Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:27 — 172.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | RSS | More

Overview

I gotta say – this movie was not what it appeared to be. Unless you watch the trailer. Then you get it. But I didn’t.

shut up, leave me alone.

Anyway – a moody, black and white – almost noirish – film. Not set in the states. It’s gotta be about revenge, she’s really gonna ef someone up right.

Then WHAM – it is not what I thought. And Rhys picked it! He purposefully fooled me!

Good for him.

We’ve said there are some different vibes off of the movies this season. That the women directors push things in a different direction. Well, this one sure holds up to that. There is nothing about this that is edge of your seat viewing, yet it all seems to feel that way.

I’m really trying not to reveal anything, so if you don’t watch the below trailer, you’ll be surprised as I was.

Trailer

Get It

Amazon – https://amzn.to/4kjOGwr

YouTube

Transcript

HL S06E04 A Girl Walks Home

[00:00:00]

Stephen: All right. So we’re going to travel around the world today. We’ve got an, I I think this is a new country for us. An Iranian horror movie. A girl walks home alone at night an interesting pick by Mr. rhys.

Rhys: Yeah. And technically it’s not Iranian. It was an American film because she didn’t wanna deal with all the censorship issues she would have to deal with if she shot it in Iran.

Stephen: interesting. All right, so let’s talk about a Girl Walks home. I’m, that actually makes sense with a couple comments I have later.

Rhys: Oh, good. Okay, good.

Stephen: All right. So the first thing I had to wonder, and it’s interesting that you said it’s actually American is, I wonder if the title is different in foreign country and it’s just this, longish title because it got translated.

Rhys: I guess it’s possible.

Stephen: Translated. Yeah. I was just curious. I know Colin said he read the graphic novel, which I didn’t realize there [00:01:00] was one.

Rhys: Yeah. The graphic novel is one of those cases where the graphic novel came after.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: They speak Persian in this as for what the title would be in Persian? I don’t know. IMDB has it listed in Spanish, but it’s certainly no shorter than the English version actually. It is, it was made in the United States in 2015.

It was written and directed by a woman named Anna Lily Amour. She is, was born in England to Iranian parents.

Stephen: Ah, okay.

Rhys: And so she grew up in one of those bilingual houses. And when we go through the cast, you’ll see, half of them are Iranian American and then the other half were actually born in Tehran and.

Stephen: Yeah, it’s a huge cast, especially if you count the cat masuka,[00:02:00]

Rhys: Masuka. Yeah. Masuka wasn’t originally gonna be in the movie.

Stephen: oh really?

Rhys: Yeah.

Stephen: What he do? Wander on set one day, so they left.

Rhys: And she was impressed with how well he did with direction. So they rolled him into the thing. So

Stephen: he was a very big cat, I must say,

Rhys: very large cat.

Stephen: but he didn’t look like a man coon or anything. He just looked like a big cat. I have one that looks very similar.

Rhys: Yep. A healthy cat.

Stephen: He’ll be 10 times over.

Rhys: The movie runs an hour and 41 minutes. It was shot in Taft, California. So

Stephen: Very desolate looking. They really must have found some spots. And I was looking at the street and particularly I’m like, okay, this does not look like a studio set, but that street, there’s like nothing on it. There’s no trash anywhere, there’s nothing. It, it looked almost almost like a Tim Burton or something did it the street, with Clay, Asian or something.

Rhys: [00:03:00] Perfectly abandoned. This was her major film debut when she did this they shot the whole film in 24 days. And when it was done, she did work with a company called Radko to do graphic novels based on not just the girl, but also the city itself. Bad city.

Stephen: Oh, interesting that. It’s cool. Almost a world

Rhys: yeah. I would really be interested because one of the great things about this movie is that when the was all said and done, I found myself wanting to know more about her backstory.

How long has she been here? How long has she been like this? What was her life like before that? The movie doesn’t address any of that. So maybe the graphic novels do

Stephen: I might have to check it out now. I’m pretty sure Colin has them. And it’s funny you mentioned Bad City. That was another question. I’m like, so is that just the translated version of what that city name is or is it named Bad City to give us that, allegory [00:04:00] that this is any bad portion of a city or something.

Rhys: they actually, when they refer to it in Persian, they say the word for city followed by the adjective bad, like our word bad. So if you were listening to it, say in Iran, you would have the word city and then a foreign word attached to the other end of it.

Stephen: So it more of they’re just generically referring to the place as Oh, up in the city.

Rhys: Yeah,

Stephen: So that, that, that is a translation thing there that changed it.

Rhys: A little bit. This film grossed $587,000 worldwide, but it was a show and festival kind of film like it premiered at Sundance.

Stephen: yeah. It didn’t look like an art house thing at all.

Rhys: yeah it, it was nominated for 32 awards. It won nine of them.

Stephen: I can see that. [00:05:00] Like I told you, we were talking the other night, I was like, wow, I’m really enjoying this one. And I’m not always biggest fan of these slow moving art house pieces. But this one clicked with me pretty good.

Rhys: That’s could be because it was a vampire film, which

Stephen: that maybe but actually I was thinking about, I’m like, this is reminding me of something. And I think in the end it reminded me a lot of clerks, not just ’cause it was black and white, but the pacing of the story and how you’re wondering how the story is gonna fit. And honestly the story of this is very minor.

It’s not, in the end the, there’s almost no story. It’s almost like just following people around for a day or two.

Rhys: Yeah I consider it almost more of a character study

Stephen: Exactly,

Rhys: because you really get into the characters, which is so funny because the characters almost have no names at all.

Stephen: And the ones even referred to the girl

Rhys: Yeah. So you have a Rosh, and then you have the

Stephen: whose name, [00:06:00] actor’s name was Arash.

Rhys: You have the girl, the pimp, the prostitute, the junkie, the boy and then what was the other one? I’ll come across it when we come to it, but, it was literally, everyone is named by what they do,

Stephen: right. And to be fair it, it took a while to realize it was a vampire movie. And for those of you that didn’t watch it, oops. We just spoiled that before you watched it.

Rhys: I suppose. I don’t know that it was the world’s greatest secret. ’cause it’s,

Stephen: No. No, but like we were saying, when I was watching it, I was thinking it was gonna be some like revenge plot that the girl was, had been harmed by the pimp or something, and was come, coming back for revenge or something like that.

Rhys: yeah. Ampo, like I said, was born in England to Iranian parents. They immigrated to Florida. But she was raised, growing up in Bakersfield, California. That’s where they finally ended up,

Stephen: Wow. Wow. That’s a pretty interesting [00:07:00] mix to get a movie like this.

Rhys: Yeah. She was big into, the massive change in culture between where she was, what her parents were used to being born in England, and then Florida and California.

That’s, that, that’s a pretty big jumbled pot if you’re gonna go through culture wise. She got a camcorder when she was 12, and interestingly enough she, what she did was she started reshooting commercials at 12 on her camcorder. She found it interesting and she enjoyed doing it. But she points out her parents did not see that as a viable avenue for revenue.

Because as she says, Iranians don’t do that. Iranians don’t become directors apparently.

Stephen: Wow. That’s funny. But I like her choice of what she did. That’s a lot of the great ones. Start emulating what’s out there, seeing how, what works, what doesn’t, without even realizing what you’re doing.

Rhys: Yeah, she her schooling vaguely reminds me of [00:08:00] me. She started at uc, Santa Barbara, studying biology. That lasted about a year. And eventually she went to San Francisco State and took some drawing and painting classes before she finally landed at UCLA School of Theater, film and Television where she studied screenwriting.

So she took a lot, a wound about way to get there, but eventually,

Stephen: Yeah, some. Again, some of the best do.

Rhys: so I, I think this is also a great piece to highlight the theme of the of the season with female directors. And I’ll get to it here just at the end. She’s written 14 pieces and she’s directed 21,

Stephen: Wow.

Rhys: Nine shorts. She’s done nine shorts. They were all written and directed by her. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was her first full length film.

She had done a short, under the same name as well. And again, I think she just saw it, [00:09:00] she did the short and she was like, wow, I could really expand upon this. It was so well received that her second film, the Bad Batch drew such talent as Jason Momoa, Jim Carey and Kena Reeves. And if you like watch, just watch the trailer for it, it is an off the wall kind of thing.

She describes it as the road warrior meets pretty and pink.

Stephen: I guess what I’m gonna be doing after we’re done with this.

Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. She it came out in 2016. It came out the year after. She did some television episodes between the Bad Batch in her next movie, like she did one on Twilight Zone. She did castle Rock she did Legion. And then in 2021 she did a movie called Mona Lisa and The Blood Moon which is another horror adjacent kind of film that takes place in New Orleans.

Stephen: It’s starting to sound more and more like she’s gonna become [00:10:00] one of the favorite directors here that’s going to have to go look up a lot of stuff. I, at least me always talk about Gardner and I’m like, his stuff clicked. I’m getting a feeling I’m gonna find more of her stuff and talk about it more.

Rhys: The nice thing is she’s early in her career too, so you don’t have this huge backlog to go through. It’s not if you suddenly decided I’m gonna study Kronenberg you’d be doing that for three months before you got through everything

Stephen: Hey, look, I found 200 of his student films.

Rhys: yeah. Yeah. She’s got two upcoming written and directed pieces. Please give me you and one called basket full of heads, which is

Stephen: Oh, that’s a Joe Hill story based on comic books. That was good.

Rhys: That’s coming up. now we come to the whole crux of the female director situation. She has an upcoming writer credit on a cliffhanger reboot.

Stephen: The Stallone movie.

Rhys: Yes. [00:11:00] And so she, the studio approached her and said, Hey, would you be interested in doing this? She wrote the script. She was gonna, she was tagged to direct it. Jason Momoa was gonna be in it. It was gonna be told from a female point of view. So the main character would be a female. Jason Momoa was like a cameo or a side character to the whole thing.

Stephen: Maybe he’s the one that dies at the beginning because in that movie, the Stallone’s girlfriend dies.

Rhys: Knowing that she got it. Cannes the film festival reserved a pl a slot for this film to show there. Sylvester Stallone got wind of it

And said no. We wanna do a continuation of my guy’s story. Here’s the director who’s gonna do it, and we’re gonna rewrite the script. And so she’s no longer associated with the project at all.

Aside from the fact that those guys actually get to show it at cans because they’ve already reserved the spot for it [00:12:00] based on the thought that she was the one who’s gonna be doing it.

I’m just like, if that doesn’t sum up the whole struggle of being a female director in Hollywood, I know what does.

Stephen: you’re right. And to be honest, Stallone, you’ve got enough money, you’ve done enough movies, give it up. You’re almost 80. I don’t care about your action movies anymore. You’re not in, now if you’re wi got a walker or a wheelchair and you’re doing crap, I’m impressed. I, let me just say I’ve, you know me, I love the big action explosion movies.

That’s, I love those. I lo I’ve seen almost everything Stallone’s ever done, including Oscar, which is a comedy with a bunch of mobsters. It’s really good. But the last Rambo movie. He dies very spectacularly. And he’s sitting in this rocking chair and he dies as the film’s fading away. And I’m like, that is such a great ending for his character.

I love it. And then it comes back up and he stands up, gets on his horse and rides away. I’m like, goddammit, now I hate you. That sucks so bad. It’s if I [00:13:00] ever watch that movie again, I’m stopping it. So I don’t see the stupid, him coming back to life. He needs to be dead. It that’s a better ending.

Rhys: Cut.

Stephen: Yeah.

Give it ups. Stallone. I love your stuff. I’ve watched your stuff. I own a lot of ’em. Let this lady do it because this was a great movie. I think I’d be very interested to see what she’d do with an action movie.

Rhys: I would too. It’d be amazing.

Stephen: Ugh.

Rhys: Oh yeah there’s my soapbox for the day.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m on it with you. We had, it’s the same thing when, I was in Girl Scouts with your wife that we got the books for the girls stuff to do and I’m like, what the hell is all this crap? These girls don’t wanna do this junk. They wanna do some fun activities and stuff. And we barely followed the book and they had a wonderful time too.

Rhys: they did. Sheila Van, she plays the girl. She’s an Iranian American. She was born in la She’s been in 49 pieces. Argo was like her [00:14:00] first major film. And she did a made for television version of Beverly Hills Cop too before she came to a girl Walks home at night alone

Stephen: was that? The Beverly Hills Cop four on Netflix.

Rhys: maybe. I don’t know, it was just, it said a Beverly Hills cop made for TV movie. So

Stephen: Yeah, that might have been it a couple years ago.

Rhys: since then, she’s done some long runs on television with prom queen state of Affairs 24 Legacy undone and Snow piercer,

Stephen: oh,

Rhys: the series, not the movie,

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: Movie wise. She was also in Whiskey, tango, Foxtrot and then holidays,

Stephen: Oh yeah, I know

Rhys: the Anthology xx, which is the female horror movie director anthology.

So she,

Stephen: seen that one.

Rhys: it’s a good one. She was also in, we Are the, we Are Animals and the Fall of The House of Usher.

Stephen: [00:15:00] Oh, the latest Netflix one

Rhys: this was a movie. It wasn’t a series. She does have one upcoming piece called Pandemonium, so be on the lookout for that. Arash Morandi plays Arash, oddly enough. He was born in Tehran and he grew up in Germany and presently holds citizenship to both countries.

Stephen: Oh, interesting.

Rhys: He is been in 27 pieces, and most notably for me, he’s in a film called Under the Shadow, which is another Iranian horror movie that deals with a supernatural entity.

It’s really good. Somewhere along the lines. We’ll end up watching that, I’m sure,

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. These Iranian directors, I was even actually thinking about that, ’cause we didn’t get a lot of the culture of, which makes sense now ’cause they weren’t there. But I was even thinking about, I’m like, with their restrictions stuff, I [00:16:00] wonder what movies are like that they make there and, stuff like that.

Probably not very many at all.

Rhys: Yeah. And that was her whole point was there’s a whole level of censorship that she would have to be looking at. Once she did the whole thing, she’d turn it in, they would cut tons of it out.

Stephen: Be a 12 minute movie.

Rhys: yeah, he’s got one upcoming project. He’s got five episodes on a show called The Deal.

So Marshall Mosh plays the father or the junkie, depending on, how he’s listed. He was born in 1950s, Maad, Iran. He’s been in 122 pieces. He’s not new to this. He got his start in 1986 with a movie called Checkpoint.

Stephen: Okay.

Rhys: I saw you thinking I was gonna say, let’s see if you’ve seen it. But then he went on to True Lies talk about big action [00:17:00] movies. He was in The Big Lebowski. He was in Hial Hidalgo. He was in Pirates of the Caribbean, the World’s End. He was, I think he’s the only one who was in a Girl Walks home at night, the short.

Stephen: Ah.

Rhys: So he did the short and the main film. He was also in the Next Big Thing, and so many television appearances from like the X-Files to long runs on Will and Grace and how I Met Your Mother.

Stephen: I love sometimes that we get these actors that we’re like recognizing 3 million things they’ve been in. It’s oh my gosh, I’ve seen them without realizing it so many times. But then they do these, smaller horror things. Some movie that had probably less budget than some of the TV shows they’ve been on.

I just love that they do that sometimes, I’m going to give them the benefit that they do it ’cause they love it and they wanna do it. Not that they weren’t getting anything and they just had to take whatever. We’ll go with that.

Rhys: I think especially for him, [00:18:00] like he did the future film, if nothing else, because he did the short and he knew her, he knew the quality of her work, and

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: he’s got one upcoming project called The Man in the Red Jacket.

Stephen: Does he walk home alone at night?

Rhys: I I hope not. Moozon Nvi plays the prostitute. She was born in la she got a bachelor’s degree

Stephen: probably familiar with the job and what to do.

Rhys: Yeah. She got a bachelor’s in comparative literature from Bernard College at Columbia University. She then went on to get an MFA in acting from Yale and then went on to work at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, in the Shakespeare lab in New York. So she’s a very traditionally classically trained actress.

She’s been involved in 36 broadcast [00:19:00] projects including Charlie Wilson’s war. She did voiceover work on Sky.

Stephen: Oh, cool.

Rhys: And she had long runs on the House of Cards and 104 episodes of a show called The Blacklist.

Stephen: Oh, wow. I’ve heard of that.

Rhys: That’s 104 episodes is a long time.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.

Rhys: Dominic Rains played the Pimp. It’s just funny because like you and I were talking the side of his head in Arabic literally says The pimp,

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: That’s somebody who loves his job.

Stephen: Very proud of what he does.

Rhys: He is he was born in Tehran. He was in a film called Burn Country. He was also in Captain America, winner Soldier.

Stephen: Oh, wow.

Rhys: And, a long run on eight episodes on Agent of Shield

Stephen: Oh, okay.

Rhys: as a [00:20:00] different character. It wasn’t like, ’cause those things are so closely entwined. But yeah, it was a different

Stephen: E everyone’s gonna be blowing up about the, ruining cannon that we got the same actor doing something else.

Rhys: Yeah. And he also was at a 93 episode run on a show called Chicago Med,

Stephen: Yeah,

Rhys: which is, a hospital procedural,

Stephen: I hope he didn’t have the pimp tattoo on.

Rhys: I don’t think so. His tattoos were pretty funny. Like he pimp on the side of his head. He had sex down here in his neck. He had Pacman going down the one side of his neck.

Stephen: Yeah

Rhys: so yeah that’s all the production notes. We’ll get into the film itself now.

Stephen: And the premier of the cat Masuka.

Rhys: Yes, Masuka. That’s true. I didn’t list him. ’cause I don’t know that he really has a whole lot in the way of further projects.

Stephen: should get him on sometime and ask him

Rhys: yeah I think this is the first vice [00:21:00] film I’ve ever had. I’m, on the list I watch vice’s documentaries and stuff all the time, but it’s the first time Vice has shown up as a production house,

Stephen: and it’s funny you say that because I was even made a note saying, so is there a message here or is this a focus on drugs? Is the message, don’t mix drugs with vampires or vampires are better than drugs. So yeah. It was, that wasn’t coming across that there was gonna be such a big focus on that until way into the movie ’cause of the way it’s filmed and all that.

Rhys: Yeah, Amport had said that she made the movie because she was lonely and she finds tremendous connection in working with people towards a common goal. And then she takes it beyond that and she feels great connection with people who watch and appreciate her films. And so she was feeling lonely and this was like the perfect way to fix that.

Stephen: Oh, okay. [00:22:00] That’s, Hey, you found your own therapy

Rhys: The film’s theme kind of is loneliness too, right?

Stephen: The way Yeah.

Rhys: The whole reason the vampire doesn’t just eat everybody is because she likes having people around. It turns out.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a classic black and white type movie that there’s, again, it reminded me of clerks, but it wasn’t what I would call modern filming. In a lot of it, there was a lot of stationary camera. Even when you had people talking, there was a lot of long shots that were, long, far away.

And you watched a quiet, silent scene for a minute and a half, and instead of. Changing the camera and stuff all the time. So that gave it a lonely fa and the whole places of the city they were at, it’s there is nobody around, there is no cars going by, there’s no lights on in the building.

It’s, there’s nothing here. And even the opening credits, [00:23:00] the way it looked it was the way it was coming in looked, lonely and all that.

Rhys: The scene at the club is the only time where you have a lot of people

Stephen: yeah.

Rhys: you know in there. And one good thing that this movie did, it really reinforced for me that well shot black and white to really appreciate it. You need to see it on the big screen

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: because I can just picture being in a theater and seeing this 40 feet wide, the contrast and the brights.

It would just, it would be pretty amazing. I learned that when I was at Case they would always show Casablanca every year and, you, it’s completely different from watching it on television and watching it in a dark in the theater

Stephen: Yeah I try and emulate that most of the time when I watch, I, not a huge screen, it’s whatever, 36 inch or whatever, but the room’s dark. I got a no case sound system. Sound makes a big difference, but there’s not a lot in this movie that, not [00:24:00] even much music

Rhys: There’s actually a considerable bit. In fact, they have a set list compiled if you’re interested in what they consider like Persian sounding music. They’ve got it listed out, I think in Wikipedia that the whole thing has all the songs as they appear throughout, so

Stephen: except for the one where they were high in her room. It was an American song I

Rhys: Yeah, that was something I learned when I went to France. There’s so many, when you get outside of the United States, there’s, there were a whole lot of countries where they would listen to music where they had no idea what they were saying ’cause they were singing it in a foreign language.

Stephen: I listen to English music. I don’t know what they’re saying half the time. And I did notice a lot of the posters on the wall were old eighties rock bands and musicians.

Rhys: so yes and no.

Stephen: They were like the Madonna one, but it said Marika or something like that.

Rhys: And it’s so subtle because the Madonna poster, the actual one of her first album cover, she’s got this kind of sassy look on her face. The poster on there was someone who looked vaguely [00:25:00] like Madonna, but it looked very sad, which kind of adds to the theme of loneliness in the film in general. And it’s that kind of uncanny valley where you’re like, I, Michael Jackson leaning back there.

His head’s not in the right position. Something’s off with this.

Stephen: Yeah I got that without realizing I was getting, ’cause I kept looking at them and I’m like, wait, is that Bee Gees were, I saw Bee Gees too. And it was that, but the coloring was way off.

Rhys: it’s black and white.

Stephen: But even that it the, it made it look weird,

Rhys: Yes. One of her big influences you can tell as soon as the movie starts because you’ve got that high plains drifter sounding music, and you’ve got that typeface like Rosewood, it’s slab type. She was very influenced by the spaghetti westerns of the late sixties and early seventies.

And there are times in this movie where it just leaps out at you. And the start of this movie is one of [00:26:00] those.

Stephen: Yeah. I told you I’m probably gonna end up watching this one again ’cause I just feel like there’s more in it to pull out. So now I’ll pay attention to spaghetti Western influences.

Rhys: It starts, you’ve got, this guy looks like he’s right outta the fifties wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, and he’s just hanging out by himself, smoking. He jumps into the ruins of a house and comes out with a cat. This large fat cat. And he starts walking off with the cat. The music in this part is actually kind of more traditional Persian sound.

But that’s the interesting part, right? The music, the movie starts with that interesting kind of older Persian sound. And then you get everything from, pop to just a wide range of things, which, it, it’s not distracting. I think it works well.

Stephen: No and like I said, a lot of times you don’t even notice their music at all. A lot of times there wasn’t music, but [00:27:00] even when there was, it’s not overpowering at all. It’s very background.

Rhys: Yeah. And right off the bat, he’s walking around with his cat and he is just walking through this deserted town and he like crosses this bridge and the camera slows down and it’s just a giant open mass grave. Which, which is, super handy, you don’t have to, not, doesn’t take a whole lot to just bury people.

You just toss them in the ditch with the gen rest of the pile.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: But you’re like, oh, okay, so this is, this movie is a little bleak.

Stephen: And if you’re looking for lots of lines of dialogue, yeah. This is another movie, you’re not gonna get tons of dialogue. It, there, there’s spots where there’s talking, but there’s a lot of just how the actors portray their character in a lot of this, which seems to be a common theme for the female directors so far.

Rhys: Yeah, he is walking along with the cat. He’s trying to get into his car. [00:28:00] This boy comes up, the boy comes up and asks him for money. He is I don’t have any money. He is that’s a nice car. He is it took me, he lists the days, but it’s basically

Stephen: I think.

Rhys: Yeah, it’s six, six years if you kinda leap, you’re in there of saving money to buy that car.

So he puts the cat in and off, he drives, and then we’re introduced to the junkie right away because it cuts right from that to a guy who’s injecting into his foot. He’s, his veins in his arms are all shot now. So he is injecting into his foot. He’s watching television, which seems to be a religious propaganda type thing.

Or a guy selling insurance. One of the two. I’m not really sure.

Stephen: sometimes the same thing.

Rhys: Yeah. The kid is there. Ah,

Stephen: A rush.

Rhys: Aash. Thank you. He’s there with the cat and the pimp shows up. And knocks on the door and Arash opens the door. He seems reluctant to let him in, but the pimp comes in and [00:29:00] he’s Hey, and this is something you can see.

It happens in like Persian culture a lot. They’re big on hospitality. And so even this guy who you don’t wanna see, you certainly don’t wanna let him in his house. Once he’s in, you still serve him like a nice cup of tea or coffee with a fancy sugarcoated, swizz, swizzle stick kind of thing. And so he’s there to see the junkie.

He owes him money. And then Ash accuses him of making him a junkie. He’s Hey, you’re the one who did this. And the pimp seems to know that, he’s completely in charge in this situation. He’s no, he owes me so much money. I’m just taking your car.

Stephen: Yeah, no, no argument, no fight. Arash just gives him the keys basically.

Rhys: Yeah. Hey. It is funny because he is look, your father, he is just a normal man. He likes women, he likes to gamble and he likes his drugs, but you gotta pay for this. And so he takes the key and a Ross just stands there like some beaten [00:30:00] puppy, just letting him take it. And he walks out.

Then he gets his courage up and goes chasing after him. But by then the car takes off. And so he punches the wall and breaks his hand.

Stephen: Yeah, the wall didn’t do anything. He wasn’t, it wasn’t involved in this situation

Rhys: That’s right. And so the next scene, instead of driving around in a flash car, he is on a bicycle, going to work

Stephen: with a broken hand.

Rhys: with a broken hand. It’s just lightly round up with some, bound up with some rags. He’s a groundskeeper slash handyman at some wealthy families. Oh, the princess.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: yes, the princess is there.

She, she’s on the phone, she’s talking to her friend about going out and getting wasted and, getting ready. And Arash is just standing in there. And eventually he’s hey, can we, and so she like, hangs up the phone and starts talking to me. He is look, this is gonna take me a while to fix.

Can you leave? And she’s like, why? And he is ’cause your parents aren’t home, and what happens if they come home and find you [00:31:00] in here with a man? And she’s oh, you’re so gallant. She’s making fun of him. And then she does leave. But when she does, he helps himself to a pair of diamond earrings off of her nightstand.

Stephen: And I found this interesting and it makes sense, I guess you said, ’cause she very much seemed more like an American teenage girl, not what you might picture from his stance on that’s not our culture heritage. That’s what we don’t, we do, he, he almost represented the other end of it.

And so at this point, after the junkie, the pimp this with him and I’m going, okay, so this definitely does not seem like a supernatural horror movie. That’s what I put. I’m still wondering what type of horror movie it was.

Rhys: It’s funny ’cause up to this point I’m like, I don’t know where the girl comes into this, but Arash is the main character in this movie. And even after watching the whole thing, I still think that’s the case.

Stephen: Yeah. It’s more about his life and the change in his life.

Rhys: Yeah. This big [00:32:00] change. The pimp is now showing off his car to the prostitute.

Stephen: How hard is it to get a prostitute that you control? You know that kinda showed his character.

Rhys: yes. He has her get in the car. He’s she hands him her money. He’s you’re getting older. Don’t you want kids? And she’s I want my money. I want my cut. And then he like puts his finger in her mouth, which she proceeds to suck on, and then pleasure him orally. The interesting thing about this is that behind the car you’ve got the girl and she’s standing there watching.

She’s wearing a, she’s wearing a shado, which is a, a very heavy covering garment. But it’s not it’s not like hiding her face or any, it’s hiding her hair in her head, but she’s standing back there. All of the actions between the pimp and the prostitute you’re seeing in the side mirror of the car, is how she would be [00:33:00] seeing it,

Stephen: Right.

Rhys: which is really interesting to me.

At some point in time the pimp looks up in the rear view mirror and Caesar there, and then he freaks out ’cause somebody’s standing there watching.

Stephen: Yeah. And again, this is her character. The girl, most of the time she’s standing there just very silent. I it’s got its own bit of creepiness to it and use it a lot. She’s, quiet throughout the movie. She only says a few things here and there no matter

Rhys: And with the shado on, she looks like a ghost, almost just silhouetted as this, human sized amorphous shape in the distance. The prostitute’s Hey, regardless, I want my cut. He throws her out of the car, calls her a hag. And then looks

Stephen: Which, which I thought that too. I’m like, okay, is that a huge insult in that culture, calling them a hag? Because here it’d be like not much of anything. There’s much worse [00:34:00] words as that would get someone ticked off. So I was just wondering if, whatever the translation is, if it if that’s a worse insult for a female.

Rhys: there’s a guy later on who refers to her as something cat. And I can’t remember what he says.

Stephen: A blind cat or something. Oh yeah. Blind cat. And I said, I wonder if a blind cat is worse than a bitch.

Rhys: That’s a weird ass insult there, dude. But,

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: We cut from that to the girl with the SHA door, leaving a shop, walking down the sidewalk, legitimately walking home alone at night, just like the movie says on the box. Yes, she goes into what looks to be her bedroom.

She’s listening to music and she’s dancing. And that’s when you start to see the posters on the wall. And again, they’re very similar to actual posters, but they’re just slightly off. And that was done on purpose. She finishes doing her makeup and then she’s walking down the street and she happens to pass.

The pimp [00:35:00] happens to, one of the things that I really came out of this film with was the girl really likes her hunt. She enjoys her night hunts and. Not necessarily this scene. Although this scene is fine, but the next one with her out at night really emphasizes how much she enjoys playing with people.

Stephen: Does she, or is it because she’s actually very reserved, quiet, shy and this is just how she does it? Because we’ve got the one homeless guy that, she’s not really hunting. She just walks up and attacks him. I wonder if it’s just, it’s part of her character and maybe when she was alive, she was just the wallflower girl.

Rhys: Could be, there’s a reason for that homeless guy though, and we’ll get to that in a

Stephen: Okay.

Rhys: She’s walking down the street, she happens to pass the pimp. It’s not really an accident. He stops and turns around and notices that she’s standing there. And unlike most people in this film, he like just walks right up to her.

He’s not running from [00:36:00] her. He is not freaked out. He is so now what? And they end up back in his apartment. And the funny thing to me is in the span of five minutes, this guy does three lines of coke.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m was waiting for him to be bouncing off the walls.

Rhys: Yeah. Just keel over of a heart attack. He’s got this closed briefcase on his table. He pulls out some money and counts it and opens a briefcase. You see there’s more money in there. And the girl is just standing there silently, taking in the whole room.

Stephen: So there’s, that happens a lot. Is that creepiness factor? She doesn’t act normal.

Rhys: I said later, it’s almost like she’s shopping at ikea. She’s just walking around seeing what she wants to take.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: And it’s so funny to me because he’s all coed up and he thinks he’s getting laid and like he puts on music and he starts dancing sexy. She’s not interested in any of that.

Stephen: No.

Rhys: He asks her if she [00:37:00] wants a line of coke.

She doesn’t answer him. He does it.

Stephen: So remember at this point I’m still wondering what type of horror movie this is. I’m still trying to figure out, because I didn’t think it was gonna be vampire.

Rhys: you are about to find out.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: He walks up to her and he tries to do that whole finger thing that he did with the prostitute, and she opens her mouth and there’s this switchblade sound is two fangs just suddenly appear in her mouth.

Stephen: I literally jumped at that. I’m like, whoa. Wait, what? What? Yeah.

Rhys: He does too, but then he doesn’t seem to have any reservations after that. He is whoa. And then she like takes his finger and starts sucking on it and he is oh, okay. This is cool.

Stephen: as fuck.

Rhys: Oh, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. Because she does just regardless of what, they will say on internet questionnaires, she does bite straight through his finger.

There’s a big thing, not a big thing, but my [00:38:00] kids ran across it on the internet about could you actually bite through your finger? And it turns out your jaw strength isn’t enough to actually bite through a finger bone. Hers, however, apparently is

Stephen: And I was gonna say, one of the things you get with vampires is all that extra strength and flying and she doesn’t really have any of that. She’s doesn’t run fast, she’s not reading mine, she’s noting them, she sucks the blood. That’s really her only thing. Does she have stronger jaws maybe?

Or is that just something they put in the movie? ’cause it was disgusting.

Rhys: well, there are times where she has a little bit of extra feat and we’ll get to those.

Stephen: You’re right. You’re right. She appears and disappears. You’re right. She does have some speed,

Rhys: Yep. And she does drag that fat old man out of the house by his ankle.

Stephen: so she, so you’re right. I didn’t even really think of it like that. Yeah. But they’re very subtle.

Rhys: Yeah.

Stephen: The, like we always talk about, it’s not the big box popcorn vampires.

Rhys: she’s not holding somebody [00:39:00] up by the throat with one arm or anything like that.

Stephen: Right.

Rhys: The guy falls back shrieking like you would if somebody just bit your finger off. And then she takes the finger out of her mouth and goes over and traces his lips with his own finger, which is hilarious. And then she moves in for the kill. She just they do this in the film to the point we were just talking about. They actually speed the film up whenever she goes in to actually bite somebody in the neck. So everything’s running at. Let’s say a hundred percent and then all of a sudden she leans in the camera speeds up to about 150 so that she’s moving at a crazy fast pace, but still mo still making the movement that we can see. Arash happens to be coming back because he’s got diamond earrings in his pocket and he wants to buy the car back with them. And he’s calling and the girl is not concerned at all. She can hear the voicemail, she’s still just walking around the house. She takes the guy’s watch, she takes a bunch of his [00:40:00] jewelry.

She’s flipping through his CDs. She’s not bothered by any of this. She walks out of the house and sees Roche standing there and just walks right past him and right out the gate.

Stephen: She does cover up the bloody shirt, but she still has blood around her mouth.

Rhys: And I wonder if that’s more just, Persian modesty than actually trying to hide anything.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I was it, it did seem multiple times that she knew a rash and she had a crush on him, it seemed that way. Right here in a couple of her spots. And I just found it interesting that she still had blood on her mouth and he kinda looks at her but nobody says anything.

And then later he gets, wants to get to know her better. Okay.

Rhys: Yeah. He

Stephen: a little, it’s a little bit of let the right one in,

Rhys: Yes. I was thinking that too. He goes inside and finds the body. The first thing he does is he gets his keys. And then before he leaves, he is oh, hey, there’s a briefcase full of drugs [00:41:00] and money and a gun. I’m gonna take that too. And so he takes the briefcase as well.

Stephen: So you gotta wonder how long the pimp’s dead body would be there. ’cause how many people are coming to visit him,

Rhys: and that’s what I was thinking. With the advent of a wide open, just public mass grave, it’s easy to just kill somebody because that’s what he does. He just tosses the guy down in the ditch. You know who’s gonna say that? That body’s been down there any longer than any of the other ones.

You know what I mean? It’s a great way to way just anonymously get rid of bodies.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we should implement that.

Rhys: He comes home and he brings the junkies some water. The junkies going through some withdrawals. He’s I should die and leave you in peace. And Arash has drugs in his case that would alleviate, the withdrawal symptoms. But he’s trying to get his father to dry out, I think. So he doesn’t give him any. In the meantime, you have the [00:42:00] girl in the bath and the camera angle in the water, and the lighting was such that it almost looked like she was bathing in blood.

Stephen: right.

Rhys: But then when she sits up, it’s just water. It just comes right off of her. But I thought it was a really interesting effect.

Stephen: And for black and white, that’s a good way to make it seem like that.

Rhys: Yep.

Stephen: Real quick, I missed something. I’m gonna jump back a second. When the pimp was on the street meeting the girl, there was a road sign up and I think it was a crosswalk sign. I swear to God it looked like Godzilla instead because it’s not the same pictures we have.

It was like this big, bulky, hulking creature with, or a person with a big coat. But it looked, I’m like, is that Godzilla crossing? So sorry, I missed that when we were talking.

Rhys: Oh, no, it’s fine. I didn’t see it at all.

Stephen: Yeah. I had to go back and re-look at it again. So

Rhys: The movie does take periods throughout where they just take a beat and show you the desolation. They’ll show you the oil fields, the urban blight, [00:43:00] the open grave. They stick one of those little depressing vignettes right in here.

Stephen: yeah, the B-roll definitely adds to the lonely creepiness.

Rhys: Yeah. And then we find the next day a rash has taken over, just stepped in as the local drug dealer now.

Stephen: Breaking bad the vampire.

Rhys: Yep. He’s got money. He actually goes to see a doctor who x-rays his hand and puts a cast on it.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: And while he’s getting a cast put on his hand, the princess is getting ready to go out. She’s taking one of those nose strips off her nose. It’s this interesting dichotomy between the two different social stratas.

Stephen: And I was also gonna say slightly different in how they got made up. The girl earlier and now the princess getting ready to go out to look good for the party. And the girl was almost trying to look, scary gothic almost,

Rhys: arash is driving his car and that’s where you have this serious Sierra Sergio [00:44:00] Leone music playing as he is driving. Just through we see the junkie at home. He’s going through, he’s going through withdrawals, and the cat just sits there and looks at him.

Stephen: Yeah. And I thought his withdrawals were pretty good. They had a lot of things in there that, not that I’ve been through withdrawals or I know anyone, but it really seemed fairly realistic as to how, what he was experiencing.

Rhys: Yeah, climbing the walls.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: So we have this old man, he’s hassling the prostitute. He just wants her to spend some time with him, and she’s you’re broke. Come back when you have money and I’ll spend some time with you. And he is but I gave you so much money over the years. She doesn’t care if you don’t have the money now.

She’s not interested. She looks off in the distance and then walks away and the old guy looks off in the distance where she was looking. And it’s not the distance, it’s across the street because the girl is standing there in hers door watching him over there, [00:45:00] and she starts to mirror his every movement as he walks down the sidewalk.

Stephen: So this was very. I loved this because it was scary and creepy and freaky and very easy and simple filmmaking to do. So that, that’s one of the things that I loved about this movie is you didn’t need this big special effects and you didn’t, it was just her mimicking every time he moved, she moved, he stopped.

She stopped. That was, did it throughout the whole movie. It was really good,

Rhys: he holds up one arm. She holds up one arm. Eventually he starts to pick up the pace and walk a little faster.

Stephen: Because, he’s go outrun a vampire.

Rhys: Yeah. We find out that’s pretty impossible ’cause we cut to the little boy who is walking home alone at night. Not necessarily suggested he’s carrying a skateboard. He stops to have a candy and we note when he does that the girl is behind him and he’s walking along, carrying it.

He [00:46:00] turns around and doesn’t see her behind him, and then turns and walks a little more and she’s right in front of him. And they do a little dance as she’s, he’s trying to get around her and she’s getting in his way. And then he jus her and takes off and he’s running down the street, top speed.

And he looks behind and runs right into her because again, that mystical kind of speed where she just suddenly was here and now she’s here. And this is the first time she speaks in the movie. She asks him if he’s a good boy and this whole scene is pretty freaking creepy.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely.

Rhys: He says yes, and she insists that he is lying. And throughout the entire interaction between them, he never once admits that he’s not a good boy.

Stephen: Right.

Rhys: And she keeps saying, you are lying. You’re lying. She flashes her fangs. And then she leans [00:47:00] out and says she can pull the eyes out of his skull and feed them to the dogs and tells him, till the end of your life, I will watch you.

Do you understand? Be a good boy. And then he runs away, but he leaves the skateboard.

Stephen: Yeah. What was her I, this whole scene, this is a pretty big scene actually, because she obviously was hunting him, going, wanting to kill him, thinking about killing him, but she didn’t, instead, she basically kept him in line for the rest of his life. So why, what was, why did she do that?

Rhys: This is the scene that I’m talking about where I’m like, she enjoys the hunt. She enjoys going around, creeping out old men who are hassling prostitutes and giving little boys advice so that they don’t turn out in, oh man, Hulu’s got that series with the Native Americans res dogs. There’s the dear, there’s the dear woman who shows up and will hook up with guys who are [00:48:00] bad unscrupulous woman abusers.

And she just kills them. She leaves them dead. And that’s how I see this, where she’s she’s going to try her best to improve the world around her a little bit, but she’s having a good time doing it.

Stephen: Yeah, and I took that too because when the junkie was talking to the prostitute, she was kinda scaring him, but she didn’t go after him and kill him. Not at that point. It’s like he’s not really doing anything yet, keeping an eye on him type

Rhys: Yeah. Arash, we cut to Arash being at home, he’s helping his dad through his withdrawals, which is, a nice sun thing to do, especially when you have the drugs in your possession to make it go away, but you’re trying to make him healthier. So then he finds his mother’s lipstick and he starts to cut out some black fabric.

He’s making a costume and we go to the party. We have,

Stephen: It’s an ironic choice of costume.

Rhys: it is at the party. We have the [00:49:00] princess dancing, and we are introduced to this character just in passing named rockabilly. And Rockabilly is a transvestite. He only appears in two scenes. And and it included him in there as a nod to the difficulties and struggles that the queer community has in a place like Iran. And so they’re at the party, which is the first introduction, and then later there’s another scene that she uses to really emphasize how lonely and isolated it is for those people in that society. We’ll get back to that later, but it’s again, like one of those one, just one of the seven types of characters that are in this film.

Stephen: Yeah. They’re all, they’re like all avatars.

Rhys: Yes. Yeah, they’re the personifications. The princess and [00:50:00] her friend come up to Aash by some ecstasy. The princesses is surprised to see that it’s a rash. And her friend had told her to go look for the guy who dressed like Dracula and he would have the medicine if you will. He gives them two pills for free.

He’s this is on the house. And the one girl’s like really pleased with that. The princess is talking to him. She’s so this is your job now? And he is yep. And she’s oh, okay. And she asks him if he’s scared and he is like, Nope. And she’s gimme another pill. And he is no, you’ve already had enough.

And she insists enough that he gives her another pill, but it turns out it’s not for her. She wants to give it to him. And so she she’s this pill is nothing without you. It needs you. And so he takes the pill.

Stephen: She’s her. She’s a pusher.

Rhys: She’s,

Stephen: the drug dealer.

Rhys: and that’s funny because she has this drug from [00:51:00] him, wants to give it to him. He doesn’t want it.

She insists later on the junkie is gonna shoot up with heroin and insist that the prostitute do it too. I don’t know why these people are constantly pushing their drugs on other people. Save it for yourself. You get a

Stephen: It’s Iranian culture. They wanna share getting high.

Rhys: There you go. I don’t think that’s necessarily an Iranian thing.

Stephen: That’s true.

Rhys: I know lots of people who would be like hey, have another beer with me and

Stephen: yeah. But I don’t think just having a beer would’ve the impact like it did.

Rhys: No, because you can see in the next scene, the world seems to slow down. You’re seeing it through RA’s eyes. There’s actually this kind of interesting thing where like they clo or they close in on his eyes, he’s got the makeup underneath it. It really reminded me of those old sixties, seventies vampire movies where everything slows down and there’s the glamor and all that.

It was a nice little nod to that genre.

Stephen: Yeah, she uses the filming techniques extremely well [00:52:00] without delving into special effects or, not some conceived special effect. It’s just a filming technique more

Rhys: it’s that T west thing where I’m going to make this with enough craft that you can’t deny that it’s a well done film regardless of what my budget is or who my stars are. You’re gonna walk away saying, wow, this was really well done.

Stephen: Which Ty West is, a top favorite too.

Rhys: Yep. So Rosh is dancing with the princess. He is trying to get a little more intimate. She doesn’t want anything to do with him. He’s the gardener for God’s sakes.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: And then, she hooks up with somebody else. She asks if he’s okay. And so frequently when you, if you’re going out and getting completely trashed with these people, they’re gonna ask if you’re okay.

And then when you’re not, they’re gonna be like, you’re too much work. And they’ll just leave. You be. And we find a rush just wandering the streets of bad city, staring at a light.

Stephen: Completely abandoned the city.

Rhys: I did fail to mention, and I [00:53:00] should have the girl on the girl when she gets the skateboard, she’s on the skateboard, she’s got the shado on, it’s billowing out behind her. All of the actual skate work. Yeah. Wow. All of the actual skateboard work was done by Amour, who is an avid skateboarder. And she,

Stephen: I love that.

Rhys: yeah, she looks similar enough to Sheila Van to be able to do that.

And then whenever they had to get close, they would get close in, but, on those distance shots. So

Stephen: Which I also love the fact that this is a vampire with a skateboard. That just, really

Rhys: Yeah.

Stephen: is whoever it just doesn’t fit, which made it that much weirder.

Rhys: Vampire’s gonna thrash too, man.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: The girl skateboarding down the road, she sees a Ross standing there staring at this light in his altered form. He doesn’t sense any danger off of her. As she approaches them, he just like suddenly notices she’s there. He is not startled. He is just I [00:54:00] don’t know where we are, where are we?

She’s we’re in bad city. And he’s I’m from bad city. This doesn’t look like bad city. He walks up and he tells her he’s Dracula. I, she doesn’t respond. He is I won’t hurt you. And then he starts to walk away and she follows him like she does with everybody. But he turns around. He’s not frightened.

Stephen: Because

Rhys: like, why? Yeah. He’s like, why are you here? And I think this is like a question. She had never given a lot of thought to like, why are you here? Why do you still stay in this place? He takes her hand. He’s it’s so cold. And then he gives her a hug, which, as a frightening vampire of the night, that’s just not something you’re probably used to.

Stephen: right?

Rhys: He’s I gotta sit. And he sits down on the ground, she’s my house is nearby. We go sit there he is I can’t walk. He’s just too high to walk. So she puts him on the skateboard [00:55:00] and pushes him back to her little apartment, for lack of a better word or house. They’re in there. And I had to wonder, so she doesn’t kill him. He’s sweet, he’s innocent, but I wonder if he had been just sober out selling drugs, if he would’ve just been a regular mark,

Stephen: it might have been, but something about him intrigues her, it seems.

Rhys: This is their second meeting. She puts a radio, a record on, he spins the disco ball and she’s just standing there listening to music. He comes up behind her, she turns around and, it looks like it’s gonna be this kind of intimate thing. And then she pulls his neck back so you can see his neck like, oh, okay.

But she resists the urge to feed on him and just puts her head on his chest and you can hear his heartbeat. So she’s listening to his heart. She’s listening to his heartbeat. Here’s where the second it cuts to the second scene with rockabilly who is [00:56:00] standing there in his complete makeup and his whole persona.

And he is got a balloon in the middle of a completely abandoned square, just dancing with himself in the balloon, which again is so sad, so lonely.

Stephen: I’m glad you said that about why she put that in there and stuff. ’cause now it makes a little bit of sense, but I’m watching it. I’m going. What the hell does this have to do with anything? He’s dancing with a balloon and then we switch to something else and totally forget. So I’m glad you because that’s, that’s makes sense.

Rhys: Yeah.

Stephen: And I like, I appreciate it more knowing that little bit of background there.

Rhys: Yep. The prostitute’s walking down the street at night and sees Ross’s car on the street. And the last, she saw the pimp on that car, so she decides she’s gonna key it. So she’s keying the car, but she gets caught by the girl.

Stephen: It was a little painful watching her key, that car.

Rhys: Yeah.

Stephen: And it’s a fifties car too, by the way. We had that sensibility of the fifties, [00:57:00] the car too fits that. So placing the timeframe it could be the fifties. There was, except the pop music was the

Rhys: and she stole his CDs and stuff

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. So it, it’s an interesting mix of where, what time we are, because there’s nothing really that states definitively

Rhys: Yeah, the prostitute tries to walk away from the girl, and we know that’s not possible. So eventually she just comes right up and confronts her. She’s what are you doing? Are you religious extremist? Which, in Iran is like a legitimate thing. And she’s no. And so she takes her back to her apartment and they’re talking she’s look if you’re trying to do what I do, I’m not a teacher. And she asked, are you religious? And she’s no, because she’s a vampire.

She does pull out all the pimp’s jewelry that she stole and gives it to the prostitute as recompense for [00:58:00] his cut, her cut that she did not get from him that night.

Stephen: Yeah,

Rhys: So she’s paying her back. Really?

Stephen: So it’s like the social worker vampire.

Rhys: Yes. In exchange the prostitute offers her a fig, which she takes and holds, but doesn’t eat. Then the girl points out the prostitute doesn’t like what she does and that she’s sad and she doesn’t remember what she wants or even actually want anything. Nothing ever changes. She’s not just speaking to the prostitute, she’s speaking to herself as well, because they have very similar tracks in that they’ve both been here for a long time.

They don’t know why. They don’t really know what they want. They don’t even remember wanting anything, for the long time. She points out, you’re saving your money, what for? And then she’s are you a thief? And she’s Nope. So

Stephen: And all of this here. This movie could fit very well in a cluster with like lock stock and [00:59:00] two smoking barrels showing the desolation of these people and where they live and stuff,

Rhys: yeah, this was not quite as funny. But yes,

Stephen: no I guess it depends on your perspective, but yeah. Vampires might find it very funny,

Rhys: Yeah, she leaves and goes to the alley and finds a homeless guy and she walks up very compassionately and then just pounces and feeds on him. And I think the main reason there is two people now. She has had in her clutches and didn’t feed on either of them.

Stephen: three, counting the Boy, but I think that was a different day.

Rhys: So I think, she’s getting a bit peckish.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: This guy was just in the wrong alley at the wrong time.

Stephen: And in the typical, in our vampire that they go get somebody so they don’t attack the people they don’t wanna attack

Rhys: Yeah. She comes back to her apartment and there’s a note on the door from Ash telling her to meet him at the power plant at 10 o’clock.

Stephen: because it’s such a romantic setting.

Rhys: I don’t know where in this town [01:00:00] you would go to find a romantic

Stephen: Yeah. Everything is,

Rhys: We’ll hang up by the mass grave. She seems to be sleeping and she’s dreaming. I assume it was a rush in a dark tunnel with a light behind him.

Stephen: And her sleeping, it’s not a coffin, it’s just her bed in her basement apartment or whatever.

Rhys: Yeah. Coffins get stuffy and are uncomfortable.

Stephen: Yeah.

Rhys: He’s at the power plant and all of a sudden she’s like Batman. She’s just, boom, she’s there, appears outta nowhere. He

Stephen: was a vampire, I would do that. I would like appear just I am.

Rhys: oh yeah, in a heartbeat. He asked her if she’s hungry. He bought her a hot, a hamburger. She just stands there and picks Eddie. He is I don’t know that I know anybody who doesn’t like hamburgers. Never met a vegan in Iran apparently, but,

Stephen: Yes.

Rhys: He says he doesn’t know her name. She points out that he doesn’t know her at all.

And he tries this different tact. He is like, what was the last song you listened to? Which I thought that’s an interesting little icebreaker kind of [01:01:00] game. And it was, hello by Lionel Richie.

Stephen: Which again, American pop music.

Rhys: he’s that’s a sad song. Sad songs hit the spot. So he walks over to his car and turns on the radio to a sad ish song, and he gives her the princess’s earrings.

Her ears aren’t pierced, but he is you could just have ’em. And she outta nowhere, pulls out a safety pin and tells him to go ahead and pierce her ears.

Stephen: Yeah. I love that. It’s like all of a sudden safety pin, boom.

Rhys: Yep. But if you’re wearing like the shado I can see where you might need it to hold stuff together and stuff.

So he pierces her first ear, and I think it’s probably the first time in a long time she’s felt pain. She turns away and her fangs pop out. And then he does the other side and she’s more prepared for it,

Stephen: Right. And you notice they, they didn’t do blood

Rhys: yeah. No blood.

Stephen: And he didn’t notice that. So whatever.

Rhys: He is did it hurt? And she like, looks up and she’s already got the earring in place.

Stephen: Yeah, she’s, there’s the quickness. [01:02:00] It’s like suddenly safety pins suddenly earring in, it’s wow,

Rhys: yeah. He seems to really wanna get to know her. She is I’ve done bad things. I’m bad. And he is you have no idea how bad I am. And he’s oh, I, you don’t know what I’ve done. No, dude, you’re not on this scale.

Stephen: you stole money from a drug drug pimp. Yeah. I don’t know how many people would condemn you horribly for that.

Rhys: Yeah. Shoot. I was gonna say in, in some townships in our county, they would plaster that on the side of a vehicle and be very proud of the fact they stole it from a drug

Stephen: Or put a tattoo on the side of their head about it.

Rhys: Yeah. She’s he is if there’s a storm coming over that mountain, there’s nothing we can do about it.

So you’re bad. I’m bad. It should all be fine. She leaves.

Stephen: That was the weirdest analogy.

Rhys: it was, they actually had to change the shooting schedule on this because the train was coming and so they scheduled the round the train so that they could [01:03:00] actually include the train in the closing shot.

Stephen: I figured they did that. That’s exactly what I thought. I’m like, they had to, do that to get that shot.

Rhys: Yeah. He gets home, he’s rejected. And in the morning he basically finds himself dealing with his father who’s hallucinating or I kind of wonder if maybe he wasn’t, his father is staring at the cat and insists it has the eyes of his deceased mother and she’s just there staring at him, judging him for what he’s been doing.

So he has a fit and starts breaking stuff up.

Stephen: All the pictures and everything. Yeah.

Rhys: Arash is in a bad frame of mind ’cause he just got dumped by my mystery girl. And so he comes out with a thing of heroin, comes out with a whole bunch of money, throws it on the floor and says, take it and get out. Take the cat. I don’t want the cat here either. And so

Stephen: important.

Rhys: it does, which makes me wonder ’cause they weren’t gonna use the cat

Stephen: Right?

Rhys: how this story would’ve [01:04:00] changed if the cat wasn’t in it.

Stephen: Fortuitous accidents and sometimes.

Rhys: He takes this money and his heroin and he goes to seek solace with a prostitute. And the first thing is like dance for me like you used to. And so she dances. Then he has her sit on the bed next to him and he wants her to shoot up and she doesn’t want to. Then he takes off his belt and binds her hands with the belt and injects her with heroin.

Stephen: and she doesn’t really struggle to put up a fight, which I think again, shows the culture more than anything.

Rhys: Yeah. Then he injects himself with heroin and they both just pass out.

Stephen: So right there, I said, why do we always get these movies with the freakiest sex? How is this good sex folks where let’s get so high we pass out and we never have sex? The these, the sex scenes in these horror movies are like so extremely bad.

Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. They are. We’ve got one later in the [01:05:00] season that, that will, it’s that scratch if you’re into it, but.

Stephen: Yeah. But it was just I was laughing watching that, and I’m like, this is what you consider a good time. You spend all your money on something that you pass out and then you don’t even get to have sex. It’s you people are doing it wrong. If this is what doing drugs and sex does to you

Rhys: and then here’s the mysticism part. It’s got a vampire, so it’s already, supernatural anyways, but the cat is sitting there staring at them, and the girl is walking down the street and suddenly notes something. There’s something in the air, and she goes right to the prostitute’s apartment.

Stephen: She had a.

Rhys: like she had a connection with the cat. She shows up, drags the father right off the bed, consumes him right there in the room.

Stephen: You know what? I never thought about her connection with the cat. So that’s how Arash got totally into this whole situation at the beginning. Oh man. Wow. If her [01:06:00] not having the cat in it, that’s pretty intense.

Rhys: The prostitute doesn’t seem frightened by this whole situation. Of course, she’s also high on heroin right now, but

Stephen: Yeah, she seemed to just accept it. Come on. The pimp was probably worse.

Rhys: yeah. They take the junkie’s body out in an alley and leave him, and the boy is watching from an upstairs window and the vampire looks up at him just so he knows I am watching you at all times. And she leaves and takes the cat with her. So the next day, the boy brings a rash to his father’s body. And we’re actually seeing it from the body’s point of view, which I thought was really interesting. We are the dead junkie in the alleyway.

Arash is pulls the boy aside. He is did you see anything? And I’m like, oh, is he gonna say anything? The boy’s Nope. I was on nothing. And it’s the exact mirror of the girl talking to him in the alley because he asks him three times and he denies it all three times.

Stephen: [01:07:00] right.

Really interesting in this scene ’cause he is like really studying the body. He is looking down at

Rhys: Yeah. He’s just fascinated by it. is funny ’cause there’s a wide open grave right in the middle of town. You go watch dead bodies all you want on

Stephen: why haven’t they done an Iranian Frankenstein movie if they got mass graves like that? Make Igor’s job easy.

Rhys: Arash goes back home, he’s packing his stuff up, he’s leaving bad city and he tries to, he decides he’s gonna try and convince the girl to come with him. So goes to her apartment and he just sits outside her door. I don’t even think he knocked, she just like walks over and opens the door to go out and he’s just sitting there and she lets him in and he’s we need to go, we need to get out of this town.

Just get in my car and will just drive. Don’t leave me alone. And she turns his back, her back on him and she changes out of the shado into her black and white striped t-shirt that she likes [01:08:00] to wear. I don’t think it’s a t-shirt, but black and white striped shirt. And then she does start to pack stuff up and it’s like a pile of jewelry from all of her victims.

And then the cat walks out of the back room and RA’s looking at all this and he is starting to piece things together. Not necessarily that she’s a vampire, but there’s a giant pile of men’s jewelry. She’s putting it into a bag. Where did she get all that? Oh wait, there’s my dad’s cat. He’s dead now.

Stephen: And this is another example of this movie and some of the past ones we’ve just watched where there’s not a lot of dialogue. He doesn’t jump up and scream, he doesn’t announce it, but you could see the acting on his face for three minutes. The camera’s just focused on him turning his head back and forth, and you could see his face like, oh, wait a minute.

Hold on. Very well done. I love that.

Rhys: As reality Dawns on him, she picks up the cat, she’s good to go. And so we’ve got the car

Stephen: she doesn’t care that he realizes it.

Rhys: Not at all. If he wants to leave [01:09:00] her here, fine. I think she would’ve actually, she wanted to go with him, another a hundred years, she’ll just find another one.

Stephen: Yeah, let the right one in.

Rhys: Yeah, they’re driving down the road.

He stops the car and gets out and has this crisis of conscience right in front of the headlights. She’s just sitting in there looking at him out the windshield and then he’s just gets back in the car and it’s quiet. You had this great scene where you have the girl, the cat, and a rash, just all sitting in the car looking at the windshield, and then he reaches over and he opens the glove compartment.

I’m like, it’s the gun. It’s the

Stephen: I thought he was opening the door.

Rhys: ah, I thought he was gonna pull the gun out from the briefcase out of the glove compartment, but nope. He pulls out a tape, puts it in, starts playing music, drives back onto the.

Stephen: Yeah, that, this is a great example of a, a movie. Like you said, it’s a character study, but the [01:10:00] story is. Hard to define. The ending is nebulous and, it doesn’t really end so much ’cause there was no story for it to build up and, fix and end. And it’s just a really well made all around movie.

Like I said, I this not that I haven’t liked pretty much everything we watch, I always enjoy ’em. But then this one the battery, the gardener one, a couple others just really click. They, you always find those ones. And this is one for me.

Rhys: Yeah, it’s another one of those kind of crazy coming of age films that’s not your standard coming of age film because everybody’s already an adult. They’re not really getting any older, but it’s that. Arash shouldn’t have been in this city this long anyways, he should have started to move on.

And this old movie is just the impetus to like make him get up and go on with his life. So

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Good movie. Enjoyed that one a lot.

Rhys: yeah,

Stephen: And it’s a vampire movie.

Rhys: [01:11:00] I know we’ve, shoot, we’ve done five or something now. It’s

Stephen: Yeah. Not even. Yeah. But again, like you said, but it’s not a traditional vampire, it’s not Lost Boys, it’s not interview with a vampire. It’s not even sins. It it’s diff it, the vampires are not the focus,

Rhys: Not at all. Yeah. It they’re more of a plot device to focus your study on the character development.

Stephen: For people that looking for more advanced horror this one’s a really good recommendation.

Rhys: Yeah, it’s

Stephen: is interesting because I just, I told you I watched Haga Souza that

Rhys: heck is Suza. Good one.

Stephen: And it was in a way similar to this ’cause you were wondering what the story was.

You were wondering if about really a witch and all that. I watched those almost back to back. So I wonder how that really affected things. ’cause there’s a lot of similarities

Rhys: lot of, yeah. That’s crazy.

Stephen: Yeah. And I didn’t even plan it. It just I’d been wanting to watch that [01:12:00] for a while and I was like, oh, okay.

And then this one all right. Do you know what we got next? ’cause I never know what we got

Rhys: I know you never do, but I do. I actually have them in order in my document over here on the side,

Stephen: you’re organized.

Rhys: Next we’ll be looking at the very interesting cultural institution that is British film censorship with a movie called Censor.

Stephen: Oh, all so raw, they were eating raw meat. So is this one they eating sensors.

Rhys: They’re not eating censors, but it’s about Great Britain has a ridiculously color colorful history with controlling films that come into the country. And we’ll talk about it next time.

Stephen: Okay, good. Because now I’m intrigued with that considering some of the other things they have that we consider lax. It’s interesting. All right man. Good show. I.

Rhys: Awesome. See ya.