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

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?

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 saw Halloween as more of a teen movie, and it certainly didn't get the kind of across-the-board exposure that Nightmare was 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.

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. 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 Carpenter's, 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.*

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!

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.

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.

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 is under the stairs. 

I think Campbell was 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 degree 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

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

(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.