IWOW: I Walk on Water
Directed by Khalik Allah
★★★

NEW YORK-BASED photographer and filmmaker Khalik Allah returns to the streets of Harlem with a first-person documentary poem which, according to him, you need to watch with an open heart and an open mind.

Certainly you ain’t seen nothing yet: when he’s high on mushrooms, Allah’s (Black Mother) visually arresting epic certainly looks like a 199-minute-long psychedelic trip as it follows his long-time muse Frenchie, a 60-something schizophrenic homeless Haitian man.

Allah asks him his advice on relationships as well as his thoughts on God and the miracles in his life as he befriends Frenchie, taking him to a barbers and to his home for a meal and a shower.

One of Allah’s friends, Fab 5 Freddy, warns him: “Your intentions are good but I think you take it too far.” You are constantly on tenterhooks to see if and when Frenchie turns on him.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to comprehend what Frenchie is actually saying, along with Allah’s Italian girlfriend Camilla when he gets her to describe, in her native tongue, how and when she first met Frenchie.

Subtitles would have been helpful. Shot on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in east Harlem, where apparently Allah has based a lot of his work in the past, he captures all manner of people and snapshots of night life in an unconventional way.

The film is made up of a diary of visual snaps intercut with bizarre footage of waves lapping up on a beach, overlaid with the audio of interviews with friends, family and complete strangers.

Allah explores his relationship problems with Camilla and his mother, who is the highlight of the film — calling him out on his Jesus complex and telling him off for recording her without asking her first.

It is a strangely hypnotic and overly long documentary which won’t appeal to everyone and is definitely an acquired taste. But it’s worth keeping an open mind … 

MD
Released on demand February 26

The Dark and the Wicked
Directed by Bryan Bertino
★★★★

DIRECTOR of The Strangers Bryan Bertino literally takes us home with the stripped-down and viscerally chilling The Dark and The Wicked, reportedly filmed on the helmer’s actual family farm.

It doesn’t take long before this lean, handsomely put-together terror trip, about a pair of adult children returning home to bid their ailing father farewell, ensures that if you don’t have trouble sleeping afterwards, you certainly won’t be chopping carrots any time soon.

A much more abstract tale than the comparatively mainstream and clear-cut Strangers, Bertino nonetheless shows up ready to play hard.

There are rock-solid performances from Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr, as well as a fleeting appearance from the always welcome (and delightfully sinister) Xander Berkeley. Easily the most unsettling of any horror flick since Relic at the tail end of last year, The Dark and the Wicked is a must-see for genre fans — perhaps a smidge inaccessible for the multiplex, admittedly, but damned-fine nihilistic filmmaking.

VC
Available on demand 

Wrong Turn (18)
Directed by Mike P Nelson 

★★★★

IN AN era in which cinema packs fewer and fewer surprises, the notion of adding the near-two-decade-old trash horror franchise Wrong Turn to the reboot pile would rank, naturally enough, among the barely noticeable.

That the inbred cannibal gore-fest would turn out to be not only a rock-solid frightener, but a pointed take on an increasingly disassociated American heartland — now that’s a surprise.

Retooling the “teens in the woods picked off by mutant rednecks” theme by swapping the antagonists for the isolated descendants of pre-civil war seditionists, Wrong Turn disarms its presumably familiar audience — surely the only ones left watching seven movies into this franchise — by delivering the outright unthinkable: an academically decent horror flick.

With series originator Alan B McElroy back on scripting, the frights, recoils, and grizzly, horrifying deaths are back with a refreshingly thoughtful edge — pumping sorely needed new blood into the veins of the stagnant series in much the same manner as The Domestics helmer Mike Nelson does by crafting a disarmingly cinematic franchise do-over.

Offering up a handful of genuinely impressive pivots and, it must be said, resoundingly game cast, Wrong Turn is the most surprising thing it could possibly have been: the reboot that genuinely revives its fledgling series.

VC

Available on demand