of a pretty dress meant to miti- gate the eventuality of something abhorrent—Tim Fehlbaum’s German-language HELL (2011) is a worthwhile entry in the sci-fi subgenre of stories about post- Apocalypse survival and a small- scale answer to Val Guest’s THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961).
In 2016, soaring tempera- tures have desiccated the earth’s surface, driving city dwellers to- wards the mountains and the slim possibility of fresh water. (In this devalued Promised Land, an empty Evian bottle becomes a vision on par with the burning bush.) Bringing up the rear of the southern exodus is a station wagon bearing sis- ters Marie (Hannah Herzsprung, THE BAADER-MEINHOFF COM- PLEX) and Leonie (Lisa Vicari) and driven by Philip (Lars Eidinger), Marie’s boyfriend. (Whether Philip had been Marie’s lover before the onset of ecologi- cal disaster, or if this relationship is a consequence of the inciting event, is one of the film’s more beguiling mysteries.) Scrounging for supplies at an abandoned petrol station off a highway hemmed with livestock car- casses, the threesome encoun- ter the resourceful Tom (Stipe Erceg), an enigmatic, sun- scarred, potentially trouble- some loner whose mechanical skills earn him a place in the car. Reaching the mountains, the refugees stop to scavenge from a wrecked vehicle and are blind- sided by an attack in which Leonie is abducted by locals who have worked out the harshest possible plan for survival. Pitched to exploit our fears of an unpredictable and unsustain- able future in which we will fig- ure as either an heroic asset or a pitiable liability, apocalypse tales follow characters in flight from a life governed by desire to one
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fueled almost exclusively by need, by the struggle to secure suste- nance and ensure survival. Too many recent post-apoc tales (David and Alex Pastor’s CARRI- ERS, Justin McConnell’s THE COLLAPSED, Xavier Gens’ THE DIVIDE) dither away tension with extraneous dialogue and bicker- ing between the principals that tenders an authorial cynicism at the expense of narrative and for- ward momentum. Thankfully, HELL director Fehlbaum and writers Oliver Kahl and Thomas Wöbke favor practical problem- solving over squabbling and soap operatics and keep their dramatis personae from grow- ing idle and loquacious by break- ing survival down to tasks, from cadging gasoline dregs by the thimbleful to bleeding rest stop radiators for sips of potable wa- ter. Even HELL’s over-familiar second act complication is nicely particularized, making the film’s villainy less a matter of glib hu- man debasement than of simple human need taken to its logical, if unappetizing, extreme. Hannah Herzsprung makes for a winning and eminently resourceful hero- ine, whose youth and fidelity to yesterday’s morality are offered in stark contrast to the cruel prag- matism of mountain materfamil- ias Angela Winkler (nearly 40 years past her own youthful turn as a reluctant heroine of Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 paranoid political thriller THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM) and her rav- ening brood. Not content at the end of the day merely to cook up a world’s worst case scenario and pile high the grotesqueries for the amusement of the sub- genre’s lowest common denomi- nator, HELL’s ace in the hole is its unabashed civility, which dares to dream that there may remain even in the belly of the beast a spark of human goodness.
This no-frills standard-def DVD from Arc Entertainment presents HELL widescreen, framed at an anamorphic 1.78:1. Though the overuse of filters in contemporary genre films has become an industry cliché, HELL earns its piss-yellow chromatics, which persuasively limns a world slowly burning itself out (as the overexposed, blown-out back- grounds focus audience attention to the foreground, squeezing maximum yield from what was no doubt a modest budget at best). The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is of- fered in its original German (with optional subtitles) and a truly mis- erable English dub—a must to avoid. No extras. As of this writ- ing, Netflix offers HELL for instant streaming.
HIGH LANE Vertige
2009, MPI/IFC Midnight, 83m 52s, $24.98, DVD By Richard Harland Smith
When Abel Ferry’s Vertige was imported to American shores under the English title HIGH LANE, online critics tripped over one another in the rush to brand the French-lan- guage wilderness survival tale a rip-off of John Boorman’s DE- LIVERANCE (1972), or Wes Craven’s THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), or Rob Schmidt’s WRONG TURN (2003), or Neill Marshall’s THE DESCENT (2005), or any number of other like-minded ad- ventures. (We might add Peter Carter’s RITUALS, Andrew Davis’ THE FINAL TERROR, or Don Coscarelli’s SURVIVAL QUEST.) In truth, there’s enough room in the world for variations on the theme of in- nocents straying deep into rough territory and HIGH LANE earns its keep within the subgenre, at least for its first two-thirds.
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