I don’t normally do request reviews for new filmmakers, chiefly because I cringe at the possibility of having to tell people their work is no good, or the opposite, the risk of feeling obligated into dishonesty. But I made an exception for Michael Okum, chiefly because he’s an online acquaintance of upstanding character, and he buttered me up well when he asked me. Expressway to Your Skull is a micro-budget horror feature, funded with Kickstarter on a budget well under $100,000. For a film as cheap and necessarily modest as it is, Expressway to Your Skull represents a striking clarion labour for Okum. He takes on a pretty familiar set of genre essentials but delivers them with hints he has something more to say than the average would-be gore-schlock maker. Named for a Sonic Youth song, Expressway to Your Skull is a bit of a throwback to the days of counterculture-infused low-budget horror cinema you used to see a lot of in the ‘70s, with drug use a major theme and stylistic key, lending the work a trippy, jittery feel throughout, as if the surface, corporeal drama we see isn’t ever the whole story. The film kicks off with unfortunate young Cindy (Katie Royer) hooking up with grizzled, ageing recluse Charlie (Mark Aaron), only for Charlie to cuff her, rape her, and stash her in his cabin deep in the forest. Meanwhile, young couple Ed (Paul S. Tracey) and Amy (Lindsay Atwood), a pair of transplants from Colorado in the big city right, are at the point of tumbling from their toehold in urban bohemia. Ed talks Amy into a venture out into the countryside with the promise of escaping into nature and the side-effects of some high-quality ’shrooms, although Ed actually wants to skip town because he’s fleeced a drug dealer.
The opening scene, as Charlie entices and then captures Cindy, immediately announces an aptly toey, brutal mood, a feeling of having stumbled into a scene you hoped never to witness and knowing you can’t back away from it. I like how Okum establishes just how straitened Ed and Amy’s lives have been when Ed celebrates his lover’s birthday with a single candle jammed in a cupcake, and a gift of chintzy jewellery before a session of lovemaking wielding the pathos of an almost desperate brand of affection; their poverty and anxious hunger for more than life is offering is taking a toll on them as individuals as well as a couple. But escape into verdant zones doesn’t mean release from the petty terrors of humanity, first manifesting when a pair of redneck jerks pull up in a car and flick a cigarette at Ed just for yucks. Okum’s low-key approach to Ed and Amy’s attempts to find their way out of their emotional morass and chase a faded idyll of blissed-out hippie experience feels like reportage from a fringe many nonetheless exist on, and he does a good job of delaying the moment when tattered nerves snap and repressed emotions combust. Expressway to Your Skull is reminiscent of a handful of other recent, quietly ambitious horror works including Adam MacDonald’s Backcountry (2014) and Bobcat Goldthwaite’s Willow Creek (2013) in this attempt to capture the vicissitudes of coupling with something like a behaviourist’s detached analysis, before straying into more heightened drama, as Okum isolates his couple and then watches them closely as they fray.
Whilst Ed and Amy wander in the bush, Charlie keeps Cindy captive, trying to fit her for an old dress, keepsake of his late wife. But the dress doesn’t fit and Charlie, enraged by a whispered insult Cindy delivers in his ear, retaliates by cutting out her tongue. The film drifts close to torture porn territory here but maintains restraint. Soon Charlie starts appearing in the fringe of Ed and Amy’s firelight, and it becomes clear Charlie sees Amy as a much more fitting candidate to fill out his wife’s clothes. The uneasy conversation the trio have around the blaze feels a little like a caustic lampoon of the campfire scene in Easy Rider(1969), nonconformist communality transmuted into contemporary disconnection between different brands of outsider – Charlie, a damaged war veteran whose hippie-ish streak has turned dark, abusive, and occult rather than New Agey, and Ed and Amy, anxiously trying to get high as both escape from, and an act of defiance against, a much colder age. I can see why Okum included the concurrent depictions of Charlie’s abuse of Cindy, not least because it assures viewers quickly just what kind of movie we’re watching and slip in some gore to keep the genre hounds happy, as well as keeping the viewer mindful about what could be waiting for Amy. But on another level I wished Okum didn’t give the game away so early, and wield the resulting ambiguity of Charlie’s intentions towards the young couple, mostly because I found the asymmetric quality of their outlooks an original theme in this branch of the genre, one which usually relies on simplistic oppositions. Here the unforgiving divide lies between Charlie’s brutalised version of the back-to-nature project and the pacific one Ed and Amy try to pursue; Charlie isn’t the usual redneck caricature but, it’s hinted, someone who retreated to his current life with his wife for similar, and even more urgent, reasons, but hasn’t been able to halt a slide into madness.
The notion of Charlie being more of a sex fiend than a regulation mad killer is gutsy and more direct than a lot of veiled psycho-sadist depictions, and Okum does a good job skirting exploitativeness with it. Charlie does kill, however, including some stray characters who blunder upon him during a potentially embarrassing moment, seguing into impressively sudden, blind-siding violence. I wouldn’t pretend Expressway to Your Skull is perfect, and my praise is conditional as this is a work from the very baseline of film production. Although only 84 minutes, it’s still too long to sustain a very slender story, begging the one-hour run-time of a good old B movie, and it took a little patience getting through the protracted mid-section. Also, I felt the crime and occult elements in the film were essentially unnecessary, even though they do underline in turn Ed’s mix of nothing-to-lose gutsiness and foolishness, and Charlie’s devolution into a neolithic mindset. But Okum’s control over tone is genuinely strong, never lapsing into cheesy Grand Guignol or cruelty for its own sake, and tension mounts admirably as the gloves come off. The visual style, littered with patches of authentic psychedelia and defined by an ever-so-faint dissociative tone in even the more stable and chatty scenes, is judicious. Okum handles his small cast with authority – Aaron in particular has peculiar charisma even when being monstrous. When the gloves finally come off, the film becomes genuinely gripping. Like Wes Craven, Okum scrapes off the skin of civility on his characters to note the primal reflexes lurking under our socialised behaviours, and he takes on a theme other survivalist thriller makers tend to graze with less consideration – reducing the drama to a macho pissing contest where Ed has to essentially face Charlie on the level of caveman fighting for mating rights. Expressway to Your Skull, for all its rough edges, is a genuinely interesting and persuasive ground zero for a movie talent proving himself.
