BAGHEAD (on DVD December 27 from Sony Pictures) winks at mid-1980s straight-to-video slasher films, but mumblecore filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass are generally disinterested in crafting scary setpieces. Shooting with a shaky camera and a handful of actors, concentrating on purposefully awkward social situations and stilted dialogue, their goal is to create a movie as “lifelike” as possible.
The genre elements, including a car that won’t start and a masked figure appearing outside the window while the heroine takes off her shirt, exist as setups to show how real people might behave in these situations. Your tolerance for all this will really depend on whether you can stomach this particular filmmaking style, which is raw and poorly lit, with scenes drifting along and quirky dialogue that seems aimless if you’re disinterested in simply observing human behavior. If John Cassavetes decided to shoot APRIL FOOL’S DAYusing modern digital technology, you might get the idea of what BAGHEAD is going for.But there’s also a postmodern irony in the story, about four actors staying in a rural cabin and cooking up ideas for a horror script. When the movie they’re writing seems to be happening to them, the audience has to wonder if it’s for real or whether they’re making a movie-within-the-movie with hidden cameras. Occasionally, someone pops up with a paper bag over his/her head, but generally the friends assume it’s one of them playing a practical joke.
Things only get strange when a fifth bag-headed figure makes an appearance, wielding a survival knife, and even then the mumblecore aesthetic ensures that scenes aren’t played for scares so much as improvisatory seriocomic looseness. When one of the guys drops his baseball bat while running away from the killer, it’s played as more of an iconic beat of “what happens during these kinds of movies” than a suspense tactic. The more painful suspense scenes have to do with the guys trying to hit on the girls and failing awkwardly—when sad sack Chad (Steve Zissis) attempts to kiss gorgeous Michelle (Greta Gerwig), she tries to pretend he’s giving her a head-butt.
Genre fans willing to cross over into more traditional independent, naturalistic cinema may get a kick out of BAGHEAD—as long as they can groove on the disaffected hipster vibe. The DVD’s audio commentary by the Duplass brothers is not dissimilar from the onscreen dialogue, as they cheerfully ramble about their digressive filmmaking techniques and incredibly small crew, and praise the actors and their spontaneity. When the discussion turns to the horror elements, it’s more of an abstract idea—like a wall they’re bouncing their ideas off of. When the four protagonists emerge from the house, each wearing a different-color shirt, they observe, “We’re in SCOOBY-DOO territory,” and while discussing the filming of chase scenes in the woods, they reveal that their technique is basically to intercut as many camera whip-pans as possible.
There’s also some talk about audience reaction to BAGHEAD, such as how the cheap-scare moments made some people scream and others laugh, and that “the people who scream get angry at the people who laugh, because they didn’t experience the same thing.” It’s a lively chat, mainly because you feel like you’re in the same room as these two down-to-earth, unpretentious guys who approach their movie with humor and humility. It’s a useful how-to for no-budget filmmakers.
The extras also include a five-minute home video segment called BAGHEAD Scares in which we see real people going about their lives when someone suddenly jumps out and startles them wearing a paper bag over their heads. It’s amusing to watch the reactions of the prank victims, who either run away or jump in the air, but my favorite has to be the 3-year-old girl who pursues a fleeing baghead happily calling out, “Daddy?”
There’s also an interview with the filmmakers, with the two sitting on a bright red couch with each of the directors holding their infant children, entitled Mark and Jay Duplass Answer Questions They’ve Already Answered. Since they know the top 10 queries interviewers always have, they go ahead and rattle down the list, such as “What was the budget on this thing?” ($1,000) and “Where did you get the inspiration for this film?” (“We had to answer that question 150 times, and answered it with pep each time, and every time we answered it we lost a little piece of our souls”). It’s easy to see why these guys make mumblecore films, since they’re chatty, rambling and self-effacing.
When they talk about the off-the-cuff atmosphere and non-scripted scenes in BAGHEAD while their toddlers hiccup and fuss, one can’t help but feel like the kids are props being used to spice up an otherwise mundane filmmaker Q&A—and the brothers seem self-aware that the audience has heard it all before. If this sounds cute and endearing, you’ll probably be won over by the entire DVD. On the other hand, if this feels like a toxic mixture of navel-gazing and sardonic asides, you’ll probably loathe BAGHEAD.
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