Roads? Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads.

Guest Post: Show Me Love

2012-01-26T19:20:00.000-05:00

Hello all, this is Shenan writing another guest post for Dan, because he seemingly has no motivation to blog when it’s not October. And we just watched a movie that I particularly connected with--you know, the kind where you read 12 different reviews of it after watching just because you want to keep hearing people talk about it. So I figured, if I couldn’t get Dan to write about it, I’d just write about it myself. Anyway, this movie came out in 1998 and presumably the rest of the world doesn’t live under a rock like I do, and has probably seen it or at the very least, is probably aware of its basic plotline. But for those who aren’t, I will have to warn: SPOILERS ahead, because I haven’t yet mastered the artful craft of film writing in such a way that I can talk about the movie, weaving in just enough explanation of the plot incidentally in my analysis to make it all stick, without explicitly summarizing the succession of action. So, read on, and be warned.

Now, I will begin by saying this: I have never been a teenage lesbian in small-town Sweden. This may come as a surprise to some of you, I know. But, truly, on the surface, I seem to have less in common with the two main characters of SHOW ME LOVE, Agnes and Elin, than Donatella Versace has with the 99% (topical hyperbole FTW!), save for my gender and the fact that I too was, at one point, a teenager. But this movie plays so subtly true to the teenage and, frankly, the human experience, with tenderness and compassion, that the details of the setting or the particulars of these girls lives are just that: details. You will continually see parts of yourself, or who you had been, or things you had felt at one point in your life, in it. I equate this movie to what I’ve often said about Bruce Springsteen: I know he can be hit or miss (and I’ve heard “Born in the U.S.A.” on the radio way too many times in my life at this point to even consider not switching the station when it comes on), but I don’t care who you are, the only way you can not adore “Thunder Road” or “The River” or “Dancing in the Dark” is if you have never been a teenager, or have never been in love. And if you were at any time a teenager, then I guarantee you, you have been in love. Unless you were a teen robot. In which case, you were probably the plot of a Disney Channel movie at some point in the mid-90s.

I digress.

SHOW ME LOVE takes place in the small Swedish town of Amal(the namesake of the movie’s original title, FUCKING AMAL), where 16-year-old Agnes (who looks much younger than her years) moved the previous year.

Agnes, quiet and self-awaredly different, has no friends in Amal, save for one wheelchair-bound girl just as unpopular as her, whose friendship is more one of convenience, both being outcasts, than it is based on anything they have in common or even a mutual liking of each other. She’s depressed, lonely, not only ignored but actively hated and harassed, and a lesbian, though she has yet to say as much to anyone directly (all the kids at school seem to somehow know, though). On the flip side of this equation is Elin:

Elin is beautiful, popular, self-assured, much older-looking than her 14 years, with her pick of any and all the teenage boys in town, and just as miserable as Agnes. She’s achingly bored, with what she perceives as both the emptiness of her life and the emptiness of the place she lives, where she fears she’ll be trapped forever because she has no vision of her future, no sense of what she wants to do or what she wants out of life or if anything she could possibly want would even be a realistic possibility, and thus sees no way out of Amal. There seems to be no father in her life, her family is poor—they couldn’t afford another mirror in their apartment after Elin broke theirs, so she has to use the mirror in her building’s elevator to get dressed and do her makeup—and her mother seems to be Elin’s worst nightmare vision of where she could (and probably will) end up: empty and sedated, not even sad or dissatisfied anymore at the lack of…anything, really, in her life, besides her two daughters. I mean, she watches the lottery on TV without buying a lottery ticket. Why? For “the music…and other things,” and how “it’s fun to see what other people win.” Metaphor much?

Oh yes. And Agnes is in love with Elin.

The plot, very briefly goes like this: Elin kisses Agnes ona drunken bet from her sister Jessica, then runs off and the two sisters go to a party. Elin wants to go back and apologize, but Jessica steers her away. The two go to the party, get horrendously drunk, and Johan (a young man in love with Elin, whom Elin seems repulsed by) makes a move on her, which causes her to flee the party. Meanwhile, Agnes, having just been kissed by the one she loves as a joke (ding ding ding! We have a match. I have very similar memories from my own middle school years. Can I just make the ding-ding-ding sound everytime Agnes or Elin has an experience that I can directly relate to from my life between the ages of 11 and 17?) is trying in an almost endearingly inefficient way to slit her writs with a safety razor (the kind that come 10 to a pack).Elin knocks on Agnes’s window, apologizes, and the two end up walking around at night talking. Elin kisses Agnes, sincerely this time. They both dispel their misconceptions about each other: though Agnes is firm in her sexual identity, she has never kissed a girl before, let alone been with scores of them as Elin thought; as much as Elin has messed around with seemingly every guy between the ages of 14 and 19 in Amal, and has a reputation for being promiscuous, she has never slept with a man before.

Elin promises to call Agnes. But frightened of her mother’s and sister’s potential responses to her love for Agnes, Elin is scared away from associating with her, let alone admitting she was attracted to another woman. Elin completely ignores Agnes, Agnes’s heart is broken, and Elin dives immediately into a very sexual relationship with Johan, perhaps in part to convince herself that if she can be attracted to—or at the very least, sleep with—a man, she can ignore what she felt for Agnes. But Elin eventually dumps Johan, corrals Agnes into a single-occupancy bathroom at school, and tells her of her feelings for her. They end up with a crowd outside, who all think Elin is in the bathroom with a boy, goading them to come out so they can see who it is.

I’m going stop there and just talk about all the reasons I loved this movie for awhile, before I segue into the ending. Just personally, I saw so many aspects of my younger self in both Agnes and Elin. Crazy, right? The two polar opposite leads of this movie and I, an unrelated American third party, have lots of stuff in common? I think that right there summarizes the teenage experience: you feel you are so different from everyone else, in every way, all the time. And so does every single other person. But in reality, there is so much of everyone in everyone else. So much that the older I’m getting, the more I’m having trouble comprehending on a day-by-day, person-by-person basis how it could be possible not to find at least something I love in everyone I actually spend time with (well, except the complete asshats). I said I was going to make the ding ding ding! noise whenever I related to Agnes or Elin, but I guess I’m just going to summarize it instead. So much for that gimmick.

First Agnes: she feels so alienated, different, and rejectedby her peers that she acts aloof and angry at everything and everyone while in public, as if they’re all stupid and she is above them, not needing their acceptance because she’s tough as nails. Meanwhile, she sinks into deep, paralyzing depression that renders her unable to do much but lie on the couch and move her head yes or no at one point (ding ding ding…shades of me in highschool). You can also see her coming into her own as the film goes on though, perhaps when she passes the point where she feels like she has nothing to lose, and you can see her self-assurance start to build. She learns to deflect instead of hide, but without lashing out or fueling the fire, as in the scene when three male classmates stick a pornographic photo on her locker. You cansee her emerging from the dark side of teenage-hood into the more self-confident light, and everyone, I’m sure, has also had moments like that when all of a sudden you find that you’ve become a notch more comfortable in your own skin without realizing it.

And Elin: she’s just as alienated as Agnes, but manages to hide it in beneath the layers of makeup, the boys, and her playing of the popularity game. But she never actually connects with anyone or does anything meaningful because, frankly, I think she’s scared to. She creates this promiscuous persona, one who’s wild and unafraid, and is happy to let people believe it from a distance. But she never actually engages with anyone closely enough to let them find out if any of it is true, or what actually lies beneath the surface of Elin, either because she’s not quite sure herself, or doesn’t want to risk them not liking what’s there. Or both. Ding ding ding! Here’s a little personal history of me: I think somewhere probably around 7^thgrade, I started becoming convinced that I knew everything and everyone else knew nothing. Naturally. And, thus, I had to be extreme, and extremely different, to set myself apart from everyone else. Let me give you a picture to demonstrate, circa age 15:

I think I wore that jacket (with anti-war buttons on it) every single day to school. You know, when I wasn’t walking out of school to protest the war in Iraq. I played guitar, wrote poetry, painted psychedelic artwork on my walls, read The Politics of Ecstasy, and hung out in Takoma Park a lot. And, as I said, became increasingly convinced that I knew something big that everyone else was ignorant of. Although I do think I really did feel and believe all those things I felt and believed at that age, there were two other very major factors that contributed to me being how I was back then: one, for the validation of a boy I was in love with (never got that validation, natch), and two, so people could know who I was at a glance, and (so I dreamed) create some big picture of me and what a deep and meaningful and creative person I was, without me actually having to expose any part of myself to others. I was happy to just build up my (imagined) mystique and live behind it, because it beat the alternative of actually giving people the chance to get to know me and possibly like me, for fear that they wouldn’t. Ding. Ding. Ding. Just like Elin. Or, what I read into her character, at least.

I’m sure everyone reading this can probably relate to all of that, and other things in the film, in some way. Because it’s all the universal teenage experience. Loving others so powerfully we’re sure the world might turn on its axis. Wanting to be loved. Being afraid to let ourselves be loved. Sneaking out and then coming home and eating all the chips in the house to make it look like someone with a teenage-sized appetite had been home all night (another part I loved: “Why can’t we just not have eaten the crisps?” “No, she’ll never believe that.”)

And it looks like I did manage to use the dings after all!

Finally, what I also loved about this movie was how it refrained from taking any sort of moral or political stand where it may have otherwise found the ground to. Not that I think taking a stand is a bad thing, but refraining from doing so really let the humanism of the characters shine, without leaving the viewer feeling that they might have merely been agents in some sort of agenda. Which I think was essential for building characters that seem as true as these two.

The movie also never assigns Elin a sexual identity. I thought this was interesting and enlightened, and true to how many human beings actually operate. Not only because of the commonly accepted notion of the Kinsey scale, but because sexuality as an “identity” at all is not a universal construct, it’s a cultural one, and one not shared by all cultures. In some cultures, sex, with whomever, is just something you do, and doesn’t contribute to your sense of self. Way back in ANTH 101, we learned about the Baruya tribe in Papua New Guinea, for instance, believes that manhood does not organically happen, but rather it’s a tangible thing that must be given from men to boys. Thus, pre-pubescent boys must ingest the semen of older men in order to become men themselves. Then once they go through the initiation ritual to become men, they take a wife, sleep with her, and meanwhile pass on their manhood to younger boys. All with no concept of “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality,” or “pedophilia” for that matter, or how their sexual activities contribute in any sense to who they are. “Sexual identity” to them would sound as strange as “food identity” would sound to us if someone defined a large part of who they were by their love of pizza and distaste for artichokes as we do by our sexual preferences and activities (personally, I’m “onion-curious”: I’ll eat them cooked, or in small amounts raw within other foods, but never in large quantities raw, and I won’t call them in the morning).

Likewise, from what the movie gives us, Elin isn’t a young woman who believes herself to be straight until Agnes comes along and leads her to discover that she is gay, or bi-sexual. She is simply someone who loves someone else. She’s someone who’s kissed a lot of guys, has never been in love with anyone before, and then happens to fall in love with Agnes. Even when she sleeps with Johan, there’s no real indication that she didn’t enjoy the experience because she’s definitively not attracted to men as a whole, only that it was not the wonderful thing she always thought sex should be because she doesn’t love Johan (and to be fair, Johan is kind of a spineless prick). At the end, when Agnes finally coaxes Elin into opening the bathroom door and showing the school who was actually in that bathroom together, Elin doesn’t come out declaring “Ta-da! I’m gay!” she comes out declaring (actual quote)“Ta-da! This is my new girlfriend. We’re going to go fuck.” And the two walk off hand-in-hand together, grinning. It’s an important distinction. And it’s an absolutely wonderful ending, to see Agnes finally validated and Elin finally directing her confidence towards something she actually does feel for once.

Though a part of me did still wonder, as Agnes and Elin are shown in Elin’s home drinking chocolate milk together (a nice detail, maybe indicative of how neither has to put on a false sense of adulthood around each other like they do with their peers, and can be vulnerable towards each other?), where did Elin’s fears of being shunned by her mother and sister disappear to? Did they come to fruition, or were those fears overblown to begin with? Does her mother know she and Agnes are girlfriend and girlfriend (we assume the sister knows, since she was there when they emerged from the bathroom), or does she think their friendship is platonic? We don’t know. But, I suppose it’s not something we absolutely need to know for this film’s purposes, either.

So in conclusion, thanks, Dan’s readers, for letting me ramble on about my teenage years and this movie I loved so fucking much. I think I’ll end with the words of Charles Taylor, film reviewer for Salon.com, on this final scene: “There’s humor and sweetness in the way the movie leaves the girls teetering between the shelter of girlhood and the bigger, scarier, more thrilling world of sex. That they don’t seem willing to give up either only makes them even more appealing. Like all adolescents, they want it all, a chocolate milk and a nice afternoon fuck.” Isn’t that all any of us really want? Amen.

Witchery

2011-11-03T00:27:00.003-04:00

David Hasselhoff, a pregnant Linda Blair, an obnoxious child, the worst actress of all time, and some old people end up stranded at a mysterious house on a small, secluded island, and suffer the wrath of a vengeful witch who can make them travel into some sort of evil witchery dimension or something.

The whole month can be summed up with a deceptively simple question: Witchery, or Faceless? Actually, no it can't, those are just two shitty horror movies that Andy procured for me that happened to start and close out the month. I never intended to end this year's festivities with Witchery; in fact, Andy and I tried to watch it the first weekend of October. But we watched it late at night and got kinda tired the first time and turned it off after a confusing half hour. Then we tried again a few weeks later... and the DVD turned out to be broken, and the last half hour wouldn't play. So I finally tracked down another copy and watched the rest of it on Halloween.

And that story is a lot more interesting than Witchery itself, although unlike some of the other unfortunate crap I watched this month, it's a pretty funny bad horror movie. It has an incoherent plot about haunted houses and witches and mysterious lights and alternate dimensions, a lot of elaborate but shitty looking and poorly staged make up effects (that one woman sure takes getting her mouth stitched shut well), a really hilarious bad recurring effect where shots of the actors waving their arms and moaning are superimposed over some poorman's 2001-style swirling void. And I swear the film ends with the world's worst actress, in a monotone voice I assume was meant to convey horror, saying "A baby?" and then looking directly into the camera:

If I didn't know better, I'd think the filmmakers were actually trying to make a comedy. Although it still wouldn't have been a very good comedy.

Grade: D++

I do these marathons every year in the hopes that I'll find some forgotten classic or unknown gems. Although I had no trouble discovering a lot of okay to really good movies this year, I didn't really find anything I hadn't seen before that really blew me away. I worry sometimes that I've already seen all the great horror movies that have already been made, but that's not going to stop me from searching. And to show you how positive I still feel about all this, here is a list of the movies I saw for the first time this month that I enthusiastically recommend, even if none of them were quite great:

(in no particular order)

Nightwish

Rampage

The Abandoned

Scissors

Vanishing on 7th Street

Bereavement

A Horrible Way to Die

Make-Out With Violence

A Chinese Ghost Story 2

I Bury the Living

The Baby

Kuroneko

Rampage

2011-11-02T23:50:00.000-04:00

A ruthless serial killer is captured and put on trial. The liberal prosecutor is given a tough assignment: to get the jury to go for the death penalty.

My final William Friedkin film for YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ, Rampage is a little less of a horror movie than The Guardian was, instead it's sort of a legal thriller with some horror movie elements. What it does have that The Guardian lacked is that spooky Friedkin brand of ambiguity. The film is actually an interesting and sometimes provocative probing of an interesting idea, which is how do we legally define insanity, and how much can an insane person be held accountable for their actions? For clearly this man is nuts; no sane person would commit these crimes. And yet, he shows forethought, planning, a sense that he knows what he did was wrong...

I thought for a while that this movie might be taking a more conservative stance on this issue, but in classic Friedkin fashion, you're actually less sure about how to feel about everything by the end. The killer remains not only mysterious but unknowable. He is left both unexplained and, unlike so many other serial killers in film, unglamorized. Is he remorseless, or simply un-self-aware? He expresses a desire to change, but is he for real, or is it an act? Rampage reminded me a little of The Ugly, another serial killer film I watched this month. But where that film sought to explore and explain, Rampage is all the more chilling and effective because it refuses to explain, and rather takes a hard look at the uncomprehandle nature of the mind of a killer.

Grade: B

Screamtime

2011-11-02T23:31:00.002-04:00

I believe this is officially the laziest setup for an anthology film ever: two guys steal a couple of horror movies from the video store and watch them over at a friends house. In the movies they watch: the enemies of a bullied puppeteer are brutally murdered by a mysterious killer; a woman has strange visions of a killer roaming around her new home; a young man plans to rob the old ladies he works for, and then, um, something about haunted lawn gnomes I guess.

The poor quality of the Netflix streaming video didn't help, I'm sure, but I found Screamtime to be near unwatchable. It's a British anthology film (though the wraparound story is American, for some reason), but lacking in any of the style, class, wit, or budget that distinguished the classics like Tales From the Crypt or Vault of Horror. It's a dull, awkward looking film with overlong stories that build to obvious endings. It may not quite be the worst movie I saw this October, but it may have been the dullest.

Grade: D

Creature

2011-11-02T23:13:00.002-04:00

Astronauts, space monsters, let's do Alien on a budget, you know the drill.

Notable things about Creature:

1) Klaus Kinski having fun overacting in an extended cameo.

2) A slightly campy tone, sort of a throw back to old 50's sci fi movies.

Otherwise, this is just like every other sci fi/horror movie to come out after Alien.

Grade: C

Case 39

2011-11-02T20:03:00.002-04:00

A social worker saves a little girl from her strange, murderous parents. She is granted custody of the child, but soon discovers that maybe the parents weren't the dangerous ones after all.

Case 39 takes a while to get going, and for a little while it seemed like it was a perfect example of everything I hate about the studio horror films of the last decade or two: heavy-handed screenplay, choppy direction lacking in finesse, bombastic music, name actors floundering in underwritten roles. But when the other shoe finally drops, and Case 39 finally starts to turn towards its real story, it becomes a surprising amount of expertly manipulative, if silly, fun. It reminded me a bit of another recent evil-child movie, Orphan, although not quite as awesome.

The plot grows increasingly crazy (in good ways), the major set pieces (especially the one where a bunch of hornets crawl out of a dude's mouth, ears and eyes) are solid, and the child actor has that amazing Dakota-Fanning-like ability to seem far too mature and intelligent for her age. I'm not sure if this movie was intended in total seriousness, and if it was then it's probably something of a failure. But as a piece of absurd, far-fetched fun, it had me mostly delighted.

Grade: B-

The Legend of Hell House

2011-11-01T19:47:00.002-04:00

A group of paranormal experts and psychics are hired to investigate an infamous, supposedly haunted house.

The Legend of Hell House is a throw back to classic haunted house movies like The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill, with a little bit of sex and violence thrown in to update it for the 70's. Like those films, it tries to play up a central mystery as to whether or not something supernatural is going on, or if there is a rational explanation for the strange events. I think the main reason I was mostly indifferent to this one, despite some solid technical credentials, is that it goes about this the wrong way. The problem is that the events are clearly supernatural, and the only mystery is whether or not it is being caused by a ghost, or by the psychic powers of some of the main characters. The tension in this type of story is supposed to be between the real and the fantastical, but here it's between one ludicrous supernatural explanation and another equally ludicrous supernatural explanation. Whatever "rationality vs faith" (or however you want to term it) debate there is raised by the story is immediately made moot, and I spent most of the movie wondering why they even bothered making it a mystery at all. The film's frequent stabs at trying to seem authoritative and plausible just make it all the more silly. It opens up with a disclaimer that though the film is work of fiction, it's based on stuff that, like, could totally possibly happen or something. Which is some pretty hilarious bullshit.

On the other hand, the film does star Roddy McDowell, which counts for a lot.

Grade: C

Alucarda

2011-10-30T15:01:00.005-04:00

A young woman, sent to a convent by her father, is roomed with the mysterious, free-spirited Alucarda. Unfortunately, Alucarda is maybe a little too free-spirited and adventurous, and soon the girls are all caught up in a world of satanic rituals, orgies, torture, vampires, and gratuitous nudity.

Alucarda aims to be, I think, a sort of surreal, over-the-top, possibly intentionally campy expression of religious and sexual hysteria. The dream-like opening scenes, where the girls meet some weird hairy man in the woods and follow him to a castle no questions asked, showed a lot of promise as oddball entertainment. It keeps this weird tone going through the whole film, but that doesn't really prove to be enough. At some point, it just seems like, as ridiculous as the whole film is, it really needs to cut loose and bust out a crazy blood bath or something. Instead, it mostly feels like a film full of half measures; everything is all weird and tawdry, sure, with the sex and the torture and beheadings and stuff, but nothing crazy enough ever happens, and never for a sustained period of time. I guess shit does finally hit the fan at the very end, but by that point it was too little, too late. For such a strange, sleazy film, it could have benefited from a little less restraint.

Grade: C

Eyes Without a Face

2011-10-29T12:52:00.001-04:00

A wealthy, amoral surgeon and his loyal assistant begin abducting young women, with plans to use them as donors for his disfigured daughter's face transplant.

I had sort of wanted to try to make Eyes Without a Face my last movie of October, since I started the month with Jesus Franco's crappy ripoff Faceless. But I have tentative plans on the 31st, and I was worried I'd accidentally blow it and not fit this one in in time.

Of course, if you haven't seen this one, it's a real classic. It's a creepy but classy affair, icky and surprisingly violent for its time, but with a strange elegance and beauty to it. The doctor's daughter, Christiane, is one of the real accomplishments in horror cinema. She has a horribly disfigured face (which we never see, except in one purposefully out of focus shot) and is made to wear an unnerving, white, expressionless mask. By all appearances, Christiane is the film's monster, but she's a complex, conflicted character, and the one the audience ends up most empathizing with.

I had not seen this in several years, and the thing I forgot about it that is really cool is that the first 20 minutes or so play as kind of a mystery. The film opens with the doctor's assistant dumping a corpse in a river, so we know something terrible is going on, but for a while we are lead to believe that the corpse is that of Christiane, and the doctor's actual involvement in what is going on is unclear.

This leads to a great scene that plays very differently the second time you see the film, where the doctor runs in to the father of the young woman he has murdered. The doctor has falsely identified her body as Christiane's, and when the man tries to open to the doctor about his concern for his missing daughter, the doctor chastises him, saying something like "It's funny I should have to console you, when you still have some hope left." That shit is chilling on so many levels.

Grade: B+

American Horror Story (Episode4 "Halloween Part I")

2011-10-28T19:09:00.002-04:00

Okay, the last American Horror Story of October and... I don't really have a lot to say. This was a major improvement over last week's silly episode, but doesn't show enough of the promise that I felt episode 2 displayed. There's enough crazy stuff going on by the "cliffhanger" endings that I'm curious to see part 2, which means I'm hanging around at least one more week. Yet it suffered from the same lack of focus as last week's episode and the pilot, and mostly just felt like an hour of setup for what I'm hoping is going to be a cool payoff in part 2.

The biggest development was the death of Addie, and since she died before her body could be put on the property, it looks like she won't be coming back as a ghost. Which is a damn shame, because Addie was (by default) the closest thing the show had to a likable character. They spent a lot of time setting things up for her character over the past 4 episodes that I'm kinda stunned to see her go so soon, so maybe she will (somehow?) be back. I hope so, because the Harmon family and everyone else on this damn show are so mopey that even when they get to go over the top (like this week when the dad punted Burn Face's candy basket across the lawn) it still feels pretty dour.

Grade: C+

Attack the Block

2011-10-28T18:47:00.001-04:00

A gang of teenagers in London find themselves doing battle with some nasty, hairy aliens with glow in the dark teeth.

This is a classic case of a movie getting overhyped before I saw it. It's funny and cute and I liked it, but when people start invoking the name of John Carpenter in their reviews I'm sort of expecting something a little more accomplished than this. Attack the Block has a great cast (this ought to be a starmaker for the kid who plays Moses, the hero) and a nice look, but its pace is rushed and uneven. I can appreciate that the filmmakers may have wanted to get right to the action and keep the momentum going, but if that was the case they should have streamlined the story more. Even coming in under 90 minutes it still has too many damn subplots and characters padding things out.

I'd say it's all more clever than successful. It has a fun screenplay with some good ideas for some cool action and suspense sequences (especially one where the kids get lost and disoriented in a smoke-filled hallway) but director Joe Cornish doesn't really have the chops to pull it off. As fun as it is to watch punk kids fight evil space monsters, the action is all kind of choppy and otherwise unremarkable in its execution.

I don't want to pile on this one too much, so I'll stop here. I still did quite enjoy it, I just wish my expectations had been set a little lower. I'd say it's more of a slight but genuine pleasure, rather than the new classic some folks have painted it as.

Grade: B-

The Silent House

2011-10-28T18:27:00.000-04:00

A young woman and her father are staying at a creepy old house, which they have been hired to fix up. Her father goes to investigate some strange noises, and she hears what sounds like a struggle. Is she trapped in the house with a killer?

The gimmick of The Silent House is that it was designed to look like it was filmed all in one shot. In fact, I've read many claims online that it was done in one shot, but I'm positive I saw several masked edits. I love checking out stuff like this, but I also have to admit that it's kind of pointless. There's rarely a valid artistic reason for attempting this kind of thing, it's usually just a gimmick slapped on the cover up how unremarkable the rest of the film. Sometimes you get a nice fit of style and material, like the similarly gimmicked Rope, but not everyone has Hitchcock's technical chops or his gift for showmanship.

The Silent House is actually pretty good for a while. The house is a great location, with great set design, and that's important because 80% of this film is just a girl walking around a dark house with a lantern looking at things. The setup is suspenseful, and despite the fact that the one-shot style must have limited the filmmakers' options in terms of lighting, framing, etc, it has a little bit of atmosphere going for it, too.

I think the main thing that gets in its way is the underwhelming story, which ends up limiting the film's possibilities rather than expanding them. I would have been perfectly happy if it was just a girl in a house with a killer, with quiet scenes of her exploring the house looking for an escape route punctuated by an attack every 10 or 15 minutes. Instead, the movie runs out of steam probably not much past the half way mark, as details of what is happening are left vague because, sigh, there's a SPOILERS really predictable twist ending coming. The kind I really hate, where it pretty much negates everything that came before it. That's annoying under normal circumstances, but it's even worse here because it seems to violate the entire point of the one-shot gimmick. Presumably everything we're seeing is happening in "real time," but the ending makes it clear that much of what we were seeing wasn't happening at all.

Grade: C+

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

2011-10-27T23:46:00.000-04:00

I think the title says it all.

For years, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been a film I very much liked but never really loved the way a horror fan is supposed to love it. It's an undisputed classic, yet as much as I liked it I never thought it stood up to any of the other classics from its era. Why was I reluctant to embrace it fully? Was it because it's not as suspense driven as my favorites tend to be? Was it because of the unlikable lead characters? Was it because of it's more rough hewn look, when I typically prefer something a little more elegant?

All true, but I think I need to finally just say "uncle" and admit what this is. It will probably never mean as much to me as Halloween or Deep Red or Dawn of the Dead, but who said this had to be a horse race? It's a masterpiece of grimy, gritty atmosphere. There are countless strikingly framed shots. The set design is awesome. The lead actors all kind of suck, but the actors playing the killers are creepy as hell. There are more than a handful of all-time classic horror movie scenes, most notably the first appearance of Leatherface, which has to be in the top 10. It's not as scary as my other favorites are, but it's strange and wildly entertaining, and a lot more darkly funny than I think it gets credit for. So I hereby shed off any hesitation I had about calling this a great horror movie. It's a great horror movie.

Grade: A-

The Abandoned

2011-10-27T23:24:00.001-04:00

A woman travels to Russia to trace her family history, and ends up at their old farmhouse where she meets her long lost twin. Only some spooky shit is going down there, and soon enough she's facing off against a sinister force.

I watched two of Nacho Cerda's short films earlier in the month, and though neither was exactly a home run, they both showed enough potential that I knew I wanted to check out The Abandoned, apparently his only feature. And I'm glad I did. This is a weird, spooky film, heavy on atmosphere and with a nice dash of suspense. At heart I suppose it is a haunted house story, but one with some odd and unique ideas, enough so that you're not really sure where it's going at any given moment. And I'm not even sure I could totally explain what was supposed to have happened, but sometimes I like it like that. It has ghosts and ghouls and time loops and man-eating warthogs, really going out there with a crazy story and yet maintaining an eerie tone that keeps it from getting silly.

Though not completely without dialogue as his short films were, Cerda is good a crafting long stretches of film without any talking, focusing more on mood and suspense and doing a pretty good job of it. Good chunks of the movie are just the protagonist walking around witnessing spooky things happening, which can be tedious in some films, but I'd say the mix of creepy ideas and atmosphere is potent enough to keep the viewer engaged throughout.

Grade: B

Anthropophagus

2011-10-27T00:11:00.000-04:00

A bunch of obnoxious assholes take a trip to a little island town, only the town appears to be inexplicably deserted. Before you know it, they're all being picked off by some sort of invincible (?) cannibal dude, who apparently has already murdered literally everyone in town.

Andy pretty much insisted I watch this one, so I obliged. But I don't think he wanted me to watch it because he thought I would like it, so much as he bought it blind, didn't like it, but wanted it to get some use so it didn't feel like a complete waste of money.

Anyways, it's a lousy movie: ugly, boring and artless. And I'm still not sure I understand the story. So, like, the cannibal guy managed to wipe out the entire town, including all law enforcement, without anyone realizing (?) even though he's just one dude. So I think they explain at one point, when the protagonists find a journal that details what happened, that the guy is unkillable. Except at the end they totally kill him in a normal, straight forward way. So if he wasn't invincible, how the hell did he not get killed by the cops or something?

Whatever. The only remotely good thing about the movie is the killer, who looks genuinely creepy and, if I recall, has a cool introduction where he steps out of the shadows and there's lightning and stuff. Otherwise, this is just dull eurosleaze best suited for the lowest common denominator gorehound.

Grade: D

God Told Me To

2011-10-26T23:59:00.001-04:00

After a string of random, seemingly unrelated murders by ordinary people, a detective finds that the perpetrators keep giving the same reason for their acts. And guess what that is?

Larry Cohen is something of a master of conceptual horror, by which I mean he has great ideas for horror movies, and his films rely more on those concepts and exploring them then they often do on, say, crafting tight set pieces or building atmosphere or what have you. And this has got to be one of his best ideas. It raises so many provocative questions about the nature of religion and faith in such a cool, creepy-ass way that of course the movie isn't really going to be able to live up to it, and the explanation and conclusion is going to be a bit of a letdown. That's just how Cohen usually rolls, and I think it's best to just accept the great ideas then nitpick how it could have been better.

Grade: B-

Paranormal Activity 3

2011-10-25T00:32:00.000-04:00

In this prequel, we find out how Katie and Kristi first experienced the supernatural, as children. And fortunately for us, their mom's boyfriend videotaped the whole thing, so the movie conveniently doesn't have to change format from the series' found footage gimmick.

I didn't really care for either of the first two Paranormal Activity movies, but the thing that the original understood that the sequel didn't seem to get is that fear in movies is all about anticipation. It's not so much about the scary thing as it is about waiting for the scary thing to happen. Anyone can say "boo!", but getting someone to dread a hypothetical future boo is the real skill set.

Part 3 understands this, and in fact I thought it was the best of the series so far. It was directed by the guys who did Catfish, the much talked about documentary that's not really talked about because of its merits or flaws so much as because everyone wants to know if it was bullshit. Whether or not Paranormal Activity 3 is their first fake-umentary or their second, both films are somewhat adroit at milking the audience's anticipation of what is going to happen next for tension.

Though the story is just another rehash of the events of the original (with, granted, a bit of a twist at the end this time) complete with an abrupt anticlimax, this one is probably the most clever of the three. The film's masterstroke is to have one of the cameras mounted on an oscillating fan, slowly panning between the kitchen and the living room and creating a nice tension between what's in frame and what's out. This leads to some fun scenes where objects ominously disappear, or mysterious figures appear, as the camera pans back and forth.

There's not a lot of what I look for in horror films going on here. There's little to no atmosphere, not much going on that's conceptually scary or disturbing, the story is neither original nor a clever twist on the old. All it really has is the suspense factor, and it's not scary enough to me to sustain feature length. (It probably didn't help that I saw this the morning after watching Halloween and The House of the Devil, which is sort of like taking a master class in suspense). Yet there was at least a little tension here and there, and I caught myself having fun watching this one in a way that I didn't with the previous installments. All in all, not bad.

Grade: C+

The House of the Devil

2011-10-25T00:03:00.003-04:00

Despite her friend's warnings, a college student takes a babysitting gig under shady circumstances because she's hard up for cash. Between the odd behavior of the family, and a shadowy figure lurking around outside, something is going on, but what?

Ti West's The House of the Devil, from 2009, has fast become one of my favorite horror movies. It's like some sort of perfect distillation of everything I love about the genre. It's focused on suspense rather than shock (but it knows how to shock when necessary). It is deliberately paced, yet the story is streamlined to its essentials. It's richly atmospheric without being distractingly stylized. It knows how to use violence effectively without relying on it to provide all the entertainment.

And, maybe most importantly, it's legitimately scary, but in a fun way. These days, if a horror movie is scary it tends to have to be disturbing or completely downbeat, or if it's fun then it's a horror/comedy. It's such a rare treat to find a movie that understands how fear and fun don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Grade: A

Halloween

2011-10-24T23:44:00.000-04:00

If you seriously don't know what this movie is about, then congratulations, you're just like our downstairs neighbors/friends were Saturday before we forced them to watch this. John Carpenter's Halloween is one of my all-time favorite movies, period, but I go back and forth on whether or not it's my favorite horror movie. I go mostly back and forth between this and Carpenter's The Thing (meaning I do feel comfortable calling him my favorite horror movie director, and maybe just flat out favorite director), although catch me on the right day and I might argue for Aliens, or Deep Red, or Dawn of the Dead.

I'm not going to write any more about this, because I might be using Halloween for the kick-off post for a horror movie themed blog project I've been considering. So, we'll see if that happens.

Grade: A+

The Guardian

2011-10-24T20:54:00.000-04:00

A young couple, new parents, discover the shocking truth about their new live-in nanny. No, it's not a Hand That Rocks The Cradle situation, actually she just worships some sort of tree-god to which she intends to sacrifice their baby.

A killer tree seems kind of a silly thing to base a horror movie around. And, you know, it is. I mean, even considering that this tree is pretty tough, able to rip off people' limbs and eat them and cause them to spontaneously combust; even considering that it has a loyal pack of ferocious wolves to do its bidding; even though it has a sexy, baby-stealing nanny doing its dirty work... just, like, don't go into the woods. End of movie.

Still, The Guardian is actually a lot of fun. It doesn't really have a good screenplay, or good acting, or anything like that, but it's actually quite well shot, atmospheric, entertainingly violent, with a few solid set pieces to round it out. And that's because this silly little horror movie was directed by none other than the great William Friedkin. This was 1990, when Friedkin's stock wasn't as high as was in the 70's, so this is a lot less ambitious and artsy than his classics; I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a work for hire. It lacks the spooky ambiguity and strong central performances of his best films, but it just goes to show you how a director can craft weak material into something worthwhile if they have the technical chops for it.

Grade: B-

Kuroneko

2011-10-23T18:16:00.001-04:00

The ghosts of two women who were raped and murdered by a group of samurai get their revenge by luring samurai wandering through the woods back to their home to murder them. A young warrior is sent to do battle with the spirits, and discovers that they are in fact his wife and mother.

I was taken aback for a moment when the translated title of Kuroneko came up on the screen as Black Cat. This couldn't possibly be another adaptation of the Poe story, right? And luckily it wasn't, although I guess resetting a Poe story in Feudal Japan would be novel.

Last year I watched Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba for my October festivities, and it was an offbeat, moody drama/horror that I very much admired. Made by Shindo just a few years later, Kuroneko shares more than a few similarities with the other film, and in fact sometimes feel like a more elaborate (bigger budgeted?) rehash. This one has a great first act and final act, but I thought it floundered too much in the middle, with a little too much focus on melodrama and not as much on the horror and the atmosphere. So I didn't enjoy it as much as Onibaba, but it's still an interesting, sometimes pretty eerie supernatural horror movie with a little bit of revenge drama thrown in for good measure.

Grade: B

American Horror Story (Episode 3 "Murder House")

2011-10-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

Well, that sucked. Right off the bat, the episode disappointed, opening with a pointless flashback to events we've already heard about and then segueing into more boring family melodrama before the opening credits. I had been hoping that, as per the first two episodes, American Horror Story was going to start every week with a cold open that was essentially a short story unto itself. Instead, it was just a bunch of development of the still uninteresting, unfocused master plot(s?), and the rest of the episode followed suit. Like the pilot, this didn't really have a strong central story, it was more a bunch of shit that happened that wouldn't even really feel related if it weren't all happening in the same episode. Unlike the pilot, however, none of this was campy or crazy or over-the-top enough to hold my interest. The story in the middle of the episode about the previous owners was okay, and the abrupt murder at the end at least made me laugh, but that was about it for entertainment value.

Also, the dude with the burned face... he's got to be in the father's imagination, right? Otherwise, how did he know all that info about the lover, and why was he there to kill her just at the perfect moment? So I'm guessing that the father is insane and is eventually going to try to murder his family a la his imaginary friend's backstory, only then ol' Burn Face asks him for $1,000. Not sure why a fake personaily would need cash. Hmm.

Grade: C-

Body Melt

2011-10-22T12:15:00.000-04:00

Residents of a small Australian town are secretly the test subjects of an evil corporation, trying out a strange new drug. Unfortunately, the side effects include melting, exploding, birthing mutant killer babies, and flat out vanishing into thin air.

Body Melt feels scattershot throughout, so I wasn't too surprised to see at the end that it was based on four different short stories by the director. The experimental drug thing mainly seems like an excuse to hang together a bunch of otherwise disconnected scenes of funny, gross-out special effects. And there's not much more to the movie than the effects. The movie feels a little like early Peter Jackson (and I'm not just saying that because of the accents. Not entirely, anyway), but where as the dopey tone of some of Jackson's movies could be charming, here it's a little more groan-inducing. The attempts at humor in the story and dialogue are weak, with most of the laughs coming from the enthusiastic, if unconvincing, special effects. Good news is, there are a lot of these effects, enough to keep you entertained through the brief run time.

Grade: C+

Bloody Reunion

2011-10-21T20:51:00.003-04:00

In this South Korean slasher flick, a group of former students, now adults, have a reunion at the home of their old, ailing teacher. As the trip wears on, old resentments start to come out, tension is in the air, and soon enough some psycho in a bunny mask is running around slaughtering everyone.

South Korea has given the world some of the best, most stylish, most creative, most unique genre films of the last decade or so. Bloody Reunion should most definitely not be included on that list. There's very little about it to recommend outside of the occasional striking image and some kill scenes notable for their creativity and brutality. Otherwise, this is a slow moving mess, filled with whiny, obnoxious characters, that builds up to one of those annoying twist endings that negates everything that came before... and then has the gall to drag on for another 10 or so tedious minutes of what appears to be sincere melodrama.

Apparently, the movie's original title was To Sir With Love, which I have to admit is a pretty hilarious, deliberately ironic name. The teacher is female, so that name wouldn't make a lot of sense, but I'm assuming the main reason it was released under a different name in America is that it was a copyright issue.

Grade: C-

Make-Out With Violence

2011-10-21T20:35:00.003-04:00

A small town mourns the apparent death of Wendy, a teenage girl that everybody loved. Twin brothers Carol and Patrick and their young brother Beetle are taking it especially hard... until they find that Wendy has returned from the dead, as a zombie, and they decide to take her in.

Make-Out with Violence initially got on my radar because the premise sounded a bit like Deadgirl, a movie I kinda hated. I wanted to see what someone else would do with similar material, and much to my delight, the two films couldn't be more different. Deadgirl is a film about teenage boys who find a female zombie and rape her. Make-Out with Violence is a film about teenage boys who find a female zombie, and care for and fall in love with her. In fact, Make-Out isn't really a horror film, it's more like someone took a quirky, coming of age, indie comedy drama and added an offbeat horror movie twist to it. It evokes the films of Wes Anderson, or Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, or, as my wife astutely pointed out, The Adventures of Pete and Pete (although much less wacky).

Sometimes on my blog I think maybe I'm prone to complaining about the technical aspects of low budget films, and I worry that maybe I come off as trashing those movies simply for their limited means, meanwhile praising other movies simply for having better resources. But that's not what I mean to say. My problem is with the low budget films with no vision, or the ones ambitious in the wrong ways. Too many low budget horror movies want to emulate more effects/set-design/money driven films that they can't hope to match, and end up looking shoddy and laughable.

Make-Out with violence is so cheap it that I'm basically assuming that it was made by a group of friends in their back yards, but it has a real style, tone and point of view to it. It's a real movie by real filmmakers, and although far from perfect and a little derivative, it is strange, effective and a little poignant. It over relies on its ubiquitous, standard issue, soft rock indie soundtrack, and it mishandles a potentially great ending for a bit of a last minute let down, but it's still the kind of thing that gives indie movies a good name. It's the directorial debut of the Deagol Brothers (really brothers? I can't find their names online), and I am definitely on board if they make another feature.

Grade: B

Requiem for a Vampire

2011-10-20T23:41:00.002-04:00

Two young women, apparently on the run from the law, aimlessly wander the countryside. They are captured by a vampire and his brood, where they are to take part in their orgies and massacres and whatnot.

I don't know what brought me to watch another Jean Rollin movie, considering that The Grapes of Death and Zombie Lake are two of the worst films I've seen in my life, but here I am trying him out again. And I bet it will happen again some day. I just want to understand what the deal is, why this maker of such ugly looking, tedious, stupid movies seems to have a legit cult following. I keep hoping one day I'm gonna watch one of these pieces of shit and something will click, and even if I don't like it, I'll at least get it.

I think I'm getting closer, but I'm not there yet. Requiem for a Vampire is terrible, but it kind of tricks you into thinking it's not terrible at first. (I think Grapes of Death might have done the same). It starts abruptly, in the middle of a car chase/shoot out, with the two women being chased by the cops while dressed as clowns with no explanation as to how any of this came to be. It sounds awesome, and in theory it is, although in classic Rollin fashion the actual chase is dull. Eventually the chase ends, the women torch their car (with their wounded accomplice still inside) and begin wandering the countryside. There's next to no dialogue during any of this, so for a while you're thinking "Ok, maybe this isn't terrible, it's just arty." You think the long shots of them walking around doing jack shit might be setting some sort of mood. You think it's leading somewhere.

I think this must be what Rollin fans feel; they see the flat, boring, stagey, silly nonsense as a bold stylistic choice, the see the lack of a coherent plot as surrealism, they see the shitty looking sets and costumes as deliberately sparse. But I think if you take a hard look, you'll see there's no there there. The film just descends into an incoherent mess of gratuitous, unsexy sex (and rape) scenes, lame attempts at titillation, and dull, unconvincing, meaningless violence. The sex is probably the worst because it's so icky. I don't say that as a prude; I love sex and nudity in films, and this movie has some gorgeous women that I very much looked forward to seeing naked. It's just that the scenes are awkwardly long and mechanical, and no fun. And Rollin doesn't seem to have the healthiest view of women and female sexuality, managing to both sexualize and infantalize the two women, often at the same time. Ick, dude.

Sort of the poor, perverted man's Lucio Fulci, Rollin does the microbudget horror thing and maybe tries to infuse with a little arthouse flavor, but he takes the worst elements of both worlds. This is by far the best of the three Rollin films I've seen and it's still the worst piece of shit I've watched all month. And I'm thankful for that. My pointless grades have been way too homoginized so far; everything has been mediocre to good, but nothing I haven't seen before has been great or terrible. Finally, something terrible.

Grade: D

Red State

2011-10-20T23:17:00.001-04:00

Three horny teenage boys plan to meet a stranger they met online for sex, and instead find themselves captured by a weirdo group of fundamentalist Christians with some extreme ideas on how to atone for your sins.

Way back in February, I wrote a post where I made a bunch of predictions about how Kevin Smith's ambitious but also kind of obnoxious plans for the distribution of Red State, his first ever non-comedy, would turn out. I then, more or less, promptly lost interest and forgot to keep following the story. So I'm not really sure if any of my predictions came true, and at the moment I'm too lazy to do any research.

There is one comment, though, that I'd like to eat. Or at least nibble a bit. I predicted that it would lack "the needed atmosphere and tight directorial craft that make for a truly special horror film." I guessed correctly that I would enjoy it but have mixed feelings overall, but my problems with the film honestly had little to do with Smith's direction. In fact, he does a pretty okay job going out of his comfort zone and trying something new. Cop Out had lead me to think Smith incapable of doing anything besides scenes of people talking at each other, but Red State looks and feels like a real horror movie. So kudos to Kevin for stretching his wings.

The problem I guess is that it's a movie that works more in concept than it does in execution. For instance, it pulls what is, in theory, one of my favorite tricks in horror movies, right out of the Hitchcock playbook, where SEMI SPOILERS characters we might assume are the lead characters are abruptly knocked off, making way for other characters. It's a nice way to shock the audience out of complacency, but I don't think Smith pulls it off entirely, and the result is that the film feels more disjointed than it should.

The same goes for a lot of other major elements. The film is going for a pretty bleak tone, with no real heroes or likable characters, which I admire but it also has the side effect from removing a lot of the suspense out of the second half of the film. It essentially becomes bad guys vs bad guys. It doesn't stop being entertaining, but you're not so much invested in the actual outcome. Near the end, Smith throws in what seems to be a pretty radical, biblical twist... but then walks back from it and provides a much less interesting explanation.

The film is, the more I think about it, chock full of great ideas, but a lot of them don't really play out as successfully as you'd like. It's not a disaster either; these ideas are legitimately good and they get milked enough to keep you going along. Plus, you can't help but admire the effort. It sounds like Smith is going back to comedy, but I'd actually like to see him tackle something like this again. It's an ambitious film with a lot of intriguing elements, strong performances, unique touches. Even if it doesn't come together like gangbusters, we need more people out there trying to make these kinds of horror movies.

Grade: B-

Evil Dead Trap

2011-10-19T20:27:00.001-04:00

In this Japanese horror film (with absolutely no relation to the beloved American Evil Dead series), a woman who works for a television program that airs viewer submissions receives what appears to be a snuff film. She and her crew decide to try to track down the source of the tape, only to find themselves ensnared in a deadly trap. An evil dead trap, if you will. (I won't).

What starts off seeming like a Japanese Videodrome turns into more of a slasher film, with something of a focus on bizarre, elaborate traps. So in that sense, I suppose Evil Dead Trap is more like a precursor to the Saw series than anything else. For a while, it's not bad verging on good. It looks nice, has a cool score, some good gore effects, a really fun scene involving a crossbow set to go off when someone opens the door. It had its problems (including a gratuitous rape scene), but it was shaping up to be a good time at the movies.

Unfortunately, it turns in to one of those slasher movies where pretty much all the side characters get killed in the first half, the movie goes slack, and the heroine spends the rest of the movie aimlessly wandering around, hiding from the killer, and slowly solving the not particularly interesting mystery at the center of the film. Outside of a ridiculous twist in the final 15 minutes that gives a slight boost to the final confrontation, not much of interest happens during the second half of the film. It's boring enough to pretty much retroactively wipe out any of the fun you had during the first half.

Grade: C

Torture Garden

2011-10-19T18:57:00.000-04:00

It's your prototypical anthology film setup: a creepy carnival barker promises to show a group of people their fates in exchange for a little extra money. In the stories, a man becomes obsessed with his late uncle's strange, sinister cat; an up and coming Hollywood actress discovers the bizarre secret behind her costars' good looks; a piano becomes possessed by a vengeful spirit; and collector of the works of Poe kills a fellow collector to get a look at a very special part of his collection, and what he finds is quite curious indeed.

Pretty run of the mill as far as British anthologies from this era go, but that's not a bad thing because I kind of love these movies. I don't have a lot to add (as much as I enjoy these movies, they are all sort of the same, so it's hard to think of new tings to say) except that these are fun, reasonably well made stories, and if you enjoy this sort of thing then it's worth your time. Director Freddie Francis also directed at least two other anthology horror films: the excellent Tales From the Crypt and the acceptably okay (though wonderfully titled) Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. I'd say that Torture Garden falls somewhere between those two, in terms of quality.

Grade: B-

The Thing (2011)

2011-10-19T00:28:00.001-04:00

In this prequel to/remake of John Carpenter's The Thing (itself a remake of The Thing From Another World, itself based on a story called "Who Goes There?"), we discover what happened to the Norwegian outpost, the grisly story of which were only hinted at in Carpenter's film. Turns out that the Thing, an alien capable of ingesting and then perfectly imitating other living creatures, um, basically did the same kind of stuff to them that he did to the American's in the 1982 version.

Look, Carpenter's The Thing is one of my top 2 or 3 favorite horror movies of all time (and by extension, one of my all time favorite movies of any kind), so there was no way that this was going to hold a candle to it. Just not possible. But that's cool. I'm a laid back guy, I try to keep an open mind. I don't get upset when my favorite movies get needless remakes. In fact, considering that Carpenter's version was already at least the third version of this story, it would be downright silly to complain about it being remade. I went in with an open mind.

It's not terrible. It's just not any good, either. It somehow manages to be reverent to Carpenter's film (copying the look, set design, props, basic structure, even reusing some of Morricone's great score) without really capturing any of its magic. Or, really, even understanding what's so great about that film. Carpenter's film is probably best remembered for it's eye-poppingly awesome, disgusting special effects, but in between the big payoff scenes the film is moody, tense, downbeat and paranoid as hell. The new Thing pays some lip service to the idea that no one can trust each other, but it's so short and briskly paced, it's basically just in a rush to get to the big special effects scenes. And don't get me wrong, some of the effects are cool, but they aren't enough to hang a whole film on.

What the new film doesn't understand is that the Thing is scary because it hides. It disguises itself as your friend, a perfect copy right down to the cellular level, and waits. It only attacks when it gets you alone or when it's forced out into the open. Not this time, though. This time, the Thing is prone to Thing-out for no particular reason, at any given time, basically whenever the filmmakers decide that it's been too long since the last gross special effect of a morphing monster. There's no rhythm, no build, no suspense, really, just sporadic money shots that come out of nowhere.

One last note: the movie kind of has an anticlimax, because if you've seen the 1982 film, you know how it has to end. What I want to know is, for the people who say this one but never saw Carpenter's version, what the hell do they make of the final scene? During the credits we essentially see the lead up to the first scene of Carpenter's film, as two Norwegians get in a helicopter chase down the Thing, currently disguised as a dog. And then it abruptly ends. Hopefully this will inspire them to see Carpenter's version, but I have to imagine there were a lot of confused teenagers walking out of multiplexes this past weekend.

Grade: C

Cruising

2011-10-18T19:47:00.001-04:00

A serial killer is on the loose, preying on gay men he picks up at S&M clubs. The NYPD send in an undercover cop (Al Pacino) to cruise the gay scene and see if he can smoke out the killer.

I already wrote extensively on Cruising a few years ago, and I don't have much to add to my original thoughts except that I liked it even more this time. It has the trappings of a more run of the mill serial killer thriller (with the admittedly unorthodox-for-its-time gay themes), but leave it to William Friedkin to strip out all the usual structure, thrills and resolution, leaving a weird, sparse work of profound ambiguity. The story is disjointed, the hero is held at arm's length, tantalizing plot threads lead nowhere, the mystery is never satisfactorily resolved to the degree where it's heavily implied (but never clearly answered) that the hero might be the killer, or at least one of several killers. The film is dark and unknowable.

Also, awesome. It's more of a mood piece exploring some odd themes, scoring chills not through tightly crafted suspense sense but through revealing in the creepy mysteriousness of everything. One of the things that really threw me the first time I saw Cruising is that it seems to set up this identity crisis for Pacino's character but then never really explores it or resolves it. It's not clear what's up with him, whether his work disgusts him or turns him on or what. But now I think that maybe the film just externalizes his identity crisis. Cops and gays start becoming a fluid concept in the world of the film. There are cops sexually assaulting trannies, a cop-themed gay S&M club, cops employing large black men in ass-less chaps to slap suspects around, even the title is a double meaning applying to both cops and gays... what the hell is going on with this movie sexually? Exactly.

Grade: B+

The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)

2011-10-18T00:27:00.002-04:00

A retarded, mentally unbalanced man, obsessed with the movie The Human Centipede, begins abducting people in order to make his own centipede. Unfortunately, unlike the mad scientist in the film he so loves, this man has no real medical experience and goes about making this hideous creation with duct tape and a staple gun.

Tom Six's first Human Centipede turned out to be something of a pleasant surprise. It wasn't the grueling, perverted endurance test I was expecting; more of an old fashioned mad scientist movie with a particularly unique, disgusting (but not too graphically explicated) twist. And it had something of a playful sense of humor, a welcome touch.

Part 2 is a little closer to the movie I had imagined in my head when I heard about the first one. It feels more like a reaction on Six's part to the over-reaction to his original film. "Oh, you guys think my movie was sick and twisted? Well, I'll show you something sick and twisted..." It's everything part 1 was not. The original's sterile, clinical atmosphere and (relative) restraint is here replaced with a grainy, black and white grittiness and absurdly filthy and over-the-top violence.

So far over the top, in fact, it's clearly intended as even more of a comedy than part one; granted, a comedy that would probably nauseate and repel most audiences. Six is clearly going for the "I can't believe I just saw that" brand of shock humor, and with the exception of a few missteps (the movie has a few details that veer it into more serious territory that it just can't handle) he's pretty good at it. I don't know, guys, maybe there's just something wrong with me. Certainly, I'm at a loss for words for why the scene where he gives the centipede some powerful laxatives and then cackles with glee as all the members have to violently shit in each other's mouths was funny, but I wasn't the only one in the theater laughing. It's just so far outside the bounds of acceptable content that you have to go with it.

It's a little too crass, cheap and slight for me to praise it too much, and overall as a film I didn't like it as much as the original. Still, one thing I have to give it credit for: the main character never speaks, and long passages of the film go by without much dialogue. That can sometimes draw attention to itself, when a movie attempts long, silent sequences. Yet it didn't even dawn on me until the extended, basically dialogue-free finale how much of the film played that way. I think it's a testament to Six's skills as a visual storyteller (and the relative simplicity of the screenplay) that you barely even notice until afterward.

Grade: B-

A Horrible Way to Die

2011-10-17T22:05:00.000-04:00

A recovering alcoholic meets a nice young man in her support group, but has trouble opening up to him due to some dark secrets in her past. Meanwhile, a serial killer escapes from jail, and leaves a trail of bodies behind him as he travels the country. Flashbacks slowly reveal a shared history between the two, and it becomes clear that their paths will be crossing again soon.

Things were off to a bad start, and I was not inclined to give director Adam Wingard the benefit of the doubt. His Home Sick was one of the worst horror movies in recent memory, and I had to shut off Pop Skull after 30 minutes due to boredom. So when A Horrible Way to Die started in with its desaturated, hand held style (often obnoxious, lazy, low budget shorthand for "this movie is serious and gritty, yo"), I was ready to write it off. I'm glad I didn't. Much like how Stevan Mena made major personal improvements between Malevolence and Bereavement, so too has Wingard evolved into a promising filmmaker. A Horrible Way to Die is a smart, moody thriller/character piece with some seriously strong performances and a few unique ideas. It's serious minded and even kind of sad in a way few horror movies ever bother for these days. And though Wingard's initial aesthetic choices rubbed me wrong, they are mitigated by his favoring of long takes and naturalistic performances.

My main misgivings here come from the ending, but I don't want to get specific because I'm still highly recommending this one. After an hour an 15 minutes or so of muted, understated atmosphere (punctuated by effective scenes of violence) and thoughtful character work, it throws in a silly, unnecessary and borderline insulting twist that makes some of the movie seem weaker in retrospect. But then, the movie throws in another twist that's actually kind of cool and, unlike the first, follows logically from everything we've seen before. So I guess I'm conflicted.

As a final note: just a shout-out to actor AJ Bowen, who plays the serial killer. Bowen is becoming something of a scream king; he was in two of my favorite horror films from the last decade, House of the Devil and The Signal, and stole every scene he was in. As far as I know, maybe he hates it and feels like he's stuck in the horror movie ghetto, but I'm always happy to see someone doing strong work in the genre. Here, after so many lively, wisecracking serial killers in the movies, Bowen brings us a guy with a real sense of melancholy and inner-turmoil, and he's a big part of why this film works so well.

Grade: B

American Horror Story (Episode 2 "Home Invasion")

2011-10-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

Episode 2 of American Horror Story is considerably more cohesive than the pilot, and consequently a more satisfying hour of television. Though I had a certain admiration for its insanity, the pilot more felt like a bunch of weird shit that happened without rhyme or reason than it did a coherent story. Although episode 2 ("Home Invasion") did move some of the myriad subplots from the pilot forward, it had a central story with a clear beginning, middle and end. And it was a fun one, too: the house turns out to be the site of some murders committed by a famous serial killer back in the '60s, and a group of his weirdo followers break in and tie up the mom and the daughter, hoping to reenact the grisly crimes. It's not exactly a masterpiece of suspense, but it's a funny, exciting episode that gives me a little bit more confidence for where this show is heading.

Some overall notes:

- The ADHD editing from the pilot is still here, prevalent enough that it's obviously a (poor) stylistic choice and not just incompetence. Looks like I'm going to have to learn to ignore it if I'm going to enjoy this show.

- Like the pilot, the cold open is a flashback to something terrifying happening in the house years ago. I like this, and I hope the other episodes do the same. It sort of makes the beginning of each episode like a little short horror film unto itself.

- I don't take notes while I watch this, but I'm pretty sure both this and the pilot used bits of various old Bernard Herman scores. And why not? I'm sure some people out there don't like hearing their favorite film scores being re-purposed, but I tend to take the Quentin Taratino view that great music should be reused.

- I still am not finding myself caring much about the characters or the overall story. The family is going through a lot of boring, troubled family cliches. The parents are too morose to like, the daughter too bitchy. The only actor I'm enjoying watching is Jessica Lange, who is having fun going a little bit over the top while still maintaining some level of emotional honesty.

- The best part of the episode was, clearly, the ipecac-filled cupcake and how it pays off. But I'm still unclear as to why Lange's character wanted to give it to the daughter. Is it because she doesn't like the way the daughter treated her family, or did she somehow know that one of the killers would eat it?

Grade: B

Ghost Story

2011-10-17T21:20:00.000-04:00

Returning home after the bizarre death of his twin brother, a man learns of the dark secret his father and his father's friends have been hiding for the last 50 years.

Milquetoast, I suppose is a good word for this one. It's not bad so much as kind of dull and unsurprising. I was very curious about it based on the description and the cast (including an elderly Fred Astaire and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), but it's story (based on a Peter Straub novel) is a bunch of sub-Stephen King cliches involving small town life, the supernatural, hidden secrets, etc. I guess I'm getting in to some SPOILERS here, but I think it's pretty clear within 5 minutes that 1) There is a ghost and 2) the old men are responsible for her death. Yet the movie teases this out slowly, over two hours, as if there is some sort of mystery. We are even treated to an extended flashback (seemed a good 20 or 30 minutes) late in the film to finally "explain" everything, and of course it's just a bunch of information we already inferred earlier in the film. There is no mystery, it's exactly the same story as every other ghost story, only longer and slower.

Grade: C

Genesis

2011-10-16T13:08:00.002-04:00

In this short film, a sculptor working on a tribute to his late wife finds himself in a bizarre situation when the statue begins turning into flesh... and he begins turning to stone.

Another short film from Nacho Cerda, whose Aftermath I also watched for this year's YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ. Genesis is a much, much less disgusting film, in fact this premise basically could have been used for an old Roger Corman movie or something. It's much more of a classical horror film setup, spooky and a little dreamlike, and far less of a confrontational piece of work. In that sense, I think this one was a lot more enjoyable and I'd actually be comfortable recommending it to other people. Aftermath I felt like I could defend but not really endorse; Genesis is just a cool little artsy horror short that anybody could get behind.

Like Aftermath, Genesis's story is told without dialogue, instead relying on clear visual storytelling and a simple to grasps premise that supplies some memorable visuals. Cerda definitely shows talent, although he's also a bit of a needless over-director (like a pointless nightmare scene full of whooshes and flashes and sped up footage and all that stupid crap), which is ultimately what keeps this from being a better film. Enough of this film is done right that it's kind of a shame that they throw in some silly, show-offy flourishes like that that kind of breaks the spell. Oh well.

Cerda also has a full length feature called The Abandoned; I haven't yet decided if I want to give it a shot this month.

Grade: B-

The Wolf Man

2011-10-15T18:39:00.001-04:00

A young man is bit by what he thinks is a wolf while protecting a lady the beast was attacking. He beats the creature to death, but the police find the body of a dead man instead. Could the beast have been some sort of... wolf man?

Considering my love of horror movies, I have to admit that I'm not too familiar with some of the old, established classics. It's a bit of a bias on my part. There are a lot of wonderful horror movies from all eras, but I tend to be drawn towards horror films from the 70's onwards. So this is always a good time of year to slip in a few beloved classics that I've never seen, to at least get them under my belt.

The Wolf Man is not an all-time great, in my esteem, but it is atmospheric and fun, and has a good cast to boot. It's one of those movies that's engrained enough in the culture that you sort of feel like you've already seen it, even when you haven't. It is kind of a kick to see a movie from back before werewolf movies were an overpopulated subgenre. The characters all act as though this "werewolf" concept is totally alien to them, they have to be told that silver kills werewolves, etc. On the other hand, everything that this film does has been done a thousand times since (and in some cases, better) so there is nothing here to really surprise or wow. It is, I suppose, exactly the movie I expected it to be.

Grade: B-

The Invisible Man

2011-10-12T21:58:00.003-04:00

A scientist, experimenting on himself, has managed to turn himself invisible but has not yet discovered a way to turn himself back. The invisibility has some unfortunate consequences: his new found ability to basically get away with anything has given him a serious superiority complex, and he begins expressing his supremacy in increasingly violent and detestable ways.

The Invisible Man turns out to be a much funnier movie that I expected; while not exactly a horror/comedy, the antihero is just so delighted with himself and his evil deeds that it's hard not to crack a smile, even when he's doing some pretty heinous stuff. In fact, the whole movie is more in the spirit of fun than anything else, with the other major draw being the frequent, creative invisibility special effects. You know, doors opening by themselves, objects floating across the room, clothing walking around with seemingly no one inside them, that kind of stuff.

What maybe keeps the movie from being a little better than it is, is that it lacks a center. The main character is really the invisible man, but he's evil and completely unsympathetic, plus its hard to identify with a character if you don't even know what they look like (until the final, pretty cool shot of the film). The ostensible hero of the film is a passive, weak-willed loser who spends the whole movie afraid of/getting pushed around by the invisible man, so we don't really like or care about him either. As a result, it's hard to get too invested in what's going on, even though the humor and the effects most definitely do provide a fair amount of fun.

Grade: B-

I Bury the Living

2011-10-12T21:19:00.001-04:00

So there is a cemetery, and at this cemetery there is a map of all the plots. The map has a simple system: plots with black pins are in use, and plots with a white pin are reserved but empty. One day, the new proprietor accidentally sticks black pins in some empty plots. Soon after, the owners of those plots mysteriously drop dead. Is this a tragic coincidence, or has the man discovered some sort of terrible power?

Despite not featuring anyone getting buried alive like the name implies (the name is really just a confusing way of saying "I kill people"), nor any zombies like the poster shows (although it does tease the audience that things might be heading that direction), I Bury the Living is a pretty cool old low budget horror movie. I'd say it's a little bit like a feature length Twilight Zone episode, where its more about setting up and exploring a creepy concept than it is about action or violence. It also reminded me a little bit of Jacques Tourneur's excellent Night of the Demon, where most of the tension comes from the ambiguity: is there something supernatural going on here, is it just coincidence, or is someone trying to fuck with the hero? It turns out to be a (slightly confusing) combination of those options, and though I would have preferred it left things more ambiguous, it still all comes together as a tight, tense, scrappy little horror movie with an intriguing moral dimension.

Grade: B

The Keep

2011-10-12T11:13:00.000-04:00

In WW2, a group of Nazis (including Jurgen Prochnow and Gabriel Byrne) stationed in Romania accidentally incur the wrath of a head-exploding demon, locked away in massive citadel. Their prisoner, a Jewish scholar (Ian McKellan) brought in to help investigate, secretly tries to unleash the monster, in the hopes that it will slay the Nazis, while a mysterious man with glowing eyes (Scott Glenn) arrives to offer ominous warnings. Or, more briefly, imagine if someone tried to turn the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark into a feature length film, but less awesome than that sounds.

One recurring plea I make is that I wish more talented filmmakers with strong, recognizable styles would go out on a limb and make horror movies more often. I feel like there are so many great directors out there whose unique skill sets could make for some awesome horror movies, but the genre has this stigma that seems to keep a lot of filmmakers away, even if they wouldn't bat an eye at making a more action oriented film (or nearly any other genre, for that matter). Michael Mann would have been on my list of non-horror directors with the chops to make a killer horror film, due to his films' rich atmosphere and his (inconsistently applied) ability to make precisely crafted set pieces. Turns out that he actually did make a horror film, back in the early 80's, so I knew I had to check it out.

(And, okay, now that I think about it, Manhunter has some serious horror movie elements to it, even if it's more of a thriller/police procedural.)

Well, I guessed right about the atmosphere part. This is a gorgeous looking movie, creating a dreamy, fog-covered world, filled with strange, endless caverns and war torn battlefields straight out of a nightmare. It also has a great, characteristically trippy Tangerine Dream score that lends much to the tone of the film. Although the film is probably at least as much fantasy as it is horror, I was surprised to find how much of the score was energetic and rousing (as opposed to dark and creepy). It's a little incongruous at times, as Tangerine Dream's scores often are, but in an interesting way where it feels more like it's adding unexpected dimensions, rather than misjudging the tone.

Unfortunately, it's one of those visually wonderful films that's all great shots and no good sequences. Mann would later become known for his action, but here none of his shots are pieced together in a way that suggests he cared at all about giving the movie any sense of energy, or narrative propulsion. There's nothing like a real set piece or suspense sequence. Everything is just mood, and its all the same mood, whether its an action scene or just a drawn out sequence of a boat drifting across the ocean while the sun sets in the background. It all plays at the same speed. A scene of violence is given the same weight as a character standing around doing nothing.

Mann's silly, tin eared screenplay doesn't help. A dynamite cast is forced to spit out a lot of dumb, over written dialogue and interact with cool but dated special effects, and I'd say McKellan is the only one who comes out without embarrassing himself. Like a lot of Mann's films, The Keep often feels like it was whittled down from a much longer film. It has way too many major characters than it can sustain in its brief 95 minutes, with characters often vanishing for extended periods of time only to re-emerge during a seemingly climactic moment... and ultimately prove their presence pointless in the overall scheme of things. Mann would have been smarter cutting most of the characters out and focusing on McKellan and the demon, unquestionably the highlights of the film.

If it seems like I'm slagging this one, well, I am, but I also had a certain affection for it. It has a corny, indelible 80's-ness to it that I enjoyed, a great score, some fun special effects, and a rich visual style. So I'm giving it a thumbs up, but I must be honest that by the end of the film, my frequent laughter was mostly at the film's expense and not simply out of fondness.

Grade: C+

The Baby

2011-10-12T10:34:00.001-04:00

A social worker finds herself drawn to a bizarre case, that of a supposedly retarded grown man with the mind (and behavior) of a baby. Only, she comes to believe that there's nothing wrong with his mind at all. Rather, she suspects that Baby's domineering mother and sisters have deliberately kept him trapped in a state of eternal infancy via bizarre abuse.

Ick. Just ick. Even if The Baby was a shitty movie, the premise alone would be enough to get under my skin. Something about a grownup dressed in baby clothes and making baby noises creeps my shit out. No offense to those adult-baby fetishists all over the internet, you guys please feel free to continue to live your lives in whatever way makes you happy, but gross.

Thing is, The Baby is also a pretty good horror movie. It's deliberately paced and, while far from a realistic portrait of abuse or abnormal psychology, spends a lot of time milking the psychological dimensions of its premise for its creepiness, rather than inserting too many arbitrary, phony thrills. Things do become more overtly thriller-y during the last half hour or so, but it's earned after a strong buildup, and works in a great, icky final twist that must have a large part in giving this film its (deserved) cult status.

Grade: B

The Ugly

2011-10-12T10:18:00.004-04:00

A psychiatrist with potentially dubious motives interviews a notorious, incarcerated serial killer, a surprisingly unassuming looking dude, who had no patterns, no modus operandi, no consistency and seemingly no motive for any of his crimes. Can she shine some new light on his actions? And is she inadvertently putting herself in danger?

The Ugly, made in New Zealand in the mid 90's, is sort of an ambitious little movie that could. It's something of a low(ish) budget attempt to make a stylish Holywood serial killer thriller a la Silence of the Lambs or Seven. On that level, it's not very successful. Most of the stylistic tics (shaky cam, camera flashes, aggressive sound track) come off more as obnoxious than slick. Also it has that over-lit 90's cinematography that makes everything in the frame look homogenized, and it can't always shake (and I hope I don't come off too condescending here) that New Zealand-y sense of affability that undercuts many of its attempts to be dark or edgy.

Yet there are some things about The Ugly that work swimmingly. A handful of sequences managed to build real, if only minor, suspense, particularly a clever one where the killer hides in a bathroom shortly after a murder, trying not to be seen by the victim's wife. The subjective flashback structure leads to some cool visual gimmicks, where elements of the present intermingle with elements from the past, or things we're seeing on screen are obviously tainted by the killer's warped perspective (most obviously, all the blood during his murders is jet black).

Best of all, the subjective nature of the film leads to some real, slightly haunting weirdness during the final act. For much of the film, despite some cool gimmicks, it's a standard (even a little cliched) serial killer story, but then it raises some odd questions near the end and deliberately leaves much of it unanswered or seemingly contradictory. I'm honestly not sure what the last 15 minutes or so mean, and I mean that in a good way. Maybe there's an objective "truth" or answer it's all pointing to that I'm just not getting, or maybe it's supposed to show how the mind of a madman makes no rational sense, but either way it stuck with me. The Ugly is a flawed film, but it haunted me at least a tiny bit in the days since I watched it, and that's saying something.

Grade: B-

Possession

2011-10-11T20:16:00.002-04:00

Okay, I've already written about Possession here, and I don't have much to add. I would like to note that I had the opportunity to introduce this one to some new audience members, and this is a great movie for that. It is a real joy to watch it with newcomers, to see their reactions as the film flies off the rails into previously uncharted levels of madness and hysteria. I love the shit out of this movie.

Grade: A

As a note, my companions and I also "watched" To the Devil a Daughter the same evening we watched Possession, but the drinking and talking and general merrymaking was such that I don't recall hardly a damn thing about it. Unlike with Amok Train, I didn't catch enough of it to feel comfortable including it. I think I may have to atone by watching the film for realsies this month.

Amok Train (a.k.a. Beyond the Door III)

2011-10-11T19:37:00.000-04:00

Some students go on a study abroad trip, but their professor turns out to be some sort of satanist trying to lure them into a ritual sacrifice. They flee and eventually manage to board a moving train, but the troubles don't end there.

Okay, I'm going to level with you. I was a little intoxicated for this one, and got a little distracted, so I'm not 100% clear on what happened during the 2nd half of the film. I'm going to refrain from giving it a grade, but I'm still including it in the marathon, because it's my fucking marathon and I can do what I want.

Online reviews for this one seem pretty harsh, but from what I saw it wasn't all bad. The production values are decent, there seemed like their might have been a genuinely creepy moment or two. The reveal that the professor is evil is pretty great: right before he gets onto a ferry with his class, he gets a telegram that the main character's mother died in a car crash... which he promptly crumples up and throws into the water. But what little I can recall of the second half seemed pretty dull, a lot of endless, repetitive train scenes, which turns out to be kind of a boring and limited location.

Grade: N/A

Nightwish

2011-10-11T19:27:00.001-04:00

A group of grad students apparently studying nightmares accompanies their creepy professor to a secluded house to document some apparent supernatural activity. The professor claims that the "entity" can cause feelings of paranoia and delusions, so they need to trust him if shit starts getting weird. But is that true or is he up to something more sinister? Could he just be trying to study their fear? Or is something even more bizarre going on?

I don't want to give away the game here, so I'm going to try not to talk too specifically about the story of Nightwish. It starts off a little slowly, and the crappy VHS-looking quality of the video on Netflix is a little hard to get past (it was bad enough that my brother made me turn it off when we tried to watch it a few weeks ago). Stick with it, however, and Nightwish turns into a completely crazy paranoid thriller that has fun pulling the rug out from under the audience every chance it gets.

By the time the professor has everybody handcuff themselves to some posts in the basement (supposedly so they won't run away if they get scared by the entity), and everyone slowly starts to realize that maybe they shouldn't be trusting this guy, I knew this was a keeper. It's the kind of movie where, at any given time, there seem to be 4 or 5 plausible yet contradictory explanations for what could be going on, and every time you think you know what the hell is happening, the movie takes another abrupt twist.

So what I'm saying is, Andy, you totally should have stuck with this one.

Grade: B

A Chinese Ghost Story 2

2011-10-10T22:55:00.000-04:00

Shortly after the events of part 1, our goofball hero Ning is mistaken for a criminal and jailed. Ning escapes, only to find himself in another case of mistaken identity, where a group of rebels (led by a woman who looks exactly like the departed heroine of the first film, naturally) mistake him for a wise elder sent to help their cause. Soon Ning is once again forced to do battle with the forces of evil.

Much like the original Chinese Ghost Story, part 2 is an irresistibly silly, imaginative hybrid of kung-fu, fantasy, horror and comedy. I suppose, like most sequels, it represents a step down in quality by virtue of the fact that it looses some of the original's freshness, but I'd venture to guess that if you liked that one, you'll like this one. Until the bonkers finale, it doesn't seem as much of a nonstop special effects extravaganza. In fact, much of the middle of the film involves the heroes fighting the same, unconvincing-looking (but still awesome) monster over and over again in various scenarios. But what it may or may not have lacked in budget, it makes up for in imagination, as the seemingly defeated monster keeps coming back with more outlandish attacks, usually coming back with fewer limbs each time.

Another note: the love story here is a little odd. As I mentioned above, the female lead is played by the same actress who played the deceased romantic interest in the original. She's not supposed to be the same character or a reincarnation, she's just a woman who looks exactly like the other woman. It's never really explained, and somehow she still ends up falling in love with Ning even though you'd think maybe she'd find it creepy that he likes her because she looks like his dead girlfriend. I don't know, just a weird detail, I thought.

Grade: B

Jaws of Satan

2011-10-10T22:37:00.003-04:00

A big ass king cobra with magical powers (?) escapes from a locked box on a train (?), and slithers its way into a small town, where it begins killing everyone with its super-deadly venom. While a sexy local doctor and a snake expert try to track the snake down, the town priest begins to become convince the the snake is the devil, come to do battle with him.

There was some real potential here, for sure. Jaws of Satan, for what it is, is well shot and well acted, with some interesting ideas floating around the margins. I liked the characters and a handful of scenes, but too much of it is either terminally dull or poorly handled. The snake itself (a sometimes unconvincing special effect) lacks personality or menace, draining pretty much all suspense or even basic interest from all of the set pieces. And it all builds up to a stunningly lame finale, where the snake is SPOILERS defeated when the priest holds a cross up to it and says a prayer, and then the snake bursts into flames THE END.

Grade: C

The Black Cat (a.k.a. Demons 6: De Profundis)

2011-10-10T22:22:00.000-04:00

In the most faithful adaptation of The Black Cat ever made, some filmmakers who are making a film version of The Black Cat in the opening scene (but then it's never mentioned again), decide that they want to make a horror movie based on the same made-up witch mythology as Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno. The director asks his actress wife to play the lead role of the evil witch Levana, but it turns out that Levana really exists and doesn't cotton to having someone play her in a shitty Italian horror movie.

Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat was on my radar because a description I read online made it sound like it was an unofficial attempt to make a final installment in Dario Argento's (then unfinished) "Three Mothers" trilogy. So you can imagine my surprise when the full, on-screen title was Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Ugh. I love Poe to death, but I swear that "The Black Cat" has been adapted to film more than any other story in the history of literature. (Here are just two versions that I've written about on this blog). I'm getting kind of sick of it. Turns out though, this one really has next to nothing to do with Poe's story or Argento's films. It's just kind of a dull supernatural horror movie with some not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is meta elements, some lame showbiz satire, and a fair amount of accidental comedy. There are enough laughs in this one (like when a character dies and comes back as a supernatural force, exclaiming "That's right, Sarah, I can control time now!") that I don't regret watching it, but even though it caters to some of my guilty pleasures (like really gaudy lighting involving bold primary colors), I'm not going to pretend for a second that this is a good movie. This isn't like the real Demons, where the bad stuff is funny but the good stuff is genuinely good... this is just all bad.

Grade: C-

Dead Snow

2011-10-08T16:45:00.001-04:00

A group of Norwegian med students go on vacation up in the mountains, where they accidentally incur the wrath of a platoon of Nazi zombies.

Dead Snow is a goofy, energetic horror/comedy, although you'd be forgiven for not knowing that based on the first half. Although it's got a likable, funny cast, it gets off to a seriously slow start. I understand that the build-up is a crucial part of these films, but considering how little of interest happens, and how much fun the premise seems, it starts to get a little frustrating. Worse, most of the first half takes place at night and is ugly and murky, even kind of hard to follow in places. Maybe it was just the copy on Netflix streaming, but it was a little hard on the eyes.

Then, shit hits the fan in the second half, and the movie seriously picks up. It turns into a fast-paced, funny, inventive gorefest (mercifully shot in daylight!). It's actually a major shift not only in tone but in overall quality; it just seems like it becomes a better made movie. And one with a bigger budget, too. The first half struck me as a silly little low-ish budget thing slapped together by some friends, then BAM the second half has an army of zombies, chainsaw evisceration, a POV shot of someone having their guts ripped out and eaten, a part where a dude fights a zombie while dangling off the side of a mountain swinging from another zombies intestines. Maybe best of all, a scene of self-amputation and cauterization that turns tragically, hilariously futile.

Grade: B-

Bereavement

2011-10-08T13:55:00.000-04:00

In this prequel to the 2005 horror movie Malevolence, we learn the origin of that film's killer. As boy, he is abducted by a religious nut serial killer, who believes that the creepy cow skull in his house commands him to kidnap and murder young women as some sort of means for atoning for previous sins. The boy, who intriguingly cannot feel pain, is forced to become the man's assistant in his crimes. Meanwhile, a young woman, moving in with some family after a personal tragedy, finds herself in close proximity to the killer.

I know, guys, your prayers have been answered. Put on your official Malevolence T shirts and baseball hats, pack a lunch in your Malevolence lunch box, pour yourself a Coke in your clear plastic McDonald's Malevolence glasses, and go ahead and take down your vision board where you've been trying to envision a Malevolence sequel for the past 6 years, because they finally did it. They finally made a follow up to perhaps the defining horror film of our generation.

OK, enough snark. I barely even remember Malevolence from whenever I saw it 5 or 6 years ago, except that I thought it was terrible. It was a particularly dull slasher movie with perversely unlikable characters (they were bank robbers who spent the whole movie shouting and being assholes), and a "twist" ending that didn't really seem to add or explain anything. I was kinda stunned anyone even remembered the movie enough that there would be an audience for a sequel. But I was even more stunned to find out that, holy shit, Bereavement was actually a pretty good horror movie.

Director/Writer/Producer/Editor/Composer/probably also the Caterer Stevan Mena (who gives himself a few too many credits during the opening; dude, either condense that shit or start using pseudonyms like John Carpenter) has clearly learned a thing or two in the last 6 years. Bereavement is, more or less, a slasher movie, but one with an uncommonly melancholy atmosphere, a nice feel for suspense, and a surprising focus on character development and themes. It doesn't break any new ground, per se, but it does what it does quite well. It spends long stretches not only with the killer and his new protege, but also fleshing out the heroine and her relationship with her family, especially her uncle (played by Michael Biehn!). This will probably make the movie a little too slow or dull for casual viewers, but I appreciated the fact that we're given more of a chance to learn about and care for the characters. There's also some ambitious themes in the film, mostly dealing with the old nature vs. nurture debate. (Sadly, there's one scene where they spell it all out a little too heavy-handedly in the dialogue, but I'm willing to give them a pass on that part).

Not perfect by any means, Bereavement is just a real horror movie in an era of half assed crap. The ending doesn't really have the impact it should (for one, if you've seen Malevolence, then you already know there's only one way this can turn out), but the stakes still feel greater than they usually do in these things, and you're genuinely upset to see the characters meet their demise, instead of eagerly awaiting the next murder scene. I still haven't found an honest to goodness great horror movie this month (or even a minor classic), but this is as good as anything I've watched so far, and I'm glad my memories of the original didn't keep me away.

Grade: B

American Horror Story (Episode 1)

2011-10-08T13:28:00.001-04:00

It's the classic setup: a family, on the verge of falling apart, moves into a old house with an unnerving backstory (the previous owners killed themselves). Could the house be... haunted? Probably. But here's the twist: there's like 80 twists. The girl next door with Down Syndrome likes to sneak into the house and proclaim "You're going to die here!" There's a fucked up fetish suit in the attic that may or may not come to life and rape people. The maid appears as an old woman to the mother, but as a sexy young trollop to the father. The father is a psychiatrist, and one of his patients may be able to turn in to (or summon?) a monster. Some dude with a burned face seems to be hanging around near the property, watching the family. And like a million other things I didn't mention.

Okay, so this is not technically a movie, but I thought since there was a new horror TV series debuting this month, I'd include the first few episodes for the marathon. Reviews for American Horror Story have been brutal, and I can kinda see why, but I was tickled enough with the pilot that I want to stick around for at least a few more episodes. At the very least, I'm intrigued with the format. Usually, when there's a horror themed television show, it's either an anthology series (Twilight Zone, Tales From the Crypt, Tales From the Darkside), or if it's an ongoing story, it's more of an episodic/procedural/monster-of-the-week type deal (X Files, Supernatural) with some serialized elements. So I'm really curious to see how this is going to work, a horror series that is presumably telling one, extended story.

The pilot has (serious) problems, but there's some creepy touches, some novel ones (the maid thing is kinda unique), and sometimes a sort of knowing, campy tone that let's you know they are trying to have fun with all this weirdness. It has way, way too much story for one episode of TV, but I suspect that's supposed to be part of the appeal: it's like they are trying to pile on every plot, every stock image, every cliche from every horror movie you've ever seen onto one show. I can't say that I'm at all drawn into the story yet, or that I care how the solutions to any of the countless mysteries they've set up, but I am curious to see just how thick the writers keep laying it on.

This is by some of the folks that did Glee, and this pilot was directed by co-creator Ryan Murphy. And he seems kind of like a shitty director. Well, that's a little unfair: some individual shots are kinda cool (those ghost twins walking out from behind either side of the mother was nifty), but it's all been edited into ADHD incoherence. Brief scenes of two people conversing will be broken up into what seems like 10 different shots for no discernible reason. Much like how Murphy ruined all the song and dance scenes in the Glee pilot with his unwillingness to hold a shot long enough to show a complete action (one of the main reasons I have never watched another episode of that show), he kills a lot of the atmosphere here by breaking everything up so much. Some times, it's clearly intended for effect (there's a scene where the mother thinks someone is in her house, and the editing gets herky jerky to, I guess, show her panicked state of mind), but it just looks ugly and incompetent. The only time it maybe kind of works is during a bizarre, strobe lit suspense sequence set in the basement, but it works because the point is that the scene is supposed to be visually confusing. Credit where it's due, that scene is one of the highlights of the episode.

Ha, kinda funny that I just wrote more about an hour pilot than I did about any of the full length features so far. But I guess it's just because I'm really into the idea of a new horror series, and I care enough that I don't want them to fuck it up. I'd say there's just enough here in the pilot that I'm willing to stick it out for at least the rest of October.

Grade: C+

Edge of Sanity

2011-10-07T19:45:00.003-04:00

A doctor by the name of Henry Jekyll begins experimenting with cocaine (on his patients and himself), and accidentally invents some sort of super crack that, when he smokes it, turns him into a vicious, sex crazed madman who goes by the handle of Mr. Jack Hyde. Soon, he's off gallivanting around London murdering prostitutes. That's right, this time Jekyll/Hyde is also Jack the Ripper.

As a story, Edge of Sanity never really comes together. It's a mostly typical journey through a well-worn story, despite the attempts to add interest with the Jack the Ripper thing, and the drug themes and some transgressive sex. The story develops along predictable lines, there's not much of a build to it, and Hyde's victims are all basically cyphers so there's not much suspense either. Anthony Perkins gives a good performance in the lead role, but he's such a frail, old guy here that he never makes much of a credible physical threat.

Yet the film is still a fair amount of fun, thanks in good part to the over-the-top direction by Gerard Kikoine. It's the kind of film where characters will enter a room, and it will be entirely bathed in red or blue light for no reason except that it looks cool. Where the whores in a brothel all wear elaborate costumes, and perform bizarre sex acts that involve reenacting the crucifixion. Where madness is signaled not through subtle lighting changes or music cues, but through the camera violently spinning around or zooming into an extreme close up while the score cranks up to 11. If you have a taste for this kind of overwrought nonsense, as I do, then Edge of Sanity is a good way to kill 90 minutes. It's a real, if slight, treat for the eyes and ears, a horror movie with few interesting ideas but tons of style to burn.

Grade: B-

Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil

2011-10-07T19:20:00.000-04:00

A group of obnoxious, stereotypical slasher movie college kids go camping and run afoul of two menacing looking rednecks named Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine). Soon, the kids are dropping like flies, in a series of increasingly grotesque deaths. The twist? Tucker and Dale are just a couple of innocent, goofy, lovable schmoes who keep finding themselves in situations that make them look like Leatherface-esque serial killers.

Yes, it is sort of a one-joke premise, but it's a pretty funny joke. And even when the joke gets a little stale, the movie still has two enormously likable leads to keep your attention. Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil starts off as a knowing, almost pitch perfect parody of the countless generic kids-in-the-woods slasher movies they made in the 80's. I actually kinda wish they had actually set it in the 80's, although maybe that joke would have gotten old fast. As it is, there's a pretty priceless 80's flashback scene, with some ridiculous fashion and a brilliant choice of soundtrack, that milks the joke for what it's worth. The movie, by virtue of the plot, kinda veers away from slasher parody after a while, before oddly enough becoming a more typical slasher/comedy during the last act.

It's a reasonable amount of fun. I think the biggest missed opportunity is with the death scenes. The running joke is that the stupid college kids keep getting themselves accidentally killed in hilariously horrifying ways that make Tucker and Dale look responsible. These are intended to be over-the-top, but the problem is the deaths actually aren't any crazier than the normal deaths you get in these kinds of movies (kid gets impaled on a stake, cop gets nails shoved through his face, dude goes headfirst into a woodchipper, etc.). Slasher movies became self aware years ago, trying to one-up each other with their gross-out content. The audience I saw this with was eating it up, really going crazy for these deaths, which makes me suspect that they probably don't actually watch a lot of the kinds of movies this is trying to parody. For those of us more familiar with this disreputable genre, some of the big payoffs are gonna seem kinda tame.

Grade: B-

Subspecies

2011-10-07T00:25:00.000-04:00

Some sexy young grad students go to Romania to student Romanian history (or something), but end up drawn into a conflict between to vampire brothers, one good and one evil, fighting over their father's legacy.

I actually tried watching this one for last year's marathon, but I couldn't get past the first scene. It's a Full Moon release, pretty much a guarantee that it was going to be an unwatchable, microbudget mess. But then I kept reading more about it, how it spawned an entire series and seems to have a genuine fanbase behind it, so I thought I'd give it one more shot.

And even though I wouldn't say I liked it, I'm glad I saw it. Turns out that the first scene of the movie is probably the most overtly awful, and the rest of the film is surprisingly not unwatchable. In fact, it's kinda ambitious and even has some cool ideas. Despite its (many, obvious) limitations, it aspires to be a classic-style, classy vampire movie with just a slight "modern" (it was made in the 90's) twist to it.

The problem, of course, is that the budget (and maybe the overall talent of the filmmakers) can't really sustain this. The makeup, the sets, the costumes, and especially the special effects, are all just a shade on the cheesy side, as are the actors and the screenplay, so it never fully cultivates the serious tone it's going for. But, and I mean this sincerely, it's kinda fun watching them try. The effects are almost laughably bad in place, but there's also sort of an earnest charm to them as well. The title refers to the evil brother's henchmen, these tiny little monsters that he creates from his own body. They look like this:

Yeah, not the most intimidating monsters in the world, but they are kinda cute!

So, again, not a good movie, but not without it's charms. I'm still trying to decide if I want to watch any more of the series for this month's festivities. We'll see.

Grade: C

Demons of the Mind

2011-10-07T00:06:00.000-04:00

Baron Zorn keeps his (teenage?) children drugged and locked away in his castle, fearing that they have inherited their mother's insanity. But it seems more like Zorn is the madman, and soon he entrusts their care to doctor with some, shall we say, questionable practices that pushes his children closer to the edge.

Demons of the Mind is a pretty cool, weird little early 70's British psychological horror movie. It's a little slow (sometimes in a good way, but not always) and a little unsatisfying, but it has a pretty richly creepy atmosphere and some standout scenes. Considering its a period piece and is set in a castle, you might expect a more Gothic atmosphere, but it actually goes for a more naturalistic feel (except for one awesome, trippy scene of a bunch of creepy images superimposed over an extreme close up of an eye) that helps play up the psychological element. It gets its tone more from the story and themes (lots of madness, murder, incest, all that good stuff), solid performances, a measured pace and a wonderful, eerie score. It's not a complete success, but there's enough cool stuff going on that you won't waste you time with it.

Grade: B-

Scream and Scream Again

2011-10-06T00:27:00.000-04:00

Jeez, where to begin? Um, someone's abducting people and amputating their limbs. And also there's a foppish serial killer on the loose, killing women that he picks up at a nightclub. And also there's this weird, apparently well-funded neo-Nazi type group up to no good. And a big guy going around killing people with the Vulcan nerve pinch. And don't forget the oddball scientist who claims he's just doing medical research, but happens to keep a giant pit of acid in his backyard.

I've developed something of a taste for the British horror films of the 60's and 70's, but I had a bad feeling about this one when I started it up, and instead of an orchestral score it was some obnoxious jazz fusion nonsense. I knew what this meant: instead of a classy, elegant production a la one of the better Hammer Dracula movies, this was going to be one of those offbeat cheapies, complete with slopy handheld camera work, a dull color palette, and bad sound.

The bad news is I was right. The good news was that, though it wasn't any good, Scream and Scream Again was completely fucking crazy and that's better than nothing. As you can tell from the above description, it has enough plot for probably 5 bad horror movies, attempting to make up for quality with quantity. It took a little too long me to realize this, but about halfway in it dawned on me that this was probably supposed to be something of a horror/comedy. Certainly no one could have made something this ludicrous, thinking it was a serious film.

Even with all the stories vying for attention, this one is kinda slow and has a few too many dull stretches. More disappointing: Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee all get top billing, but their roles are little more than cameos. (Price, at least, factors significantly into the finale).

So, not very good, but not a waste of my time either. And it has at least one completely awesome subplot that I wish had gotten more screentime/been dragged out more: a man wakes up in the hospital, and finds that his leg has been amputated. And every time he wakes up, another limb is missing. That is some hilariously horrifying shit, and I wish more of the film had been in that vein.

Grade: C

The Sleeping Car

2011-10-04T22:57:00.001-04:00

A down and out former journalist, recently divorced, tries to get back on his feet by moving to a new town, getting a new place, and going back to school. His new apartment is, oddly enough, the sleeping car from an old train, and wouldn't you know it, the car turns out to be haunted by the ghost of "the Mister," the anal-retentive train conductor responsible for a major train crash.

This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but The Sleeping Car is the most affable horror movie I can recall watching in a long time. I know that's not usually a quality you're looking for in a horror movie, but there's a real laid back charm to this one that I appreciated. Since there's barely any real plot (just the usual hokum where the protagonist slowly realizes his place is haunted, the ghost kills a few people, final showdown, etc.), the movie mostly ends up being about the characters sitting around, bullshitting, and enjoying each others company.

An American Werewolf in London's David Naughton leads the cast, and he brings a similar goofy, wisecracking charisma to The Sleeping Car. (Come to think of it, this might be the only other thing I've ever seen him in). The female lead is Judie Aronson, which probably means nothing to you, but I recognize her as the hottest, most likable girl from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (and she also had a small role in After Midnight). She and Naughton have good chemistry together, despite him being way too old for her (the movie comments on this, at least), and the smartass screenplay is content to devote a lot of screentime to them bantering and trading one liners. His Girl Friday it ain't, but it's still good fun. There are also enjoyably silly roles for Kevin McCarthy and Jeff Conaway.

It's ironic, in most other Nightmare On Elm Street wannabes from this era, you usually tune out during all the dialogue scenes and perk up for the murders and special effects. This time, it's the opposite. It's almost a shame that it has to be a horror movie at all, because most of the special effects are a little on the cheap and unconvincing side. Although, I suppose there is some genuine fun in seeing Jeff Conaway get mutilated and eaten by a fold out couch. The big finale is a little awkwardly staged and feels a tad inconsequential, but honestly the movie built up enough good will at that point that I had fun any way. Don't set the bar too high, and I think fans of this sort of crap can enjoy the charm of something light and likable like The Sleeping Car.

Grade: B-

Vanishing On 7th Street

2011-10-04T20:38:00.003-04:00

Everybody in the world is minding their own beeswax, when suddenly the world is engulfed in darkness and most of the population is devoured by some sort of weird shadow entity. A very, very small group of survivors holes up in a bar and tries to plan a way to escape the city.

Over the past decade or so, Brad Anderson has established himself as a reliable director of quality horror movies and thrillers. Although Vanishing On 7th Street doesn't quite match his best movies (for my money, Session 9 and Transsiberian), it's a brisk, exciting post-apocalyptic thriller with a cool, novel villain.

Maybe a little too brisk. My only major complaint with the film is that at 90 minutes, it could stand to be a good 20 or 30 minutes longer. Post-apocalyptic movies tend to get a lot of their flavor from atmosphere and world-building, really fleshing out the details of the devastation in order to mine all the pathos. Vanishing On 7th Street is more breathless; the world ends in the blink of an eye and its a mad dash for the few survivors to try to stay in the light and not succumb to the darkness. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of a unique take on the genre, and it really emphasizes the fast and heartless nature of the threat. Still, I think a little more screen time showing us a little bit more of the world outside of the bar the heroes are hiding in would have helped sell the premise a little better. Maybe they didn't have the budget for it.

The cast is good (I've discovered that Hayden Christensen is a serviceable actor when he's not working for George Lucas), the screenplay is streamlined for maximum forward momentum, Anderson makes good use of light and shadow (he better, given this premise), but I'd say the real standout element is the villain. It's sort of a whispering, moving shadow with the impression of human figures (its victims, most likely) inside of it, and when it gets you, you vanish, gone in an instant, leaving behind only your clothes. This leads to some awesomely abrupt/shocking ends for some of the major characters, just the way I like it.

Grade: B

TrollHunter

2011-10-04T19:53:00.003-04:00

A trio of students in Norway are making a documentary about poaching, and try to latch themselves onto a suspected poacher. Instead, he turns out not to be poaching at all, but rather hunting down and exterminating escaped trolls for the Norwegian government.

Okay, at this point I feel like I've written more screeds on the internet about my distaste for most phony documentary horror movies than I've had hot meals in my life. So I don't want to be a broken record here, but let me at least give the greatest hits. The main thing is I just resent the way the format makes filmmakers think they've been given a license to ignore the basic tenants of competent film making. Awkward framing, choppy editing, incoherent shaky cam, pointless zooms, lazy storytelling, etc., all suddenly become acceptable in the name of making the movie look "realistic." TrollHunter is just another in a long line of movies to cover up shoddy directing with this tired gimmick.

Which is a shame, because I think there's a dynamite concept here for a deadpan horror/comedy. The trolls are inherently ridiculous, but everyone treats them with grave sincerity; it's a great dynamic. Too bad every time the trolls show up, the audience is treated to five minutes of a cameraman waving his camera around as he runs through the woods, showing us a bunch of blurry trees while the shot cuts every 3 seconds despite the fact that we should probably be watching an uninterrupted take.

Grade: C

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

2011-10-03T22:49:00.005-04:00

In this oddball Czech film, a pubescent girl undergoes a sexual awakening, via a journey through a weird dream world of ghouls, vampires, and lots of lesbians.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders isn't a horror movie in the normal sense. It's more of a surreal art film with a fair amount of horror-influenced imagery. It's main aim is to strike a partly beautiful, partly nightmarish dream-like tone and sustain it for an entire film. Appropriately, I was kinda tired myself when I watched it (had to start and stop it a few times while I drifted in and out), and so it played even more like a series of odd, semi-connected images than I've heard it already comes across as. In other words, I'm a little hazy on the story specifics, but it sounds to me like most other viewers are, too.

I don't think there's anything bold, or unique, or striking enough here that would put it on the level of Lynch or Bunuel, but it's still got some solid atmosphere and some memorable imagery. It looks fairly low budget, but manages to nail that elusive, half-remembered nightmare feeling even with its limited means. I'd say the main problem is the frequent menstrual and sexual symbolism grows stale pretty quickly, and the atmosphere gets repetitive and isn't really enough to hold interest, even for the film's brief run time of only 75 minutes or so.

A note of interest to at least one person who might read this: the film was supposedly a serious influence on Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and although it's been a long time since I've seen it, I'd say the tones of the two movies are pretty similar. So if you liked that one, this one is worth your time as well.

Grade: B-

Scissors

2011-10-03T22:23:00.003-04:00

A socially awkward, shut-in young woman (Sharon Stone, because who else would you cast as a socially awkward shut-in?) is assaulted and almost raped in the elevator of her apartment building. Despite the reassurances of her shrink (Ronny Cox), she is convinced that the rapist is still out to get her. Meanwhile, she meets with her friendly neighbor and his intense, crippled twin brother (both played by Steve Railsback!), getting entangled in some sort of power struggle going on between the two men. Then things really start to get weird.

Scissors is the kind of movie it's probably best to know little about before you see it, so I don't want to spoil too much of the story. The real gimmick of the film doesn't kick in until nearly half way, but as far as I can tell, every description of the film online gives it away as if it's the overall premise. Suffice it to say that the second half is mainly confined to one location, has a solid gimmick, and works in part because its not the direction the movie initially seems to be heading in.

Usually with these kinds of high concept thrillers, they try to get to the high concept right away, only to find out that it can't really sustain feature length. This usually results in the movie running out of steam and having to resort to endless subplots, distractions, plot twists, etc, to reach the 90 minute mark. (Just recently I saw The Perfect Host, which was extremely guilty in this regard.) So I think it's pretty nifty the way Scissors starts out as a different kind of thriller, before abruptly taking a left turn.

This is good, overwrought thriller material, with a story melodramatic and audacious to a degree worthy of DePalma, even if stylistically it is nowhere near his level. It's got psychodrama, sexual hysteria, creepy dolls, seriously over-elaborate set design, and a killer with a ridiculous motive and even more ridiculous master plan. So needless to say, this was right up my alley.

The cast is top notch (even the seemingly miscast Stone really gives it her all), working straightfaced with ludicrous material, and I think I kinda love that Railsback goes to great pains to play two distinct characters and (SPOILERS) both characters turn out to be completely extraneous to the plot, one a romantic interest and the other a red herring. Scissors is by no means a classic, but those with a taste for silliness played straight, like myself, will dig it.

Grade: B

Aftermath

2011-10-03T19:43:00.002-04:00

In this short Spanish horror movie, a mortician sticks around after hours at the morgue for some overtime. And by "overtime," I mean he mutilates and rapes a female corpse. Ick.

I think that description right there would be enough to turn most folks off of ever watching Nacho Cerda's Aftermath, but bear with me here. I'm not recommending it, and I didn't even like it too much myself, but it's better-made and more ambitious than you might expect from a film that, on it's surface, seems like the worst, most exploitative trash. It's a 30 minute short, shot without dialogue, although it definitely makes, uh, shall we say strategic use of some very evocative sound effects. Which isn't to say they keep the really nasty stuff off camera; graphically speaking, this one goes there. There's no denying that on a very basic level, this is a work of provocation, but I'd say there's some evident technical skill behind the camera that makes the overall result seem less crass (at least, a little). This isn't some tossed-0ff, low budget, cult audience sleaze; it's a real film with real style, real atmosphere, and real ideas.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the film might be aiming for some level of disgusting profundity. The film that Aftermath most obviously brings to mind is Stan Brakhage's remarkable, near-unwatchable autopsy documentary/art film The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes. Like that film, I genuinely think that Cerda is trying to grapple directly with the ugly realities of death. As much as this does come off as a bit needlessly vulgar, I think it's clear from the way the film ends with a closeup of the victim's obituary, that our empathy is supposed to lie with the corpse (even if its just a corpse) and not with the necrophiliac. It's not a film designed for the audience to enjoy the gross special effects, it's a film designed to make the audience sad and contemplative. And that's, ultimately, where I think it fails. I'm pretty hardened to this stuff, but Aftermath is just a little too imaginative in its nastiness, and there's a distancing effect. It's aiming for something like existential despair, but I'd say it mainly just succeeds at being gross.

I see that Cerda has another short film or two, plus a horror feature, so I may get around to watching one or more of those before the month's up.

Grade: C+

After Midnight

2011-10-02T10:57:00.003-04:00

In this terrifying bone-chiller, a group of college students meet at their professor's house to let it all hang out, chug-a-lug and shout, stimulate some action, get some satisfaction, and find out what it's all about.

No, I'm sorry. That's not right. Actually, their professor is teaching some class on the psychology of fear, and basically they all get together to tell scary stories. It's an anthology film. In the stories: a man and woman break down in the middle of nowhere and find themselves seeking help at a creepy looking old mansion; a group of teenage girls break down in the bad part of town and find themselves terrorized by a crazed vagrant and his vicious, well-trained dogs; finally (no break downs in this one) a phone messaging service operator with a broken leg hears a murder over the phone, and finds herself next on the killer's hit list.

I'm a sucker for a good horror anthology movie. Or even a not that good horror anthology movie, as is the case here. I tend to prefer these kinds of stories to be short and sweet, with a good twist ending, which isn't really the case with After Midnight, although technically the first story has a twist ending. These are all more in the vein of "oh shit, something's chasing me and I have to get away from it" type horror stories, which is funny because those don't seem like the kind of scary stories you sit around and tell your friends. I can only imagine, if instead of the stories being short films we just saw the characters in the wraparound story talking, there'd be a lot of scenes of people saying "And then the girls ran from the dogs into another room. And then into another room, and then down a hallway."

Still, this is silly, reasonably well-made 80's fun. It's never boring, it's got some enjoyable special effects (especially during the nonsensical finale) and I'll probably never have the need to ever watch it again in my life.

One (probably not intentional) hilarious touch: during one of the wraparound segments, the power goes out, and the professor says he thinks he has some candles he can light. Cut to the next scene, where the room is now filled with, like, 50 different candles of varying sizes eerily lighting the room. Who keeps that many candles?!

Grade: C+

We Are What We Are

2011-10-02T10:19:00.003-04:00

After the death of their father, three teenagers and their mother find themselves awkwardly trying to take over the family business. Unfortunately, that family business involves abducting, killing and eating people for bizarre ritualistic purposes.

To me, We Are What We Are was a bit of a swing and a miss, but it did enough right that I enjoyed and appreciated the effort. The approach is slightly arty and very serious, while still trying to deliver the goods in terms of suspense, creepiness, grotesqueness, etc. The tone is mainly somber, and it has a very muted, desaturated color palette that sets a downbeat mood without going over the top into slick, designer grittiness territory. The performances are strong across the board.

Honestly, though, the film could stand to have a little more fun. You can see the potential for something a little more lively in the scenes where the siblings awkwardly stumble their way through abduction and murder, something with a little more dark humor, a little more energy, a little more excitement. But We Are What We Are is committed such to its dreary tone, that all its major set pieces are basically nonstarters.

Worse, it gets harder and harder to take the film seriously as the final act gets more and more ridiculous, yet the tone stays grim. Now, you know me, I'm not someone who cares about realism or believability in movies. I don't sit around picking out plot holes or applying logic where it's not required. What I do hate, however, is contrivance, and the last 20 or 30 minutes has to keep piling contrivance on top of contrivance to keep the story going and have it reach its predetermined ending place. It has a few too many coincidences, too many characters doing stupid things just to keep the plot rolling, too many major events happening with clockwork timing. When you can see all the gears turning in the screenplay, it's hard to stay invested.

As a side note, the reason this film was originally on my radar was because it was directed by a fellow named Jorge Michel Grau, who I assumed was the same Jorge Grau who directed Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, a flawed but cool mid-70's zombie movie that I have a certain affection for. Only it turns out that they are two different people, just two dudes with the same name who both happen to direct horror movies. If this Jorge Grau makes another horror movie, I think there's enough potential evident here that I'd be on board, even if I didn't feel this one was successful.

Grade: C+

Faceless

2011-10-01T11:38:00.004-04:00

After his sister is disfigured by one of his patients, a crazy plastic surgeon and his sexy assistant begin abducting beautiful women, keeping them prisoner beneath his clinic. With the help of a former Nazi surgeon, he plans to cut of the face of a woman and transplant it on to his sister. Meanwhile, a private detective (played by Robert Mitchum's much less handsome, charming or talented son Chris) investigates the disappearance of one of the women.

Faceless is just a sleazed-up, sexed-up, gory ripoff of the French horror film Eyes Without a Face (which I'm considering rewatching this month), but that could have been a good thing. It was a lot slicker looking, with better production values, than I was expecting from a Jesus Franco movie, and the premise is still solid even if there was no chance in hell it could ever hold a candle to Georges Franju's classic. Mostly, though, it blows its potential on a glacial pace, with way too much downtime between major events, and too many go-nowhere subplots. In particular, Mitchum's story probably takes up 1/4 of the film but could have been excised entirely; for all his character accomplishes, he might as well have just shown up during the finale, instead of treating the audience to 4 or 5 scenes of his investigations that don't really have much to do with the rest of the film.

I was going to grade this one much lower, but if I'm being entirely honest, doctors freak me out and the idea of forced surgery is still a really creepy one to me. What I'm saying is, despite some unconvincing special effects here and there, the two relatively brief surgery scenes in this film, where a paralyzed victim helplessly watches as their mad doctors cut her face off, did get under my skin a little. So, credit where credit is due. Unfortunately, there's not enough of the creepiness to make up for the rest of the film and its general lack of quality in direction, writing, and acting, but it helps keep it from being a total wash.

Grade: C-

Return of the Revenge of Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue

2011-10-01T11:22:00.004-04:00

Oops.

So the last few months have been interesting. I had some weird health issues that may or may not be in my head, I kicked off a new school year at work, I got married, I went on a honeymoon. All in all, I guess some good excuses for not really updating this thing, but the truth is my silence has actually been more inspired by laziness, a lack of self confidence, or sometimes a touch of apathy. Just this week, I was going to sit down and turn out a brief post about my admiration for Contagion and Drive, but I ended up second guessing myself that I had anything interesting to say about them (or the writing skills to even properly express my thoughts about them), and after a few minutes of trying to work through it, it just didn't seem worth the effort.

Well, no more. If there is one thing that could shake me out of my funk, it's the return of my annual "Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue" challenge. I'll keep introductions brief. You know the drill: I'm gonna spend October trying to watch as many horror movies as I possibly can, and each movie will get a short post on my blog. I am planning on keeping last year's addition of assigning letter grades to each movie, even though I think it's silly, reductive and arbitrary. It's also fun.

In the comments below, I'd appreciate any recommendations for movies to cover this month. Keep in mind, I have seen a fuckload of horror movies in my life, so I'm looking more for off the beaten path type stuff (unless there's, like, a classic or something you think I should watch because you want to hear my take on it.) Thanks!

Like a Rat to the Bone: GIRLY and Creepy British Sexual Psycho-Drama Horror Cinema

2011-07-15T18:18:00.004-04:00

GUEST POST

Hi all you readers of Dan’s blog! Shenan here. I am normally but a humble reader like yourselves, consuming Dan’s thought-provoking and insightful movie commentary from my bat-cave (er…office), usually while putting off some sort of analysis to be performed or report to write, adding my own thoughts in the form of comments not usually comprised of anything longer than a few sentences.

But three factors have brought me here today, writing to you in this format: a) I’m really bored at work. Really bored. Without going into too much detail, some changes at my workplace have left me with very little actual work to be done lately, and I need to keep my brain from atrophying; b) Dan’s been in a little bit of a blog-rut lately, finding himself unmotivated to churn out posts. And good fiancees write guest-posts for each other, right?? Right!; and c) we just watched GIRLY. I was very, very taken with this movie. And I begged Dan to write a blog post about it. His response? “You write a blog post about it.” While I think he originally meant it in the sense of “Oh, hon, can you find out your grandma’s mailing address?” “You find out my grandma’s mailing address! Why don’t you marry it if you love it so much!”, I took the suggestion to heart, and decided to write a guest post about it.

So. Here I go. I’m not sure if I really have anything to say about it that’s intelligent or insightful on the scale of Dan, but I’ll try! I admittedly owe much of my (comparatively small) movie-savvy to hanging around with Dan, but I did shell out thousands of dollars for a Johns Hopkins graduate education in writing, so maybe I’ll at least find a way to use some big words (maybe). If nothing else, maybe I’ll intrigue you enough to go see this flick yourself.

GIRLY, titled MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY, & GIRLY in its original UK release, is a 1970 British….horror? Horror-comedy? Creepy sexual psycho-drama horror flick? It’s hard to categorize. It was originally based on a stage-play, though apparently deviating significantly from it, and really, I’m surprised this shit flew back in late-60s/early-70s Britain. But then, I wasn’t alive back then, so maybe I’m underestimating how edgy British theater/cinema was back then.

The essentials of GIRLY are such: a “family” (how or if any of them are actually related is never explicit) exists, consisting of Mumsy, the matriarch; Nanny, the (surprise!) nanny; and two children, Sonny and Girly. They live in a sprawling English estate near enough to the town/city (I assumed London? But then, that’s probably the only English city this ugly American knows) for the “children” to walk to.

I say “children” because Sonny and Girly are clearly in their late teens, if not 20s. All the members of this family live their days in an elaborate role-playing existence, assuming never-aging parts in an upper-class English family, and go by no other name than the monikers that summarize their familial roles. Meaning that Sonny and Girly, while obviously adults biologically, dress in school-child outfits, build sandcastles and play cowboys and Indians, sleep in giant cribs in rooms full of toys, and talk and behave with childish mannerisms. Nanny helps govern the children, always remaining subservient to the head-of-household, Mumsy (a father figure is never present, or mentioned).

But it gets weirder.

“The Game,” which is what they refer to this elaborate role-played life as, is governed by rules (because all children need rules, of course! All families operate on rules. That’s what keeps things running smoothly). Most of those rules are set and enforced by Mumsy. And one of those rules, of course, is that no happy childhood is complete without friends. So Sonny and Girly lure London’s lonely—those without family or friends to miss them, mostly tramps and bums—back with them under the promise of a bath, a hot meal, and a good deed being offered up by two well-meaning children. They then trap these men (always men) there, force them to take part in The Game as another child being looked after by Mumsy, and “send them to the heavens” (i.e., kill them) if they violate any of the rules. The rules which include not fleeing the family.

Writing this down, Charlie Manson? Good.

Without giving too much away, the crux of action begins when Mumsy decides that Sonny and Girly targeting the usual crowd of urban bums and tramps over and over is garnering them some suspicion. Thusly, the kids decide to stake out a high-class party in the suburbs. They “befriend” a highly intoxicated pair exiting the party: a woman and the male companion (possibly a prostitute?) she hired to accompany her to the party. Sonny and Girly engage them in an all-night play session at a local park, during which they push the woman off the top of a slide, killing her and convincing the still very drunk man that he killed his female companion. They take both the living and the dead of the pair back to their house, and you can see where the rest of this is going. The man (only referred to in the movie as “New Friend”) is subjected to a ridiculous, humiliating existence as one of Mumsy’s children, following her rules and ultimately fearing for his life at every turn, should he violate the rules or even just displease one of the family members. Until, that is, he realizes that there are real people underneath these characters—ones with sexual appetites, even though sex has no place amongst children or in a Nice Family—and decides to exploit these appetites to pit them against one another.

So there’s the basic plot. Now here’s my take on it. GIRLY, to me, works so well as a horror movie because it really gets under your skin, and it does so not by showing you disturbing, horrific, or graphic images. You won’t see any eyes gouged out or limbs slowly gnawed off by rats. It gets under your skin by metaphorically gnawing, for an hour and twenty minutes, on all your sensibilities.

Your sensibilities about the family. About age, hierarchy, and authority. Your sensibilities about the fact that things that appear to be loving and innocent on the surface should actually being loving and innocent at their core—not evil. Your sensibilities about reality, about existing in a reality that you know to be false and distorted, but being powerless to the bounds of that reality. I mean, the whole thing plays like a nightmare: one where you’re trapped with an evil family not your own, forced to do things that may not seem evil or scary on the surface, but become nightmarish because they’re just not right. They’re not what the “you” you know yourself to be would do. And you’re doing them against your will. Who hasn’t had a dream that follows along those lines, and couldn’t shake the icky feeling afterwards? It’s the same fear we have about the authority of governments, or religions, or any structure of power that sets the rules and the bounds of reality, tells us what is right, what is wrong, who we are, and how we are to operate. If we have no verifiable source of objective truth, who is to keep those with this power in check?

Perhaps most importantly, though, it plays on your sensibilities about sexuality, about sexual control, sexual power, and sexual domination. Now don’t get me wrong: this is the America of the 21st century where, thanks to Dan Savage and Alfred Kinsey, I (and scores of others) have an open, honest, accepting, and healthy relationship with sex in all its intricacies and possibilities. A relationship free of shame, with the knowledge that everyone does it, and that all the stuff you do that you think no one else does? They probably do. So I tell you in all honesty that I’m not easily creeped out, sexually. In fact, this whole movie sounds like a romping good time for the right group of consensual adults. But the key word there is “consensual.” There is something very creepy, even verging on horrifying, about being controlled, humiliated, and put into a regressive role or state of sexual maturity against your will. And lest you have any doubts…I think it’s all but spelled out in title cards that this is all very sexual for Mumsy.

“Adults” is another key word, actually. The fact that, when confronted by New Friend about how long she can really stand to play a child, Girly seems to not accept that there is a reality beyond this family, makes me wonder if perhaps she was impressed and indoctrinated into the family at a young age—perhaps when she actually was still a girl. But a girl she is not, though she plays one. And you can tell that Girly is aware of her budding, or maybe long-repressed, nature as a sexual being, especially around New Friend. Is he committing some sort of sexual sin himself by eventually having sex with someone who is so clearly a child, emotionally? It is legally considered statutory rape, after all, to have sex with a mentally ill or mentally incompetent person. You wonder this, while feeling slightly dirty the whole time yourself for noticing, inexorably (there’s my Hopkins-worthy word!), that Girly pulls off those short little schoolgirl dresses smolderingly; that her long lashes, faux-innocent expressions, and teasing laughter could heat up a frozen dinner in an igloo (and there go those Hopkins-grade metaphors!)

Like I said. It gets under your skin and stays there. Gnawing.

Sorry for the novel, Dan! But I get the feeling that your readers have pretty elastic attention spans….when they’re eating up your delicious words, that is. Hopefully they’ll indulge mine.

Rubber: Celebrating Cinema for No Reason

2011-07-11T23:00:00.000-04:00

Right away I realized things weren't quite going to be what I expected. Rubber had been marketed as something of an off-the-wall horror/comedy about a sentient car tire that can blow up people's heads with its thoughts. And though it does feature said tire, the tire is only one part of a much more bizarre whole, and horror never really enters the equation. This becomes clear during the opening scene, where a cop climbs out of the trunk of a patrol car and proceeds to explain directly to the audience that every great movie has an element of "no reason." This is something of a mission statement for Rubber. Of course, the cop's examples don't really make a lot of sense (for instance, he explains that Adrian Brody's character in The Pianist has to go into hiding for "no reason"), but maybe that just proves Rubber's point.

Then it turns out that the cop is not just telling this information to you and I, but that the audience of the film are actually, uh, characters in the film. They are a group of people, gathered in the desert for reasons never explained, who peer across the land with their binoculars and watch (and I guess somehow hear) the story of the sentient car tire.

This introduction is followed by a strange, delightful sequence of pure visual storytelling, as the tire comes to life and enters the world. We see it learn to roll (it stumbles and falls a few times before getting the hang of it). We see it discover and learn about other objects, other living things. And discover that it likes to break them. And when it learns it can't break a bottle, we learn that it has the ability to make things explode with its telekinetic powers. The sequence is very sensuous and immediate, almost has the feeling of a nature documentary, except of course for how absurd it is. Because of the film making, but also because of our need to anthropomorphize, you actually begin to empathize with the tire. So, naturally, at that very moment, the film cuts back to one of the audience members saying "This is the first time I've ever empathized with a tire!"

It's about here that I should stop describing the "plot" of Rubber, since most of the fun is that you have no idea where it is heading from minute to minute, and any story it does is establish is continually, gleefully, ruthlessly deconstructed and devoured. The story of the tire, which seems like it broadly fits the outline of a bad horror movie, is cut off at the knees as the film takes bizarre tangent after bizarre tangent. The "audience" and film interact in ways that seem to have a subterranean logic, only we're never let in on what exactly that logic might be. Layers of reality are stripped away, only to be reapplied. In between all of that is a lot of absurdity, and a good number of laughs.
This is not a film for all (or most) filmgoers, but I kinda loved it. It seems to me that, philosophically, it shares some of my ideas about the possibilities of cinema. It all boils down to the "no reason." While I'm sure I could do intellectual backflips trying to justify Rubber as a comment on filmgoing, on narrative, a seminal work in the theater of the absurd, etc., a lot of its appeal comes from just luxuriating in its profound oddness. I'm all for over-analyzing movies, but sometimes as filmgoers I think we have a problem with over-intellectualizing them. We're always looking for subtext (political, social, emotional, whatever), or a literal explanation, or a grand thesis that explains a film, or a scene, or a shot, or even just a small detail. That's all well and good, but sometimes a film's power or worth is more aesthetic, or abstract, or at the very least comes from something less logical, less easy to put in words. Sometimes a film exists for "no reason" other than to be itself.

Which is to say, Rubber is kind of a celebration of itself, of the way it is shot, of the cleverness and subversiveness of its (lack of) story. I wouldn't want most films to be like this, but I'm glad director Quentin Dupieaux made this one. He supposedly has another film in the works, which I'm officially excited for, although in some ways Rubber feels like a great magic trick that can only be pulled off once.

Dispatch From A Last Minute Staycation

2011-06-02T17:49:00.004-04:00

The problem with working at a university is that the fiscal year ends in June, so any of my vacation days not used by the end of this month are lost. I tried to see if I could have my days carry over for the honeymoon in September, but alas they could not (no worries: I'll have plenty of next year's vacation days to use for that). Since Shenan just started at a new contractor and hasn't accrued any vacation, I find myself yet again taking an impromptu stay at home vacation just for the sake of not losing the whopping 14 days I didn't use this past year.

Which is cool with me. I'm not big on traveling in general, and we're going to Germany for the honeymoon in just 3 months anyway. So I plan to spend the next few weeks watching a ton of movies, playing a ton of video games, and probably imbibing a lot of alcohol.

I don't think I'm gonna blog about all the movies (that's what the Twitter is for), but I did want to put down a few words on some of them.

I watched Eric Rohmer's A Tale of Winter and Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia less than a day apart, and couldn't help notice they shared a crucial plot point (which I won't name), and both have a similar sort of climax set on a public bus. Yet the two films, both delightful in their own ways, couldn't be more different.

Winter is archetypical Rohmer; a witty, dialogue heavy story about verbose Parisians waxing philosophical about love and life, with a few whimsical twists of fate. The story is about a young woman who has a brief but passionate affair with a man she doesn't know, and ends up having his child. Unfortunately, when the two lovers parted ways, she accidentally wrote down the wrong street name on her address and has since never heard from the man, and has no way of contacting him. This causes complications with her future boyfriends, as she holds on to the hope that the man will one day return, and hence she can never quite seem to fully commit to her other relationships.

This leads to a lot of soul searching, etc, and lots scenes where lovers argue in over-analytic, over-intellectualized in that indelible Rohmer fashion. I've never seen a bad Rohmer film, and this is no exception, even if it's not his best. There's a kind of comforting uniformity to the majority of his films, they are warm and familiar without quite being repetitive or trite. If I have a problem with A Tale of Winter, it's just that it doesn't always cohere the way Rohmer's best films do; I confess that I'm not sure what this film's earnest philosophical discussions about the nature/existence of the soul has to do with the basic story.

Sylvia, in stark contrast, is a film where long chunks of time go by without any dialogue at all. Guerin's film revels in pure cinema and visual storytelling in a way Rohmer never would have attempted. David Bordwell did a great breakdown, here, of one of the film's best sequences, in which a seemingly mundane scene of various people sitting outside at a cafe turns into a virtuoso cinematic performance. Guerin creates tiny narrative threads within the various tables, and then teases them out by creating a clear but complex series of shots, framing and reframing the patrons over and over again in various combinations that keeps the viewer actively engaged, even as "nothing" seems to be happening. (Bordwell notes a great moment where a customer in the background kisses her boyfriend, but is framed in a way that makes it look kinda like she's kissing a man in the foreground). Nothing more dramatic happens than a waitress getting an order wrong, and yet the sequence is funny, compelling and creates a weird kinda subterranean human drama going on between all the patrons. Sort of an illustration that "everyone has a story," no matter how banal.

Sylvia begins by showing us a young man but explaining almost nothing about him. He goes to the cafe to do some people watching, sketching pictures of the women he sees, until he spies a beautiful woman leaving the cafe... and begins to follow her. Lest you think the film takes a turn into thriller territory, with the man being a serial killer or something, let me be clear that nothing that overtly dramatic ever happens in this film. Although we eventually learn more about the man and what he's doing, and the scant "plot" does have a few unexpected developments, this is more a film about the process of watching, and the behavior of people being we watched. The man idly people watches, unaware of his presence, and we watch him, unaware of us. I don't know if I'm doing a good job of selling this, but I was completely enamored with In the City of Sylvia and could not recommend it more to others who enjoy a little bit of pure cinema from time to time.

On a final note, I had promised myself that I wouldn't bother with The Hangover Part 2. I'm not exactly a big fan of the original to begin with (although I do think it's funny), and the trailers for this made it look like such a cynical, pointless cash grab that I almost felt insulted just watching them. Does Hollywood really think my standards are this low? I really didn't want to support it. But I was itching to do a double feature while on vacation, and it worked perfectly with Kung Fu Panda 2, so I figured what the fuck.

(BTW I'm delighted to report that KFP2 turned out to be every bit as good as the original, which snuck past my low expectations back in 2008 and really kicked my ass. The sequel maybe isn't quite as laugh out loud funny, but the animation is even more elaborate and beautiful, and the at times nonstop action sequences are eye-poppingly spectacular and genuinely exciting. Loved it.)

Well, holy shit, I was expecting bad, but not this bad. I knew the film was going to be an obnoxious rehash, but I at least figured there would be a few solid laughs along the way. No such luck. Hangover 2 is not only the most creatively bankrupt film I've seen in ages, it's a comedic dead zone on top of everything else. It carbon copies the original to such painstaking degree it's almost like a second draft of the same screenplay; nearly every scene, nay, nearly every moment is a blatant corollary to a moment from the original film. It's not just the exact same plot told with the exact same story structure, they even repeat most of the original film's jokes with only slight alteration. Even the surprise "celebrity unexpectedly shows up in cameo role as themself" is the same: it's Mike Tyson. Again. That is the opposite of a surprise.

The best thing about the original was Zach Galifianakis's performance as oddball brother-in-law Alan, which was obviously something of a starmaking role for the comedian. There was a sense in the original that Galifianakis really took the character and ran with it; it was so in line with the sense of humor he displays in his standup that it's not hard to imagine that he did a lot of improvising. I don't know how they fucked it up, but somehow they managed to make Galifianakis unfunny. The key to Alan's character is as much of an offputting weirdo he is, he's still somehow strangely lovable due to his puppy dog earnestness. Part 2 turns him into a pissy, unpleasant jerk who spends most of the movie whining about how no one else appreciates him. After this and the not abysmal but not good Due Date, I'm convinced that director Todd Phillips doesn't actually understand Galifianakis's appeal, despite being the one to give him his big break.

The Best Film I've Seen So Far In 2011

2011-05-05T17:50:00.000-04:00

Wow. We're coming up on three months since I last updated this blog. I don't know what to say. It's true this has been a busy time (I got engaged back in January, so there's wedding planning; work has been busy; I'm voluntarily giving up more of my free time in order to be social like a normal person), but I don't think that really accounts for my silence. I've watched a metric shit-ton of movies in the past few months, so it's not like I'm lacking for topics, either. It's just... I either haven't had a lot to say, or haven't been able to effectively express the things I wanted to say. I tried doing a 2010 horror movie roundup in January as I've traditionally done, but then realized I hadn't seen enough new releases to make it worthwhile. I tried to do a general best of 2010 list, got halfway into and realized I had nothing interesting to say about any of the films and quit.

It's weird. Back in December I did two of my favorite posts ever, but it feels like that dried the well. And not in a bad way; I'm still having an intensely gratifying experience watching a lot of great movies, I just don't feel the need to share my opinions as often as I used to. In some ways that feels to me like maybe that means I'm in a healthy, happy place where I'm content keeping my hobby to myself.

On the other hand, I do miss some of the back and forth on here, and I do miss being able to go back and see where my head was at at different points in my life, especially when it comes to movies (although Twitter gives me a micro version of that). Plus, Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue is insanely fun for me every year, and it would be stupid to have this blog be completely inactive the other 11 months of the year. So here's a short post to keep this baby from dying completely. I'm not really ready to do any full-on critical analysis, so just consider this a brief recommendation of what has been my favorite film so far of 2011. (We'll see if this changes if Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ever makes it to D.C.).

I caught Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte this past Sunday and was completely blown away. It contains no dialogue of substance, and there were no subtitles to translate what little dialogue there was (and no need for subtitles). The film is about an old man, and then about a baby goat, and then a tree, and finally it's about smoke. And what it implies is that all four things are essentially different stages of the same being; whether that connection is meant to literally imply reincarnation, or if the interconnectedness of everything is just metaphorical isn't really of importance to me. Each story flows into the next and into the next in such a beautiful and elegant way that the effect is near-transcendental. (This is high praise coming from an atheist).

This is all told in a serene, deliberate manner that I suspect most folks will find painfully boring. I wouldn't blame them. For those of us who can tune in to what Frammartino is doing, however, the film is hypnotic. It can also be surprisingly (unintentionally?) funny and is deeply harrowing at one point (a scene involving a baby goat getting lost in the woods, which was almost too painful to watch), but it's goals are bigger and more ambitious than that, I think it is attempting to be an almost spiritual experience. If I read some of the imagery correctly, the film's ethos might be something like when people tell you they are "spiritual, but not religious," only a lot less insufferable than that.
There is a lot of masterful visual storytelling involved here; I've already mentioned that the story and its ideas are conveyed without dialogue. There's little of anything resembling a traditional plot. Frammartino does a lot of wonderful things with precise framing, complexly choreographed long takes, and a lot of simple but profound cause-and-effect editing. Already one scene is becoming (justly) famous amongst cinephiles, a long-ass take involving a stubborn sheep dog, his flock, a procession of worshipers reenacting the crucifixion, and a precariously-parked truck, that keeps building and developing in unexpected ways. The staging of the shot is so mind-bogglingly complex yet so perfect that you sit in awe of the entire sequence. (It apparently took something like 21 takes to pull off). It also has the best, most precise acting by a dog you will ever see in your life.

Through style alone, Frammartino elevates the natural and the everyday into something fascinating and profound. (My favorite quote about the film might be AO Scott's "You have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along.") For those out there willing to try something new, I can't recommend Le Quattro Volte enough.

As for going forward, I'm hoping to keep updating before the horror movie marathoning in October, at least sporadically, but I need some ideas. Feel free to chime in. Neil Young has a new Archives Series release coming out in a month or so, so I may use that as an excuse to catch up on a few of the additions I made after completing Journey Through the Past last year. And I might do a similar project with another group or artist I'm into (although definitely not one with as huge of a catalog as Neil's), so let me know if you think Warren Zevon, Smashing Pumpkins (and anything Billy Corgan related), or Steely Dan (plus Fagen & Becker's solo albums) might make for a good retrospective. (I also thought about doing Opeth, but I don't think enough folks listen to them to care). This is supposed to be a movie blog, though, so if anybody has any good ideas for movie-related posts, I'd love to hear them.

On the Mockumentary Format, and Why I Am Sick of It

2011-02-18T16:30:00.002-05:00

"We'd rather be making the movie that we're making with the mockumentary movie instead of the movie we're making." - Home Movies, season 3, episode 10, "Storm Warning"

(I don't normally talk about television on my blog, but a few things I read today touches on some ideas about TV visual style that I'm interested in. I'm not big on recapping, so if you didn't see this week's episode of Community, this won't mean a lot to you.)

The votes are in, and it seems last night's episode of Community (probably my favorite current TV show, except for possibly Justified and How I Met Your Mother) "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking," which assumed the mockumentary format of shows such as The Office, Parks & Recreation and Modern Family, is a hit with the critics. My most trusted sources for Community reviews (specifically Times' James Poniewozik, The AVClub's Todd VanDerWerff, & Hitfix's Alan Sepinwall) all had high praise not only for the episode (though all expressed reservations with certain story elements), but with it's abrupt, one-time change in style as well. Heck, Poniewozik (easily my favorite TV critic) praised the style as "so natural and seamless, they lent emotional gravity without getting in the way of the comedy and dialogue."

Community is a show known for taking potshots at other shows (though in friendly, playful way), so when "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" began by explaining that Abed was making a documentary about the gang's reaction to Pierce's (fictional) imminent death, I thought there was some serious potential to satirize the above-mentioned mockumentary shows. Yet, outside of a few throwaway lines addressing the topic, I thought the whole thing was a gigantic missed opportunity.

Let's back up. The mockumentary format is, in my opinion, a pox on television. As a fan of Parks & Rec and Modern Family (season 1 at least, haven't seen any of season 2 yet), and a former follower of The Office, I must emphatically state that those shows successes are all in spite of the format in which they are shot, not because of it. I firmly believe that these shows suffer as a result of the (often pointless) pseudo-documentary style, that they fail to use the style in an innovative or interesting way, and that they would all be better shows if done as a straight-forward one-camera sitcom, a la the usual episodes of Community. Modern Family might even kill as a two-camera, studio audience sitcom.

What's the problem with mockumentary style? Well, we all know the main criticisms. Abed even said them directly to the audience on Community this week. In brief, there's a narrative laziness to it. Instead of having to elegantly weave things like plot developments and character motivation into the dialogue and action of the shows, the writers often opt to simply cut to an interview with one of the characters explaining the story to the audience. This holds true with with jokes, too. Instead of incorporating the humor into the story and the character interactions, the writers can save an unfunny scene by cutting to a character quipping about it, completely independent of the action, continuity, whatever. Yes, these cutaways can be funny, but they are funny in a way that isn't as earned by the preceding scene; it would be equally funny if we cut from a scene of character interaction to a scene of a standup comedian telling an unrelated joke. The laugh is real, but not necessarily earned through craft.

The best mockumentary shows are the ones that have tried to go beyond using the style as a joke-streamlining system and played with the form a little bit. Arrested Development used its fictional documentary structure to jump forwards and backwards through time, offer bizarre digressions, and insert all sorts of delightful visual gags (and it also didn't resort to direct-to-the-camera testimonials from the characters). Its use of an omniscient narrator could be seen as poor storytelling, but that was redeemed by the narration's playfulness and silly meta elements (for instance having the narrator, Ron Howard, make references to himself and his career).

The U.K. version of The Office also justified its documentary trappings by virtue of its lead character. Ricky Gervais's David Brent wasn't just supposed to be a subject in a documentary, he was trying to hijack the documentary to be about himself. The show was just as much about Brent mugging for the camera and trying to steal focus from everything around him as it was about the goings on at his office. I don't feel that Modern Family, Parks & Rec or the American Office has a clear-cut reason, as that show did, for using this style.

Still, my real beef with these pseudo-docs is one I don't often see mentioned: they are all, almost without fail, visually dreadful.

There's an adage that film is a director's medium, and TV a writer's medium. I think there's a lot truth to that, and I keep it in mind when watching TV. I'm not looking for a television equivalent to Jacques Tati's Playtime when I watch a comedy series. I don't require shows to have the same level of visual artistry that I expect of film. Yet, I think television critics are so focused on the writing, the performances and the jokes that too often they accept form passively.

Why else do they put up with the visual styles of these shows, especially The Office and Parks & Rec? The herky-jerky camera work, the pointlessly rapid editing, the often dull color palette, the lack of detail or artful composition of the shots, all things that would be criticized in a movie. Yet, too often these silly, worthless, distracting stylistic quirks are given a pass when used on TV.

(Modern Family probably does the style the best, at least from a technical standpoint. It still tends to get on my nerves, but I have to credit them for using brighter, more visually elaborate sets, and trying to frame the shots in more complex, interesting ways. For instance, there's a great punchline in an early episode involving three identical bicycles that works because all the bikes show up together in a long, deep shot. If that same gag was on The Office, it might have given each bike a separate shot, or wildly panned back and forth between all the bikes, and ruined the timing. Plus there would have been a bunch of unnecessary reaction shots.)

Worst of all might be the zooms. Do you notice them? I can't un-notice them. The camera is constantly zooming in and out, on nearly every shot. Sometimes I suppose this is done to accent a joke (sort of like a visual equivalent of a rimshot), but more often than not they happen for no discernible reason. It's a stupid, pointless visual distraction, and one that I find often actively steps on the punchlines.

The zooms don't stop with the faux-documentaries. They are becoming prominent in action series as well. I recently watched the first season of Battlestar Galactica because of its sterling reputation, and was disappointed to find that the show's supposed ambitions of visual artistry mainly consisted of ceaseless mini-zooms. (I had other issues with the show as well). Even a show I mostly enjoyed, Dollhouse, couldn't stop zooming in and out on nearly every shot, making needless visual complication out of even straightforward scenes of dialogue.

I've talked about realism in film on here before and why I think it's a nebulous concept; this shaky/zoomy style is a particularly annoying symptom of it. (I think 24 is probably to blame for its prominence in modern television). Whatever sense of "realism" or immediacy one might achieve by shaking the camera and having an itchy zoom-finger is negated by the loss of visual coherency, focus, depth, etc. It's a cheap trick, a way to add a vague sense of grittiness that wasn't achieved via the writing, staging, or performances.

(And I should note here that I'm not always against shaky cam style; I'm actually a big fan of Paul Greengrass's Bourne films, which take all these stylistic elements I've bitched about and amplify them to absurd degrees. I just think these things only work when paired with careful, painstaking filmmaking, which is almost never the case on TV).

The realism/immediacy argument holds up even less for the mockumentary comedies, because those shows constantly violate their own reality. Supposedly we are watching a documentary about these people, yet the cameras are frequently in places they shouldn't be, are given unrestricted access to the subjects' lives, and will cut to all sorts of angles during a scene, as if everything is being shot by 10 simultaneous cameras when logic dictates that there should only be one or two.

Phew. Which is my long way of saying that, both structurally and visually speaking, Community had a lot of material to work with in terms of satirizing this style, and then completely blew it. Instead, it used the style the exact same way that Modern Family would have, and save a few cheeky comments from Abed, failed to really comment on the style or even do anything particularly creative with it.

Did I think "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" was funny? I thought it was hilarious. I think every episode of Community has been hilarious. But what makes the show something really special for me, something more than just a funny show, is its cinematic qualities. It's often visually well-constructed, full of detail, playful and imaginative in a way that a show like Parks & Rec never could be.

Think about the action movie homages in "Modern Warfare," or the blink-and-you'll-miss-it theft of the pen in "Cooperative Calligraphy." These are signs that the show is made by people who care about how it looks. They don't want us to just passively accept the visuals, they want us actively engaged by them. You could argue that "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" is an attempt to try something new visually on the show, and I appreciate that, but mostly I felt it limited the episode's potential rather than expand its possibilities.

Red State Predictions

2011-02-02T09:50:00.008-05:00

Before reading this post, you should probably read this story to make sure you're up to speed.

Kevin Smith's next movie, Red State, is a horror movie, and I think that's cool. For one, anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes on my blog knows that the only thing I love more than my fiancee is horror movies. (Sorry, honey.) But also, despite my tastes in film growing ever-more erudite with each year, I'm a fan of Smith's and have been for a long-ass time. Even as I become more and more aware of the man's flaws as a filmmaker, his movies still make me laugh, and still tap into certain truths about a place/time/mindset that I wasn't too far removed from as a teenager. I saw Clerks when I was 14, and it was kind of a milestone for me. Heck, there's still a Clerks poster I bought a 10 years ago hanging above my fiancee's and my bed. (This is more a matter of the fact that I haven't bought any posters in a good decade. There's also a Titan A.E. poster still hanging up in our room.)

Recently, some of us were slagging on Smith a little bit on OutlawVern.com, mostly for what we perceived as a lack of ambition and growth on his part. Truth is, though, Red State is a sign of serious ambition on the man's part. It's way out of his comfort zone, and it sounds like he had to fight tooth-and-nail to get funding after all the major studios passed on it. I have my doubts as to whether or not Smith has the cinematic chops to pull off a horror movie (he failed pretty spectacularly when he tried to make an action movie), but that doesn't mean I'm any less excited for the film.

Thing is, 12-ish years of being a Smith fan means you become prepared for each new release to become a bizarre, Smith-induced media storm of hype, ass-kissing, backlash, controversy, back-tracking, finger-pointing, and so on and so on until it all turns into a witty anecdote one of those An Evening with Kevin Smith DVDs. Red State isn't even out yet, and Smith has already managed to stir up a minor frenzy over the film because his distribution plan, and because of negative comments he's made about critics and critics' screenings.

I hope it's an awesome movie, and that if it's an awesome movie that it's also a financially successful one. However, based on my history with Smith's films, here are some predictions about the release and reception of Red State:

- Early word on the film, from the fan screenings, will be overwhelmingly positive, which Smith will proudly announce at every opportunity. Despite his refusal to allow press screenings, Smith will gladly quote any professional film critics who do see his film early and give it a positive review.

- The Westboro Baptist Church, to Smith's dismay, will protest (in embarrassingly small numbers) at the early Red State screenings. In fact, Smith will be so dismayed by this that instead of ignoring them, he will go out of his way to address them as publicly as possible, much like with those who protested Dogma. Any publicity this generates will be completely incidental, I'm sure.

- Although Smith will do no press, he'll be very actively promoting his film on his website, Twitter, etc. He will have nothing but glowing things to say about the film, the cast, and the crew.

- The media will grow tired of covering the Westboro Baptist Church "controversy." Once this well runs dry, some other "controversy" surrounding the film or Smith's personal life will pop up around the time of the film's official release. Maybe a cast member will become infamous after impregnating one of the Obama daughters, or maybe a Taco Bell employee will refuse to sell Smith a Cheesy Gordita Crunch because it's no longer technically on the menu. Whatever the issue, Smith won't necessarily start the controversy, but he will sound off on it loudly and frequently.

- Although no critics' screenings are held, many major film critics will see and review Red State after its official release. The critical response will be mixed, with some believing that Smith has turned a new corner in his career, and others finding the film to be an awkward mismatch of director and material.

- Smith will cite the disconnect between Red State's rapturous reception from its early screenings and the more measured critical response as a clear example of film critics being out of touch with modern audiences. This despite the fact that all the enthusiastic early buzz was generated entirely by die-hard Kevin Smith fans who love his movies so much they were willing to pay $100 to see one, instead of waiting 6 months to pay normal prices. Smith still won't hesitate to quote the good reviews.

- Smith will also imply that the critics who wrote negative reviews were just upset about comments he made in the media and by the fact that no critics' screenings were held for Red State. Most film goers will not see any signs of such a bias in the negative reviews, but the die-hard Smith fans will glom on to the argument. They will use it as a blanket dismissal for all negative criticism when discussing the film online, instead of actually addressing other peoples' points.

- Smith's much touted distribution plan will not yield great results, and it will be his lowest grossing film since ~~Mallrats~~ Chasing Amy. Smith, convinced his film was going to be a runaway success, will be disappointed and will accuse the major studios of sabotaging his film because they were afraid of his self-distribution plan.

- However, due to the low cost of the film and robust DVD sales, the film ultimately will turn a healthy profit. Smith points to this as a sign of success, and he's not wrong, but it doesn't end up revolutionizing the industry in any of the ways he initially claimed.

- Some time well after the film's release, Smith admits that his incessant praise for everything Red State was a little overblown. The film has it's flaws (although he's still fiercely proud of it), and there were a lot of production problems. For instance, maybe it turns out the younger cast members were a bunch of vain assholes who were difficult to work with. The hilarious trials and tribulations of Red State end up as an hour long monologue on A (S)E7ening With Kevin Smith. Even people who hate Kevin Smith movies agree that it's pretty funny.

- And for my final prediction: when I finally see Red State, I enjoy it and appreciate Smith's ambition, but think it lacks the needed atmosphere and tight directorial craft that make for a truly special horror film.

So that's my checklist, and I think if it's 75% or above in accuracy, I'll finally buy myself a new HD TV. Please feel free to make your Red State Predictions in the comments below, and come its official release, we'll see who was the most accurate.

A Few Quick Mini-Reviews

2010-12-26T17:29:00.003-05:00

The Fighter

I was a little hesitant when I first heard about this one; I'm a big fan of David O. Russell, but this seemed like an obvious attempt to play nice for the studios and make a mainstream crowdpleaser to rehabilitate his image, following a box office flop and some very unflattering behind the scenes footage of his approach to directing actors. The Fighter was produced by Darren Aronofsky, and after the critical/commercial/awards success of his The Wrestler, I couldn't help but see this as a transparent attempt to repeat the formula. Is it? Maybe. Did Russell sand down some of his rough edges in the process? Sure. But as far as crowdpleasers go, this is a keeper. Russell may be playing nice, but one of the joys of The Fighter is how he still manages to build up a lot of manic energy in the performances and the story, which is sort of his trademark and I'm glad he didn't downplay it. The show-offy stuff goes to Melissa Leo, Amy Adams, and especially Christian Bale (the consummate overactor) in the supporting cast, but it's the good kind of show-off. Lead actor Mark Wahlberg, after his live-wire turn in Russell's I Heart Huckabees, gives one of his most restrained performances, going for an unshowy naturalism that helps ground the film.

Black Swan

Speaking of Aronofsky, he was never a filmmaker of subtlety or tact, but he never needed to be. Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain are all bold, blunt objects, but gloriously, excitingly so. Personally, I've never much valued taste or class in my films, so I was all set for an unhinged, overwrought ballet-themed melodrama from the modern king of cinematic audacity. Black Swan is good fun with a lot of good atmosphere, and I was happy to discover that it plays at least 30% like a horror movie, always a plus with me. Yet, possibly due to the level of hype this film generated, I was little disappointed by the final result. It's big, crazy, messy and fearlessly unsubtle (all good things), but I would have appreciated some degree of ambiguity or mystery. It's a story told from the POV of a character who is losing their mind, yet it never really plays with reality in any provocative ways: the audience is always basically aware of what is real and what isn't. When the end came, to my dismay I felt as though I understood everything about the film; it had no mysteries left for me to discover. It's a glistening, dazzling surface, but surface is all it is, and it was out of my head practically as soon as we left the theater.

I Love You Phillip Morris

Not really a prestige film, though as unlikely as it is, I honestly think Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor could garner some awards nominations if this film gets more attention. The directorial debut of the writers of Bad Santa, I Love You Phillip Morris is a reasonably entertaining true-crime con man story that suggests Catch Me If You Can rewritten as a dark, foul-mouthed comedy. It's treatment of homosexuality is a little juvenile in places (a few too many punchlines seem to consist of nothing more than two men being intimate, as if that's immediately funny), but what's admirable is how the love between Carrey and McGregor's characters is treated with sincerity, leading to a few unexpectedly heavy dramatic scenes between the two of them in the later stretches of the film. Not a strong recommendation, but worthwhile to those seeking a good comedy after a year that felt a little dry for the genre.

True Grit

I've never read the novel, but I have seen the John Wayne film, and was surprised at just how closely this remake sticks to it. And yet somehow still the Coens have come up with something special, a western that feels like both a throwback and a revision; it keeps the original film's flip humor and deliberate, bon mot-filled dialogue, while adding a harsh layer of tough violence (I have no idea how this film got a PG-13). The Coens' mix of playfulness and unsentimental brutality, told with their typical attention to detail and painstaking craft, is a potent combo. Their films in the past have often been challenging and purposefully unsatisfying; this is their most mainstream and conventional film (at least since their lackluster comedies of the early 00's), and yet it is a great, tremendously entertaining mainstream film that will likely have a spot on my list of the year's best.

Finally, just a quick shout-out to J.T. Petty's S&MAN (pronounced "sandman"), a documentary about perverse, violent underground horror movies that SPOILERS turns into something of a horror movie itself, when one of his documentary subjects starts dropping hints that maybe his films aren't exactly faked. Petty has made some good horror films himself, but this one really announces itself as something special. It's a mix of actual documentary footage with staged footage meant to look like a documentary; sort of a mix between tired horror fakumentary movies like Paranormal Activity and is it real or is it fake docs like this year's excellent Exit Through the Gift Shop. The staged footage wasn't quite convincing enough to trick me for long, but that's hardly the point. It's a thoughtful, occasionally tense film about the nature of cinematic violence, with questions about cinematic "realism" that kinda tie into some of the discussions we've had on this blog lately. A mix of genuinely interesting documentary and clever meta-commentary, it's not perfect, but I do think a must-see for fans of the genre.

The Camera/Eye: "Realism" in Cinematography

2010-12-08T17:25:00.023-05:00

A few weeks back, I was having a discussion with the frequently brilliant, witty posters on the forums over at OutlawVern.com about the overuse of blue filters, color desaturation and other cheap cinematographic and post-production tricks in modern American films. This prompted commenter Mr. Majestyk, something of a genre film guru, to express his feelings as "Just make the fucking movie look like my eyes see." After further discussion, he offered several caveats and clarifications to that sentiment, but the initial statement made me think. Do films ever actually look like the way we see? Realism in film, and whether it's desirable or achievable, is an interesting topic to me, and this seemed like an intriguing variation on that. Setting aside narrative realism (a worthy debate for a different day) and taking Majestyk's comment at face value, can and do movies ever look like real life as we normally see it?

When a movie is highly stylized, we tend to notice right away. Bold colors, exaggerated shadows, rapid editing and acrobatic camerawork all typically draw attention to themselves.

Something weird is happening in Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain

Something blurry is happening in Paul Greengrass's Bourne Ultimatum

But what about films with subdued, subtle colors, lighting, editing and camera movement? Are these films an accurate representation of how we see the real world? I submit that they are not. Filmmaking is a complex process, so much so that even a visually unadorned movie represents a series of intricate choices involving lighting, color, focus, framing, and so on. Or, more simply put, the camera doesn't do a good job of approximating the human eye.

POINT OF VIEW

We could start by talking about films that literally try to approximate vision. I'm talking about delightful gimmick movies like Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake, in which the camera assumes the POV of classic noir detective Phillip Marlowe for no real reason whatsoever. If you've never seen it, it's definitely worth your time just to see the gimmick attempted. Any 30 seconds of the film make it clear that the gimmick doesn't work. The result is strange and stilted, and doesn't allow for natural head movement, despite all sorts of fun moments, as when Marlowe smokes a cigarette and the smoke wafts in front of the camera.

Nope, not distracting at all

Let me ask this: What is it you always see, out of focus and differently in each eye, all the time even though you rarely think about it? Your nose. Technically, a film attempting an overly literal POV shot should include a blurry nose in the frame, but I don't believe I've ever seen this attempted. Yet. Now that I've typed it out, I'm hoping some young filmmaker takes inspiration and goes for the gold.

Although he doesn't quite go that far, Dario Argento has some fun taking the POV shot to silly, literal extremes in Opera, one of his best films. In it, the heroine is repeatedly subdued, tied up and forced to watch the mysterious killer murder her friends. The killer forces her to keep her eyes up by taping pins underneath them, so that if she shuts her eyes, the lids will be pierced. Argento not only has the balls to stage POV shots that include the pins in the foreground, but actually simulates her eyelids dangerously drooping towards the protrusions!

POV shot from Opera...

... and one with the drooping eyelids

The best attempt at this style I've ever seen might be Enter the Void (I've been name dropping it a lot here lately), which tries to approximate more natural head movements into the camerawork, and also includes blinking (amusingly so). It stages some impressive, and entertaining, long-take POV shots that effectively give the illusion that they last 30 minutes or more.

Note the tips of his fingers partially obscuring his view. Nifty and completely unnecessary

Yet, even at this level of cleverness and sophistication, with over 60 years to learn from the mistakes of The Lady in the Lake, nobody has figured out how to do one important thing: eye movement. Ever notice that when you look around, you don't just move your head, but your eyes, too. In fact, your eyes are almost constantly in motion, endlessly scanning your surroundings. Cameras just aren't able to imitate this, and if they were it would likely result in something very disorienting to the viewer. Camera movement, even a whip pan, is just too slow. Ironically, a simple cut to a new shot might be the most accurate way to represent eye movement... which, of course, would completely defeat the point of staging a POV shot in the first place.

FOCUS

Okay, so you're thinking "Big deal, Dan. So overly literal POV shots are phony looking? So what? That doesn't mean that other movies can't look real." Fair enough. So now I'd like to try to argue that even your most natural, unadorned looking movie is the result of some serious stylization. Let's talk about the problem of focus.

Deep focus photography (which uses a large depth of field) allows for a kind of god's eye view. Background, middle-ground, and foreground can all be in focus at once. Does this style, which affords the viewer a wide, open playing field of a frame to explore, lend itself towards realism? Let's look at a few classic deep focus compositions to admire how much they remind you of what you see every day:

Citizen Kane

Ashes and Diamonds

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Children of Men

Okay, you got me. I cherry picked stills from some very stylized, visually unrealistic movies. I still think I have a point, though: as much as the world around us feels like its in focus, you will never see in extreme deep focus in your life. What does visual focus even mean when we aren't talking about the human eye or cameras? Focus doesn't really exist from an "objective" view point. Going by the criteria of making a movie that "looks like my eyes see," deep focus is not at all similar to how we actually perceive the real world.

Acknowledging that degrees of focus would need to exist in order to make a film look a little more like how we see the world, we could look to cinematography that goes for a more shallow depth of field, in which one visual plane is in focus, at the expense of the rest of the image. It's not uncommon for this to be quite severe in films, even though we often don't think about it. Take these examples from two movies pitched as gritty, working-class dramas:

Hustle And Flow

The Fighter

Unless you are Mr. Magoo (or, you know, nearsighted), you've never actually seen anything look like that in real life. Especially the Hustle and Flow still, where the focus turns the background into an abstract painting. Still, even using a much less severe example, I think it's still apparent that this doesn't imitate the way our eyes focus. Here are two typical images from The Time to Live and the Time to Die, an early film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien:

I bring up Hou, a filmmaker I have recently been catching up with, because his early films are photographed in as unobtrusive and naturalistic a manner as any fiction film I can think of. The films themselves are often focused on the mundane details of everyday life, de-dramatized to a degree that's a little bracing to those of us accustomed to plot-heavy mainstream films. The visual style is designed to match, with its muted colors, lack of ornate sets or costumes, and subtly complex framing/blocking of the actors to capture their unselfconscious, apparently semi-improvised actions.

Yet even Hou's tasteful, quiet, telephoto framings show major signs of stylization. Look at the way they can flatten out the image (esp. in the 2nd Time still above. The still from Robert Altman's Nashville below also provides an example), so that objects on different visual planes appear stacked right on top of each other. The focus may be closer to what we see, but the effect of distance is greatly altered.

A sea of faces in Altman's Nashville

We could probably go on about the ways different lenses change the image, distorting and altering space and depth, etc. And by "we" I mean a smarter person than me who has a greater knowledge of photography. Just sticking with the focus, even the look of the focus itself isn't quite right:

Hou's Dust in the Wind

For one, most of us have two eyes, and things that come too close to our face tend to not only blur, but double as well, a visual effect only duplicated by bad 3D. Even discounting that, cinema allows us to do something that we can't do with our own eyes: explore the out-of-focus areas. Try that in real life, and your eyes uncontrollably go into focus.

COLOR

It always struck me as an amusing irony that some filmmakers, when attempting to give their film a "gritty" or "realistic" look, opted to shoot in grainy black and white. I suppose because of its associations with low budget documentary filmmaking, it's become something of a code for a lack of artifice. Of course, we see the world in color, making black and white the more artificial option (my apologies to any color blind readers). And let's not even get into sepia tone or anything like that. Of course, I've heard other, more persuasive arguments for monochrome's realism, but let me state here that the very reason I love black and white is precisely because I find it less real than color.

Could you imagine Out of the Past in color? Ick

As for color photography, well... if it's not clear already, I'm not a person with a great knowledge of the technical nuts and bolts aspects of filmmaking, so I'm not able to go into depth here. That said, color photography is a complex chemical process, and different types of filmstock process the colors in different ways. Even a highly sensitive stock used to film dull, every day colors isn't going to perfectly duplicate every nuance of even those colors that our eyes can pick up on. (And of course, this applies to film and video quality in general, which even in its most highest definition still isn't as detailed as what we see in real life).

Hou's Dust in the Wind again, because I had another still left to use

IN SUMMATION: FRAMING

Our visual perspective is incredibly limited, but have you ever tried to see those limits? Obviously our vision stops at some point, but there's not a perceivable end point; you can't find the exact "line" where it stops. Part of the beauty of film is that it exists in a clearly delineated frame. It's not like vision, it's better than vision. It gives us a specific, artful way of looking at things, and opportunity to see things from a new perspective that is, I must say, inherently full of artifice.

My final point being: awesome. As much as film is a record of "real" things that "really" happened in the physical world, it alters those things in the process. Every shot is a specific choice. Images pass through a interpretive lens and burn themselves onto film, creating something new and special. Film isn't just about reproducing the real world, but about reinterpreting and reinventing it.

Still disagree? Great. There are limitless counterarguments to what I've said, as well as plenty of things I could've said but didn't. Tell me I'm wrong, or tell me this: what do you think is a great example of visual realism in film, and why.

The Elephant(s) in the Room (237)

2010-12-07T20:30:00.005-05:00

I recently caught the late British director Alan Clarke's Elephant, a short film about the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland that was originally made for TV (and is a good sign of just how different overseas TV programming can be from American TV). I had originally heard of Elephant because Gus Van Sant admired it so much he modeled one of his own films after it, even going as far as to borrow its title (more on that film in a minute).

Clarke's Elephant is political, but if you watched it without knowing any of the context, you'd be forgiven for just thinking that it was existential, or even nihilistic. The film is stark, almost completely lacking in dialogue, and devoid of what you might consider "plot." It details a series of coldblooded assassinations, not unlike what you might see in a mafia movie, only with all the exposition, characterization, and false drama removed. The audience has no real idea who the killers or the victims are, or what specifically prompts the murders (although they are all supposedly modeled after actual murders). Each scene depicts a different attack, and nothing is done to explicitly link the scenes together with any sort of master narrative. From the audience's perspective, these deaths are horrifying and literally meaningless.

A typical scene starts with an unidentified character (sometimes the killer, sometimes a victim), and follows them as they walk around an innocuous public setting for a few minutes. Eventually a climax of sorts occurs as someone is shot, the killer flees nonchalantly, and the camera lingers over the corpses for a few moments. Cut to next scene.

Clarke films mainly in wide-angle tracking shots. Although there are usually several cuts in each scene including some close-ups, many shots are of extended length, and often assume a perspective that follows a character from behind. Implicit in these following shots is a sense of doom, of unavoidable fate. The shots create a kind of visual pathway in the frame, especially when indoors and in hallways, and that path is terrible and inescapable.

Gus Van Sant's Elephant isn't quite as unadorned as Clarke's film, in that it actually has some dialogue and characters and story, but it's every bit as bleak and still pretty damn spare when compared to most narrative filmmaking. The film is about a Columbine-like massacre at a high school, but drained of all the sensationalism other films (cough cough Uwe Boll's Heart of America) might have opted for. It's disturbing and sobering, and I mean that in a positive way, because I admire the way Van Sant refuses to find easy answers, or over-editorialize, like so many in the media did after Columbine. It takes an unblinking look at a tragedy and surmises, to quote Vonnegut, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." It's a film about its own lack of insight into its story.

While Van Sant's lack of agenda (or his anti-agenda agenda) may be in contrast to Clarke's more pointed intentions, stylistically he borrows much from Clarke's film. Not the least of which are those wide-angle tracking shots that follow characters from behind. Van Sant's camera follows the students, victim and killer alike, down endless, winding hallways, evoking that same sense of impending terror. To the victims, it's just an ordinary, mundane day at school, but they are on an unavoidable collision course with death.

I'm certainly not the first person to point this out, but these shots of killers and victims marching down endless hallways strongly recall another film, which I think was likely an influence on both Van Sant and Clarke: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Tell me what you think.

Kubrick's vision of the Overlook Hotel is one of the great, iconic locations in horror movie history (hell, maybe in all branches of movie history), and his tracking shots are some of the most unforgettable moments of his film. What is it about these shots that is so effective? How is it that, when following a victim, they imply foreboding and helplessness, but when following a killer they imply an unstoppable force? There is something in their trajectory that makes everything feel unbearably inevitable.

Kubrick is the rare director who could make a horror film that is not only accepted as an art film, but has had an observable influence on the art house. (In addition to these examples, Gaspar Noe, an ardent Kubrick enthusiast, took these tracking shots to their furthest extremes during a lengthy segment of his Enter the Void. I loved that film, although maybe I'm being too generous in considering it part of the "art house.") What surprises me is that I can't think of examples of many horror films that stole, borrowed or were inspired by these tracking shots. Filmmakers have frequently ripped off, for example, the POV shots from John Carpenter's Halloween. Where are all the Kubrick knock-offs? Can anyone think of any examples I'm forgetting? This is a demonstrably awesome stylistic strategy, more young filmmakers need to get on it.

Final thought: I've read in the past that Kubrick was a fan of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Do you think there is any chance that Kubrick was inspired by a certain famous shot from Hooper's film?

Some Things Dan Watched: Possession & A Chinese Ghost Story

2010-11-30T19:00:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I aspire to be a pretentious dick. Part of me sees myself (or would like to see myself) as a member of the cinematic literati, a man of impeccable taste who watches only the most austere, sophisticated films, while furrowing my brow in a manner indicative of my absolute seriousness and focus on critical analysis, possibly while wearing a smoking jacket and sipping on a glass of brandy. Yet despite my earnest forays, especially recently, into the cinema of revered auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (and a very real appreciation of those filmmakers), at the end of the day I'm a basic kind of guy. My interest in film is far more personal than academic, and though I have some interest in different branches of film theory, I tend to be biased towards films that work directly on my emotions, or those that go for bold stylistic gestures, rather than those that appeal to my intellect, or emphasize stylistic restrain and maturity, or are meant to be viewed through certain theoretical frameworks.

Which is my longwinded way of explaining why I enjoy weirdo cult movies so much despite my aspirations to serious cinephilia. I'm still hoping/planning to include some more serious-minded films in upcoming Something Dan Watched posts, but for right now it seems that it's turned into a forum for me to recommend bizarre, slightly obscure films that I enjoyed. And today I have two for you.

Possession stars Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as a married couple on the skids; she's leaving him for another man, and he is not taking it well. Now, I'll try to step lightly here because I don't want to give too much away, although I'm not sure how much you can spoil a movie that doesn't make a lot of sense. The husband moves out, but discovers that the wife is neglecting their young son. The husband confronts her lover, a flamboyant European sex machine, but it devolves into an awkward fist fight. He confronts the wife and it devolves into... her trying to slice open her neck with an electric knife, and he matches her by slicing up his own arm. Then he meets his son's schoolteacher, who looks exactly like his wife with different hair, so naturally he starts an affair with her. And he keeps on having weird confrontations with his wife that culminate in things happening like her stepping in front of a tow truck, causing it to swerve and send the demolished cars it was hauling flying onto the sidewalk.

I'm just talking about the first 20 minutes or so, before the movie really gets weird. I'll stop talking specifics now and just say that the movie then rushes headlong into mystery, murder, grotesqueness, and some very, very transgressive sex, all with an unexpected supernatural bent (although nothing to do with demonic possession, as the title might lead you to expect). And it may culminate with the apocalypse. Or something.

The early scenes of Possession threw me; it seemed pitched at too high of an energy level, with a lot of overacting and melodramatic dialogue. What I first thought might have been bad acting and writing turned out to be a deliberate stylistic choice. Possession sustains a manic energy for its entire 2 hours, with nowhere to go but up: you think you're already at a 10, then you find out that this one goes to 11. It's main goal seems to be to do whatever it takes to get a reaction out of the audience, to put them on edge or confound them at every turn. Actors assume random ticks, spasming and flopping around during some scenes for no discernible reason. The camera work is just as intense and overly-stylized: for example, if a character sits down in a rocking chair, the camera will rock with them. The plot grows increasingly bizarre and audacious, veering frequently from broad comedy to melodrama to freakish horror. And when that's not enough, it'll throw everything at you at one, as in a scene where Adjani suddenly begins screaming and flailing around, before inexplicably secreting weird, viscous fluids.

I have to praise the acting, especially the lead roles. The behavior of the characters grows increasingly erratic and inexplicable during the film, yet Adjani and Neill ground it in a certain internal consistency while still relishing every exaggerated second of it. I was familiar with Adjani's work from Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, so I knew she could play madness and handle herself well amidst all the weirdness. Neill, on the other hand, I'm more used to see play buttoned-down straight men, so it's a real treat seeing him go for broke.

I have never seen another film by director Andrzej Zulawski, but I may have to seek one out. Possession is an inspired work of insanity, a seemingly endless treasure trove of horrific surrealism. It moves with the relentless pace of a nightmare, following its own twisted logic that doesn't make rational sense but is persuasive nonetheless. Lest I'm making this sound like a work of empty provocation (not that provocation doesn't have it's place), I suspect that the film is a genuine attempt to deal with the ugly emotions of a messy divorce, translated into visceral, horror movie terms.

The next movie I wanted to mention has little in common with Possession, despite also being a horror film (ish), except for a similar desire to cram as many ideas into each shot as humanely possible. I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about A Chinese Ghost Story, but I definitely give it a strong recommendation to fans of 80's horror/comedies. The best description I can give it is that it's like a kung-fu version of Evil Dead II. The plot concerns some silliness about a goofy ne'er-do-well who falls in love with a ghost and has to do battle with her evil ghost family, but that's all just an excuse to wow the audience with a bunch of exuberant, imaginative special effects.

You get stop-motion ghouls, a giant tongue monster, an army of the dead, a POV shot from a ghoul traveling down someone's throat, and lots of berserk supernaturally enhanced martial arts scenes. Any time the movie stops to focus on character or exposition the energy flags a little too much, but all the flipped out action makes up for the dull spots.

The reason I sought this film out, oddly enough, is because Renny Harlin mentioned it on the epic length Nightmare On Elm Street documentary Never Sleep Again. Apparently it was a major influence on Harlin when he made part 4 (The Dream Master, my favorite of the series), and it clearly took inspiration from A Chinese Ghost Story's crazy, inventive special effects.

Hey, So I Finally Saw That Human Centipede Movie

2010-11-29T21:42:00.007-05:00

After what feels like an eternity of queasy anticipation, I finally saw Tom Six's now-infamous horror film The Human Centipede last night. I don't have too much to say about it, but horror movies are kind of my domain, and since this one was probably the most talked about of 2010, I figured I should chime in.

I first stumbled upon the premise of The Human Centipede back when it had only shown at a few film festivals, and not that many people had actually seen the film. Imagination is a powerful thing; when I heard that there was a movie about a mad scientist who stitches three innocent people together mouth-to-anus and forces them to live as one being, I basically envisioned the most heinous, horrifying thing ever put to celluloid. I immediately lost my appetite, and I couldn't shake the thought of the movie for days on end. When I heard that people who saw the movie actually liked it, I knew I had to see it myself. In my mind, it would be something like seeing Ichi the Killer again for the first time, an experience both unbearably disturbing yet strangely fascinating and gripping.

Of course, a few things happened between then and now. One, it turns out that once a concept, even one as insidious as a human centipede, lays its eggs in your brain and hatches little baby human centipedes that colonize your every thought, you eventually learn to accept and become desensitized to the idea. Two, my brother Andy, a trusted source for horror and cult movies, saw it and gave it a "meh." The film had lost its shock value and my expectations were lowered.

On the one hand, I wish I had seen The Human Centipede knowing next to nothing about it, like those original festival-goers did, where it might have been able to truly shock me. On the other hand, having fully adjusted to the filthy idea beforehand helped me appreciate that Tom Six has crafted a reasonably entertaining horror flick/cult oddity that works as more than just an endurance test. Most importantly, it actually has a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor about itself, albeit a pretty fucked up sense of humor. Take a look at the final image in the post, a picture the mad scientist shows his victims to explain the procedure he's about to perform on them, for a sense of what I mean.

It's not a great horror film by any means, I wouldn't call it a must-see or even strongly recommend it or anything like that. But I think aficionados might appreciate how Six dreamed up a singularly twisted hook for an efficient, classically scripted and structured monster/mad scientist movie. For starters, despite its completely tasteless premise, Six treats the material with a modicum of restraint (you know, relatively speaking). He knows the concept alone is enough to lure in viewers; the film is no more graphically violent than most R-rated horror movies, and the most disgusting part of the premise (the whole having to eat someone else's shit thing) only factors into one scene and you can't even see the horrible thing happening.

Six has a good knack for building suspense. Three scenes come to mind, all good enough to cover the price of admission. In one, one of the victims manages to escape the mad scientist's clutches pre-surgery, and is chased around the compound, leading to a clever sequence involving a swimming pool with an automated cover. Another involves the centipede desperately trying to function as one unit to escape the doctor's clutches, including a painful, maddeningly slow excursion up a winding set of stairs. Finally, there's a fun sequence where the doctor tries to get rid of some cops snooping around his property, and he can't even keep his act together for 2 minutes and seem like a sane person in front of them.

I'm not the only person to note that Dieter Laser, as the mad Dr. Heiter, is the film's secret weapon. He goes way over the top while still trying to make his impossible character feel "real," showing flashes of humor, crying over the death of his beloved pet 3-Hund (a doggy centipede), affectionately running his fingers over the furniture of his home as he walks by. It's a work of heroic overacting that helps elevate the film into something more fun than it otherwise might have been.

Something Dan Watched: Madhouse

2010-11-22T21:59:00.006-05:00

Just a quick one for you. Over the weekend, I showed my brother Madhouse (a.k.a. There Was a Little Girl, the onscreen title on my DVD copy), a little gem of an early 80's slasher movie that I discovered earlier this year. I talked about it briefly last month, but thought it was time to say just a little bit more about one particular element of the film.

The story, which shares a few plot points with Happy Birthday To Me (coincidentally, I believe, as both films came out the same year), involves Julia, a young teacher at a school for the deaf. Her abusive, crazy, deformed twin sister breaks out of the mental hospital a few days before their birthday. And soon, people close to Julia are vanishing or dying, at the hands of a mysterious killer with a vicious pet dog, who is planning a special birthday surprise.

There's a lot to like in Madhouse, which for a sleazy, early 80's slasher is uncommonly well shot, written, and acted. The clincher, what makes it a minor classic in my esteem, is the way the film (an Italian production that does a good job passing as American) works some giallo-style weirdness into the slasher template. This includes odd touches such as the killer's choice of murder weapon (dog), the killer's fondness for singing nursery rhymes, and the heroine's job working with deaf children (no offense to the kids, who are all sweethearts, but there's something vaguely unnerving about deaf children trying to speak).

One especially weird detail that sticks out for me every time is that, although I'm not 100% sure about this, I swear in one scene the killer is played by a puppet. Tell me what you think:

It's probably hard to see what I'm talking about without seeing the way "she" moves in the shot, which strikes me as looking somewhat weightless. Here are a few stills of the sister in other scenes for comparison:

The thing is, I cannot figure out for the life of me why they couldn't have used the actual actress in the shot. Is it because they didn't think a person could leap into the frame fast enough? Was the actress not available? Is it because (and maybe I'm getting into mild spoilers here) there's some doubt as to whether the evil twin is really the killer, and the filmmakers wanted to make something about the scene feel "off"?

I like that last theory the best, but I doubt it's true. There are a few other (more obvious) puppets in the film, and they seem more like products of budget limitations than intentional surrealism. Take for example these corpses:

And this dog head:

Yet, my point is that no matter the intent of the twin-puppet, the shot of her stabbing the maintenance man adds to the dreamy, creepy quality I admire about the film.

Anyone looking for a good slightly off-the-beaten-path slasher movie should check this one out.

Something Dan Watched: Enter The Void

2010-11-15T21:36:00.006-05:00

Well, considering that I've recently purchased a box set of Hou Hsiao-Hsien films that I'm doggedly working my way through, I was hoping my next Something Dan Watched post would cover something a little more prestigious or, you know, respectable. Instead, less than a week after covering Liquid Sky, I find myself discussing another trippy, drug-conscious, offbeat cult oddity: Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void, which just came to D.C.'s new West End Cinema this past weekend.

Enter The Void isn't really about its plot, so much as it is about its style, but let me briefly synopsize anyway. It tells the story of Oscar, an American drug dealer living in Tokyo with his younger sister. One night, a drug deal goes bad, and Oscar ends up getting shot to death by the cops. For more movies that would be the end, but things continue as Oscar's soul leaves his body. It experiences a strange journey, watching over Oscar's friends and family, reliving the formative experiences of his life, and eventually SPOILER being reincarnated as his sister's son. Or, as the film hints, this all may just be a hallucination Oscar experiences as he lays dying on the bathroom floor of a sleazy club known at The Void.

Like I said, though, it's not so much about the story as it is about the way Noe tells it. Enter the Void is the most stylistically rigid and all-around ballsy film I've seen in theaters this year. The whole film is shown as Oscar's subjective experience: the early scenes, when he's alive, are filmed from Oscar's POV, as though the camera was his eyes (this includes frequent black frames to suggest blinking, and a spectacular sequence where he does some heavy hallucinogens and trips for a while); after he dies, the camera assumes a weightless, god's-eye-view perspective as it flies around Tokyo, passing through solid objects like walls and people, as Oscar watches over the people from his life; the life-flashing-before-his-eyes scenes are filmed from directly behind Oscar, never showing his face, almost like you might see in some video games.

The only previous Noe film I've seen was his controversial Irreversible, which was so nihilistic and intent on rubbing the audience members' faces in filth and human misery that it was almost comical... yet I still respected its ambitious visual style and structure, in which the scenes were show in reverse chronological order, and each was staged as one continuous, elaborate take. Enter The Void spectacularly brings that one-take style to its most insane extreme (some shots are designed to appear "continuous" for what seemed to me to be nearly a half hour or so in length).

I've read several valid complaints about this movie, criticizing that it is style over substance, that the actual story of the film isn't as interesting as the visuals, that Noe includes too much of his trademark human degradation and miserableness. Those folks have a point. The screenplay never much bothers for subtlety (minutes before Oscar's death, he and a friend discuss the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and everything they discuss directly correlates to what happens to him in death) and I do think the exhilaration I felt during much of the filmed flagged about 90-minutes-ish in when it focused for too long on Oscar's friends and family in the aftermath of his death. Yet there's something about Noe's balls-out, go-for-broke style that redeems these flaws. Although I've gathered that Noe shares my lack of religious beliefs, and that the spiritual components of the film are ultimately just Oscar experiencing the "ultimate trip," as chemicals flood his brain as he dies, there's something about the way Noe conflates death, spiritualism, hallucination, subjectivism, reincarnation, etc., as different ways of looking at the same thing that makes the film energizing. It should be a downer but it feels like a positive experience.

Many will (perhaps rightly) hate this film, but those who appreciate bold aesthetic statements will find it was at least worth watching. (Also, I'm pretty sure this is going to be a cult item amongst stoners for years to come.) The best I can describe Enter the Void: it's like a four-way collision between Wings of Desire, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lady in the Lake and a Stan Brakhage short, and yet it's still not quite like anything you've seen.

Something Dan Watched: Liquid Sky

2010-11-11T18:30:00.000-05:00

"Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue" has finished its third consecutive year and, as per usual, fatigue has set in. I blogged 60 horror movies last month, regardless of whether or not I actually had anything to say about them. You start to get a little tired of writing after a while.

Last year, I let the blog fall into inactivity for several months afterward, and I would not like to see that repeated. What, then, to do? A Piece of the Action, while still an interesting idea for an ongoing column, turned out to be too time-consuming to keep doing. (And, frankly, I'm not happy with how either previous post turned out). If it ever returns, it will be in a much truncated fashion. I had ideas for two other articles, one a series and the other a one-time deal, but both involve horror movies and I'm a little burned out on that topic.

So the idea is this: I'm just going to make an effort to write little capsule reviews about movies I've recently seen, when I feel I might have a few thoughts about them. I call it Something Dan Watched, and I plan to do one weekly-ish, depending on if and when I watch something remarkable.

"Remarkable" as in something worth remarking on, not necessarily something I thought was good. And, boy, did I watch a remarkable film this week. Loyal readers (hahahahaha I crack myself up) will have noticed by now that I have a certain affection for movies that blur the line between "bad" and "good"; problematic, deeply flawed movies that are also weirdly interesting in unexpected ways. For me, this often turns out to be horror movies like I Know Who Killed Me, which are grossly deficient in terms in terms of script/plot/acting/coherency/etc, but have an off-kilter aesthetic worth or uniqueness about them. What's "bad" about the films is intertwined with what makes them "good" or interesting, and not just in a "so bad it's good" way.

1983's Liquid Sky is a bad movie in the sense that it is awkward, often poorly written and acted, narratively inept, and chintzy in its style... but it's also an interesting and provocative as a work of art. It's primary focus is on Margaret, a young woman and aspiring actress/model who likes to go to the New Wave clubs dressed in outrageous, androgynous outfits obviously influenced by David Bowie. She hangs out in a sleazy, drug addled world of low-rent performance artists and fashionistas, and much of her time (and the time of her colleagues) is spent trying to get high/trying to find the next score. She's dating another woman but considers herself bisexual (or maybe pansexual), and the movie is loosely structured as a series of her sexual encounters.

I should mention at this point that a tiny flying saucer has landed above her apartment, controlled by unseen, heroin-addicted aliens that discover they also enjoy the chemicals released in the human brain during orgasm. Oh, and people just sort of keep showing up and raping Margaret, and at the moment of orgasm the aliens shoot crystal blades into the rapists' brains, killing them and extracting the orgasm chemicals. Visually, this is all conveyed in what I assume are alien POV shots that at first appear as a proto version of Predator heat vision, then turn into colorful abstractions akin to the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Realizing that plot is maybe not well conveyed via the medium of acid trip, the filmmakers make room for a subplot about a German scientist who watches all this from across the street through a telescope and helpfully explains the story to a woman who is trying to seduce him.

So it's got a certain charming batshit quotient to it that we all love in our cult movies, but let me adjust your expectations before you run out to find a copy. I'm fairly certain most people would, reasonably, not have any appreciation for Liquid Sky. It's an awkwardly made low budget film, complete with tin-eared dialog, flat line readings, lots of bungled shots where actors are clumsily placed in the frame, and shots that go on forever not because the filmmakers were attempting something complex but because they didn't have time for multiple setups.

That said, I have to confess feeling admiration, or feeling something, for the film's ambitions, and for certain elements of its style. It may be all those negative things I said, but it's also bold, trippy, funny, bizarre, unique. At its best, it feels like somebody stitched together pieces of a talky, pretentious art movie with a near unwatchable, microbudget sci-fi/horror movie (I know that doesn't sound like a compliment). This schizophrenia extends itself thematically as well; the film seems to have a lot to say and wants to say all of it, even if those things don't have much to do with each other. It's a film that is in turns about sexuality, drug addiction, a celebration of drug consciousness, a critique of the New Wave/art scene it depicts, a forum for performance art, a commentary on the objectification of women in art and the media, and much more.

If there's a central theme to it all, it's about the way that poor Margaret, because of the way she looks and dresses, is treated by everyone she meets as their own personal sex toy. No one respects her or what she says; whether by force or by coercion, everyone feels entitled to fuck her. Two of the film's most memorable sequences deal with this: one in which a crowd of gawkers and hanger-ons at a fashion try to egg her into having sex on camera, their voices being digitally lowered in a nightmarish way; another where Margaret gives a monologue while applying glow-in-the-dark paints to her face.

Still, the most noteworthy element of the whole film may be Anne Carlisle's performance, who co-wrote the film in addition to starring in it. She's not only Margaret, but in a bizarre dual performance also plays Jimmy, an antagonistic drug addict who is, yes, a man. Carlisle's performances aren't technically polished, but they are at times transfixing (which is why she fits so well in this film). Physically, she resembles a mix of Bowie and Tilda Swinton, with all the androgyny that implies. She's somehow both sexually alluring (in an unconventional way) as Margaret, and oddly convincing and poised when playing a man. This sexual tension climaxes, as it only could in a movie this singular, with Margaret blowing Jimmy. I could be wrong, but I suspect an actress performing oral sex on a male version of herself is a cinematic first, and in this case a perfect summation of Liquid Sky's themes of sexuality and gender .

Saw 3D (in 3D!!!!!)

2010-11-04T22:02:00.007-04:00

Well, technically I didn't see this in time for my October marathon, but I do see the Saw movies as my "beat," and figured I should cover this here any way.

Evil Detective Hoffman, having escaped the reverse bear trap, sets about to track down and deal with nemesis Jill Tuck once and for all. Meanwhile, a self-help guru who runs a support group for Jigsaw victims finds himself a part of the most elaborate Jigsaw game yet. Meanwhile to that meanwhile, a good guy detective tries to track down Hoffman and stop him before it's too late. And meanwhile to all of that... but you get the gist.

Ostensibly the last film in the series, Saw 3D turns out to be the most genuinely entertaining sequel since Saw IV. Part of this is a subtle shift in tone and style that I think is due to the 3D. The 3D itself looks fine but isn't anything spectacular. The positive side-effect is that in working with the 3D process, director Kevin Greutert has gone for a much brighter, lively color palette, and also tones down much of the confusing, ADHD editing. (Attempting the series's usual dimly lit, designer gloom and rapid cutting in 3D would have likely rendered the movie incoherent). Back when the Feast guys took over writing duties in Saw IV, they slyly interpreted the films as absurd, violent dark comedies with impossibly convoluted stories. The unexpected (but welcome) change in visuals highlights this sense of ridiculousness and makes 3D the most fun of all the sequels.

Which is a good thing, considering the traps in this film. They are elaborate, crazy, vicious and they are also many; if the filmmakers didn't present them with a sense of grotesque fun, the movie would be tedious and depressing. And when I say many, I mean it. This has, by far, the most traps in the entire series, so many that sometimes the movie has to cut away to new, unimportant characters just to introduce a new trap and spectacular death. And one trap even shows up in a dream sequence that has no bearing on the actual story. And as if that wasn't enough violence for you, late in the film Hoffman goes on a rampage where I swear he must stab five hundred cops to death. (Conservative estimate).

The one thing that was disappointing me for a while was, considering that this is supposedly the final film, it didn't seem like it was doing much to wrap up the massive, complex, almost mythological story the series has going on. It introduces a shit ton of characters we've never met and essentially relegates Hoffman and Jill to supporting roles. Plus, Jigsaw's appearance is more or less a cameo. It seemed like the promises of closure were bullshit... until the appropriately nuts twist ending, which in one fell swoop ties up all the important plot threads still dangling in a more than satisfactory manner. The twist itself I suspect many Saw fans will see coming, but I don't think it will disappoint anyone. And there's still enough wiggle room to make another movie, should the makers be so inclined. Pretty neat.

Grade: B

The Shining

2010-11-04T17:04:00.002-04:00

I'm sure you know what this one is about. You have to, right? If not, then just know that it's a delightful family comedy/drama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf7h6o3I8yw

Normally on Halloween it's been my tradition to watch John Carpenter's Halloween, easily in my top 5 favorite horror movies (and thus an all-time favorite film in general). Earlier in the month my brother Andy recommended trying to fit The Shining into Your Vice Is A Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have The Netflix Queue: The Third My Nerd, which was a great suggestion because it's a beloved classic (even by those who don't normally like horror movies) that I hadn't seen in a long-ass time (many years, I'm guessing). I've always admired The Shining but it was never a personal favorite of mine, and thus not one I watched often. Dunno why, guess I'm just a jerk, because as I reconfirmed on Sunday night, it's a great film.

Do you think Stanley Kubrick thought he was slumming it at all when he made this film? Horror has always been a disreputable genre (unfairly), and its rare to see an artist of his stature work in. Of course, this film is a fantastic argument for the artistic relevance of the genre, but it didn't exactly become a call-to-arms for serious filmmakers to make more horror films. Horror has given us enough great directors, but few other great directors come to the genre. I've long wished that more art house auteurs would detour to the darkside once in a while.

One of the real accomplishments of this film s the Overlook Hotel itself. Kubrick's wide angled shots of little Danny riding down endless hallways on his bike give the location an epic, ominous feel that remains in the memory. It's one of the most memorable locations in horror film history; Kubrick created a cinematic space out of the hotel that has colonized itself in our imaginations, especially the haunting and unforgettable hedge maze, and room 237.

The real clincher, I think, is the ambiguity. It's unclear for a while what is really happening; is the hotel haunted, or is Jack just going crazy? It comes down definitively on the haunting by the end, but there's still a lot of tantalizing, open questions. Like, why does Jack lie about what he sees in room 237? How is the former custodian also a waiter, and why does his name change? How is it that Jack is both himself in present, and a member of the part back in the 1920's? And what the hell is up with the guy in the dog costume blowing the guy in the suit?

Grade: A

Dread

2010-11-04T16:40:00.003-04:00

A young, impressionable film student teams up with a charismatic, confrontational artist for an interesting project: they interview people to find out about their deepest, darkest fears. However, the artist is dealing with some serious psychological trauma, and his emotional breakdown leads to him manipulating the information they've gathered in a bizarre, gruesome fashion.

The movie that kept running through my mind during Dread (apparently based on a Clive Barker story) was The Lost, a similarly flawed but stylistically assured debut with an uncommonly nuanced villain for a horror movie. It's surprisingly thoughtful and effective; it technically fits in with the torture-themed horror of the past several years, but the emphasis is more on mental torture than physical (although it still gets icky in places). Afterwards, I felt a little disappointed with the final act. I don't care much about realism in horror films, but the last 20 minutes or so relies a little too much on plot devices, coincidence, and convenience (for example, the villain should be easily captured by the authorities, except that not one but two characters, independent of each other, decide to take him on themselves instead of going to the cops), then piles on the misery to an excessive degree and ends on what feels like a sick joke. It was still a good movie, but something rubbed me wrong.

Yet, I don't know, a few days later the film had still stuck with me. The final moment may be a little over the top or too brash in its execution, but it's truly disturbing and perfectly fitting with what came before. I still have problems with it, but I have to admit that the film, including the ending, got under my skin. After watching it Sunday I initially thought I'd saddle it with a "B-," but with a few more days contemplation:

Grade: B

Demons

2010-11-03T23:11:00.002-04:00

I am guessing I have seen Demons well upward of 10 times by now, probably more than any other horror film I have ever watched in my life. Why? What is it about this film that makes it so endlessly watchable to me? In part, it has to do with my life long fascination with so-bad-they're-good movies; it's a treasure trove of bad dubbing, bad dialogue, and nonsensical plotting. But beneath the irony, I genuinely love this film. I love its overblown but awesome visual style. I love the frequently awesome and clever make up and special effects. I love the all the movie-within-a-movie meta jokes. I love that its completely whacked out and unpredictable and doesn't feel like any other horror movie I can think of. And I love that there is a scene where a man rides around a movie theater on a dirt bike, hacking up demons with a samurai sword.

Is it a bad movie? Sorta. Is it also an awesome, supremely entertaining movie? Definitely.

Grade: A

Staunton Hill

2010-11-02T22:49:00.002-04:00

Set in 1969 for no discernible reason, a group of youngsters heading to some protests in DC break down in Virginia, and crash for the night in an apparently empty farm. There, they are butchered by a standard issue serial killer, who has an obsession with baby dolls and likes to pull out his victims guts.

We put this one on because it was set in Virginia (our home), but later I found it that it was directed by George Romero's son. I love the elder Romero, who despite often lacking the technical brilliance of a Carpenter or Argento, had a lot of solid ideas, a knack for potent satire and social commentary, and a good sense of the spooky. His son's film has all the cheap awkwardness of a Night of the Living Dead, but none of that film's virtues. Staunton Hill is a dull, flatly directed collection of slasher cliches about how all southern people are grotesque, retarded mass murderers. The gore is too brutal to be fun but not convincing enough to truly disturb. Its a joyless slog through familiar material that builds to a stunningly banal twist ending that doesn't make the previous events any more interesting or scary. My least favorite of the films I watched for YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ.

Grade: D

Kwaidan

2010-11-02T22:16:00.002-04:00

Ghosts and the supernatural are the common themes in this anthology of Japanese horror stories, by Samurai Rebellion director Masaki Kobayashi. The tales: a samurai cruelly leaves his wife for another woman, and when he one day returns learns a shocking truth; a demon spares the life of a man as long as he promises to never tell anyone what happened, which leads to a bizarre tragedy (amusingly, another more gory and twisted adaptation of this story was in Tales From The Darkside, which I watched earlier in the month); a blind singer is taken to the underworld, where he sings a ballad about a fierce battle to the ghosts of those who died in the battle; a man is disturbed to find someone else's reflection when he looks into a cup of tea.

At 2 hours and 45 minutes, Kwaidan is very likely the longest horror film I've ever seen. That's probably too long for most casual fans, but there are rich rewards for those of us who appreciate measured, atmospheric films. It's not "scary" in the sense that it's intense or suspenseful or manic; no one is chased by a madman with a knife. These are quiet, deliberately paced stories of the strange and tragic, told in a highly stylized, theatrical fashion complete with elaborate but clearly unrealistic sets. They are less about plot or excitement than about the creation of mood through offbeat production design and cinematography, and its eerie, sparse sound design.

It teeters dangerously close to greatness, but I found myself a little disappointed by the final story, which is also the shortest. It has a memorable final image, but otherwise is kind of a silly drag. I might be a little too hard on the overall film just because of the sequence of stories. If it had come earlier, it might not have been such a big deal, but after nearly 3 hours it ends the film on an underwhelming note.

Grade: B+

The Seduction

2010-10-29T14:38:00.003-04:00

A sexy, young local newscaster starts receiving creepy phone calls from "Derek," who unbeknown to her is a photographer who lives across the street and likes to take pictures of her from his window. She tries to brush him off as a harmless weirdo, but of course he's a dangerous stalker, and its only a matter of time before his obsession veers into deadly territory.

The real "find" (although I guess technically I found him two years ago, when I first saw Tourist Trap) for this year's YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ is David Schmoeller, a director mainly unknown today who worked in the era of John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and Brian DePalma and notably shares some of their aesthetic talents . Crawlspace, an elegantly sleazy slasher movie with a great villain performance by Klaus Kinski, proved that Tourist Trap wasn't a fluke. And Catacombs, if a disappointingly typical Exorcist knockoff, still showed a real sense of style and intelligence often missing in that particular subgenre. (He also did Puppetmaster, which I recall hating, but now I wonder if I should give it another shot).

I knew I wanted to work one more of his films into this month's activities, and it was between The Seduction and what appeared to be a Full Moon cheapie called Neatherworld. Since Seduction sounded not unlike Crawlspace, I was more stoked to check it out.

Voyeurism is one of my favorite themes common in thriller and horror movies. Obviously, the concept of someone watching you from the shadows is a creepy one. More importantly, though, voyeurism works well because it goes hand-in-hand with the medium: film is a type of controlled voyeurism, offering the same thrill of watching someone who doesn't watch us back. This isn't a new insight, and horror films from Peeping Tom onwards frequently comment on the voyeuristic elements of the medium.

The first 2/3rds or so of The Seduction effectively exploits this, inviting the audience to watch the reporter as the villain does, making us uncomfortable for sharing his hobby. The film's polished style, upper class settings, and cheesy 80's score are somewhat reminiscent of late night, softcore, cable pornography, and I don't think its entirely accidental. Two of the film's most effective sequences (the opening scene where Derek photographs the heroine swimming nude from his apartment, and a later sequence where he hides in her closet and watches her undress) seem like commentaries on the objectification of women in mass media. The heroine is a reporter, getting by in part on her good looks, and her first line in the movie is something like "I like being watched." (spoken to her boyfriend). By making the villain a photographer, Schmoeller might even be implicating himself in all this.

It's Hitchcock by way of Zalman King, at least for a while, and makes for an effective thriller, before throwing it all out the window by becoming a standard issue, overblown serial killer movie during the finale. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for a neat twist or some indication that things weren't going to play out by the numbers. And for a few minutes, the film teased me that this would happen: the heroine turns the tables on the villain, the watchee because the watcher, etc. This would have been an appropriate turnaround for the film, but instead it devolves into a standard, boring action movie climax complete a life or death struggle in the bedroom, shotgun blasts galore, and a worthless plot device of a character arriving with clockwork timing to save the day.

I'm still supportive of the film for the first 2 acts, and still plan to see more of Schmoeller's films, but there is a lot of wasted potential on display here.

Grade: B-

Mulberry Street

2010-10-29T13:41:00.002-04:00

Infected rats cause an outbreak of a zombie plague in Manhattan, as survivors hole up in their apartments or desperately search for a safe haven. And these aren't just any zombies, but rat-faced man-rodent zombies.

Let me start by saying a few nice things. For a low budget horror picture, Mulberry Street has a bit more of a professional sheen to it (or, should I say, the professional artificial rawness you associate with larger budget pictures) than some of the other modern cheapies I watched this month, like Head Trauma or Salvage. I can't fault it for ambition; much like the excellent The Signal, it tries to do the apocalypse on a budget a shows a certain knack for hiding its limitations. I think it's cool, even though they are essentially not much different from the fast zombies we typically get in modern horror, that the zombies are weird ratmen. The make up effects are a little silly but still neat. Although the rat thing ends up an underused gimmick, its leads to a funny scene where a guy locks a zombie in a closet, and the zombie uses his rat powers to tunnel out through the ceiling.

So, points for trying, but the movie itself didn't much work for me. The most obvious flaw is that the director tries to ape the shaky-cam, rapidly edited, intensified continuity style of the 28 Days Later (Mulberry Street's obvious, unavoidable inspiration), but doesn't have much of an idea of how to do it coherently. The result is an often ugly and muddled mess, such an eyesore that I wanted to turn away. The ironic thing is, its not nearly as shaky or manically edited as 28 Weeks Later, which came out the following year, but is far more difficult to understand visually. I've defended the style in the past, but it has to be done right to work. You still need to respect things like framing & geography, you need to give each shot a clear subject, you need to piece the shots together in a logical sequence, etc. All things Mulberry Street consistently fails at.

If you want to watch a movie like 28 Days Later, just watch 28 Days Later. If you want to watch 28 Days Later with more shaky-cam, watch 28 Weeks Later. And if you want to watch 28 Days Later set in an apartment building, go for REC (or Quarantine if you're too lazy to read subtitles). Mulberry Street is completely skippable.

Grade: C-