Indie dark comedy 'Little Sister' features terrific performances from Ally Sheedy and newcomer Addison Timlin

In Little Sister, an endearing dark comedy written and directed by Zach Clark, Addison Timlin plays Colleen Lunsford, a 20-ish girl who lives at a convent in Brooklyn, where she’s preparing to take her vows and become a full-fledged nun. Colleen unexpectedly finds herself drawn back to her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, where her older brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) has just returned from Iraq, after suffering a severe injury that left his entire face permanently disfigured. 

The movie takes place in October 2008, and the drama of the presidential election between Obama and McCain foregrounds the comparatively small-scale, yet no-less urgent, drama of Colleen’s family. Colleen’s mother, Joani (played by the wonderful Ally Sheedy), struggles with depression (which fueled a suicide attempt a few years before); Joani never completely explodes, but Sheedy’s performance is so fine-tuned that we get the queasy feeling she could erupt at any minute, and that life with Joani is a constant dance through a minefield. Colleen’s dad, Bill (Peter Hedges), is simply trying to keep the peace; he doesn't know what to do to change things, so he focuses on avoiding conflict as much as possible. (When Colleen says something to set her mother off, Bill silently signals Colleen to please quit, a pantomime of meek desperation.)

Meanwhile there’s Tricia (Kristin Slaysman), Jacob’s wife, a beautiful young woman who’s found herself in a tough situation, living with the parents of a husband who no longer resembles the man she married. (And it’s not the injuries I refer to, but the personality shift, the emotional disconnect, that hovers over Jacob like a dark cloud.) What’s more, Jacob has seemingly lost interest in Tricia; it’s as if he cannot imagine anyone finding him desirable anymore, so he too feels nothing but disgust for himself. (This is unfair to Tricia, who tries to spice up their fledgling marriage with sexy lingerie; later, we see her surfing a singles’ dating website: more desperation.) 

Little Sister explores the ways family members radically change—or, in some cases, radically remain the same. Colleen’s conversion to Catholicism seems genuine, yet she wavers when confronted with memories of her old life: her bedroom, preserved like a museum to her goth-metal teenage years, still bears all the posters and clothes and the upside down cross, and there’s still a tube of Colleen’s trusty black lipstick in a drawer. When she can’t get an audience with Jacob, Colleen dons her old look, and lip syncs to the song “Have You Seen Me” by Gwar, a song that was once very special to them in its angry, clever, satirical anarchy. Jacob, who’s been hollowed out by the war, needs the old Colleen to bring him back to life. Indeed, Colleen is the catalyst for this family’s particular form of redemption. It’s no Hollywood form of redemption—there are still shards of hurt and anger and waves of dysfunction running through this unit—but in Little Sister, what matters is the little bits of the broken that we find, and what we do with them in the name of re-building.

Little Sister probably errors on the side of being too hip and cool, like many independent movies. It has that homegrown, quaint feeling that only hipsters can provide so masterfully, but there’s a heart beating inside this movie too, and the performances of Timlin and Sheedy (and the marvelous Barbara Crampton, who gets too little screen time as Colleen’s supportive but frustrated Mother Superior back in New York) are reason enough to see this film. 

From Beyond

From Beyond (1986) is director Stuart Gordon's follow-up to Re-Animator, and it's a misfired attempt to see if lightning can in fact strike twice. You know you're in trouble when the source of the conflict and the horror is a device that, when turned on, unleashes a monstrous power from another dimension. I mean, all you have to do is not turn it on, right? Problem solved. So how to get the characters in the movie to keep turning that sucker on...

The characters are not that far removed from Re-Animator. There's a nerdy researcher played by Jeffrey Combs, and a self-important psychiatrist played by Barbara Crampton (who is once again molested on camera by a terrifying creature), and an overly good-natured cop played by Ken Foree who's hired to accompany the other two to an isolated house where they can observe a strange contraption known as the Resonator. The Resonator is a big metal, phallic-looking machine that, when switched on, reveals slimy, snake-like, floating creatures that can attack if they detect humans. The machine's creator, the eccentric, kinky Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel), is ostensibly beheaded by some creature accessed via the Resonator, but then we discover that he's actually been pulled into another world and is now an extremely powerful, shape-shifting creature with mind-controlling abilities.

I'm sure you're as riveted reading about this as I was watching it. The whole thing feels absolutely ridiculous, but not in a good way. There's not enough humor in From Beyond, and the movie relies on the stupid decisions of its characters to tell its story. The only character I liked--Ken Foree's--is poorly conceived, but at least has the good sense to utter the line that dogs so many possessed house movies: "Let's get the hell out of here." (Or some variation of that.) But Barbara Crampton can't leave, because she's doing important work. And Combs's character comes off as a weakling who has little if any influence in this story. He's absolutely forgettable.

As with Re-Animator, there's an attempt to shape an H.P. Lovecraft short story into a compelling horror film that mixes icky gore with clever humor. Unfortunately, From Beyond retains little of that film's novelty. It's structurally a bit of a remake of Re-Animator (and fans of the 2006 horror-scifi film Slither may find in From Beyond some intriguing parallels), but being like Re-Animator isn't enough. It's nice to see a director who can turn more than one trick. If that's asking too much, then the same trick has to be fresh enough for a second go-round. This one turns out a dud. Written by the director, Dennis Paoli, and producer Brian Yuzna. ★½

Re-Animator

All in Good Fun: If Re-Animator (1985) isn't the goriest movie ever made, it's gotta be at least in the top ten. You've heard the story before in Frankenstein and you've seen it parodied before in Young Frankenstein, but never to this degree of unbridled insanity. It's about a pompous, eccentric med student named Herbert West (played by Jeffrey Combs), who discovers a serum that can bring the dead back to life. Trouble is, they're not really controllable, they seem to acquire inordinate amounts of strength during the reanimation process, and they're really rather cranky (and a tad ungrateful, given that they were brought back to life).

Re-Animator is director Stuart Gordon's first feature, based on the short story, Herbert West-Reanimator (1922) by horror icon H.P. Lovecraft. It makes calamity out of and jeers lovingly at the interplay between stability and instability of the human body. When West severs the head of a prominent surgeon (played by David Gale, who bears an uncanny resemblance to John Kerry) and then reanimates him, it's as though the divided body has become two selves instead of one, and so the movie makes you think, are we separate from our bodies or not? Are we our bodies or simply our brains?

It's quite a philosophical question for a movie so saturated in blood and matter, and yet this is the work of the horror genre, if the horror movie in question is worth its salt: it not only touches a nerve of whatever is freaking out the culture at that precise moment, but it pokes around at our subliminal fears and addresses them in ways we could never imagine. Somehow, there's relief to be had in this process. We've vicariously lived and died through this experience, and we come out alive knowing it was only a movie.  

Re-Animator won't be the selection of the squeamish movie-goer, but it delivers a deliciously funny good time to those who can stomach its icky moments. Those gory outbursts are so over-the-top that it's hard to really be affected by them (up to a point). It's as if the viscera becomes completely artificial (the 80s make-up and special effects hold up pretty well, although there are moments when they don't quite work--CGI has similar problems too, though).

There are interesting little moments in the camera work that register well. A shot of the leading lady (Barbara Crampton) walking from the elevator to the morgue is handled with an eerie superfluousness. The camera glides backward while she walks forward but very slowly. It's a cool effect. Later, the doctor summons forth his zombie minions in the morgue, and the effect of their springing forth simultaneously from their body bags gives that moment a wonderful zing. The whole movie is fluid and alive. It's so fresh and unpretentious. Perhaps because Gordon doesn't hold back on the gore, he doesn't feel the need to withhold or delay plot information either (which we are smart enough to figure out anyway). He's an honest and an efficient director, and he plays up the campy aspects of the material nicely, too.

With Bruce Abbott as a fellow med student who becomes caught up in West's bizarre experiments, and Robert Sampson as the dean of his med school (who becomes one of Gale's shambling zombie goons).

Followed by Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator. 86 minutes.