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.