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.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
"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!
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.
Monday, April 30, 2012
I don't think I've mentioned -- most likely because I haven't posted since it came out -- how passionately and aggressively I hate the cover "art" for the Blu-Ray release of Near Dark. HAAAAAAATE. It is a blatant copy of the cover of Fucking Twilight, right down to inexplicably making Caleb gray and vampire-y and Mae pink and human-y -- i.e., it was created by someone who'd never seen the movie. I've rarely considered writing an angry letter about cover art, but my god does this inspire it. BLEAGH.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Don't you dare ruin my dinner.
Huh.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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.
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.)
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.)
Monday, August 3, 2009
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.
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.
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 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.
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