Do you feel something? Anything?

So the movie I wanted to post about shows no signs of magically appearing at my house. I probably ought to try actually buying it, or at least renting it, before I despair at that state of affairs. But I also ought to go ahead and post this wordy-as-hell review, sadly image-free. I'll embed the trailer at the end, anyway -- the quality is crap, which is a shame because the original looks surprisingly good for something so low-budget -- but it's something.

The Wizard of Gore. No, not that one. The 2007 remake of the Herschell Gordon Lewis classic (or "classic," if you prefer): directed by Jeremy Kasten of The Attic Expeditions, who wants very much to be horror's answer to John Waters. He's... not.

The film also stars Brad Dourif, Jeffrey Combs, Crispin Glover and former child actor Josh Miller (of Near Dark and River's Edge, making a return to the screen after many years' hiatus).

It seemed like a sure thing. And as the opening credits rolled, I started to warm up to that glow of cinematic satisfaction that I was expecting. Under the title, rich retro textures and some gorgeous music accompanied the printing of a newspaper on a manual press by a man drenched from head to foot in blood. Cue me and a bowl of popcorn planning to have a lovely night.

And then cue the "wah-wah"s of disappointment kick in as the actual movie starts, and the happy glow begins fading almost immediately.

It doesn't help that the film's second scene is set at a trying-too-hard L.A. underground Halloween party, which the lead character then ironically describes as trying too hard. It is the first, but not the last time that the whole thing is a little too on-the-nose, a little too self-congratulatory. Yes, movie, we see that you are too good for this kind of orchestrated anarchy. And yet, here you are, ogling the Suicide Girls. (Which... oh, I'll have to get to that later.)

But the thing that everyone talks about when they discuss this movie is the plot, which makes NO SENSE. Well, actually, when you watch the movie a second time, the plot holes you thought the movie was getting lost in seal themselves up, but a thousand little ones re-open in their wake (I'd almost suggest that the film's final magic-show setpiece was a clever allusion to that fact, but... it's not). And that may be even more irritating, because you find yourself wondering if the filmmakers didn't pick up on those, or just didn't care, and moreover you find yourself pausing every couple of minutes to talk to yourself to be sure that there couldn't be a way for what you just saw to actually hold together in any coherent narrative fashion.

Kip Pardue plays a dilettante journalist who is by his own admission simply a collection of retro aesthetics: in every sense, an empty suit. He's just another bored hipster spectator with too much money and no sense of self. He has a girlfriend to condescend to and an assy loft apartment with no post-1970 technology. One night, he decides to go to a magic show with the same aimlessness he seems to do everything, but the show changes him in ways he spends the next two hours unraveling.

The thing is, if they'd just gone ahead and let the narrative blow itself to hell and not tried to make it make sense, I think the movie would actually be better. But instead we have a deus-ex-Jeffrey Combs wedged in at the end like it's a Scooby Doo episode. Just let the movie get lost in psychedelia and weirdness, and what you've got is a movie that follows happily in the footsteps of the trippy sixties exploitation films that its parentage would imply. Try to turn it into a murder mystery, pretend that all the clues fit together, and instead what you've got is a desperately unsuccessful and vaguely pedestrian genre film.

And the squandered potential is what really gets me about this movie. Here's the thing: most of the individual scenes work okay. Well, no -- every scene where Kip Pardue has someone else to play off of or isn't central to the scene is internally good. But put together, the film falls completely apart.

Pardue is a serviceable leading man, but I think he lacks the depth or charisma to pull this part off. It's not entirely his fault: Ed Bigelow is a deeply unpleasant character, and I'm still on the fence about whether the creators realize how much so. On the commentary, somebody -- possibly the writer -- was characterizing Ed's shifts of identity, saying, "'I'm a modern primitive! I'm a retro asshole!'" So somebody gets it, that the character is an asshole. And the thing is, a fascinating asshole can make for a great central character, but it's really hard to pull off. In Kip Pardue's performance, I can't say there's anything fascinating.

And again, this is wasted potential, because he's surrounded by a cast so wonderful that I actually got all tingly when I first discovered the film on the IMDb.

Montag the Magnificent, the enigmatic magician with a killer sawing-the-lady-in-half routine, is played by Crispin Glover, who basically defines fascinating. Glover's inspiration is said to have been Siegfried and Roy, and... wow. Yeah, that's in there, and in the creepiest possible way. One of the reasons Montag is such a great character is because he's so utterly ridiculous -- you would laugh out loud at him and his campy patter if he weren't so malevolently terrifying. Oily, grotesque, and deeply unsettling, Montag works perfectly in the movie that this should be, and with a different (better) main character and narrative approach, would have been.

And then there's Brad Dourif, who apparently was doing so many movies he couldn't remember which script to use, intimidated the crap out of everyone on set, and wears truly spectacular facial hair. Honestly, he's doing his Brad Dourif schtick. I can't say it's unique here, but it's always, always entertaining.

Another familiar face is Joshua Miller as Ed's bored, jaded best friend; Miller is back in a movie for the first time in almost ten years here. I was a little worried that what he brought to Near Dark was as much a function of his youth as his actual talent -- that his Homer worked on the strength of his baby face and ancient eyes as much as the work he was doing. But I think my concern was probably unfounded. I would admit that he seems vaguely -- rusty? That may be just because of what I went into the film already knowing about his career. But there was still a bit of what I want to call immaturity in the performance. Nevertheless, he thoroughly overpowers Pardue in their scenes together, and so much the better. In fact, if it were up to me I'd probably do away with Ed and make Jinky the main character; the movie loses a lot of steam when he makes his exit.

Oh, I suppose I should talk about Bijou Phillips as the female lead, but... why bother? Maggie has absolutely no personality. For that I'm prepared to place equal blame on the creators, who seem to have no interest in her as anything but a plot device, and Phillips, who is unbelievably irritating. (She's also saddled with some truly unfortunate hair and makeup, but that's just icing on the cake of an utterly forgettable role.)

Jeffrey Combs -- I won't say anything about Combs in the movie, other than the fact that he is, of course, grand. His role has some surprises that I don't want to blow.

But let me go back to Maggie for a minute, because I do write about women in horror, and The Wizard of Gore is the textbook definition of "problematic" in this regard. The character is so slight that she basically disappears down one of the film's more gaping continuity rabbitholes: in brief, the only backstory offered for the character is completely impossible within the narrative sequence of events proposed. I could explain the whole thing, but suffice it to say, we're left knowing absolutely nothing about her that makes any sense. She is so irrelevant that what she might be or might have been independent of Ed simply evaporates.

And this is one of the subtler examples. Much like the first scene I described, the film revels in its own vapid misogyny, then pats itself on the back for calling itself out as misogynist. And the filmmakers do the same thing on the commentary, with the writer ribbing the director at one point, "Hey, I'm not the one who made the misogynist movie!" Guys, admitting that your movie is misogynist doesn't make it okay, it just opens the door for you to actually offer a comment on misogyny in movies, in horror, in society -- just SAY something. All you did is have Maggie say, hey, that guy Montag's routine is misogynistic, y'all. And then you let -- spoiler alert for those of you who've never seen a horror movie before -- both Montag and Ed brutally murder her. So now, Pretentious Filmmakers, you've made a misogynistic movie, and said that your film was misogynistic. And yet again, no one with a double-X chromosome has made it to the last reel. Am I supposed to be impressed?

And that's before we even get to the Suicide Girls. They apparently partly bankrolled the picture, and so a whole flock of them have bit parts, largely as victims. In this picture, their role has not changed much since Herschell Gordon Lewis -- or, indeed, since the pale dead maidens of pre-Raphaelite painting.

And obviously the Suicide Girls out in the real world are a troublesome but ambiguous symbol -- does their embrace of a retro aesthetic and various forms of decorative self-mutilation simply echo in gothy flavors the physical distortions of a mainstream fashion model? Or do they assert their autonomy and right to choice and self-determination by defying Western society's insistence on keeping women safe and clean and quiet? Does anybody care now that they've basically faded into cultural irrelevance? I don't know the answer to any of those questions, though I could probably generate a paper about it.

But in this context, pulled from coy online photos and inserted into an exploitation horror film, any pretext to autonomy or self-determination they might have is stripped away under Montag's drug-induced hypnosis. Stripped, tortured, and eventually murdered for the benefit of a paying audience, they are rendered, as Montag himself precisely notes, meat.

And yet: I recommend the film. It's worth seeing for a brilliant performance by Crispin Glover and the reappearance of Joshua Miller, and the general hotness of both of the above. At the very least, I recommend it to those who enjoy a gory romp for its own sake and revel in a psychedelic mindfuck even if it ultimately disappoints.

But I do think it's kind of ironic that the film actually isn't nearly as bloody or gory as the creators seem to think it is (I saw the unrated version, and I have a hard time picturing what didn't make it into the R-rated version); there's better splatter out there. I'd say it's probably exactly as bloody as fans of the Suicide Girls can stand.

Every town has an Elm Street.

All right, so I promised a spirited defense of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. The problem now is that I've just watched the trailers for the next Harry Potter film and I am so excited, y'all. It looks to rock like a rocking thing. And now I may be way too excited about Harry Potter to put together any coherent thoughts on the subject at hand.

Sorry, Freddy. Aw, don't give me that look. No, you are better than Harry Potter, really.

Okay, here's the thing: I'm not saying Freddy's Dead is a good movie, by any means. No, it is not even a mediocre movie. It is a bad movie, an exceptionally bad movie. But I've never thought it was the worst of the series by half, and have always felt like some outrageously silly and ill-conceived moments have gotten it a bad rap.

So I know that it is often silly and stupid, and that the 3D ending was a stupendously bad idea, and that the video game death really is the worst in any of the movies. But I want to highlight some of the redeeming qualities of the film, without denying any of those fully valid criticisms.

First of all, I love this bunch of kids. They're the first post-Roseanne teenagers in the series, and the kind of kids you actually don't see that often in horror movies. They aren't especially attractive (granted, I always had a thing for Breckin Meyer, but I'm fairly sure I was in the minority on that one), they don't have cookie-cutter suburban lives, and there are no cheerleaders or nerds. They're like the Breakfast Club if all of them had been Judd Nelson.

She wants to be Darlene Connor so bad she can taste it.

The backstory on Freddy is kind of fun, and suitably weird. Alice Cooper was his father, which would make anybody a little bit odd.

I'm of two minds about expanding on Freddy's story; I realize that it does probably detract from his pure monstrousness. In the first film he's barely a memory and it's his very vagueness that makes him so terrifying. But a familiar monster also grows in stature as his legend does, I think, and as Freddy gains more of a story to tell, he becomes increasingly mythic.

In this one, Freddy's actually scarier without the makeup.

Freddy's house has gotten a bit of a makeover in this one, which works quite well for me. The blue lighting and cobwebs were getting a little campy by the end, there, becoming more carnival haunted house than horrifying outpost of evil. The abandoned look expressed in dirt and grime and decay reminds me of the house in Clive Barker's Hellraiser, which also gave me the willies.

There's a scholarly paper in the way the decay of Freddy's house mimics the real-estate-related terrors of his aging fan base -- which is why I'm not in grad school anymore.

The opening sequence is a good setup and the total mystery about what the hell has happened to the town is well-played, I think. I particularly like the spectral bus stop. Plus, let's face it, Bob Shaye actually is kinda creepy looking, so his cameo here is awfully appropriate.

Yes, Peter Jackson got into a feud with this guy. But then, he's hard to scare. Except with crickets.

Speaking of cameos, you've gotta like Johnny Depp's little cameo. (Side note: you know how there are several actors from the series at the funeral scene in New Nightmare? Apparently Wes wanted to ask Johnny Depp to do it but was afraid to. And then Johnny told him later he'd have been happy to do it. How awesome would that have been? And knowing he did this dreck, did Wes really think he'd turn them down?)

I like the creepy little girl; she's just creepy enough, without being too obvious. Which the children in white weren't to start with, but they kind of got done to death by the fifth movie. Which was, I might add, in my estimation actually substantially worse than this one. This movie veers into a trippier, harsher tone from the previous couple of movies, which had become almost fantasy, an excuse for increasingly absurd transformations and dream sequences. Freddy's Dead has, at the very least, a fairly credible set of characters and an attempt at recapturing the series' bite.

The town going completely mad after all of the children are killed was, I think, a weird and bold move. The creators have admitted that they'd been watching a lot of Twin Peaks, and it shows. In fact, if you put Roseanne and Twin Peak in a blender with a gallon or two of fake blood and a big hunk of cheese, you might get something like this movie.

And the powerful female characters in this movie are one of the things it takes from the influence of popular texts of the time, like Roseanne. I love Lezlie Dean's Tracy, cliche though she seems now. I love that there's no "good" girl, no cheerleader, no "hot" girl -- just Tracy, who'll happily emasculate any man who gets on her bad side. She's like if Kat from 10 Things I Hate About You was in a horror movie instead of a comedy.

As Ani Difranco put it, "I am not a pretty girl. That is not what I do."

And then there's Lisa Zane's Maggie, who I also love. She's down-to-earth without being naive, good without being innocent, and kicks ass without losing her shit completely. She feels like a worthy successor to my girl Nancy, and I don't think I'd say that of any other Elm Street heroine (except Heather, but that's obviously too weird to get into and the stuff of another post). She brings a welcome maturity and substance to a subgenre largely dominated by dimwitted teenagers.

(There would be an image of Maggie here, but I don't have this on DVD and can't find a nice one out on the Internet. Alas.)

As for Maggie being Freddy's child, I've actually always kind of liked the idea, though I thought it was pretty hideously handled in the film. There were some nice moments -- I like the confrontation between them in Maggie's dream, as she relives a childhood memory and tries to resolve the father figure she seems to have loved with the gruesome discovery in the cellar. Of course the whole thing devolves into silliness in the end, which is perhaps the film's most unforgivable shortcoming, but for a moment the prospect of real darkness looms.

Watch this Space

Haven't been feeling 100% for a few days, but appear to be on the mend. Coming to this space Friday: a spirited defense of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. No, really.

Don't give me that look. I like it, what can I say.

Field-Hockey-Stick-Fu

I'm trying to find a subject I can be brief on today, for I still need to work on my taxes and I've felt gross all day and would like an early night.

Oh, okay: the end of Red Eye pisses me right off. I think it's a neat little thriller for the most part. The heavy claustrophobia of setting the key events in a pair of airline seats is lovely and largely well-handled. Short of locking two people in a coffin together, it's hard to imagine a way to slice the movie down any more; talk about cutting out the fat. Those are, obviously, the movie's best scenes, partly because Craven handles them masterfully and partly because Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy do likewise. McAdams is just complicated enough for a thriller heroine -- a little generic, sure, but that's not necessarily a major drawback in a genre where identification with the heroine is key. On the other hand, Murphy is unique and weird and specific: not a psycho, not at all, merely a businessman. (A really bad one -- what kind of professional would take only one hostage? if she refuses initially, you've got no leverage to persuade her -- but I'm certainly overthinking that one.) His Jack Ripner here and the Scarecrow in Batman Begins both showcase his ability to play a larger-than-life character without raising his voice or veering into Nicholsonville.

I've got to say: never sat next to anybody that handsome on an airplane. Also no one as evil, as far as I know, but still.

At least, until the ending, and that's what ticks me off. The climax demands that Ripner go completely, inconsistently berserk, which is annoying. But I could deal with it.

No, the part where I start headdesking is in the final moments of the film, when Lisa gets completely blindsided by a Sarah Connor Classic. The SCC is named after the moment at the end of Terminator 2 when Sarah Connor has the T1000 dead to rights, splayed into a blob and teetering on the edge of a precipice over a pit of molten metal. In that moment, Sarah has won the day -- she is the Ripley, she is the hero.

Except. Of course. Her pump-action shotgun -- which she has been (heroically) operating one-handed because T1000 put a spike through one of her shoulders -- jams. T1000 recovers; her victory is lost, and she has to wait for Arnold to come along and save her skin. It's one of the most anti-feminist moments in what I generally think of as an awesomely feminist movie (and I'll talk about that at some point too).

I'd thought of it as a "It's Superman's book, you idiot" moment, after an argument that two Buffy characters get into about why Lex Luthor can't win at the end. The movies are called "The Terminator," so in the end it's got to be about The Terminator. Red Eye, though, has no such excuses. If it has any obligation, it is to provide us with a Craven-style Final Girl.

For monster-fighting, I gotta say, I'm all over the field hockey stick.

Lisa has won. She kicked his ass. She did it with a field hockey stick. We love her. Ripner is crippled and hers for the killing. She shoots the motherfucker.

Victory!

But he lunges, knocks the gun away, grabs her by the fucking hair -- and who fires the killing bullet? Her dad. You know, the one who was unconscious on the floor a minute earlier.

AAAAAARGH.

WHY?

It's a rhetorical question. We know why.

"They're here!"

The Invasion. It's a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of my favorite movies, a movie that already got one of the best remakes out there in the 70s with Donald Sutherland and his Amazing 'Stache of Doom.

So I went in with reservations, obviously. I also, however, went in with a serious jones for Daniel Craig, so those two things may have canceled each other out.

The hotness.

First off, I also knew that it had sat on a studio shelf for a couple of years before getting released. In fact, Daniel Craig found out he was cast as James Bond during re-shoots, and then the studio sat on the movie until after Casino Royale was successful. Which is just as mercenary as everything else about the film, I think.

Actually, the movie is surprisingly good, I've got to say. It's a very effective thriller. And there are certainly plenty of problems, but since most of the specifics I'll bring up are bad, I do want to say right off that I enjoyed the 90 minutes I spent sitting in front of the movie tremendously. But on to those problems.

The pod people are a little bit too alien, for one thing -- they're too easy to tell from the humans right off the bat. Some of them are better than others, too -- Carol's secretary is a nice is-she-or-isn't-she moment, but with most of the aliens, you find yourself wondering how they get through even two or three days without everyone around them suspecting them of being either Coneheads or on quaaludes.

In addition to the many little references and in-jokes, this version also recalls the original in having its ending monkeyed around with by the studio. I don't know that for a fact, but good lord. I rolled my eyes so hard I almost fell over.

Nicole Kidman has really remarkable chemistry with the child actor they have playing her son. It's good, because she has zero chemistry with Daniel Craig, sadly. There are plenty of scenes that suggest that their relationship was probably less platonic in the original cut, and then somebody with sense got ahold of it and was like, "No." I mean, the movie sorta sells it, but really only on the amazing charisma of Daniel Craig. You believe the relationship mostly because he's lovely and you identify with her, so presto, it's lurve. It could be worse -- it's not Annikin-and-Padma bad -- but it's not good.

Jeffrey Wright, despite being saddled with selling The Deus Ex Machina What Ate Pittsburgh, is marvelous. He should be in everything. Which is good, because I've noticed lately that he kind of is.

Roger Rees should also be in everything and isn't, and that's a problem for me. But he's in this, and he gets to VO the last line, because if nothing else, Roger Rees should VO the last line of every movie. And if we can't even manage that, at the very least he should narrate my life, because if he did it would be far more interesting and cleverly written. He can do that, you see -- everything that comes out of his mouth sounds cleverly written, even when it's dreck.

Speaking of things coming out of people's mouths, I could have done without all the vomiting. Euch. And yet, while the convincing vomiting grossed me out, the unconvincing vomiting by the crowd on the train, while still kinda gross just on the strength of its volume, was the least convincing vomiting since Linda Blair's stand-in spat pea soup all over Father Karras. They may have actually used the same Dick Smith rig from The Exorcist for all the train people, actually, because you could almost see the little nozzle between their jaws, just like you can in The Exorcist (if you freeze-frame it, at least -- not that I've ever obsessed hard enough over that movie to do something so weird).

The whole concept of infectious disease being the vehicle for the pod... being... pod-iness? -- there aren't technically any pod people here, since there aren't pods anymore, but I think we can safely say that "pod people" now means more than just "dopplegangers grown in pods" -- I liked it, actually. Frankly, partly because "pod people" is such a part of our vocabulary, it seems vaguely ridiculous when you see it in the original movie, the actual plant pods growing people. (In the 70s remake it's way gross. Way gross. And thus avoids being ridiculous.) The idea of the replacement as an infection, and as something that can be spread like an infection -- the mass vaccinations are especially chilling -- this seems like a nice updating. It also solves some sticky questions from the first two versions: what happens to your old body? How fast does the new one grow? How can the new pod happen to be wherever you are? I'll never forget the fleeting moment of total silliness when Sutherland's girlfriend's old body deflates like a week-old birthday balloon. This does work better, though it also, sadly, allows for the ridiculously upbeat ending.

But even having solved some problems, there's a trifle too much goofy science going on. It's a hard balance to strike: you need to have just enough science to let people not feel stupid believing in pod people, but not so much that everyone who's taken AP Biology starts going, "But that's horseshit." They tip a little too far in that direction here, I feel.

I liked the little call-backs to previous versions, for I am a geek and geeks love to be in on the joke. Both the prior movies had a scene where someone runs in front of the protagonist's car yelling about how "they're here!" and then later in the film, the protagonist is in the same position. I loved how Veronica Cartwright (the first to be aware of the pod people in the 70s remake and -- spoiler alert -- the only survivor at the end) was also in a very similar position here. And calling the protagonist Carol Bennell -- the original love interest Becky Driscoll becomes Ben Driscoll -- very nice.

Why does this keep happening to me?

The gender swap actually works particularly well, I thought. Carol is connected to everyone in her life in ways that the male protagonists never were, and you can argue about whether that's because she's a woman, but -- well, I just think it is. Not inherently, obviously, but societally, yeah, it makes sense that she has more connections. I like it, in any case: it keeps the emotional stakes higher, I think. Clearly sticking her with a kid -- as much as I hate that as a cliche and a gender stereotype -- makes the desperation even more acute.

But I think it also introduces a dynamic with her ex-husband that appeals to the feminist in me. The girl that Tucker lives with is clearly coded as a "younger model," which kind of makes me hate him, and unfortunately that's really the only indication of what Tucker was as a husband. But once he becomes a pod person, the violence, the malevolent control that he tries to exert and the obedience he insists on extracting from Carol -- the way he deposits her at home with his mother and the children while he goes off to do Important Work just makes me itch -- is a disturbing comment on gender roles.

Or I've been reading a lot of Jezebel lately and I see the patriarchy everywhere.

Probably both, actually.

It ain't exactly "Get the hell away from her, you bitch," but it'll do.

I also like the evolution of professions. In the original, Miles is a doctor and Becky is a... girl. In the sequel, Matthew is a health inspector and the girl is... well, a girl again. But also the villain (Leonard Nimoy!) is a psychiatrist. Here, Carol is a psychiatrist, and Ben is a doctor. I think it's easy to read the foregrounding of science as authority (and the growing acceptance of psychology as more than the touchy-feely gobbledygook that Nimoy's character promotes) as antidotes against blind conviction and unthinking faith, as demonstrated by the pods.

Total tangent: I love movies shot on location, I really do. Especially when they're shot on location where I actually live. Look! It's the Cleveland Park metro station! I've had dinner in that Greek restaurant, and the city's best movie theater is right behind the camera!

I said a lot more about the problems, I know, but it is really a decent little movie with some nice scares. Nicole Kidman's actually surprisingly good, Daniel Craig is excellent, Jeremy Northam's creepy as hell.

I ought to say something about what the pod people are this time around -- Communists, new agers, they've always been something -- but honestly, I'm still trying to decide what that deeper comment here is, if there is one. I mean there's an obvious "emotions, bad and good, are what make us human" message, but that's so horrifically obvious, it would be a shame to waste an Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake on it. I mean, it's one of the greatest ready-made open metaphors out there; surely we can do better. Maybe xenophobic times just make for Body Snatchers movies, simplistic though they may be in execution; maybe context is really all that counts.

Not interested in seeing dead people. No thank you.

I know how you feel, kid.

I don't know why ghost movies freak me out so much more than any other kind of horror movie. Slashers, zombies, vampires, any kind of glopola you can imagine, and I'm first in line. But ghosts just mess my shit up.

In particular, it's the modern ghosts. The pale, transparent, floaty spectres of ages past don't tax my nerves so much -- Jacob Marley used to be a little creepy, but now they all seem kind of quaint. And monster-ghosts, which come back looking and acting very little like real humans -- Freddy Kruger, or Slimer -- also don't bother me.

But the dead girls in The Shining? Good old-fashioned nightmare fodder. Any and all of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense -- though especially that first one, the woman in the kitchen, and later Mischa Barton, the puking one -- kept me awake for weeks, literally, and I was a college student at that point. (Please note that there are no pictures from The Sixth Sense in this post, except for that classic Haley Joel Osment shot. Because having seen it once, almost ten years ago, I still can't bring myself to look at stills from the movie.) I can't even think about watching those Japanese horror movies with the long-haired ladies -- the commercials for the U.S. version of The Ring scared me shitless.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

It's not the essential concept of a dead thing that comes back -- as I said, zombies and vampires don't bother me at all. I think maybe part of it is that they come back just the same, but not; changed, in some way, they have seen what should not be seen, they are not who and what they appear to be, and cannot be trusted, or even truly known.

Another thing is that ghosts are apparitions, by nature, and so cannot be bound by rules. They have no physical form; one could be standing behind you right now.* You can't lock them out, you can't fight them, you can't hide from them. There are no talismans to ward them off, and nothing can protect you.

Possibly standing behind you right now.

And that lack of physicality is behind another reason they wig me out: they could, effectively, be real. Sure, you may not ever have to deal with an actual angry spirit living in your television (or whatever), but with a tiny (and terrifyingly possible) tweak of your brain chemistry, you might see Samara climb out of it just the same. Vampires present a kind of danger never encountered in the real world, while ghosts are basically just the manifestation of madness.

And why the modern ghosts particularly? This is harder to pinpoint, beyond "they're just really freaking scary" (as many important film historians have said). Maybe part of it is the tendency to embody them in that moment of death, making the threat they represent -- not decay, like a zombie, or afterlife, like a vampire, but the actual, painful experience of death -- all the more real.

This is the part where I ought to come up with some pithy conclusion, but I don't really have one. I do want to point out that my house is both generic and only about 30 years old, and has very little in the way of supernatural vibes.** Which is, frankly, one of the reasons I like it so much.

*Actually, though there may not be talismans, I'm fairly sure there isn't one standing behind me right now. One, because I checked before I typed that, but also, two, I have a snoring cat in my lap. That makes an apparition of the malevolent dead seem somehow far less likely. People who've seen The Grudge, please to shut up now (I know there's a cat, but I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALA).

**Also, people who've seen The Grudge, please also to keep to yourselves how new-ish and generic that house is too, kthnx.

It's too late, Freddy. I know you too well now.

The title, I should explain right off. It's a line from A Nightmare on Elm Street: it's heroine Nancy's response when good-natured jock boyfriend Glen inquires, leading into act IV of the flick, as to why she's picked up a book about booby-traps and anti-personnel devices.


I like it. It's such a teenager-y thing to say, casual and to-the-point, cool without being scripty or a wisecrack.

It reminds me of an occasion when I was in college: I was being bullied by the university administration, and by way of encouragement, my father quoted Hunter Thompson to me: "Don't take any guff from those swine." Nancy is saying, basically, that she's not gonna take any more guff from that swine.

Nancy is also giving the mission statement of every woman in horror and, to some degree, every woman out in the real world as well. It's certainly mine: this is my thing now. I'm into survival.

I'm not gonna be den mother for you guys.

I'd really love it if there was a spin-off TV series following the adventures of these two as they

criss-cross the county hunting zombies and have lots of Unresolved Sexual Tension (tm X-Files fandom, back in the day).

I've been watching Dawn of the Dead again. Every now and then, I have this need to just put it on and let it run over and over again for a few days. (Pardon a brief tangent here, but as far as I know the Evil Dead II DVD is the only DVD movie that hits the end of the film and starts over automatically at the beginning, instead of bouncing back to the DVD menu and making you hit 'play' again. I really wish more DVDs did that auto-loop though. Surely I can't be the only person who wants to just put a movie on and ignore it for six hours?) It seems superfluous to say that the movie is good, but it's a fact that that's not why I watch it for days on end. I love, love love the DVD transfer, all radiant and crisp and vibrant. Sure, the zombies look unabashedly stupid in such a clear, high-contrast transfer, with their day-glo red blood and green face paint. But I have a total weakness for that suburban late-70s aesthetic, all orange carpet and imitation wood. Maybe because that was the texture of my early childhood -- rural North Carolina was still catching up on those trends when I was a wee one, in the early-80s -- or maybe because it really was kind of successful in evoking the warmth and comfort it was designed for.


It's also a stand-in for spending time with actual people, though, because at some level I think of Frannie and Peter as friends of mine. Something indefinable about both performances seems to reach through the screen and start a conversation. While Flyboy and Roger, the spaz and the jackal, are relentless in their dopiness and obnoxiousness respectively, Fran and Peter seem in their silences to be listening, and thinking. The other two -- not so much. ("We got this, man, we got this by the ass!" Seriously, what?)
I love Fran, in particular, rescuing Roger with a well-aimed shot from the rooftop. I love her "just take the car, assholes" moment during the lock-out sequence, especially given how good she looks with a gun on her hip and how entirely she embarrasses dense Flyboy on that particular mission. I love how she tells the boys how it is at the start, and I love Peter when he points out to her snorting boyfriend that she's right about all of it (and he, by inference, is a moron, particularly with that eyeroll at him when she "And I don't want you leave me without a gun again" -- the look says, "I did leave you with a gun -- talk to the dipshit here about that one").

I love the quiet friendship that seems to form between Fran and Peter, especially once Roger's gone -- it's all in looks, silences. Does it occur to Fran that Peter is clearly superior to Steven in virtually every way? I think it does, though I may be projecting. But I think they're both essentially good, and so there's nothing she or Peter would imagine doing about that. And that may be one reason why the trio feels so emotionally strained, with nothing to think about but one another, no future but one another.


And don't get me wrong, I love a sassy dame zombie fighter as much as the next third-wave feminist, but the reality of Fran, the fact that she doesn't thrive in the zombie apocalypse, but she copes, the fact that she doesn't already know how to use a gun, but she learns, the fact that she is planning from the beginning for the day when Steven's incompetence catches up with him and she will have to be Flygirl... I'd like to think I'd live up to Frannie's example if and when the zombies come.

The film is rife with things that make me itch, some of it because it's an artifact of another time, some because it's a complicated movie about a complicated world, and some because I am a feminist and George Romero -- well, like I said, it's an artifact. But putting Dawn on again is a bit like spending time with some old friends. It feels a bit like going home.