I'm Into Survival

Don't you dare ruin my dinner.

2010-02-21T20:07:00.000-08:00

Huh.

Well, Netflix tells me I just finished watching Bloodsucking Freaks. Which is good, because otherwise I wouldn't be entirely sure whether I imagined it or not.

By which I mean, that was seriously weird. It was made all the weirder, I think, by virtue of being substantially better than I expected. Maybe it's the effect of watching two Herschell Gordon Lewis movies as my primer on early modern exploitation horror, but that was actually a pretty entertaining hour-and-a-half. Its legendary perversity was of course tamer than a lot of modern BDSM porn, but that's kind of expected, given its time.

The real surprise was how charming Sardu was. (A friend I described the film to made a connection to Zod. "Kneel before Zod!" Yeah, that might not have been a coincidence, actually.) He reminded me of no one so much as Dr. Pretorius, mincing around in his dungeon dressed exactly like the director's assistant from The Producers and camping it up like there was no tomorrow.

Which, from the film's point of view, there isn't. It's bizarre that something so gleeful could also be so nihilistic, and it quite warms my heart to witness fatalism enacted with such good humor.

I suppose I ought to say something about the misogyny at work here, but honestly, this is one of those rare cases where I feel like the misanthropy is truly so predominant a theme that the misogyny is trivial by comparison. People make that argument to me a lot -- so-and-so doesn't hate women particularly, just humanity in general -- but I usually think it's bullshit. You can hate people generally and still hate women in particular. And I notice it's an argument rarely made when women are accused of hating men.

But I think Bloodsucking Freaks is truly a pretty stunning work of wholesale misanthropy. Absolutely everything human in this film is utterly loathsome -- Sardu perhaps less so, but when the Marquis de Sade is the best example of human morality you can find because he, at least, is honest about his evil -- that's a fairly bleak universe.

Yet somehow, again, I enjoyed this. Reasonably good pacing, a great deal of filmmaker energy, and morbid curiosity kept me pretty thoroughly entertained through the whole of this movie. Call me demented, but to tell the truth, I'd probably watch it again.

Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job at a sideshow.

2010-01-12T10:53:00.000-08:00

Oh, Herbert.

That's pretty much the best way to sum up my reaction the first time I saw Re-Animator. Though I've since come to appreciate the rest of the film (except maybe Barbara Crampton's shrieky victim, but we'll come to that later), my first, oh, half-dozen viewings were pretty much motivated by the fact that Herbert West is basically my ideal man.

I mean, he's aggressive, handsome, brilliant, arrogant, rocks a skinny tie, and is really short.* That pretty much covers all my requirements. Unfortunately, yeah, he's kind of a sociopath with zero interest in women. But nobody's perfect.

Which all may help to explain why I'm single, actually.

ANYWAY. My romantic issues aside, he's really an incredible character. Neither villain nor hero, victim nor savior, Frankenstein nor Pretorius, Herbert is one of the great mad scientist characters, truly an inheritor of the great classical tradition of over-reachers -- Dr. Faustus with a pocket protector.

And that's one of the reasons he's become such a cult figure, too -- Herbert is a hopeless nerd. He's like the patron saint of hopeless nerds, because despite being as square as they come, he's supremely confident (and completely justified in his confidence, unlike most real people). He absolutely does not care that people think he's weird and dislike being around him, and he doesn't envy their normalcy or ability to connect with one another in the slightest. And his work, his obsession actually is grand enough and important enough to justify his divorce from the rest of humanity. Unlike most [of us] hopeless nerds, his alternative to human connection actually is a fair tradeoff.

There's a deleted scene on the two-disc DVD in which Dan finds Herbert injecting himself with his own re-agent, clearly addicted to it as a stimulant; it's a nicely played scene by both actors, and the moment of vulnerability for Herbert is quite touching. I do kind of wish they'd kept it, though it's clear why they didn't: it's an ambiguous and human side to Herbert that complicates his character considerably, bringing him too close to the fragile side of madness: in the film as released, Herbert is so larger-than-life that this kind of moment would seem out of place. It only really works if you're inhabiting the film's world so entirely that you're already looking for that humanity -- which I am, of course, but that's what I do.

Anyway. Enough about my horror-movie boyfriend. There's a whole movie here, and it's a good one, though it took me a while to come around to that view. The writing is a little stilted -- Jeffrey Combs basically says as much when he admits on the film commentary that he railed against having to say the line "Terrible, terrible, terrible!" when Herbert finds his work stolen. Because, seriously, not only has nobody in the twentieth century ever talked like that, I doubt anybody has ever talked like that outside the confines of an H.P. Lovecraft story. On the other hand, there are a few lines, like "trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed," (more on that later, obviously) that almost make up for it.

The deaths, though, are fantastic. Awesome effects, enough blood and gore and mayhem to totally satisfy -- apparently the crew decided Stuart Gordon's motto was "More is not enough," and that's evident onscreen.

But then there's Meg. Oh, Meg. Well, wait, first there's Dan, and I gotta defend Dan, because it took me a long time to join Team Dan. It's a totally thankless role and I think Bruce Abbott really does an awesome job with it and is subtler than he's given credit. The dynamic between Dan and Herbert is tricky, and he largely has to carry it because Jeff Combs is otherwise occupied devouring the scenery. (Said with love!)

All right. Meg. She just -- she gets on my last nerve, she really does. She's a victim in every sense, but that needn't necessarily be a deal-breaker -- so is Cheryl in The Evil Dead and I'm always prepared to defend her. Meg's just so blonde and... blonde. I mean, she doesn't really have any defining characteristics to speak of, besides being helpless and blonde, and being an amazing screamer, which -- again, so irritating. And I don't blame Barbara Crampton, I really don't, because she rocked it in From Beyond. But, nasty as Herbert is about her, he's kind of right that she's mostly just in the way of people getting stuff done ("bubble-headed co-ed" is the kind of meanness that I completely love him for. What's that Liz Phair line -- "everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, true and mean"?) And it's such a small central cast, and Meg is the only woman, which is fatal in a horror film. Not only is she guaranteed to die, she's guaranteed to be annoying getting there, because the "good girl" always is and if you can only have one female stereotype in your horror movie, that's what you're going to get.

But that brings me to another point about women in horror movies that I think often gets glossed over: "good girl" is often popularly translated as "virgin," and that's obviously not applicable here -- or, I think, in a lot of genre fiction. I like to bring up The Stand: the "bad girl" is a virgin, and the "good girl" obviously isn't, but that's not really how you tell the difference. The "bad girl" doesn't give Our (male) Heroes what they want, and the "good girl" does. When the author is taking a paternal stance towards a female character, "good" means virginal, but when he regards her as a potential mate, "good" means available. Teenaged girls, for example, are almost always "supposed" to be virgins (Halloween, Sleepaway Camp), while girls in college are "supposed" to be available (see also April Fool's Day) -- though not too available, and Meg's loyalty to Dan is central to her supposed likability. And I'm not saying that it's not a positive trait or even an unrealistic one, but it defines her exclusively in relation to him in a way that makes her essentially impossible to like. Basically, here's a litmus test: turn Character A into a straight man. Is there still a reason for him to be in the movie? In Meg's case, nope. Then, given my relative lack of interest in seeing her naked, why should I like her?

Again, Barbara Crampton kills in From Beyond, and it's in large part because she's not paired off: her character stands on her own, and as such there's little they can do to render her helpless (for all that Stuart Gordon tries, bless his pointed little head).

I have this personal connection to Stuart Gordon. I was active in a theater in Madison, Wisconsin that he actually started back in the 60s. Every time our managing director gave the first-rehearsal speech about the theater's origins, he'd point out that Stuart Gordon was the writer of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and inevitably forget the title of Re-Animator. I think he did it just to bug me. So I can't hold too much against Stuart, because he's like my theatrical great-godfather or something.

That said: wow. Yeah. The "head giving head" scene. It's a joke, and a truly, desperately unpleasant one. I know it's the movie's most famous moment, and like the tree rape in Evil Dead, it's famous because no one can believe they went there. And in the end, I'm pretty staunchly of the opinion that they probably shouldn't have. If it were a moment of horror, like the tree rape, it would at least earn some marginal respect for making violence against women unpleasant, but: it's a joke. When I re-watch the movie -- and I do, a lot -- I always get queasy there, because unlike the rest of the movie, it's not gross in a fun way. It's gross in a Reservoir Dogs ear-cutting scene way, and I think we can agree that that's actually not funny at all. You could certainly argue that the circumstances are so bizarre and ridiculous and improbable that it's too removed from reality to take personally, and I think that's a valid argument -- maybe especially if you don't consider the world of horror movies, where shit like this happens, to be your world, so it's utter fantasy rather than just another story about the world. But it just doesn't work for me, and I think that's the movie's shortcoming, not mine.

*(I've also been known to posit that Hellboy may be my perfect man: tough, cocky, loyal, loves cats and junk food, brings beer to a date and has a prehensile tail.)

Was that the boogeyman?

2009-08-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

Halloween. I will admit right out, I went into this one biased because everyone else seem to have hated it and so I was determined to give it the benefit of the doubt, because I am nothing if not an iconoclast.

I should also admit that I don't consider myself a "fan" per se of either Halloween (1979) or John Carpenter. It's a great movie, don't get me wrong. I just never had any of the same affection for it that a lot of contemporary horror fans and critics do. Part of that is a question of age: I was born in 1981 and was a child of the 80s, when "every kid knows who Freddy is... like Santa Claus," but slasher movies in general were not really meant for kids. I always sawHalloween as more of a teen movie, and it certainly didn't get the kind of across-the-board exposure that Nightmarewas getting throughout my impressionable years. Heresy though it may be among the hard-core horror crowd, I didn't see Halloween until I was a freshman in college and it really didn't have much of an effect on me. I mean, it was fun, but not especially scary.

That having been said: I did enjoy this movie, but I think Rob Zombie was unequivocally the wrong choice for it.

Carpenter is about restraint; Zombie is about excess. If I were going to pick a 70s classic to assign Zombie I'd obviously have had him remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: that's a movie that's a clear part of Zombie's filmmaking lineage, far more so than Halloween. I'm sure he's as familiar with Carpenter as any good horror fan, but Chainsaw's gritty, ugly, sweaty aesthetic and fascination with taxidermy, cannibalism, perversion and mad redneckery is all Zombie.

Watching the movie try to negotiate that central contradiction is like watching amateur gymnastics. Ultimately it doesn't really succeed, and the ways in which it fails really highlight why Zombie was the wrong director.

The nitty-gritty is this: the first half or so of the film is really entertaining, while the second feels like Zombie is swimming upstream against material that, though once horrifying, now feels almost quaint -- even nice, compared to his usual stuff. Everything Zombie injects into the movie -- the background on the Myers family, the scenes at the hospital between Michael and Loomis, even the lengthy scene basically created to give Ken Foree a gratuitous cameo -- it all has the ring of authenticity and the characteristic gonzo excess of a Zombie film.

The whole things starts to unravel when we're dealing with the actual meat of the film that was Carpenters, when Zombie is treading -- far too carefully, far too anxiously -- on the master's turf. While the murderous chaos of the film's climax works reasonably well, the air has already been let out in an overlong coda in the middle. In Carpenter's film, this was the ramp-up, the tightening of the screws that made the explosive climax work; here, it just feels like naptime. Slow burn tension is just not what Rob Zombie does, and he seems unsure and the pacing goes leaden when he's trying to establish the Strodes and Laurie's friends, characters with whom he clearly never fully connected.

Here we come to why this was maybe the wrong story for Zombie to tell: the moments when the movie really rings false are in the polished suburban tidiness of the Strode house, the ordinariness of a modern high school, the interchangeable ticky-tacky houses where Laurie spends her days, and which Zombie clearly despises and is unable to really portray in any relatable way. Laurie herself, the virginal tomboy Jamie Lee Curtis made sweet but not sugary, is so alien to his universe he has no idea how to make her his own in any meaningful way. Since Laurie is, ostensibly, the hero of the piece, this is obviously a major problem. Michael and his mother are acutely real, multi-dimensional and genuine, while Laurie seems to have wandered in from the set of a sit-com next door.

This is ultimately the film's great weakness: Laurie Strode, her family, and their home are all very clean, very nice, and completely unbelievable. Oh, Zombie makes an effort to make them his own, introducing Laurie by having her tell a filthy child molestation joke to her mother over breakfast, complete with obscene hand gestures. It's ludicrous, and frankly really embarrassing: not because the joke is gross, but because it's a naked attempt to make these characters at home in Rob Zombie's universe, a place none of them would ever be caught dead. Literally. Even Dee Wallace seems embarrassed, not because of the joke but because of how forced it all feels.

Maybe if a teenaged Sheri Moon Zombie were Laurie, or even a younger Fairuza Balk, or Rose McGowan -- hell, Mandy Moore could have pulled this off a few years ago, in the Saved! years, when she was so good at playing a WASP princess with a nasty side. You need somebody with some edge, and not the foul-mouthed cheerleader kind of edge that Taylor-Compton tries to develop. It's like he didn't have the money for Miley Cyrus or Hayden Panatierre, and he didn't have the imagination to conceive of a Laurie who might reasonably be able to survive in his world, so he wound up with this. I'm sure Taylor-Compton is good at doing the thing she actually does, which if I were to guess involves Disney in one way or another. I mean, Jamie Lee Curtis essentially had no edge, but then Jamie Lee Curtis was anchoring a John Carpenter movie, not a Rob Zombie movie. And Scout Taylor-Compton is, let's face it, no Jamie Lee Curtis, much less a heroine who could under any circumstances actually survive a Rob Zombie movie.

But the first part of the film, the part that he's basically invented from whole cloth, the part that's all Zombie, has none of these problems. Zombie has an eye for mise-en-scene like few others in moviemaking these days, or any days, and his style is unmistakable. Like I said, TCM is the obvious granddaddy of the Zombie aesthetic, particularly in the awesome clutter of the universe he works in. He never specifies a period, but the first act feels like it's set in the 70s, and once again his feel for and love for the period is rendered perfectly tactile and real.*

His gift for realizing a particular form of domestic disfunction is put to splendid use: the Myers house is a suburban rendition of the same sense of unraveling chaos he explored so gleefully in House of 1000 Corpses. There may be less taxidermy on display, but the filth is still there, and Zombie still wallows in it, loves it, swims in it 'til his fingers get all pruny.** And his enthusiasm is infectious: the first act of the film, right up through the Myers massacre, is rich and vigorous and just batshit awesome.

And that's exactly who you think it is.

It helps that Daeg Faerch is scary good. I hear he isn't back for the flashback scenes in Halloween II -- inevitably, he did age, even during the production (Zombie notes on the commentary that Daeg was visibly taller in the hospital scenes, which no doubt made him incredibly glad he shot in order). He's a fierce and frightening presence, with eyes more haunting than most grown-up movie monsters. Evil kids have a particular frisson all their own (check out the fantastic Kindertrauma if you doubt it, a site devoted entirely to kiddie and childhood-related horror), as a long string of movies from The Bad Seed to The Omen to The Exorcist and even the currently-playing Orphan are well aware. Most of those kids, though, have an otherworldliness to them that removes them somewhat from our day-to-day experience, making them less a palpable and immediate threat and more a weird apparition from hell. Faerch's Michael Myers isn't at all weird, he isn't spooky or odd. He comes across like a totally normal kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and heaven help you if you don't look in his eyes before you hire him to water your plants or walk your dogs. Because between Zombie and Faerch, they captured exactly what Dr. Loomis always talked about when he tried to explain Michael: the sheer absence of a soul behind those hooded eyes.

But Sheri Moon Zombie acquits herself almost as well. She was the real revelation of The Devil's Rejects, if you ask me: I fully expected to see maturation in Zombie's style as a director and a maturation in terms of his approach (though, granted, I was still a bit boggled by how much more confident and proficient he was by his second outing), but I had no idea, after her vacuous giggling in House, how good Moon could be. And as Zombie keeps writing her better parts, she keeps meeting the new challenges: she actually plays a sympathetic character and is even more real and nuanced than in TDR. Moon and Faerch are really the anchors of the movie, and it's when we lose them that everything goes awry.

*Actually, he never sets a period because the "present day" scenes are clearly set in the present day (2006, per the movie's release date), meaning that at least 25 years ought to have passed since the Myers massacre and Laurie should be a working adult, not a 16-year-old. The clothes, the cars, and the cell phones are all vintage mid-2000s. He didn't want to go to the effort of setting the later scenes in the early-mid 90s, and he supposed, likely correctly, that The Kids at whom he was targeting his movie wouldn't got to see it if all the teenagers were either wearing high-tops and color-blocked neon or not brushing their hair and wearing a lot of plaid. But he loves the 70s and he doesn't love the late 80s, so he said, if I were to guess, "Ah, fuck it." Even though I appreciate Zombie's love for the 70s and it's clearly the period that best lends itself to his aesthetic, the refusal to go make even the vaguest gesture in the direction of temporal continuity grates, because it's stubborn laziness. Remember that point in the 90s when Somebody had an intervention with Hollywood scriptwriters to explain to them that you couldn't have a character in her 40s in the present day whose flashbacks to her teen years involved sock hops and poodle skirts? No, not even you, Stephen King? Whoever did that needs to have a sit-down with Rob Zombie. I'm sorry, Rob: people who were babies in the 70s are approaching 40, and you're old now.
*Yet again, I find myself quoting something with the full realization that nobody else will get the reference, because the crossover audience between Rob Zombie's Halloween and the Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline rom-com French Kiss probably is... just me. Suffice it to say: not my line, but a good line, and I feel the need to cite my sources.

Call the Fremonts, fast! And for Pete's sake, don't let them eat anything!

2009-07-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, I have learned my lesson about setting myself assignments. I have one more Evil Dead post to write, or rather one more chapter in a marathon essay. But I don't feel like writing it, and knowing that I'd said I was going to do it, I didn't want to write something else, and now I've seen both Blood Feast and Rob Zombie's Halloween and written about neither. So: I will be returning to The Evil Dead at some point, but for now it's just going to have to wait.

So I rented Blood Feast.

Wow. Just... wow.

I admit, I'd never seen a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie before, and I didn't know what to expect. I guess he got a little overhyped. I've read a lot of Joe Bob Briggs, obviously, and I realize that the drive-ins didn't ask for a lot in terms of writing or production value or acting or ... well, anything besides some fake blood and a few breasts.

But for Cliff's sake, this is godawful.

I can put myself in the shoes of someone who'd never seen someone's head lopped open and their brain scooped out, to whom the intersection of ~~naked~~ occasionally under-dressed women and bloody violence was a new concept. From that point of view, I can see how the boob-flashes plus the bloody wrist-stumps and disembowelings would be a mind-blower, and who cares if the dialogue is laughably awkward or the acting is well below the standards of community theater.

The effects are pretty tragic as well, though I guess at the time they would have been shocking. I've always thought that one of the reasons Night of the Living Dead works as well as it does is that it's in black-and-white, which nicely masks the cheesiness of the effects; one of the problems (also one of the strengths, I'll grant you) with Dawn of the Dead is the intense 70s colors, rendering the zombies bright blue or green and the blood day-glo red, shading occasionally into an almost neon fuschia. Blood Feast suffers from the same problem; the effects might be a little more gruesome if they weren't quite so... loud.

And the acting... oh, the acting. You'd have to be weird or desperate to take a job in this kind of movie back then, I suppose. So desperate because literally nobody else would hire you to say words in front of a camera (and, in these folks' case, not without reason), or so weird that you could not go amongst normal people. Basically, these are actors and technicians who made this movie while they were waiting for Ed Wood to get the funding together for his next flick.

As a piece of film history, it's sort of amusing. As actual entertainment, it's unwatchable. See if you can scout out a scene on YouTube, or watch the first couple of scenes and then call it quits: it's not getting any better, and that's forty minutes* of your life you can't get back.

Next up on my drive-in history tour is Bloodsucking Freaks. I've read extensively about it, which will probably guarantee more disappointment. But seriously, it's got to be better than this.

*Drive-in movies were no doubt shorter than we expect these days, though I also wonder if footage got excised from this little epic along the way; it clocked in at barely 50 minutes when I saw it.

It was the woods themselves... they're alive, Ashley.

2009-05-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

Oh, Evil Dead. You scamp.

It's like the 90-minute enactment of every feminist horror fan's internal conflicts with the genre.

I mean, obviously, tree rape. It's another elephant. One of the reasons I was excited about the DVD of the film was to finally get a definitive word from the filmmakers about that, but almost inevitably, I was disappointed. Raimi and Tapert -- actually Tapert specifically takes credit for it -- say that it was just an idea they had to push the scene further and make it more painful for the audience.

"Sam, I was thinking, how can we hurt the audience?" is exactly what Tapert says. They don't dwell on the point, and this is basically all they have to say about what prompted the tree rape.

However, even though they don't have some Sooper Sekkrit Feminist Statement, nor do they have, for lack of a better word, an excuse for the scene -- still, I think this explanation actually says something positive about their intentions.

Specifically, what's interesting to me is that they don't talk about it being "scary," but painful. And not painful for the character, but painful "for the audience."

Which suggests that the idea that men don't identify with female characters in movies without some kind of psychological gymnastics probably doesn't hold water. Which should not come as any surprise to anyone but the most die-hard Lacanians, really, but which I spent six years of feminist film theory classes trying in vain to argue.

Of course, this only works if you grant that Raimi and Tapert were making the movie specifically for a male audience. I think you'd kinda sound ridiculous arguing otherwise, though, seriously. We're inclusive and enlightened now, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that they really thought any women were going to see the movie except in the tow of a boyfriend. See also: Joe Bob Briggs -- he took girlfriend of the moment Cherry Dilday, who apparently yarked all over the upholstery in the Toronado. (See my previous post for the reference.)

I can give credence to the idea that the filmmakers meant the audience to identify with Cheryl to some extent. They mention on the commentary track for Evil Dead II that a similar scene in that film, minus the money shot, was originally written with a male victim; I guess with the idea that being impaled with a tree branch through the crotch is pretty unpleasant no matter what the anatomy of it.

But I think, especially when you're talking about guys who quickly got out of exploitation film and are now very successful in respectable movies ("indoor bullstuff," as Joe Bob would put it), I think you're going to have a hard time getting them to admit that something like the tree rape scene was intended to be erotic or titillating.

And obviously, this is really the most acutely problematic issue. Is the tree rape erotic? I mean, that's obviously subjective, but less so are the questions of whether it's seen that way, and was it intended to be?

And I can say, being an aficionado of Joe Bob Briggs' work, that the answer to that second question is "yes," albeit in a way that is strange and difficult to pin down. And that's something that the film, and the filmmakers, should probably be held accountable for. After 15-ish years of shock horror film and the drive-in cinema that obviously influenced The Evil Dead, I think everyone involved would sound pretty disingenuous claiming unfamiliarity with the eroticization of extreme sexualized violence against women. Blood, breasts, and beasts: they knew the formula, and they did it justice, if you can call it that.

And this of course brings me to the question of eroticized violence in exploitation film generally. And it's an issue I've struggled with since watching Evil Dead the first time -- it was, I think it's fair to say, the first exploitation movie I ever saw, and I enjoyed the hell out of the movie and was left with a new threshold for gore and perversity in horror movies. But eroticized violence is unavoidable, even central, seen by many as a virtual requirement to qualify for the "exploitation" label.

In a sense, it's horror in its purest form: what is the genre about, after all, but taboo and the violation of taboo -- the seeing of What Must Not Be Seen? Sexualized violence lies right at the heart of that territory.

Now, just because that's What Horror's All About doesn't make it okay. I think there's a razor's edge here, and it's hard to define where the boundaries are. Clearly, what is personally offensive, what is genuinely socially and culturally harmful and degrading, and what it actually kind of fun and entertaining are categories we all probably draw a little differently.

There was a fight last week over at Jezebel about whether a rape-simulation interactive DVD is so socially damaging that it's valid to pull it from Amazon, or whether that threshold and where we place it is a question of personal taste (and whether that personal taste should be allowed to direct decisions about what can and cannot be sold to the public). It's a question that's been part of the public discourse ever since we came up with the idea of free speech, and it's not one that I think there's any simple answer to.

So I guess the only conclusion I can draw is that the tree rape is only as offensive or acceptable as sexualized violence in exploitation film ever is. And personally, I would argue that, especially in a cinema as marginalized as this one, that it is not necessarily Part of the Problem. I'm a lot more concerned about the scene where audiences aren't going "blech" -- even if only for the benefit of the people around them.

Last week I went to a screening for some locally-produced short horror films. I left early on (projection issues rendering staying a waste of time, unfortunately), but not before seeing a little piece of crap about teenage zombies. The idea was that lust turns teenage boys into actual zombies. The boys are interested in nothing but (female) flesh, and the protagonist is a girl who learns that she would be happier and less afraid and conflicted if she just gives it up to her zombie boyfriends like the other girls in the film do. The film offended me a hell of a lot more than Evil Dead ever did, because it offered a blanket acceptance of all of our stereotypes about male and female sexuality -- men are monsters, incapable of self-control, women have to be cajoled into sex, women lack the monster impulse (none of the female characters become zombies), and teenage sexuality is horrific and dangerous, but funny. Most of all, it basically stripped women of all sexual autonomy, yet a-freaking-gain. Just give in! You'll feel so much better! As if that's any less destructive a message than the ever-so-subtle "ABSTINENCE" scrawled in three-foot-high letters on the blackboard in the "sex-ed" classroom where one girl takes refuge.

My point here is not to savage this little short, much as it may deserve it, but rather to point out that nobody is suggesting at any point, textually or subtextually, that The Evil Dead normalizes tree rape. Or any other kind of rape. Rape is the work of EVIL TREES.

And that, I think, is the thing that redeems a lot of exploitation film. It's neither making an argument nor reinforcing an assumption that there is anything acceptable in any way about violence against women. Its position is so far outside the margins that most people are vaguely embarrassed to admit they watch it at all, and the scant one or two who would actually publicly admit that they're turned on by it were, let's face it, probably mentally unbalanced and dangerously deranged to start with.

So it's not something like Stockholm (the DVD causing the fight at Jezebel), or Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, or the fact that Chris Brown continues to show his face in public, all of which make pretty profound arguments in favor of rape or violence against women.

There are arguments to be made that Evil Dead might reaffirm some negative, societally-held views about rape -- from a horror fan's perspective, anyone who wanders off into the woods because they heard a noise out there is "asking for it," whatever "it" may be. But I think you're reaching a little bit, at that point.

Really, the rape itself bothers me less than the reactions of the other characters... but that's for next time! Yes, this will have to be a three-parter. Incredibly enough, I still have a few more things to say about The Evil Dead, all inspired by a single word on the director commentary. Stay tuned to find out what it was!

Join us.

2009-05-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

So obviously I need to talk about The Evil Dead. I've been avoiding it, overwhelmed by the prospect -- I've been avoiding a lot of movies on my "to-do" list for the same reason, actually. But okay, here we are.

You sure this is a good idea, guys?

Yeah, totally, go for it. We'll be right ... back here.

I'm going to have to split this post into two parts, because it's seriously way, way too much ground to cover in one post. The first part is where I gush about how awesome this movie is. The second part is where I suggest that it's immoral and unethical and that Raimi/Tapert/Campbell should probably be ashamed of themselves.

Never let it be said that my opinions are simple.

Complicated lady.

It's the elephant in the room for me personally: earlier this year, I watched it every single night as I fell asleep. It is actually good for that: the dialogue drops off drastically after the first half-hour. I usually fall asleep right after the tree rape. ...God. Okay, yeah, it's something we need to talk about. But that'll be in part II.

Okay. [deep breath] I love the movie, in bizarre and perhaps unseemly ways. It grabs ahold of my lizard brain and won't let go.

Ordinarily I'm a big proponent of story and character as central to a good film, but really, this one's just about pictures. Brutal, bizarre images and the raw, unformed ball of charisma that was Baby Bruce -- even when you don't know what the hell is going on, you can't look away.

Cutie.

Raimi's natural talent as a director is here in its purest form: essentially making it up as he goes along, he comes up with unrelenting craziness and makes it look easy. With virtually no professional equipment, he accomplishes incredible things: that overhead tracking shot of Ash he got by hooking his legs on the cabin's rafters, gymnast-style, and shooting while hanging upside-down.

There isn't a single inch of this cabin Raimi didn't wedge himself into to get a shot. Here, he's under the stairs.

Campbell may have been standing on Raimi's face for this one.

(Stories like that make me assume that they were using Bolexes or some other super-light camera with no sync-sound, then looping sound later on. By contrast, essentially exactly the same equipment was used to make Manos: The Hands of Fate.)

It's gonzo indie filmmaking at its absolute height, and you can't not love and admire it for everything it accomplishes. I'm not of the school of indie apologists who will say that about movies like Manos -- if this movie bit the big one as hard as that one does, I wouldn't be writing about it. But this is great filmmaking and a great example of what infinite determination and unbelievable patience can do -- the movie took more than two years to complete. Dude, that's essentially a master's degree.

Actually, getting a master's is a lot like this.

I do acknowledge that there is a definite camp factor here, and that it's a big part of why the movie is awesome and why I love it so much. I admit I was genuinely shocked when Raimi said the film wasn't meant to be funny, because it doesn't have that Ed Wood quality that makes failure charming -- it doesn't feel like a failed horror film, but rather a successfully campy comedy/horror film.

Whee!

But I guess part of the reason I laugh is the gonzo factor -- all the fluids going ever-which-way, the obvious glee with which they're covering Bruce in a film of goo, all the monsters making noises that veer from "eerie" to "frickin' loud" to "asthmatic fruit bat." You go that far over the top, a fair amount of camp just comes with the territory.

On the Evil Dead II commentary, talking about the latest puddle of goo they'd immersed Bruce in, Raimi notes, "My policy is to soak Bruce's membranes in as many strange dyes and liquids and potions and chemicals as possible."

Fluids everywhere.

Joe Bob Briggs characterizes Evil Dead thusly: "On the old barf meter... I think you'll agree that this is the paint-the-room-red vomit champion of 1983." That's from "The Evil Dead: Red Meat City," compiled in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in. Joe Bob didn't manage to get the film into a Grapevine, Texas drive-in until 1983, incredibly enough.

And yet, there are some truly chilling moments. Cheryl's initial moments of possession, with that broken-doll pose (Tyra would be so proud!*) as she hangs in mid-air, that angry Pazuzu voice, and the genuinely effective make-up still manage to give me a little shiver every now and then.
The blood flood in the basement, played for freakout factor here (rather than Three Stooges-y punchline it would be when they revisit the gag in Evil Dead II), is still effective, particularly with that revved-up carnival music.

Let's see Nicholson try this.

That moment of foreboding in the third scene as they approach the house for the first time works so well, with the slamming of the porch swing like the clock counting out the final moments until their fates are sealed.
And leading up to that, I've always like the drive through the woods that brings them to the cabin; growing up in rural eastern North Carolina, I knew a lot of people whose "driveways" were those long unpaved back roads, and the movie perfectly captures that moment of doubt and danger as you wonder what's really at the other end.
I could say a lot of good things about Evil Dead, but few of them are new. The criticisms aren't new either, but some of them deserve more nuance than I think they've gotten before.

So, next time, I rip the beloved movie to shreds. Ash is so excited!

*It has occurred to me that the overlap between potential readers of my blog and fans of America's Next Top Model is, most likely, pretty much just me. That's okay. My planet is a weird but fabulous one.

Sally still carries a scar on her cheek

2009-05-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

I know, it's been two weeks since I last posted. And I'm determined not to turn into one of those bloggers who never posts about anything but why she hasn't posted lately. Suffice it to say, I shall try to dig up some clever thoughts about a horror movie soon. Under consideration: Re-Animator, Evil Dead, Dead Alive and Blood Feast (which is the next thing on my Netflix queue -- oh! actually, I loaned my Netflixed copy of River's Edge to Dave and I can't watch a new movie until he sends it back. See, it's not my fault I haven't updated).

At the moment, to tell the truth, I'm kind of obsessed with The Who. It's difficult to connect that back to horror movies. I guess I could post about Tommy, except that I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be that scary. Although with Ken Russell there's really no telling. Oliver Reed is pretty much terrifying just by showing up on set, and I can't be the only OCD case who has to leave the room during the scene where Ann-Margaret rolls around in beans. And there's Uncle Ernie, of course, and Keith Moon doesn't have to work that hard to be kinda frightening either, even when he's aiming at completely ridiculous. Maybe especially when he's aiming at ridiculous. The wacky comedy child molester... well, I've always had mixed feelings about it.

Anyway. One of those I mentioned earlier, soonish. Watch this space.

Ling Chi: Death by a Thousand Cuts

2009-05-04T14:00:00.001-07:00

(Quick note: Blogger does not have the option to label only a single post "adult content," and I refuse to put a warning label on my entire blog because there will, inevitably, be the occasional breast in the occasional screencap. There's a couple in here. You know what? Breasts happen. Because of, you know, half the human race having them. Deal.)

So to make up for the lack of illustrations in my last post, this will one will be all illustrations (with snarky commentary, of course). A copy of The Wizard of Gore -- um, magically appeared, totally legally -- at my house, so here it is. Apologies that some of the images are low-quality -- my, um, magical copy has some magical quality issues.

Sigh... such lovely credits. Such a mediocre movie.

The party scene, wherein Ed demonstrates that hipsters reach a certain threshold of self-important pompousness at which they not only can't have fun, but they begin to actually implode from the force of their own toolishness. "I dig their sound." Ed actually has that line. Seriously, any human being who has said those four words in that order since 1980? Is a neo maxi zoom dweebie in desperate need of something -- anything -- to fill that yawning chasm between his ears.

"Sit down, bitch -- you die tonight." Apparently the line was supposed to be "sit down, slut," but Glover changed it. Because he's Crispin Fucking Glover, bitch.

"Did you feel something? Anything?" Also: fairly good shot for illustrating that yes, the codpiece is sort of amazing, but also that the filmmakers completely overreacted to it when they were like "oh my god we can't make the movie if Crispin insists on the codpiece." They spend, no lie, at least ten minutes of the commentary talking about the codpiece. I, on the other hand, didn't even notice it the first time I watched the film. Sue me: I was looking at his face.

I simultaneously find Ed's apartment assy and pretentious and also kind of covet it. Oh, well.

The effects are really cool, actually, for a low budget movie -- because "realistic" is impossible on that budget, they go for "surreal" and are generally pretty successful.

Dourif doing that thing Dourif does.

This is such a well-shot scene. It's not brilliantly edited; there's a couple of obvious continuity problems. But the wash of cool sunlight and the awesome location make me very happy.

I don't have a problem with taking inspiration from another actor's performance. What Kip Pardue does here, however, is actually outright theft. If it were consistent throughout -- but no, for some reason it's only in this scene that he simply cribs the Sweaty Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Does that guy have a name?

Enlightened comment on misogyny: you're doing it wrong.

Don't you just kind of hate these people on sight? Also, please to note Maggie's atrocious hair and godawful wardrobe. I think a high brow is a beautiful thing on many women; Christina Ricci is one of Hollywood's most gorgeous women. Bijou Phillips, though, just looks -- at least with this hairdo -- like she's going bald.

So one of the random trivia facts with which I impress my friends at parties is this: Joshua Miller here and Jason Patric starred in Near Dark and The Lost Boys, respectively -- the two big vampire movies made in 1987 and released within days of one another. As it happens, they're also half-brothers. They're the sons of Jason Miller, who was nominated for an Oscar for playing Father Karras in The Exorcist. In at least one of my numerous viewings of this movie, I decided that Josh turned out looking a lot more like his father than Jason Patric does (Jason Patric, as you will no doubt note if you watch the trailer for Downloading Nancy, now looks alarmingly like post-pudgification Vincent D'Onofrio.) Dude, look at that nose. That's a family nose, right there.

Cool images, cool transitions, beautiful production design, even some very nice shot composition: the cinematographer, Christopher Duddy, and the designer, John Pollard, did an amazing job on this picture. Again, the talent going to waste here just kills me.

Okay, here's one of the film's key problems, summed up in an image. This is actually a clue: Ed sees this and frowns. What we're supposed to get from that is that a pair of his shoes are missing. Do you get that from that image? No, of course not, because you don't know what the shoe rack looked like before. You just wonder why Ed is confused by his shoes. That's the problem I'm talking about: the filmmakers are playing a game of spot-the-difference with us without showing us the original. Even on repeat viewings, there's still no baseline: for all we know, Ed Bigelow does this every week. "It's like our lives started that night," Ed says. That's exactly the problem: unless you're playing Pirandello meta-games, characters ought to feel like they existed before we met them. So I guess the big question is, do the filmmakers know that meta and mindfuck are not necessarily the same thing?

Interesting note: the version that I -- um, that the magical movies fairies brought me is a slightly different cut than the one I saw originally. I'm assuming it's the R-rated version rather than the unrated, but I'd swear there are other differences, lines in one missing in the other that would have nothing to do with the rating. If I weren't a little bit tired of this one I'd get copies of both and compare them, but honestly I think I need to watch another movie for a while. I'm on a Crispin Glover kick; I may bump Willard to the top of the queue.

Do you feel something? Anything?

2009-04-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-18T18:43:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-13T14:22:00.001-07:00

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!"

2009-04-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-05T12:09:00.000-07:00

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").

"Smooth move, Flyboy."

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.