“Little Red Riding Hood” has been told in countless different ways by countless different tale-tellers—in the film world alone, directors from Neil Jordan to Tex Avery have used it for their own ends. But To Kill a Wolf, writer-director Kelsey Taylor’s first feature, is different. “I see this as a deconstruction of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in a lot of ways,” she said during an interview with ArtsWatch last month. Many of the traditional elements are missing, and the movie begins with an unnamed Woodsman (Ivan Martin) discovering a young woman named Dani (Maddison Brown) lost in the Oregon forest and taking her to his remote cabin outside Burns. Turns out she has run away from home and is trying to get back to her grandmother’s place in Klamath Falls. He’s a gruff recluse who regularly sabotages the wolf traps that his cattle-ranching neighbor sets on his property. Both have secrets, which Taylor allows to bubble to the surface as the Woodsman reluctantly decides to help Danni on her journey.

“People have said,” Taylor relates, “you don’t need ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The story stands on its own. That’s been a debate since the inception of this script seven years ago. Ultimately, I dig in my heels. I think there is something here.” Our shared familiarity with Charles Perrault’s original and its various updates and adaptations kicks in just enough to be subverted when things don’t unfold the way we expect them to. To Kill a Wolf isn’t a horror story, and it isn’t interested in anthropomorphic canines or other supernatural business, but it does tap into the story’s (often sublimated) themes. “There was definitely a kind of sexuality to the original messaging that seems to have been lost because people are so uncomfortable talking about that with their children,” says Taylor.

Taylor grew up in rural Eastern Washington, where she benefitted from supportive parents and a school system that allowed her to follow her creativity from an early age. “One of my teachers let me put on a play in second grade,” she says. “We got to use the high school stage and we made costumes.” After high school, she majored in Film Production (with a Film Studies minor, naturally) at Loyola Marymount University and spent the next few years working as an assistant director on several undistinguished features. “That led to a lot of frustration,” she says. “I was like, ‘When do I get my turn?’ I’d just been expecting someone to hand me a script and say ‘Go.’ And it took a while to realize that’s never going to happen. So that’s when I started writing.”

After trying to get To Kill a Wolf off the ground through traditional avenues, Taylor and her producing partner and cinematographer Adam Lee decided the fund the film themselves. “We took everything we made for a number of years and put it into a pool,” Taylor says. “We had to invest in our careers the same way you would invest in school.” With some additional funding raised with the help of the online platform Slated, they ended up with a bit more than anticipated. Still, she warns, “I wouldn’t recommend funding your own movie unless you’re very, very serious about it and willing to live without that money forever. It’s not even a gamble. It’s just not coming back.”

With the Mount Hood Wilderness around Sandy and Rhododendron standing in for southern Oregon, production got underway in early 2023, just in time for the area to get hit with a massive winter storm. “We showed up egregiously unprepared,” Taylor recalls. “Our A.D. pulled up in flip-flops. We didn’t have snow tires.” This led to numerous schedule changes, where Taylor’s career as an assistant director came in handy. “Without that experience, it could have been a disaster. It would snow, then it would melt. Then it would snow, and then it would melt,” she continues. “We had a scene we started shooting in the snow, and by the afternoon it had melted.” Having a small, nimble crew of around ten made changing plans on the fly relatively possible, as did the flexibility of locals when it came to location shooting. “We were leaving notes on people’s cars, on their cabins, saying ‘Can we just come in? Can we film here?,” she adds. “We were really embraced by the community when people answered those calls.”

Now that the film is out in the world, the job of promoting such a truly independent project falls to its creator, and it’s safe to say it’s not Taylor’s favorite part of the process. “It’s not what I want to do,” she confesses. “But going through the festival circuit and distributing the film ourselves, you have to be selling. I feel like, sadly, I’ve come to realize that the film industry is a business. It’s been a little soul-crushing to see this side of things. All I want to do is just tell the stories I want to tell.” It seems likely that she will have the chance to do so, based on this well-crafted, compelling effort that subtly tweaks a legend to make it relevant while retaining its core. As Taylor puts it, “Fairy tales are the stories we tell our children to warn them, and I think of this is a modern version of that.” (Friday 8/15 through Thursday 8/21, Regal Fox Tower in Portland and Regal Old Mill in Bend; Thursday 8/21, Eugene Art House. Several screenings will be followed by Q&A sessions or panel discussions; see https://www.tokillawolf.com/ for details.)

Also opening

Hanabi Film Festival: For the third year, the Clinton Street Theater presents a diverse sampler of Japanese cinema over the next couple of weeks, kicking off on Monday, August 18 with Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 classic Woman in the Dunes. It’s a surreal, black-and-white fable of sorts about a bug collector who gets stranded in the coastal village where he had been hunting for beetles. He’s allowed to spend the night in a deep pit, where he ends up trapped and forced to work with a widow who lives there, toiling in Sisyphean fashion to keep the pit from collapsing by hauling out sand which the other villagers then sell. Teshigahara was nominated for a Best Director Oscar (which he lost to Robert Wise for The Sound of Music, of course) and the film’s cinematography deserves the big-screen treatment. Even more enticing are the selections that can’t be readily found on a streaming service, which this week include 1984’s The Crazy Family, Gakuryū Ishii’s slapstick saga about a perfectly normal clan who, as their new suburban home starts to be devoured by ants, becomes increasingly paranoid and detached from reality. Reminiscent of some of Takashi Miike’s taboo-busting early work, it was Ishii’s last film for ten years because no one would fund his work. Another hidden gem is 1968’s The Snow Woman, a vibrantly colored fantasy about an apprentice sculptor who witnesses his master being frozen to death by the titular winter spirit. She swears him to silence, but shortly thereafter arrives incognito at the village where the apprentice is now living with his master’s widow and begins to insinuate herself into his life. Director Tokuzō Tanaka, who directed entries in both the Zatoichi and Sleepy Eyes of Death series, made dozens of films from the 1950s through the ’80s, but very few have received exposure in the U.S. Another twelve features unspool over the next two weeks. (Monday 8/18 through Sunday, 8/31, selected dates, Clinton Street Theater)

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Highest 2 Lowest: Spike Lee and Denzel Washington team up for the first time since 2006’s Inside Man (which screens this weekend at Cinema 21) in this remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 thriller High and Low, but the reunion is an uneven one. Washington stars as the unsubtly named David King, a wealthy music mogul with a beautiful wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) and a teenaged son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), who sports diamond earrings just like his dad. He’s also got an ex-con live-in chauffeur (a miscast Jeffrey Wright) whose own son Kyle (Elijah Wright, Jeffrey’s son) is Trey’s best pal. When the Kings receive a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped Trey, they initially agree to pay the $17.5 million ransom. When it turns out to be a case of mistaken identity and it’s actually Kyle who’s been nabbed, David wrestles with putting his family’s riches and his business in jeopardy for his employee’s son rather than his own. (This is what’s known as a first-world problem.) The first half of the film moves haltingly, with several sloppy moments that puncture its sense of realism, including an unconvincing fake newscast about the kidnapping, several obvious uses of ADR, and fake-looking Manhattan backdrops to scenes shot in the King’s majestic penthouse. The cops in this movie, including one played by Dean Winters (“Mayhem” in those insurance ads), don’t talk or act like real cops, and the investigation aspect of the story feels underwritten. Once a plan emerges to track down the kidnapper (nicely played by A$AP Rocky), Lee kicks into high gear, and a subway chase scene that takes place on the same day as a Yankees-Red Sox game in the Bronx and Puerto Rican Day festivities is thrilling. Then, because every Spike Lee feature must be over 130 minutes, there’s a dénouement that goes on far too long. That duration, like the blaring score by Howard Drossin (doing a bad Terence Blanchard imitation) and several trademark visual flourishes, comes with the territory, as do the scenes when the camera practically drools over the glory that is New York City. If you’re attuned to Lee’s vibe, those are features, nut bugs. If not, they indicate a filmmaker tripping over his own tropes. (Wide release)

Night Always Comes: Vanessa Kirby moves easily from superhero gloss in Fantastic Four: First Steps to working-class grit in this Portland-shot adaptation of local novelist Willy Vlautin’s 2022 novel about Lynette (Kirby), who has one night to raise $25,000 or lose the modest home where she lives with her irresponsible mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her brother (Zach Gottsagen), who has Down syndrome. It’s a simple enough conceit, but one that felt more convincing on the page than the screen. (Maybe that’s because in the book she had two nights to get the money together.) As Lynette, who tends bar and performs sex work on the side, tries to cajole cash from a wealthy John (Randall Park), a fellow sex worker (Julia Fox), and anyone else she can think of, her quest becomes more and more sidetracked and dangerous. Meant as an indictment of the housing crisis in America, and Portland in particular, Night Always Comes devolves eventually into a decent but superficial thriller. Kirby’s convincing as a woman who may have made some poor decisions in her past but finds herself up against unforgiving economic realities. Director Benjamin Caron, a TV veteran (The Crown, Andor), does a good job of showcasing the sides of Portland that don’t make it onto either right-wing outrage factories or quirky sketch comedy shows, the side that are often featured in Vlautin’s writing. The film is getting a rare (for Netflix) theatrical release in the Rose City, which is a treat for the many locals who worked on its production. (Hollywood Theatre)

Went Up the Hill: What are the odds that the same week would bring a film inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood” and another inspired, albeit even more loosely, by “Jack and Jill?” Those are the names of the two characters that take up 90% of the screen time in this eerie, impressive Down Under ghost story. In southern New Zealand, at the funeral of a woman named Elizabeth who died by suicide, her long-lost adult son Jack (Dacre Montgomery) appears out of the blue at her funeral. Elizabeth’s wife Jill (the always great Vicky Krieps) had no idea he existed, but allows him to stay with her, much to the chagrin of Elizabeth’s older sister. Almost immediately, Elizabeth’s spirit begins to possess, alternately, Jack and Jill whenever they fall asleep, using them to communicate to the other. Literally haunted by his mother, Jack begins to pry into the circumstances that led to him being taken from her at a young age, while growing increasingly close to his, I guess, stepmother. It’s fascinating to watch Krieps and Montgomery (and director Samuel Van Grinsven) handle this acting challenge, creating a third character between them who grows increasingly forceful in the demands she makes upon the living. It all culminates in a legitimately intense standoff that feels like an exorcism. (Living Room Theaters, Regal Fox Tower)

Also this week

The Donn of Tiki: It wasn’t clear going in whether the life of “Don the Beachcomber,” the inventor of tiki bar culture, would have enough meat on it to merit a 90-plus minute documentary, but considering the ups and downs it took, it makes sense. It also allows time for multiple versions of the various legends that sprang up about the man born Ernest Gantt in 1907, many originating with him, to compete. After traveling the world during the late 1920s, he and his brother got involved in bootlegging and speakeasies during Prohibition, and he opened his first Don the Beachcomber bar the day of its repeal, somehow having sufficient stock on hand to do so. The combination of Cantonese cuisine, Caribbean rum cocktails, and South Pacific décor distinguished the place and gave birth to countless imitators over the decades. He’s hailed as a pioneer and a genius by present-day mixologists for creating the Zombie and other precursors to craft cocktails. But then his wife, perhaps along with the Chicago mob, took it all away. It’s a fascinating story, brought to life when necessary by clever line-drawn animation and a Rankin-Bass-style stop-motion version of Don himself. (Monday 8/18, Kiggins Theatre)

Life After: Filmmaker Reid Davenport (I Didn’t See You There) examines some of the complicated and disturbing issues surrounding assisted suicide and its effect on the disability community, especially when the profit motives of the health care and insurance industries get involved. (Friday 8/15, Tomorrow Theater, open captioned, post-film Q&A with Davenport)

Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War: Japanese filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao stopped in Lebanon in 1971 as they were returning from that year’s Cannes Film Festival. There they made this newsreel-style documentary demonstrating the Japanese Red Army’s work alongside the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as they prepared for a Maoist global revolution. (Wednesday 8/20, Clinton St. Theater)

The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane: The long life and career of 93-year-old singer and activist Dane is chronicled by veteran documentarian Maureen Gosling, the longtime collaborator and partner of Les Blank. While not a household name, Dane’s praises as an artist, feminist, and progressive are sung by Bonnie Raitt, Jane Fonda, and others in this celebration of a woman who worked with everyone from Muddy Waters to Pete Seeger to the Chambers Brothers and who fought against war, racism, and sexism until using California’s End of Life Option Act to draw her own curtain last October at the age of 97. (Wednesday 8/20, Hollywood Theatre)

Sponsor

The Last Class: Following his stint as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich has become a reliable voice of the left, venting outrage at the desecration of the American Dream that has transpired in recent decades while backing it up with data and analysis. This documentary portrait captures the charismatic Reich as he teaches his last class after forty years as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. It’s both a look back at his career and a look forward to the generations that he hopes to inspire to fight for real and lasting change. (Wednesday 8/20, Cinema 21)

Also opening

Nobody 2: “Suburban dad Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk), a former lethal assassin, is pulled back into his violent past after thwarting a home invasion, setting off a chain of events that unravels secrets about his wife Becca’s (Connie Nielsen) past and his own.” (wide release)

Americana: “The lives of local outsiders and outcasts (including Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser) violently intertwine when a rare Lakota Ghost shirt falls onto the black market in a small South Dakota town.” (wide release)

East of Wall: “After the death of her husband, Tabatha (Tabatha Zimiga), a young, tattooed, rebellious horse trainer, wrestles with financial insecurity and unresolved grief while providing refuge for a group of wayward teenagers on her broken-down ranch in the Badlands.” (Living Room Theaters, Salem Cinema)

Jimmy and Stiggs: “A perfect storm of lousy news sees out-of-work filmmaker Jimmy Lang (Joe Begos) spiral into a bender, during which he claims to have been abducted by aliens, and fearing their return, he contacts his old friend Stiggs (Matt Mercer) to help him gear up for war.” (Regal Fox Tower, Clackamas Town Center, Bridgeport Village)

The Knife: “After the mysterious appearance of a stranger (Melissa Leo) in their home, a young Black family must deal with the fallout of their choices, big and small, as a steadfast detective tries to crack the case over the course of one fateful night.” The directorial debut of former NFL cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha was co-written by Mark Duplass.

Witchboard: “A cursed Witchboard awakens dark forces, dragging a young couple into a deadly game of possession and deception.” (Kiggins Theatre)

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Repertory

Highlights this week include more celluloid goodness at the Hollywood Theatre, including both Kill Bill movies and Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby; rare screenings of films by Jacques Rivette and Sam Peckinpah, and the pinnacle of surreal cyberpunk body horror.

Friday 8/15

• The Ballad of Cable Hogue [1970] (Academy Theater, through 8/21)
• Inside Man [2006] (Cinema 21, also 8/16)
• Kill Bill: Vol. 1 [2003] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm, also 8/16)
• Le Pont du Nord [1981] (5th Avenue Cinemas, through 8/17)
• Mandy [2018] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Men in Black [1997] (Academy Theater, through 8/21)
• Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989] (Academy Theater, through 8/21)

Saturday 8/16

• Cannibal! The Musical [1993] (Hollywood Theatre)
• The French Connection [1971] (Cinema 21)
• Kill Bill: Vol. 2 [2004] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm, also 8/16 & 8/20)
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants [2005] (Hollywood Theatre, also 8/17)

Sunday 8/17

• Being John Malkovich [1999] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Cyber City Oedo 808 [1990] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Notting Hill [1999] (Tomorrow Theater)

Monday 8/18

• Moby Dick [1956] (Hollywood Theatre)

Tuesday 8/19

• The 1960s Super Show [collection of 1960s superhero cartoons] (Hollywood Theatre, on 16mm)

Thursday 8/21

• Million Dollar Baby [2004] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm, Q&A with Clint Eastwood biographer Shawn Levy)
• Three Kings [1999] (Tomorrow Theater)