Auteur

James Cullen Bressack has been a favourite here at EHC amongst some of us here. Knowing of my wait on Pernicious he offered for me to experience a few films he has been involved with in the past few years. So I felt it would be cool to do a series of these reviews. As a starting point is a film he worked on as both writer and executive producer, Cameron Romero’s…

Auteur (2015)

Jack Humphreys thinks he has a plan of success as a filmmaker by interviewing Charlie Buckwall and discovering the mystery behind his last film, Demonic.

Strange incidents, death and most of all, the disappearance of the actual film with its director surrounds the whole story.

Interviewing the main players, some feel there are some truths about the events while others feel it is all just stories. Finally picking up the guts to approach Charlie he finds out the truth can be stranger than fiction!

Auteur for me was a diatribe on Hollywood. Of the people who are prepared to do anything, and bugger the consequences towards others!

Jack; who under the pretention of making a doco on supposedly his filmmaking hero but in all reality is a failed filmmaker who is really just there to get the film Demonic back for his big time Hollywood executive! Charlie, who is pushing his main actors to the point of using Black Magic, human blood and possible demonic possession to get his film made.

Tom Sizemore sizes it up right at the beginning when he comes out and states he doesn’t like Jack and it is obviously why. Jack is taking someone else’s apparent failure and using it to farther his own career plus to obtain a film back for his father! He is a muckraker out for fame and not in it for the art and fandom. Pretty much part of the paparazzi machine.

I like to get the negatives out of the way before moving on!

CGI eyes at the end annoyed me as I feel contact lenses and make-up would have looked WAY BETTER! Hell it is horrible, even for a moment, especially a key one! Oh boy, I will keep THAT there! But yes please filmmakers really consider all your options even on what may seem like small details like this, people do notice and for some the CGI eye thing should be kept back to when it was quirky in the 90s.

One of the characters gets his head bashed in with a concrete block and we get a shot of it at the end with a little bit of blood on it. Along with this there is bugger all blood on the killer though they were kneeling on top of the victim while bashing away with said concrete block! This would have been so much more effective with a bit more blood and some added gore for the effect of what happened! Hell show the aftermath of the victim’s face bashed in would have really been a trump card!

Tom Sizemore is awesome, sizing up the reality and matter-of-factly telling it how it is in his point of view. In fact everyone was good with they’re roles. B.J. Hendricks as Jack Humphreys is well done! He is daddy’s boy and is not quite sincere with what he is doing. Ian Hutton as Charlie Buckwald portrays to sides of the coin; in flashbacks he is this confident filmmaker who is cool as a cucumber then in the present time he is this fearful paranoid individual who is in fear of the enemy! Then Madeline Merrit as Kate Rivers, who is the possessed victim in Demonic and perhaps in reality as well after what is done to her. At first she is this actress not quite coping with her role then afterwards when she changes; as a character sums it up she was nice at first then she changed and became pretty much a whore…not those exact words.

Found the story an interesting one. The correlation between what is happening with what is surrounding the documentary along with the events surrounding Demonic…of control and deception.

Gore…Sickness…Insanity…Filth…Depravity…

Insanity…

In a way; with Charlie Buckwald’s change from this confident and experienced filmmaker to a nervous wreck with his physical twitches and nervous disposition.

Cameron Romero’s Auteur is an interesting take on the possession subgenre with obvious influences from his father George. Though I felt it could have been done a little better with the above mentioned aspects of the CGI eyes and the lack of any real violence or gore in a key part of the story I am sure Cameron and James had their reasons. As a character study on the whole culture of Hollywood I felt Auteur was an interesting take on the mainstream filmmaking system.