Christian Slater? Mark Metcalf? Daryl "Chill" Mitchell? What happened?

Playback is a weird little movie. Mostly because every twenty minutes or so, you'll go, "Is that... is that Daryl Mitchell? What the fuck is he doing in five minutes of this movie?" Same goes for Christian Slater* and Mark Metcalf, who similarly show up for just long enough for us to go, "...the hell?" The producers clearly spent all their budget on these guys, though. I mean, it's easy to make fun of movies about movies, because they are the most solipsistic thing to make a movie about. But somebody in the writing chain here though, "You know, the films they shot way back in the day, those little random soundless pieces where you can barely tell what the camera's pointed at? Those are kinda creepy." And that's how Playback happened.

*Christian Slater actually is in it for long enough to get lead billing, kind of hilariously. Honestly, he's good, in a very sleazy and off-putting role. Good enough to make me wonder, seriously, Christian Slater? What kind of personal problem has led to you being in this movie? Because he's not visibly desiccated or bloated or high on something. Why did the world turn against Christian Slater so hard that he's in this movie? And could he do some kind of Mickey-Rourke-in-The-Wrestler-style comeback, maybe? I'd pay to see that.

Leaving aside what all those random people are doing in this movie, it's kind of cute. Again, the basic idea is, "Nineteenth-century film footage is creepy looking!" But it's a valid point. It is creepy-looking. And Daryl Mitchell gets to declare that Louis le Prince was the devil. Which is entertaining. I mean, it's on Netflix streaming, so with a little booze to get you through a few slow scenes, it's worth watching. I liked the people, I wanted to see them survive, I was a little sad at the de rigeur nihilistic ending. That's how you can tell if the characters in this kind of disposable horror movie are effective: nothing will end well, but how do you feel about that?

I'm being easier on Playback because I'm a little drunk. That's probably ideal. A fire in the fireplace, a cat, some vodka, and a difficult time in your life. That's what you need Playback for.

Cult TV, Freddy Krueger, and Pop Culture Stockholm Syndrome

Okay, first, a story. I come in just shy of five feet tall, and have always been a lot shorter than average. When I was five, around the time that Nightmare on Elm Street came out, I was the size of a toddler. So little tiny me is toddling around a novelty shop at the mall with my parents, my eye level right around knee height for most adults, when I bump into a pair of legs. I look up to see who I've bumped into, and it's a life-size Freddy Krueger doll. 

I lose my shit. 

I still remember that tantrum, the hysterical sobbing as my parents took me out in the mall concourse to try to calm me down. I remember going home that night and lying in bed, terrified that Freddy Krueger was going to climb through my window and kill me. And for the rest of my childhood, I had nightmares about Freddy. He was my own personal boogeyman. 

Fast-forward to high school. The Sci-fi Channel has a lovely running feature, the Sci-fi Series Collection, that airs short-lived and unlamented sci-fi television shows in their entirety. It was an obvious ploy to fill airtime with cheap content, but it was a treasure for me. (That's where I saw the Planet of the Apes TV show, another one that changed me for the weirder, but that's another post.) They aired all six episodes of a show from a couple of years before, Nightmare Cafe. Created by Wes Craven and starring Robert Englund, the show was a lot sweeter than you might expect, more fantasy than horror. 

Having avoided everything related to A Nightmare on Elm Street ever since that scarring childhood trauma, I had no idea who Craven and Englund were. I just knew I ADORED Nightmare Cafe, particularly the snarky and mercurial angel of death, Blackie. When I discovered that my beloved Blackie was also Freddy Krueger, my brain kind of melted. 

But by then I was a jaded teenager, not to mention a devotee of classic horror from the 20s and 30s, so I decided it was time to face the boogeyman. At a sleepover at a friend's house, she suggested the most recent of the Nightmare movies, New Nightmare. Saucer-eyed but too cool to admit my abject horror, I agreed. And of course it was the best horror movie I'd ever seen.

Granted, I'd seen next to no horror movies that dated past about 1970 at that point, so it didn't take a lot to awe me. Still, the storytelling was so good that, despite being a movie basically about a movie that I'd never seen, I adored it. Langenkamp and Saxon's performances in New Nightmare were so good, I felt like I'd seen the original, somehow. Little Miko Hughes was so weird and yet so believable -- mid-90s L.A. was so weird and yet so believable, for that matter. Occasionally a character in a movie is a Hollywood star, but very rarely do you see movies about people who just work in movies, known but not by any means famous. 

And then going back and watching Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time after seeing New Nightmare was surreal. But that's not what this is about. 

This is about Freddy, and Robert Englund, who of course appears both as Freddy and out of makeup as himself. It did… strange things to me. Taking my profound childhood fear (and fascination, of course, because that's fear for you) of Freddy with my teenaged puppy-dog crush on Blackie and effectively embodying both in a single figure, who then slices his way out of Heather Langenkamp's bed… it was a sexually formative moment. 

My high school was an historic brick edifice surrounded by old-growth trees and flower beds. Outside the school, there was this particular turn in a particular path I walked regularly which was completely unlit and black as pitch at night. It scared the crap out of me. But when I came up on that turn, I thought of Freddy hiding behind a tree or in a shadow. And that comforted me, even though I still thought Freddy was apt to disembowel me, because no other monsters would dare, not with Freddy there. Only Freddy could kill me, and I loved him, so it was okay. (It's probably fair to say that this had some strange affects on my love life later on, but everybody deals with weird shit, right?) 

I was lucky that New Nightmare happened to the be first Nightmare film I saw, really. If I'd seen, say, The Dream Master (…yeurgh) first, things might have gone very differently for me. I might be writing a blog about romantic comedies right now. 

Instead, I encountered a figure who might do horrible things to me, and who I loved anyway. A grotesque and horrifying monster who was somehow my grotesque and horrifying monster. I went on to watch enough horror movies to write an occasional (...very occasional) blog about horror movies largely because of this man -- this monster. 

Oh, MERDE: High Lane

I've been watching a lot of horror movies lately. More, I daresay, even than when I started this blog. It seems sensible to record some of my thoughts about them, especially since even now I realize I can't quite remember them all. And because Netflix has a lot of obscure and/or crappy horror movies on streaming... a lot of them. It might be nice for someone other than BC at Horror Movie a Day to comment on some of them (not that he's not awesome, but a second opinion never hurts).

So: High Lane. I picked this one out on the strength of the poster. Really. The poster reminded me a little of Yellowbrickroad, which was one of my best blind selections from the Netflix streaming collection, and I hoped for something similarly unexpected. 

Alas. 

It's French -- the Netflix version is dubbed, and I have to say, dubbed pretty well. The first time I started it and realized it was dubbed, I switched to something else, because I thought that would annoy the crap out of me. But in this case, I have to say I found the voice acting quite good. 

Unfortunately I can't say the same for the rest of the flick. The script is just crap, with one-note characters and an incredibly tired story. 

The one reason to watch the flick is to watch some European aerial course climbing. There's an aerial course near Harper's Ferry, WV that I go to, and it's awesome, but you don't see a lot of these hardcore aerial courses in the U.S. So that's pretty nifty. And the cinematography is nice when the camera is pointed at the mountains. I did want to visit Croatia after watching this movie, which is a thing I rarely say. 

Otherwise -- just watch Wrong Turn. Or Texas Chainsaw. Or Deliverance. Or... pretty much anything else, really. 

The Bilchsteim, you know; huge, scaly, big antlers. You don't have those?

Too obsessed with The Avengers to think about horror movies. I could probably write about male objectification and the joy of the female gaze, though. Hmm. Thoughts.

This machine is there to please.

I'm obsessed with Porcupine Tree's album In Absentia. It kind of started with Dirty Knobs, actually -- okay, it started with Warren Ellis. 

Warren Ellis posted a link on his blog to an album... well, he put it best: "An eight-hour piece of ambient drone music broken into thirteen chapters. The album’s name, FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE EDGE OF HELL, is such a perfectly fitting descriptor of the sound that I have little more to add. I’m only 90 minutes in and I swear I can hear organs playing from inside a pit." 

Field Recordings from the Edge of Hell, by Dirty Knobs, put me on the track of more unsettling ambient music. There were so many things about that appealed to me: beyond the obvious appeal to my morbid instincts, it also reminded me, in its documentary presentation of indescribable and inscrutable darkness, of the House of Leaves. Which is totally the kind of thing that makes my brain all wet and spicy. So when Boyfriend gave me a bunch of albums by his new favorite band, Porcupine Tree, and I discovered that they were to varying degrees ambient and creepifying, I was delighted. (It helped that I was in a play at the time that was also morbid and strange, about which I may expound further at some later point.) 

So In Absentia was from a period when they'd moved away from straight-up ambient, more towards a kind of prog-metal-ambient mutant beast thing? And there's murder and mutilation in there, though it's not necessarily obvious all the time. My favorite track is probably "Gravity Eyelids," which segues right into the instrumental "Wedding Nails." The former is as tender and delicate a song about molesting someone as has probably ever been written, but of course it's also got a thick, greasy layer of awfulness right underneath this film of beauty. Yearning and desire and hope and sorrow and fear all at once. And then "Wedding Nails" is a piece that sounds to me as much like murdering someone can be and still be music. It ends with this amazing ambient section, like a breath held in a cavernous place.

I'm partial to Fear of a Blank Planet as well, though that one is creepy in a less visceral, more civilized way. Still unsettling, but it has more to do with suburban alienation and teenage hopelessness and angst than, you know, murder and madness. I do recommend the band in general, though, for those times when you want something subtler than Rob Zombie but more intellectually disturbing.

Wherein I learn to appreciate some of my more tedious academic experiences.

Daisies. (Or Sedmikrásky, if you're pedantic.) A Czech film from the 60s. Apparently it's About Things, but really, I just enjoyed watching it. It's totally avant-garde, which can go either way with me: basically, I quite enjoy avant-garde films when they avoid tediousness, the great plague of movies that are About Things, avant-garde or otherwise. Like, this movie is like the opposite of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, another flick I had to watch for both of my college classes on women directors and feminist film theory.

Yes, I took the class twice -- once freshman year at Smith College, and once senior year, after transferring to Georgetown. The second time, I went in with a bit more of an open mind -- which may come as a shock to my Prof. G, my senior year teacher. The thing is, I was expecting freshman year to see Clueless and K19: The Widowmaker and, you know, Penny Marshall movies. I had it in mind that we'd be seeing the influence that women have wielded in Hollywood, talking about why there weren't more of us, that kind of thing. Instead, lots of avant-garde movies and lots of psychoanalytic theory. This was my very first exposure to film studies, so I was a little overwhelmed. Also I thought most of the theory we read was unbearably stupid. (Even 12 years and a Master's degree later, I still think so, which is probably why I don't have a PhD.)

The second time around, I mostly took it because I figured it would be easy -- I'd seen have the screenings and done half the readings on the syllabus in freshman year, because apparently this is how everybody teaches that class, at every school. I've got to say, one of my few regrets about not going into teaching is that I never get the chance to create a syllabus for Women Directors that has Penny Marshall and Amy Heckerling and Kathryn Bigelow.

(Prof. G made sure the class wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, and bless her for it. She is the only person in my academic career -- which included a "Performance & Culture" concentration at Georgetown that was all film, and an MA in "Media & Cultural Studies" at U Wisconsin-Madison -- to actually teach me cinematic textual analysis. And she thought my analysis of the genre blending and consequent psychosexual tensions in Near Dark was awesome. I should've followed her advice and done Screen Studies up in New York. Alas.)

But anyway. My point is, the "canon" of "women directors" movies is limited and largely unbearable, as a viewer. But there are a few gems that are rarely seen outside of those kinds of classes -- and there's probably some cause and effect there, but anyway -- that I highly recommend to people who want to see a movie instead of a political screed. Daughters of the Dust, The Ballad of Little Jo, Meshes of the Afternoon, Daises -- all are actual films before they are political statements. There's politics in there, certainly, but implicit in stories (as the political always is in life, at least when it really matters).

Daisies was my favorite, and it came up in my last post because it ends with the most fabulous, strangely appetizing food fight in cinema history. Up until then, though, it has lots of arresting, beautiful, absurd imagery. You'll want to go to Czechoslovakia in the 60s, which was certainly not as awesome as it looks in this movie. Anyway: come for the sensory experience, stay for the feminist discourse. It's a good time.

"It's not called 'The Wizard of Creeping Dread.'"

But yeah. Posting is hard. (Let's go shopping!)

So, the creators of The Wizard of Gore (I swear I'm not obsessed with that movie -- it's been about three years since I watched it, but it was actually just a recent re-watching that reminded me I have this blog and then I was like, dude, I should post there again. Anyway) mentioned that people asked them if the movie was going to be gory. According to the DVD commentary, the above title was their response. By way of saying, I've been thinking a lot lately about what I like about horror.

First there's gore. I do quite enjoy a nice splatterfest, drive-in style. But that's really not about scare so much as excess. I get the same thrill out of watching a splatter movie as I do from the food fight at the end of Daisies.* 

I have gotten a lot more into Creepy Things as opposed to straight-up horror movies. I've never been fond of jump scares and much preferred the disturbing and morbid, and I feel like movies are so reliant on the "building tension and building tension and building tension and BWAH!" cycle that I get a little frustrated with them. Like The Woman in Black? I feel like that's the kind of movie I'll need to see a couple of times to really appreciate, because I spent a lot of it with my head in my shirt going, "Ahhhhh something's going to jump out at me and if I keep holding my breath I will pass out." After we saw the movie, my companions and I joked for hours about BWAH SCARY LADY FACE! Because it got silly after a while. And my constitution is too sensitive to put up with the constant assaults on my heart rate, so I just check out after the seventh or eighth jump scare. And yet, Woman in Black has a gorgeous dark waterlogged aesthetic that I think I would enjoy if I could relax a little.

These days I spend a lot of time reading creepy stories, looking at creepy art, and listening to creepy music. I think I'll try to post about some of those things for a while, with women and horror film as a background thing. Consistency be damned! 

SO. I saw a movie a few months ago on Netflix streaming called Yellowbrickroad. With a twee title like that, I wasn't expecting much, but I was completely gripped by the movie by the end. I totally forgot about computering or whatever else I was planning to do at the same time and was enthralled. Gotta take issue with the sound recording -- bleagh. Glad the actors were good, otherwise I would have had no idea what was going on, because a lot of the dialogue is just totally submerged. And yeah, maybe there's some ripoffs from Blair Witch, but man. Honestly? Just as gripping, maybe moreso because real photography means you can actually see what's happening. It's kind of the standing definition of Creeping Dread for me now. So much atmosphere you could cut it with a knife. Really quite good. Must suggest it if you're looking for a couple of hours of tense, vague unpleasantness.

*Which, if you haven't seen it, is definitely worth a watch. I think I'll have to post about it next, horror be damned.