Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath

#125: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (John S. Robertson, 1920)

2012-01-28T11:30:00.009-06:00

The official Oscar hype season has begun, and silent film homage The Artist looks like the sentimental favorite. I haven't seen it yet, so I'll refrain from knocking it, but several critics I admire, as well as Kim Novak, have taken issue with its appropriation of large chunks of Bernard Herrmann's music for Hitchcock's Vertigo to score much of the film's final third. Since I haven't seen it, I don't have an opinion yet, but I'm puzzled by what I've read. That score has about as much to do with silent film as a Jay-Z video or a super-talky Aaron Sorkin-scripted project, etc. I'm sure plenty of people will congratulate themselves on seeing The Artist and recognizing a connection, however revisionist, to the early days of film, but will it inspire anyone to actually, you know, seek out and watch authentic silent films from the first 30 years of the medium? Is it just more faddish costume-party pastiche?

I know silent films are a hard sell for most people. When I first began learning about film history, I had a tough time watching silents. The poor quality of a lot of silent film prints, the sometimes comically exaggerated gestures of the performers, the quaintly worded title cards, the jarring absence of human voices (or any diegetic sound, for that matter), the cultural distance between silent and sound film (for me, even an early 1930s film seems relatable and connected to the world we currently inhabit, but silents seem like found footage from some distant ancestral time): watching these films seemed more like necessary work than pleasure. I stuck with it, though, and I began to appreciate, enjoy, and occasionally even love many silent films and filmmakers, especially F.W. Murnau, D.W. Griffith, Erich Von Stroheim, Louis Feuillade, and Buster Keaton, and the pre-sound films of Charlie Chaplin, Carl Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Yasujiro Ozu, King Vidor, Ernst Lubitsch, and Josef Von Sternberg.

Silent film at its best can put the viewer in an almost hypnotic state, a weird place between the dreaming and waking world, and is ideally suited to horror. Some of the best silent films are horror movies or contain horror elements. Murnau's Nosferatu was the first silent film that really drew me in and made me forget about the absence of sound. John S. Robertson's take on Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Jekyll and Hyde story is not a masterpiece like Murnau's vampire film, but it is most definitely worth seeing, particularly for the delightfully creepy performance of John Barrymore (Drew's grandpa) in the dual title role. This is a briskly paced film with great atmosphere and clever use of minimal sets.

I think we're all familiar with the plot, so I'll spare you a description. This mostly faithful film departs from Stevenson's book by using two characters added in an 1887 stage play: Millicent, the daughter of Sir George Carew, who is engaged to Jekyll, and Miss Gina, a dance hall singer who gets involved with Hyde. These added elements have become such a part of the story that they often appear in subsequent adaptations. Unlike some poor-quality silents, the cast here realizes it's on film and doesn't mug for the back row, although Barrymore does go cuckoo-bananas when he drinks the potion. The transformation into Hyde is a marvel of performance. Using just a little makeup and some bizarrely oversized prosthetic hands, Barrymore makes his Hyde a lecherous, menacing, leering, disfigured walking id, hunched into himself, grinning with huge teeth, reaching out with those bizarro-world hands, indulging every impulse. A scene where he stomps on a small homeless boy is a hugely enjoyable celebration of evil. Barrymore is genuinely unsettling in the part. This is not a dated, archaic performance. It still works.

Robertson shot on a set with just a few artificial buildings and streets, but he fills them with such a sense of geography and lived-in presence that you almost forget it's not a real London street. Jekyll's home and laboratory, Carew's entertaining room, a seedy bar presided over by a top-hatted MC who bangs a gavel on his table to get the room's attention, a dirty street and flophouse where Hyde stays. These locations are given life by the film's subtle camerawork and detailed set decorations. It's a good-looking movie.

John S. Robertson, a Canadian, began his film career in 1916 and quickly became a prolific Hollywood director throughout the silent era. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was his most successful film. When sound replaced the silents in the early 1930s, Robertson continued working for a handful of years, making one of the earliest Little Orphan Annie films in 1932. He retired in 1935, concluding his career with a Shirley Temple movie, Our Little Girl. I wasn't able to find out if the experience of working with Shirley Temple drove him out of the business forever or if he'd already planned his retirement, but he never made another film in the 29 of his remaining years.
Fun facts: Notable classical composer Edgard Varese has a bit part in this film as a policeman. The Byrds' song "Old John Robertson" is about John S. Robertson, who retired in the same Southern California neighborhood where future Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers member Chris Hillman grew up. According to Hillman, Robertson had a huge personality and was famous around town for both his career as a former silent film director and his large handlebar mustache and 1920s clothes.

Flashback: Super Mega Gigante Quatro Edition

2012-01-21T12:04:00.007-06:00

Hey, everybody. I have already written about the next four films on the Rue Morgue list. Here are links to those older reviews.

Deathdream (Bob Clark, 1974)

Dellamorte Dellamore aka Cemetery Man (Michele Soavi, 1994)

Deranged (Jeff Gillen & Alan Ormsby, 1974)

The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo Del Toro, 2001)

#124: Dead & Buried (Gary Sherman, 1981)

2012-01-14T12:35:00.009-06:00

This unfairly neglected cult horror film from 1981 comes armed with a pedigree that should make any horror fan take notice. The director, Gary Sherman, previously wrote and directed the cult British horror film Raw Meat aka Death Line, and he went on to make other cult films of varying quality like Vice Squad, Poltergeist III, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and Lisa. The credited screenwriters, Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, wrote the screenplays for Alien and Total Recall, and the late O'Bannon was also involved as screenwriter, director, editor, and/or special effects man on Dark Star, Star Wars, Heavy Metal, The Return of the Living Dead, Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars, and The Resurrected. He unfortunately died a few years ago from Crohn's disease at the too young age of 63. (In an extra on the DVD, O'Bannon says that he and Shusett didn't deserve their screenplay credit and merely revised the original screenplay by Jeff Millar and Alex Stern.) Stan Winston, the makeup effects designer, created the makeup, prosthetic, and/or digital effects for White Dog, the first three Terminator movies, Aliens, the first two Predator movies, The Thing, Edward Scissorhands, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Iron Man, to name just a few. He also directed Pumpkinhead and a Michael Jackson video. (Winston also died a few years ago, from cancer, at the too young age of 62.) Finally, the cast features a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund, who hasn't died recently.

Dead & Buried takes place in the fictional New England seaside small town of Potters Bluff. We open to a photographer taking some nature shots on the beach. An attractive woman wanders into his shot, and the two have some vaguely smarmy flirtatious banter. He takes some pictures of her, she propositions him, and the first of the film's many effective shock scenes follows.

We quickly learn that, despite its Capraesque nomenclature, Potters Bluff is a crazy fucking town. Don't go there on vacation, you knucklehead. The nature of this insanity appears at first to be some kind of homicidal community ritual, shades of an oyster-shucking New England port-side Wicker Man. The viewer quickly settles in for a strange, strange take on the then-current slasher film fad, but Dead & Buried becomes something even stranger when a couple of bizarre twists are later revealed. I'll leave those twists for you.

Sherman and cinematographer Steven Poster (Donnie Darko) create a pleasurably unsettling atmosphere with a color palette of dark earth tones, minus the red, and unique lighting of scenes, in which Poster keeps parts of the frame dark and overlights others. This lighting technique creates a visual style similar to headlights cutting through fog. Sherman also creates a real sense of community with his cast of interesting faces who were mostly undervalued by the big screen and worked primarily in television, including James Farentino as the town sheriff investigating the recent string of bizarre murders, Jack Albertson as the mortician, and the late Lisa Blount as a sexy nurse with a homicidal streak. Most of the performances are understated and dryly humorous, though Farentino goes apeshit in the final third of the film, to hilarious effect.

Dead & Buried has a real time capsule quality as well. It contains so many hallmarks of late '70s/early '80s horror that are sorely lacking from today's world of torture, lightning-speed cuts, casts full of blandly attractive voids, no atmosphere or sense of place, and network television style lighting. Here is a film with real suspense, humor, lively characters of varying ages, skillful pacing, developed atmosphere and setting, and a distinct look and feel. I don't have much to say about this one other than recommending it as a satisfying, enjoyable early-'80s horror film that deserves a wider audience.

#123: Cutting Moments (Douglas Buck, 1997)

2011-12-31T11:16:00.007-06:00

Note: Cutting Moments is available on DVD with two other Douglas Buck short films, Home and Prologue, under the title Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America.

A quick Internet search for Cutting Moments reveals several bootleg and foreign region DVD covers and posters that, aside from the official Family Portraits cover, do the film a disservice. Some feature grinning, maniacal goofballs (who aren't even in the film) holding drills, chainsaws, and bloody knives. In addition to having nothing to do with the film, these covers look more like straight-to-video schlock or advertisements for small town haunted houses staffed by Jaycees, Lions Club, or Moose Lodge members. Even more damaging, these covers have blurbs promising that Cutting Moments will be the most shocking/sickest/most disturbing film you will ever see. This promotional gimmick invites viewers to disagree and turns the film into a carnival sideshow. Cutting Moments is disturbing and contains some extreme, unflinching violence, but the film's tone is quiet, reserved, and distanced and is far from the freakout gorefest promised by many of the promotional materials.
I wish Rue Morgue had included the entire Family Portraits triptych in addition to Cutting Moments because it shows a filmmaker growing in complexity, confidence, ambition, and narrative and visual skill and toning down the immaturity and need to shock. The shorts also comment on and complement each other, turning three shorts made in different years into one cohesive piece. Plus, Larry Fessenden's in the last section, and I love that dude. I want to write about the whole shebang, but instead I'll just urge you to rent it. Despite its pompous subtitle (A Trilogy of America), it's a strong, unique, and subtle work (other than four or five minutes of pretty intense violence).

So, Cutting Moments. The most shocking film in the history of the world. The sickest movie since The Care Bears Movie. The most disgusting thing this side of a Long John Silver's menu. Etc. Ignoring all that shit and concentrating on what Douglas Buck is doing renders that kind of hyperbole irrelevant. Buck's film is carefully composed, structured, and arranged, and its gradual movement into violence is mostly earned and presented in the same detached, careful style as the rest of the short. Buck avoids needless exposition and lets his detailed images and their juxtapositions tell the story. Buck has a natural filmmaker's talent for shot composition, framing his actors and their possessions within both their domestic and landscape settings in ways that make the ordinary cinematic and special. Window blinds become ominous alien beings claustrophobically controlling physical space. A man on a couch watching baseball on a television becomes an embodiment of depression, alienation, and detachment. These compositions are not heavy-handed or exaggeratedly stylized past the point of ordinary human experience. Buck doesn't judge his characters. He watches them, subtly controlling their environment but allowing them freedom and space to live within it.

Cutting Moments tells a bare bones story about a small family in Long Island. Things aren't right. The wife and mother (Nicca Ray, daughter of director Nicholas Ray and dancer/choreographer Betty Utey, and credited here as Nica Ray) is like a mistreated family pet; nervous, hesitant, careful, and wounded, she is afraid of her husband and son while desperately anxious for love and affection from them. The husband and father (Gary Betsworth) is a hollowed-out husk, detached to the point of non-existence, monotone and empty. The young boy (Jared Barsky) also seems hollowed out, lost in himself, unable to connect with either parent. There are some hints of sexual abuse from the father to his son, and mention of a lawyer's phone call about the possible removal of the son from the home. The wife unsuccessfully attempts to reignite some affection and passion into the marriage, but has to resort to unconventional means when her traditional attempts are ignored. In this and his other shorts, Buck knows that the family fucks you up and tends to disintegrate over time, but he also knows how strong those familial connections are and how they determine who we are and what we do.

So, yeah, this movie is not a laff riot, and its four minutes of intense violence are pretty hard to watch. (My wife, usually up for any cinematic atrocity, had her head buried in her hands for most of this chunk of the film and I almost joined her.) The special effects for this scene were supervised by the legendary Tom Savini and created by two employees of his effects company. I think the scene does go on a bit too long, and I would have cut the final portion taking place in the bedroom, which seems like a sop to the lovers of torture and mutilation movies or the immaturity of a young filmmaker suddenly afraid of the emotional terrain he'd skillfully set up. (Though I may need to reconsider my judgments.)
My misgivings aside, this is an impressive work for such a then-new filmmaker. Buck is a guy with a fully formed visual style. If the extreme violence is not your bag, I urge you to check out the other two shorts, particularly Prologue. In all three, Buck comes across as a thoughtful, original writer/director, though he does share some affinities with other independent films and filmmakers. Tonally and compositionally, I was reminded of other films about family and the intersection of emotional and physical violence, like Buddy Giovinazzo's Combat Shock, Jon Jost's Sure Fire, Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (particularly for Prologue), Larry Fessenden's non-overtly politicized work (Habit, Wendigo), and David Cronenberg (in style, his early work - in subject matter, the more recent films). Like all these filmmakers and films, Buck finds a detached, clinical way to present intensely emotional material and in doing so treats this material with the non-histrionic, unsentimentalized approach it deserves. Buck has a new film tentatively scheduled for release this year. His only other feature is a 2007 remake of De Palma's Sisters, starring Chloe Sevigny and Stephen Rea. Has anyone seen it? I had no idea it existed until I did a bit of Internet research into Buck's career. Weird. Whatever that film's merits or lack thereof, his Family Portraits trio of films is something to see.

#122: Cut-Throats Nine (Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, 1972)

2011-12-17T10:35:00.008-06:00

Here's an interesting oddity: a dark, violent western with horror and crime thriller elements and an atmosphere recalling Werner Herzog's madmen-surviving-the-elements classics. The film is bleak with no sympathetic characters, but it's also unpredictable, directed with invention and energy, strikingly shot on location by a talented cinematographer, and features character actors with great movie faces, each one getting a carefully placed closeup. The 1972 Spanish film was originally marketed and released as a western but flopped. Scenes of splatter and gore were shot and added to the film, and it was rereleased and marketed to drive-in, exploitation, and horror fans. It did a little better, not much, but acquired an enduring cult reputation that finally led to its DVD release. The gore reshoots are silly, with lots of Tempura paint red and bulging intestines, but the rest of the movie is solid, solid as a rock, to quote noted gore enthusiasts Ashford & Simpson.

Spain stands in for the American west as a wagonload of violent prisoners, chained together and sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor and accompanied by a cavalry on horseback, move through a snowy mountain pass on their way to a fort after working in a gold mine. A family of criminals, led by its vulture-faced father, attempts to rob the wagon of its gold but is unsuccessful at finding any. The ensuing struggle leaves the wagon in shambles, the cavalry misdirected or dead, and the prisoners left to wander the elements on foot, chained together, led by the sole remaining sergeant and his adult daughter on the surviving horses. The sergeant knows that one of the criminals murdered his wife, but he doesn't know which one, for reasons never satisfactorily explained. He leads his daughter and the seven chained violent rapists, robbers, and murderers on foot to the fort, battling the weather, lack of enough food, and the various hidden motives of everyone, including his daughter and himself. Things get more complicated when the hidden gold is accidentally discovered by one of the convicts. Twists pile on twists, which I'll leave for you to discover. I'm not spoiling anything by letting you know that no one gets what they want in the end. Happy endings are for suckers in this landscape.

My description of the film makes it sound more conventional than it is. Tonally, it occupies a place of its own. I think western fans will enjoy it a great deal, but it also calls to mind Herzog's Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and Heart of Glass as well as the gore scenes from Herschell Gordon Lewis' films and Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve. It also occupies that fine tradition of crime films including Kubrick's The Killing and Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs in which a group of hardened criminals need to work together but don't trust each other and in which the audience is only given hints about their pasts. These are strange genres to mix, and the film finds a unique visual palette to fit the mood, combining quick B-movie energy and violence with an almost mystical art-film approach to the landscape. The flashbacks are handled well, giving us small pieces of the backstory without bogging down the narrative. Marchent freeze-frames the action when an event triggers a memory in one of the characters, then briefly switches to a flashback sequence with minimal or no dialogue before returning to the freeze frame and resuming the present action.

As a nice bonus, the English dubbing on the DVD is some of the best I've heard, with real performances instead of the usual jarring cheeseball idiocy. Once I grew accustomed to the voices not matching the lip movements, I soon forgot I was watching a dub. That almost never happens, though I wish the DVD had included the original subtitles. I don't know how involved Marchent or the cast was in the dubbing process, so it would have been nice to see the original dialogue subtitled, though the dubbing frees up the English-speaking viewer to take in every part of the frame.

This film is kind of a stretch to place on a horror movie list, but I'm glad Rue Morgue made the leap. If I had to narrow Cut-Throats Nine to a single genre, I wouldn't hesitate to call it a western. The video store I rented it from sensibly placed it in its western section. However, it's a bizarre western, sharing only horses and a wagon with a typical classic of the genre like Stagecoach, for example. I think horror fans will find much to enjoy in Cut-Throats Nine, not just the gore and a hallucination sequence involving a ghost. If you're like me and love horror films and westerns, you're going to have a great time with this one.

P.S. I haven't seen any of Marchent's other films, but he has some great titles, including Implacable Three, Seven Hours of Gunfire, One Hundred Thousand Dollars for Lassiter, and I Do Not Forgive ... I Kill!. He's still alive but hasn't made a film since 1994. Bizarrely, plans for a remake of Cut-Throats Nine are underway, with Harvey Keitel in the lead. Let's see if it actually happens.

#121: Curse of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

2011-11-26T11:53:00.011-06:00

Jacques Tourneur was born in Paris nine years after the invention of cinema and brought to the United States by his father Maurice nine years after his birth. He and the movies grew up together. Maurice was a silent film director, notable for The Wishing Ring and The Last of the Mohicans, (though he made some sound films toward the end of his life) and when Jacques was old enough, he began working on his father's films as a script clerk and editor. Jacques eventually directed films of his own, mostly shorts and documentaries, until his debut feature in 1939, a noir film called They All Come Out.

Maurice Tourneur was a great director, and Jacques was even better. He was good at everything. Horror, noir, westerns, dramas, action/adventure. The younger Tourneur directed enduring classics in all these genres. Most famous for a trio of atmospheric horror classics for producer Val Lewton in the early 1940s (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man) and the Robert Mitchum-starring noir classic Out of the Past (1947), Tourneur is a master of mood, light, shadow, and perspective. I haven't seen The Leopard Man yet, but the three other films I mentioned are among my favorites, and so is the little-seen small-town family drama Stars in My Crown (1950), starring Joel McCrea as a minister in a tight-knit town coming apart thanks to an outbreak of scarlet fever and the persecution of a sharecropper by a mining interest wanting his land. These are all great movies I strongly recommend to anyone who loves this era of film.

After a long break from horror, Tourneur came back to the genre in a big way with Curse of the Demon in 1957. An American/British coproduction based on an M.R. James short story, Curse of the Demon (aka Night of the Demon) stars Dana Andrews as Dr. John Holden, an American psychologist attending an international conference in England, the purpose of which is to debunk claims of the paranormal and supernatural. Holden was working closely with a British colleague to expose the manipulations of a self-styled Satanic cult guru and expert in black magic named Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), but his colleague died in a mysterious accident the night before Andrews arrived. Or was it an accident? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Karswell places a curse on Holden by surreptitiously sneaking onto his person a parchment with ancient runic symbols on it. According to the curse, Holden will die two days later, at ten p.m., at the hands of a scary demon. Holden thinks the curse is nonsense, but the parchment seems to have a mind of its own and tries to fly away or into a fire, sealing the curse onto Holden before he can pass the parchment to someone else. The remainder of the film sees Holden struggling to reconcile his education and logic with his fear and superstition while he tries to find out more about the delightfully evil Karswell. (In a bit of inspired storytelling, the Satanic Karswell lives with his kindly old mother, who wishes the committed bachelor would quit black magic and settle down with a nice girl.) Holden is joined in his adventures by Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummin), the niece of his deceased colleague.

Though the central conceit of the film is a common horror trope (superstition and faith vs. science, logic, and education), Curse of the Demon is more complex than most of its counterparts. Though the film makes clear the curse and demon are real (against Tourneur's wishes), the film never discredits science and knowledge. Every character is complex, intelligent, and flawed. Curse of the Demon instead makes the argument that an open mind and a healthy curiosity are virtues and that there are things we may never understand. Andrews' unbending, rigid skepticism and Karswell's overwhelming belief in the supernatural are presented ambiguously, making the film more unsettling than more simplistic films handling similar themes.

Alongside the effective story and performances, Curse of the Demon is visually beautiful. Edward Scaife's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is a masterpiece of light and shadow. Tourneur directs some amazing setpieces with gracefully gliding camera work (including a windstorm scene at a children's party) and uses a varied but narratively coherent selection of shots and perspectives, including medium shots, closeups, high and low angles, moving and still cameras, first-person and omniscient perspectives, and an effectively controlled use of space (open and claustrophobic) to eerie effect. This is such a great movie, made by people who are really good at what they do.

I hinted earlier that Tourneur didn't want to show the demon. As filming drew to a close, the producers decided the demon needed to be shown at the film's beginning and conclusion. A pissed-off Tourneur was forced to sacrifice some of his film's ambiguity for the sake of crass commercialism. To his credit, the demon looks great from a distance, an expressive, shadowy evil hovering in the sky, surrounded by smoke. The closeups of the demon do not look great. He looks like a child's stuffed animal. These closeups are one of only two flaws that mar an otherwise excellent movie. (The other is a small, domestic cat that turns into a large jungle cat. The effects are unconvincing and Andrews is clearly fighting with a floppy stuffed animal. It's a minor gripe, a nitpick, and doesn't hurt the film too much.)

The film played in most countries as Night of the Demon but was edited down from 95 to 82 minutes and retitled Curse of the Demon in the United States. The edit removes two scenes, a trip by Andrews to Stonehenge and a visit to a family of one of the cult members, in order for the film to play on a double bill at drive-ins and Saturday matinees. Both versions of the film are available on DVD.

#120: Curdled (Reb Braddock, 1996)

2011-11-11T11:07:00.020-06:00

Despite the patronage of Quentin Tarantino, Reb Braddock's sole feature film, Curdled, didn't make much money and received mostly negative reviews. Braddock has been unable to get any other film projects made, though he's enjoying a second career as the head of the film program at his alma mater, Florida State. This bad luck is unfortunate, since Curdled is an energetic, entertaining, skillfully paced, darkly funny film with lots of good performances (especially Angela Jones') and not much filler. Why did the critics beat up on a film that, at least in my opinion, is very good? I'm going to do some armchair speculating and put forth the idea that many deserving films receive a critical drubbing (and many bad or mediocre films receive praise) every year for two major reasons that have very little to do with the film's content, form, and style.

First, if you're the kind of movie fan with fervently mainstream tastes who thinks the purpose of film criticism is to find a consensus opinion about films you've already been bombarded with advertisements about and confirm your own taste without challenging you or pointing you to anything new (the consumer report or test kitchen approach to film criticism), then you probably have no problem with most newspaper, television, and magazine film criticism and the Rotten Tomatoes tyranny of the majority philosophy. Here's the first problem with that approach. It's mostly dishonest, though many of its practitioners have convinced themselves otherwise or just never thought about their part in upholding a boring status quo. Here's why. Most newspaper, TV, and magazine film critics are journalists, with journalism degrees. They don't have any film or film studies backgrounds. They're reporters who happen to like movies, but they approach film like journalists, and it shows in their writing. These are people who mostly think in terms of stories and language, not in terms of image, sound, and structure. They are also instructed in journalism school to write every article, no matter which section it's in, in language a fifth-grade student can easily understand. I don't have a problem with this populist approach when it comes to important news stories the public needs to know about, but it's a horrible approach to arts criticism and complex news stories (particularly foreign policy stories that require more historical background than the mainstream media is ever going to give you). Film is primarily a visual and aural medium, but popular discourse about the medium almost always forces it into that limited plot and story box, with some perfunctory cliches about the acting. I love a good plot and story as much as anybody, but it's the least important part of a movie. How that story is told visually is the real deal. I'm starting to digress here. Here's the second problem with the mainstream approach. When a movie with a lot of promotional buzz opens, the New York and Los Angeles critics review it first since it opens in these cities first. These critics have their own biases, pressures, unholy alliances with advertisers, and hidden agendas, but they get the first crack at publishing their opinions. The mainstream critics in the rest of the country see these reviews and hear the buzz by the time the film gets to their metropolis, hamlet, or burg. Most of these critics don't want to appear unsophisticated or wrong, so they tend to follow these early reviews like lemmings or sheep or whatever other belabored animal simile you care to use that's been beaten like a dead horse or whatever other belabored animal simile you care to use. Sometimes, the New York and L.A. critics are divided on a film. The rest of the country soon follows, dividing into two camps. It's both funny and sad how predictably the mainstream critics follow each other. The same handful of films get reviewed, talked about, discussed in the same terms. The public discourse is shaped. Curdled is one of those films that received a first round of negative reviews that just kept following it across the country.

Whew. That was a bit long-winded. Here's the second major reason good films get bad reviews: cultural pressure. What I mean when I use that term is that a person or situation involved in the making of the film has done something (or nothing) to draw the ire or confusion of the mainstream press, so the press dumps on the film to avenge itself or the public, regardless of the film's worth. This happened twice in the 1980s to two very good films, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Elaine May's Ishtar, to such an extent that they are still considered two of the worst films ever made, though mostly by people who've never seen them. Both films went over schedule and over budget and lost money at the box office, which the press gleefully reported. Cimino, the director of Heaven's Gate, and Warren Beatty, producer and co-star of Ishtar, had alienated the press shortly before both films began production. Beatty in particular had made several publicly disparaging comments about film critics. Both films had their share of flaws, but both were ambitious, visually interesting, unique, and politically prescient (the former about widespread corporatization, the latter about Mideast foreign policy and showbiz) and were unfairly trashed by nearly every major mainstream critic. Former critics' darlings Cimino and Beatty were taken down a peg, a whole peg. This happens all the time.

In 1996, Quentin Tarantino was one of those guys who needed to be taken down a peg. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had been moneymakers and critical successes, but Tarantino was taking his sweet time making a followup. In the meantime, Hollywood seemed to have gone to his head. He kept popping up in goofy acting cameos, his segment of Four Rooms was a bad idea in a bad film, he produced or executive produced several movies that weren't that great, and he kept showing up on talk shows in a Kangol hat acting like a coked-up, obnoxious goon. Also, Tarantino imitators were saturating the crime film market. Nearly every weekend between 1995 and 1998, some shitty Tarantino knockoff opened. This had very little to do with his still-excellent directing chops, which he showed off in the following year's Jackie Brown, one of his best and most underrated films.

The reason Curdled existed was also the reason it was treated unfairly by the critics. Tarantino had seen director Reb Braddock's student film, also called Curdled, at a crime film festival in Italy when he was debuting Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino fell in love with the film and its star, Angela Jones, and helped co-writer/director Braddock get the funding to adapt the short into a feature film. He even cast Jones in a small but substantial role in Pulp Fiction as the taxi driver who helps Bruce Willis make his getaway. The character was based on Jones' character in Curdled. Tarantino executive produced the feature film, convinced Miramax to distribute it, and put it out on video on his own Rolling Thunder imprint. Curdled had the misfortune to hit theaters during the peak of the first major Tarantino backlash, and I strongly suspect that much of the negative response to Curdled can be traced, intentionally or otherwise, to the prevailing anti-Tarantino sentiment. All this massive preamble is my way of saying that Curdled is a very good black comedy/horror/crime thriller that has been the victim of a royal screwjob. It's not a great movie, and Braddock is not an unsung genius, but this movie is a damn good time, damn it.

Curdled is about a Colombian immigrant in Miami, Gabriela (Angela Jones), who works in a bakery. She's a childlike, naive innocent with a sexual charisma she doesn't realize she has and an intense fascination with violent crime and serial murder. She keeps a murder scrapbook and is closely following the current wave of killings and beheadings of socialite women in Miami. One night, she sees a TV ad about a crime scene cleanup company that's looking for new employees. She gets the job, quits the bakery, and enthusiastically takes on the new position. I like the scenes in the workplace featuring the all-female, mostly Latino and Cuban staff (including Daisy Fuentes) and boss Lodger (Barry Corbin from Northern Exposure and No Country for Old Men). Soon, Gabriela's job puts her in close contact with the serial killer, leading to a lengthy final scene that combines suspense, humor, horror, music, and dance and a very funny and satisfying conclusion. That's all I'll say about it.

Braddock is clearly dealing with a limited budget, and the film is not exactly a visual feast, but he wisely avoids flashy overstylization and gets a lot of mileage out of his actors' graceful movements through the frame and facial expressions and a great soundtrack of cumbia music that is skillfully integrated into the narrative. Jones has a wonderful movie face that can play sexy, naive, frightened, and sophisticated at the same time, and her performance is a highlight. The jokes are all understated and funny, except when they need to be broader (though they're still funny). William Baldwin's serial killer (not a spoiler, the movie reveals this at the very beginning) could have been a lot more ridiculous but is not overpsychologized or overblown. The film's 89-minute running time never drags, and the editing is sharp and natural. Even the smallest characters are individually drawn and personalized. Each character has his/her own voice and personality.
I like this movie a lot. The critics are wrong. Give it another shot. Braddock also needs another shot. I think this guy can make another good film.

#119: Communion (Philippe Mora, 1989)

2011-10-29T11:22:00.012-05:00

I'm a skeptic, but I'm also open to the possibility I could be wrong and this world could be much stranger than we know. I even had my own bizarre encounter with something I can't entirely explain when I was a senior in high school. I wasn't anally probed or abducted by small gray men or the skinny ones with the oval heads and the large eyes or anything like that. I didn't see any beings, and I didn't have any weird stuff done to me. I did see something, though, that I can't quite find a place for in the world of hard facts. I was driving down the highway at night on a Friday in my parents' brown station wagon, which my friends and I dubbed the "Meat Wagon of Doom." I was a few months away from graduating high school, and I was feeling isolated, alone, and melancholy. I grew up in a rural small town in western Nebraska, and I didn't fit in at all. I was feeling that sting of isolation after a particularly alienating week, so I decided a long drive by myself was the perfect complement to my dark mood. I started driving south of town with no particular destination in mind. I planned on driving for ten or fifteen miles, then turning around and heading back to town. When I got about seven miles out of town, a large, strange aircraft flew over my car and hovered there for a few minutes. I remember thinking it was an airplane, but when I looked up at it, I noticed it was much closer to my car than an airplane should or would have been. Its shape resembled a smaller version of the ship from Close Encounters and it was covered in lights, some of which pointed down at me. I remember feeling thoroughly creeped out. I kept driving and the ship eventually moved upwards and out of sight. I turned the car around and drove back home.

What happened? I still don't know, but most of me believes it was a military aircraft. Several closely guarded military institutions exist in the countryside near my hometown, thanks to its low population. Some of our nuclear weapons are housed there, and it's probably a great place to test experimental aircraft. I don't think I was buzzed by an alien ship, but a tiny part of me would like to believe I was. The weird thing about this encounter was how quickly I forgot all about it. A week later, and I was once again preoccupied with teen angst. I didn't remember my mothership sighting until the end of my college years, five years later. Why did I forget about it so suddenly and for so long? That's the part that creeps me out the most. What if I imagined the whole thing? Memory is unreliable, deceptive, and strange.

Philippe Mora's 1989 alien abduction movie, Communion, covers this uneasy feeling well. Is this really happening? If it is real, why is it happening? Based on Whitley Strieber's 1987 nonfiction ("nonfiction"?) account of his own encounters with beings from somewhere else, Communion features a great, gonzo Christopher Walken performance, some wonderfully creepy scenes, some hilariously ridiculous scenes, a frighteningly accurate portrayal of depression, and dancing aliens. Strieber's screenplay for the film admirably refuses to answer questions, presenting the possibilities that the "visitors" are aliens from another planet, beings from another dimension, religious visions, or psychotic hallucinations. My own skepticism puts me in the last camp. I think Strieber believes these beings visited him, but I don't believe these beings exist.

Whitley Strieber was a horror novelist whose first two novels were made into the films Wolfen and The Hunger. In the late 1980s, he announced that he'd been visited by possibly alien beings beginning in 1985, and he documented this supposedly true experience in 1987's bestselling Communion. He's since followed up with several sequels. In my opinion, his credibility has been damaged by his affiliation with Art Bell and penchant for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories about sudden climate change and some hokum about "the Master of the Key," information he claims to have gleaned from a mysterious elderly man who visited his hotel room one evening. (The disaster blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow was based on one of his novels.)
I read Communion when I was in fifth grade, but I remember very little about it except that I expected much more terrifying descriptions of alien probing and experimenting than I received. The book was a bit dull for a 10-year-old who wanted action and thrills. Director Philippe Mora (The Beast Within, Howling II, Howling III, Mad Dog Morgan) and star Christopher Walken fortunately provide the action and thrills I wanted when I was a child.

The movie breaks down into roughly six sections, each with its own tone and feel. It begins with Walken delivering one of his hilarious, offbeat, amped-up-to-10 performances. Walken, like Nicolas Cage, is one of those rare actors who is at his best when he chews the scenery. The beginning scenes establish a warm, comedic rapport between Strieber (Walken), his wife Anne (Lindsay Crouse, David Mamet's ex-wife), and his son Andrew (Joel Carlson) in their New York City apartment. Walken plays Strieber as an eccentric goofball, with the odd Walken pauses, outbursts, and dances. The second part takes place in the family's rural upstate cabin and is the most unsettling. It is here where the alien visitation begins, and Mora does a great job of creating a feeling of creeping dread and unease. Though the film was obviously made on a limited budget, Mora does great things with lighting and editing. These are scary scenes. We also get some anal probing and needles into the back of the head. The third part of the film concerns Strieber's difficulty understanding what's happening to him as he descends into depression and anger. This domestic drama portion of the film is also highly effective. As someone who's suffered from depression off and on for the past two years, I watched these scenes with both difficulty and admiration because they were so accurate. The fourth part of the film is less effective as Strieber seeks out psychiatric help, undergoes hypnosis, and takes part in a group therapy session with other people who have seen the beings. The film loses momentum here and drags a bit, seemingly unsure of which direction to take the material. The fifth part gets into hypnosis-inspired memories, hallucinations, dream sequences, and more interactions with the beings. Some of this stuff is laughably hilarious, but it's all super fun. Walken meets an androgynous magician version of himself, talks to the aliens, dances with them, gives them high-fives, parties with them while shirtless, and puts an alien face over his own face. I detect some strong Cronenberg and Lynch influences in these sections of the movie. The film ends with more diffuse, scattered scenes in which Walken and his wife theorize about why he is the recipient of this visitation. There is no real conclusion, but how could there be?

Communion is a strange film. Its melding of tones never quite coheres into anything solid, but that's precisely what the movie's about. Strieber doesn't know what is happening to him, why it's happening, or who these visitors are. Maybe he's nuts. Maybe he's a liar, perpetrating a hoax for the sake of book sales. Director Mora says he was approached by a man at a film festival who told him his movie was inaccurate. "How do you know?" Mora asked the man. "Because the aliens told me," the man replied. It's a weird world.

#118: Charlie's Family aka The Manson Family (Jim Van Bebber, 2003)

2011-10-15T12:01:00.017-05:00

NOTE: I'm not sure why Rue Morgue calls this movie Charlie's Family on its list. Charlie's Family was the film's working title as it was being shot, but The Manson Family is the theatrical and DVD release title and the one you should look for if you want to see it.

Jim Van Bebber is a persistent man. What began as a friend's idea for a quick exploitation movie turned into a heavily researched obsession that took years to complete. Van Bebber started shooting his Manson film in 1988 and finished the bulk of that shoot several months later. Years of financial problems followed before more shooting in 1996 and a rough cut that played a few festivals the following year. Van Bebber endured even more financial trouble before finally securing enough backing to complete the film, which was finally released in 2003.

Was all that trouble worth it? The story of Charles Manson, his followers, and the murders they committed has been told repeatedly. Manson has become a meaningless counterculture T-shirt image and a passing fad for several immature rock stars and surly teens, a sort of mass murdering cult version of t-shirt Che Guevara or dorm poster Einstein. Books, movies, TV movies, TV specials, talk show discussions, CD and vinyl releases, posters, magazine articles, t-shirts. The Manson market is saturated. In 1988, when Van Bebber started work on his film, Manson was experiencing a resurgence of interest in his weird life story thanks to a sensationalistic Geraldo special. In 2003? Was anybody clamoring for another addition to the Manson media pile? My own ambivalence to yet another retelling of the story kept me out of the theater when the film played my city.

After seeing Van Bebber's take on Manson's family last night, I have to admit that Van Bebber's exhaustive efforts to get his film released were worth it. Van Bebber tells a familiar story, but he tells it in such a structurally inventive way with such energy and low-budget indie resourcefulness I couldn't help but be won over. This is the kind of low-budget exploitation/art/horror/sex/gore/underground/psychotronic filmmaking that hasn't really existed since the Internet became a thing we all have. Van Bebber also wisely chooses to make Manson himself a peripheral character. Instead, he focuses on the family members who carried out the murders. There's really no explaining the appeal of Manson or any other cult guru. The people who choose to follow these guys and their reasons why are the interesting part of the story, a part that is too often marginalized. Why would someone follow David Koresh? That's always fascinated me more than Koresh himself. Also, this movie has more boobs than a Russ Meyer film, so there's that. (A boobstravaganza, you might say, if you're a dork like me.) Wangs, too, straight ladies and gay men.

Van Bebber has done a lot with very little money. He has an accomplished visual sense, with a sharp eye for shot composition and editing. He skillfully creates his narrative from an offbeat structure that juxtaposes recreations of the family on their compound in the desert and the murders they commit in the city with faux-documentary footage of interviews with the members in prison years later, conversations between news producers putting together a special about the murders, and a group of crazy, drugged-out punks planning their own murder spree in the present (well, the then-present of 1996). On top of this roiling stew of formal structure, Van Bebber adds stylistic flourishes adopted from non-narrative avant-garde and underground exploitation filmmakers. Van Bebber interestingly uses a variety of film stocks and video to give each section a distinctive look. The 1960s-set scenes look like a late-'60s/early '70s film with scratches and grain, the faux-documentary stuff resembles 1980s videotape, and the 1990s-shot footage looks like a low-budget '90s movie. Everything clicks and the various parts add up to a unified whole.

Van Bebber primarily used non-professional actors, and some of the performances are pretty rough. This roughness, rather than detracting from the film, adds to its handmade charm. I'd rather see an awkward amateur give it a good try than a talented Hollywood star sleepwalk through another big-budget mediocrity any day. Besides, several performances, including Van Bebber's own as Bobby Beausoleil, are strong. The film continually walks a fine line between exploitation and a genuine portrayal of the cowardly, horrible crimes these people committed. The violence is intense, bloody, and copious. No attempt is made to sugarcoat or glorify the behavior of the family.
Though the film was inspired by Geraldo's ridiculous late-1980s TV special about murder that featured his Manson interview (I taped it off the TV as a kid and watched the VHS over and over again), in which Geraldo comes off even worse than Manson does, one never gets a sense of who Manson is and how he exuded the charisma that enticed people to follow him as a fucked-up Christ figure. Some critics consider this a weakness. Maybe it is, but if Van Bebber chose to move in that direction, the film's focus would have shifted away from the others. Van Bebber instead gets the multiple, contradictory perspectives of the family members, the way they each downplay their own involvement and implicate others, their differing accounts of certain events, their various entry points into the cult. This varied perspective nicely matches the varied structure.

Part of the pleasure I took from The Manson Family was in recognizing an aesthetic that's largely disappeared thanks to the Internet's ahistorical, context-free potpourri of everything except the stuff you can hold in your meaty fists and the samey corporate look of most media. Van Bebber, a Midwesterner who gave The Manson Family a convincing Southern California look even though it was filmed in Ohio, has assembled a film that doesn't just tell the story of the Manson family. The film's lengthy production has accidentally produced a historical curiosity, a museum piece that documents the ways Midwestern kids like me sought out and soaked up the counterculture from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s. This film stirred up so many memories for me. The 1970s blaxploitation, slasher, vigilante, and hippie films I caught on late-night TV when I was in elementary and middle school; the Hustler magazines my friend smuggled into school and showed us in the boys' bathrooms; magazines about skateboarding, punk rock, heavy metal, horror movies, and pro wrestling (Thrasher, Rip, Reflex, Fangoria, Gorezone, Pro Wrestling Illustrated) I'd buy at the grocery stores or look through in friends' basements (I remember one cheap wrestling magazine I often bought that had B&W newsprint that came off all over my hand and featured advertisements for videos of women's bikini oil wrestling in the back); cheap cassette dubs of friends' older brothers' thrash metal and hardcore punk tapes; fanzines; drive-in movies; USA Up All Night movies with Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear; straight-to-video exploitation VHS rentals from convenience stores; true-crime books from the library; catching Geraldo's Manson interview or G.G. Allin's appearances on Geraldo and Jerry Springer and Morton Downey on afternoon TV; word-of-mouth stories about movies, bands, and news events not readily available. None of this stuff happened alone in front of a computer. This was a mixture of the randomness of chance, genuine curiosity, and the small community of like-minded weirdos who thought, "There's something else out there besides football, blockbusters, and sitcoms. I need to see some weird shit and I need to see it now." This movie just exudes that sense of Midwestern isolation leading to cultural investigation, and how one went about finding it through trial, error, and accident in a huge but semi-hidden pile of exploitation, art, and trash in the last pre-Internet era.

P.S. One of the extras on the 2-DVD set is a documentary about the making of the film. Van Bebber is interviewed while chain-smoking cigarettes and chain-drinking Foster's. He sounds pretty drunk and spends a lot of the interview veering between down-to-earth descriptions about the practicalities of low-budget filmmaking and insanely hubristic pronouncements about his own talent and vision. He also brags a lot about drinking and smoking weed. He's a pretty hilarious guy.

Flashback: The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)

2011-10-08T11:39:00.003-05:00

The next film on the list is one I've already written about: Peter Medak's The Changeling, an entertaining haunted house movie starring George C. Scott. Here's a link to the old review.

#117: Calvaire (Fabrice Du Welz, 2004)

2011-10-01T11:41:00.013-05:00

What a pleasure it is to see a modern filmmaker who knows how to use visual space and how to blend content, form, and structure into a personal style. Two days ago, I watched Slumdog Millionaire, and my viewing of Calvaire last night acted as a coincidental rebuke to the former film in almost every way. I bet the Academy felt pretty hip when it awarded Slumdog Millionaire the Best Picture Oscar in early 2009, but that overrated trifle combines a moldy old underdog-triumphs-and-rescues-his-true-love story (the villains practically twirl their mustaches) with a nonsensical, spatially incoherent visual style that is divorced from the material. The film's rapid cutting (only a few shots last a full second), bizarre framing of shots so one never knows the spatial relationships between the characters and the geography (never mind all the sideways camera angles that exist for their own masturbatory sake), occasional lapses into extraneous 1990s music video-style camera and editing tricks, incoherent action sequences, and a color palette drained of most of the spectrum have the effect of clashing badly with the content and enjoyable performances. I'm not just beating up on Danny Boyle's Oscar winner. Most mainstream films of the past decade suffer from these flaws and look like they were the work of a single terrible director. Boyle knows how to make a movie (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Millions), but the pressure to conform to the terrible new industry standards must be strong. It worked out all right for Boyle. He can roll around in his pile of Oscars and money, while I have to make do with my carpet and a pillow or two.

Thank the movie gods for the filmmakers on the fringes. These are the craftsmen and women and innovators keeping the medium alive. Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz is one of these craftsmen. His debut feature-length film, Calvaire, besides being a very strange psychological horror story, is a fine example of lean, economical, thoughtful, and personal visual storytelling. Calvaire owes a lot to Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and any old story about a deserted inn and a lone, stranded traveler, but Du Welz brings plenty of his own weirdness to the party. In scattered moments, Du Welz sometimes pushes a calculated strangeness for its own sake, but, more often than not, he makes his weird corner of the world plausible and visceral.

Calvaire begins with Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) applying eyeliner in front of a mirror. Next, we see him appear on a small stage, wearing a cape, singing love songs oozing with black velvet and glitter to a crowd of elderly people on folding chairs. Backstage, an elderly woman makes an explicit sexual overture to him. He freezes, then pushes her hand away in disgust. While loading his van and preparing to leave, an employee of the nursing home, a pretty blonde woman, makes her sexual hunger for him readily apparent. He has no reaction. He's looking forward to his next performance, at a Christmas party. Record label executives will be there. He and the woman know the next time he returns, he'll be a star. Marc Stevens, pushing 40, playing an anachronistic set of standards to the elderly while dressed like a third-tier 1970s glam-rock star, fully expects to become a famous singer. It pleases me to tell you that he is the sanest person in the entire film.

Marc's van gives him some trouble on the way out of the nursing home, and it finally breaks down in the countryside in thick fog, close to an isolated inn. A bizarre man finds Marc while looking for his missing dog and takes the singer to the inn. He wakes up the owner, Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), who offers him a room. The inn has no other guests but looks nice and homey. Bartel says the inn has been closed since his wife left him, but he's pleased to welcome a fellow artist. Bartel says he used to be a stand-up comic and his estranged wife was a singer. He tells Marc he can fix his van since the area's only mechanic is booked solid. I don't think I have to tell you that Bartel is less than honest, though he does tell a pretty good joke, and Marc is probably not going to make that Christmas party. I won't spoil much of the rest, because a lot of weird, weird stuff happens.

I will briefly introduce the other characters. Besides Bartel and the man looking for his dog, a farmer and his many sons live nearby. The farmer and Bartel don't get along, probably because Bartel's wife was also involved with the farmer. When she left Bartel, she left the farmer, too. The rural area's only official entertainment takes place at a depressing bar that could have come from Bela Tarr's Satantango. The farmer, his sons, and several other rough-looking men congregate at the long tables and drink their beer in silence. An old piano sits alongside the wall between the tables and the bar. A man plays a blackly comic dirge on it, leading to the most bizarre all-male dance party scene of 2004, or, most likely, any other year. The women (woman?) have abandoned this part of the country, and the men have gone insane in their absence. (Maybe they were already crazy and drove the women away?)

In the hands of a more exploitative filmmaker, Calvaire could have been one of those dreary torture and rape movies, but Du Welz has a lot more on his mind. There is some torture and rape, but Du Welz films this from a distance, showing us only enough to let us know what's happening. The bulk of the film is a darkly humorous, unsettling, and possibly even tragic look at abandonment, fantasy, insanity, wish fulfillment, and destroyed dreams. Every single character projects his or her preferred fantasy on Marc (who projects his own fantasy on himself), with disastrous results. What this all leads to in the film's abrupt, cryptic conclusion is something I need to think about some more.

Calvaire is not an easy watch, but it's also not a film that revels in its violence. It's not an endurance contest. Du Welz is an exciting, talented filmmaker with a nice eye, and so many shots are beautifully framed. When the film does engage in visual incoherence, it's not extraneous. Instead, these moments are inextricably tied to the characters' mental states and physical movements. I'm not quite sure the final third is as strong as the rest of Calvaire, but Du Welz certainly gives you plenty to chew over. If you're up for an unsettlingly strange point of view and an ending that may not give you what you expect, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Calvaire.

#116: The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997)

2011-09-17T11:46:00.008-05:00

Irish director Neil Jordan is primarily known for his thrillers and dramas (The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, The End of the Affair, Michael Collins), but he's no stranger to horror. His second film, The Company of Wolves, was an offbeat werewolf story, two of his director-for-hire Hollywood assignments were horror films (Interview with the Vampire and In Dreams), his fourth film, High Spirits, was a horror-comedy, and he's working on a vampire movie that will be released next year. Oddly, his horror films lack the leanness and darkness of his best work, and his thrillers and dramas tend to be stronger, more personal films (excepting The Company of Wolves).

The Butcher Boy stands out by combining most of what Jordan excels at into a single entity. Here is a film that skillfully blends disparate genres and tones into a cohesive, unified work, held together by an amazing performance from a then-13-year-old Eamonn Owens. Adapted from Patrick McCabe's novel, The Butcher Boy is at once a dark comedy, kitchen-sink drama, surrealist nightmare, criminal-on-the-run thriller, boyhood coming-of-age story, and charismatic anti-hero fable, with an eye-grabbing comic book color palette and elements of horror, apocalyptic sci-fi, and Catholic fantasy. A film with all these competing elements could easily fall apart, but Jordan skillfully weaves them together.

Eamonn Owens plays Francie Brady, a small-town, red-haired Irish boy with a combustible home life. His father (Stephen Rea) was a promising musician once but is a severe alcoholic who bounces between affectionate love and explosive violence. His mother (Aisling O'Sullivan) is mentally unstable and emotionally fragile. He has one close friend, Joe. Francie is a volatile cocktail of his parents, a swirling blend of charisma, pain, intelligence, and psychosis. He's so hard to dislike, so smart and funny and wounded and determined, that you root for him even as his behavior becomes increasingly disturbing and violent. Francie lies, manipulates, bullies, steals, vandalizes, assaults, and eventually murders, but he has us in his pocket the whole time. We like him and we like the bad things he does.

Narrated by the adult Francie, The Butcher Boy surrounds us with Francie's point of view, his unusual slang and speech patterns, his humor, his sadness. We're in this boy's mind and he's in ours. His rich fantasy world is inextricably tied into his everyday life. The adult narrator Francie carries on conversations with the onscreen boy Francie, Communist nuclear bombs drop on the town, people turn into pigs, fly-headed aliens take over human bodies, and the Virgin Mary makes multiple appearances. (She's played by a hard-to-recognize Sinead O'Connor.) As the tragedies and punishments and confinements and betrayals pile up, Francie focuses his hate and rage and sorrow on a neighbor, Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw), a self-satisfied moralist who looks down on the Bradys. Francie bullies her son Phillip, but his real target is Mrs. Nugent and her tight-lipped disapproval. Francie's real and fantasy lives converge in an explosive finale involving Mrs. Nugent and small-town religious apocalyptic hysteria brought on by the Bay of Pigs crisis. Pigs, aliens, the atomic bomb, and the Virgin Mary make for a rich combination of images.

The Butcher Boy is a film bursting with energy, from its opening comic-book credits to its bloody conclusion. Owens' performance is more than impressive in its complexity and confidence. How can a kid be this good? You believe almost every second, excepting three or four overemphasized line readings. He gets this kid, all of this kid. The wounded, fragile parts. The manipulative, thieving parts. The loneliness. The humor. The intelligence. The dark, dark stuff. The rest of the cast is nearly as good, though Fiona Shaw sometimes emotes a bit too much for my taste. Jordan's direction is complex and confident as well. He takes a sure, even hand with material that could have spilled over into parody or overblown melodrama or distanced coldness. The cinematography from Adrian Biddle is gorgeous. The heightened colors pop off the screen, but aren't too pretty or too artificial. The fantasy elements are skillfully integrated into the story. I like this movie, and I think more people should see it.

#115: Blood of the Beasts (Georges Franju, 1949)

2011-09-03T12:32:00.017-05:00

This is the first documentary I've reviewed on this site. The documentary is not a genre that springs immediately to mind when one thinks of horror film subgenres. There's not a lot of crossover there. Real-life horrors don't give you the guilt-free thrills most good horror films provide. Still, I think the material's presentation in this documentary, a weird but highly effective mixture of blunt realism and alternate universe surrealism, makes it an appropriate choice for Rue Morgue's list of alternative horror films. If your food-related ethics are closer to Morrissey's and Chrissie Hynde's, you may be offended by its presence on this particular list, but maybe you won't. Either way, it's worth seeing.

Blood of the Beasts is only 21 minutes long, but it's bursting with powerful images and ideas. Directed by Georges Franju, who later went on to create the horror classic Eyes Without a Face, with narration by Jean Painleve, director of several acclaimed documentaries about aquatic animals, Blood of the Beasts juxtaposes images of beauty, strangeness, and ordinariness from the outskirts of Paris with the even stranger matter-of-factness of the daily operations of three nearby slaughterhouses. If you have a problem seeing horses, cows, calves, and sheep slaughtered, you're going to have a tough time watching this film. If you have the stomach for it, you're going to see one beautifully made work of art.

As anyone who's seen Eyes Without a Face knows, Franju has an incredible eye. His framing of shots here is like a master class in film art. The elegant composition of images, the knack for capturing odd details, the way he makes ordinary objects look strange and the disturbing look ordinary, all these things contribute to making this film special. Though all these images are taken from the everyday lives of Parisians in 1949, there is a sense that we're witnessing some science fiction universe. A more straightforward documentarian wouldn't have been able to create that feeling.
Franju has stated that his goal in making Blood of the Beasts was to create a piece of realism that didn't betray his surrealist loyalties, and he says his initial inspiration wasn't the slaughterhouses but the nearby Ourcq Canal, which figures in a few of the film's shots. We're introduced to the region near the Canal first. We're still in Paris, but we're on the outskirts. Most of the urban setting is turning into rural fields and countryside as we leave the city, but there's still a lot of activity. Street vendors sell merchandise, children play, couples kiss, the water in the canal moves peacefully under a bridge. Amidst this normalcy, Franju is able to find images of strangeness and surrealism. An abandoned female mannequin stands next to a large phonograph in a field, a table full of radios becomes a lonely collection of abstract shapes, wind blowing through a woman's hair takes on a dreamlike quality as Franju frames the back of her head in closeup.

Soon, we're introduced to the first slaughterhouse, a facility that turns horses into food. For reasons unclear, a bronze statue of a bull sits near the entrance of the slaughterhouse, though only horses are killed there. The camera then shows us a piece of artwork affixed near the top of the facility's entrance, providing one of the film's few laughs (unless you're a seriously disturbed human being): a bust of a prominent-looking older man with the inscription, "In Honor of Emile Decroix, Proponent of Horse Meat." We then see the killing of a horse, the removal of its hooves, the draining of its blood, and the removal of its hide. A photo of the slaughterhouse's owner shows a spitting image of a robber baron caricature (an enormously fat grinning man in a suit with a top hat, pocket watch, and cane) sitting in a chair on the killing floor next to a freshly killed horse.

The film follows this pattern for its remainder, alternating scenes of nearby Paris with two other slaughterhouses, one for cattle and one for sheep. The animal's deaths are presented verite-style, with blunt directness. We see close-cropped Frenchmen, smoking and whistling, doing their work efficiently. One man wears a dirty beret, using it as a barrier between his hair and a cow's hoof as he steadies the carcass with his head to get the proper angle for his blade. The veal preparation might give people the most trouble. Frightened but cute little calves are thrown onto work stations forcefully, then decapitated and dehooved as their blood runs from their necks into buckets. The headless, hoof-free carcasses continue to twitch and jerk spasmodically for a few minutes as the men continue their work. In another scene, a sheep is held by a worker and moved in the direction of the killing floor as the other sheep follow along like, you know, sheep. That sheep's life is spared. His job is to lead the others to their deaths, and he's been nicknamed "the traitor" by the workers. An image of an inside-out cattle carcass with parts hacked off looks like some David Lynch art installation or a creature from a Burroughs Naked Lunch fever dream.

Despite some sympathetic words about the sheep at the film's end, this hardly seems like an animal-rights, pro-vegetarian polemic. I believe Franju wants to show us the strangeness and efficient brutality of our daily life. He's creating a surrealist artwork made up entirely of everyday, realist images. We eat food and use commercial products without thinking of the alternate world that brings it to us. It's a parallel universe, existing alongside us but never intersecting with ours. Our daily lives contain products and foods that come to us through an organized, efficient system of labor that destroys living things, all of which remains out of sight of anyone who doesn't work in those places. Franju shows us what's on the other side of those walls. It is what it is, he says. However and whatever you think about it is up to you. It's not enough to make me quit eating ribs (I'm a Smiths fan, but dinner with Morrissey sounds excruciating), but I will probably think about how those ribs got to my plate more than I did before seeing this film.
Blood of the Beasts is available as an extra on Criterion's edition of Eyes Without a Face.

#114: Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)

2011-08-19T12:28:00.008-05:00

It's turning into Mario Bava Month here on the old D-Cap ZomVamp B-Bath (as the youth call it), and I can't complain. The last movie on the list was Bava's first color film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath, and now we have another Bava film, 1960's Black Sunday. Black Sunday was Bava's first full-length feature and one of his rare black-and-white films. Bava's expressive use of color is such a large part of his identity as a filmmaker that I was concerned Black Sunday might be lacking some oomph, some pizazz, some ring-a-ding-ding, some hotcha, and so on. It isn't. Bava's b&w is just as beautiful as his color, and his camera work is just as expressive. This is a good-looking movie. Narratively, it's no great shakes, but I'll get into that later. Atmosphere and style count for a lot and can survive much plot silliness.

Black Sunday begins in the mid-1600s. A man and woman have been captured and accused of witchcraft and Satanism. They're killed in a particularly grisly way, but not before the woman vows revenge. The Inquisition-style punishment is not complete until the bodies have been burned immediately after the execution, but a sudden thunderstorm puts out the fire. The fundamentalist executioners have little recourse but to bury the bodies unburned and hope the revenge curse blows over.

Jump ahead 200 years. We're now in the middle of the 19th century. A doctor and his young protege are traveling by horse and carriage to a medical conference in the region of the execution 200 years earlier. The doctor insists they take a shortcut through some spooky woods at night and pays the frightened coach driver extra to coax him into the freaky route. They hear strange noises and the coach driver insists that a branch from one of the trees deliberately tried to choke him. One of the wheels slips off its track near the halfway point of the journey, and the driver needs to repair it. The doctor and his protege decide to explore the nearby ruins of a crypt while they wait. This crypt is the resting place for the Satanist woman, and this night is the 200th anniversary of her execution. While exploring the crypt, the doctor kills a giant bat with his patented blend of nonchalance and reserved action. He also cuts himself during the scuffle, and a few drops of his blood land on the face of the dead woman, bringing her back to life and activating the ancient curse. After the wheel is fixed, the doctor and protege make it to the inn for the night, where the vodka is much renowned. Just before leaving the crypt, however, they encounter Katya (cult movie icon Barbara Steele) walking her large hounds. The protege is instantly smitten with her mysterious beauty.

After our doctors make it to the inn, the film shifts focus to the castle where Katya lives with her brother, father, and servant. The Satanists killed in the film's opening were their ancestors, and Katya looks just like the dead woman, Princess Asa. The father is uneasy since it's the 200th anniversary of the execution. On the 100th anniversary, another ancestor mysteriously died who looked just like Katya and Princess Asa. Thanks to the doctor's few drops of blood, Pops is justified in his fear. Not only is the Princess reanimated, but the Prince also crawls out of his grave, ready to do a little Satanic ass-kicking. What follows is a nice bit of Gothic horror as the doctor, his protege, and the family battle the undead ancestors in atmospheric sets full of hidden passageways, trapdoors, crypts, cobwebs, dark woods, mist, fog, and graveyards. You can see why Tim Burton considers Black Sunday his favorite horror film.

Bava's later films can be so narratively incoherent they approach surrealism, but the plot of Black Sunday is pretty simplistic. The English-language version, the most widely available on DVD in this country, sports some atrocious dubbing. The voice actors are wooden, and much of the dialogue is ham-handed and silly. None of the characters are particularly interesting, and the story isn't as engaging as any of the vignettes in Black Sabbath. Barbara Steele is a compelling performer with an unusual, expressive face, but the woman dubbing her dialogue is pretty terrible at emoting convincingly.
Despite these flaws, the film is far more interesting than it has any right to be. Bava's cinematography, fluid camera movement, and framing of shots are top notch work. The film is gorgeous to look at and has a palpable atmosphere no amount of weak dubbing can ruin. A scene in which the reanimated prince rides a coach and horse through a fog-shrouded forest is the personification of Gothic horror. There are so many memorable images in Black Sunday. This is a fine debut. Cult movie legend Barbara Steele, in particular, has a great face for horror, with her long black hair, big eyes, large lips, long eyelashes, and curved eyebrows. Besides Black Sunday, she also appeared in Roger Corman's Pit and the Pendulum, Fellini's 8 1/2, Schlondorff's Young Torless, Cronenberg's They Came from Within aka Shivers, Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, Joe Dante's Piranha, episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Rod Serling's Night Gallery, and dozens of horror B-movies.

Black Sunday was released in the U.S. under that title as well as a translated version of the Italian title, The Mask of Satan. Unlike Black Sabbath, Black Sunday's Italian version is hard to find on DVD in the U.S. The American version is dubbed, but so is the Italian version. Until recently, Italian movies were always filmed without a soundtrack and dubbed later. This was standard Italian film industry practice. It saved money and freed the directors to move their cameras and set up their actors in any configuration without having to worry about recording the sound. Like Black Sabbath, the Americans censored parts of the film, though not as extensively. In the Italian version, the Satanic prince and princess are siblings who engaged in an incestuous relationship. All mentions of their romantic and familial relationships have been removed from the American print. This doesn't really harm the film the way the removal of the lesbian elements from Black Sabbath hurt that film's U.S. incarnation, but it's further proof of how entrenched the Puritan fear of sex is in the American psyche. Oh well. Either version of Black Sunday is worth your time.

#113: Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1963)

2011-08-05T11:20:00.011-05:00

A British rock band called Earth were rehearsing in Birmingham, England across the street from a movie theater in 1968. Their shows were sparsely attended, and audiences were confusing them with another band of the same name, but the theater had a huge line. The band looked at the marquee. The movie bringing in the crowds was a five-year-old Italian horror called Black Sabbath. The band's members decided a name change was in order. A few years later, Black Sabbath became one of the earliest, best, and most successful metal bands.

If Mario Bava's first color film's only success was inspiring Ozzy and Tony Iommi, that would be enough to justify its existence, but this three-part anthology film set the template for quality Italian horror in its set design, lighting, use of color, camera movement, and atmosphere. This is the film that nearly every Italian horror movie from 1964-1990 (and several after that) clearly owes a debt. Black Sabbath obviously had a huge impact on Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Bava himself. Quentin Tarantino has called it a major influence on Pulp Fiction and David Lynch said it inspired a few moments in his Twin Peaks movie. Besides being so influential in so many ways, the movie itself is pretty damn good.

Before I get into the movie, I want to mention that I'm reviewing the Italian version, which is widely available on DVD. The American version is a lot different, and I'm going to explain those differences now. The film is made up of three separate stories; "The Telephone," "The Wurdulak," and "The Drop of Water." That's the order of the stories in the Italian version. The American version mixes it up by placing "The Drop of Water" first and "The Wurdulak" last. This is fine, but I prefer the Italian placing of the vignettes. The momentum and visual opulence builds in a much more pleasing way in the Italian placement of the stories. We're seemingly never going to be free of those goddamn Puritans over here in the States, and the American version reflects this moral panic by watering down two of the segments. "The Wurdulak" sees some of its gore and violence purged, while "The Telephone" is radically changed by removing a lesbian subplot entirely, replacing it with a supernatural ghost story plot absent from the Italian version. The segments with Boris Karloff as the film's narrator are different in the American version as well. More comedic in Italian, Karloff's segments are presented without most of the humor in the American version. Maybe someday the bible thumpers and self-appointed arbiters of morality will finally die the fuck out, but I don't think I'll be lucky enough to see it. Oh well. At least the Italian version is available, and that's the one I'm reviewing.

Black Sabbath begins with an extremely colorful opening intro from an Italian-dubbed Boris Karloff. Though it's initially off-putting to hear Karloff dubbed by some Italian guy (just like it's disorienting to hear Burt Lancaster dubbed in The Leopard or Marlon Brando dubbed in Burn! or Richard Harris dubbed in Red Desert), the intro is strikingly filmed and pretty funny. The first segment, "The Telephone," begins with a beautiful woman returning to her opulent bedroom quarters and getting ready for bed. She's interrupted by several phone calls in which the caller says nothing. Finally, the anonymous caller starts talking. He notices her every move, threatens her, and promises to kill her before dawn. This segment turns into a ghost story in the American version, but here it's a psychological horror story with a lesbian subplot, surprising for 1963 in its matter-of-factness and lack of sensationalism. The conclusion of the story is surprisingly anti-climactic, but Bava's camera movements, framing of shots, set design, and lighting throughout this segment are a master class in film art. The woman moves all over her opulent quarters, turning lights off and on, and the camera follows her gracefully.

The second segment, "The Wurdulak," sees Boris Karloff pulling double duty by appearing as one of the characters in addition to his narrating duties. The cinematography in this segment is particularly beautiful, and the set design is, again, a major achievement. A man is traveling on horseback through the countryside and spots a headless corpse with a dagger in its back. He takes the dagger and stops at a nearby home for the night. The family there; two brothers, a sister, and one brother's wife and young son; are tense. The dagger belongs to their father, who left five days before to kill a wurdulak who's been terrorizing the village. A wurdulak is a kind of vampire who feeds on the blood of people he loved when he was human. The family fear their father has become a wurdulak himself and warn the traveler to move along. He decides to stay because the sister is incredibly sexy. The father, played by Boris Karloff, finally returns but there's something off about him. Hell yeah.

The final segment, "The Drop of Water," continues the gorgeous cinematography, lighting, use of color, and set design. A nurse unwinding for the night with some whiskey and her phonograph gets a phone call. A rich old aristocrat has just died, and she needs to prepare the body. She takes off and arrives to find the old palace in disarray. Dozens of cats roam freely about, lamps and furniture are falling apart, and the place is mostly empty except for a small staff and the cats. The rich old woman was an eccentric who hadn't left her home in years and who had become fascinated with the occult. The recently deceased woman had a heart attack during a seance, mid-trance. Her body is not pleasing to the eye, to say the least. She has a creepy, waxy face that death could only improve. The nurse spots an expensive ring on the dead woman's hand and decides to pocket it. If you think that's a mistake, you think right. Creepy shit goes down once the nurse returns home. Karloff appears again for a nice outro that does a little fourth-wall busting. It's a bit like the horror/comedy version of the end of Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry.

If you can't tell already, I really like this movie. I have a purely aesthetic love of the rich, expressionistic lighting and color of this era of Italian horror, those rich reds and blues and yellows and blinking lights and deep darkness, and the set design is incredibly beautiful here. The artifice is somehow more convincing in horror than a naturalistic approach, and the expressive lighting and sets create a world where these horrific events are believable and logical. Bava's later films are also visually stunning, but lack a lot of narrative coherence. This film knows how to tell a good, atmospheric story in addition to its formal beauty. This may be due to the source material, which comes from stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Maupassant, but Bava freely and loosely adapted his literary inspirations, amplifying the horror elements.
Oh yeah, the title. Black Sabbath sounds pretty cool, but it has nothing to do with the movie. The film's Italian title translates as "The Three Faces of Fear," which is a lot more appropriate, but Bava had a big hit a few years before with Black Sunday. The film's American distributors decided to give it a title that would remind ticket buyers of the previous film. Nonsensical title or no, this movie has it all. Sexy Italian women, heads on pikes, threatening phone calls, Karloff, creepy houses, vampires, ghosts, killers, and purty, purty colors.

#112: The Beast Within (Philippe Mora, 1982)

2011-07-23T11:29:00.008-05:00

If we've learned anything from the movies, we know we should never leave a man or woman behind when we go off to get help. Let's isolate one of many scenarios. (Assume we're in the days before cell phones, unless you're a phone-hating Luddite like me.) You and your lovely wife and loyal dog are driving down the road in an unfamiliar area. It's dark. You miss your turn. You realize your error, and you swing the car around too fast and drive off the road. As you attempt to reenter the highway, your tires get stuck in some deep, soft gravel. You attempt to get out of it, but you can't. You're stuck hard. The nearest town is less than two miles away, so you walk back to town to get a tow. You leave your lovely wife and dog behind to guard the car. Big mistake, jerk. Why? Because a crazed man-beast KILLS YOUR DOG AND RAPES AND IMPREGNATES YOUR WIFE!!! That's why, sucker.

This is exactly what happens in the early moments of Philippe Mora's The Beast Within, a sleazy little drive-in/midnight/B-movie horror show that is not particularly good, but not too bad. This is the kind of movie horror fans will enjoy, but it is decidedly not the kind of movie that has crossover potential with non-aficionados of the genre. What we have here is little more than plot, gore, a few moments of dark humor, a little atmosphere, a weird cicada metaphor, killings, monster rapes, possession, good and bad southern accents, and weird mutations and transformations. Certainly not a waste of a few hours, but hardly one of the classics.
After the opening scene, The Beast Within moves 17 years into the future. It seems the unfortunate couple decided to keep the monster-rape baby. He's since grown into a nice, normal teenager, but complications have arisen. Shortly after his 17th birthday, his pituitary gland starts going crazy, and he's hospitalized in his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. The doctor tells them he doesn't really know why their son is having this problem. He thought it might be genetic, but both parents have been tested and are fine. The mother wants to tell the doctor about the true genetic father of the boy, but pops is still uptight about the whole monster-rape thing and refuses to discuss it. After some pressure from his wife, he decides to relent, to an extent. The couple revisit the town where the horrible incident occurred, Nioba, and conduct some research into the little town's sordid secret history. They pose as journalists writing a book about crime in small town America, but they don't really fool anybody. They do discover that, despite the townsfolk's insistence that there haven't been any serious crimes in Nioba, a man was ripped apart and partially eaten around the time of the rape.

Their son soon escapes from the hospital and wanders Nioba at night, driven by a strange impulse sent to him from beyond the grave by his man-beast father. He's caught and put in the hospital in Nioba. Meanwhile, the couple's journalist story falls apart, but they make a friend in the sheriff and a few enemies in the undertaker, the newspaper editor, and the judge. This town has a dark secret, and everyone is involved. Meanwhile, the son keeps escaping the hospital and raising hell at night. He is then recaptured and put back in the hospital. This happens so often in this film that it moves beyond parody. Soon, members of a prominent family in the town start getting killed. Are any of these dramatic events connected? Why, yes, all of them. Funny you should ask.

Most of these events are all just preamble for the film's final 20 minutes. We get a pretty sweet transformation/mutation scene that owes more than a little to both The Exorcist and An American Werewolf in London. God, I miss non-CGI special effects. Hollywood wastes so much fucking money on catering and marketing schemes and star's salaries and bullshit. Why not blow a little money on master craftsmen making real stuff instead of the oddly textured and unconvincing computer effects that look like they're happening in a different dimension than the rest of the action on screen? Maybe, some day, CGI will look right. Right now, it's a joke and it makes every movie it's in look cheap and shitty. I'm just shouting into a void, I know. I complain about this 100 times a year, and no one will listen. "Hey," some Hollywood exec is not saying right now. "Some semi-employed, occasional substitute teacher is complaining about CGI on his blog. Let's scrap this shit and go back to foam and latex. Get Rick Baker on the horn now. We've got some robots and severed heads to build. Take it out of Shia LaBoeuf's salary. We've given that dope enough money." That will never happen. I just don't get our world sometimes. Why does technology always trump aesthetics? Just because we can do some things doesn't mean we always have to do some things. CGI can suck my ass in hell for all eternity.

Now that I've hit my quota of CGI complaints for the second quarter of 2011, I can resume my review. The Beast Within is loaded with veteran character actors, which may be of some interest for film buffs, but unfortunately does very little with them besides using them to further the plot. Still, it's enjoyable to see so many of them in one film. They include the late Bibi Besch (mother of Samantha Mathis), Ronny Cox, L.Q. Jones, Luke Askew, R.G. Armstrong, Logan Ramsey, Ron Soble, Don Gordon, and Designing Women's Meshach Taylor. Many of these actors have worked with Sam Peckinpah. Meshach Taylor has not. L.Q. Jones and Luke Askew get the best use of their talents out of the mediocre script, but Logan Ramsey also gets a nice moment when his character, so excited about the hamburger he's about to grill before he's attacked, decides to grab a handful of raw beef and eat it as he's being killed. He's not going to let a little thing like being murdered stop him from enjoying his rare meat.

The writing/directing team behind The Beast Within would go on to long careers in the horror genre. Writer Tom Holland later wrote the screenplays for Psycho II and Class of 1984 and wrote and directed Fright Night and Child's Play. Director Philippe Mora is an interesting case. Though his parents are French and he was born in Paris, he's lived most of his life in Australia and was one of the pioneering directors of the Ozploitation scene of independent Australian B-movies in the 1970s and 1980s. He was offered The Beast Within on the basis of his violent 1976 Western, Mad Dog Morgan, one of Dennis Hopper's rare 1970s leading roles during his bridge-burning, drug-fueled insanity period. The producers thought, "Hey, this Mora guy is great with blood and violence and he hasn't worked in a few years so we can probably get him cheap." The movie kicked Mora's career back into gear, and he's worked steadily ever since in two distinct tracks: genre B-movies and documentaries about philosophy, history, art, and culture. His other genre films include The Return of Captain Invincible, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, Howling III, Communion, and Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills.

#111: Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)

2011-07-08T22:09:00.009-05:00

Kinji Fukasaku was one of the kings of Japanese genre filmmaking. Working in a variety of genres at a fiendishly prodigious pace, Fukasaku nevertheless gave the majority of his output a hard-to-maintain standard of quality and irreverent personal stamp notably absent from many other filmmakers who cranked out as many movies as he did. Perhaps his closest fellow traveler is countryman Takashi Miike, another audacious visual stylist who pumps out movies by the truckload and works in many genres. Fukasaku's best work is found in a series of formally inventive, extremely violent, darkly funny, and offbeat organized crime and gangster films in the 1960s and 1970s. From his claustrophobic and sadistic, compressed-space mini-masterpiece Wolves, Pigs, & Men to his more traditional gangster epic Battles Without Honor and Humanity and its sequel Graveyard of Honor and Humanity (which sit nicely next to the first two Godfather films and Goodfellas in their grand sweep and mixture of classicism and New Wave/New Hollywood currency), Fukasaku's crime films are a more than fine place for movie lovers to spend their time. The man had a lot more to offer than films about the yakuza, however. Horror, science fiction, dramas, samurai films, war films, youth pictures, and the indescribable Black Lizard, which combines a heist film, a gangster film, a murder mystery, a smoky nightclub film, a French New Wave homage, and a transsexual love story that's played with a surprising (for 1967) amount of empathy, sympathy, and matter-of-fact nonchalance, starring Japan's most popular drag queen of the era. I tried to describe it, but you just have to see it.

Fukasaku's final film, 2000's Battle Royale, is just a hair short of his 1960s-1970s best and unintentionally (in the sense that he didn't know it would be his final completed film) puts a period on the sentence of his filmography by combining a bit of everything he does well. Battle Royale combines elements of horror, science fiction, action, crime, war, drama, black comedy, the high school movie, and over-the-top soap opera sentimentality into a taut little teenage version of an only-one-can-survive scenario. The film also features one of my favorite recent performances, an understated black comic gem of revenge, loneliness, and cookie-hoarding by the legendary Takeshi Kitano. I'll come back to him later.

Battle Royale begins in a near-future that is much closer for comfort than it was 11 years ago. The economy has collapsed and public education is in the toilet. 800,000 teenagers have stopped showing up to school. The ones who still come are out of control. The government passes a law, the Battle Royale Act, to scare the bejeezus out of the little punks. The act makes it legal for the government to pick a random high school class by lottery, ship them off to a deserted island, and make them fight to the death until only one student survives. That student gets to go free, but he or she may be forced back into the mix as a ringer for a future battle royale. There are always two ringers. Some of them are past winners, but others are sociopathic thrillseekers signing up for fun. The ringers are called "transfer students" in governmentspeak. The particular battle royale in this film enjoys one of each brand of transfer student.

The students get to the island through a combination of treachery and drugging. They think they're taking an already scheduled field trip. They eagerly hop on the bus but are eventually put to sleep and transported to the island unawares by a heavily guarded military presence. They awake in a simulated classroom with electric collars around their necks. Their former teacher Takeshi, now a government employee with the battle royale department, happily explains the general plan to his ex-students and then shows them a video of a cheerful young woman happily filling in the details. The students are released into the dark of night one by one, by class rank, alternating between boys and girls. Each student is issued a bag of supplies, a map of the island, and one random weapon. Fate can be cruel or kind here. The weapons include guns, crossbows, axes, Tasers, tracking devices, poisons, grenades, bulletproof vests, swords, nunchakus, trashcan lids, and flashlights.
Soon, we're thrust into the claustrophobic hotbox of 9th grade interpersonal relations, made more intense by the new social order of kill or be killed. Some students form factions, some go it alone. Some refuse to kill, some kill themselves, some kill for revenge and/or twisted pleasure, some kill only in self-defense, some kill because they want to get into a good college later. It's a typical three days of high school, with more blood and explosions. Oh yeah, those collars. Four times a day, parts of the island are declared off-limits. Anyone lingering in these areas will get their throats torn out by the explosive devices embedded in the collars. The collars will also detonate if the students attempt to remove them or if more than one student survives the three-day time limit. Only one student may survive, or everybody dies. To drive the point home, one student's collar is purposefully detonated during the orientation.

As I mentioned before, the ex-teacher turned battle royale administrator is played by Takeshi Kitano. Kitano is a modern Renaissance man. A film critic once wrote that if one turns on a television in Japan at any time of the day or night, Kitano will be on at least one channel. This is probably not hyperbole. Kitano has worked as a standup comic, game show host, sitcom star, late night talk show host, actor, writer, director, and painter. He's a great actor and an even better director. In films like Fireworks, Boiling Point, Sonatine, Kikujiro, and Zatoichi, writer/director/star Kitano skillfully integrates slapstick comedy, extreme violence, action, meditative beauty, complex drama, bizarre non-sequiturs, romantic paeans to nature and love, his own painting, and his painter's eye for color and composition. His films are unlike anyone's, anywhere, and his body of work is a must-see for anybody who cares about movies more than a little. His role here is one of his most enjoyable. A scene where he answers his cellphone at a particularly interesting moment in his life is worth the next hundred jokes you'll hear.

I'll leave the rest of Battle Royale for you to discover. I've seen it three times, and it's still as exciting, funny, and gripping as it was on that first viewing. The first two times I watched the film, I identified with the kids. After several years in the fringes of education as a student teacher and substitute teacher, I now identify just as much with Kitano. I've worked with a lot of kids that needed the occasional crossbow through the throat. Teaching is a lonely profession. It's always you vs. them, even when they're momentarily on your side.
Fukasaku's Battle Royale became such a success in its native country that he got to work on a sequel. Shortly after filming began, Fukasaku was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died shortly thereafter. His son Kenta completed the bulk of the film. I haven't seen it yet, though most reviews call it a disappointment. Whatever the second film's quality, the first one makes a fitting epitaph. Fukasaku's earlier films have a world-weariness and jaded cynicism that comes with hard living and age. This final work bears most of his trademarks, but it's paradoxically a young man's film. The 70-year-old man at the end of his life and career made a movie with a young person's energy and enthusiasm. I like that.

#110: The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

2011-06-25T12:46:00.013-05:00

What will you give me for a basket of kisses?
Why, I'll give you a basket of hugs.

Just try getting that dialogue out of your head after watching The Bad Seed. The question is spoken in a child's cloying faux-sincere sing-song by blond, pig-tailed Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack), an eight-year-old girl. One of her parents, usually her father, provides the answer. Rhoda does everything right. She gets good grades, is well behaved, knows just what to say to win over most adults. But she's a little too perfect, too calculating. And when she doesn't get her way, she kills without remorse. She has no conscience. She's a sugary, pigtailed, blackhearted little ball of pure evil. And her mother is starting to realize it.

This campy yet emotionally affecting 1956 gem skillfully blends dark comedy, horror, and melodrama and, rare for its time, provides multiple complex roles for its mostly female cast. Not a "woman's picture," in the parlance of the times, but a movie about several women and their interactions with each other. Besides evil little Rhoda, the movie introduces us to her warm-hearted, loving mother Christine (Nancy Kelly), coming to the realization that her precious little girl is a horrible monster, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden), their landlord and doting family friend who is obsessed with true crime and psychoanalysis, Hortense Daigle (Eileen Heckart), the mother of one of Rhoda's victims who has turned to booze in the absence of her son, and Claudia Fern (Joan Croydon), Rhoda's teacher, who is harboring some dark suspicions of Rhoda herself while suppressing those same suspicions. The men in the cast are minor supporting players, used to further the plot or supply brief bits of character actor color, with the exception of Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup, an oddball handyman who has an adversarial relationship with Rhoda. Jones is a good actor, but he struggles with a terrible Southern accent here, though his body language and facial expressions sometimes make up for it.

The Bad Seed started life as a novel by William March, which was quickly adapted into a successful Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson. The film followed with that same Broadway cast, after initial plans to feature Rosalind Russell as the mother fell through. The film has a sedentary, stagy quality common in films adapted from plays, and the film's action is largely confined to the Penmarks' apartment in long scenes of dialogue. Despite this stage-bound quality, the film succeeds as a film, for a number of reasons. The 1950s was a great decade for beautiful black and white cinematography, and this film is gorgeously lit and shot by Harold Rosson, whose resume includes Docks of New York, The Wizard of Oz, and Singin' in the Rain. Hollywood veteran Mervyn LeRoy's direction is subtle but visually distinct. He knows when to pull in for a close-up and when to pull back to see everyone in the room at once for maximum emotional impact. He moves the camera rarely, but when he does, it packs a punch. The cast, so comfortable in the roles already, do amazing things with body language, facial expression, and movement. Just seeing what they do with their hands and feet is an acting lesson. These people are living these characters. I don't know what they were like on stage, but they clearly perform for the screen here. Nobody overperforms for the back row. Everything is natural and tightly controlled.

The Bad Seed begins with Christine's husband preparing to leave for Washington, D.C. He's a colonel and has to advise some important people, but that's not important. He needs to be gone for the plot, so he leaves. Christine gets lots of alone time with Rhoda, though Monica drops in often to spoil the girl. Rhoda is her smiling, insincere self until Monica mentions the penmanship contest in which Rhoda came in second to that Daigle boy. Rhoda flips the fuck out into white-hot rage and says that medal is hers. A few days later, at the school picnic, the Daigle boy mysteriously drowns and his penmanship medal goes missing. When Christine finds the medal among Rhoda's things, she begins to realize that her daughter is not just a spoiled liar, she's also a cold-hearted snake. (Look into her eyes.) She begins to wonder about a suspicious death at the last apartment they lived in, and things get pretty damn dramatic after that.

If you're the kind of horror fan who wants to see the shit go down, you may be disappointed. All scenes of physical violence occur offscreen. The horror in this film is of the emotional and psychological variety. Words, suggestions, facial expressions. That's where the horror happens here. Patty McCormack as little Rhoda is perfect in this movie. She really makes you believe she's the embodiment of evil. It's a hilarious, genius performance. How could a kid be that good? With every twirl of her pigtail, every scowl, every smile, every movement of her hands, she's a composed little devil. I love it. Eileen Heckart is also particularly good as the drunken mother of the dead Daigle boy. Despite some dated debate about heredity vs. environment (apparently, it had to be all one way or all the other way), the film holds up nicely. The black comedy and horror elements are pitched in the right tone, and though the film threatens to explode into hysterical melodrama near the climax, it manages to keep everything together.

Oh yeah. The ending. The Broadway play ended on a much darker note, which I won't reveal. Unfortunately, the Motion Picture Production Code, the arbiter of inconsistent and contradictory movie morality at the time, had a confusingly worded rule: "Crime shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and order." The studio forced a new ending on the film, which would have dulled the impact of the preceding two hours if they hadn't come up with the hilariously apocalyptic fuck you happy ending that makes a mockery of forced happy endings. You want it to end like this, they ask. Well, get ready for it to end like this times a billion, followed by a goofy joke. Evil is punished in spectacularly silly fashion. I recommend this movie.

Flashback: Aswang (Wrye Martin & Barry Poltermann, 1994)

2011-06-18T12:14:00.003-05:00

The next movie on the list is one I've already reviewed on the site. Here's a link to that review.

#109: Anguish (Bigas Luna, 1987)

2011-06-11T12:24:00.009-05:00

Wes Craven's Scream is a smug, stupid film that is inordinately pleased with itself. Craven thinks he's clever, but the film is postmodernism for dummies, a braying donkey of a movie that can't stop honking instructions at the audience about how to watch. Possibly more irritating than the film itself was the mainstream critical response. Critics praised Craven for breaking new ground in the horror genre and ushering in a shiny new era of self-reflexivity and self-awareness. Meta-horror! Whoo! The problem with this praise (besides overrating a film with bad acting, editing, writing, and shot composition) is that the horror genre had already pioneered this critical self-awareness for decades before Craven cashed in, with more wit, style, respect for the audience, and respect for the genre. Craven had even, clumsily, done it himself two years before Scream with his postmodern Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, New Nightmare. It wasn't a very good movie, but it was much more ambitious than Scream.

Critics in the Family Guy reference-bludgeon era who pretended Scream was something new should have been pantsed (or de-pantsed, depending on your regional slang) and forced to watch Spanish director Bigas Luna's Anguish, a movie about watching movies, generally, and horror movies, specifically. A postmodern delight, this film within a film within a film within a circle within a spiral within a wheel within a wheel is a blackly comic horror gem that is clever, but not too clever. This is a movie made by a movie lover, intended for movie lovers. It replaces Craven's contempt and self-satisfaction with authentic pleasure and fun.

WARNING: Anguish is almost impossible to write about without giving away spoilers, so proceed at your own risk. I'm not a plot-oriented moviegoer, so I don't mind spoilers myself, but a fresh viewing of this movie with no idea what to expect would be something sweet.

Anguish opens with a funny William Castle-esque warning about hypnosis and then enters the home of Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist) and her son Michael Lerner (Barton Fink, A Serious Man). He's an orderly for a prominent eye surgeon, and he and his mother are both pretty nuts. Zelda has some powers of clairvoyance, and she flips out when her son is accosted by a rude patient. She hypnotizes him and instructs him to kill the woman and steal her eyeballs. When things get even worse for Lerner at his job, Zelda sends her son on a hypnotic killing and eyeball-stealing spree. This portion of the film, formally and structurally, resembles a combination of Castle-style '50s horror gimmickry and the '70s Italian horror of Argento and Fulci. It's a clever and interesting mix, but the movie is just getting warmed up.

After the first two killings, the camera pans back and reveals this portion of the film as a film. We're in a dark theater, watching it on a big screen with an audience. The rest of Anguish cuts back and forth between the people in the theater watching the horror movie, the horror movie they're watching, and both at the same time as events in the theater begin to parallel what's on the screen. When Lerner's character in the film-within-a-film goes into a movie theater himself to start his killing spree, I really wished I was watching Anguish on a big screen instead of a DVD. Audiences in a theater get the experience of watching people on a big screen watch people on a big screen watch people on a big screen. I love that.
When the film reveals itself as a film-within-a-film, the audience members become characters and Anguish becomes a film about how we watch movies. Some people are bored, some entranced, some disturbed, some hypnotized. We focus mostly on two teenage girls who are experiencing vastly different things. One girl loves the film while the other feels frightened and ill. She wants to leave and whines a lot while the other girl tries to shut her up. Another audience member near them gives her the creeps. He seems a little unhinged. Later, we'll find out he's very unhinged. He really loves the movie. I'll just leave it at that.

This English-language film by Spanish director Bigas Luna is one of his rare forays into horror. Called the Russ Meyer of Spain by a few critics, Luna gained his arthouse reputation by making visually audacious sex comedies and giving Javier Bardem his first major roles. I haven't seen any of his other films, but Anguish really makes me want to give them a look. This movie could have easily been a cloying, overbearing mess in the wrong hands, but Luna gets everything right. In most films-within-films, one of the two pieces is throwaway junk. Here, the horror film the audience watches is just as interesting and beautifully shot as the rest of the movie. Unlike Craven's running commentary throughout Scream, Luna relaxes and tells his story with images, not words. This is an enormously entertaining film about the ways we watch movies. It's funny and suspenseful and horror fans and movie lovers in general should check it out.

#108: Angst (Gerald Kargl, 1983)

2011-05-28T12:29:00.008-05:00

Here's an interesting, neglected gem. Angst is an Austrian film about a serial killer that resembles few other serial killer movies. Most often compared to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Angst shares some similarity in tone with John McNaughton's classic but mostly exists in its own world. Never released on DVD or video in this country and many others, Angst can be downloaded from several cult film sites or tracked down on hard-to-find import DVD if you have an all-region player. It's worth the search.

I'm fascinated by directors who've made only one feature film, and Gerald Kargl fits the bill with Angst. A collaboration with Polish cinematographer/director Zbigniew Rybczynski, Angst was inspired by the story of mass murderer Werner Kniesek and contains quotes from several other murderers in the voice-over narration. Unlike many other serial killer movies, the protagonist here (Erwin Leder) is not a glorified, charismatic, evil genius. Instead, he's an insane, bungling, single-minded, almost stupid character whose crimes are poorly planned, messy, and chaotic. The film stays relentlessly on him, though it never tells us his name. We see the film almost entirely through his perspective, with the exception of two god's-eye-view shots at the beginning and end and a few quick shots of the victims.
The film opens with Leder in prison on the day of his release. Still a young man, he's already spent more than half his life locked up for the attempted murder of his mother and the random killing of an elderly woman. Released with no home and no plans for the future in a city he doesn't know, he wanders randomly to a strange cafe, where he eats a sausage dipped in mustard in extreme closeup and decides to begin another murder spree as soon as possible. He picks a female cab driver, but she becomes alarmed by his strange behavior and kicks him out of her cab on a deserted stretch of country road. He chokes and freezes, unable to go through with his poorly planned murder. He runs away, deep into the woods, and stumbles across a large, seemingly abandoned, sparsely furnished home. He decides to make it his base of operations, breaks a window, and crawls inside. Inside, he realizes the strange home is not abandoned and finds a mentally disabled, wheelchair-bound adult man. Soon, the man's elderly mother and adult sister return from the grocery store. Leder decides to torture and slowly murder the three, but his plans are thwarted by his own stupidity. I'll leave the rest for you to discover.

Though my description makes Angst sound like one of those dreary, depressing slogs with lots of torture and unpleasantness, the film is full of energy, offbeat but naturalistic humor, stellar performances, top-notch cinematography, and thoughtful shot compositions and camera movements. The score by ex-Tangerine Dream member and solo composer Klaus Schulze is also of high quality. This is a very good movie. I also need to mention that Angst contains the most entertaining wiener dog ever captured on film. Yes, you read that right.

This film contains some effectively stylized camera movements that aren't used to show off or wow the audience. Instead, they get you deeper into Leder's action, movement, and mental state. In some scenes, the camera is actually mounted to Leder's body as he runs or moves frantically. It's jarring, unsettling, and effective, and Kargl never overuses it. This placement of the camera has the odd visual effect of expressing simultaneous kinetic movement and an inability to move freely, a trapped claustrophobia. The film uses the camera to drive the story to its hilariously grim conclusion.

Another interesting aspect to this film that most other films with similar subject matter ignore is the messiness and work involved in murder. The cleanup, the moving of bodies, the repetitive brutality of making sure the person is truly dead, the blood, the broken glass and furniture, the inability to process the craziness of it. This guy isn't Hannibal Lecter. He's a nut, driven by impulse instead of intellect. He thinks he has some master plan, but his plan must continually change due to his own stupidity, the randomness of chance, the actions of his victims, and the intrusions of the world around him.

Kargl and Rybczynski aren't the guys you'd expect to make a darkly humorous yet brutal film about a serial killer. The two men wrote the film together, with Kargl directing and Rybczynski handling the cinematography. Rybczynski works steadily as a cinematographer and also directs short films and several Pet Shop Boys videos. Kargl never directed a feature film again, but he's worked steadily in film for most of his life. Prior to directing Angst, he created a successful film festival and published a movie magazine in Austria. Since Angst, he's worked as both a director of television commercials and an educational filmmaker for Austrian schools. On the strength of Angst, it's a real loss that he hasn't been able to make another feature. I strongly recommend this film.

#107: Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987)

2011-05-14T13:03:00.007-05:00

Alan Parker is one of those directors critics love to hate. He has a high opinion of his work and himself, but his films too often self-consciously masquerade as high art or hot-button issue movies, barely covering the ordinariness of the mildly fascistic middlebrow vulgarian more in line with Oliver Stone or Adrian Lyne than one of the greats. He's a bit of a dilettante as well, hitting different genres and countries without much personal connection to the material, though I'm certainly making an assumption I can't entirely prove. What I do clearly see in his films is much ugly stereotyping (every white male Southerner is a sweaty, racist, stupid, fat or emaciated hillbilly), use of women as sex objects or plot exposition (sometimes both), and a macho, right-wing interior covered by a thin liberal exterior. These qualities are shared by his one-time collaborator Oliver Stone (Stone wrote the screenplay for Parker's Midnight Express), but Parker is less ham-fisted and messianic than Stone.

I'll give Parker some credit. He's good with his lead actors, he picks talented cinematographers, and he can be pretty entertaining. His varied filmography appealed to precocious teenage boys and/or girls in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In that way, he can be seen as a gateway drug to better things, much like Jim Morrison, the Beat Generation, and mainstream alternative rock. Just look at this lineup: Bugsy Malone (1976), Midnight Express (1978), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), Birdy (1984), Mississippi Burning (1988), The Commitments (1991), and Evita (1996).

Angel Heart is my favorite Parker film, a period detective noir/horror hybrid that mostly succeeds despite Parker's flaws because of its intriguing premise, reliable genre thrills, offbeat cast, luscious cinematography, and visually stimulating locations. It's also my favorite Parker film for personal teenage reasons involving Lisa Bonet. I taped this movie off of cable television in my formative early adolescent years, and let's just say that some scenes on the video got more play than others. I hadn't seen this film in at least 12 or 13 years, but I knew every move Bonet was going to make. "She's going to bite her thumbnail here," I thought, and she did. It's some kind of voodoo post-pubescent muscle memory sexual attraction movie magic. Man, I can't believe I forgot how hot a 19-year-old Lisa Bonet was in this movie. Okay, I'll wipe my dirty old man drool off the computer and continue. Yeah, it was just two paragraphs ago that I criticized Parker for treating women like sex objects. Life is complicated.

Anyway, I like Angel Heart more than any other Parker film for many reasons, teenage lust being just one. I love the film's 1950s period recreations, exaggerated just enough without moving into self-parody. The location shooting in two of the most cinematically appealing cities on earth, New York City and New Orleans, doesn't hurt. The movie successfully blends two of my favorite genres, horror (freaking obviously) and film noir. I like the bananas cast. Mickey Rourke is the right guy to play a sleazy, charismatic private eye from Brooklyn, and Robert De Niro is just campy and amusing enough as the devil. (I'm not spoiling the end when I say that. His name is Louis Cyphre, after all, and he talks about eggs being a religious symbol for the soul as he devours a hard-boiled one.) I've already mentioned the Lisa Bonet factor, but I want to put in some positive words for her as an actress, too. I've heard people call her a bad actor, but I really disagree with that assessment. I like her understated, naturalistic style. There are also some fine smaller roles here for Charlotte Rampling as a fortune teller and legendary blues musician Brownie McGhee as a legendary blues musician. Who could see that coming? You will also see one of the worst acting performances ever committed to celluloid, from Elizabeth Whitcraft, which is thankfully brief.

The story begins with New York private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) called to the offices of Cyphre (Robert De Niro). A big band crooner by the name of Johnny Favorite owes Cyphre a debt, but Favorite is missing. Cyphre wants Angel to track him down. This seemingly straightforward job turns into a whirlwind, nightmarish journey through Harlem, Coney Island, New Orleans, the bayou country outside of the city, jazz, blues, voodoo, and Satanism, with plenty of murder, fistfights, dog bites, gumbo, partial nudity, blood, sex, chicken phobias, my favorite LaVern Baker song ("Soul on Fire"), and fat, racist Southern cops. The movie gets more ridiculous as it progresses, a visual motif involving a large fan is overused, and the twist ending is sub-Shyamalan, but it's all presented with such energy, fun, and sleaze that I didn't mind too much.
Angel Heart is not the masterpiece I believed it was when I was 14, but it's far less ponderous and more fun than Parker's other films. It has the good sense to locate the action in two of the four best noir locations, New York and New Orleans (the other two are Los Angeles and rural Texas, if you're keeping score), and the Satan and voodoo elements aren't overcooked until the movie's final moments. In the end, this is a fun 1980s genre hybrid that gives you the chance to see De Niro and Rourke act together and ogle Lisa Bonet. In these troubling times, that's saying a lot.

#106: Amityville II: The Possession (Damiano Damiani, 1982)

2011-05-01T17:55:00.009-05:00

None of the films in the Amityville franchise earned good reviews or critical respect (though most horror films are treated poorly by the majority of mainstream critics), but 1979's original The Amityville Horror has since become an iconic movie in the horror canon. A huge hit and still a popular Halloween rental, the film has all the hallmarks of horror success: the obligatory remake, sequels, a catchphrase ("GET OUT!"), and scenes and locations that have become pop culture touchstones (the Amityville house, the flies on Rod Steiger's face, the blood oozing down the walls, etc.) The Amityville Horror is one of the most famous haunted house movies ever made, and many of its effects have become standard haunted house movie cliches.

The Amityville Horror is a popular and influential film, and I don't dispute its iconic status. I have to admit, though, that it's not a very good horror movie. The locations look fantastic, the leads (Margot Kidder, James Brolin) are likable, the opening scenes set up some effective tension and mood, and if you're within fifteen years of my age in either direction (nearly 34), you probably saw this on late-night television as a kid and freaked yourself out. However, the film never really goes anywhere, nothing much happens, some of the supporting actors should have been reined in (I'm looking at you, Rod Steiger), and the approach to the material is just too damn straightforward and respectable. Directed by Hollywood veteran Stuart Rosenberg, most famous for making Cool Hand Luke, the film lacks the scuzz, sleaze, B-movie economy, death, slime, sex, angst, lunacy, and fun I find in many of my favorite horror films.

Enter the awesomely named Damiano Damiani. Amityville II: The Possession brings the scuzz, sleaze, B-movie economy, death, slime, sex, angst, lunacy and fun sadly missing from the first film. Derided at the time of release for being a cheap, exploitative, bottom-feeding cash-in, this is one of those rare sequels that completely obliterates its predecessor. This is a real horror film, a kick-ass, punk-rock, demonic possession jamboree, full of glowering yellow eyes, creepy grins, fire, blood, slime, screams, incest, murder, poltergeist activity, Jim Morrison posters, hilarious mustaches, demons, Argento and Bava-esque color schemes, and the phrase "Camping, anyone?"

The film benefits from the lean, B-movie energy Damiani gives the material. Known for a series of low-budget spaghetti westerns, crime films, and comedies, Damiani goes balls-to-the-wall in his only horror film. Instead of the traditional TV-style blandness and respectability of the first film, the sequel features controlled but aggressive/expressive camera movements that capture different points of view, including those of several characters and an omniscient observer. Sometimes gracefully gliding through and around the house and sometimes moving in tight on characters' faces or circling around them (in some cases, even moving upside down), the camera is an active participant in the action. I'll talk about the fine cast later, the special effects are effective and squishy and tactile and gross and fun and the score by inventive composer Lalo Schifrin (Dirty Harry, Enter the Dragon) is good, good stuff.

Though I've been calling Amityville II a sequel, it's really a prequel. This film tells the story of the ill-fated family killed in the opening scene of the 1979 movie before Lois Lane and Barbara Streisand's husband moved in. We see this troubled family move in to the Amityville house at the beginning and watch them come unraveled almost immediately. The father (Burt Young) is a cigar-chomping, domineering, abusive cretin, and his wife (Rutanya Alda) is a kindly devout Catholic who keeps the family together when Burt goes nuts. The oldest son, Sonny (Jack Magner), is a likable, rebellious, angsty teenager, though there's a hint of forbidden sexual attraction between him and his adoring sister Patricia (Diane Franklin). The other two children are much younger, and they don't do a whole lot besides scream and clutch each other tightly as shit flies around the room, though they get a few funny moments together when the little girl puts a plastic bag over the little brother's head for laughs. Poor, angsty, charismatic Sonny gets possessed by a demon shortly after moving into the house, which turns him into a bad boy rock star who does evil shit because evil shit is fun. He throws Satanic poses, glowers menacingly, laughs disturbingly, seduces his sister (which happens far too easily on her end), and finally wastes them all with his dad's shotgun. The rest of the film concerns a priest's efforts to cast the demon out.

Veteran character actor Young does a great job of playing a giant prick, and Rutanya Alda does an equally great job of playing the burdened Catholic mother. She also makes one of the great scared shitless faces in the movies. Alda looks like everyone's kindly aunt, but she's had one hell of a cult movie career. These are just some of the films she's appeared in: De Palma's Greetings and Hi, Mom!, The Panic in Needle Park, The Long Goodbye, Scarecrow, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, The Fury, The Deer Hunter, Rocky II, When a Stranger Calls, Christmas Evil, Mommie Dearest, The Stuff, Black Widow, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and TV's Tales from the Crypt. She's also been in the 1985 Mario Van Peebles vehicle Rappin', which I leave to imdb.com to describe: "An ex-con and break-dancer helps save a neighborhood from a greedy developer while trying to win a rap contest." Diane Franklin has a tough role to play as the sister who lets her demon brother get his swerve on with her private area, but she makes it work. You may remember her from such '80s teen classics as The Last American Virgin, Better Off Dead, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Finally, I must give the bulk of my praise to Jack Magner as Sonny. He blows the doors off. This guy plays the best possessed teen I've ever seen. So much of the film is contingent on his facial expressions, line delivery, and movement, and he delivers the goods. I was shocked to discover he appeared in only two films. His only other role is a small part in Firestarter. What happened to this guy? My brief Internet research turned up nothing. If you know the rest of the Jack Magner story, help me out. I'm curious.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It knows exactly when to rip off The Exorcist, and when to do something else. It's simply a fun, solid horror movie. Nothing more, nothing less. It isn't afraid to kill children, which is a plus in my book, and it isn't afraid to divert from the straight line drawn to its door by the first movie. Damiani brings the Italian horror color scheme, inventive camera work, and kick-ass soundtrack I love so much to the suburban American dysfunctional family/teen angst milieu. It's not high art, but it is art. Skip the first movie, and give this one your attention instead.

#105: Alucarda (Juan Lopez Moctezuma, 1978)

2011-04-16T00:32:00.009-05:00

Michael Weldon, in his Psychotronic Video Guide, paid Alucarda a mighty compliment, which Mondo Macabro, the company releasing this film on video in the U.S., shrewdly blurbed on the cover of the DVD: "More blood, loud screaming, and nudity than any horror film I can think of." Weldon's statement is not factual, but it is true. There's a difference between truth and facts. I've seen more blood and more nudity and heard more screaming, but I've never seen such expressive use of all three in one film. In many ways, Alucarda is incompetent, ridiculous, and stupid. It's also transcendent, ridiculous, and right fucking on.

Narratively, Alucarda is a piece of junk. The dialogue is shit. The characters have no motivation for anything they do. The camera movements are awkward and graceless. The zoom lens is out of control, like a bad high school kid during last period on Friday with a substitute teacher. The editing is troglodytic. That doesn't matter. This movie is bananas. Ba-motherfucking-nanas. Tina Romero, as Alucarda, is one of the great movie faces. I'm talking Maria Falconetti, Gena Rowlands, Ida Lupino, Tuesday Weld, Lynn Lowry, Sissy Spacek, Grace Zabriskie. The kind of female screen face whose beauty is beside the point. Interesting, captivating facial expressions and features that you can't stop looking at and that can't be framed in any non-cinematic way (unless they're working with a piece of shit like Oliver Stone). Besides her face, Romero can scream like nobody's business. She has the most interesting scream I've ever heard. I generally find screaming, on film and in real life, cloying and ear-tiring. I could listen to Romero scream all day. I don't know if this makes any sense. You have to see this movie to make sense of it, and I can't really recommend this movie to anyone who doesn't have my peculiar taste and hard-to-explain aesthetic. I'm a fan of the auteur theory. My primary, and sometimes only, decision in seeing a movie is the person who directed it. That's not true with horror films, though, and particularly untrue in this case. This is, in many ways, a bad movie, maybe even a terrible movie. But it has so much to offer. It's a fucking weird experience. If you like weird experiences, you should see it.

A plot description for a movie that has no idea how to tell a story, which is different than choosing not to tell a story. Moctezuma is trying, but doesn't know how. Still, he's got something. In an extra on the DVD, Guillermo del Toro talks about how Moctezuma hosted a late-night Mexican TV show that aired horror, sci-fi, and fantasy silent films on weekends. This helped me better understand Moctezuma's aesthetic. He would have made a great silent filmmaker. He's fantastic with closeups, with nightmare logic, with lighting, with facial expressions. He's bad with a lot of other things. In horror, his strengths are welcome and his weaknesses are easy to forgive.

Oh yeah, that plot. A girl (really, a full-grown woman playing a teenage girl) enters a Christian orphanage after the death of her parents. Her roommate, Alucarda (spell it backwards), has a bizarre fascination with death. Immediately, these two ladies get the pseudo-lesbian hots for each other and vow to die together one day. (Things move fast in 78-minute films). On a stroll in the countryside, they meet a deformed, hunchbacked gypsy (Bunuel regular Claudio Brook) and unwisely follow him to his camp. They buy some shit, including a large dagger, and head back to the orphanage. I won't explain how, but these young ladies become possessed by Satan and start taking off their clothes, staring crazily, blowing up shit, sucking the blood from each other's breasts after slicing the breasts open with a knife, giving some hardcore Satanic sass-back to the Christians, screaming like beautiful banshees, and freaking everyone the fuck out. A lot of stuff happens after this, and none of it makes any narrative sense. Claudio Brook shows up again in a second role as a straitlaced doctor. You see a lot of naked people, a lot of blood, and hear a lot of screaming. God Bless Mexico!

I don't know what else to say. This movie is a prime example of the bizarre virtues and weaknesses of filmmaking. Something can be a piece of trash and an oddly beautiful piece of something else at the same time. I don't know whether I'm overpraising this thing or selling it short. Maybe I'm just a fan of the time when women didn't make their private junk look like an elementary school girl's business. Maybe I like blood, breasts, Satan, fire, and Christians getting their comeuppance. Maybe I had some free time on a Friday night and this filled the bill. Or maybe it's great.

Come on, everybody. Who doesn't love Mexican lesbian Satan-possessed adult women posing as teenagers with a vague connection to the Dracula mythology? Who doesn't love a movie where the actors are speaking English but came to it as, at most, a second language? Who doesn't love life, my friends? Who doesn't love life? And who doesn't love death? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Alucarda! Whoop! Whoop!

#104: Alien 3: The Assembly Cut (David Fincher, 1992)

2011-04-02T12:42:00.007-05:00

Ignoring the Alien vs. Predator franchise because it doesn't even rate, I find it fascinating that the four Alien films have been made by four different, visually distinctive, powerful directors: Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise), James Cameron (The Terminator, Titanic), David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac), and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children, Amelie). Most of us agree that the first Alien film is a kick-ass horror/sci-fi classic and the second one is a kick-ass action/sci-fi jam, but I am in the minority in my enjoyment and admiration of the final two films in the series, particularly the fourth film, which only my wife and I and one friend enjoy among the entirety of planet Earth. I really like the Alien series. My wife loooooooooooves the Alien series. She is like a fan of the band Phish when it comes to Alien, if that fan stopped loving a terrible, noodly rock band and transferred that love to a movie series about killer aliens. My wife's enjoyment of these movies enhances my own enjoyment. I love how much she loves them.

When I first saw Alien 3 on the big screen in high school, I found it ambitious and visually interesting but dreary, confusing, and tedious. I watched it again in college with my wife in the early days of our relationship and liked it a little more but generally agreed with my previous opinion. I also found the comical overuse of the f-word unintentionally ridiculous. It was a film easier to admire than enjoy. Still, there was something in there worth seeing. Fincher wasn't just copying the highs of the first two films.
The production of Alien 3 was troubled. Screenplays by cyberpunk author William Gibson and Near Dark co-writer Eric Red, both supposedly awesome, were rejected. The shooting screenplay, by Hollywood jobber Larry Ferguson from a story idea by Vincent Ward (Map of the Human Heart), underwent an emergency rewrite from producers David Giler and Walter Hill (Hard Times, The Warriors, TV's Deadwood), and some reports indicate the film was still being written as it was shot. Fincher, in his debut film, endured constant interference from the studio and had final cut taken away from him. In most instances in which a Hollywood studio takes final cut away from a strong director, poor decisions were made. Fincher, still apparently bitter about the experience, says he hates the film and refuses to watch it again.

This leads us to the "assembly cut" found on the special-edition two-disc DVD. Sometimes misleadingly marketed as Fincher's "director's cut," (Fincher says he doesn't know who assembled this cut, and he refuses to watch it to find out) this version of the film is 30 minutes longer, restores some deleted scenes, takes out some scenes, and is a differently edited, vastly improved beast. This cut of Alien 3 turns an interesting failure into a solid sci-fi/horror film with a stronger sense of character development, narrative momentum, and suspense. It makes more sense, moves through the story with more fluidity, and just plain looks better. Despite being 30 minutes longer, it is far less tedious and leaden. And the comical overuse of the word "fuck" is mostly absent until the concluding scenes. I suspect this version is much closer to what Fincher intended, but we may never know.
The basic story, if you haven't seen it, begins when the escape pod from Aliens crashes into an ocean on a not very hospitable planet, which is deserted save for an all-male prison colony of violent YY-chromosome offenders. Ripley is the sole survivor of the crash. Except for the motherfucking alien! Oh yeah! Her presence in the colony stirs up some shit. These men haven't seen a woman in years. Charles S. Dutton, a prisoner, has become the de facto leader of the place and converted most of the other bad apples to a fundamentalist Christian offshoot of his own devising. The only employees are a doctor who used to be a prisoner, the warden, and the warden's second-in-command. Most of the prisoners are British, with a handful of Americans spicing things up. There are a lot of solid actors in this crew, including the late, great Pete Postlethwaite, Mike Leigh veteran Philip Davis, and Withnail & I's Paul McGann. Into this claustrophobic, dystopic, sweaty, all-male gumbo comes Ripley and a cute lil' alien. The alien, still in its infant crab/camel spider-looking phase, jumps into the body of an ox (deleted and re-shot as a dog in the theatrical cut, for inexplicable reasons) and births itself for realz (that spelling is really going to bring the youth demographic into this blog's readership), quickly mutating into a full-sized adult killing machine.

This version of the film restores a number of images that were idiotically removed from the theatrical cut, including a number of shots of the surface of the prison colony's planet. One particularly neat shot shows a work crew leading a team of oxen through a dusty, snowy landscape to get to the crashed ship. Some early CGI of the alien in movement looks pretty weak, but Fincher uses these shots sparingly and goes for the full-on animatronics, make-up, and latex suits when the creature is in close-up. I continue to remain excited about H.R. Giger's sweet alien designs. This is one of the great movie monsters. Giger's involvement with all four films is one reason why they look so good. (Let's also give credit to Sigourney Weaver's excellent work in all four. She makes a great action hero.) The conclusion still drags on a bit too much for my taste. How many shots of alien POV and guys running down a hallway and buttons being pushed and hatches being closed can a person sit through? However, the final scene is a bleak yet oddly optimistic conclusion, dulled a bit by the existence of the fourth film, but still pretty unexpected for a Hollywood movie.

Fincher may have had a miserable experience making this film, but he's done alright for himself since, making Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Social Network. Still, I think he's too hard on Alien 3. He should watch this assembly cut sometime, at the very least to end the debate about whether it's his version or not.
One final observation: the placement of the 3 in the logo for the film makes it look like Alien Cubed. I'm no mathematician, but isn't this misleading? The film should follow this equation: (the number of aliens in the first two movies) x (the number of aliens in the first two movies) x (the number of aliens in the first two movies) = a holy living fuckload of aliens. This movie has just one full-grown alien, plus an alien fetus. What gives? Aah, I'll let it slide. It's the weekend.

#103: Aftermath (Nacho Cerda, 1994)

2011-03-19T11:30:00.006-05:00

This second film from the Rue Morgue list is a 30-minute short by Spanish director Nacho Cerda. Unlike the Fangoria list, the Rue Morgue list includes a number of short films, and I'm presented with a writing challenge. How do I give a short film the same treatment I give the feature-length films without giving away the entire story or cutting my review too short, especially in this film's case, in which only a few things happen? I think I'll just proceed as usual. The description of this film's plot on IMDB and the back of the DVD case gives the whole game away, but this film is more about the how rather than the what, so knowing what happens doesn't ruin anything. Still, if you want to see this one fresh and cold, I'd suggest skipping this review until you see the film. Unlike a lot of short films, it's widely available on DVD, paired with another Cerda short and his student film, and as an instantly viewed film on the streaming portion of Netflix.
The film takes place in a morgue and the only living characters are a morgue attendant and two pathologists performing autopsies. If you're squeamish about blood, guts, innards, and body fluids, you're probably not a regular reader of this blog, but you may have a tough time with Aftermath. I wasn't bothered by it, since my squeamish factor only kicks in when I see needles going into the veins of living people. Nevertheless, the special effects are quite good. Cerda spent some time witnessing autopsies before assembling his effects team, and he put that knowledge into effective practice here.

[SPOILER PARAGRAPH] The skeletal story begins with a brief shot of some kind of innard getting the pudding treatment in a blender, for reasons we don't yet know, before a fade to black. Then we hear a woman screaming and the sound of a car accident followed by a slow pan up the body of a dead dog in the highway. Then we fade to black again, the credits roll, and we see a morgue attendant delivering a body to the autopsy room, staffed by two pathologists. One of them has a creepy thousand-yard stare, and you know right away that he's up to some shit. We see a couple of autopsies in clinical detail, one of the pathologists goes home for the night, the other pathologist (the one with the creepy glare) defiles a fresh corpse and documents his misdeeds photographically, then he goes home and we see what he does with the blender and the internal organ he swiped after his defilement, then the film ends.

You might be saying so what after reading that plot description, but the so what comes from the film's structure, look, tone, atmosphere, detached dark humor, and clinical matter-of-factness. Cerda creates a compelling short film with zero dialogue. Not one word is spoken in the entire 30-minute running time, and you don't miss it at all. The story is conveyed to the audience through image, sound, and music. We hear the autopsies, we see the facial expressions, we listen to the unobtrusive and effective musical score. That's it and that's enough. This lack of speech perfectly matches the film's detached, observant tone, creating a bizarrely meditative splatter film about corpse defilement.

The film is a humorously dark observation of the sexual fetishization of ritual, death, and decay, too. Aftermath spends a lot of time on the almost lovingly photographed autopsy details. The choosing of medical instruments, the careful dissection of bodies, the cleaning of the body and the instruments, the weighing of the brain, the removal and reinsertion of internal organs, the sewing up of the chest, the placing and removal of sheets over the body, the documentation of the autopsy's findings. This same detached approach, this uniformity of tone, also documents the crazy pathologist's sexual misdeeds with one of the dead bodies. It's an almost absurdly gentle approach to transgressive subject matter, and it really makes this film interesting and compulsively watchable when it could just have been an adolescent gross-out (though there's always a place for a solid adolescent gross-out in all our lives from time to time).
On the basis of seeing only this short film, I find Cerda a truly talented and exciting formal stylist, and I'm looking forward to checking out his other work. The other short film in this DVD collection, Genesis, also appears on the Rue Morgue list, so I'm going to hold off on that film until I'm ready to write about it. Cerda also directed a handful of other short films, a documentary about Spanish horror movies, and the full-length horror feature The Abandoned. He's currently preparing to shoot another horror movie, I Am Legion, which may be released next year. Also, his name is Nacho. That's worth noting again.

#102: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Robert Fuest, 1971)

2011-03-05T11:16:00.010-06:00

We're kicking off a new list this week, Rue Morgue magazine's Connoisseur's Guide to 100 Alternative Horror Films, and I think it's a good omen we're beginning with The Abominable Dr. Phibes. I'm trying to tone down the hyperbole, but oh my god I love this movie. If a supervillain gave me the choice between exploding my family or exploding a single DVD copy of this movie, of course I'd save my family but I'd have to think about it for a good 30 seconds first. It's like the creators of this movie sat around discussing exactly what I might like to see onscreen, six years before my birth. "Wait until that guy is born, grows up, and finally rents this movie in 2011. He's going to shit his brains out!" is what one of those creators probably said during this fabricated event.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a 1970s British horror-comedy, but it's so much more. Starring Vincent Price, in his 100th role, as Dr. Phibes, the film has one of the best opening scenes ever. We see the bad doctor, dressed in black, playing ominous music on a red organ that slowly rises from some underground lair. Phibes is surrounded by an animatronic orchestra, Dr. Phibes and His Clockwork Orchestra, which resembles a far more ominous and creepy version of the Chuck E. Cheese band. Suddenly, a beautiful young woman dressed to the nines makes a grand entrance. Phibes commands his robotic orchestra to play, and he dances with the woman. We soon find out she is his assistant, Vulnavia, and she never speaks. She just looks fantastic, dresses sharply, and helps Dr. Phibes perform terrible deeds. Soon, they're off in a car with Dr. Phibes' image painted over the tinted windows to lower some killer vampire bats into the bedroom of a sleeping doctor. If you're intrigued by this opening scene, I have great news for you. Every frame of this film is just as awesome.

Here's the basic plot. If you'd like to go into this film cold, just skip ahead. Phibes was a well-known organist and a doctor, but he flipped out when his wife died during an emergency surgery. He was in Switzerland at the time and was badly hurt in a car accident while rushing back to England to be by her side. He faked his death and proved his own doctors wrong by learning to speak again, which he does by inserting a tube into a hole in his neck that transfers his vocal cord vibrations to a phonograph speaker. Yes! He also eats and drinks through his crazy neck hole. He uses the cloak of faked-death anonymity to construct the most bizarrely interior-decorated mansion in the world, which he uses as his headquarters to elaborately plan his insane revenge on the nine-person medical team who failed to save his wife's life. This years-long plan is finally ready. Let's just ignore the nonsensical fact that the medical team includes seven surgeons, a psychiatrist, and one nurse. (When does that ever happen?) Instead, let's focus on the fact that the revenge plot takes the form of nine of the ten Old Testament plagues, which leads to a series of awesome deaths. Throw in the bumbling Scotland Yard detectives on the case, led by the hilarious Peter Jeffrey, to provide some dry British wit, one-liners, and slapstick, and the legendary Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man) as the chief surgeon during the ill-fated Mrs. Phibes operation, and you have the ingredients for a weird, wonderful movie.

The director, Robert Fuest, was a production designer first, so the physical design of the film is pretty amazing. Every frame is full of eye-popping visuals and striking imagery, but the effect isn't wearying overkill. He doesn't go in for over-stylized camera tricks, just beautiful, bizarre production design and framing of shots. This film never stops being gorgeous to look at. Also, the horror and comedy elements mingle gracefully without overwhelming each other. Dr. Phibes manages to be both creepy and hilarious, campy without being superior and winky, unsettling without making you feel dirty. They really don't make movies like this anymore, but they didn't really make them like this at the time, either. This is the kind of movie that exists in its own singular world. I love it.

The long-retired but still-living Fuest had a strange career. He was a production designer for British television for several years and debuted as a director with the Swinging London comedy, Just Like a Woman. He followed with several episodes of the TV series The Avengers and an adaptation of Wuthering Heights starring a young Timothy Dalton. Then came a run of horror films: And Soon the Darkness, The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again, the sci-fi/adventure/horror hybrid The Last Days of Man on Earth, and The Devil's Rain, the latter featuring one of the most bizarre casts ever for a horror film about Satanic cults with the power to melt people's faces off - Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn, a young Tom Skerritt, a young John Travolta, Claudio Brook, and Mr. Church of Satan himself, Anton LaVey. He ended his career with a lot of TV, including several ABC Afterschool Specials, and the European sexploitation movie Aphrodite. He retired in 1987.

So, he didn't exactly go out in a blaze of glory, but Fuest is a legend based solely on The Abominable Dr. Phibes. I recommend it to every living thing.

#101: The Wisdom of Crocodiles aka Immortality (Po-Chih Leong, 1998)

2011-02-13T12:18:00.006-06:00

Well, I did it. I have watched, and in some cases re-watched, every film on Fangoria's "101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen" list. The initial plan for this blog was to complete that list and then pull the plug. I have two other blogs, and three seemed a little excessive. This would just be a long-term temporary project. I was a horror fanatic as a kid, and this blog proposed to get me back in touch with that childhood love before I put horror on the back burner again. Four years on from my first post, the plans have changed. I'm going to keep this site going indefinitely. I'm having fun writing the posts, my self-imposed schedule of one review every other week is low-pressure, I'm back in love with horror movies, and I have a dedicated audience that, though relatively small, is much larger than the audience for my other two blogs. So, thank you, my people, for reading and leaving nice comments and linking to me and spreading the word of mouth. In two weeks, I start my next crazy project. I will watch all of Rue Morgue magazine's "Connoisseur's Guide to 100 Alternative Horror Films." This list is even more varied and esoteric than Fangoria's list, and I look forward to tackling it.

On to The Wisdom of Crocodiles. This late-1990s British vampire film from Hong Kong director Po-Chih Leong is currently available on DVD under the much more generic title, Immortality. Leong tries to do something different with the vampire genre and mostly succeeds, with the exception of a couple of howlingly stupid scenes I will discuss later. Instead of garlic, crosses, fangs, hypnotic eyes, and sunlight, this vampire has to approach his female victims the old-fashioned way, using only his charm, sparkling personality, and regular teeth. The twist this time is that the vampire can only feed on a woman who loves him. Once he kills and sucks the blood from a woman who loves him without reservation, he will be immortal. Until then, he goes through a succession of women who mostly love him, but harbor a certain amount of resentment, anger, suspicion, or uncertainty. These emotions manifest themselves in the blood and cause a painful reaction in the vampire that seems to combine acid reflux with the passing of a kidney stone. The vampire vomits forth a large crystalline shard and files it away in a locked wooden box above a piece of tape with the woman's name on it. He's satiated for a while, but he will need to find another victim if he wants to keep living.

The vampire (a pre-fame Jude Law) lives in a swank art deco apartment in a building that seems to house no other tenant. After picking up a victim that almost loved him (An Angel at My Table's Kerry Fox), he goes on the hunt again for that magic woman who can guarantee his immortality. He hits on a woman who intrigues him (Elina Lowensohn, who played a vampire of her own in Michael Almereyda's Nadja), and they begin a relationship. Meanwhile, his last victim's body unexpectedly turns up after an illegal fishing net scoops her up from Law's usually reliable dumping site. Law is not a suspect, but he purposely makes himself one after phoning the police and letting them know he used to date the woman and never reported her missing. Why does he do this? The movie never explicitly offers a reason, but I suspect his motivation is loneliness and boredom. The vampire lifestyle may be mysterious and glamorous in most other vampire movies, but this one is solitary, tragic, and isolating. Law strikes up a suspicious and adversarial mutual admiration society with the chief investigator on the homicide, played by Mike Leigh veteran and one of my favorite actors ever, Timothy Spall. (Spall has in fact had to get his ass replaced on at least 12 separate occasions after acting it off.)

Spall and Law's unlikely friendship begins during one of the film's two moronic scenes I mentioned earlier. Spall trails his prime suspect Law in the London Underground and is accosted by a gang of street thugs. This roving gang of toughs is a rainbow coalition of skullduggery. Almost two of every race, ethnic group, hairstyle, and fashion accessory are represented, with the possible exception of Eskimos and pageboys. Blacks, whites, Asians, Pennsylvania Dutch, 1990s techno DJs, greaseballs, grunge rockers, baldies, baseball caps. They're all here. It's a human Noah's Ark of street criminals. Regressive in all other aspects, this gang sure is forward-thinking when it comes to race relations. Besides the ridiculousness of the Benetton West Side Story gang's appearance, these guys are way too old and way too non-threatening in appearance to make the ominous impact Leong attempts. I kept expecting them to bust out some choreographed dance moves. The guys who accost Michael Jackson in the "Bad" video are scarier than these clowns. Law stops their beating of Spall with some wise words that any respectable multicultural street gang must respect. Unfortunately, these dorks show up in another scene. They have no business there, and appear only through a remarkable coincidence that is never explained, but you do get to see Law kick the shit out of them. Fortunately, the rest of the film works much better than these two scenes.

If you're looking for either a traditional vampire film with all the reliable mythology or a neck-biting bloodbath of gore, you're going to be disappointed by this film. If you're in the mood for a character-driven, low-key twist on the vampire genre, with cameo appearances from the world's stupidest street gang, you're in for a treat. Jude Law makes for a great vampire, Timothy Spall nicely underplays his detective and gives you a guy more human than cliche, and the production design is gorgeous. Leong has a nice eye, going for subtle composition rather than a bombardment of camera tricks. Instead of going back to the horror classics, Leong claims his visual inspirations for The Wisdom of Crocodiles were Kurosawa's Rashomon and Melville's Le Samourai. To be honest, I don't see much of Kurosawa in this film, but I caught plenty of nods to Melville's existential gangster film. Leong borrows that film's technique of slowly fading in and out of a single scene to indicate the passing of just a few seconds, or several hours. He also parallels Alain Delon's hitman in Melville's film with his vampire. Both men kill for a living, one for money, the other for immortality, both men are exhausted of living that life, both are lonely, and both are immaculately neat, solitary apartment dwellers. Leong doesn't have Melville's or Kurosawa's visual genius, but he does alright with his smaller palette.
The Wisdom of Crocodiles was Leong's first English-language film after a long string of Hong Kong genre films (mostly comedy, action, and mystery), and he currently works in American television. Maybe the street gang here meant to connect him with his comedy roots. Who knows? Barring those two silly scenes, I can recommend The Wisdom of Crocodiles to anyone looking for a subtler, more atmospheric take on the vampire myth.

#100: When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979)

2011-01-29T12:26:00.006-06:00

I've reached my 100th review! I still have one more movie to write about until this project is over, but the blog will carry on indefinitely while I accumulate more horror movie lists, guides, cheap DVD sets, etc. Announcements about the next phase in the blog will show up in the next post.

When a Stranger Calls is an odd choice for an overlooked horror film list and joins the company of a handful of other movies from this list that most horror fans have already seen (Day of the Dead, Last House on the Left, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, From Beyond, Black Christmas). The movie was a minor theatrical hit in 1979 and a popular rental for years, but I'm sure the kids of today with their iPads and video games and horse-drawn carriages have maybe only seen the 2006 remake, so I can justify its inclusion on those grounds. Additionally, I've overlooked it. It was one of those movies I'd been meaning to rent since I was a pre-teen but never did.

Though When a Stranger Calls is a long way from being a great movie, it compensates for its lapses into cliche and lack of distinctive visual style with a solid, unusual cast, excellent use of location, great atmosphere, and mixture of reliable genre tropes and unexpected detours from conventional genre narrative. Perhaps the most interesting of these detours is the film's structure. Most mainstream films have a three-act structure, but the three acts in When a Stranger Calls have three distinctive beginnings, middles, and ends. The film's first third is the most famous and most prominent in all the promotional materials. Inspired by the urban legend of the terrorized babysitter who discovers that the disturbing phone calls she's receiving "are coming from inside the house!!!!," this section is a showcase for Carol Kane as Jill Johnson, the babysitter for a rich couple going out to dinner and a movie. The kids are asleep upstairs when she arrives, and she's soon bombarded with creepy crank calls that have become horror movie catchphrase dynamite: "Have you checked on the children?" The pre-caller ID/cell phone/star 69 days were a golden age for creepy phone calls. Like Gang of Four says, two steps forward, six steps back. If creepy phone calls are your metier, creeps, you're SOL in this sexting age in which we live in, to paraphrase Paul McCartney. After this section, the film's strongest, ends, the movie loses a little momentum, but there's still plenty of solid entertainment ahead. The second act fits more comfortably in the police thriller genre and takes place seven years later. In this section, the madman, Curt Duncan (Tony Beckley), has escaped from a mental hospital. We get to know him, a woman he becomes obsessed with (Colleen Dewhurst), and the private detective tracking him down (Charles Durning). The last act returns to the horror vibe of the beginning, as Duncan resumes his terrorizing of Carol Kane, now married with two small children, after seeing a newspaper article about her charitable work.

When a Stranger Calls was director and co-writer Fred Walton's first film, and it's clear he's no visual stylist. The film's camera setups, shot compositions, and editing are closer to the flat style of the era's network television programs, and Walton spent most of his career making made-for-TV films, including a sequel to this film starring a returning Kane and Durning and The Stepfather's Jill Schoelen. Inactive for several years after his successful debut, Walton returned in the mid-1980s with an episode of the revamped Alfred Hitchcock Presents and April Fool's Day, a teenage slasher film with a twist ending that critiqued and parodied the teenage slasher film genre. He made two more features, thriller The Rosary Murders and boarding school drama Hadley's Rebellion, before switching to TV movies for the rest of his career, which has apparently ended. (He hasn't made a TV movie since 1996.)
Despite Walton's visual limitations, he compensates by choosing atmospheric New York City locations, including wealthy suburbs, seedy bars, and city streets, and staying out of the way of his talented cast and compelling story. Carol Kane is great, as usual (though I doubt a woman as interesting as her would marry the "new regional sales manager" dweeb of a husband she's saddled with), and so is Colleen Dewhurst, Charles Durning, and Tony Beckley. Beckley brings depth and even a bit of sympathy to his crazed madman, and it's surprising to learn he had terminal cancer and knew it while he performed what would become his last role. (He died in 1980.) Humphrey Bogart knew he was dying of cancer while filming one of his last roles as a home-invading murderous criminal in William Wyler's The Desperate Hours. He said the part helped him deal with his anger about his terminal illness. I wonder if it was similar for Beckley.

When a Stranger Calls is a satisfying genre film with an iconic opening scene, an above-average cast and an unusual structure that gives you three conventional short films in one. I'm sure it's better than the 2006 remake. I admit I've never seen the remake, but I was bored looking at stills from it online, so I can't even imagine the boredom of sitting through it. I know I'm being a little judgmental, but the remake appears to be a generic slasher movie with one of those modern casts of corporate-sexy, sexually asexual, robotic J. Crew twentysomethings, devoid of personalities and interesting faces. When a Stranger Calls may not be a classic, but it sure has more than that.

#99: Wendigo (Larry Fessenden, 2001)

2011-01-15T12:31:00.007-06:00

I'm a big Larry Fessenden fan, even though he's directed only four feature films in 20 years, and I hate one of them and have some minor problems with another. He's one of the few modern directors working in the horror genre whose films I anticipate, and he's a fine character actor, too. A true independent filmmaker (as opposed to "indie"), Fessenden has integrity and has so far managed to avoid the lure of Hollywood cash and the compromises that go along with it. He not only directs, but also writes, edits, produces, and sometimes acts in his movies. His four feature films are personal, character-based, independent dramas that use classic horror themes and cliches to parallel the ways we use religion and religious myths to help explain the horrible things in our lives. Fessenden has an idiosyncratic, distinctive visual style as a director and an expert sense of structure, pacing, and formal style as an editor.

Fessenden's first three features are an unofficial trilogy of classic monster updates. His first feature, 1991's No Telling, uses elements of the Frankenstein story to express Fessenden's discomfort with animal testing and is the only Fessenden film I dislike. His two pet causes, animal rights and environmentalism, often make their way into his films, but the political content overwhelms the story in this first feature. No Telling is an awkward, preachy film with weak writing and acting and an amateurish look, but isolated moments hint at the talent revealed in his later work. Fessenden followed his worst film with his best, 1995's Habit. Not only one of the best independent films of the decade but also one of the best vampire movies ever, Habit is an overlooked gem. A character-rich drama with elements of black humor and a creeping sense of dread throughout, Habit sometimes plays like some unholy but successful marriage of John Cassavetes or early Scorsese and George A. Romero. Can you tell I love this movie? Next came 2001's Wendigo, my second-favorite Fessenden movie, and his extremely loose update of the werewolf/shapeshifter genre (just replace wolves with deer). I'll discuss this in more detail later. His last feature was 2006's The Last Winter. Despite some serious flaws (a return to the soapboxing and preachiness of his first feature), The Last Winter also contains some of his richest visuals, a good cast, great atmosphere, and a stunningly bleak ending. A mixed bag, for sure, but well worth your time. His one flirtation with Hollywood filmmaking occurred recently. He was hired to direct the remake of Spanish horror film The Orphanage and wrote a screenplay with Guillermo del Toro, but he quit the project when the studio interfered with his casting ideas.

Though Fessenden's made only four features, he's been actively involved in film since the late 1970s. He directed several short films, works steadily as a character actor in small but interesting parts (Bringing Out the Dead, Animal Factory, Session 9, Broken Flowers, Wendy and Lucy, his own films), and produces independent features (River of Grass, Wendy and Lucy, House of the Devil, his own stuff). He has also written a how-to book about reducing environmental waste on film shoots and occasionally gives lectures about it.
As I wrote earlier, Fessenden's films use horror archetypes as a parallel to the way religious myth explains away life's horrors. The supernatural elements in his films retain an ambiguity. Unlike most other films in which the supernatural may only be occurring in the characters' minds, Fessenden's films (mostly) retain their mystery and dread. The ambiguity remains after the closing credits scroll down the screen. Both interpretations remain plausible. No Telling uses the Frankenstein legend to explain sanctioned animal abuse, Habit the vampire myth to explain alcoholism, grief over the loss of a parent, suicidal thoughts, and relationship problems, and The Last Winter a variation on the Wendigo creature to explain global warming, corporate greed, and environmental destruction. On the other hand, the girlfriend in Habit could very well be a vampire and that weird creature in The Last Winter really could be out there in the frozen Arctic.

Wendigo is Fessenden's most explicit exploration of the mythology theme. Mostly seen through the perspective of a small boy, Wendigo is about a child's attempt to understand the adult world around him and its anger, sadness, marital problems, mental illness, jealousy, and violence. That, and a weird part-deer, part-human, all-ass-kicking demon in the woods. Wendigo opens with a New York City family driving to the upstate country home of a friend. The family (Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, and Malcolm in the Middle's Erik Per Sullivan) hit a large deer a few miles from the home and get stuck in the deep snow after sliding off the road. Shortly thereafter, a trio of hunters appears alongside the deer. They've been tracking it for hours and have already wounded it. One of the hunters, Otis (John Speredakos), kills the wounded deer. Tension flares between Otis and the family almost immediately. Otis is angry that the deer's antlers were cracked when the car hit it, and Kim (Clarkson) is angry that Otis fired his pistol so close to their car. Fessenden sets up two prominent horror cliches in this opening scene (city folk unwisely going to the dangerous country, the menacing backwoods hick) but, as usual, transforms the stereotypes into something realistic and strange. Otis is far from an inbred, slobbering hillbilly stereotype and closer to the resourceful, smart, mean-eyed, gun-loving, quick-to-anger bully I know too well from my own rural upbringing. The city family aren't stereotypical, either. They're entitled and pushy, yes, but mildly so. Their negative qualities don't solely define them. Their young son Miles (Sullivan) tries to understand the menacing outside world, the deer's death, and his own parents' problems, and we see these events through his perspective. As my wife astutely pointed out, whenever his parents talk directly to him, they are actually indirectly talking to each other, scoring points, pressing their arguments and disagreements, and attempting to quell their own and each other's insecurities. Miles turns these outside worries into internal nightmares and fantasies of supernatural creatures and the menacing Otis. The tensions between his family and Otis continue to mount, and then the Wendigo enters the picture. These elements come together in a tense, satisfying conclusion that doesn't wrap things up but doesn't make you feel cheated out of an ending, either.

Fessenden's work as an editor on this film is just as impressive as his directing. He skillfully weaves together long and medium shots, long takes, and contemplative passages with quick intercutting of closeups on Miles' toys, drawings, and nightmares. He has a big bag of stylistic tricks, but he uses them sparingly and effectively. He has a knack for shooting everyday objects in a way that imbues them with terror and dread. I also appreciated the tiny visual and verbal nods to The Wolf Man, Poltergeist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Wendigo isn't quite as consistent or developed as Habit, but it's pretty damn good.

#98: The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988)

2010-12-31T12:40:00.008-06:00

I love horror movies, but horror movies don't really scare me. I've been unsettled by a handful of disturbing movies and felt suspense and shocks and surprise during particular scenes of many films, but horror is fun. There is a pleasure and a joy I take in the watching of horror movies that I just can't get anywhere else. When I really want to scare myself, I have to turn to another interest. In a separate compartment from my love of horror films is a fascination with true crime, particularly murder, double particularly the murder of a stranger by a weirdo with no apparent motive. I haven't had cable for thirteen years, but when I stay in a hotel or travel back home for the holidays, I load up on murder shows like "Forensic Files," "Cold Case Files," etc. I became fascinated by the Manson Family and Ted Bundy and Son of Sam when I was a small child of eight or nine, and I devoured serial killer biographies and television specials. I dubbed Geraldo's ridiculous interview with Manson in the mid-1980s on a cheap VHS tape and watched it dozens of times. I would drop everything to watch an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries," even a rerun.

I don't know why this fascination with murder and violent crime continues unabated. If I think about the victims too much, I start to feel terrible. Some people's lives are so brutal and short and full of misery, and too much thought about them and their families is a real buzzkill. However, the lives of killers, the cultural impact of the murders on the region where they occur and the area's collective psyche, the process of the police investigation, the science of forensics, the randomness of chance, all these things are so compelling. Murder also scares the shit out of me, and there's a sick part of me that thrives on this fear. I don't like rollercoasters, but a part of me likes the fact that there is a tiny chance I will be the victim of a violent crime. The fact that I haven't been the victim of a violent crime is, in some weird way, life-affirming. I'm not alone in my family. My mother used to read true-crime books. My sister shares my fascination with killers. (We once stayed up all night one Christmas break watching a marathon of serial killer specials.) My beloved late grandmother on my mother's side, a devout Catholic whose empathy and kindness explained her serious aversion to anything from the darker, dirtier side of life, nevertheless shared my same fascination with violent crime and serial murder.
You'd think horror movies about sociopathic killers would be right up my alley. Most of them, unfortunately, are pretty stupid. The Vanishing, a Dutch horror-thriller from the late 1980s, is one of the few that succeeds. This is an unsettling and disturbing film. It's also well made, well told, well performed, and compulsively entertaining. The Vanishing is a piece of fiction, but everything in it could conceivably happen. To other people. To someone you know. To someone you love. To you. And to me. A few of you sick bastards could even do these things. Maybe you already have.

The Vanishing opens with a Dutch couple in the middle of a road trip from Holland to France. They've been on the road for too long and are starting to wind each other up, as couples often do on long car trips. Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) won't drive on the highway even though Rex (Gene Bervoets) is tired. He won't stop for gas even though she thinks they're probably getting low. When they run out of gas in the middle of a dark tunnel road that is only one lane each way, the tensions burst. Rex leaves Saskia alone in the tunnel and walks to a gas station without telling her where he's going. He returns with a gas can. She's gone. He fills up, drives out of the tunnel, and sees her standing on the side of the road. They make up, apologize for being jerks, and continue the vacation. They stop again later for a beer, some Frisbee, a chance to stretch their legs. Saskia promises to do some highway driving and goes into the gas station for a beer and a soda. She never comes back.

The film then subtly and expertly interweaves the chronology of events before, during, and after Saskia's disappearance. We follow the man who kidnapped her, Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), as he gets the idea for the crime, practices it, makes some unsuccessful attempts, and finally gets his victim. We see Rex, three years later, with a new girlfriend, still haunted and obsessed by Saskia's disappearance. Finally, Raymond and Rex meet each other, and the film's supremely disturbing final act begins.
The Vanishing is a character-rich film without the usual blustering hyperbolic nonsense of the psycho killer genre. I could have done without the golden egg metaphor that crops up three or four times, but otherwise this is a film that proceeds intelligently, logically, and calmly toward its dark conclusion. Raymond is a fascinating character, a high school science teacher and a family man with a wife and two happy daughters, whose sociopathy drives him to do terrible things in the same matter-of-fact way he does the other things in his life. He's a complex, developed character, as are the other people in the film.

I first watched this film six or seven years ago, and the kidnapping scene still haunts me. I take a long road trip with my wife once or twice a year, and I think of this film whenever we stop for gas, food, or a bathroom or have those dumb arguments you have with your loved ones on a long car trip. A mild uneasiness hits me when we momentarily go our separate ways in those simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar gas stations in random small towns and cities off the interstate, and I don't breathe easy until my wife and I are back in the car together.
Dutch director George Sluizer made a horrible mistake when he directed a Hollywood remake of his own film in 1993. The remake cost more than 20 times the budget of the original and is, in every way, inferior. A truly inessential movie, the remake is ill-conceived, ordinary, stupid, and gutless. The usually wonderful Jeff Bridges is miscast as the sociopathic killer, and the film's second half betrays everything unique and disturbing about its predecessor. With a grindingly dull devotion to Hollywood convention, the remake's second half amps up the tension between the Rex character, here renamed Jeff and played by Kiefer Sutherland, and his new girlfriend. We get loads of dull scenes where Jeff fights with the girlfriend about his obsession with his missing ex-girlfriend (here played by Sandra Bullock, who I can only hope will actually disappear someday if a Blind Side sequel is ever proposed), and an extended fight scene in which Kiefer and Jeff Bridges battle each other to save the new girlfriend. Bridges is killed, Kiefer saves the day, poor Sandra is dead, but Kiefer and new girlfriend (Nancy Travis) can now live happily ever after. Avoid this bullshit at all costs.
Sluizer may have defamed his own accomplishment, but fortunately the original film still exists in a nice Criterion Collection edition. I highly recommend The Vanishing. Just make sure you're renting the right version.

#97: Urban Ghost Story (Genevieve Jolliffe, 1998)

2010-12-04T12:33:00.011-06:00

This low-budget Scottish film, though not without its problems, is a solid, enjoyable haunted house/social realism hybrid that convinces in both its modes for most of the running time. Take out the haunted house story, and you have a compelling drama about a 12-year-old girl, her young half-brother, and her single mom living in a Scottish tenement full of drug addicts, criminals, and the working poor. Take out the drama, and you have an atmospheric poltergeist story. Put them together, and you have a comedy about a lovable Sasquatch who moves into the household and turns it upside down. Wait, forget that last part. What you do end up with is a movie that successfully blends its genres into an organic whole.

Urban Ghost Story is full of memorable characters, and 12-year-old Lizzie (Heather Ann Foster) is the pivotal one. A smart, angsty pre-teen, she and another friend from her building decide to grow up a little too fast. The two middle school tenement buddies make some poor decisions that are a little advanced for their tender ages, including joyriding in the boy's father's car while loaded on vodka and ecstasy. These things tend to end poorly, and this is no exception. She survives the terrible car accident, though she is clinically dead for three minutes. She's left with a bum leg, but her friend isn't so lucky. He's trapped in the burning car and gets incinerated.

Lizzie is left with a wicked case of survivor's guilt and a poltergeist who may or may not be the spirit of her dead friend. Furniture starts moving around the bedroom she shares with her little half-brother Alex, his bed covers jump off the bed by themselves, and some invisible something scratches the walls and pounds on the doors. Her stressed-out single mom Kate thinks Lizzie is responsible at first, but soon changes her mind. She reports the events to the police and social services, but no one believes her. In desperation, she stupidly turns to a tabloid reporter she thinks believes her. He sees a marketable story to exploit and temporarily moves in to milk it for all its worth. The apartment is soon crawling with paranormal investigators and psychic mediums. Fun fact: the reporter is played by Sean Connery's son, Jason Connery, who has a much subtler Scottish brogue than his old man.

Things are tough for the family. Social services is investigating the mother for possible child abuse and neglect, a group of hired thugs led by Billy Boyd of Lord of the Rings fame comes calling for a debt, and Lizzie is hanging out with a teenage mom/druggie who is another of the tenement's many bad influences. Meanwhile, the ghost becomes more aggressive. These story strands are fleshed out and compelling until the final third of the film, but I'll get to that later.
Director/co-writer Genevieve Jolliffe has a nice eye for detail and shot composition, and her characters are three-dimensional and well written. The cast is uniformly strong, and their Scottish accents are so cute. That's a little condescending, I know, but I love a Scottish accent. The most terrible news sounds heartwarming when delivered in a Scottish brogue.

I'm recommending this film, but I have a few reservations. The soundtrack is occasionally oppressive. There are nice moments when Lizzie has her headphones on and we get a blast of the industrial metal she loves, but other instances of loud score are less organic to the story and punch scenes harder than they need to be punched. The film's final twenty minutes seem rushed and a little forced. The filmmakers seem to have realized, "Oh shit! We need to conclude these story strands! And fast! 23 skidoo, gang!" Plot points are resolved in a dizzying array of activity. The film is only one hour and twenty minutes long, so an extra ten minutes to conclude things less frantically wouldn't have been excessive. Despite these quibbles, Urban Ghost Story is an unfairly overlooked film that mostly succeeds as a social drama and a horror movie. I liked it.

#96: The Unearthing aka Aswang (Wrye Martin & Barry Poltermann, 1994)

2010-11-20T12:50:00.008-06:00

NOTE: This film is available on video and DVD under both its original title, Aswang, and The Unearthing. I had a much easier time finding it under Aswang.

This low-budget horror film made by two college buddies from Wisconsin for under $200,000 is well worth your time. Based on a Filipino vampire legend (coincidentally, I was drinking a Filipino dark lager while watching it), The Unearthing/Aswang shares some tonal, atmospheric, and visual similarities with early Cronenberg, the first two Evil Dead films, and the darkest childhood fairy tales. While it doesn't come close to early Raimi and Cronenberg at their best, it's pretty damn good in its own right and certainly better than the majority of mainstream films, including Gone with the Wind, Daddy Day Care, and Event Horizon. Aswang is low-budget without being cheap and amateurish, darkly funny without being campy, truly weird without being affected or "quirky," and honestly unsettling and scary.

Aswang begins with a young woman discussing her unplanned pregnancy with her mildly mulleted metalhead boyfriend. Check out that alliteration. She has decided to sell the child to a couple who can't have a baby, with a slight catch. She will also be paid to pose as the wife of the couple at a rural Wisconsin mansion owned by the man's sickly mother so he can inherit the property. As he tells the young pregnant woman while they drive to the mansion, his mother won't leave him anything in the will if he doesn't produce an heir. Things get sinister when they arrive at the mansion, which looks like it was designed by Stanley Kubrick. The only inhabitants are the sickly mother, who keeps sucking on oxygen, a strange Filipino maid named Cupid, and an exotic white chicken who roams the premises freely. Oh yeah, there's also an unseen sister who lives in a cottage out back. Apparently, she's "a little touched." At this point, I'd probably call a cab and head back home, especially after seeing a painting of an aswang, a Filipino vampire who drinks the blood of newborns, given prominent place in the study. Fortunately, our heroine sticks around, ensuring our enjoyment of a fucked-up, unusual vampire movie.

First-time filmmakers Wrye Martin and Barry Poltermann wrote and directed Aswang together, and they did an admirable job of creating a lot with a little. Working with a cast of amateur non-actors, including Violent Femmes drummer Victor DeLorenzo as a bumbling sheriff, they get mostly naturalistic performances. Even the few awkward actors add to the film's weird texture. The directors have a nice eye (they share one giant eyeball), and though they're clearly new at the filmmaking game, they avoid a lot of dumb-ass overstylization and clumsiness. The film is loaded with atmosphere, too. A creeping sense of dread slowly increases, the house and the rural Wisconsin countryside are great horror movie locations, and the directors and their editors use sound and visual space well. The special effects are convincing, too, which isn't always the case in super-low-budget filmmaking.

I don't want to give too much away, so this review will be a little short. The movie's pleasures and surprises deserve fresh eyes and ears, and I don't want to diminish the Aswang experience. (That's what she said.) I'm a big fan of regional independent movies, and Aswang is a fine example of the creative freedoms possible within the financial limitations of non-Hollywood filmmaking. Joe Bob Briggs likes Aswang, too, so it's got that going for it.
Writer/directors Martin and Poltermann have remained active in independent filmmaking. Martin now works as a producer. Poltermann directed one other film, The Life of Reilly, a documentary about Charles Nelson Reilly's one-man show, and has enjoyed a long relationship with director Chris Smith as his go-to editor, working on American Movie, The Pool, and Collapse. I admire their later work, but I think these guys need to get back together and make another horror movie. Aswang is too good to be a one-off.

#95: The Ugly (Scott Reynolds, 1997)

2010-10-30T11:56:00.010-05:00

This disappointing debut feature from New Zealand writer/director Scott Reynolds presents a dilemma for me as a writer: I have a lot of specific things to say about the aspects of the film I disliked, but its virtues are a bit more amorphous and abstract. I will try not to beat up on Reynolds too much because he's attempting something interesting with the serial killer storyline, and I'll try to describe just what he's doing that works without getting too vague or fluffy. Let's begin by beating him up.
The Ugly takes place in a bizarre insane asylum in rural New Zealand housing prolific serial killer Simon Cartwright (Paolo Rotondo). Unlike most killers, he has no pattern for choosing his victims. He kills them by slicing their throats with a straight razor, but the weapon is the only constant. His victims are men and women, children and adults, friends and relatives and strangers. He doesn't rape, torture, or beat his victims, and he doesn't keep souvenirs. He's a mystery man. To use sophisticated psychological terminology, what is the cut of this guy's jib? Cartwright has been declared legally insane. Six years later, he decides he wants a second opinion, and requests famed and controversial psychologist Dr. Karen Schumaker (Rebecca Hobbs) for his reevaluation. This angers his current psychologist, Dr. Marlowe (Roy Ward), the head of the institution and a man who resembles a walking penis. He ensures that his only two employees, a couple of knuckle-walking goons (one of whom dresses exclusively in a sleeveless vest with no shirt underneath), regularly abuse Cartwright and attempt to intimidate Schumaker. He is what is known in the psychology biz as a dick. The rest of the film takes place in the two days in which Schumaker evaluates Cartwright, alternating between flashbacks to Cartwright's life before and during the murders, dream and fantasy sequences, and the present.

After a promising first fifteen minutes, the film unfortunately becomes a bit of a slog with some bright spots. Some of the blame can be placed on the miscast leads, Rotondo and Hobbs. I never accepted Rotondo as a serial killer. He lacks menace and intensity, and he's just physically wrong for the role. This may sound like a contradiction, but he's both too much and not enough of a pretty boy to convince as an indiscriminate killing machine. Maybe if the movie worked with Rotondo's almost-but-not-quite-teen-idol looks, something interesting would have developed, but painting him as a mysterious and threatening presence is a stretch. At least Rotondo is a fairly subtle actor. Hobbs chews scenery like she needs to compress every role she's ever had into one character. It doesn't help that the film's idea of psychotherapy is evil manipulation on the one hand (Marlowe) and yelling, confrontation, and high drama on the other (Schumaker). When Hobbs angrily throws all her papers on the floor with a sweeping gesture of her arms as she screams at Cartwright, I checked out. That is some ri-goddamn-diculous professional methodology. I think we're beyond the highly unorthodox at this point. "But she gets results!" you may offer in counterpoint. "Stupid results," I might reply.
Another problem with the movie is an overabundance of dream and fantasy sequences that borders on self-parody. On multiple occasions, the film devolves into the following sequence of events: Oh my god, that just happened! No, it was just a dream. Or was it? Yes, it was. No, it wasn't! Oh my god, yes it was! Or was it? No. Yes. Or, maybe... I sometimes wondered if I were watching a New Zealand version of an interminable Saturday Night Live skit.
Reynolds sometimes mistrusts his own admirable visual skill with abrupt switches to rapid jump cuts, shaky cams, and intrusive zooms in and out with an accompanying deep-focus/out-of-focus image. When he stays out of his own way and avoids over-stylization, he has a nice eye and the film is visually powerful. To his credit, he trusts himself more often than he feels the need to hyperbolically overzazz his imagery, music-video style, but when he punches up the visuals, the film becomes unnecessarily jarring and distracting.

My last criticism may be a little unfair since I'm slamming the film for what it isn't rather than what it is, but I found the overly serious tone oppressive. The Ugly tries too hard to be a serious art film but can't really pull it off. The movie's understanding of psychotherapy, serial killers, and mental asylums is too movie-cliched to reveal any new ways of seeing these subjects. A dose of exploitation or campy fun or a beheading or two would have been welcome, especially since the film's one moment of humor really worked. That moment involves penis-shaped Dr. Marlowe's secret one-way-glassed room with theater seats and piped-in classical music where he spies on Schumaker's sessions. Marlow is a balding, incredibly thin man with neatly trimmed sideburns and a soul-patch, and he's fond of wearing ascots. While he watches the session, he glares evilly and chomps on hard candy. The only thing missing is an aged cat or small dog for him to stroke while he formulates his evil plans.

Time to stop bashing Reynolds. Here's what he does right. His aforementioned visual skills are formidable when he's not bogged down in over-stylization. He has a nice eye for detail and shot composition, and the film's cinematography has that pleasing grit and grain often found in American films of the 1970s and Australian and New Zealand films of the 1970s-1990s. The black blood coming from the victims in the flashbacks and dreams is a nice little stylish touch that makes things seem not quite right without going overboard while also providing a payoff in the final scene. The asylum and Marlow's office are well designed, strong visual presences. The art director deserves some kudos for doing a lot with a little. The flashback sequences to the killer's childhood are handled in a straightforward, compelling way, ably performed by a strong cast. The mother gets some of the blame, as usual, but many actual serial killers had fucked-up mothers, so I can let this slide. Finally, the ghostly physical manifestations of the voices the killer hears are nicely handled. These apparitions are creepy and unsettling, and Reynolds uses them just enough without overusing them. I wish I liked this movie better, because Reynolds has some talent. Unfortunately, I can't work up much enthusiasm for The Ugly.

#94: Two Thousand Maniacs! (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964)

2010-10-16T12:10:00.010-05:00

I nearly made the same mistake with Herschell Gordon Lewis I made with Mario Bava in my last post. I erroneously reported that Twitch of the Death Nerve was my first exposure to Bava's films. I later updated with the corrected information about seeing Bava's science fiction film Planet of the Vampires on the big screen as part of the Austin Film Society's global science fiction series several summers ago. I also nearly forgot that Two Thousand Maniacs! wasn't my first exposure to the films of H.G. Lewis, the "Godfather of Gore." I saw his biker chick movie, She-Devils on Wheels, on the big screen at an old motor speedway a few miles outside of Austin for an Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow makeshift drive-in theater event. It was the first film on a double bill with Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Tura Satana and Hajji were there in person. The show was plagued with technical difficulties, stifling heat, and not enough restroom facilities (it was the first Rolling Roadshow event and procedures hadn't been nailed down yet), but I got to see some garage bands play live, watch a couple of cult classics on the big screen, and hear Tura Satana talk about her sex life with Elvis Presley.

At any rate, Lewis made biker chick movies, sexploitation, and children's adventure films, but he's better known as the man who invented the gore film, beginning with Blood Feast in 1963. His second film, Two Thousand Maniacs!, is probably the only gore film inspired by Brigadoon, though if you can think of any others please let me know. Two Thousand Maniacs! doesn't have it all, but it does have murderous Southern rednecks, a 1963 Playboy Playmate, the worst Southern accents captured on film, terrible acting, buckets of red paint, fairly decent suspense, some surprisingly powerful images, iconic moments in the history of horror/gore, amateurish camera work, a fascinating 1960s time-capsule quality, a Twilight Zone-esque twist ending, and an above-average bluegrass score.

The film opens with a pair of hillbillies hiding out on the side of the highway. One is up in a tree with binoculars, the other hides behind some tall grass next to the road. When Binocular Boy spots a car coming, Tall Grass Boy removes the "Augusta, Georgia - 110 Miles" sign and puts up his own detour sign leading the unsuspecting tourists to the town of Pleasant Valley instead of their destination. They need six Northerners to be the guests of honor at their centennial celebration. We never forget this because the phrase "guests of honor" is repeated at least 428 times. Why Northerners? You'll find out later in the film. Why six? That's never explained. The six Northerners they snag with their wily street sign switcheroo have many things in common. They all drive convertibles, they share stereotypical early 1960s fashion sense and good looks, and they can't act.

The film's depiction of small-town Southerners is so grotesquely over-the-top that it moves beyond the realm of stereotype and into some strange land of surreal, parodic homage. We get the fat, well-dressed mayor who likes to take off his pork-pie hat and provide you with overbearing Southern hospitality. We get the big dumb handsome guy, the regular-sized dumb ugly guy in a straw hat, the amply cleavaged Southern belle, and a lot of other goony, inbred dummies. We get a lot of dialogue like "We got us some good'uns! Dogged if we don't!" and "Yay doggies!" and "Yee-haw! We got us a mighty fine centennial!" We get moonshine in a jug.
This stereotypical setup is complicated by the twist ending, and the reason for the centennial. In 1865, near the end of the Civil War, a group of Northern soldiers killed and mutilated everyone in Pleasant Valley. It's now time for some revenge, Dixieland-style. The Northerners are separated from each other and forced to participate in twisted versions of normal centennial-type events like a barbecue, a horse race, a barrel roll, and a dunk tank. The blood flows copiously in these scenes, which are much more violent and gruesome than other films of similar early-1960s vintage.

Finally, it's up to our heroes, school teacher Tom (William Kerwin) and Terry (Playboy Playmate Connie Mason), the pretty lady who picked him up on the highway when his car broke down, to find out what's going on and plot their escape. Will they succeed? And what is going on? I'll let you find out for yourselves, although, if you're familiar with Brigadoon, I probably spoiled the twist ending.
The action is accompanied by a quality bluegrass score credited to the fictional band The Pleasant Valley Boys. In addition to the Lester Flatt covers, the score also includes some songs written and performed by Lewis himself, "Rebel Yell (The South's Gonna Rise Again)" of particular note. Lewis might have made a career for himself as a musician if he hadn't been too busy pushing the envelope of cinematic violence. Besides the score, the film's virtues are inseparable from its flaws. The awesome and terrible intermingle to such an extent that they become a single, lovably disgusting entity. This is a weird-ass movie, truly deserving of its cult-classic, midnight-movie status. It's Lewis' favorite of his own pictures, beating out such contenders as Color Me Blood Red, The Gruesome Twosome, The Wizard of Gore, and The Gore-Gore Girls.

#93: Twitch of the Death Nerve (Mario Bava, 1971)

2010-10-02T11:19:00.013-05:00

Whew. This has been quite a week. I saw two great shows by two of my favorite reunited '90s bands, Pavement and Guided By Voices. I'm in the second week of preparing materials for a major life and possible career plan for next year. My wife and two friends were on lockdown at their jobs for three hours because a masked gunman opened fire on the University of Texas campus, fortunately killing or injuring no one, and killed himself in the main campus library. My wife and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary and our eleventh anniversary as a couple. Most importantly of all for me personally, my maternal grandfather died peacefully in his sleep after a long life. It's been a strange cocktail of mixed emotions all week long, and when life hits you with everything it has, good and bad, it's important to take a few hours to watch some Italians get murdered horribly. It centers your chi, I hear.

Mario Bava directed several films that horror fans generally consider classics, he is sometimes referred to as the grandfather of the slasher film, and he was a major influence on Dario Argento. For whatever reason, I'd never seen any of his movies until last night. Peculiar. Unfortunately, this particular DVD copy of the film contained the single worst sound quality I've ever encountered. I had to turn the sound on my television to Spinal Tap 11, and even at that level, the sound fluctuated from piercingly loud to normal to so quiet one-third of the dialogue was unintelligible within the space of each single line of dialogue. Come on, Image Entertainment, get your shit together. For some reason, the sound problems disappeared during the film's final 30 minutes, which is when everything gets explained anyway. A string of kick-ass murder scenes is the primary reason for this film existing, so you don't really need the dialogue until that final 30 minutes.
Let's get the dumb stuff out of the way first. This movie is either woodenly acted or overacted, stupidly written (by four people, from an idea by two other people!), and occasionally clumsy. None of that really matters, though, because the actors giving those wooden line readings have strikingly visual faces and facial expressions, the murder setpieces are clever, unexpected, and blackly hilarious, some of Bava's shot compositions are beautiful (others are sloppy, but there's more of the beautiful than the sloppy), and the film's influence on the slasher genre is pretty all-encompassing. If you've seen this movie and the original Halloween, you've seen every slasher movie. Friday the 13th, Part 2 even lifted two murders from this movie, shot for shot. (If you're interested, those murders are an axe to the face and a couple speared in flagrante delicto. I finally got a chance to use my favorite Latin term.)

Bava's film opens with a dialogue-free eight-minute scene that includes two murders and a hilarious fly's point-of-view shot that includes the fly's accidental death in the bay. This is a great scene. I won't spoil any of it for you if you plan on renting this one. (Just avoid that Image Entertainment disc if you can.) After these murders, we're introduced to several characters. There's an entomologist, a Tarot card reader, four randy teens, a developer, his secretary, a fisherman, and so on. We don't know their relationships to each other, in most cases, or what their angle is. Several murders occur, from your basic stabbings and stranglings to your axes to the face and elaborate beheadings. We don't know why people keep getting killed, though it has some vague something to do with development of the bay, a countess, and an illegitimate son. (The vagueness may be deliberate or just a byproduct of the DVD's atrocious sound quality.) We know there are multiple killers, because some of these killers are killed by other killers. And that's basically it. One murder after another, until the final thirty minutes explains, in flashback, who these people really are and why they are killing each other. Then we get a darkly comic ending that's expected in event but not in detail.

There's not much to say about this film without spoiling any of the fun, but I think any fan of Italian giallo, slasher movies, and creative death will enjoy at least part of this movie. Just find a DVD with better sound quality, if you can.
Claims are made that this film has more titles than any other. These claims may be right. Twitch of the Death Nerve is my favorite. It's just fun to say. The original Italian title translates as Chain Reaction, but the film has been released under many others, including:
A Bay of Blood
The Last House on the Left, Part II (though it has nothing to do with Craven's film and was shot a year before)
Carnage
Ecology of a Crime
The Antecedent
O Sexo na Sua Forma Mais Violenta
New House on the Left
A Smell of Flesh
the fabulously redundant Bloodbath Bay of Blood.

UPDATE - 10:01 p.m.
We're drinking with some friends right now, and one of them just reminded me that I have seen another Mario Bava film, and on the big screen, no less. Bava's 1965 science fiction epic, Planet of the Vampires, in brilliant color, is recommended to any living thing. It would make a great double feature with Forbidden Planet.

#92: Tombs of the Blind Dead (Amando de Ossorio, 1971)

2010-09-18T11:56:00.007-05:00

Tombs of the Blind Dead is commonly regarded as Spain's answer to Night of the Living Dead. Regarded by whom? I don't know, but this statement appears several times on the DVD case and is repeated in every review of the movie I scanned, so I might as well join the crowd. Both movies feature an army of undead killers crawling out of their graves and inspired several sequels, but the similarities generally end there. Night of the Living Dead is a far better movie, but I don't want to sell Tombs of the Blind Dead short. Ossorio's film is a Eurotrash mini-classic, lovable in its shabby ineptitude, genuinely unsettling fright scenes, hazy lesbian flashbacks, beyond stupid screenplay, unintentional and intentional comedy, and bikini- and hot-pants-clad Eurobabes. Also, lots of lovely on-location Spanish countryside and ultra-macho smuggler Pedro. Quien es mas macho? Pedro es mas macho!

The film opens at the swimming pool of a luxury hotel/resort in Madrid. Two bikini babes run into each other and start conversing. They were roommates and friends in boarding school, but they haven't seen each other since. One of the women, Betty, has just moved back to town, opening a mannequin shop next door to ... the morgue! The other woman, Virginia, is there with a man who she thinks she's dating. The man, Roger, thinks he's still single. He hops out of the pool and is immediately smitten with Betty. He starts hitting on her and invites her along on a trip to the countryside the next day. Betty immediately says yes. No one finds this odd. In fact, most of the characters in this movie make nonsensical split decisions. On the train trip, Virginia starts feeling like a third wheel, but is she jealous of Betty or Roger or some sexy combination? Cut to hazy boarding school flashback, where we discover that Betty and Virginia were more than friends ... they were lovers! Whatever the sexual case, Virginia jumps off the train near a spooky abandoned monastery.

Instead of following the tracks back home, which most of us would do even if we were dumb enough to jump off a train in the middle of nowhere, Virginia settles in for the night at the creepy monastery. She unrolls her sleeping bag, takes off her short shorts, gets naked, smokes some cigarettes, finds some beach party music on her transistor radio, reads a trashy paperback, and tries to get some sleep. Unfortunately, she gets a visit from the dead. The blind dead!
These are no ordinary zombies, however. This group is a bunch of undead Knights Templar from the 13th century who turned to the dark side. They started worshiping Satan, sacrificing virgins, and drinking their blood. They were finally caught and hanged in the town square. Birds pecked out their eyes. Because of their Satanic blood rites, however, these knights get out of their graves every night and go hunting for humans. Because their eyes have been pecked out of their sockets, these knights are blind and hunt their victims through sound. They drink their victims' blood, ensuring continued immortality. These victims become blood-drinking zombies. Got all that? Did I mention these knights ride through the countryside in slow motion on zombie horses? I didn't? Well, they do.

The rest of the film involves Roger and Betty's search for Virginia and whether all this spooky activity is the work of undead knights or area smugglers. They enlist the help of a professor specializing in the knights and his son, head smuggler Pedro. Pedro is the personification of assholish Spanish machismo. He likes to drink rum, bed the ladies, immediately accept insane challenges, participate in date rape, slap ladies in the face, walk around shirtless, tell people what to do, and take cigarettes from his girlfriend's mouth and place them in his own. Another notable character is a lecherous, creepy morgue attendant who provides some solid black humor.
This film is almost avant-garde in its lack of dialogue and abundance of stupidity, but there are some truly thrilling scenes, particularly a run-in with a zombie in the mannequin shop that involves melting mannequin heads, blinking red lights, and a near-Argento mise-en-scene. The knights themselves are pretty sweet horror villains, and the ending provides some nifty nihilistic abandoning of all hope.

This is the kind of movie that's hard to recommend to general movie buffs, but if you appreciate Eurotrash horror and can ride out some rough patches, there is much to enjoy here.

Fun trivia tidbit: Some U.S. distributors of this film drastically re-edited it and gave it the zippy new title Revenge of Planet Ape. Hoping to capitalize on the Planet of the Apes craze, they filmed a new prologue in which a race of super-apes controlled Earth 3,000 years ago. Unfortunately, man killed them, burning out their eyes with pokers, but not before the head of the apes vowed undead revenge 3,000 years in the future. This prologue required editing out all the Knights Templar talk, so we could pretend these skeletal killers were actually super-apes. God bless this stupid world of ours.

#91: Ticks (Tony Randel, 1993)

2010-09-04T11:18:00.010-05:00

I'm fortunate to live in a city with two of the greatest video stores in the country, with two locations each, that continue to thrive in the era of Netflix. Occasionally, however, something falls through the cracks. And that, my friends, is how I came to own a second-hand VHS copy of the straight-to-video shitsterpiece Ticks. Ticks is not a good movie. Director Tony Randel (not to be confused with Tony Randall) has no discernible directorial style and the screenwriter's knowledge of human behavior seems to have been gleaned entirely from after-school specials and 1980s sitcoms. Having said all that, Ticks brought me great joy. This is a fun movie, with the most bizarre casting this side of Skidoo.

Ticks stars Peter Scolari (Tom Hanks' co-star on Bosom Buddies), Seth Green, Alfonso Ribeiro (Carlton on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), Ami Dolenz (daughter of The Monkees' Mickey Dolenz), veteran character actor Michael Medeiros, Ron Howard's more talented brother Clint Howard, and their father Rance Howard. This cast is nuts in theory and in practice, particularly Clint Howard and Alfonso Ribeiro.

Ticks opens with teenager Tyler (Seth Green) getting dropped off in inner-city Los Angeles by his drunk father. He encounters menacing street thug Panic ("They call me Panic, 'cause I never do!") (Alfonso Ribeiro), screenwriter Brent V. Friedman's bizarre idea of a typical black inner-city teenager. Soon, a van pulls up to pick up both teens. Turns out, Panic's street thug persona was mostly an act. Driving the van is Holly (Rosalind Allen), who runs a program for troubled inner-city teens. She takes them camping in the wilderness to broaden their horizons. She's joined by the oddly named Charles Danson (Peter Scolari) (rejected names for this character: Ted Dundy and John Wayne Dacy) and his surly teenage daughter Melissa (Virginya Keehne). The rest of this rag-tag group of troubled teens includes spoiled rich girl Dee Dee (Ami Dolenz), her vaguely Hispanic steroid-loving boyfriend Rome (Ray Oriel), and vaguely Asian selective mute Kelly (Dina Dayrit).

I'm not even done setting this shit up yet. Next, we meet marijuana farmer Clint Howard. It seems the steroid he and many other pot farmers in the region are using to embiggen their weed is also embiggening and mutating the region's wood tick population. These ticks are now about the size of a small hubcap, and their venom has hallucinogenic properties. Howard, whose small but memorable role contains a couple of great line readings, is the first to encounter the killer ticks. (Great line: After his gerbil gets shredded by a tick, he pulls the mangled corpse out of its cage and says "Dude, you're all messed up.") The troubled teens have a few run-ins with the ticks, as well as a couple of evil marijuana farmers: inbred hick Jerry (Michael Medeiros) and the vaguely British Sir (Barry Lynch) (yes, his character's only name is Sir) who likes to take out a comb and run it through his hair while talking about his evil plans. As if killer ticks, evil marijuana farmers, and the surly vagaries of troubled youth weren't enough to contend with, the region is prone to forest fires. Shit is about to get fucked up. (Bonus great line: After Panic's dog is butchered by a killer tick, the teary Panic says, "I always thought I would go in a drive-by shooting, but my dog ... MY DOG WOULD MAKE IT THROUGH ALIVE!" I'm paraphrasing from memory. The actual line is even funnier.)

There's not much to say about the filmmaking side of Ticks, though the special effects are surprisingly good. Director Tony Randel is most famous for Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and his other credits include a live-action version of Fist of the North Star, Assignment Berlin, a hair-growth infomercial, and the television series Power Rangers in Space and Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. Screenwriter Brent V. Friedman has written two other films on our list, The Resurrected and Necronomicon. His other credits include Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and Foodfight!. As you can see, he specializes in films with a colon in the title.
Ticks!

#90: Swamp Thing (Wes Craven, 1982)

2010-08-21T10:36:00.007-05:00

I'm not a big Wes Craven fan. That might be an understatement, considering I find The Last House on the Left and Scream two of the most insulting, repugnant films ever made, but I have to give the guy a little credit. He's directed a lot of iconic horror films (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes, The Serpent and the Rainbow), his visual style complements the tone of the particular projects he directs, and he's certainly had staying power in an industry that tends to discard older directors. And he made this campy piece of fun.

Swamp Thing is often misunderstood by film writers, bloggers, and fans who have no appreciation for the sources of its visual style. It's supposed to look cheap. The rubber suits, comically exaggerated pratfalls, and Wilhelm screams are there on purpose. This film is paying homage to both the DC comic book it's derived from and cheapo 1950s monster movies and their low-rent rubber-suited beasts. Craven gets this mood just right. Swamp Thing looks like a late-1970s/early-1980s comic book brought to life, and the creatures and mad scientist super-villain are old-fashioned monster movie staples.
Craven could have buried this movie in too many layers of camp and self-referential, condescending winkery (wankery?), but he achieves a surprising amount of empathy and warmth by assembling a wonderful, offbeat cast and shooting on location in the swamps outside of Charleston, South Carolina. There's just something visually magical about a Southern swamp, am I right? That unusual cast does a fine job of playing it straight enough to make an audience feel something for the characters, but silly enough to let you know they're aware of acting in a film about an avenging plantman who lives in a swamp and fights an evil genius named Dr. Arcane.

Adrienne Barbeau stars as government scientist Alice Cable, who is dispatched to the South Carolina swamps to replace a predecessor who became alligator food. She joins a team working on a secret government project attempting to end world hunger by genetically engineering super-plants that will grow quickly and abundantly in hostile conditions. Barbeau, besides being a likable actress and crush object for genre fanboys of a certain age (mine), was the go-to female lead for early 1980s horror and sci-fi. In addition to Swamp Thing, she appeared in her then-husband John Carpenter's early classics The Fog, Escape from New York, and The Thing (in an uncredited, vocal-only role as the voice of the computer), as well as George Romero's Creepshow. Her fellow government agents and scientists include Ray Wise (best known for playing Leland Palmer on Twin Peaks), Al Ruban in a rare acting role (he was the producer and cinematographer for most of John Cassavetes' films), and television veteran Don Knight. The government workers are being targeted by evil mad scientist super-villain Dr. Arcane, played by international movie veteran Louis Jourdan, who wants to kill them all and steal their scientific secrets. The scientists and the world at large think he's dead, but he's secretly living in an enormous, super-villain mansion deep in the swamps. He's enlisted an army of thugs and mercenaries, led by Last House on the Left sleazebag David Hess, to carry out his dirty work. When they finally make their move, something goes awry with the super-plant formula, and Swamp Thing is born! He's played by veteran stuntman Dick Durock. Soon, Barbeau is on the run in the swamps, aided by teen-aged, Coke-bottle-glassed, deadpan-voiced, convenience store clerk Jude, played by the thoroughly enjoyable Reggie Batts in his only film role.

What follows is 90 minutes of silly, inviting, horror/sci-fi/action fun. For once, Craven decides to depict warm, likable, human characters, and he has a lot of fun with his comic-book panel transitions between scenes. This is a rare horror film that's kid-friendly, and it was marketed that way when it first hit theaters in 1982. I remember wanting to see this movie so badly as a child and being fascinated by an article about it in a sci-fi magazine my mother bought for me at the grocery store. By the time we got a VCR three or four years later, I had transferred my fascination to R-rated horror films (even though my mother never let me watch any), and no longer cared to see the PG-rated Swamp Thing. That was kid stuff. I should have seen it then. I would have enjoyed it.

Speaking of kid stuff, the European prints of Swamp Thing were a bit less kid-friendly. In the non-Puritanical half of the Western world, the film featured a couple of nude scenes, including the amply bosomed Ms. Barbeau bathing in a less grungy part of the swamp. When Swamp Thing was first released on DVD in the U.S., the European version was mistakenly pressed instead. Even though the case showed the PG rating, American kids got an eyeful of boobage. After getting several complaints from a bunch of prudes who think the key to a well-adjusted adulthood is to never catch a glimpse of the opposite sex's anatomy until you're 18, the studio recalled the DVDs and replaced them with the PG version. That version still shows a brief shot of sideboob and much emphasis on Barbeau's cleavage, but I guess the prudes are okay with that. As we all remember from the recent Janet Jackson Super Bowl debacle, this country is full of people with serious, bizarre, and inconsistent hangups about body parts that exist on half the adult population.
Unrelated note: I think Craven missed an opportunity to convince The Troggs to reform and record the theme song to this film. Just imagine it. "Swamp Thing, you make my heart sing. You make everything...swampy. Ohh, Swamp Thing."

#89: Strange Behavior (Michael Laughlin, 1981)

2010-08-06T10:46:00.011-05:00

A few minutes into Strange Behavior, I smiled and thought to myself, "This movie was made by interesting people." That thought continued for the rest of the movie's running time. This is a weird, forgotten gem that deserves more attention, and anyone who dislikes it should be battered with large objects and thrown off a couple of bridges.
A slasher/mad scientist hybrid set in Galesburg, Illinois but filmed in New Zealand during the creative height of 1970s-80s Australian and New Zealand exploitation cinema called Ozploitation (see the entertaining documentary about this scene, Not Quite Hollywood), Strange Behavior contains a smart, considered visual style, rich characterization from everyone including even the tiniest roles, and a mix of satisfying genre cliches and bizarro weirdness unique to this project. If you want to quibble, there are some continuity errors, unexplained occurrences, and a few stiffly delivered lines, but, on the whole, this is the kind of buried treasure I'm always on the hunt for as an obsessive movie lover.

In the small community of Galesburg, life is sleepy and content until some teenagers get carved up by what the police think is a deranged whacko until the evidence points to multiple deranged whackos. Why is this happening in Galesburg? Meanwhile, at Galesburg College, some bizarre experiments are taking place in the psychology department. Late professor Dr. Le Sange's work is continuing, even though he's been dead for three years. All his lectures have been recorded on film, so he's still teaching from beyond the grave, and his protege Dr. Parkinson is continuing his work. Are these victims and killers somehow connected to the experiments and events related to these experiments from 17 years ago? Take a wild guess. Meanwhile, the chief of police, John Brady, and his teenage son, Pete, get deeply involved in the mystery, unbeknown to each other.

The cast is excellent, except for a handful of people who have just one line. Each character is layered, complex, and refreshingly un-Hollywood. Michael Murphy, best known for appearing in multiple Robert Altman and Woody Allen films, plays the police chief. He's an obsessed, stressed-out guy, which is all we'd learn about him if this were a conventional movie. Instead, we also see his wicked sense of humor, his kindness, and his close relationship with his son. Louise Fletcher plays his girlfriend. She's still so identified with her most famous role, Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that her varied talents are often overlooked. Here, she plays a warm, likable woman who couldn't be more different from Nurse Ratched. Dan Shor, best known to my generation as Billy the Kid in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Ram in TRON, plays Murphy's teenage son Pete. He's smart, charismatic, and funny, and a weird combination of popular jock and punkish, skinny-tied new waver. In fact, all the characters are smart and unusual. They have personality, instead of being movie personalities. Other favorites of mine include Hollywood legend Charles Lane as the police chief's elderly clerk (Murphy: "Where'd you get that tie?" Lane: "Munky Ward's"), Marc McClure as Pete's teenage buddy Oliver, Jim Boelson as Waldo, the annoying guy in class who looks like he's 40 and always ruins the party, and horror movie pinup queen Fiona Lewis as the sexy and sinister Dr. Parkinson. I love this cast.

Director Michael Laughlin, in his debut, does a lot of interesting things, structurally and formally. In almost every scene, the camera frames the action in a mostly stationary medium shot, so we can see the characters interact with each other and see the physical space they're moving around in without being forced to take any character's point of view. These shots ensure a certain detached objectivity, which creates a physical space for the audience to form its own judgments and make its own choices about what to look at in the frame. Closeups are eschewed until the final two scenes, in which our relationships to the characters are fully earned and invested with carefully developed feeling. At the same time, Laughlin nudges us into feeling a little uneasy and off-kilter by positioning his camera in these shots either slightly above or slightly below the action, as if we were sitting on a chair that's just a little higher or lower than the rest of the table. It's subtly discombobulating. When Laughlin does move his camera during a few crucial scenes, the effect is startling. These scenes really take off and stand out.

One of these scenes takes place at a costume party and has immediately become one of my favorite scenes in the movies after just a single viewing. It's the kind of scene that does nothing to further the plot and everything to justify this visual medium's existence. It's a ridiculous, exciting, visceral, unexpected visual pleasure that makes me love the art of film. Our teenage characters, Oliver and Pete, attend a costume party dressed as skinny-tied new wavers commonly found playing bass in The Knack, Tubeway Army, The Damned, or some other late-punk/early-new wave combo of your choice. As they enter a room full of teenage cowboys, nurses, vampires, Batmans, Robins, etc., Lou Christie's "Lightnin' Strikes" begins to play. The teenagers sloppily and jokingly dance around for a few minutes in a half-assed fashion before slowly growing more enthused until, finally, the whole party comes together in a giant, choreographed dance routine as Christie's crazy falsetto launches into that final, kick-ass, uber-pop chorus. The camera glides through this party gracefully as the dancing turns from sloppy to organized. When the song ends, the dancers fall back into normal, sloppy teenage mingling. What a lovely, magic scene. It's cinematic Red Bull, and the kind of scene that exists for no other reason but its own awesomeness. You know you're in the hands of filmmakers who are comfortable eating their own boundaries.

Director Michael Laughlin has had an erratic but interesting movie career. He directed two other films, an alien invasion movie called Strange Invaders that I'm really excited to see now and a drama about a teenage girl forced to marry a creepy older man called Mesmerized, which Laughlin wrote with acclaimed Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (who had a rare acting role in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises). Laughlin also produced Monte Hellman's cult classic Two-Lane Blacktop and the Warren Oates-starring Raymond Chandler homage Chandler. His last movie job was the massive flop Town & Country, which starred Warren Beatty and was written by Laughlin and Buck Henry. Laughlin's producer and co-writer on Strange Behavior was Bill Condon, who has gone on to be a successful Hollywood director and screenwriter. Condon also co-wrote Laughlin's follow-up, Strange Invaders, and the Oscar-winning movie based on the hit musical Chicago. As a writer/director, Condon got his start with a bunch of TV movies and the job of work sequel to Candyman called Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. That movie sucked, but Condon bounced back with Gods and Monsters, an excellent little drama/historical fiction about the final days of film director James Whale and his unrequited crush on his pool boy. Condon also directed Kinsey and Dreamgirls and is on tap to direct the next two Twilight sequels and a Richard Pryor biopic. I still think his finest work is that party scene in this movie.
Bonus points: The soundtrack, besides Lou Christie's immortal, unstoppable pop hit, includes great songs from The Birthday Party and Pop Mechanix, and a score by Tangerine Dream. The first murder victim is wearing a Nebraska Cornhuskers sweatshirt. I love that a kid wearing a shirt of my alma mater's football team takes a knife to the eyeball.

#88: Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999)

2010-07-24T11:58:00.007-05:00

Maybe I sound like an angry old man bemoaning the state of the world because he no longer keeps up with it, but something bad happened to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking in the first decade of this new century. This badness didn't originate in the 2000s and is really an amalgam of all kinds of cultural influences and changes that aren't necessarily bad in and of themselves (French New Wave, 1970s auteurist cinema, Pop Art, 1980s and 1990s blockbusters, music videos, television, commercials, video games, the Internet). This synthesis of influences, combined with an influx of producers, studio chiefs, and actors with little knowledge of film history (audiences, too) and a move from director-as-auteur to producer-as-auteur and director-as-ringmaster, has led to a crippling uniformity of visual style (dizzyingly quick cuts, zero character development, spatial incoherence, lack of structure, bloated running times, overloaded special effects, every scene a climax, no space for an audience to ever look at anything). This style is often compared to video games, but most video games use the physical, visual space of their landscapes in competent, coherent ways. Instead, Hollywood films are trying to compete with video games by bombarding an audience with enough stimuli to kill a miniature pony. The Stage 5 cancer proliferation of remakes and big-screen versions of television franchises and the return of the unnecessary, screen-dimming 1950s gimmick 3D aren't signs that these fuckers have run out of ideas. They're signs that these fuckers never had any ideas to begin with. (Aside #1: This is a Hollywood era in which Christopher Nolan is regarded as an important director, but do any movies make less visual sense than his two Batman adaptations? I'm disappointed at all the interest my friends have taken in Inception, which I admittedly have yet to see, but, seriously, the guy can't film an action sequence to save his ass. Did he learn how after The Dark Knight? Would you learn how if no one cared except for a small army of film lovers like me? Yeah. Me, either. Crotchety get off my lawn fogeyisms again, maybe, but I just wish the general audience cared more about film history, visual space, and structure than bombardment of spectacle and flattery of preconceived expectations. Give yourselves more credit, people. You can handle it. Most of you deserve it. I like this recent quote from a critic I'm not particularly a fan of, Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we've entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be awesome, which isn't nearly the same thing.") (Aside #2: To prove that this isn't just fogeyism on my part, I want to say that there are amazing films being made in the present by people in Iran, Japan, France, Spain, South Africa, right here in the USA, etc., that are consistently overlooked by most of the people going to Inception. It's a chicken-and-egg thing, my blaming of Hollywood and its audience.)

All this complaining is a long way of introducing a review of a fairly routine yet satisfying ghost story filmed in the final year of the final decade so far in which mainstream American films made any kind of visual sense (noting, of course, the handful of exceptions every year, mostly comedies, that don't whack you in the face with a Bedazzled 2x4 for 2.5 hours). Stir of Echoes is a film with a lot of cliches and a lot of flaws, but it's also a finely told, smartly directed, empathetically acted scary horror/thriller with a real sense of place. The film seems like it was written at one of those Screenwriting 101 seminars, but ghost stories are a breed of subgenre that can thrive within their tropes and revel in the late-night campfire tale qualities of their conventions. There are really only a few ghost stories, anyway. Ghosts are usually a) haunting the person who did them wrong, b) haunting the person who can reveal their mysteries and save them from limbo, or c) haunting anyone who stops by because they want to stir up some shit and/or get revenge. Stir of Echoes concerns itself with the second option.

Kevin Bacon (Oracle of Bacon number: zero) stars as Tom, a lineman (not a Wichita lineman) in Chicago still holding on to his dreams of rock stardom (or at least punk rock cult stardom). He and his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), are very close, but she's the practical one who keeps everything together. They have a son, Jake (Zachary David Cope), who, in an unfortunately timed coincidence, sees (and hears) dead people. (This movie was in development and filmed about the same time as The Sixth Sense and was based on a Richard Matheson novel that predated Shyamalan's movie by many years, but Stir of Echoes still suffered an undeserved copycat reputation that hurt it at the box office.) Maggie has an unfortunately written bohemian sister, Lisa (Illeana Douglas), who is working on becoming a licensed hypnotherapist. I like Douglas a lot as an actress, but she's saddled with what my wife calls the "Joan Cusack role" here. She's the kooky, eccentric sister who has to deliver undeliverable lines like the following, upon learning that Maggie is pregnant: "So, she's six weeks pregnant. That means the baby's due in... April, May... June. Gemini. That's cool. Einstein was a Gemini. So's that Scottish gal from Garbage." Ugh. Douglas does the best she can with a part that's a collection of screenwriter tics. (Screenwriters, why does the neighbor, sister, and/or best friend character always have to be kooky?) Fortunately, the rest of the cast is much more developed and interesting. Anyway, at a neighborhood party, Tom tells Lisa to hypnotize him, she does, and bad shit starts to go down in the following days. Tom begins hallucinating a ghostly teenage girl, starts to realize Jake's imaginary friend may not be imaginary after all, and goes quickly insane. For some reason, he starts drinking gallons of orange juice every day. Don't ask me why. The rest of the movie concerns Tom's efforts to solve the mystery of the ghost girl and his wife's efforts to keep the family together.

Writer/director David Koepp is one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood and much in demand, especially by Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma. His writing credits include Bad Influence, Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way, Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes, Panic Room, Spider-Man, War of the Worlds, and the recent Indiana Jones and Da Vinci Code sequels. As a writer/director, he also made the Stephen King adaptation Secret Window and the Ricky Gervais comedy Ghost Town. Despite his primary career as a writer, his work on Stir of Echoes is stronger in the directorial department. The story is your basic Hollywood three-act structure, and a lot of what's supposed to happen in these kinds of stories happens. Aside from a terrible soundtrack of late-'90s corporate alternative schmucks (Moist, Dishwalla, etc.), Koepp does a fine job telling this story visually and aurally, avoiding heavy-handed stylization, quick cuts, and flashy tricks. He shoots on location in a real Chicago neighborhood, even though the film mostly takes place in a few locations and could easily have been shot in a studio. Location voodoo is a real thing, and I love it when people shoot on location. Bacon, Erbe, and Cope are convincing playing a family, and Erbe has a rare horror movie mother role that isn't just mothering, running, screaming, and receiving protection from the husband. The film's climax is a bit overblown, neat, and pat, and a Beth Orton musical montage in the penultimate scene pushes the cheese factor too far (I like some Beth Orton songs, but any music with lyrics at a film's conclusion can topple what's been carefully built). However, the film's final scene redeems the climax with a nice little creepy, unsettling jolt. I like this movie.

#87: The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1987)

2010-07-10T13:03:00.007-05:00

When I first saw this film about 11 years ago, I appreciated it as a much better than average variation on the generic slasher template. Seeing it for a second time last night, my appreciation only increased. Making the crazed killer a step-parent with a Reagan '80s/'50s sitcom idea of family values resonated with me in a general way on that first viewing. Since then, however, my parents split up, my dad remarried, and my mom let her boyfriend move in with her. Now, the idea of a step-parent as a homicidal maniac resonates with me in a very specific way. Yes, the movie is still a satire of generic media-generated idyllic family values, but the daughter doesn't like this guy long before she realizes he's nuts, and that's what's going to give this movie its staying power. Newly divorced or widowed middle-aged people make bad relationship decisions, I'm talking borderline retarded, and the kids tend to see this pretty clearly.

Seeing it clearly here is teenage girl Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). Her father has been dead for a year, and her mother Susan (Shelley Hack) has remarried Hugh Beaumont-type Jerry Blake (Terry O'Quinn). Stephanie is close to her mother, but she sees through Blake's Father Knows Best veneer right away. The audience does, too, but that's mostly because we've seen the aftermath of Blake's most recent massacre during the opening moments of the film. Blake moves to small, all-American towns, ingratiates himself with widowed women with children, tries to live life like a Saturday Evening Post cover, and flips his wig when real life intrudes. He then massacres the family, changes his appearance through wigs, colored contacts, glasses or the lack thereof, and facial hair or the lack thereof, and hits a new town and a new widow.
The movie includes a lot of stereotypical genre tropes, including a climax that sees all the principal characters in a room together, a gratuitous shower scene (I'm not really complaining, but there's no reason for it other than T&A), and the Halloween he's dead/he's not dead after all stalk-and-slash chase. However, Joseph Ruben's direction and the performances of the solid cast kick this one several notches above most slasher flicks. O'Quinn, veteran character actor who most people know from the inexplicably popular TV show Lost (I know I'm in the minority on this one, but I think that show is a gigantic piece of shit) plays this guy so well. The character could slip so easily into caricature or over-the-top mega-insanity, but O'Quinn plays him as an almost tragic figure, a guy who believes in the generic, all-American family ideal so much that the pressure is quietly imploding within him while he tightly keeps the lid on the exterior image. You almost feel sorry for the guy. The only moment of real satisfaction he shows in the film is when he watches a rerun of Mr. Ed. Otherwise, you see a man under an insane amount of self-imposed pressure. He's truly scary when the veneer occasionally cracks and the psychopath comes out, and truly funny, too. It's hard to imagine any other actor playing this role.

I also need to mention Steve Shellen in his role as the brother of one of O'Quinn's murdered widows. He's on a crusade to track down his sister's killer, and his character's role is mostly expository and unintentionally funny. Every move he makes is unnecessarily frantic and intense, particularly during one of the funniest library research scenes ever made. Too much of this guy could have seriously damaged the film, but a little of him is pretty entertaining.
Ruben, a master craftsman who's made both big-budget Hollywood vehicles and independent cult classics, presents this material in a matter-of-fact but artful way that calls to mind guys like Don Siegel. He avoids shots that call attention to themselves while subtly framing the action and moving the camera in intelligent, visually distinctive ways. He avoids most generic horror camera setups and gives the audience a lot of space to really look at this movie. It's a good-looking movie that fills the space of its budget nicely. I wish I had the words to describe it in more technical terms, but my vague adjectives will have to do.
I haven't seen many of Ruben's films, but he's admired by a lot of sharp film writers, including New York Times DVD columnist and former Chicago Reader critic Dave Kehr. His credits include the sci-fi movie Dreamscape (a favorite of mine as a little kid), cheerleadersploitation film The Pom-Pom Girls, '70s roadtrip cult classic Joyride, pretty awful James Woods/Robert Downey Jr. lawyer movie True Believer, and Julia Roberts vehicle Sleeping with the Enemy.

The Stepfather's screenwriter, Donald Westlake, was a renowned mystery novelist and one of only two men to win the Edgar Award in three separate categories; novel, short story, and screenplay (his Jim Thompson adaptation, The Grifters, for director Stephen Frears). In addition to novels and screenplays under his own name, he also wrote books under 13 pseudonyms. Films made from his novels include John Boorman's Point Blank, The Hot Rock, The Outfit, and Payback, and, very loosely, Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA. He died on vacation in Mexico in 2008.
The Stepfather was stupidly remade last year with a cast of blandly attractive nobodies and bombed, but its release prompted a DVD release of the original film, so some good came from bad.

#86: Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)

2010-06-04T12:03:00.006-05:00

(Warning: Nostalgic childhood anecdote precedes movie review. I apologize if any of you find this irritating. I usually do, but this anecdote is forever tied in my memory to this movie, so suck it.)
I have a long and strange history with this movie. My first exposure to it was late at night at the age of eight, on one of those formative childhood weekends that sticks with you forever. It was late in the summer, and my parents and most of my aunts and uncles were out of town at the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota. My father and my uncles on my mother's side are avid motorcycle riders, and Sturgis used to be a yearly routine for them. Since the oldest of the kids was only 11, the entire bunch of us got farmed out to various grandparents and family friends while our parents were out of town for four days. My brother and sister stayed with friends, and I ended up on the couch at my maternal grandparents' house. My cousin Pat got the spare bedroom. This was a sweet deal for me. My late grandmother was a lot of fun and a great cook, her house was across the street from the local bike trail and lake, and my older, much cooler cousin Pat was staying there with me. Not only that, his older friend Greg was staying there, too, on Saturday night. Greg was in junior high, which was almost high school. High school was as cool as you could get. This was going to be a weekend of awesomeness. Little did I know that this weekend would imprint the close-up image of creepy doctor Emil Breton (William Finley) on my brain and haunt my childhood dreams forever after.

My cousin Pat is three years older than me, and the oldest cousin on my mom's side of the family. Despite being very quiet and shy, he was the most popular kid in school because he looked a lot older than his years and was good at everything. He got straight As, was great at basketball and track, knew how to build shit, pulled some legendary pranks with his friends, was ahead of the curve on music trends, was interested in a wide variety of stuff, had friends from all walks of life, and never seemed to fuck up in public. Most of his friends were older than him, but they idolized him, and he couldn't walk ten feet without getting hit on by an older girl. He was even a good dancer. (He currently lives in an amazing log house, which he built himself, with his beautiful family.) I thought he was cool, but he also seemed to be everything I wasn't. I was a scrawny, young-looking, bookish, non-athletic, awkward, overenthusiastic dork. I wouldn't shut up about rock music and horror movies, and I sucked at basketball. True story: an older kid once demanded that I publicly apologize to him and give him five dollars for irritating him. (Excellent scam, by the way.) When I told him Pat was my cousin, he got down on his knees and begged me not to tell him. Can you imagine that kind of playground cachet?
Anyway, the day was a good one. I believe my grandmother made Mexican pizza, or maybe Denver omelets, Pat and Greg took me with them to buy candy and soda pop and illegal fireworks from a friend of Greg's, Greg thought I was hilarious for some reason, and I watched pro wrestling with my grandfather. After my grandparents went to bed, the real fun started. We watched some music videos, Pat and Greg wrestled while I acted as ring announcer and referee, and then they left while cryptically telling me to possibly expect a few more people to come over and not to tell my grandparents. Greg also dropped this line, which I have never forgotten: "I get the one with the big chi-chis." Being eight, and not being in the habit of calling breasts "chi-chis," it took me longer than it should have to realize they were going to sneak some girls into the house. About an hour later, they came back with two girls. They hung out for a bit, watched some more videos, then they all went into the spare bedroom and closed the door. Left to my own devices, I turned my attention back to the television. And that's when I saw it.
I flipped the channel to KWGN, a local Denver station that was seemingly created just to please me. With the exception of its local news and Denver Nuggets coverage, everything on this channel was of great interest to me. There was Blinky, a local clown who always seemed to be drunk or hung over. Imagine a cross between Krusty the Clown and Nicolas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas. They regularly showed horror films and gritty '70s movies. They showed Geraldo's specials about Al Capone's vault and the Charles Manson interview. They played classic Tex Avery and Chuck Jones cartoons, and Keaton, Chaplin, Three Stooges, and Little Rascals shorts. In the days before infomercials turned late-night TV into total garbage, KWGN showed strange, strange movies, cartoons, and old comedy shorts in the wee small hours. I loved this channel.

On the night of the living chi-chis, when I was frozen out of the adolescent make-out session, KWGN was playing De Palma's Sisters, though I didn't find out the title of the film until I was in my early twenties. The movie was about two-thirds over when I started watching it that night when I was eight. I happened to pick up on the film at a particularly memorable scene. Jennifer Salt's character is walking toward a large house in the country at night. The house, which is a home for the severely mentally ill, is ominously shot from below. Salt moves closer to the house and the camera pulls up for a medium shot. Salt stands next to a large picture window, eavesdropping. She sees a strange, bug-eyed man (William Finley) plunge a hypodermic needle into a struggling, disturbed woman (Margot Kidder). I was transfixed. The image was unlike anything I'd seen before. Though I've loved monster movies and horror since I could crawl, I hadn't seen anything that really frightened me until that moment. I was thoroughly creeped out, and exhilarated by my fear. The image was such a strong one. The combination of light and darkness, the characters' prominent facial features, the thrill and terror of voyeurism, the chance of the woman being caught, the lack of information about the characters or what happened in the film so far, the strangeness of the whole experience. Voyeurism is one of the great film subjects, and I was getting my first taste. I watched the rest of the film, not knowing what the hell was going on, but fascinated anyway. At one point, one of the girls came out of the spare bedroom and watched some of it with me. She was the pretty, slender blonde one (not the one with the big chi-chis), and I remember her commenting on how creepy the movie was and if it would give me nightmares. I said it wouldn't, she laughed, watched a little more, and went back in the make-out room. I spent the next several years fruitlessly waiting for the movie to reappear on television, sometimes wondering if I'd dreamed it, never forgetting William Finley's face. That scene stuck in my mind forever, and I was often frustrated at not being able to find out anything about the movie, including the title. When the Internet became available to me, I thought I might solve the mystery. Not knowing any of the actors' names, however, and relying on memories of childhood, my searches turned up nothing.
Finally, at the age of 24, I rented Sisters, unaware that it was that formative, unnamed movie from my childhood. I was interested in '70s movies, and I wanted to check out more De Palma. Watching the film, I began to get a creepy, familiar feeling whenever Finley appeared onscreen. Finally, that scene appeared, and I almost leaped out of my seat. Holy shit! That's it! That's the movie! A 16-year mystery was solved. I became much more excited than I should have been, but I thought I was going to go to my grave not knowing the name of the film that blew my eight-year-old mind.

Sisters, Brian De Palma's second foray into suspense (after the underrated, little-seen Murder a la Mod), is a thoroughly entertaining exercise in audience manipulation, black humor, Hitchcock homage, and horror. De Palma is a master visual stylist and one of the great entertainers, and he deserves more credit than he gets from most serious critics. De Palma, like most filmmakers whose primary subject is the medium of film itself, takes a lot of flak for being contemptuous of his audience and for lacking human feeling. Quentin Tarantino and the Coens catch the same hell constantly. Admittedly, there is a little bit of truth in this criticism, and there is some suspended adolescence in all of these filmmakers, but the process of filmmaking seems to me just as suitable a subject for film as any other. While these guys may not reach the heights of the all-time greats whose primary subject is human experience and/or the mysteries of life (Renoir, Bresson, Cassavetes, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Fassbinder, Mike Leigh, Charles Burnett, early Scorsese, early Herzog, Vigo, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kiarostami, Fidanzati, Panahi, Ford, Hawks, to name just a few in my upper echelon), it's like saying Dashiell Hammett is no good because he's not Tolstoy. Fun is also highly important, and there are plenty of floors in the tower of great filmmakers. Many canonized filmmakers are primarily interested in filmmaking as a stylized comment on film-watching (Hitchcock, in particular) or favor image over character (Kubrick) or seem to dislike people intensely (Lang), but they escape most of the drubbing that De Palma et al. regularly receives. Maybe the problem is Pauline Kael, a loud and proud De Palma supporter. One of the most powerful film critics ever, Kael made plenty of enemies and detractors among some of the most thoughtful critics, and this may explain some of the De Palma hostility. Whatever it is, I think De Palma's run of films from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and a handful of his later works, are some of the most eminently watchable movies ever made. However deep he is or isn't, his ingenious mixture of Hitchcock, Godard, exploitation trash, Pop Art, voyeurism fetish, and black humor is thrilling and exciting.
Sisters opens with a nice, tongue-in-cheek red herring. A blind woman (Margot Kidder) enters a changing room and begins taking off her clothes. A man is already in the room, watching her. This proves to be a segment from a Candid Camera-style game show called Peeping Toms, and the guests have to guess if the man will stay and watch or politely leave. Kidder is a plant who's not really blind. Her and the unsuspecting man strike up a friendship and mutual attraction after the show and decide to go to dinner, then head back to Kidder's apartment for some casual sex. That's about all I will reveal of the twists. Part of the film's pleasure is not quite knowing what will happen next. All I will say is that the story involves twin sisters, murder, experimental mental health treatment, private detectives, and lots and lots of voyeurism. Kidder is fantastic, giving a physical, complex performance, and the rest of the cast is pretty good, too. De Palma regular William Finley (the phantom in The Phantom of the Paradise) is unforgettable, as usual, and the film is both unsettling and hilarious, with an excellent Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Taxi Driver) score.
I really, really like this movie.

#85: Shadow Builder (Jamie Dixon, 1998)

2010-05-23T12:26:00.007-05:00

I had low expectations for visual effects man Jamie Dixon's straight-to-video directorial debut, Shadow Builder, and these low expectations were largely met. For one thing, look at that title. Yes, the title comes directly from the obscure Bram Stoker story that loosely inspired the film, but Shadow Builder? It sounds like something New Age idiots buy. I would like one dream catcher and one shadow builder, please. Shadow builder, build me a shadow! Then there's that whole straight-to-video thing, and that first-time director thing, and that director-is-normally-a-special-effects-guy thing. Sometimes, these things ain't no thing, but this time, these things were definitely a thing.

Here are the problems. The movie is visually generic and presented in a flat, anonymous style with no real sense of place. Filmed in the Toronto suburbs, it could be taking place in any random town or suburb in Canada or the United States. The script is ridiculous, simultaneously overwrought and underwritten, with loads of unintentional hilarity. The actors in the leading roles do a good job of naturally selling the ridiculous material, but many of the supporting roles are wildly overplayed. And the one thing I thought would be solid, the special effects, blows clams. Dixon was one of the pioneers of CGI, which still looks bad but is slowly getting better. Late-1990s CGI, however, can't be helped. It looks like outdated video game graphics and never for a second appears like it was filmed in the same place as the rest of the movie. There is no suspension of disbelief with CGI, especially from this early era. Even the packaging for this movie fails. The DVD cover with that goofy-looking demon on the front? That demon is not actually in this movie. The menu screen shows an image of a young boy who is also not in this movie, though a young boy is one of the main characters. I'd love to see this trend continue. Well, Tom Cruise is in this movie, but any movie star will do. Let's put Harrison Ford on the DVD cover instead.

Shadow Builder opens with renegade priest Michael Rooker (Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) sneaking into the ceremony of a Satanic cult. This cult is summoning a demon called a shadow builder, who will unleash hell on earth by sacrificing one of God's chosen people during the upcoming solar eclipse. This comes directly from your Bible, people. I think it's in the middle somewhere. Remember all those shadow builder sermons you had to sit through in your youth? This cult is doing the ceremony up right. They've killed a man and a woman, drained some of their blood, and smeared the blood on a Bible, which they read from while standing in a pentagram. They've paid the drunken, deadbeat father of a young boy who experienced stigmata during his baptism and is pure at heart and all that shit to present a sample of the boy's hair and blood and a likeness. He comes through, they burn the stuff in a spooky, Satanic candle, and the shadow builder is summoned. This ceremony contains my favorite unintentionally hilarious line in the movie, from the cult leader: "You understand, 'hell no' will soon be a contradiction in terms. Hell will no longer be denied." Rooker busts in on the ceremony a little too late since the shadow builder has already appeared and left to do his work, but he does get to whip out a couple of guns and blow away all the cult members.

The film then shifts to the small town of Grand River, where the chosen boy lives with his veterinarian aunt, who dates the town sheriff. His mother is dead, and his dad's the aforementioned deadbeat. The shadow builder, who resembles Darth Vader and the Predator except his face is a constantly swirling CGI shadow, has hit town. He turns to dust in the light, but in the dark he can swirl around town and gather souls. He gets stronger with each soul, and he needs six of them to take the boy. Besides his direct soul stealing, his mere presence in the town is enough to create havoc. Grand River soon devolves into a succession of fistfights, axe murders, and spontaneous topless dancing. Soon, the boy, the sheriff, his aunt, the renegade priest, and the town eccentric (a sorry collection of affectations and tics sadly played by the Candyman himself, Tony Todd) are the only ones capable of saving humanity from the shadow builder.
Dixon, whose only other directing credit is a TV movie sequel to another TV movie called Bats: Human Harvest (apparently the story of killer bats attacking U.S. troops in Afghanistan), is still enjoying a long career as a visual effects person. His credits include Robocop 3, True Lies, Showgirls, Titanic, Deep Blue Sea, X-Men, Undercover Brother, and Tropic Thunder. Oh yeah, and Flubber. Never forget Flubber. Shadow Builder is no great shakes, not particularly scary, and not that memorable, but I did have fun watching it. You might, too, with enough beer, nachos, friends, and snarky comments to last two hours.
Bonus dialogue: "What is a priest doing with two nine-millimeter cannons?"

#84: Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001)

2010-05-01T11:26:00.008-05:00

Session 9 is, happily, a modern anomaly. That is, a horror film relying on character, suspense, tension, dread, and avoidance of cliche instead of godawful, anonymous, 2000s-style quick cutting, personality-free adolescent and twentysomething voids as main characters, bland and/or stupid remakes, and extended rape and torture. American horror films had a pretty weak decade, so it's even more disappointing that a gem like Session 9 fell through the cracks.
The movie takes place at, and was filmed in, a real abandoned mental hospital, Danvers, outside of Boston. I'm not sure why the facility closed in our real world, but in the movie, Danvers has been abandoned and empty since the mid-1980s because of the double whammy of Reagan economics and lawsuits over repressed memory therapy. I like having the facility closed for these reasons because they were some of the most idiotic bullshit of the 1980s. State institutions were forced to close thanks to that cocksucking prick of a president Republicans still can't stop ejaculating over at every mention of his name and his failed economic policies (terrible actor, too) and lots of mentally ill people were forced onto the streets. Also, a bunch of dumbass therapists convinced a lot of patients that they had been raped by their incestuous, Satan-worshiping family members and/or witnessed a lot of baby sacrifices and had repressed the terrible memories for years. None of this shit ever happened, a lot of families were torn apart, and a lot of therapists and institutions were deservedly sued. But I'm meandering on my foul-mouthed soapbox.

Anyway, the abandoned institution is going to become an office building, so a Hazmat team is contracted to remove all the asbestos. The team's boss (actor/director Peter Mullan) and his second-in-command (David Caruso, not playing a cop, also delivering one of the best fuck yous in cinema history) place their super-competitive bid and win the contract. Mullan says they can finish in a week, but Caruso thinks it will take at least three weeks to do a thorough job. The $10,000 bonus if they complete the gig in a week is incentive enough for Caruso to silence his objections. The rest of the team includes Josh Leonard (Undertow), who's sleeping with Caruso's ex-girlfriend, Mullan's mulleted nephew Brendan Sexton III (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Boys Don't Cry) and law-school dropout Stephen Gevedon (also the film's co-writer). These guys all have their own stresses, conflicts, and problems, and the film does a good job of showing the dynamics of a small group of people who've worked together closely for years. They're all developed characters, and they each get their moments. Leonard has one overwrought monologue (one of the film's few missteps), but he also gets a couple of the best lines. (On finding an old coin: "1883? Fuck yeah!" On discussing Mullan's stress over having a newborn daughter: "It should be the joy of his life, dude.") Every character is sympathetic, flawed, and suspicious at different moments in the film.

Besides the creepiness of an abandoned mental hospital, things get creepier when Gevedon, who has been considering a return to law school, sneaks away from work at periodic intervals to listen to tapes of nine therapy sessions he found in the basement. These sessions are between a psychologist and a woman with multiple personalities, and the woman is being goaded into revealing what happened on a Christmas night 22 years ago. The voices of the various personalities are unsettling, and the movie handles these scenes well. They could have easily been ridiculous, over-the-top, and stupid, but nothing stupid happens. For example, the tapes don't make Gevedon go crazy. Things do start getting stranger once the tapes are played, but the connection is mostly left to the audience's discretion. Once the tension really gets cracking, everything seems ominous, including such benign items as photos of a christening and an empty jar of peanut butter (seriously).

Director Brad Anderson lets his characters and story dictate the filmmaking style, instead of the other way around. One of the first features to be shot in Hi-Def digital, Session 9 relies on natural light, naturalistic shot compositions, and organic effects (CGI was only used once). We also get a couple of excellent cameos from CSI's Paul Guilfoyle and director Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo). I haven't seen much of director Anderson's other work, but he directed the Christian Bale movie The Mechanic, which I've heard mostly negative things about, Next Stop Wonderland, Happy Accidents, and Transsiberian. He's also directed a lot of television, including two episodes of The Wire. I just started watching that show, and recently watched the first Anderson episode, which was particularly strong. Anybody have any opinions about Anderson's other films?
I'm giving a strong recommendation for Session 9. We need more character-based, non-idiotic, non-torture-based horror movies in our modern era. And this movie is actually scary.