, Servetalis, Vekris, Labed and Poupalia meet to discuss the terms and conditions of their new enterprise. They agree to call themselves `Alps', as the title cannot betray to outsiders the nature of their operation, and each selects a mountain codename, with the leader Servetalis deciding upon Mont Blanc, while Vekris becomes Matterhorn and Poupalia Monte Rosa . The service will entail standing in for a deceased family member or friend until the bereaved has come to terms with their loss. They will wear the loved one's clothing and deliver lines specially scripted by the client. Moreover, they will behave, if only for a few hours a week, exactly like the departed to relieve the pain of letting go and resuming normal life.

Thus, Vekris poses as the husband of blind woman Eftihia Stefanidou, while Papoulia plays the diabetic wife of lighting shop owner Efthimis Filippou, who is such a stickler for her remaining precisely in character that he even breaks off from performing cunnilingus to correct a misspoken word in her dialogue. Papoulia also spends much time with the ageing Stavros Psillakis, who is probably her father, but could just as easily be another customer. However, her primary fixation is Kirozi and Servetalis encourages her to ingratiate herself with the girl's parents, Sotiris Papastamatiou and Tina Papanikolaou, and boyfriend, Nikos Galgadas. But, when Kirozi eventually dies, Papoulia informs her fellow Alps that she has made a remarkable recovery and proceeds to act as her stand-in on a freelance basis.

It is inevitable that the deception will be discovered and Servetalis beats Papoulia for breaching the Alpine code and she is replaced by Labed. However, she is so obsessed with Kirozi and her family that she breaks into her bedroom and refuses to leave. Eventually, she is forcibly ejected and left to deal with her nervous breakdown on her own. Yet, as if to suggest that there is room for manoeuvre within this bizarre milieu, the film ends with Labed performing her ribbon routine to Popcorn's 1972 electronica hit, `Hot Butter'.

The fact that nobody questions the rationale behind the Alps service may strike some as peculiar. But, while it is no more unlikely than the domestic arrangements in Dogtooth and Attenberg, there will come a point when the singularity of the Lantimos/Tsangiri universe loses its novelty and/or shock value. For the moment, however, the quirky scenario still passes muster, especially as it is complemented so cogently and consistently by performances that amusingly emphasis how inept the Alps are at playing their designated roles and by a compositional strategy that seems to have been designed to disorientate and provoke. In addition to selecting some curious angles, Lanthimos and cinematographer Christos Voudouris also seem to delight in cutting off heads in medium shots, making close-ups feel uncomfortably intrusive and alighting on peripheral details after racking or tinkering with the focus.

Yet, for all the playfulness of the acting and the technique, it is possible to detect a more serious message. In many ways, this is a mirror image of Dogtooth, which saw Papoulia playing a girl trying to escape the confines and strictures of the household maintained by her ultra-strict parents. Here, she essays someone desperate to break back into a unit that offers a kind of security from the uncertainties of harsh reality. Although some critics have dismissed the notion as far-fetched, there is no reason why the films together could not read as an allegory of Greece's current situation vis-à-vis the Eurozone, as it seeks to comply with onerous rules and play roles required of it in return for money, while all the time longing to kick against the imposed system and pursue its own policies. 

A struggle to cope with imminent death dominates the first feature by former South Bank Show director, Gerry Fox. The fourth in Edward St Aubyn's pentalogy about the Melrose clan, Mother's Milk was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2006. Having drawn comparisons with John Updike, Iris Murdoch and Alan Hollinghurst, and having even been dubbed a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Bret Easton Ellis, the Keble-educated St Aubyn has now adapted the novel for the screen with Fox. Admirers of the source series will revel in the dark wit of the writing and the adept audiovisual means employed to convey the leading character's inner turmoil. But those coming to the material afresh will be struck by its superficial similarity to David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun (2009), which turned out to be the final film made by Jean Simmons, just as this proved the swan song of Margaret Tyzack.

Jack Davenport arrives in Provence for a holiday with wife Annabel Mullion, young son Thomas Underhill and their new baby in the house that Alzheimer-suffering mother Margaret Tyzack has donated to the New Age foundation run by charming Irish charlatan Adrian Dunbar. Having alienated nanny Annette Badland, Mullion is forced to pay more attention to her children and Davenport's growing frustration is exacerbated by a ghastly visit to bourgeois friends Robert Portal and Emma Amoss, who are entertaining workaholic David Armand and his pregnant Australian wife, Helen Dallimore. The latter monopolises the conversation, while Portal films everything on his camcorder and spoils tweenage son Antoine Bataillard with a poolful of inflatable animals. Yet he seizes the first chance he gets to pack off the children with nanny Lucy Power and Davenport recognises this façade of happy families from his own youth.

Although the scenario doesn't mention it, Davenport was abused by his doctor father from an early age and he deeply resents the fact that the alcoholic Tyzack did nothing to protect him. But what galls him most is that by giving away her wealth in order to salve her own conscience, she has now robbed him of the one consolation that made the years of humiliation bearable. Infuriated by his mother's inability to see through Dunbar's chicanery, Davenport embarks upon a drinking binge that is supplemented by pills obtained from local Bulgarian doctor Jacques Germain.

Davenport's sozzled perspective is capably conveyed by cinematographer Steve Haskett's use of jerky camera movements and focus shifts. But St Aubyn and Fox are less successful in getting inside Davenport's mind or providing sufficient backstory to prevent incidents like his fling with sister-in-law Flora Montgomery seem as contrived as waspish mother-in-law Diana Quick's tongue-in-cheek conversion to Dunbar's cockamamie philosophy and Tyzack's sudden decision to seek an assisted suicide in Switzerland.

Amidst all this, Underhill becomes Davenport's wholehearted ally against Dunbar and receives a gentle admonition from Mullion when he exacts some prankish revenge. But his father is too preoccupied with his own sense of injustice and self-loathing to recognise his devotion and only begins to pull himself together after an inebriated display of boorishness at the home of Quick's wealthy friends Jane How and Jean Vincent. Indeed, Davenport even has the last laugh on Dunbar when a pair of paintings that he hoped would enable him to purchase a couple of isolation tanks turn out to be fakes.

Despite some strong performances - most notably from Tyzack, who is heart-breakingly convincing as the proud, intelligent woman imprisoned by her gnawing guilt and inability to communicate - this always feels like the continuation of an existing story rather than a self-contained drama. The abrupt switch in focus around the 20-minute mark from Underhill trying to make sense of the grown-ups and conquer his jealousy of his new sibling to Davenport and his myriad of hang-ups also feels forced. But Fox always seems to be following the story rather than imposing his personality upon it. He allows Haskett's camera to circle characters for no good reason and makes an awkward job of depicting Davenport's visions of killing Tyzack and Dunbar over lunch and seducing a bikini-clad beauty at a beachside bar.

Moreover, Davenport's simmering resentments with his various adversaries seem to come more from his own peevish fecklessness than the addled milk he received from a mother whose past is left frustratingly sketchy, even though it is clearly crucial to the development of her son's persona and the problems that beset him. Much of the dialogue is sharp and acerbic and the cast revels in the situations and the surroundings. But one can't help feeling that this might have been better suited to a television serial along the lines of A Dance to the Music of Time (1997) so that the Patrick Melrose saga could be related in full.

By contrast, another first-time feature maker throws caution to the winds, as Richard Bates, Jr. expands a 2008 short into the deliriously dark Excision. Boasting extraordinarily vivid production design by Armen Ra and the most rubicund visuals imaginable by Itay Gross, this is tantamount to a body horror version of Carrie (1976). However, with references abounding to such directors as David Cronenberg, John Hughes, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Todd Solondz, Dario Argento, John Waters and Matthew Barney, this is primarily a film buff's homage to his favourite teen and horror movies and, thus, is much more likely to strike a chord with fellow aficionados than casual filmgoers or fans of such chic TV shows as 90210 and One Tree Hill.

Eighteen year-old AnnaLynne McCord has problems at home and at school. Bible-bashing mother Traci Lords despairs of her slovenly dress sense and low standards of personal hygiene and devotes her time to prettifying McCord's younger sister, Ariel Winter, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. The class clique led by Molly McCook also pick on McCord, whose slouching walk and surly attitude have incurred the wrath of principal Ray Wise and long-suffering teachers Malcolm McDowell and Matthew Gray Gubler. With father Roger Bart being too much of a milquetoast to defend his daughter against his superficial spouse, McCord turns to pastor John Waters for advice. But the only person who seems to understand her is Winter and, consequently, she vows to become a famous surgeon and find a cure for her sibling's condition.

The trouble is, whenever, McCord dreams about performing an operation, she invariably allows her imagination to get the better of her and she not only imagines herself to be bathed in gouts of blood, but she also becomes aroused by the carnage and has necrophiliac fantasies about the mostly female cadavers. Prompted by these urges, McCord determines to lose her virginity while she is having her period and persuades McCook's beau, Jeremy Sumpter, to deflower her. However, he is appalled by the encounter and McCook takes hateful revenge when McCord informs her that she has run a few tests at home and can confidently predict that Sumpter has not given either of them an STD.

Outraged by the graffiti daubed on the house walls, McCord attacks McCook and is expelled. However, an opportunity soon arises to redeem herself, as she overhears Lords discussing the fact that Winter needs a lung transplant and waits until her mother goes out before sedating the hapless Bart and luring in the young girl from across the street with the promise of free skipping ropes.

The botched surgery makes for a marvellously macabre finale, although it is made by the pride that McCord takes in her handiwork as Lords surveys the scene of slaughter with utter disbelief. Such delicious wisps of bleak wit irresistibly recall John Waters's Serial Mom (1994), but Bates always prioritises schlock over comedy. Indeed, at a time when just about every other genre outing contains some found footage or evidence of a supernatural possession, it is heartening to find a director setting such store by good old-fashioned Grand Guignol. What's more, Bates also delights in subverting convention by fashioning a female monster, who is every bit as prone to sexual confusion, intimidatory piety and small-town alienation as any potentially psychotic teenage boy.

Playing against the image she has created on television, McCord gives a courageous and knowing performance and she more than holds her own against such inveterate scene-stealers as McDowell and Wise, as well as Waters and his onetime porn star muse, Traci Lords. But this is very much Bates's picture, with the dialogue often zinging and the satirical swipes at the body fascism condoned by the media being slyly complemented by the audacious dream sequences, in which McCord confuses eroticism, philanthropy and butchery. Some will be outraged and will hurl accusations of exploitation and misogyny. But this is too controlled and smart a debut to make such socio-politically gauche mistakes.

Finally, this week comes a hagiography that also doubles as a charitable appeal. Gilles Penso's documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan provides a comprehensive survey of the career of the stop-motion auteur who formed the link between the pioneering fantasies of Georges Méliès and the epic adventures of Willis O'Brien and the CGI spectaculars of the modern era. Produced essentially to raise funds for the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation that now curates his remarkable archive of models, armatures, sketches and test footage clips, this is full of famous faces expressing their debt and gratitude to an unassuming nonagenarian who enjoys the adulation, but takes it all in his stride. Indeed, Penso might have devoted more time to Harryhausen's reminiscences than the well-meaning puffery spouted by such acolytes as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.

Enamoured of stop-motion from the moment he saw Willis O'Brien's giant ape in King Kong (1933), the teenage Harryhausen began working in his garage on the models and experimental sequences that earned him the lifelong friendship of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who grew up in the same Los Angeles neighbourhood. On leaving school, Harryhausen sent a show reel for an unrealised project entitled Evolution to Hollywood animator George Pal and landed a job on his famous Puppetoons series. Yet, while the war intervened, Harryhausen was able to refine his craft as part of Frank Capra's propaganda unit and he put these new skills to charming use with the Mother Goose films (1949-53), which he shot on discarded stock and boasted costumes by his mother Martha and armatures by his engineer father Fred, who remained a key collaborator into the 1970s.

Sadly, Penso only shows us a frame or so each from The Story of Little Red Riding Hood, The Story of Hansel and Gretel, The Story of Rapunzel, The Story of King Midas and The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare and it's a shame none are available on disc, as they bear the influence of the Czech maestro Jirí Trnka and are colourful and quirky enough to delight even today's sophisticated kids.

The success of these fairytales led to O'Brien hiring Harryhausen as his assistant on Ernest B. Schoedsack's Mighty Joe Young (1949), another rampaging gorilla story that earned the veteran an Academy Award, even though his apprentice claims to have done 90% of the actual animation of the ape. Admiring director John Landis rightly notes that Harryhausen gave Joe a winning personality and, thus, established a leitmotif that would endear his work to genre fans for the next three decades. Indeed, Spielberg and Cameron are quick to cite pictures like Eugène Lourié's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) as a profound influence on their own sci-fi blockbusters. Adapted from a Bradbury story, this featured a new breed of dinosaur, the Rhedosaurus, and SFX guru Randy Cook explains how Harryhausen lined up his model table with pre-shot footage and matte screens to integrate the Beast into the live action in a more convincing manner than O'Brien had ever managed. Landis and Phil Tippett identify this film as the inspiration for Toho's Godzilla series (although it employed men in monster suits rather than complex animation techniques), while the impact even on a CGI wonder like Jurassic Park (1993) is readily evident in the way the creatures move. 

As the focus turns to Robert Gordon's It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), it becomes clear that Penso is heavily dependent upon trailers to show Harryhausen's creations in action. However, the access to the archive allows him to fill the gaps between the talking-head segments with design sketches, storyboards, models and test shots that complement anecdotes about the San Francisco council trying to stop the studio filming on the Golden Gate Bridge as it was concerned the public would believe the structure could be torn down by a huge octopus that only had six tentacles as Harryhausen couldn't afford to animate the full quota. The `sixtopus' remains a firm favourite of effects specialists Dennis Muren and Steve Johnson and Peter Jackson remarks that such creations fired the imagination of the Movie Brat generation and beyond.

Yet Terry Gilliam is quick to point out that some of the storylines were decidedly ropey and that many of these 1950s Bs would have been long forgotten were it not for the effects. Naturally, the emphasis is on Harryhausen here, but more mention might have been made of the directors he worked under and it is disappointing, especially given the lengthy digression on composer Bernard Herrmann, that more time was not devoted to John Cairney, Martine Beswick and Caroline Munro recalling the difficulties of acting against invisible adversaries with nothing but a cobbled contraption to guide their movements and eyeline level.

The account moves on to Irwin Allen's documentary, The Animal World (1956), for which Harryhausen and O'Brien did the opening dinosaur sequence, and Fred F. Sears's Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956), which required the invention of a geared harness to angle the attack of the craft without making the steadying wires visible. But, while Harryhausen is proud that he demolished the Washington Memorial before Tim Burton did it in Mars Attacks! (1996), this gave him less creative latitude than Nathan Juran's 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), which was switched from being a Cyclops attack on Chicago to a humanoid assault on Rome because Harryhausen fancied a trip abroad. The menacing Venusian Ymir that grows larger each night is one of his most inspired creatures and Joe Dante freely concedes that it influenced his monster in Piranha (1978).

However, Harryhausen was growing tired of destroying cities and persuaded producer Charles H. Schneer to overlook the failure of the Howard Hughes-produced Son of Sinbad (1955) to return to the Arabian Nights for Juran's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957), which was announced as a Dynamation production to convince adults that this was a full-blown spectacle and not just a kidpic. Filming in colour for the first time, this remains memorable for the Cyclops, which bears a striking similarity to the anti-hero of Peter Jackson's amateur outing, The Valley (1976), while effects designer Ken Ralston admits the influence of the sword-wielding skeleton sequence on the Jabberwocky section of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010).

Seeking to repeat the box-office success, Harryhausen turned to Jonathan Swift for Jack Sher's The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), which was filmed in Super Dynamation and brought Harryhausen to Britain because the Rank laboratory did the mattes so well. If he remained reasonably true to the source here, he departed significantly from Jules Verne for Cy Endfield's Mysterious Island (1961), which featured a crab purchased from Harrods that was humanely killed and then fitted with an internal armature to facilitate its stop-motion onslaught. But most would agree that Harryhausen produced his finest work for Don Chaffey's Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

John Landis extols the virtues of Talos and how much pathos there is in his death scene and Peter Jackson astutely asserts that each creature and character represents an acting performance by Harryhausen himself, just as motion capture is now used for computer-generated visuals. The Hydra was similarly a challenge, as it had so many heads to move independently. But the highlight of the entire picture is the fight between seven skeletons and three Argonauts, which required the input of skilled swordsmen and a series of stuntmen, who rehearsed the moves thoroughly with the actors before they shadow fought for the camera and Harryhausen matted in their opponents during post-production.

As historian Tony Dalton reveals, this episode has been copied several times, most notably in Sam Rami's Army of Darkness (1992), Stephen Sommers's The Mummy (1999) and Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). But Harryhausen is more concerned with his own artistry and ingenuity than sincere flattery and he moves on to discuss his love of HG Wells and how a failed effort to persuade Orson Welles to team on a film of War of the Worlds in 1949 and missing out in the late 1950s on the rights to The Time Machine (ironically to George Pal) led him to make First Men in the Moon (1964). What seems remarkable about this film now is that it was produced just five years before Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface and, yet, the Selenites hark back to the moon folk devised by Georges Méliès for A Trip to the Moon (1902).

Yet, as CGI artists like Tippett, Muren, Greg Broadmore and Andrew Jones point out, nodding to the past has always been a facet of effects work and Harryhausen reinforces this contention in discussing the influence of natural historian Charles R. Knight on his dinosaurs for One Million Years BC (1966), Don Chaffey's Hammer remake of the Hal Roach-produced One Million BC (1940), and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), which was based on a script that Willis O'Brien had abandoned at the outbreak of the Second World War. This proved a troubled shoot, as the studio closed down and its new owners put little effort into promoting the picture. But Henry Selick, Guillermo del Toro, Nick Park, Vincenzo Natali and John Lasseter join the chorus of admirers who admit they tend to watch Harryhausen movies for his bits and zone out during much of the rest, as the standard was often sub par. However, Harryhausen seems to have been on set for the majority of his projects (with some directors taking exception to his presence) and one is left to wonder how much input he had to the non-effects scenes. 

Tiring of dinosaurs, Harryhausen returned to Arabia for Gordon Hessler's Dynarama saga The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) in Dynarama and Sam Wanamaker's Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), which saw him competing against the Movie Brats he had done so much to inspire. Recalling the Kali sequence in the earlier film,.Colin Arthur joins Tippett and Muren in pondering whether stop-motion is more effective than CGI because models look less real (and, therefore, seem more fantastical) than amalgamations of pixels. More amusingly, Harryhausen dismisses James Cameron's prediction that he would enjoy working with cutting-edge technology and says he always preferred working alone (although he latterly allied with Jim Danforth and Steve Archer) in order to retain the control that he feels gets lost where computerisation is concerned.

Having considered each Harryhausen movie in some detail, the documentary rather peters out, as access was clearly limited to footage of Medusa and the Kraken from the Gustave Doré-influenced swan song, Desmond Davis's Clash of the Titans (1981), while the references to his honorary Oscar and BAFTA, the award of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his 90th birthday celebration are rushed to accommodate an appeal for his Foundation. Spielberg and others chip in with closing acknowledgement that they have stood on a titan's shoulders and there seems no question that modern mainstream cinema would be very different without Ray Harryhausen.