The Lair of the Boyg

The Sleeper (2012) - 1.5/4

2012-02-01T19:03:00.007-05:00

I had high praise for filmmaker Justin Russell's previous film, Death Stop Holocaust. Like Death Stop Holocaust, The Sleeper is a throwback, this time to '80s slasher movies instead of '70s grindhouse horror. But what made Death Stop Holocaust so good, what made me praise it, was certainly not the 'grindhouse' style it affected, nor any of the throwback qualities in an of themselves; it was the nightmarishness and the willingness to experiment in an almost Lynchian way with creating terror, quite contrary to anything in the grindhouse style. With The Sleeper, however, Russell does not seem aware of what made his previous film good, as he excises the best parts of Death Stop Holocaust and this time runs with pure throwback.

The Sleeper concerns a maniac who decides to terrorize a sorority with creepy phone calls and, eventually, a hammer jabbed in the eyes. As sisters begin disappearing, the house mother calls the police. Our attentions are focused on a new pledge, who is naturally set to be our final girl. Of course, some subplots involve the horny frat boys who want to bed some of the sorority sisters. If you know your '80s slashers, it's just a waiting game until most of the cast is killed and the final girl escapes and kills her pursuer.

The problem with The Sleeper isn't so much being a full-on homage. I like '80s slashers very much. However, being a lightweight connoisseur of the subgenre, I'm also very well aware that many slashers are bad, not in the good way, but in the very dull way. They're not all indie splatter hits like Maniac! and The Prowler, subtle classics like Halloween and Black Christmas, or even second-tier honourables like American Gothic, Just Before Dawn, Hell Night, or He Knows You're Alone, or even the Halloween sequels. You have a lot of rubbish like Night School and Prey, or, at the very worst, Blood Lake. In fact, even some of the memorable slashers aren't that good. Black Christmas and The Prowler are accorded much more respect than their artistic or entertainment values warrant.

My point is that Russell doesn't make The Sleeper an homage to the really good slashers, but to the bad ones. From the credit graphics onward, it's clear this is one of those made-on-the-cheap Canadian co-production sort of slashers no-one really remembers because they were too banal to be worth the neurons. I could best describe it as He Knows You're Alone meets Black Christmas. The phone calls and sorority house are Black Christmas, albeit not as good, and the killer, whose identity is irrelevant, reminds me of the He Knows You're Alone killer.

The very unfortunate reality is Russell is so incredibly successful at making his homage that it plays exactly like one of those bad '80s slashers. There are already far too many bad '80s slashers as it is, we didn't need one shot on DV. It's an interesting experiment, but one whose success entails its failure. Had Russell veered from his project course, as he did in Death Stop Holocaust, he could have had a very interesting picture. But The Sleeper is just too faithfully a throwback, to a frankly misguided cinematic space, that it's not very interesting at all.

Super Shark (2011) - 2.5/4

2012-01-29T02:47:00.003-05:00

There's no denying that sharksploitation is the 'sploitation de jour. Most exploitation subgenres take place in previous generations, like the nunsploitation films of the '70s, the blaxsploitation films of the '70s, and the nazisploitation films of the, heh, '70s. Well, the 2000s and 2010s lay claim to sharksploitation. This isn't to say there aren't precurors. Jaws (1975) is, of course, the Black Narcissus of sharksploitation; but there are its ridiculous sequels, films like Deep Blue Sea (1999), and many much cheaper shark movies.

What's interesting about an exploitation subgenre isn't its august precursors or its saturation period--that's the period when the same old narrative is clearly old and tired--but its decadent period, when all creativity is set to scattershot in the hopes something will hit and make the screenplay original. This is the period that gives us the most baroque, bizarre examples of a subgenre. There are only so many times you can have an angry shark attack a beach before it gets boring. But if that shark can take out a commercial jet just by jumping from the sea, it's stupid, but it's not boring.

That's a glorious example of the thoroughly decadent Megashark versus Giant Octopus (2009), a production of the SyFy network. While SyFy films are much derided for their weak CG, washed-up TV actors, and below-average screenplays, the freedom they gave screenwriters to go wild with the CG sharks essentially created sharksploitation as it now stands. How does it now stand? Well, here are some of the titles: Megashark versus Giant Octopus, Megashark versus Crocosaurus (2010), Sharktopus (2010), Shark Night 3D (2011), Swamp Shark (2011), Sand Sharks (2011), of course, Super Shark, and, my personal favourite title, Shark Exorcist (2011).

While the trailer suggests Super Shark is much the same as the SyFy sharksploitation movies, if perhaps a little more tongue-in-cheek, what makes it such a special entry into the subgenre is that it's co-written and directed by Fred Olen Ray, who specialized in over-the-top bizarre horror comedies back in the '80s, making cult classics like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), and Scalps (1983). Could Super Shark be a return to form? Not quite, but it's quite a bit better than any of the other sharksploitation movies mentioned and is intentionally satirizing the subgenre.

Super Shark concerns a shark released by an oil rig's reckless drilling, a shark with the ability to walk around on its fins and even use them to fly. The oil rig, like a giant metal vagina, was naturally destroyed in the process of giving birth to the supershark, attracting the attention of an anti-oil company crusader who looks pretty good in a bikini. She investigates the water and harasses the CEO over dinner and champagne. Meanwhile, a bikini contest is taking place on the shore and two local lifeguards are competing for the same buff dude. But how will they stop the super shark before he eats all the beach losers?

Well, since Super Shark is a genre send-up, we know it'll have to involve the army and a preposterous solution. As it happens, it does! As even the trailer informs us, "Walking tank for a walking shark!" Indeed. Actually, that Super Shark is a satire is in the very title, which mocks the trend in SyFy movies to make sharks impossibly powerful, as in the aforementioned commercial jet destruction. Of supershark, "That's one big ass shark," we're told. And given the guy who says this hasn't seen the shark, but has only seen what it's done, he'd be right. A shark that can topple an oil rig would have to be thousands of tons heavy. But shark movies don't work that way. Little known fact: sharks can brace themselves against thin air, making it possible to topple oil rigs with sheer muscular force even while leaping in the air. You'd expect the shark to just lift his body up, but no, he pulls the rig down. Physics does not apply in shark movies, of course. And that's part of the joke. But the best joke of all is when the shark starts eating up the melodramatic subplots, a hallmark of SyFy writing. Well-done, supershark!

The best sharksploitation movies are a flurry of witty soundbytes and preposterous shark attack sequences. Super Shark scores many points on both fronts. Most of the soundbytes belong to John Schneider as the oil CEO, whose earnest yet sardonic involvement in the film and/or narrative is just the level of irony needed for this sort of film. It's a very good performance. And the shark appears to be a combination of CG and model, or perhaps it's just unusually good CG for the budget. A damn fine-looking shark. As with any sharksploitation film, the plot tends to drag. Generally this is when the army gets involved and we have to wait for them to try out various weapons on the invincible beast. Fred Olen Ray knows this and tries to toss as much plot down the shark's gullet as possible, keeping the film hustling along far better than other sharksploitation flicks. Nevertheless, there's a fair amount of screenwriting debris that slows the pace. Surely the shark could've eaten another subplot or two? Otherwise, Super Shark is quite an entertaining, low-budget sharksploitation horror comedy.

Porkchop (2010) - 2/4

2012-01-15T06:09:00.004-05:00

A large budget and good production values aren't really needed to make a fun film. Just a supple imagination. What's sad about Porkchop is that it begins so imaginatively and ends so banally. The first two thirds of Porkchop are almost a whole other film, a bizarre teenage sex comedy in which a stereotype nerd, a British punk, and a robot (voiced by Evil Dead II's Dan Hicks) all try to get some from a cheerleader and a post-punk lolita, while their more normal friend plays his girlfriend (Ruby Larocca) and the cheerleader.

This rogues gallery heads out for a camping trip, the journey to which makes up the comedy portion of the film. This part of the film is very good. While the acting and caricaturizations are all over-the-top, the characters are funny, the dialogue is witty--often so much so it's quite surprising--and delivered just as it should be. Knowing this film to be a horror film about a pig-headed killer, of course, meant I was in wait for the backwoods slasher action to greet the oddball characters. And that seemed very promising to me. Played as a horror comedy, so much could be done in the same absurd style that characterized most of the film. I imagined the epic battle that might ensue between pigman and robot, for instance, or the horrible death that might be leveled on the punk character.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The last third of the film uses next to nothing of the potential created in the previous two thirds. Once the killer, Porkchop, shows up, the film becomes a poor slasher. In a few minutes most of the characters are dispatched. The robot falls to pieces with one hit--which should be a lot funnier than it actually is. I hoped I'd never say this about any movie, but this could have used fewer pigmen. Or the characters should have put up some amusingly odd fight against the pigman. What does work in the last third of the film is the few bursts of comedy that interrupt the slasher action and the very few moments where horror and comedy really do mix.

While I can't give Porkchop a higher rating given its general weakness as the backwoods horror film it purports to be, I certainly applaud the imagination and absurd humour Eamon Hardiman and co-writer Zack Bassham invest in this film. It's like Revenge of the Nerds meets Don't Go In the Woods made on a $100 budget. Hopefully Hardiman will get better budgets and fulfill his obvious potential better than Porkchop did.

Rage (2010) - 2/4

2012-01-13T06:07:00.003-05:00

I have killed a man for wounding me,

A young man for hurting me.

If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,

Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold. (Gen 4:23-24)

And the insane biker in Rage shall be avenged seven-hundred-seventy-sevenfold, as one offense sends him on a spree of murder and rape of anyone the protagonist, Dennis Twist, knows, has spoken to, has shared breathing space with, or has seen on TV. I exaggerate, but the explanation for the violence is quite tenuous. We all have violent fantasies, most of which are probably disproportionate to the offense that occasioned them. Most of us are very talented at keeping fantasy as fantasy. This film is about a guy who clearly cannot do that. After Dennis (Rick Crawford), a douchebag husband, leaves his sweet wife (Audrey Walker) for a day in town, he meets his mistress and breaks it off in a flurry of exquisitely bad dialogue like, "Were you loving your wife all those times your dick was in me?" He's then pursued by a biker obsessed with making his life miserable, culminating in, as I say, murders and rapes.

You know who else couldn't control their rage? The Great Lord Zeus, King of the Gods. I'm not being glib. Or I am, but only slightly. You see, the filmmaker Christopher Witherspoon, who also plays the biker and has a cameo as The Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel, purposely makes allusions to the biker as a force of fate, not unlike in Greek tragedy. In fact, the Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel even brings up the idea that the truck in Duel is a force of nature. I think Duel is about masculinity, actually, but that's beside the point. The point is that the biker can be seen as a force of pure karma whose personal motivations are scarcely relevant. Dennis's misdeeds, conscious or unconscious, are being revisited upon him many-fold through the person of the biker, and Dennis's guilt allows it to continue. Indeed, were anyone genuinely pursued by karma, our collective misdeeds could seriously fuck us up. Seriously.

When this force of karma is visited upon characters who really have no connection with Dennis's misdeeds, however, the plot is a little lost. Perhaps the anxiety of wanting to make an exciting film had Witherspoon inserting unnecessary violence, or contriving distractions for the biker in order to spare Dennis. I wish he had stuck to his thematic guns and just punished the hell out of Dennis. The character is kind of a douche, though he is trying to do the right thing and return to his wife. However, even when his wife's life may be in danger, he continues trying to hide his affair from her. When she's being assaulted, he cowers in a corner and whines. Dennis continues to whine long beyond the time for whining. So he's not just a douche, he's a pussy too. If anyone deserves enormous on-screen punishment, it's ol' Dennis Twist. Not his wife and not the beer-bellied neighbour. In fact, there is little to no reason provided in the film for harming these people.

I don't think it was wise of Witherspoon to bring up Duel in the midst of Rage, as Rage does not compare favourably. Spielberg's direction of the on-road action is excellent, keeping the momentum of what could so easily be a repetitive and dull film ever increasing until the climax. Moreover, Spielberg had a screenplay by one of the greatest writers of genre screenplays in cinematic history, Richard Matheson, ensuring not an extraneous or weak line of dialogue. Rage does not keep up much momentum, perhaps because there's too much distraction in the city setting chosen. Pausing the chase to discuss fate and the meaning of life with one's therapist doesn't help the pace, nor does bringing one's car in to the garage, chatting with the mechanic, and overhearing a discussion about Spielberg's films. The decision to take the violence off the road for the climactic scenes also serves to divide the action, making it discontinuous and the pace choppy.

Perhaps Rage would have worked best not presenting itself as a road-terror movie, or even staying mostly off-road. Because as a cat-and-mouse road-terror movie, Rage just doesn't hold up to other contenders. Duel, Joy Ride (2001), Hush (2009), and the opening of Jeepers Creepers (2007) are all better at it. This is a major problem in Witherspoon's writing and structuring of the film. Where the film's prime pleasure should be in the cat-and-mouse game, the road games, it really is in the periphery. The cat-and-mouse game is frequently uninteresting or, when interesting, like a bad lover it climaxes too soon. I found myself distracted by the mystery of who is behind the helmet, a mystery that never even threatens our attention in Duel and is already revealed before the action of Joy Ride.

Still, Rage is clearly its own movie with its own themes and internal logic. I enjoyed a good many of the finer touches, dark humour like closing a shower curtain before murdering the victim inside. The sleek, shiny textures of the biker's accoutrement as rendered on digital video are also very enjoyable in a purely sensuous way. And overall, the film does comment on a real truth of this world: there's a lot of rage out there as it is, so we should all try to be a little considerate to others. While a bumpy ride, so to speak, Rage is an interesting film that follows its premises to the end. I hope to see more from Witherspoon, preferably not tying himself to an influence next time.

Road Train (2010) - 2/4

2012-01-13T02:02:00.001-05:00

Road Kill is actually the title for non-Aussies. Road Train, or Royd Troyn if we want to transcribe accurately, is the Australian title. A royd troyn, for those of us not in-the-know, is what Americans call a 'semi' and the British call a 'lorry.' But you're also welcome to use 'big rig,' 'Mack truck,' 'transport', and just 'big effin' truck!'. There's a little more to the royd troyn, howehvah. It has not just one but multiple rectangles hooked to the back of it, not unlike a train. Hum.

Road Kill does have to do with a big truck. As in so many other films, like Duel (1971) and Joy Ride (2001), it has to do with a big truck terrorizing the bajeezus out of some road wimps. For better or worse, the writer of Road Kill decides to do something different with the road-terror movie. To wit, the film takes the road-terror movie and turns it into a magic-realist existential journey. Arguably, all road-terror movies are existential journeys. But this one knows it is. I'm not saying it knows what it's doing. I'm just saying the filmmakers were trying to make allegory here.

Just what does the big truck do? It finds and terrorizes two college-aged Australian couples, of course. One of those couples is having sex and the other isn't. The couple that isn't having sex isn't having sex because the female part of the couple decided to also have sex with the male part of the couple that is having sex. Can't blame the male part of the couple that isn't having sex for not wanting to have sex with the slut who screwed his best friend. But he has bigger fish to fry, because of that big truck I should get back to. The big truck finds these mildly unpleasant flakes and runs 'em off the road. When they go to investigate the truck, they find it empty and steal it. Or is it stealing their souls?

As they drive away, they all fall asleep. The presumptuous truck drives them off the road to the edge of a cliff and lets them simmer for a while. They yell at each other a lot, which I think Australians do in any situation good or bad, and ultimately decide to split up. Here the psychology of everyone in the group is perverted while the imagery of Cerberus is superimposed over the truck. Is the truck a vampiric denizen of hell leading these banal young adults to the end they deserve, with a sort of Antonionian sense of contempt for bored and empty lives, or are they all just suffering from sunstroke, dehydration, and infection? Decide for yourself.

Road Kill works a lot better if you imagine most of what happens as a hallucinatory nightmare of sunstroke than as a genuine magic realist mechanism without explanation. Otherwise, you're bound to view these youths as under assault by pure allegory, and in doing so you'll find yourself suffering the same fate. Either way, however, the prime joys of the film are in the explorations of the mechanism of the truck and, I suppose it's implied, the mechanism of fate. My favourite moment is when a character reaches into the guts of the truck seat and pulls out a key, resembling something from a Cronenberg nightmare. While the truck gradually grows more interesting, the character interactions grow increasingly tedious as their psychoses leave no real trace of their original personalities, and thus is evaporated what little character development and dramatic tension between them there was. Watch for the truck.

Wake Wood (2011) - 2.5/4

2011-12-14T05:50:00.003-05:00

An Irish couple's little girl accidentally feeds herself to a dog. Not the brightest kid, but her parents grieve anyway. They grieve so much they move to Wake Wood, a town of about 40 people, one of whom is Timothy Spall in frumpy fat guy clothes. Turns out Spall's one of those folk wizards who always seem to know an inordinately complicated series of actions that will result in raising someone from the dead, cursing an ex-boyfriend, or making that prostitute who fell on your cat after drinking too much gingerbeer lose a leg to leprosy. In this case, it's raising the dead, namely Little Miss Dogfood 2010. Unfortunately, mommy and daddy, trained, as medical folk, in incomprehensible prescriptions, are incapable of following instructions and so bring forth a monster in a little girl's body--and I don't mean in the hentai sense.

I suppose Wake Wood earns the peculiar distinction of being the goriest evil kid movie thus far. I guess Hammer wanted to make a comeback with a bang, so they have a lot of gooey birthing sequences, organ-removal, mutilated animals, corpse mutilation, and more. It's not just gore, it's weird gore, with strange and compelling wounds, goo, and violations. I think this was a wise decision, as the film is a bit slow-paced, with many of the early deaths being pure accident, and has a plot guessable to anyone who has seen, heard of, or buried a pet since the release of Pet Sematary. The only way to make such a film work is strong atmosphere or going wild with the grue. David Keating aims for a little of both.

As for atmospherics, Keating offers small town Irish folkiness by day and torch-lit rituals by night. The folkiness works well enough as a fantasy of Irish small towns. Of course, it's not inconceivable that this fantasy could be real. These folk wizards walked the lands, even here in Canada, within my mother's memory. I still remember tales of these folk wizards. Like the time a man fell extremely ill, baffling the doctors, and was near death. In came the bumpkin wizard with the pronouncement, "COD LIVER OIL!" "A thimble-full?" someone wondered. No! A shot glass? No! A tea cup? No, no, no! A whole goddam pitcher of the stuff! Jesus Mary and Joseph alone know how many codfish livers were squished between a rock and the dry heel of a gouty sailor to get all that oil, but it was going to be pumped down this sick man's throat whether he liked it or not. If he was going to die, it'd damn well be in a puddle of cod liver oil he sweated through his own skin. And y'know what? It worked. So, the folkiness works too. The torchlit rituals also work. They're both attractive and frightening at once, like a Goya painting or Christian Bale.

So, what Wake Wood is lacking in narrative originality it makes up for in its style. And ultimately it's always style that counts.

Notes from the Turkeyground: Reflections on a Month of Bad Movies

2011-12-13T04:50:00.007-05:00

To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of...a painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference. - Aldous Huxley

Every year I participate in two film-viewing 'challenges'. Both are managed through the online community of the IMDb horror genre message boards. One is the October Challenge, in which one has to watch 31 horror movies in 31 days, half of which must be first-time views. This October Challenge excites us all around the board and has even spread to unrelated blogs and facebook groups. The Challenge is an opportunity to marshall one's energies toward enriching one's cinematic experience, broadening horizons, deeper education in the treasures of our beloved horror genre. For the chosen few touched by some wonderful perversion, however, the October Challenge loses its lustre midway through and we see in the distance some more perillous yet infinitely more interesting mountain to climb: the Turkey Challenge. This challenge, which lasts throughout November, consists in watching as many 'bad' (rated below 5.0 on IMDb) horror movies one can for points.

The films that challenge us to see them, and through them the world, in new ways are at the highs and lows. The great films, however, give us a paten to read the code and come equipped with a guarantee, New Way of Seeing or Your Money Back. When you come to the bad films, you're on your own: it's up to your ingenuity to make them work, your mind to find the way to see them, your will to enjoy them in spite of their own protean efforts at evasion. Here are creatures that don't want to be caught, don't want to be enjoyed; and we're the Zeus to their Europa, seizing and impregnating them with value.(1) These are the turkeys and we're the perverse who find the treasures in the rough.

This year I kicked the challenge off to a wonderful start with my girlfriend and I watching some Roger Corman and Fred Olen Ray. Yes, we watched DeCoteau's Grizzly Rage, too, and it remains one of the worst of the month. But it was easily forgotten in the delirious enjoyment of Ray's Deep Space, in which the great Charles Napier fights a slimy-tentacled alien monster, and Corman's Swamp Women, which contains women and eventually a swamp, but no real swamp women. We enjoyed it so much we indulged in more Corman with the Shakespearean and brilliant The Undead and the underrated The Wasp Women. Corman's ability to entertain and have fascinating, enjoyable characters whatever the budget proved an affable start to the challenge, imparting a feeling that we were already discovering underrated treasures in what, to the ignorant public, appears to be dungheaps. Soon even DeCoteau redeemed himself with the pure '80s vomit that is Dreamaniac.

We then embarked upon a course that we would be on throughout the Turkey Challenge: the viewing of every Jerry Warren horror film. Here we were delighted. How could we be having so much luck? Even the maligned films of Jerry Warren were exciting and fun. They all had unnecessary, and unnecessarily long dance scenes, islands, looped sound effects (listen for the "Boo yeah! Boo yeah!" in Terror of the Bloodhunters), but I'll be damned if the stories weren't interesting in a zany way and the characters likable. I'll also be damned if we didn't just have the luck of picking the only original Jerry Warren films in our first three tries, kind of like winning the lottery twice. From there on, we found the hideous depths of Warren's Conquistador tendencies, pilfering the treasures of the Aztec peoples, overlaying awful narration, and inserting endless scenes of fat men receiving massages. What a guy.

Meanwhile, on my own time, I'd been educating myself in Andy Milligan. I was already familiar with, and charmed by, Milligan from previous Turkey Challenges. But this was the first time I decided to watch as much Milligan as I could. I began with a total dud, the wretched Carnage, possibly the worst film of Milligan's career. Even Surgikill, written by rejects from a Jewish fraternity and directed by Milligan for the money, is more enjoyable than Carnage, if only because it elicits some emotion (primarily embarrassment) from the audience. Still, much of Milligan is enjoyable and original. His ability to create intense drama, dwell amongst the dysfunctional, and sympathize with the deformed certainly gives his work distinction.

One of the finest ideas in the Turkey Challenge is the 'trifecta', whereby we gain extra points for watching three turkeys by the same director. Trifectas allow us to enjoy a large sampling of a frequently-unappreciated director's oeuvre and receive rewards for the dedication. My girl and I were on the lookout for new trifectas, ideas others hadn't thought of yet. So we went with Sam Newfield and Roberta Findlay. Newfield's films, all with PRC and two starring George Zucco, were mysterious, atmospheric, well-written pictures whose only flaw was having a low budget. But for 1940s horror, all a low budget really means is that the sets weren't as impressive as Universal's. I really can't say Dead Men Walk is significantly inferior to Tod Browning's Dracula, because it isn't. Nor is Newfield's The Monster Maker at all inferior to any of the highly-respected spectacle horrors from Universal, like The Hunchback of a Notre-Dame, a film whose only real merits are in the sets and Lon Chaney. IMDb ratings can be so puzzling; persistance in the Turkey Challenge will have one losing faith in them entirely. So, no surprise, we found Roberta Findlay's films to be quite good as well, all of them concerned with the same idea: a woman in a relationship begins relating to the supernatural and has to struggle against her boyfriend/husband for her autonomy in doing so. Her best film, Lurkers, slightly twists the formula in that the woman wants to avoid the supernatural, but her controlling boyfriend manipulates her into it. More wonderful discoveries! I feel we're explorers in an alien land! Why have so many observers failed to see what we see if they haven't been viewing it with the telescope of preconceptions?

We were now coming to an inevitable point in the Turkey Challenge: we were stuffed. I haven't asked my girl where she thinks it happened, but I think the last film on which we had that early thrill, that sensation of being discoverers and that we were seeing what no-one saw, or at least seeing it in a new light; the last film on which we had that elation was Witchtrap, which we watched in the second week of November and from which we learned the truly remarkable term 'neanderfuck'. The first week is always one of exhilaration. Then the abnormal becomes the normal, heaven starts looking a little like earth. We were planning to take breaks and watch a normal film now and then during the challenge, but it didn't really happen; I was too keen on beating other participants who were beginning to outstrip me. So, we were tired, but we pushed on. We continued our Kevin Tenney trifecta, started a new Corman trifecta, and even started a Freddie Francis trifecta. Sure, we encountered some good films. The Cormans were good, we enjoyed the Jeff Burr films, and William Fruet's Blue Monkey reminded us of Fred Olen Ray's Deep Space. But we'd had too much of a good thing. Our tastebuds were exhausted.

On my own time, I'd more or less given up on Milligan, puttered around with Donald Farmer films, the best of which is Scream Dream for its costumes and jokiness, but finally, despite vowing David DeCoteau, as director of Grizzly Rage, is too horrifying a prospect to return to, I plunged into the homoerotic nightmare depths of The Brotherhood. And I haven't looked back. Seven DeCoteau trifectas later, I find myself exhausted, but not regretful. I actually enjoyed the first eight or so DeCoteaus. Then it got to be too much. No, of course I never tired of the young studs in tightie-whiteys; I tired of the rigorously-pursued blandness that is DeCoteau's non-trademark.

With my girl, I still managed to enjoy a good number of the films we watched. Somehow penetrating into DeCoteau's depths left me more satisfied with non-DeCoteau turkeys and rejuvenated me a little. The Anaconda series was fun, but I clearly got more out of it than she did. The same happened with Rage of the Yeti. But we shared some DeCoteau moments at the end with Final Stab and The Frightening, and closed this year out with a bang in the form of Andy Milligan's very talky The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! together, myself with the Master, Fred Olen Ray, and she with a Wynorski double-feature.

We both found a lot to enjoy this month, though it feels like far longer than a month now that I look back. Can it be only a little over a week ago, I thought as the month ended, that we watched Anacondas: Trail of the Blood Orchid? Can it really have been but 28 days ago that we watched Swamp Women and Dreamaniac? Somehow the Turkey Challenge is outside of the ordinary laws of Time and Space. 100 movies in 30 days, countless treasures tangible and intangible; I invite everyone reading to participate next year and find yourself, as well as your relationship to movies, transformed for the better.

(1) - On the subject of viewing movies, especially bad movies, in new ways, I've already written at some length in The Question Concerning Watchability.

Rage of the Yeti (2011) - 2.5/4

2011-12-08T14:42:00.002-05:00

Actually, this film should be called Starvation-Motivated Hunt of the Yerin, but what can ya do? I like to imagine the SyFy channel operates a bit like RKO used to. RKO would give Val Lewton a preposterous movie title that they thought would bring in an audience, like I Walked with a Zombie, and Lewton had to get his writers to come up with a story to fit the title. Lewton was a genius, so he made it work. But SyFy is kinda short on geniuses. Well, enter David Hewlett, a hard-working, long-suffering, and talented Canadian actor--y'know, the sorta guy who never, ever gets a big break--who's given the big break of directing this whopper of a title. Maybe they needed a Canadian to give it that Northern touch. And by St. Athanasius of the Trinity Enthroned, he gets it right! What a guy.

It's not that Rage of the Yeti is transformed into an art film, commenting on the abuses of the Inuit by White Man or making us realize we have to learn to respect nature or it will consume us; no, it's not that. It's not that Rage of the Yeti has a compelling, engrossing plot with rich characters that illuminate the complexity of humanity either; don't get Rage of the Yeti confused with Henry James's Rape of the Yeti--that's a totally different story. It's that everyone involved in this movie doesn't seem to be aware that this is a cheap SyFy movie filled with silly CGI monsters or, if they are, they don't care. The actors don't hold back at all. You'd think they were doing Tennessee Williams. And in a way I can't ever justify or explain, they are.

The cast re-unites the leads of Witchblade the TV series. Remember that one? I do. It wasn't great, but, well, my mom liked it. Yancy Butler still looks good, though her voice sounds like an overweight lesbian who drinks whiskey every night to forget she's in a loveless heterosexual marriage that's given her the one meaningful thing in her life, her kids. David Chokachi also still looks good; in fact, he may well have been stored in formaldehyde since Witchblade was cancelled. At any rate, the rapport they developed in that series is on display in Rage of the Yeti. They work very comfortably together, and both seem to really be having fun with their parts. Credit also goes to Hewlett himself, who plays an eccentric billionaire intent on Yeti-collectin', and to Matthew Kevin Anderson as Chokachi's brother and partner. The brothers and Hewlett have this Brendan Fraser-in-The-Mummy kinda banter--of course, that banter goes back to the Indiana Jones movies, where Harrison Ford perfected the style. At any rate, it's enjoyable.

As far as the plot is concerned--haha, plot--you have two eccentric billionaires after an ancient document about a 'missing link' known as the 'Yerin'. 'Yerin' is, in that rich language Asian, the term for 'Yeti', apparently. Not only do they find the document, they find the Yerin themselves. And the Yerin are hungry for human flesh. Did you know yetis have bullet-proof skin? Did you know they can outrun a snowmobile? Did you know they can crash into a landing plane and not be damaged? These are the facts they don't give you in your community college biology books. Turns out you have to shoot 'em in the eyes, blast 'em in the head with a rocket launcher, or slice through 'em with a concrete-cutting torch. So the movie's action is a balance between yetis assaulting douchebags in the snow and Butler and Chokachi blowing the everloving crap out of computer-generated yetis while making witty repartee.

You don't watch Rage of the Yeti for the plot or the production value. You have to be content with fun. And the characters, the game actors, and Hewlett's lighthearted direction keep this movie very fun. It's a classical b-movie done right.

A Guide to The Brotherhood Series

2011-11-26T11:23:00.014-05:00

Introduction: A DeCoteau Primer

I have been convinced for some time that David DeCoteau's films are only as good as their screenplays. There are some directors who can take a weak, thinly-plotted, or uninteresting script and transform it into a very good film. These directors are artists. There are other directors who are merely competent and can ascend no farther than the quality of the text. They don't add or subtract much of anything. I am tempted to reduce DeCoteau to the latter category--were he not so puzzling to me! He's one of the most prolific directors in the world, very independent, has recognizable obsessions (particularly muscular young men in white underwear), and yet defies any efforts to consider him an auteur.

Let's look at what DeCoteau does bring to his films. He brings his oscellating dutch tilts, what we might call 'canoe cam' (he does have Canadian citizenship), or perhaps we could refer to the technique as 'flying dutchman.' Whatever it is, the technique has been in DeCoteau's repertoir for a long time and is used in nearly every film from the late '90s onward, most obsessively and memorably in Totem (1999). What DeCoteau is notorious for, however, is his insistance on featuring young men in white underwear. Several films blatantly display the young men frolicking in their underwear, rubbing themselves, indulging in gratuitous shower scenes in which they soaplessly rub their chests and abs for inordinately long periods of time. If this visual style varied with each film, were honed for interesting effect, we could call it an auteurist style. After all, DePalma's uses his split-screen technique as obsessively as DeCoteau's uses his canoe-cam. However, DePalma's split-screens always tell us more than what we're seeing; DeCoteau's canoe-cam just makes things wobbly and, yes, a little otherwordly. Nothing else.

A more subtle and, to my knowledge never critically-discussed feature of DeCoteau's work is an obsession with blandness. What seems like sheer narrative carelessness is so consistent in DeCoteau's work, regardless of the screenwriter, that it has to be a wilful trait of DeCoteau's. Every character in a DeCoteau film is cardboard, or worse, a silhouette of a cardboard cut-out. There's little distinction in depth amongst the characters; the distinction is rather one of affability. Perhaps this is why DeCoteau so consistently leaves us spend half the narrative with a set of characters, as though they were the protagonists, only to kill them whenever the monster or slasher shows up. His choices of 'protagonists' are often so counter-intuitive that he is either one of the most inept storytellers in cinematic history or he genuinely sees no important distinction between one character or another. The characters that stand out, are most interesting (which isn't saying much) and affable, are dispatched unceremoniously, while the blandest and least-developed of the characters, characters who get very little narrative time or are fairly unpleasant, very often survive to the end.

Ordinarily a filmmaker so committed to surface innocuousness is, as Robin Wood was arguing back in the '70s, on a subtler level subverting conventional norms. Look as one might into DeCoteau, however, and convention is rarely if ever subverted. DeCoteau's ideas of conventions may well have come from Revenge of the Nerds. There are jocks, nerds, preps and outsiders, and they all exist in their separate but colliding universes. Never in a DeCoteau film does anyone rise above his or her stereotype. That would require characterization. The weird, creepy outsider always does turn out to be weird, creepy and maybe even evil, as in Ancient Evil (1999). Turns out those jocks and cheerleaders were right! Of course they were; they're heroes. And the supercilious preps? Soul-stealing vampires, of course; just as we thought. Rarely has any filmmaker been so committed to, not merely using stereotypes, but upholding stereotypes and following the notion of their correctness to the bitter end. His narratives allow no opportunity for their subversion; the end for each character can be read clearly in the beginning of his films.

Perhaps, one might argue, that this is all a part of DeCoteau's worldview. He simply sees the world as a collection of boring stereotypes, the few moments of excitement provided by hunky men in white underwear or a friendly airhead. A pessimist, he thinks interesting, nice people are destined to die, and those with whom we form a bond will soon be snatched from us. Or perhaps, as I think is more likely, he rarely gets a good screenplay and when he does is more interested in a cheap production with a decent payout than making an entertaining film that'll earn a good payout. So he throws some pecs-and-bulge into a makeshift plot. Of course, were this an aspect of his style, it wouldn't be so bad: perhaps his auteurism is to be found in visual innovation, I'd ordinarily say. But, as argued above, he doesn't bring much visual style to his films either. What we're left with is a director with a few unvarying idiosyncrasies adapting whatever scripts with little contribution in terms of quality.

The Brotherhood series exemplifies this fact quite well. The series is bound together by a loose theme, namely the desire to be a part of something greater than oneself. Each film concerns the tensions amongst young men to join groups and yet remain individuals in some fashion, and each film begins on a new permutation of this notion. Each film, too, features some courtship by an individual or group to induct others into a group. Despite relatively similar IMDb ratings in the 2.5-3.5 range, the quality of each film in the series varies widely. (The generally low ratings can be attributed to the homoeroticism of DeCoteau's films. More on that later.) The fourth entry stands far above the rest of the series and the third entry is egregiously bad. Yet both are written by the same people--the puzzlement of DeCoteau's films continues. Did he have an off day or did the writers? As many DeCoteau films as I've seen, around two-dozen, I still find the man inscrutable. At any rate, I offer here brief, relatively shallow reviews of each Brotherhood film.

The Brotherhood (2001) - 3/4

The first, and one of the strongest, entries in the series, The Brotherhood concerns two very likable young college roommates, one a jock who actually isn't much of a joiner and the other a stereotype nerd who envies those who have the opportunity to be joiners. The jock attracts the attention of the leader of a frat, who decides he wants the jock's body. That is to say, he wants to steal the jock's soul and inhabit the body himself. As the jock is inducted deeper and deeper into the sinister frat, losing his affable personality in the process, his nerdy friend teams up with a sexy co-ed to rescue him.

What made this start to The Brotherhood series so strong is its reliance upon character-based drama rather than typical horror tropes. Though it does come down to bloodshed, the tensions are mostly worked out in dialogue and emotion. The characters could hardly be called deep, though they're more developed than DeCoteau's usual set of characters, developed to the point that their actions are consistent and we see a development in their psychologies. What is absent in depth is supplied in likability, as both of the protagonists are very likable and attractive.

The characters are explicit about the categories of 'jock' and 'nerd', but the 'jock' begins more interested in studying than partying. He takes to his nerd friend, who is curiously enough the leading exponent of the categories, and they form a loose fraternal relationship together. The intrusion of an attractive woman and the need to belong are ultimately dissatisfying alternatives to the brotherly bond of male friendship and the need to be one's own person.

The Brotherhood 2: Young Warlocks (2001) - 2.5/4

The themes of the first Brotherhood film are reworked, making the group not an exclusive set of privileged students, but rather a band of outsiders disliked by (most) other students and principal alike. Enter a new 'kid' with a proposal that amounts to a warlock pyramid scheme: he's been inducted by one warlock and received power; now he will induct them and give them power and he in turn gets even more power--if only they kill off a few people they hate. Unfortunately one of the outsiders, a cute twink with a crush on a jock's girl, has a conscience and faces the warlock's wrath.

Young Warlocks continues The Brotherhood's approach to horror by focusing on supernatural character drama that results logically enough in murders than in beginning with any fixed horror tropes. The 'jocks' are personality-less bullies who stalk the schoolgrounds looking for outsiders to bully. The young hero has tensions with fitting in on the one hand, and is becoming alienated from his friends for his reticence to join the warlock on the other. The drama isn't quite as good as in the first film, however, as the characters aren't as likable nor are their personalities nearly as developed.

As far as the 'goods' go, the young men aren't quite as attractive in this film as they are in the first. One of the jocks (Greg Lyczkowski) and the protagonist (Sean Farris) stand out, but we're usually left looking at the teutonic Forrest Cochran, a Cherub-faced Aryan who looks a good ten years older than everyone else in the highschool. Incidentally, that the film is set in a highschool makes enjoying the beefcake perhaps a little less comfortable than the college setting of the first film.

The Brotherhood III: Young Demons (2003) - 1/4

Easily the worst entry in the series, Young Demons abandons the Brotherhood formula (until now) of dealing with drama and instead goes the route of a cheap, poorly-paced supernatural slasher. A highschool student gets to use the school afterhours on weekends, where he prepares a roleplaying game, complete with LARPing, that anyone is welcome to participate in. This time, however, a man in a knight costume is actually killing the players. Fortunately a jock decides to play with the nerds this time, 'cause he wants in the level 6 elf mage's fire-resistant loincloth. So he can rescue the nerds, or at least a hot female nerd.

The action consists of the characters wandering the school while the knight randomly appears in a cloud of smoke and dispatches one student after another. These students have the thinnest of characterizations, ranging from 'friendly jock' to 'friendly nerd', or even to 'evil nerd.' They're present to be murdered and to wander around in underwear. So we don't care that the knight is dispatching them. All that's left to care about is that they're amusing or nice to look at, but they're not really either. Not even the LARPing, which one would think easy to ridicule, provides much amusement, as the mage has cast a Tolerance spell on the audience. Yes, some male students use the opportunity of falling in blood, for instance, to take a shower, rubbing their pecs and abs soaplessly for several minutes. Then they're murdered. Were the random, scarcely-diagetic beefcake particularly attractive, this might make the film enjoyable for studwatchers. However, they're not quite as aesthetically pleasing as they ought to be.

Where the other Brotherhood films provided drama and in that drama enough space from action and plot for beefcake setpieces and interesting moments, Young Demons is just devoid of that space. It forces a few such moments that are unsuccessful for reasons of unattractiveness and inappropriateness, but the Friday the 13th action is the dominant force in the film and that force is spectacularly uninteresting.

The Brotherhood IV: The Complex (2005) - 3.5/4

Somehow, following The Brotherhood III, DeCoteau and the same writers pull the series out of the muck with the best, most ambitious entry in the series. Leaving the usual settings DeCoteau inhabits--so he can re-use the locations, el cheapo--The Complex is set at a prestigious, private military college. The locations and props used for the film are attractive, complex, and interesting in their own right. Even more amazingly, they're inhabited by interesting characters and feature in a decent, well-paced story.

The plot concerns a child prodigy who, having reached college age, lands himself in the prestigious college just to please his naval officer dad. Unfortunately for him, as the Standard DeCoteau Opening--in which an attractive young man is pursued by a group of attractive men and killed in what amounts to a symbolic homosexual gangrape--reveals, there is something sinister afoot at the college. A secret society known as The Black Skulls have the whole complex in a grip of terror and are interested in inducting the young genius into their fold.

The 'child prodigy' could well have been an annoying character, but Sebastian Gacki has quite a lot of charm and succeeds in pulling the role off very well. The character is likable, intelligent, and does the job of protag-ing very well. The villains have a sufficiently interesting backstory to keep Gacki's character probing and the audience guessing until the end. However, it's the film's setting that elevates it and out of which its other virtues mostly arise, divided between a creepy, underground bunker and the sumptuous, mahogany-panelled main building of the college. A military strategy room and a nice bomb prop add to the film's more elaborate design. If DeCoteau splurged more often, The Brotherhood series may be better in general.

Of course, DeCoteau doesn't splurge because he aims for a common denominator, the target audience that will watch his films for the eyecandy. The Complex offers several moderately attractive young men in their underwear, naturally. It also offers a very sexy lady in hers, namely April Telek (the stripper from the "Pilot" episode of Millennium). While the eyecandy is good, one wishes DeCoteau would be this ambitious more often: eyecandy is always best enjoyed embedded in a good film, and The Complex is a good film.

The series's idea of joining and belonging receives its most complex treatment in this entry as well. Gacki's character has joined a naval academy, but is largely uninterested in joining the navy, let alone a secret society. Not only is he at odds with the secret society, but he's also at odds with a group of bullies that are themselves at odds with the secret society. Ultimately he has no real friends, no circle in which to belong; the film ends with Gacki embarking on a solitary quest to track down all the Black Skulls. Not only does he refuse their courtship and evade the symbolic rape (murder) that would follow his refusal, but he becomes the pursuer and they the victims. He's found his purpose as a decided anti-joiner, and individual of self-reliance to the end.

The Brotherhood V: Alumni (2009) - 2/4

With the title 'Alumni', I expected this episode to be a continuation of The Brotherhood IV. No such luck, however. In fact, Alumni scarcely even fits the theme of The Brotherhood, as it really has nothing to do with joining or fraternity; it simply happens to contain a group of youths, some of whom are male. Their being together is not a voluntary group. In fact, Alumni is a riff on the old I Know What You Did Last Summer plot. A group of high school seniors play a prank after the prom, leaving the prank's victim dead. Years later the whole group are summoned, not having seen each other in a long time, back to the school by mysterious notes. Soon their dark secrets bubble up while they're systematically killed.

We know how such a plot ends long before it does: one of the supposed victims must actually be related to the original victim and is getting revenge. The most interesting aspect of the film is that all of the characters had a perverse relationship of one sort or another with the victim; not necessarily sexual, just that they all hated him for one strange reason or another. Several seemingly inconsistent flashbacks of the murder and its aftermath punctuate the action, like a homoerotic b-movie Rashomon. But even this isn't terribly interesting, as we have no reason to care about these people or who's killing them. The only character worthy of any interest is Amy, a "large-boned" girl whose relative lack of dialogue gives her a mystical sort of otherworldliness, like she stands aloof from these characters and wishes she were in a film directed by Wes Craven instead.

If a DeCoteau film, as a rule, asks the audience to find pleasures outside of the plot, Alumni is a major failure. The setting is another uninteresting school (colleges and high schools abound in DeCoteau's filmography), whose architecture is only moderately distinctive. The eyecandy is decent, primarily on the homoerotic side. DeCoteau goes a little further in this film by providing a gay make-out scene between two attractive, buff guys.

The Brotherhood VI: Initiation (2009) - 2.5/4

The Brotherhood series returns to its roots in this entry, the last as of writing, to delve deeper into fraternity life. In this case, nearly every character, including the protagonist, are already in or trying to join a fraternity. So the tension isn't so much between joining or being an individual, but in maintaining one's individuality and dignity within a group. Because Initiation is all about an elaborate hazing ritual in which the initiates are subjected to two days of torment at a wilderness camp.

The main character is the son of the fraternity's founder. He loathes participating in the initiation, has no desire to be in a fraternity, but wants all the benefits a fraternity conveys. He doesn't seem like much of a party animal and he already has a girlfriend, so it's unclear what those benefits are supposed to be. Still, that's his thin motivation and he's sticking to it. While he arouses the ire of the frat leaders by mouthing off, they fret over a past initiate who disappeared after particularly cruel treatment. Then the killings start.

There's something exceptionally cheap-feeling about this entry, as though DeCoteau's budget were what he could find at the bottom of his cardigan pocket. Each time the killer readies to kill, moves, scratches an itch, or snaps a twig DeCoteau launches into a montage of the killer's eyes and hands--the same shots, over and over again. The setting, moreover, is pretty much an old shack in the woods and trees.

So what's DeCoteau to do? Amp up the eyecandy, of course! If Alumni suffered from too much plot and not enough extra-narrative material, Initiation corrects the wrong big time. The plot is as minimal as can be--a crazy guy in the woods is killing everyone--and the boys-in-tighty-whities motif is cranked up to 11. In this movie, DeCoteau doesn't just find a few choice setpieces for the boys--I wouldn't quite call them 'young men' this time--to rub their pecs and abs for a few minutes; no, he strips them in the first 15 minutes and never lets them put their clothes back on again for the whole movie. For nearly an hour these teenage boys run around the film set, by which I mean the woods DeCoteau rented for $10 a day, wearing nothing but their underwear and tennis shoes. They run in underwear, get hosed in underwear, flee in panic in underwear, get murdered in underwear, and sometimes even do some murdering themselves--in underwear. The idea is brilliant, but the execution really demanded studly men and not scrawny teenage boys.

Coda

So what do we learn from watching all The Brotherhood movies? There are some consistencies that seem to be a part of DeCoteau's worldview. DeCoteau never shows a positive side to joining. Being a part of a school, college, or fraternity is always innately dangerous. Joining subgroups within a school or college is even worse. Groups hunt, pursue their members, in elaborate courtship rituals. The frat leader of The Brotherhood, despite resistance from the jock, persists in the hunt, even overruling objections from his frat brothers. Victor Thanos in The Complex, similarly, will not take the rebuffs of Gacki's character and is willing to be insulted and humiliated while spinning his web to catch him. As Gacki makes a clear move of refusal, the only option left open is, instead of courtship, rape. Should one willingly submitting to the courter's partnership, it will culminate in a sort of death, becoming undead and without a will of one's own. Even the personality of the willing joiner alters. Should one refuse the courtship, the victim will be cornered by the group and killed, brought to death unwillingly. The willing partnership is the surrogate for sex in The Brotherhood series, and in all of DeCoteau's homoerotic films, because murder is clearly a surrogate of rape. So in DeCoteau, eros is really transmuted to thanatos; erotic love is conceivable only in death, entered willingly or forcefully. To join a group is always to be penetrated (in The Brotherhood, joining the group involves a pin-prick), to have one's individuality invaded, and with that to die.

Overall, the Brotherhood series has been devalued not just for its low budget but also for catering to a viewing audience that we still can't imagine as an ideal audience. I don't mean we can't imagine such an audience because we're homophobes, but because maybe there really is no ideal audience for DeCoteau's films. One wonders if treating men as eyecandy can ever have the same effect on women or gay men that treating women as eyecandy has on men. If certain feminist analyses are correct, the very notion of 'eyecandy' is patriarchal, and not a form of pleasure shared by women or gay men. On the other hand, I myself enjoy the aesthetic value of beautiful male bodies. But do I enjoy it in the same campy way we enjoy seeing Linnea Quigley do the Virgin Dance of the Double Chainsaws in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers or the her naked tomb dance in Return of the Living Dead? We're invited, in these b-movies, to be salacious and to be slightly amused at ourselves for being so. I'm not sure where DeCoteau's tongue is, but it certainly isn't in his cheek when he has his boys prance around in underwear--except, perhaps, in Initiation. On the other hand, DeCoteau is too timid, or too cheap, to show us full-frontal male nudity, which makes what he is showing too tame for interested parties and too wild, or should I say too gay, for uninterested parties.

So DeCoteau has found an interesting niche in which he continues to labour, a niche he really began carving out with his early '80s feature Dreamaniac. But it's a niche that is consistently rated low partially by its own target audience and partially by an alternate audience looking for a laugh. It's a shame, because The Brotherhood and The Complex are both enjoyable and well-made low-budget horror movies. They have no ambition to be great indie films; they merely entertain as a cheesy '80s horror flick, like Slumber Party Massacre, might do. Were it not for the perceived homoeroticism of the films, they would certainly be rated higher. As it stands, they are viewed to be laughed at, camp against their will.

However, as evidence by The Brotherhood series, DeCoteau's concern for making the films good and fun for whomever he imagines his audience to be seems lacking. The films' quality diverges widely. Why is The Complex quite good while Alumni and Young Demons are quite awful? Did DeCoteau just happen to have a few extra bucks to spare? Did his screenwriters just luck out and write him a decent story? I don't know. But I want to make a challenge. Mr. DeCoteau, should you be reading this, I put it to you that with the budget and deadline you have for your films, I could make a more financially and critically successful, audience-pleasing film. And with half the budget and a longer shooting schedule, I'm confident I could do the same. You put up the budget, I'll give you a movie. What would that prove? Only that you, Mr. DeCoteau, could do better if only you cared more.

A Phenomenological Viewing of Scalps (1983)

2011-11-15T08:20:00.010-05:00

The first shot of Scalps is of a hideous, aged Indian's face gazing angrily at us from the darkness. He leaps, showing a young man's body wearing blue jeans. Suddenly we see a man beheaded with gory detail of his hands catching at the gushing blood. We don't know the victim, at least not yet. The action and characters are totally abstract. It is a montage beginning in pure malice and ending in heinous violence.

Cut to a desert road over which rides a dusty old pick-up. We're now given a location for the abstract prologue: the desert. The next shot answers our suspicions: It shows a man in black robes with the head of a lion. We have no idea where he is in the desert, only that he is there and his rising is a response to the arrival of the truck. The score, consisting of long, droning synth chords is ominous and menacing. The shots of the truck suggest the driver, an old man, is being watched from all angles of the desert, and by the lion-headed man; but the oblivious driver drives on. The man parks, pulls out a shovel, and heads toward some chosen spot. The lion-headed man snarls. The man approaches a cave. We see him at the entrance from within, seeing him as an intruder. After puttering around at the cave mouth, he is overwhelmed with the urge to slit his own throat and does so, despite resistance. Only after this do we get the opening credits.

Some films have no prologues, some have one, but not many have a whole two prologues. Scalps is, needless to say, a very peculiar film. Unsurprisingly, it has never found much of an audience. Upon release, it was Siskel & Ebert's 'Dog of the Week' and maligned for its viciousness. The main audience for the film today, namely Fred Olen Ray fans, will be surprised to find none of the playfulness that characterizes his camp b-movies like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), or Evil Toons (1992), with their abundant, contrived tits-'n'-ass and silly violence, or even less facetious efforts like Deep Space (1988). In contrast to the playfulness of his later films, Scalps is mean-spirited and nihilistic, its gore, unlike the rubber arms and transparent blood of Chainsaw Hookers, is intended to horrify. Perhaps standing out most, however, is the violence to women, which is fairly extreme in Scalps and which only features in Chainsaw Hookers in catfights; most of the violence in that and Ray's other films of the time is done to men, by women. Ray himself has said he didn't find Scalps fun and wouldn't want to make another film like it. Whatever audience the film might have left, such as those looking for a bodycount slasher will be frustrated by its atmospherics and such oddities as the unexplained, lion-headed man.

Part of the reason for Ray's distaste for his own film and its general oddness is the egregious distributor interference Ray alleges--and it's easy to believe him looking at the resultant film. The first prologue I noted contains footage from what is the penultimate death of the film and is therefore quite a spoiler. It also happens to be a spectacular beheading sequence, at least for 1983. If the distributor wished to catch the audience from the first few seconds and promise lots of horrifying stuff, that's a good way to start. The second prologue, probably Ray's own, contains the much tamer death of a nearly bloodless throat-slitting. The distributor clearly wanted to make what is a strangely atmospheric slasher less plodding, so they wouldn't have to give out any refunds to bored patrons. Even adding the gory first prologue didn't satisfy them, however. The shots of the lion-headed man are, Ray claims, mostly added by the distributor and were taken from test footage never intended for the final cut. Even the superimposition of the old Indian sorceror's head was added. In short, the bulk of the film's peculiarities are the results of extreme (unheard of to such a degree) interference from the distributors.

Ultimately, however, it really doesn't matter whether Fred Olen Ray or the distributor put the lion-headed man on screen; what matters is how the phenomena of the film affects me, or you, and understanding the film's effects. Scalps doesn't have any 'meaning', at least not in the traditional sense. But it does have a phenomenological process and both how that process functions and how affects us reveals something. So let's get back to the film.

After the two prologues, the first establishing an abstract malice and violent force, the second establishing the otherwordly inhospitableness of the desert, the narrative movement begins. After the oddness of the prologues, we now are placed in normality: normality of location, action, and narrative. A disorganized archaeology professor, we learn, is preparing a less-than-legal 'field trip' into the desert, where he and his graduate students will actually be digging in Indian territory. Unable to go himself yet, he sends the students--three males and three females--ahead. So we meet the characters, see them in their ordinary university environment, and begin what is a standard "dead teenager" plot in which we fully expect a maniac to slaughter most of the group.

The shot beginning the second act is of the students' car exiting a tunnel, with the camera mounted on the car. We, along with the students, are exiting the normality of the university and the modern, civilized world in which it's located and entering the mysterious vistas of the desert. The sole outpost of civilization, as in any horror film, is the gas station. This is the point where they will be warned not to go on and must decide whether or not to pay heed; of course, these are city folk and they pay cash, not heed. The more mystically-inclined of the group, lone-wolf D.J. looks down at an old, Indian man on the shop steps and is assaulted with a vision of the glowing-eyed old Indian sorceror from the second prologue. The old Indian later warns the group that the desert is a dangerous place and they must stay away from the place of the blackened wood. As he explains that it is the burial ground of many Indians who met violent ends, we see shots of nearly all the students' deaths from later in the film. The Warning Scene, in a horror movie, is supposed to suggest a choice to the protagonists. But by accompanying the Warning with flashforwards to the characters' deaths, we're being shown they have no choice; there is a certain inevitability to their deaths. They were dead the moment they exited that tunnel. So, apart from D.J., the group assumes the blackened woods is the place to go and off they head into the Other World of the desert.

Entry into the desert is greeted with the ominous music from the second prologue, the droning synth chords suggesting untold menace in spite of D.J.'s claims that the desert is beautiful. We see a shot of an Indian spirit wielding a bow. (In fact, it appears that this is a shot of the Indian sorceror-possessed body of one of the students from later in the film, taken out of the timeline. That he could be watching the students enter the desert is, therefore, particularly ominous and menacing, their deaths particularly inevitable.) The students drive past the abandoned truck of the man who died in the second prologue, left behind like the husk of a dead insect. As the camera pans left, we see what the students don't: the dessicated remains of the man, the skull's jaw wide open in an eternally silent scream. The students are going beyond this point, into a realm of death where the living have no business.

After this slow, atmospheric drive through the desert, they arrive at a spot where they decide to park. One of the girls notices a buzzard in the sky and believes it's a buzzard they saw earlier that followed them the whole way. D.J. agrees that it is the same buzzard. Again, the suggestion is that they are already dead. Nature knows what they don't. The tensions suggested are between culture and nature, the land of the living and the land of the dead. As D.J. bangs some metal sticks together, making primitive, percussive music under the blaring sun (shot from a very low angle), shots of the hideous Indian from the first prologue and of more gory violence to the students are cut in. They are in a realm of relentless, powerful nature, reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); and a land where death, not life, holds sway.

From here, the tensions in the film's structure--between the malice and violence found in the first prologue and the ethereal, ominous sense of doom found in the second prologue--begin to conflict and the film is admittedly somewhat messy. On the one hand, the trappings of any Friday the 13th knock-off are present: a group camping in the wilderness, tents, attractive co-eds, sex (or at least the potential for it), and soon graphic violence. On the other hand, elements of the mysteriousness found in the second prologue still come through. In the dark, around the camp fire, the students notice a drumming. As they put their ears to the ground, they hear the traditional Indian music more clearly. This is unsettling as it is. They are in the middle of the desert where they saw and heard no-one, and yet there is this sudden music, as though a whole group are present nearby. One of the couples decide to look for the source of the music. They find a camp set up with a camp fire, but no-one is present in the camp. As the male student looks into the fire, the ghostly head of the Indian sorceror appears for a while, chanting with the drums; then the fire explodes in the student's face.

After the couple returns, the male of the couple is changed. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of the camp and is verbally abusive to his girlfriend. He has, with the explosion of the camp fire, been possessed by the sorceror. From this point onward the spirit of the first prologue begins to take dominance over that of the second. The man takes his girlfriend out for a walk, where hits her, rapes her, and ultimately slits her throat and scalps her. Her friends eventually grow concerned and find her in a search. While the others frantically plan out what to do, D.J. grows peculiarly resigned to their fates. More ominous music plays as D.J. tells the group the possessed friend gave her a talisman and said he'd return. (This is actually foreshadowing: when the first possessed student is killed, the Indian sorceror 'returns' by possessing D.J..)

Now the classic bodycount slasher is set up. There is a violent monster loose and it is going to inflict violent deaths on all the young adults. One of the remaining males heads to the abandoned truck seen earlier and is clubbed by the possessed student, now physically resembling the Indian face from the first prologue. There is an insert One of the remaining girls is shot full of arrows. Finally, the remaining male kills the possessed student, but is beheaded with a trowel by the newly-possessed D.J.. This beheading is the one seen in the first six shots of the film. So the destinies of the students have been completed. By journeying into the land of the dead, they have joined the dead.

The main action of the film over, we get an epilogue. The professor who sent them out into the desert comes to check in on them. He enters a tent and falls out with an arrow in his eye socket. We're taken into the tent where we find the possessed D.J. clanking her metal sticks together, shots of the gory, dead bodies accompanying each clank.

The living are no longer intruding into the land of the dead. Nature has swallowed up civilization and science, with its limited ways of seeing, of understanding what constitutes truth. Only D.J., who looked beyond the restricted worldview of the modern world, is preserved. And if we look beyond the approved ways of seeing a film, as I've tried to do in this analysis, we can see that Scalps is a unique and powerful film. If we bring a standard approach to viewing Scalps, as with many other unconventional films, we, as the excavators in the film, are destined to fail.

____
* - Please note that in Canada the term 'Indian' is used to refer to 'Native Americans', even on a legal level. The term 'native' carries connotations of primitivity that are more offensive than an ancient error of geography.

Hanger (2009) - 2/4

2011-11-06T19:53:00.004-05:00

Aristotle claimed that comedy is ideally populated by our inferiors. If that were true in degree as well as in kind, Hanger would be the greatest comedy ever written. As it stands, it is a sporadically amusing comedy disguised as a horror film, more juvenile than any Wayans, National Lampoon, or Adam Sandler comedy and far more intent on disgusting the audience.

Knowing Hanger is a comedy from the beginning may just help in appreciating it. If one expects a horror film, the over-the-top squalor of pimps, prostitutes, victims of disfigurement and mutation, murder, rape, feces-flinging, fetus-ripping, turkey-slapping, amongst many other surprises I'd rather not spoil, immediately strikes one as ridiculous and forced. The Book of the Courtier (which I'm fairly certain has never, ever been mentioned in a review of a Ryan Nicholson film before) recommends the perfect, entertaining courtier practice the art of 'sprezzatura'. Sprezzatura is the practice of making all of one's hard-earned skills and abilities, like musicianship and joke-telling, appear totally spontaneous. The effort behind the activity should be disguised. The grotesque, grimy squalor of Hanger is without spontanaeity. Harmony Korine's squalor shows sprezzatura; Ryan Nicholson's certainly does not. Its sheer ridiculousness, however, is quite effortless. And I can't deny I laughed a partially-forced and partially-surrendered laugh many times throughout.

The film concerns a boy named "Hanger", so-called because his mother's pimp ripped him from her womb with a hanger. Hanger works at a junkyard sorting recyclables with his roommate, a disfigured, tampon-fetishist Asian. Together they watch porn, drink beer, avoid getting raped by the local (disfigured, of course) homosexual, and spy on the always-masturbating, porn-star boss's daughter. Meanwhile, Hanger's dad contrives to get revenge--at last!--on the pimp who killed Hanger's mother.

More an exploration of a particularly squalid, morally vacuous milieu of perverse sexuality and disfigurement than a narrative, Hanger is nearly an unintentional art-film, as non-narrative as Last Year in Marienbad, but with more shots of floppy artificial penises. What could be padding in another film is, in Hanger, most of the film. The revenge plot only occasionally gets in the way of seeing the boss's daughter masturbating or the Asian digging through the trash for porn and tampons.

What Hanger all adds up to is hard to say. The disfigurement is distributed wildly. Hanger necessarily is disfigured and has prosthetic and make-up effects. But the Asian, played by a Caucasian, also has heavy make-up effects and a prosthetic. Hanger's father has a huge, prosthetic nose and, in most of the film, age make-up. The pimp, a black man played by a white man, has a prosthetic nose as well as make-up. Nearly every man, except the boss of the junkyard, is treated to some sort of make-up effect disfigurement. The women, with two exceptions, are undisfigured, leaving their porn-star-perfect faces as intact as their silicon tits. Were the distribution of the disfigurement not so random, one could read something about the ugliness of human nature in Hanger or something about perversion and the subconscious. But I can discern no real pattern. Hanger, the Asian, and Hanger's dad are all rancid people in their own ways, as are the pimp and the film's lovely whores. The disfigurements are just hideous ornamentation upon a world of ugliness and vileness. It's a world where there are just a lot of ugly, awful people and the rest are beautiful, awful people. They all have strange minds that don't quite work right and a total absence of moral reasoning.

For whatever reason, it's this last point that makes it all so funny for me. This is somehow more post-apocalyptic than any Mad Max movie; this is post-human sludge-porn that marries the absurdist bleakness of Samuel Beckett and his casts of degenerates with the gleeful foulness of John Waters, but does so ineptly and with a $2000 camcorder. Hanger is a very stupid movie, but I like it. I would rather not, but I like it.

Monstrous Creativity: Jeepers Creepers I (2001) & II (2003)

2011-10-27T16:18:00.012-04:00

(This essay contains spoilers. Watch the films first.)

The Jeepers Creepers films concern a monster known as 'The Creeper.' The Creeper 'sleeps' for twenty-three year stretches, then emerges for twenty-three days to 'feed', namely upon humans. I really like The Creeper. He's easily one of the most interesting monsters in modern horror film cinema. If we delve into what makes him so interesting, we'll also discover what makes the Jeepers Creepers films more than just fun monster movies; they're also works of art.

The first thing notable about The Creeper--before we ever notice he's a monster--is that he drives a truck. This first point is curious enough. Very few, if any, horror film monsters proper (i.e. physical creatures of non-human nature) drive vehicles. They attack, push, turn over vehicles; but they don't drive them. Driving a vehicle is a learned human activity, involving developed skills and knowledge. Just how far The Creeper's skills and knowledge go is demonstrated in his ability to terrorize the brother-sister protagonists of the first film. The brother, Darry (Justin Long), comments that his assailant is driving some sort of 'souped-up' truck. And indeed, it does appear The Creeper has some knowledge of mechanics, enough to 'soup-up' his truck. But by far the most remarkable thing about his truck is the false vanity plate reading, 'BEATNGU.' That's "Be eating you!", perhaps a play on The Prisoner's "Be seeing you!", telegraphing to the victims he terrifies on the road that he'll be devouring them later. Not only is The Creeper a skilled driver and mechanic, but he also has a keenly perverse sense of humour.

This isn't simply an attempt to mislead the audience in the first half of the film. While it does lead the audience to expect a human villain, subsequent developments suggest a greater significance to The Creeper's humanoid traits. After their encounter with The Creeper on the road, the siblings turn back to the house, actually a church, where they saw The Creeper disposing of bodies down a pipe. When Darry enters the pipe, he finds an elegant, arched subterranean lair where the walls and ceiling are covered with patterns of wax-preserved, stitched-together corpses. At one point in the series, this is described as a horrific approximation of the Sistene Chapel. To be compared to Michelangelo is pretty high praise. However horrific and ghastly the creation, it is indeed very inventive and, in a perverse way, beautiful. This aspect of The Creeper's lair has its effects as far as horrifying the audience goes, but it also shows us The Creeper is an artist. The idea Salva is developing as the narrative reveals more about The Creeper is the monster-as-artist, the possibility for something Other to be capable of creation, not just destruction.

Historically, in monster movies, the monster is a particularly non-creative force. Nosferatu's/Dracula's advances on Lucy are only capable of adding her to the legions of the undead. The Mummy's only imagined union with his chosen woman is, similarly, eternity in living-death, not both alive but both mummies. Frankenstein's monster depends upon his creator, the baron, to make him a woman with whom to live in permanent non-productivity. Creativity is reserved for the living and the 'normal'. Anything monstrous can only destroy. King Kong never builds anything, but he destroys plenty. Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster all take lives. The same applies to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Romero's zombies, etc.. The rule in horror cinema is that the monstrous cannot create, but can only destroy. The body that conforms to the norm alone is capable of creation.(1)

Given such overwhelming consistency, one wonders why monsters are always represented as inherently destructive. One of the more interesting answers to this question comes from Linda Williams. In her famous essay "When the Woman Looks," she argues that "the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male...the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality..." Williams argued that the monster and the female were bound together in their shared otherness from male, phallic sexual power. Since only phallic power can beget, then the monsters are inherently non-creative. However, most of the monsters are male. King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature, and Frankenstein's Monster all wanted women, and they wanted, presumably, to fuck those women. That doesn't seem to be a very different sexuality from mine at all! I, too, would have wanted to fuck Fay Wray and Zita Johan in their prime. The sexual difference between the monster and a heterosexual adult male's is that his would be productive and the monster's would not. The monsters, as I pointed out above, consummate their sexuality not in the creation of new life, but in death or violence of some form. So what we can conclude, tweaking Williams's ideas, is that monsters are monstrous not in their sexual difference but in their sexual sterility. (This is more consonant with James Whales's ideas anyway, particularly as presented in The Old Dark House, in which the insane family occupying the house is distinct from their guests in their totally non-productive family form.) They seek relationships that are inherently non-productive and, in the conservative mind, non-productivity is equal to non-creativity.

What Victor Salva does with The Creeper, while he is solidly within the history of traditional horror film monsters, is acknowledge that non-productivity does not preclude creativity. The Creeper is a monster that bears no offspring and is a cause of death and destruction, but he's also an artist. He's such an active artist that one wonders when he takes the time to create his art. If he only has twenty-three days awake to do his artwork on top of all the killing he has to do, then he's a very fast craftsman. Perhaps his twenty-three years of sleep gives him a lot of time for creative thought.

The second film in the series, in which The Creeper targets a busload of high school football players, elaborates further on The Creeper's artistic nature. His weapons are all carved from bone, wrapped with skin, and inlaid with teeth. The Creeper's eye for detail is such that he purposely chose the tattooed skin on Darry's abdomen for the centre of his shuriken. We also see a knife with elaborate scenes carved into the bone handle. But by far the most interesting aspect of The Creeper elaborated in the sequel is his method of feeding, which is itself creative.

The Creeper's 'feeding' isn't performed for the same biological purpose as animal feeding. The Creeper terrifies his victims, smells some odor given off from them while afraid, and by doing so determines which of his victims have particularly choice body parts. When he captures and kills his victims, he doesn't consume the body part and absorb its nutrients as animals would; rather, he assimilaltes the body part whole. In the sequel, The Creeper removes one boy's head and transforms it into his own. He does the same with Darry's eyes in the first film. What's interesting to me about this behaviour is that The Creeper is not just creative, but self-creative. He's able to be an artist of himself by composing his own body out of body parts he finds the most attractive (for reasons unknown to us). The only unchanging body parts are the arachnid-like structure on the back of his head, resembling a face-hugger from the Alien franchise, and his wings. The arachnid creature is, presumably, the 'naked' Creeper, which assembles its body from choice parts. What The Creeper does in this assembly is create its own identity, its way of representing itself to others. Its identity comes not from the point-of-view of others defining it by its difference or monstrosity, but from its own positive self-defining meeting the point-of-view of others.

Jeepers Creepers is not the first of Salva's films to contain this theme. Salva's first feature, Clownhouse, is also concerned with monstrous creativity of a sort. Clownhouse concerns a group of psychopaths who escape from confinement, put on clown costumes, and terrorize a group of children, one of whom is particularly afraid of clowns. We scarcely get to see the escaped psychopaths as themselves. What we see is them invading the clown tent at the circus and applying cosmetics, creating their own identity, as it were. They use creativity to create their identity as scary clowns. They also take a twistedly creative approach toward terrorizing the film's children. Jeepers Creepers just expands and deepens the theme, transforming the psychopaths to a genuine monster and the craftlike creativity to artistry.

It is difficult to take this discussion further without bringing in biographical details on writer-director Victor Salva. Ordinarily biography is best left out of criticism, either because it's speculation read into the film or it's simply not enlightening. In the case of Salva, I think it is both significant and enlightening. Salva, while making Clownhouse, sexually abused the twelve-year-old star and videotaped it. He was reported, tried, and served his jail time. Ten years after Clownhouse, he finally got to make another feature. He even got to make a film for Disney, Powder. This film was boycotted and resulted in protests instigated primarily by the victim, by then an adult, and his family. Each film he's made since has met with some protests by people who believe a convicted pedophile should never be allowed to work again.

That's as much as need be said for our purposes. What we see is that Salva is what is often referred to in our society as a 'monster.' Anyone who abuses a child is 'monstrous'. Perhaps, however, his alternative and distinctly non-productive sexuality (homosexual and pedophilic) is part of what suggests a 'monster' to our society. While I have heard Roman Polanski called a monster very rarely, I have heard it frequently used for Salva. Polanski, despite sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl, has had wives and has two children with his present wife. Salva, who also sexually abused a twelve-year-old, has never been married and has no children. The difference is one of productivity.

So, like The Creeper and so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is non-productive. But like The Creeper and unlike so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is highly creative. In an interview, he refers to his films as his children. (2) This is very important, because creativity for Salva is allowed to substitute--perhaps very satisfactorily--for productivity; this is true both in his life and in his films. So with The Creeper, Salva is representing a very interesting aspect of who he is: a (social) monster who is also creative, a monster who is an artist, creating darkly beautiful art and creating himself in the process. Seeing the monster-as-artist in the film means seeing the possibility of artistic creation as a substitute for biological creation, artistic creation as a means of recreating oneself: in his films, Salva creates himself insofar as he shows us he is not a monster, but a creator of a different order.

As an amusing turn-of-the-tables, the denouement of Jeepers Creepers II shows the film's major protagonist, a father (Ray Wise) whose child was taken by The Creeper, charging kids to view the sleeping Creeper nailed to a wall of his barn. What's interesting about this is the total lack of creativity in the father's sideshow moneymaking. He's productive enough: he had two children and still has one. But he can only display the Creeper, a self-made work of art, rather than make his own art. Why should biological creation without artistic creation be any less monstrous than artistic creation without biological creation?

But I promised that delving into biography and how Salva reflects himself, the creator of perverse art, in The Creeper would be enlightening. Finally, I want to address this. What seeing the film's relationship to Salva himself makes us ask is just what the protestors of Powder never asked themselves: why can't the monster's art be accepted, even if we don't accept the monster? The Creeper, of course, has to kill to make his art. The Creeper is biologically a monster. But Salva doesn't and isn't. His 'monstrosity' is social only and in creating his art he can also recreate himself. He kills no-one in the process and as I've argued, and am clearly convinced of myself, Salva's films have merit as works of art. There is a possibility of separating moral concerns about the creator from the aesthetic concerns of the created art. Perhaps some are afraid that accepting the monster-as-artist means failing to see him as a monster any longer, failing to see a non-procreative creativity as monstrous.

The Jeepers Creepers films are not masterpieces. They succeed very well as entertaining monster movies, the first being particularly skillful in audience manipulation and the second containing some fantastic monster-slaying action. As penetrating works of art, they are occasionally vapid or confused. The homophobia subtext of the second film is particularly striking as such. It is in the character of The Creeper, a character into which Salva has clearly invested much of himself, that the films show great depth and insight about human concerns of monstrosity and art, and their possible co-existence. (3)

(1) There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Science-fiction horror films tend to rely, in fact, upon the horrible productivity of the monster. The Alien films in particular feature the horrific chestbursters, alien young bursting from the human bodies in which they've been implanted. Inseminoid, as the title implies, is about nothing other than an alien force that impregnates human women. There is, too, a large body of cinema--both animated and live-action--in Japan in which demons and/or aliens capture, rape, and impregnate busty human women. The most fruitful argument to deal with this objection is that in these films the very productivity of the aliens itself, which uses rather than complements human creativity itself is destructive and repulsive. It's production through destruction rather than creation. But that argument must wait for another essay.

(2) "Interview with Victor Salva," by Mike Gencarelli, www.mediamikes.com. Sept. 24, 2011.

(3) Jeepers Creepers III has been conceived and I am eagerly awaiting its birth to see how well it meshes with the ideas explored in this essay.

We're All Perverts: Viewing Incubus (1982)

2011-10-20T20:48:00.006-04:00

The very first shot of Incubus, over which the opening credits appear, begins in total black; the camera pulls out gradually revealing that we are looking into the iris of a brown eye; the eye blinks twice. Why are we beginning a film about a sex-demon in an eye? Perhaps we are being promised that we will see, in what follows, what this eye has seen; but that would only be a valuable promise if we could detect that the eye had seen something horrible. Since the eye could be said to look entranced or in love just as well as horrified, something else must be communicated in this choice. Other films use similar techniques: Blue Velvet (1986), after a brief prologue, takes us into the severed ear for a devious nightmare until we emerge from the protagonist's ear at the coda. In Blue Velvet, we understand we are being taken into the mind for a cinematic nightmare. In Incubus, rather than entering an eye in the first shot, we are in fact emerging from the eye. Only in the final shot do we re-enter the eye. The procession isn't into a subjective realm and back into an objective one, but rather a projection of the interior, subjective onto the exterior, objective world. What we witness in this film, the first and final shots seem to tell us, is a drama of projection: what happens when minds project their dreams onto the real world. Let's see if this interpretation bears out.

The plot of Incubus concerns a young man named Tim who has begun to have nightmares about a woman being tortured by hooded men in a dungeon demanding 'Tell us!' He screams, "Leave her alone!" and awakes in a sweat. Each time he has one of these dreams, a local girl or woman is brutally raped, sometimes to death, and any man interfering is murdered. Tim gradually begins to worry that he's responsible for the deaths, though he doesn't know how. His mysterious grandmother (Helen Hughes) seems to suspect him as well. Meanwhile, a recently-moved surgeon, Sam (John Cassavetes), tries to protect his 18-year-old daughter, Tim's girlfriend, from the menace and work with the sheriff (John Ireland) to find the culprit.

The first, and most obvious, case of 'projectionism' in this plot description is Tim's dreams. His dreams are of a sadomasochistic nature. Later in the film he describes the procedure as a 'battle of wills', with the tortured woman laughing and the torturers amping it up to break her. Both parties involved are taking some sort of pleasure from the proceedings. The full nature of Tim's dreams remains nebulous throughout the film, however. At times he seems to see the victims in his dreams, but later the 'players' of the dream are identified as his grandmother's family and his mother; at other times the dreams seem to be unrelated to the victims other than always occurring in conjunction with a rape. Whatever the case, the cruel and slightly incestuous sexuality of Tim's dreams are projected onto real people in the real world through the incubus.

The brutality of the rapes is exceptional: each woman's uterus is ruptured by the force of the rape and (it is implied, though not stated) the size of the creature's penis; one woman's windpipe is split, suggesting she was both vaginally and orally raped; and in some cases the woman are filled with what Cassavetes calls an "incredible" amount of semen, so much "even the hemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it"; and nearly all of the women die as a result of the rape alone. Though we never see any actual rape, the shots of the women screaming, in one case rendered in a relishing slow motion, along with Cassavetes's solemn descriptions of ruptured uteruses and gallons of sperm, are disturbing enough.

The key to Tim's projectionism, and perhaps to the whole film, is, of course, his relationship to the incubus. The incubus never does, and perhaps isn't even capable, of attacking until Tim has one of his dreams. The dreams themselves come upon Tim uninvited, leaving open the question (as far as the narrative goes) of who is having the greater influence over who. Either way, Tim's conscious participation in the world must cease before the incubus can begin its rapes. While Tim is conscious, the incubus is an earnest newspaper editor named Laura Kincaide. She seems to be entirely unaware that she is the incubus and is capable of leading a fairly normal life. Tim's consciousness keeps her in balance, as it were; he's like a superego operating on an id. When he is overtaken by his dreams, the intelligent and thoughtful woman becomes a demonic rapist: pure, uninhibited desire is set loose. If consciousness is participating in the world as it is, without imposing our fantasies upon it, then when Tim becomes unconscious, he loses his grasp between his dream world and the real world and the incubus is free to enact his masochistic dreams/desires upon the world--particularly upon women, as they are the locus of his erotic urges. Therefore, the template this relationship between Tim and Laura sets up is one of latent, perverse desires becoming active without limit.

What we want to see now is whether this template has any repetition amongst the film's characters. I think it does. There is a shot during the first rape-murder scene where a young man goes to his truck. We see on his front bumper a sign reading, "Galen: 150 years of boredom." Galen is the name of the small town. Apparently its occupants view the town as very uneventful. What's curious and important about this silly bumper sticker is what it reveals about the distinction between the surface and what's hidden. Everyone in Galen has secrets. Again, much like in Blue Velvet, beneath the pleasant surface of the small town are hideous perversions and secrets we normally never acknowledge. Every character we spend significant time with is shown to have some secret. Tim has his dreams. Agatha Galen (Tim's grandmother) has both the secret of Tim's origin and her family history. Her family, the Galen's, were witch-hunters and when they went a-hunting during the last slew of incubus attacks, they killed a supposed witch who give birth to Tim. She also give birth to a girl, Laura, who was sent out for adoption elsewhere. Laura's big secret is, of course, being the incubus. Even the sheriff is hiding the unsolved slew of incubus attacks and that the source of his appointment as sheriff is Agatha.

The biggest surprise, however, is the secret harbored by Sam and his daughter Jenny. Sam hints, though never confesses, that he murdered his last girlfriend, Julie. After his wife died, he got an 18-year-old girlfriend and began neglecting his daughter. When he caught Julie cheating on him, he fought with her. He said she 'managed' to get away, so he chased her down and feels guilty over it. He never states the results, but we get teasing flashbacks of a woman lying on the ground in the rain, covered in blood. He later tells Laura that Julie is dead. Presumably he murdered the girl, then moved to a small town in hiding. That Sam murdered a young woman would be bad enough, but there is also a creepily incestuous tone to his relationship with Jenny. The very first scene in which we meet Sam, not knowing who he is, he is entering his home, going upstairs, and looking at a woman exiting a shower totally naked. We realize only later that the girl he looked at is actually his daughter. He doesn't want her to have a boyfriend. She promises to never leave him. They kiss on the lips. This doesn't mean he's ever molested his daughter; it just means that, like Tim's dreams, Sam has this perversion in his hidden life.

Everyone in Galen does have a perverse hidden life. 'Galen' is, in fact, Swedish for 'crazy'. And in the Freudian sense, this is correct: everyone in Galen is crazy. To be perverse is to veer from normality, to be crazy to some degree. Ordinarily we moderate our perversions, inhibit which of them we allow to enter into the world. What this all amounts to is a sort of vision of the world (with Galen standing in for the whole world) as perverse. Everyone is a pervert. There is no-one alive who does not have perverse desires of one sort or another--whether incestuous, masochistic, sadistic, or anything else--usually beneath the surface. We inhibit them out of a sense of dignity, propriety, morality, spirituality, or any number of other values.

Complementing this vision is the moral: what happens if we uncheck those perversions, let them reign uninhibited? It is through and in the character of the incubus that hidden, perverse desires become revealed and even actualized in the world of the film. And through the incubus, we find sex, cruelty, and death inextricably bound. The distinction between eros and thanatos, as it were, depends upon the distinction between our fantasy life (which may be as perverse as we like) and our real lives (which must be inhibited). Sex without limitation consumes its participants; infinite sex is death. Sexuality has its creative power when limited, ordered by form.

The most powerful moment in Incubus, the finale, illustrates this point very well. Sam has Laura, Jenny, and Tim in his house. He's preparing to induce Tim's dream in order to interrogate him and learn its secrets. Before starting, Jenny approaches him and tells him she's going to get some rest. Here director John Hough gives us an important and intricate shot: as Jenny heads to her room upstairs, the camera tracks and pans to follow her progress up to and into her room at the top of the stairs; the camera then pans to Sam and tracks back toward him; Sam looks toward the kitchen, leading the camera to pan toward the kitchen in time to see Laura emerge with a trey of coffee; Laura enters a doorway near the kitchen and the camera pans to look past Sam into the living room; Laura meets the camera's focus in the living room and exits the doorway Sam is looking through to talk to Sam; Sam tells her he would like her to go upstairs to see Jenny and she agrees to do so. This could have been handled much more easily with editing. Hough chose to choreograph the shot for a reason, namely, to link Jenny's and Laura's destinations. Both are going to end up in her room. Laura is sent to Jenny's room by Jenny's father. He has a desire to protect her, yes. But he also has that subtly incestuous relationship with Jenny. It is the tension between the surface desire (protective father) and perverse desire (sexual interest) that leads to the film's great tragedy.

As Sam interrogates Tim, he urges Tim to "Bring it through the door. Let it come through the door." This suggestion of penetration coincides with the incubus's penetration of its final victim. Tim sees the victim in his dream, finally; instead of his mother's face, he sees Jenny's. Tim rushes upstairs with a knife Agatha gave him and tries to kill Laura, but Sam interferes and Tim stabs himself. Laura hugs Sam, asking him to never leave her. As they embrace, he sees over her shoulder Jenny's body lying in bed, bleeding profusely from between her legs. Laura, the incubus, raped her as he was interrogating Tim. He sent Laura to the room; he induced Tim's dream; he's responsible for his daughter's death.

Sam's hidden desire to fuck his daughter was brought into the real world by the incubus. Despite all his conscious efforts to protect his daughter from all harm and, for that matter, sex, his activities resulted in her being raped to death. The tragedy is of Greek proportions, with bodies littering the stage, piercing dramatic irony, and disturbing sexuality haunting the spectator long after.

The final shot is a zoom into Sam's eye. He blinks twice, then the camera zooms into the black of his iris until we see nothing but black: the black of our hidden, perverse desires. The vision the film expresses is a moralistic one, viewing unrestrained sexuality is inherently deadly. We may all be perverts, but we have fantasies for a reason and they should remain fantasies. In the sexual free-for-all of the early '80s, these notions would have seemed very reactionary; it's not surprising the film was loathed by critics upon release. A case of bad timing, I suppose: had Incubus been released when the AIDS epidemic gained enormous attention in the mid-'80s, it may have struck the same critics as an insightful critique of uninhibited sexuality. AIDS, after all, did much as the incubus did insofar as equating limitless sex with death.

Just because Incubus has a strong vision underlying its artistic choices does not mean its a perfect film, of course. Some of the film's creative decisions are questionable. Particularly the repetitive, cruel rapes. The first rape shows only the result: a traumatized girl. The second rape doesn't just show, but dwells upon the terror and agony of the rape victim, a 40-something museum curator with children. The point, by now, is already made. The third rape is at least dramatically justified, as Hough constructs the film so as to make the audience believe Tim is the incubus. (He's always running out of a scene just before a rape.) However, the fourth rape is unnecessary and, being so near the climax, only interferes with the film's pacing. Perhaps realizing this, Hough tries some virtuosity with the final rape setpiece to make it more exciting. Particularly, he amps up the gore. But there's also a stylish shot in which the camera is attached to the bottom of a wheelchair, so we see a body through the gap of a bathroom door before the girl in the wheelchair does. I have a suspicion that Hough was influenced by Argento's gialli films, where stylish murders punctuate the detective action. But in those films, the murders can continue throughout the film because the characters murdered are related to the plot. These rape-murder scenes are of previously unknown characters. They add horror to the film, but never suspense. We have no idea who the rape victims are. A couple playing around a lake, a museum curator, some girl visiting a Bruce Dickinson concert in town (!), and finally a man and his two daughters at a farmhouse.

Still, one could argue that the final rape of a girl in a wheelchair is an act of particular perversion. One could also argue that each rape victim had someone who desired to rape her. The first victim was called a 'bitch' by her boyfriend before the rape. The second victim had a wimpy husband. The third victim was at a metal concert; the stage performance was an enactment of Samson and Delilah with a song about a 'two-timing' woman. And the fourth victims were, like Sam and Jenny, daughters with a single father. Though the rapes might not be dramatically ideal, they can be seen as adding to the picture of a perverse Galen.

Overall, whether one agrees with the main thrust of the vision in Incubus, the film's vision is certainly consistent and interesting. Hough, whose horror films are generally underrated, has made a fascinating work of art with this film, magically managing both very sleazy subject matter with a very serous, diginified tone.

How Poltergeist Influenced Evil Dead II

2011-10-14T02:43:00.002-04:00

Due to unfortunate personal circumstances, I was unable to make this week's update. However, I was able to throw together a little video showing how certain scenes, shots, and ideas in Poltergeist (1980) made their way, either consciously or unconsciously, into Evil Dead II (1986). As you'll see, just about everything Raimi borrows he embellishes and amps up several points. But the source material is clearly from the Hooper/Spielberg film.

Love and Practical Reality: A Shot-by-Shot Analysis of the 'Let's Make a Baby' Scene of Rosemary's Baby

2011-10-03T02:45:00.001-04:00

As I am ordinarily committed to the serious appraisal of films rarely taken seriously, one may wonder what purpose is served by analysing a sequence from Rosemary's Baby, a canonical film that has been analysed frequently in the journals. I often emphasize the feeling films create, one's emotional relationship to the film. I have argued elsewhere that our emotional relationship to a film is as much truth as what one can demonstrate intellectually, 'objectively.' Much more than with literature, meaning in cinema is created through the emotional impact the image conveys. What is told in words in a novel must, in film, be created within the real space of the frame and within the viewer. A novelist can tell you of a sinister atmosphere, but an adjective in the image must be shown; a metaphor must be created through the concatenation of what is said, seen, and conjoined. A master stylist like Polanski can manipulate how we feel with his images through the use of framing, movement, colour, contrasts; and from this he can convey much more information than we would ordinarily recognize. This is all obvious to the student of cinema: it's called film language and Polanski is a recognized master of it. Yet I've been challenged for writing too much of the feeling films create and evading hard evidence in film language. This analysis, a close-reading I ordinarily simplify for my readers, shows a master constructing our feelings from the raw elements of the image and from these feelings revealing to us the essence of the film.

While the hallucinogenic dream sequence that immediately follows the romantic dinner sequence of Rosemary's Baby gets more attention, the telling twenty shots that comprise the romantic dinner sequence are very densely packed with visual information about Guy's personality, the nature of the Woodhouse marriage, and the effects Guy's deal with Roman has upon it. Though there are doubtless several important themes in Rosemary's Baby, not the least of which the issue of ownership of one's body, a major theme often neglected is Polanski's cynicism about love and romance. The way he manipulates our sympathies in the romantic dinner sequence reveals a central conflict between Guy's pragmatism and Rosemary's idealism and with that the conclusion that both are mistaken extremes.

(1) The first shot begins with red roses coming into focus. As Rosemary enters, the camera tracks slightly to the right, giving us a clear look at Rosemary who, startled and curious by the flowers, approaches them. Polanski purposely makes the flowers the subject of the shot before Rosemary. She is, as it were, the afterthought. The next shot explains the first.

(2) We see more flowers in the kitchen. Again, Rosemary walks into the shot and approaches the flowers, the flowers being the subject first. The camera then pushes in toward Rosemary, pans and reveals Guy, in the shadows, at the end of the hall, the visual answer to the question in her mind and our minds: Who put the flowers there? At this point in the film we aren't aware of Guy's involvement with the Castavets, other than his having spent some time with Roman. Yet there is an effect created here. By placing the roses in the frame before Rosemary, we get the sense of the flowers coming before her. The flowers, of course, are trivial, but what they mean is not. They are the instruments by which Guy initiates the conception of their child. Guy is putting his interest in the child before Rosemary. Of course, that might not be especially sinister or even a valid distinction had the shot not continued to make an important point.

As Guy walks down the hallway to meet Rosemary, still in the same shot, he says, "I've been a creep" and explains how he's been hoping his fellow actor, whose blindness resulted in Guy getting an important role, remains blind. We expect Guy to say he's been a creep for neglecting Rosemary, but instead he reveals this perverse desire. What's important is that he reveals this in the same shot that began with the flowers. The flowers, symbolizing the couple's romance, the conception of their child, and thus their hopes for the future, is linked to Guy's acting career and how it has come to flourish. Once again, we're not, at this point, aware that Guy is conceiving the child in order to further his career, but Polanski's direction subtly implies it for us long before we know.

The shot goes on, following Guy to the calendar as he points to two dates he has circled in red: he's 'figured out' the dates they must conceive by, he explains. We can surmise, from the rest of the film, that he's been directed to impregnate Rosemary at a certain time. The use of red to circle the dates and the red of the flowers informs us of this, initially on a subconscious level: the first real glimpse of red we get in the film is Roman's smoking jacket during the scene in which they first meet. Rosemary's colours are yellow and white; only after meeting the Castavets do reds start to bleed into the Woodhouse household, starting with the red flowers. The red of the flowers indicates the Faustian nature of their romance, insofar as it is now stamped by Roman, the red of the dates how Guy's been directed by Roman: he's sold the soul of their relationship for his career.

(3) Polanski cuts to an insert of the gramophone playing some romantic, instrumental music. The object is the paraphernalia of romance, manufacturing the mood. Guy is an actor and is skilled in the use of props to create emotions. Insofar as Guy must disguise his motives from Rosemary and create a particular mood for her, this is a performance for Guy: this is the performance, in fact, that will make his career.

There is a perverse irony in how Polanski depicts Guy's career-making performance as not on stage, but in his very life. The more I watch the film, the more I find myself feeling some sympathy for Guy. His very pragmatic and unromantic thought-process has been, 'She carries the baby; we tell her it died; get over the grief; and, with my new career, I'll be in a place to have the family we dream of.' Guy is not evil. He perhaps believes he has Rosemary's interests in some sense at heart, that he is making this sacrifice for his family. Unfortunately, he doesn't get his family's permission first and therein is Guy's major fault: he sells Rosemary's womb as though he owns it.

The cynical depiction of Guy stands in for the married couple in general, at least the urban married couple. Polanski seems to be depicting modern marriage as a stage upon which people perform roles for the good of the marriage. The conception of children is not, for Polanski, done out of True Love, but for practical motives; the couple merely represents their motives to themselves as ideal and romantic. Polanski seems skeptical about the possibility of true romance unpolluted by pragmatic calculations. In this sense, perhaps it's Rosemary and not Guy who has the problem.

(4) After the record starts, we're shown Guy lighting a fire in the fireplace. In another subtle indication of Guy's sacrifice, then, we see the paraphernalia of romance followed immediately by the paraphernalia of hell. Lighting a fire can be a romantic act, but Cassavetes's/Guy's performance in lighting the fire is vaguely sinister and also shows signs of discomfort, his head tilted slightly downward, gazing from under his brow with a nervous smile.

(5) Polanski now gives us a shot of the living room, Rosemary seated to the left and Guy at the fireplace in the center. What stands out most is that Rosemary is now wearing a red dress, her whole body covered in red satin. Until now Rosemary's colours have been light, usually yellow like her hair. The only time she wears red is during the romantic dinner, after which she is raped by her husband/the devil. My claim is not that red is symbolic of any particular concept, but rather that its placement has an effect and Polanski uses this. Red is a warm and yet dangerous colour. When we first see it on Roman, we're put on alert, despite his gentlemanly ways. The red flowers were linked to Roman for this reason. Now the red dress links Rosemary to Roman; seeing it, we feel something is off, that the romantic evening is tainted and Rosemary is in danger. Rosemary's body has been sold out to Roman's interests.

After lighting the fire, Guy approaches Rosemary at the coffee table, decapitated by the frame. Rosemary suddenly becomes alarmed over the smoke from the fireplace. Guy has forgotten to open the flue, risking the white paint. The white paint Rosemary has used to decorate the home in which she wants to build their life together conveys her hopes for the purity of their future together, a purity she wants to preserve. Rosemary believes in True Romance, even if Guy and Polanski don't. That the smoke enters the frame as Guy's head exits is important. The only sight of smoke in the film prior to that moment is during dinner at the Castevets. While Rosemary and Minnie talk, Rosemary glances into the den where Guy and Roman are speaking, seeing only smoke wafting from around the corner. Here, again, Guy is (partially) out of frame when the smoke begins, linking, like Rosemary's dress, this moment and Guy's intentions to the satanic influence of Roman Castevet and particularly to the deal Guy and Roman were presumably making. The smoke that can ruin the white paint is the influence of Roman that threatens to sully their innocence and happiness. If my analysis of Guy is correct, that satanic influence in the narrative is representative of pragmatism in life.

Rosemary and Guy both sit on the floor, Rosemary on the left and Guy on the right, the fire between them as the camera slowly pushes in. In another context, that fire could easily be read as the passion between this young couple; but in this context, the fire seems somewhat hollow, the prop in an act.

(6) Polanski cuts to the candlelight dinner. Rosemary is again on the left, Guy on the right, the table and two yellow candles between them. There are a few dinner scenes in Rosemary's Baby. The first is the dinner with Hutch, during which he relates the twisted history of their new building, including baby-eating witches. The second is the dinner with the Castevets, during which the unseen deal between Guy and Roman takes place. The third is this dinner between Rosemary and Guy alone. This context is important. The discussion during the first dinner informs us of the building's history naturally prepares us for the sinister tone of the second, the Castevets taking the place of the baby-eating witches. During this dinner, Guy is seduced to the building's dark history. The third dinner is Guy seducing Rosemary to the same, in an inverse of Adam and Eve.

As they eat and drink, the doorbell rings. Guy feigns annoyance and hurries to answer the door. For a man who, later in the scene, is quite content to leave Rosemary do all the housework, his readiness to answer the door is suspicious. The camera pushes in on Rosemary, listening intently. She hears Minnie's voice; "Not tonight," she says. The sense Polanski communicates is that Minnie is an invasive force diametrically opposed to romance and love.

(7) Guy returns with desserts, jokingly explaining them as Minnie's "ESP." Polanski pushes in to Rosemary and we see she's too relieved to be suspicious. (8) Guy, sitting at the table, does an impression of Minnie, setting Rosemary's and, to some extent our, worries at ease. (The way Guy makes fun of Minnie's pronunciation of "mousse" as "mouse" returns, in fact, in Rosemary's dream sequence, when Rosemary claims to have suffered a mouse-bite. This is also a humourous reference to Minnie as the Disney character, Minnie Mouse.) (9) Rosemary takes their dinner plates into the kitchen, disappearing into the white for a moment, perhaps indicating her security in their relationship, then returns to the table, Polanski's camera staying on her the whole time. (10) Guy starts eating the dessert, chocolate mousse. (11) Rosemary starts eating as well, but complains of a 'chalky undertaste.' At the very moment Rosemary tastes the chocolate and recoils at the undertaste, the record of romantic music reaches its end. Guy has sold out their romance by giving her the drugged dessert. The 'undertaste', moreover, parallels the sense we get throughout this whole romantic dinner sequence, the feeling, created by Polanski's mise-en-scene, that something is off. We are wholly allied with Rosemary throughout this scene and experience the unsettling undertones with her. (12, 13, 14) Strangely, Guy, who has just been mocking Minnie, becomes annoyed by Rosemary's complaints, eventually telling her, "Eat it!" Although the table is positioned evenly between them, the shots of Rosemary in this back-and-forth contain a yellow candle, whereas there is only the black void out the window for Guy. The step of giving Rosemary the mousse is the giving up of his soul; Guy is committed to fulfilling his deal with the devil. (15) Rosemary gives in and once again begins eating the mousse. She's putting on a performance that she enjoys it, yet the performance is clearly a performance, unlike Guy's. She asks Guy to change the record and while he's away dumps most of the mousse. He returns to loom behind her, hands on her shoulders, his head cut off by the frame again. Polanski uses the technique of framing-to-obscure throughout the film, most famously when Minnie is blocked by the doorframe while on the telephone. (Preview audiences literally craned their necks to try see around the doorframe.) He used it, as I noted, when Guy and Roman are speaking together. Putting someone partially out of frame makes us feel the missing information, our need to know drawing our attention not to what's in frame but to what's not in the frame; we sense that the character is hiding something and indeed has something to hide, in this case his guilt over feeding Rosemary a drugged dessert.

(16) Polanski cuts from the dinner to Guy sitting alone, back to us, in the dark den. He's watching the televised appearance of the Pope at Yankee stadium. (17) Rosemary is busy in the bright, white kitchen cleaning up, without Guy's help. The shot is not initially of Rosemary's face, however, but of the trashcan into which she's emptying the mousse, leaving behind a stain resembling dried blood on the white cloth. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the image to say it conveys a sense of desecrated virginity; yet the visual contrast of the brown and the white is established earlier in the film, as Rosemary repaints the dark brown apartment white and pale yellow. It's as though the old colour, or character, of the building is coming through in their lives.

"Christ, what a mob," Guy says from out of frame. We tilt up to see Rosemary feeling ill. This is the drug taking effect. Yet Polanski's linking of the Pope ("Christ, what a mob") to her sudden dizziness reminds us that she was raised a Catholic, amongst strict nuns. Earlier in the film she dreams of a nun and apologizes for 'telling about the window.' In her second dream, during which she dreams she's raped by the devil, she explains to the Pope that the "mouse bite" kept her from coming to see him. She obviously suffers some anxiety over her abandonment of religion, her absence from the "mob".

(18) Guy is still watching the Pope. Not the least bit interested in the Pope, he states this would be a great place for his Yamaha commercial (the ad he starred in). Guy, again, subordinates higher values to his career. Guy's rejection of ideals is, as the events are linked within the shots, a cause of Rosemary's dizziness. (19) As Guy laughs, Polanski cuts to Rosemary stumbling from the white kitchen toward the dark livingroom, where Guy has been sitting. (This contrast of light and dark can be found throughout the film, most obviously in Rosemary's redecoration of the apartment.) She knocks over a chair along the way, intimating chaos entering the domestic order. She falls into Guy's arms and simultaneously into total dark, her (and his) features no longer visible against the background of the bright kitchen. (20) Guy escorts Rosemary down the hallway, blaming the alcohol for her dizziness. After she falls, he carries her the rest of the way to their bedroom, leading into the dream sequence and the rape. Now that, as the sequence of shots up to this point has established, Rosemary's defenses have been broken down and the colours of Roman and the building have begun invading the Wodehouse world as much as callous practicality has invaded Guy's heart, she can be led off for the rape, the real nail in the coffin for the couple's romance.

I've been referring to the attitude toward relationships in Rosemary's Baby as 'cynical.' However, I would like to qualify that statement. In Foucault's terms, the current discourse is that our liberal age has allowed relationships to be based on love whereas they used to be based on practical concerns, such as wealth and power. A relationship based upon money or any practicality today is denigrated. Like all discourse for Foucault, its truth is questionable. In reality, relationships in the past were often based upon a mixture of emotional and practical concerns and the truth is they are still based upon a mixture of emotional and practical concerns. When choosing a man, women do consider how financially stable he is. This is a practical concern. We're to believe, of course, that this is a "requirement for love"; but that claim is no more accurate today than it was for Elizabethan England. Seeing the modern, urban family as partially motivated by practical concerns is realistic, not cynical.

Rosemary buys into the discourse of our time and desires a family based upon pure love. So Guy, more pragmatic, must play the part for her--and he's good at it. As Rosemary detects the 'chalky undertaste,' as it were, in his performance, she begins to imagine a Faustian conspiracy. Polanski never gives the viewer indisputable evidence that Rosemary's suspicions are true. The final revelatory scene is, like her dream sequences, slightly out of sync. Moreover, the eyes she sees as she looks at the child are exactly the eyes she sees during the rape dream sequence. Possibly Rosemary's inability to accept the unreality of her fairytale idea of love leads her to villainize Guy's practicality as downright satanic. That is, of course, completely speculation. The film is purposely ambiguous. There may indeed be a Faustian conspiracy. At the very least, the viewer is led to strongly sympathize with Rosemary and to share her perception; and from her perception, Guy has indeed sold their hopes and dreams for his career.

Hisss (2010) - 2.5/4

2011-09-24T05:56:00.004-04:00

I've heard a little about Bollywood, but haven't seen much. Their cinematic form seems to have discarded all notions of consistency in tone and has instead striven to entertain in every possible way simultaneously and often conflictingly. Hisss is a Bollywood film directed by American-as-Apple-Pie Jennifer Lynch. How much of her vision remains is hard to say, but she's disowned the film. How many shots were directed by her is also hard to say. But the resulting film is nevertheless both entertaining and interesting.

"I may have brain cancer, but I can still piss like a horse." The man who utters that line is the film's villain, a psychopathic white guy (Jeff Doucette) who wants to become immortal. The best way to become immortal is to find some cobras mid-coitus, kidnap the male, put him in an aquarium, and randomly administer electric shocks. The female snake then transforms into a hot Indian supermodel (Mallika Sherawat, in this case), a snake goddess, who will find the kidnapper and trade a special diamond for her mate. This diamond can grant immortality.

Of course, it won't really go down like that. Shapeshifting snake deities will just eat you and vomit your semi-digested corpse into the nearest gutter. And that's where Hisss is a horror film. Mallika does come to the city looking for her mate. But the only trail she has is the people who assisted in the kidnapping. Instead of questioning them, she sniffs them out, swallows them, and vomits them up in nasty, slimy balls. For vore fetishists, this is no doubt very exciting stuff.

It also excites the interest of a local detective, however. Despite having little to do with the plot itself, the film is strangely concerned with the detective's personal life. He and his wife have been striving to have children, but she keeps miscarrying. Meanwhile, his mother-in-law--easily the film's finest character--believes he's really a woman, a lonely spinster in need of love. She also thinks the news broadcasts about the snake goddess's victims is a TV series starring her son-in-law.

Apparently Jennifer Lynch conceived Hisss as an absurd love story between the snake goddess and her snake lover. The producers, however, conceived of the film as a snakewoman horror film with a hot babe slinking around naked. The mixture is strangely Shakespearean in the way it appeals to high and low cultures, poetic and entertainment interests at the same time. That's not to say the film is brilliant; the producer interference has probably done a lot more harm than good. The film's finest moments are likely fragments from Lynch's vision: the poetic, fairytale moments when Mallika slithers up a tree or light post totally naked and, in silence, longs for her stolen love--the whole film, in a way, is moving toward the completion of the interrupted coitus. There are also parallels between the snake couple and the detective and his wife that are rather nebulous as the film stands, something to do with love, fertility, and respect for life. Their destinies are bound together. Alas, whatever message Lynch was going for here is tough to decipher.

One of the stranger responses I had to Hisss was to wonder why the snake goddess would work so hard to pursue her snake mate when, in human form, she has her pick of all these human males. Even though she is technically a snake, she's in human form; she could stay in human form and have a human mate. The film seems to deliberately pull these anthropocentric strings. As a man, I found myself almost jealous of the snake: why should he get this hot mate when we humans are such superior males? Perhaps this anthropocentrism as part of what Lynch wanted to explore with this film and why she made efforts to parallel the humans to the snakes. In the film's present form, it's hard to say.

However mangled and inconsistent Hisss may be, it is a fascinating mixture of conscious and subconscious, art and entertainment, poetry and exploitation. Weird, often unintentionally funny, the film is worth at least one viewing for Western horror audiences, to whom snakewomen movies, a subgenre of Indian cinema, are unusual.

Don't Let Him In (2011) - 1.5/4

2011-09-22T04:50:00.004-04:00

"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun." - Ashley J. Williams

A problem one has after watching a lot of movies, especially low budget movies, is that you've seen it all before. Rather than marvel over a movie being bad, I'm constantly surprised by how creative filmmakers are at making the Same Old Plot (SOP) somehow interesting. How can a psychopathic killer stalking cute college girls still be interesting? After watching so many films with the SOP--whatever the P may be--I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter so much whether the film is good or bad, but whether it's weird, fascinating, stamped with some personal style. It has to have that something special. That Something Special can even trump concerns of Good and Bad.

This is especially important to note for filmmakers working with very low budgets. The tendency amongst first-time filmmakers with low budgets is, unfortunately, to stick to 'safe' plots that have been done many times before. These plots have been done well and glossy by Hollywood, interesting and quirky by other low-budget filmmakers. Yet many filmmakers try to imitate the respectable Hollywood instantiations and, lacking both the imaginative quirks of independents and the gloss of Hollywood, merely present the plot in the most banal style possible. Low-budget, independent filmmakers have to take risks, dare to be odd, disliked, bad. That takes imagination and creativity; in independent cinema, there's no-one to be creative for you.

The problem with Don't Let Him In isn't that it's bad. I suppose you could say it's good--it doesn't take enough risks to be bad. The acting is of a high quality, the gore is decent, the pacing is good; there aren't any problems with the dialogue, characters, or the plot development, as it follows very well-established guidelines in these areas. Yet the film isn't the slightest bit interesting. It's good, in a sense, but totally plain, flavourless, nondescript, bland. It has nothing really weird in it, no peculiarities, no offbeat variations, fascinating flaws, or moments of creative brilliance--in short, no personality. It just coasts along, ever so competently, without imagination.

Don't Let Him In concerns a very familiar plot. There is a psychopathic killer on the loose. A group of friends all go into the woods and realize they're at risk of getting killed by the serial killer dubbed 'The Tree Surgeon'; and soon enough they do indeed start getting killed. One character fights back with modest intelligence. There is a slight quirk, or variation, in the plot--a twist--as one would expect.

If that plot sounds like something you want to see, you can see it handled solidly in Don't Let Him In. While the film does nothing else, it delivers that plot quite well. The only thing approaching a stand-out moment in the film is a shot of the killer drooling. This shot won't perturb an unremarkable evening watching Don't Let Him In, however.

Husk (2011) - 2.5/4

2011-09-19T06:47:00.003-04:00

Remember that magnificent story by Jorge Luis Borges where a spy is summoned to a mansion; there he finds himself trapped in an infinite labyrinth inside a novel and he shoots a detective to prove it? Well Husk has nothing to do with that. Husk is about killer scarecrows.

Husk is actually a sort of magic realist fantasy as much as it is a horror. Yes, it's about killer scarecrows. But it's also about a complex and inscrutable mechanism that creates, controls, and maintains the scarecrows, as well as the various instruments of the mechanism. It functions as follows: whenever humans enter the cornfield, they are attacked and crucified by a scarecrow; the victim is then entranced and summoned to a room in the farmhouse containing nothing but an Olde Tyme sewing machine; the zombie-like victim then stitches together a scarecrow mask and wears it; with that the victim is forever a scarecrow controlled by the mechanism, ready to assault more humans.

There are other rules governing the mechanism. For one, the scarecrows can't leave the cornfield once they're in it. They can't even return to the farmhouse. Also, only one scarecrow can be mobile at any given time. The mechanism can't control two scarecrows at once. And perhaps the most peculiar of all the mechanism's activities is the visions it grants to one of the victims, revealing the past.

The film tries to explain these rules by means of, as is so often the case, a past tragedy (fratricide); but the explanation is deeply inadequate for explaining the whole mechanism. Tragedy is not trauma; there's no reason a personal trauma like murder should become a cosmic trauma, unless of course the cosmos is within a dream. But even granting that Freudian premise, still only a few pieces of the mechanism are explained. Really, the rules are arbitrary. Whether that's a good or bad thing comes down to the individual viewer. Some will no doubt find it frustrating. I personally enjoyed the lack of explanation. It was much more interesting to me to see the characters struggling, like scientists, to figure out how this anomalous portion of the universe works rather than asking the more theological question of, "Why?".

The plot of Husk is that a group of 20-somethings are driving to wherever a group of 20-somethings would drive to when they crash right outside the farmhouse of the scarecrows. Naturally they gravitate toward the farmhouse seeking help. One-by-one the scarecrows whittle them down and convert them into scarecrows while the survivors, especially the young man gifted with visions of the farmhouse's past (Devon Graye), try to figure out the mechanism and fight back.

A difficulty many viewers will have with Husk is the plot holes, and just about all of these plot holes come from the arbitrary rules of the mechanism. For instance, if the sewing is so integral to the creation of the scarecrows, why not simply destroy the sewing machine? Or, for that matter, burn down the house? Several options appear open to them to interfere with the mechanism one way or another, either to stop the mechanism or at least render the scarecrows ineffectual. But, as we must always say of plot holes, "If they did that, there'd be no movie."

For anyone who wishes to dig further, there arealso some Freudian implications to enjoy. Following trauma, the sufferer represses the memory and the repressed trauma bubbles up as compulsive repetition. The Freudian ideal is to face the trauma and no longer repress it. In Husk, the mechanism is about as clear a representation of repetition-compulsion as one could hope for. The trauma is the fratricide that is too much for, well, the cosmos? the ghost of the murderer? or for the dreamer of this nightmare, namely the audience? Whomever it may be, it is through the character of the visionary that we begin to face the trauma. This parallel with psychoanalytic theory could well have been intentional, as so many young filmmakers are acquainted with film theory. If not, it's still a fruitful area of inquiry.

The main pleasure of Husk, however, is to just enjoy the killer scarecrows and the young adults kicking scarecrow ass. Killer scarecrows just aren't that common a movie monster. In fact, the best killer scarecrow before this film is in an episode of Friday the 13th: The Series. So as far as killer scarecrow action goes, Husk is an excellent update for the 2010s.

The Shrine (2010) - 3/4

2011-09-17T02:21:00.007-04:00

The Shrine , the latest film from Canadian filmmaker Jon Knautz (Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) centers on two curious, headstrong women. Carmen (Cindy Simpson), a journalist, and her assistant Sara (Meghan Heffern), defy their editor's orders and, with Carmen's boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) tagging along, decide to investigate a series of disappearances centered in a Polish hamlet. The investigation leads them to a barn/church in the middle of a field where thugs chase them off, and to a mysterious fog over a stretch of woods. After both women enter the woods, one after the other, and stare at the demonic statue at the center, they must run for their lives from a local cult.

What makes The Shrine work so well is that it continues to evade anticipation throughout and does so without cheating. From beginning to end, it's difficult to predict just where the film is going. The fog, the statue, and the cult are obviously all linked in some fashion; but since all three are equally mysterious, there's no guessing just what's going on. Many films rely on some form of cheating to keep the viewer confused. The most infamous example of this may be High Tension. The Shrine pulls some sleight-of-hand, particularly in its use of subjective camera-work, but it never cheats; it earns our continued absorption in its mysteries and this interest is paid off as the mysteries are sufficiently dealt with.

If there's any major problem with The Shrine, it's an over-reliance upon these mysteries. The characters seem to spend the majority of the film walking or running from one location to another. The intervening confrontations and/or set-pieces are either non-events or very brief. As a result, there is more atmosphere than suspense. This isn't necessarily a problem, of course. Many great horror films, like Mario Bava's or Peter Weir's, are almost all atmosphere and mystery. The problem for The Shrine is that it does appear to strive for suspense, moments of tension, and when they work--and occasionally work quite well--they just aren't sustained long enough. For suspense to work patience is required.

To get deeper into The Shrine, though, I want to talk a little about about theory. Particularly, Linda Williams's famous article, "When the Woman Looks." The basic thesis of the article is twofold. The first point is that "In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire" and "The woman’s gaze is punished...by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. " Any time a woman in a horror film grants herself the privilege of fulfilling her desire to see, to know, what she shouldn't--like Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil--she is punished. The second point is that the reason female curiosity must be so punished is that "the woman’s look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality," namely the monster's. The woman sees herself in the monster, or the monster in herself: both are an alternative to male sovereignty and thus both must be oppressed by males to retain that sovereignty. Horror films are a way of representing the eruption and repression of these threats (monsters and women), however subconsciously, to the satisfaction of male viewers.

This is where I find The Shrine most interesting. Because, if Williams is right, The Shrine should be extraordinarily satisfying to male viewers--and as a male viewer, I confess it sort of is. The character of Carmen, firstly, is a strong, defiant, stubborn, and curious woman. There's no question that she's the leader of her little group. Whatever objections her boyfriend brings up, she doesn't just disagree with him in discussion, she totally plows over him and speaks for everyone: "We're going!" This character trait, in fact, makes her rather annoying. It would be just as annoying in a man. Dictatorships are never really pleasant. This only makes it all the more satisfying when she's finally broken and forced to realize all the wrong she's done. But first, let's look at the wrong.

What Carmen and Sara do is enter the fog and gaze upon the demon statue. It's telling that Knautz has only the female characters do this. The man stays outside. In the Williams paradigm, what the women are doing is (1) becoming curious, (2) satisfying their curiosity by taking control of the gaze and (3) finding in the gaze the monstrous alternative to phallic sexual power. And most importantly, (4) they are punished for satisfying their curiosity in this way. Both emerge from the fog traumatized and disoriented. Then the subsequent events of the film befall them.

Spoilers Begin Here

The 'subsequent' events of the film are also very telling, and even suggest Knautz intentionally rather than subconsciously pursued this theme. The first is Sara's death, which occurs at the hands of the cult. The cult, which struggles to subdue those possessed by the demon statue, holds her down and pounds a mask onto her face. As the mask comes down, we see on the inside of the mask two spikes that will pierce her eyes. What's important about this is that the eyes are particularly being punished, the eyes that were used in the gaze upon the demon. In the fate of Carmen, we see what the all-male cult is frightened of: the powers of the demon overcoming the powers of men. Carmen slaughters (1) a traditional family of father, mother, and child and (2) the priest of the cult. The demonic power is a non-phallic potency that threatens to destroy male power just as Carmen herself bulldozed over her boyfriend's part in decision-making. Carmen, then, is given the same treatment as Sara, with the participation of her boyfriend.

There are a lot of other details in The Shrine that can be explored in relation to this theme. For one, the demonic statue doesn't stay still when the women gaze upon it. As Carmen moves to the side of the statue to take a second photograph (and photography is a fitting motif) she's startled to find the statue's head has moved and the hollow sockets are staring right at her. She gazes into its eyes for a long time, in the film's most haunting and frightening moment, and it gazes back, like a hypnotism sequence from a Dracula or Svengali film, until its eyes bleed. Also of interest is the masculinity of the demon statue. Its body is large and muscular, its brow heavy. Also noteworthy is that the editor Carmen works for is male. It all amounts to a statement, however intentional or not, against the modern, liberated woman who presumes to know too much and, even worse, to take charge.

Spoilers End Here

While this aspect of The Shrine is interesting, it's not a message I can entirely get behind. A less pronounced idea is a statement against idle tourists, male or female. Ever since I saw a picture of Newgrange and spotted a stainless steel handrail installed into the stone for accessibility I've marveled at how tourism can totally exploit a region and its history for idle curiosity: "just to see." The tourists who happen by the demon statue in the fog are aptly punished for their idle curiosity. Had they taken the time to consult some locals, get to know and respect the area, they'd have saved themselves the trouble of dying.

Whatever Knautz's intention in making The Shrine so misogynistic, his efforts resulted in a fascinating and unique film with a good share of surprising moments. A little shy on the gore, this is just some smart and effective atmospheric horror--an increasingly rare approach. In fact, The Shrine is one of the best atmospheric horror films of the last few years.

Laid to Rest (2009) & ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011)

2011-09-12T13:51:00.005-04:00

Laid to Rest is, to put it plainly, a horror fan's horror film. Everything a lover of horror films enjoys in the genre, including some of its more charming weaknesses, is offered by the bucket in this film. Kind of a miracle, in that it pushes the more salient features of slasher films to an extreme and is, on top of that, a competent and very good film.

The extremity to which I refer is in brutality and gore. We're now in the Third Wave of Slasher Films. The First Wave began the genre with the well-known conventions and equally well-known franchises: Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.. The Second Wave of Slasher Films distinguished itself by an awareness of the films' history, a self-consciousness of the slasher-esque situation they present. The major franchises of the Second Wave are the Scream films, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legends. The Third Wave of slashers is distinguished by its Return to Purity. These films look to what made slashers fun and try to give the viewer that. Adam West's Hatchet, the Wrong Turn films, Rob Zombie's Halloween films, and Laid to Rest all fall into the Third Wave. (It's no coincidence that Rob Zombie resurrected Michael Myers for the Third Wave, after all: Michael is the first and purest slasher monster.) The plots of these movies are as thin as need be, the women are hot, and the 'monsters' are impossibly strong--despite, in the cases of Hatchet and Wrong Turn, genetic decadence working against them--so that they can cut through skulls, rip apart heads, and do whatever godawful violence the make-up department can come up with.

Of the Third Wave of Slashers, the direct-to-video, independent pictures tend to be more brutal. Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 is about as brutal as a studio-released slasher could ever be--and it is indeed pretty brutal. Laid to Rest exceeds that film by a margin and Laid to Rest 2 exceeds it by miles. The slasher-monster ChromeSkull has no difficulty passing his blades through skulls, lifting corpses with one hand, or even exploding heads in the first film. In the sequel, bodies and faces are carved in every disturbing way imaginable, including a clumsy mastectomy. Since writer-director Robert Hall has had a long career in the make-up department of horror movies, it's no surprise that this area of his films keep up. Every slice is accompanied by realistic gushes of blood and nebulous chunks.

Where Laid to Rest impresses is in going beyond this first step of brutal set-pieces. West's Hatchet scarcely has a plot or characters; both are a clothesline on which to hang the slightly tongue-in-cheek brutal kills. Wrong Turn, similarly, offers more of a situation than a plot: there are dangerous, inbred hicks and there are people they want to kill. Rob Zombie's Halloween films stand out amongst Third Wave slashers for their intricate plots and, especially in the second film, three-dimensional characters. Laid to Rest exceeds these films in plot as well: a girl wakes up in a coffin in a funeral home with no recollection of how she got there; she's immediately pursued by the vicious ChromeSkull. The pursuit is the exciting, suspenseful slasher action. But the question of who she is and why she woke up in a coffin lingers through the action, giving the film a layer of mystery and a touch of absurd nightmare.

That Hall's script is able to provide answers to the mystery while sustaining the action is really the miracle. Instead of wasting our time with flashbacks, video footage, minimal dialogue, and realistic character behaviour gradually reveals the answers to some mysteries and leaves others remain--as some should. The film's structuring is a thing of beauty.

What isn't so beautiful about Laid to Rest is a flaw it shares with Third Wave slashers. This is a general callousness toward its characters. The brutality I praise above can and will strike any character, no matter how deserving of some nobility and dignity. Now it can be argued that a psychopathic killer could care less about how well a character as fought back and is fair game for brutal slaughter as anyone else. That is, of course, true. I'm not blaming the killer; I'm blaming the writer's approach. Laid to Rest, unlike, say, Hatchet, doesn't contain a great deal of comedy. ChromeSkull's kills are serious business. There is only one kill that is kind of a joke, based on a running gag and delivered to one of the film's most likeable characters while everyone watches. The death is disturbing (an inflation death), inexplicably tongue-in-cheek, and left me feeling there was no point caring about anyone's life--a rather important thing to do if a horror film is to be a good one. Compare to the death of Annie in Zombie's Halloween 2, where Zombie devotes a cinematic Moment of Silence to the character. While Zombie's approach is out of place and overdramatic, it's nevertheless superior to a glib dismissal.

Laid to Rest 2 shares the flaws of the first film and intensifies them. The protagonist of the first film, for instance, is casually dispatched within the first few minutes. Unfortunately, it also dispenses with the mysterious plot that made the first film so good. In this film, ChromeSkull is revealed to be the head of some organization of psychopaths who devote themselves to helping ChromeSkull set up his 'laboratory', make his weapons, and find his prey. Perhaps Hall believed the mystery of who these people are, why they're helping ChromeSkull, and who ChromeSkull really is, should hook audiences even more. But these are two different kinds of mysteries altogether. The first film gives us a close mystery of a single character's nightmare, loss of identity, unexplained location, and unknown enemy. In this film, we have more a conspiracy than a mystery. The conspiracy involves an annoying playboy who wants to be the next ChromeSkull. Unfortunately for him, the first ChromeSkull still lives and has no desire to be replaced. Meanwhile, ChromeSkull's other assistant (Danielle Harris) finds him another victim, a mostly-blind girl, to be his comeback prey.

The strong structuring and screenwriting of the first film is entangled, in the sequel, by its own ambitious plotting. Hall wants us to follow the ChromeSkull wannabe, ChromeSkull, the efforts of the police force to find the blind girl, the blind girl, a remaining character from the first film and how their threads all cross each other. Our attention is so dissipated, we care about no-one. Laid to Rest 2 is, consequently, a messy film. Characters are forgotten as the film jumps from one plot point to another, the protagonists don't really protag, and the various questions the film does raise by way of conspiracy are left unanswered. It is not a good thing that this drew comparisons in my mind to the infamous Thorn plot of Halloween 6. This is not to say the plot is all uninteresting; just that, in all its increased complexity, it lacks both the intimacy and mystique of the first film.

Perhaps a bit of hubris got in the way. Laid to Rest is a really good film and ChromeSkull is a really good slasher. But much of Laid to Rest 2 is devoted to telling us ChromeSkull is a really good slasher. When Hall has ChromeSkull walk over Godzilla's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so as to say, "Here is horror's latest and best," we're given a basic theme of this film: ChromeSkull is already a legend and piddly psychopaths want to be as badass as him. The amazing thing is that Hall is almost able to justify this kind of hubris. When we see this dork trying to be ChromeSkull, we do side with ChromeSkull; we want him to show up the dork like Stormare stuffing Buscemi into the woodchipper. There are levels of evil and ChromeSkull is something beyond a common psychopathic serial killer. The mystery of him and his motive is really the core strength holding Laid to Rest 2 together; in fact, the full title, ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 is quite apt.

Ultimately, though, Laid to Rest 2 ramps up the extremity at the expense of the intimacy and wonder that made the first so remarkable. In this way it loses itself in the same trap as most other Third Wave slashers. While it's not fair on Hall to ask that he simply remake the first film in the sequel and while his experiment in expanding the Laid to Rest universe is impressive in its own right, it is fair to note the experiment isn't entirely successful. Perhaps a decade down the road, in hindsight, this film will be viewed with the affection given to other bonkers sequels like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2--but I doubt it.

Overall, the Laid to Rest films are an impressive series of independent slashers and about the best the Third Wave of Slasher Films has to offer.

Death Stop Holocaust (2009) - 3/4

2011-09-06T01:25:00.008-04:00

There are an awful lot of films trying to be grindhouse or drive-in films. The Tarantino and Rodrigues picture Grindhouse is the most prominent and is perhaps responsible for many similar films. On the other hand, with Tarantino making the style so mainstream and his followers and fans taking it up themselves, making films of this sort stigmatizes the 'grindhouse' affectation as being just more Tarantino-ism. There are, on the other hand, original grindhouse/drive-in filmmakers still working. Herschell Gordon Lewis, inventor of the gore film, just released his latest film, The Uh-Oh Show (2009), on DVD; it is as true a grindhouse picture as 2011 will allow and it is, needless to say, a small-budget ($25,000), shot-on-video picture. Tarantino's Death Proof or Rodrigues's Planet Terror can only be wearing the grindhouse aesthetic as an affectation. No drive-in filmmaker ever had a budget near Death Proof's ($30,000,000). It's unlikely they'd ever seen that kind of money in their lives. Whatever Tarantino did to popularize the nostalgia and willful imitation of drive-in and grindhouse flicks, his stigmatized followers in the shot-on-video, b-movie market are more truly grindhouse flicks than his films will ever be.

That said, even shot-on-video flicks must affect the grindhouse style. Death Stop Holocaust is a shot-on-video picture that affects the style as unabashedly as any other. The filmmaker, Justin Russell, goes so far as to insert burning celluloid effects. We know this is an affectation, because the film was shot on a Panasonic HVX 200 (a $4000 digital camcorder). There is no celluloid to burn. Nor is there any illusion that I'm at a drive-in when I recline on my futon and watch the DVD screener on my laptop. While in most cases, the affectation, then, is all it is; it goes no further than affecting the style in reference to a style of cinema that happened to appeal to and influence the filmmakers. Call it an homage or call it being hip, it is equally limited. Death Stop Holocaust seems to me a rarity in going beyond mere affectation to making use of the style to comment upon the content. Before we get to that, the content.

Death Stop Holocaust, a title seemingly drawn from a mad lib, concerns two college girls, Liz (Lisa Krenisky) and Taylor (Naomi Watts look-a-like Jenna Fournier), taking a vacation at Liz's family summer home on a nearby island. As soon as they arrive on the island, they find its denizens behaving strangely. A man tries to run them off the road in his van, a waitress distracts them while their gas is stolen, and hardly anyone else will say a word. Before they can get to the summer home, they're being terrorized by three maniacs in creepy masks.

Naturally a movie of this sort--a movie, that is to say, so threadbare in plot that it is purely about the experience--stands or falls on the effectiveness of the terrorizing. Holocaust stands. Justin Russell has the ambition, and the talent, to strive for something more than the usual maniacs-terrorizing-babes set pieces. He's definitely experimenting in Death Stop Holocaust and the results are often quite effective. The influence of The Strangers perhaps rests a little too heavily, as the masked maniacs wander the negative space of the frame silently, toying with us as much as with the victim, but not really accomplishing much else. On the other hand, this behaviour is unsettling if only in virtue of its inexplicability. And their ability and willingness to commit upsetting violence is established before the toying around even begins. We're therefore always left in suspense as to when and what they're going to do, though there's no doubt of their being able to do something whenever they please.

Beyond the maniacs, however, is where Holocaust transcends its generic conventions and approaches the truly nightmarish. For one, the town itself appears to be held in the grip of some spell, behaving in accordance with the maniacs' goals. That the oddness of the supposedly normal people in a town where Liz has fond childhood memories is never really explained, moreover, submerges us, as in our dreams of familiar places somehow altered and decadent, in the uncanny, the horror of the familiar perverted against natural order. In fact, one of the screenplay's missteps is in having a character explain any of the mystery at all, though, wisely, not much is explained.

Death Stop Holocaust transcends not just in the narrative, but also, as I alluded to earlier, in its form. The grindhouse paraphernalia are not merely doing the work of affectation. They play a role in Liz's consciousness, in the relationship between reality and nightmare. We're introduced into the film world via the classic "Our Feature Presentation" drive-in intro. This establishes the filmic reality of the world we're witnessing as the concrete reality. At times of intense horror the 'celluloid' burns up. The first time the celluloid burns is during a rape attempt; the second time is when Liz is sedated and has a nightmare. The suggestion is that reality itself, or at least Liz's experience of reality, is compromised by the sheer horror of the situations she's in. Since this also suggests a certain subjective relationship between the form and Liz's experience, we experience with her the reality of the island as a disjointed, absurd flow of nightmare. What she experiences in sedation, a sequence reminiscent of moments in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, is an indistinguishable part of her experience of the maniacs, one no more real than the other.

Despite my praise, Holocaust is not a masterpiece debut. For all of the nightmarish effects and grindhouse allusions, it may strike many horror fans as a tame picture, representing much of its brutality elliptically. That might not be a problem if the film didn't offer us suggestive glimpses of that brutality. And the various narrative lacunae, while strengthening the mysteriousness of the events, at some points simply dissatisfies. This is particularly true of the film's conclusion, which left me a little disappointed. If the film builds up to an event, some clue in the narrative must be present to make us see that event as significant in itself; and there are no such clues in Holocaust. A nightmare, after all, is uninteresting to anyone but its dreamer unless it has a point.

However, Holocaust is still a very strong debut, showing Russell's influences to be as broad as '70s exploitation, David Lynch, and modern invasion horror like The Strangers. Some work will have to be done for Russell to make his influences work with one another, but on the strength of Death Stop Holocaust, I look forward to seeing him experiment more. Death Stop Holocaust is indeed a true heir to drive-in cinema and, thanks to Russell's adventurousness, also much more.

Priest (2011) - 2/4

2011-09-03T03:37:00.002-04:00

About halfway through Priest it struck me that I was watching The Searchers with alien vampires instead of Comanches and ninja priests instead of cowboys. That's not to say it's as good, interesting, or morally complex as The Searchers--or even as a wrinkle in John Wayne's left one; it's just to say that the writer looked to the most moving western ever made for his narrative structure and then filled it with a lot of sci-fi cliches, like a dogmatically-ruled futuristic city, some specially-trained warriors, a rebellious antihero, slick CGI and slow-motion fight sequences.

Priest is about an old warrior teaming up with a young warrior, a sheriff, to recover his niece, held captive by a pack of vampires. If she's been infected, the old warrior will kill her. The young warrior is in love with her, however, and wants to prevent this turn of events.

So that's The Searchers part of it. Here's the scifi part. Vampires are these alien-like creatures, all teeth and no eyes, and priests are like superhuman ninjas trained to fight them--they kick ass for the lord, yes. Vampires are supposed to have been wiped out. That's what the cardinals are telling everyone. The 'old warrior', a middle-aged priest, wants to kill some vampires, but the cardinals have a problem with him heading out to kill things they claim don't exist.

(There's something curiously insightful about how religion works in that, reflecting somewhat how the Catholic Church--the obviously caricatured institution in Priest--dealt with figures like Galileo. The film's representation of a personal religion apart from an institutional one also shows a level of intellectual maturity not usually welcome in Hollywood. So often the hero in these films must divorce himself from all spirituality. In this film, a few tyrannical men have seized power in the Church; otherwise, religion can be a source of personal strength.)

Meanwhile, the vampires are using this opportunity to launch an attack on the city. Karl Urban plays his villain character very Disney-like throughout this sequence, reeking mayhem and taunting the protagonist whilst striking silhouette poses and flailing his arms to no less than a symphony.

The whole film is, in fact, like second-rate Disney, as morally flat and cartoonish as Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar. It entertains while it hastens past areas needing more development, insults your intelligence, and leaves you with no concern for the destiny of its characters: you'd hardly believe the writers have seen The Searchers were it not for the obvious borrowing. Priest sadly contains a good many missed opportunities for something more; but sometimes you just have to enjoy your priest-on-alien action in a post-apocalyptic western setting for what it is.

Dark House (2009) - 2/4

2011-09-03T00:35:00.004-04:00

So often these mid-budget horror movies have one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, whether ghost, demon, witch, or banshee; and this creature leaves you so underwhelmed, you wonder, "THIS is the terror?!". Dark House doesn't come up with anything better; it just multiplies it. Instead of one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, we get a whole gaggle of them. The result is, actually, effective. While one of these creations underwhelms, the extra effort exerted in creating a horde of different creatures keeps each set-piece of the film novel and allows viewers to wonder what creature will pop up next.

The premise of Dark House is, in fact, built around these creatures. A crazy amusement ride entrepreneur (Jeffrey Combs) has designed his masterpiece, "Dark House", a haunted house using a series of lasers to produce holographic horrors. Each room of the house has some new hologram to freak out customers. The few humans are a class of student actors hired to interact with the holograms and customers. The one catch is that the house used as the "Dark House" really may really be haunted and one of the actors has a hidden past with the house. Naturally, the holograms go ape and folks start dying.

This familiar plot is a generous sampling from William Castle movies. A portion of House on Haunted Hill, a lot of Thirteen Ghosts, and maybe a dash of The Tingler, and you have Dark House's backbone, a loose basis for the various murder set pieces. Castle's films are haunted house rides, designed to give lighthearted, even cheesy, thrills in isolated moments. Dark House inherits that spirit. It even inherits Vincent Price's hamminess from House on Haunted Hill, channeled here by Combs in his eccentric millionaire performance. Copying something good is better than an original bad idea: like any William Castle movie, Dark House is fun.

Unfortunately, the screenwriters get a little too ambitious and try to throw us some unnecessary twists toward the end. As is often the case, these twists are fig leaves over something screenwriters tend to find embarrassing: simplicity. A straightforward haunting or insanity story can be elevated with a twist; but more often than not, as in this case, it's simply confused. Some may enjoy the twists, however, and some may not; but the story's simplicity throughout the majority of the film allows us to enjoy the film's real meat, which is just the inventive creatures and their kills.

The Clinic (2010) - 3/4

2011-08-25T00:53:00.003-04:00

There's nothing in and of itself wrong with being derivative. One could call Shakespeare derivative, as he readily cobbled together story elements from other writers. The Clinic, telling the story of a pregnant woman abducted and c-sectioned while her husband frantically tries to find her, is such a cobbling; but the result is so good and nearly the equal of the films it borrows from that it's worth forgiving. But first, let's look at a little history of ideas.

Over two thousand years ago, Plato indicated genetic attachment as one of the biggest problems in society. In The Republic, Plato, in describing his perfect society, does not allow children to know their parents or parents to know their children; the adults care for all children and the children obey all adults. However much we like to dress it up and glamourize it as the moving strength of a parent willing to sacrifice all to save her child, we know now that this impulse is purely selfish: we're hardwired to protect our genetic information and it's in our children that our own genetic information is being passed along. However valuable the family system is for certain social functions, the extremely plausible events in The Clinic makes Plato seem all the more justified.

The Clinic concerns a mad scientist of sorts who arranges to have pregnant women kidnapped from the local motel and brought to the abattoir. The fetuses are there removed by c-section and the mothers are stitched up and left to fend for themselves in the fenced-in compound. They wake up in an ice bath and learn the key to finding their baby may lie in the stitched-up abdomens of their fellow inmates. Mayhem ensues.

The scenario is absurd, of course, but the way it plays out is eminently plausible. While most of the women, including our protagonist, pull together and try to help each other--one of them is even a surgeon, making the solution extremely simple--one of the mothers stalks the others like a panther, dividing and brutally massacring them whenever she can. How can she justify this? For her baby, of course! A mother would do anything for her baby. What about the other mothers? And what about the other babies? Well, they're not as important as HER baby. She doesn't know why. It's just because it's hers. That's the attitude entailed by genetic attachment: anyone or anything can be sacrificed for the sake of your baby. I'm not sure whether it's the pure selfishness of it or the irrationality of such a total lack of empathy that makes it so infuriating. Why should anyone else care about your baby? Out of pure human kindness, one might answer and correctly; and that power to empathize with others equally is precisely what Plato felt would flourish best without genetic attachment.

Of course, the other women want their children just as much as the murderous mother. They just have a much stronger sense of empathy. And perhaps they realize, in this sort of Hobbesian all-against-all scenario the mad scientist has set up, that working together makes one much stronger than physical prowess and weapons. They have a much better chance of finding their own children if they can all find their own children together.

On the other hand, what made Plato's society so chilling is the genetic meritocracy he set up. He wholeheartedly subscribed to a eugenics program that bred and educated some children as leaders, some as warriors, and the rest as servants. Any too weak to even be servants were left to die. This fault of genetic detachment is also represented in the film, then, in the person of the scientist. Her detachment, it's implied, arises from a contempt for her own mentally slow child. I can't go further into either argument, however, without giving spoilers. Suffice to say, the film presents considerable food for thought on these subjects. What's the balance between Mother Bears and Human Cattle?

Despite all this talk of Plato and genetics, The Clinic is by no means an arthouse film. While not striving to be a 'grindhouse' or 'drive-in' picture of any sort, this is still a true exploitation flick--Ozsploitation, to be exact. With women in prison, women fighting each other, abdomens torn open, vicious dogs, nasty Australian hicks, mad scientists, and several other atrocities explicit or implicit, The Clinic provides ample material for a horrorhound seeking a good time. There's no need to have read a lick of Plato.

First-time writer-director James Rabbitts delivers with both adequate direction and a smart script. Though the script is doubtless derived from two successful, recent, horror films, Hostel and Inside, it replicates to some degree the edge of Hostel's social criticism and the disgust-power of Inside. (There's just something about a womb that we feel in our bodies to be sacrosanct.) The series of twists that hit us at the climax are surprising and yet consistent with all we see, which is really all that's asked for in a twist. Hopefully we'll see more from Rabbitts in the future--and hopefully next time with more original material.

Insidious (2010) - 2.5/4

2011-08-18T01:31:00.008-04:00

The narrative structure of Insidious is a very familiar one: a family begins experiencing peculiar phenomena in their new home; they do what they can to overcome it on their own; then they have recourse in a medium who takes over the show. This formula was crystalized with Poltergeist and has routinely been the basis for haunting dramas ever since. The Orphanage and Insidious are two of the more distinctive films to make use of the formula, The Orphanage by means of its harrowing conclusion and Insidious through pure spook-show gusto.

The plot concerns a boy, Dalton, who falls into a coma. Afterward, Dalton's mom begins to hear spooky sounds from her infant child's room, see shadowy apparitions in quick glimpses, and generally sense that there's "something wrong with that house." As the trailers have made clear already, it's not the house but the boy who's haunted. His comatosed body is, as a parked car is in the ghetto, a vessel just waiting to be occupied. In come the cavalry--some goofy "ghost-hunters" and a medium who seems to know her stuff--to bring Dalton back into his own body.

The film's invented mythology is simultaneously interesting and silly. The notion we're pitched is that New Agers are right and we can indeed astral project some spiritual body outside of our corporeal body (that's latinate for 'bodily body'). The dead have their spiritual bodies cast into some realm called the 'Further', a gloomy mirror of our world. Any living person projecting can wander out to the Further, but at their own peril. Ghosts, or something worse, will try to take his body. They can even hold your spiritual body captive. It's all rather foolish, but it yields some good fruit.

Wan does extract a lot of spookiness and beauty from his collision of astral and real space. The ghost sequences are frequently effective in producing not jumps but chills. One particularly skillful tracking shot of a house exterior in broad daylight, while a supernatural occurrence is visible through the windows, is one of the most unsettling moments in recent supernatural cinema. This barrage of spookiness that comprises the first half of the film is at times masterful and, had the film continued with such strength, may well have resulted in a masterpiece.

However, a masterpiece was not to be. While the latter half of the film is certainly not without its merits, it is dissipated by overactivity, a need, perhaps from the producers, to make 'things happen' rather than allow the film to have its effects. Instead of unsettling occurrences, Wan gives us a red-faced CGI demon scuttling along the walls, reminding me somewhat of an inferior film, The Frighteners. Wan is clever enough to let us see the demon only in short glimpses, though even these are too much.

Where Wan is at his strongest is in shooting the inanimate. He has a unique talent for imbuing the inanimate with the uncanny. Toys, photographs, a gramophone, a red door, drawings, doll-like ghosts ("doll girls" in the credits) are the materials out of which Wan creates that very distinctive emotional resonance. No number of ghostly jump scares or scuttling demons could equal what he does with his montage of claws, sparks, and toys set to the tune of Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe through the Tulips" or his moody camera arcs up stairs and around buildings. Even as the film begins to weaken toward the climax, these moments punctuate and elevate the film with abstract beauty and mystery.

The weakest part of Insidious is the silly story from Leigh Whannel (who also plays one of the ghost hunters). But how that story fits its formula is in itself interesting and worthy of consideration. Films of this formula have tended to be about domesticity and the family unit in Western society. Any formula in a film genre does tend to address ideological concerns of some sort and this one addresses family. In Insidious, there is only one adult male in the picture. There are, however, several mother figures. Dalton's mother, Dalton's grandmother, the medium, and the old woman ghost. The only other character that could be construed as an adult male is the demon, described as a man with a fiery face. Of all the males in the film, the only one that could be considered a powerful male, or in any way 'alpha', is the demon. The dad is ineffectual and avoids confrontation until the film's climax. The wife runs the family and, as we find out, the grandmother has powerfully influenced her son's life. Her influence has created a man-child who is himself raising three children, two of whom are male.

So what we have in this family is a situation the reflects a contemporary society of feminized, domesticated men: men who frequently assume the role of house-husband and to whom any traditionally female task other than being pregnant is one to be shared. Of course, the situation is not only one of what tasks men do in the home, but an emotional climate of sensitive, mollycoddled boys raised with kidgloves to be wimpy, ineffectual men dominated by their wives.

(Spoilers in the following paragraph.)

The demon that threatens to overtake Dalton, then, seems to reflect a semi-conscious effort to reclaim classical masculinity, a powerful male force that creates its own laws. What threatens to break through and destroy the family unit is a return of the now untenable patriarchal order. What we expect from the father is to be powerful enough not to require that patriarchal order, to be able to resist it and return to a life of equality, now stronger than before. While the father does man up to rescue his son, the film's conclusion of the boy returning to his body, the father being taken over by the powerful old woman ghost, is clearly step in the wrong direction. The conclusion leaves us alarmed and dissatisfied, hoping for the female force to be oppressed and the strong male to return to do it.

(Spoilers end here.)

In the end, Insidious is a visually strong film hampered by a silly, overexplained story. Wan dreams up several inventive means of chilling the audience visually, but the dialogue pulls us back into the uncomfortable world of needless plot. The film nevertheless remains fascinating and worthy of at least one viewing to enjoy the ride and appreciate Wan's talents. With only a single, bloodless murder, the film is also as child-friendly as Joe Dante's Gremlins or The Hole.

May (2002) and the Cult of Weird

2011-08-15T01:07:00.006-04:00

Amongst the enlightened, the hip, the intelligent in contemporary society, weirdness is an object of superficial fascination. Latched onto, the weird conveys to its obsessor a feeling of uniqueness. In an age where so many people know so many things and anything unusual can become a 'phenomenon' on the internet, many are desperate to find things with the appearance of weirdness that they might distinguish themselves from the homogeneous pack. But how many can go beyond the superficial obsession with a weird object? How many can truly accept and embrace something genuinely weird? Whatever affected eccentricities and ostentatiously peculiar interests they may adapt, they don't know true weirdness nor, I think, do they really want to.

May, the anti-hero of May, is a genuinely weird person. We all meet people about whom we say, "He's weird!" or "She's pretty strange," but these are merely people who readily display more interesting points of their personality. May is genuinely weird. Her only friend is a doll, who must never, ever be removed from her glass case!; she's amused by stories of suffering animals; she finds parts of people more interesting than the wholes; she likes sticking scalpels into her fingers. These are just a few highlights.

There's really no reason for May to be so weird. What we learn of her upbringing is that her mother was extremely anal-retentive and controlling and that May's lazy eye inhibited her social life. Of course, none of these facts are sufficient to explain May. Many kids have lazy eyes, many kids are picked on for having lazy eyes, many kids have no friends, many kids have anal-retentive mothers, and a few kids even have all of the above; still they don't become as weird and creepy as May. She just is that way. If anything, her upbringing only served to enhance what was already there, including a strain of psychopathy.

At the juncture of May's life into which we enter, May's loneliness has reached a peak. At just this time she encounters a few people who think "weird is cool." Unfortunately for May and, ultimately, for them, they don't know what being weird truly is, nor are they equipped to judge it as 'cool' or otherwise. The first and most important of these is Adam, a college-age man who likes horror movies, smoking, and weird things. He seems secure, comfortable with his level of distinctiveness. May's oddness begins to draw him in, offering an exquisite alternative to the vulgar bimbo he lives with. He enjoys, or thinks he enjoys, her odd manners and interests. When foreplay takes a peculiar turn, however, he rejects her as 'too weird.' A key scene, encapsulating the film's major theme, is when May eavesdrops on Adam's conversation with a roommate: the roommate urges Adam to enjoy the weird girl, while Adam explains she's too much and he's glad he dumped her. Adam has been initiated, given a taste of the truly weird, and discovered himself just a dilettante; his roommate has yet to be so enlightened.

The second is Polly, May's co-worker at the veterinarian clinic. Polly is a punk girl whose brains have been a little scrambled by drugs but whose attraction to whatever's outside the mainstream remains. May's 'far out' ways and physical attractiveness similarly draw Polly in. Polly's case, like Adam's, is that her interest in the weird is superficial; May is a curiosity for her, not a commitment. However, Polly's case isn't so much one of being unable to handle weirdness, but one of being unaware of the dangers of weird people. One of Gary Larson's comic strips featured four pictures, a cat with back arched and claws out, a snake with rattling tale, a spiked puffer fish, and finally a man wearing a trenchcoat and innertube with a hat on his head and a gun in hand. The caption reads, "How nature says, 'Do Not Touch!'" And that is a valid concern. If human weirdness is a deviation from predictable behavioural patterns of action and reaction, then those patterns based around keystone values--like moral, legal, and self-preservatory values--can no longer be depended upon. Someone as weird as May is not necessarily as bound to morals like 'Don't murder anyone' as the rest of us.

A third person drawn to May's weirdness is a dopey punk she finds at a busstop. With his wild hair and tattoos, he seems as likely as anyone else to appreciate May for who she is. Simply discovering a cat in her freezer is too much for him, though, and he rejects her.

In inverse order May kills all of her betrayers, harvesting from them her favourite parts. While there are psychological reasons for May's doing so, stemming from her mother's comment that one can just make a best friend, it's as though Lucky McKee were punishing the characters for their affectations. They display themselves to the world as weird or connoisseurs of the weird, but anything too far outside of society's circumscribed limits they're unwilling to accommodate. The tragedy of the film is, really, that someone as interesting and complex as May ultimately can only find a friend in her own imagination.

The grotesque finale shows us a tortured artist-figure finding joy only in her own creativity. She's too creative to be friended, but creative enough to create her own friend. What makes May such a clever film is that this may just be a happy ending. McKee doesn't give us any cavalier judgments. May is our focus throughout the film; the film is titled after May; her happiness in her project, the hideous doll creature, while perhaps unsatisfactory to us, satisfies her. This happiness, after all, could be a happiness she could never have found in the anxiety-ridden friendships with other people. All of May's experience with friendship was destructive; but her relationships to her doll and her creation are constructive, positive. It is her attempts to escape rather than reconcile with loneliness brought about the film's tragedies.

The film's progress could be seen as one toward May seeing her own weirdness through others' eyes and coming to truly see and embrace herself for who she is; the progress is one of self-knowledge, hence the giving of her own eye to the creation. And May's final happiness, indeed, could be one few of us will ever find in others. In the end, we alone are best able to appreciate our own weirdness. But how many of us have learned to do so unabashedly? how many without affectation?

Dr. Renault's Secret (1942)

2011-06-29T09:28:00.005-04:00

Dr. Renault's Secret is one of those extremely economical 1940s b-movies that, produced with leftover sets and unused character actors, magically spins a moving tale filled with murder mysteries, mad scientists, crime plots, and romance in a mere 58 minutes. The final film of Charlie Chan director Harry Lachman, its economy is achieved through a series of interesting angles and deep focus shots. The sum creates an atypical apeman film of considerable emotional depth and compelling visuals.

Enter Larry, an American scientist come to the home of Dr. Renault in order to collect his fiancee, Mademoiselle Madelon Renault. A dangerous thing to do, as it turns out. From the moment he arrives at the hotel, where he must stay until the bridge is repaired, someone--or perhaps several people--starts trying to kill him. Could it be Noel, the melancholic, simian servant sent by Dr. Renault to bring him to the mansion? Could it be Rogell, the convict gardener Renault employs? Or could it be Renault himself? They all have motives and none of their motives explains every attempt.

1. Noel, an outsider from, he says, the island of Java, has only one friend in the world, lovely Madelon, whom he would do anything not to lose. He confesses as much to Dr. Renault. 2. Rogell cares only about money and spotted Larry's stuffed wallet. 3. Dr. Renault finds Larry's keen mind digging, question by question, dangerously close to his secret.

One particular murder attempt seems completely inexplicable. As Larry sits in the library reading a text on anthropology, a blade-wielding hand creeps toward him from a hidden panel. Rogell would be the first suspect, so it would be foolish for him to make such a brazen attempt. Noel never wields a weapon anywhere in the film, preferring his bare hands. And Renault has no reason to make an attempt on his future nephew-in-law's life over a few harmless questions. There are no answers provided in the film; it's just there to keep the mystery plot's momentum alive.

The point is that the murder mystery aspects of the film don't really matter. They're hopelessly muddled because the writers didn't care about them. They're a framework with which to explore the essential question of what distinguishes a human from an animal, or, more exactly, what makes a [i]person[/i]. Immanuel Kant was one of the first philosophers to separate the concept of personhood from humanity. For Kant, a person is a being capable of moral reason, rational thought. Any human without powers of moral reasoning isn't even a person; and should a dog be found to reason morally, that dog, Kant would have to admit, is a person. We might say, in colloquial speech, that the moral dog shows more human qualities than the brutish human.

Dr. Renault's titular secret, which isn't much of a secret from the moment we lay eyes on Noel, is Renault's efforts to make a person. Noel's clearly simian appearance, and a later reveal, lets us know he is indeed an ape. After several intensive surgeries involving the brain and nervous system, plastic surgery of the face, and extensive education by Madelon, Noel was 'born'. But it's clear from the secrecy and Noel's persistent melancholy that he is deemed a failure by his own 'father', Dr. Renault.

What makes Noel such a fascinating character, however, is just how much of a success he is. The character of Rogell is primarily in the film as a contrast to Noel. They are similar in that both of them are hampered from flourishing by their genetic and environmental backgrounds. Noel, of course, is genetically an ape. Rogell, we're told, comes from a long line of criminals. And as many children of criminals, he too turned to crime. Who knows what his upbringing was like? Of course, there's no 'criminal gene.' Rogell, despite his background, is not [i]determined[/i] to be a criminal; he can choose a righteous path. Noel, despite even more difficult handicaps, does strive to walk a righteous path. Genetically he is determined to be incapable of moral reasoning. However, the work of Dr. Renault gives him the ability to learn and adapt; and an environment of kindness and friendship provided by Madelon helps him become a person.

Despite committing murders in the film, Noel's sensitivity and humanity leaves him as much a sympathetic character as Karloff's monster in Frankenstein (doubtless an inspiration for the character). When we meet Noel, he is sullen and distant, seemingly lost in thought. He is, of course, thinking over how he is losing Madelon when Larry takes her away. And when Noel intuits the presence of a dog along the road, he sharply stops the car in order to save it. He's also very easily hurt, any ridicule or offense deeply troubling him. This, too, is a very human trait. One touching close-up, where Noel turns to Madelon and we see tears in his eyes, occurs after Dr. Renault suggests the animal mind is no different from the criminal mind. In short, Renault sees Noel as a failed person, hopelessly failed, no better than Rogell. But this is patently false.

What helps make Noel's murders a little more forgivable is what he seems to want to achieve by them. The two main murders Noel commits are against those who, through humiliations, make him feel different, Other. Many of the group scenes in which Noel participates are framed so that Noel is far in the background, emphasizing his outsider status. He feels left out of society, as though he doesn't belong. A few scenes where he's treated with dignity are touching: a lady takes him to dance, Larry and Madelon take him to the fair where he wins her a prize and takes a swan figurine for himself. Some men, jealous of being bested in the fair, say he dances like an ape. Reminded of his otherness, his difference, he murders them. As though murdering them would effectively murder the difference itself. Similarly, Noel's first kill, of a dog that bit him, is not out of revenge or anger over physical pain, but because the dog rejected him for no good reason. What he really longs for is to have friends, to be treated with respect. Unfortunately, murder, a deeply immoral act, all but confirms Dr. Renault's view that Noel is a failure, as it completely severs him from the moral community.

J. Carrol Naish's performance shares considerable credit for making Noel such a strongly sympathetic character. Like Karloff, Naish is able to express a depth of woundedness and loneliness through the make-up and general oddness of the character that is genuinely touching. His quiet manner of speaking and childlike cadence also gives him an innocent quality that makes one very much pity his circumstances. It also, on the other hand, makes his utterance to Dr. Renault, "I could kill you," all the more disturbing.

It is true that Noel is an animal and commits some awful crimes. However, he, in his anxieties, sensitivity, and sorrow, is perhaps the most human character in the film. Madelon is just too angelic, Larry too cardboard, Renault too egomaniacal; but Noel captures all the vulnerability and nobility we expect in a human person. The character of Noel is the film's greatest strength: once one meets him, one will never forget him.

Gog (1954) - 2.5/4

2011-06-15T10:22:00.003-04:00

Oh my Gog! What we've got here is a balls-out McCarthyist sci-fi epic about a kuh-razy robot intelligence. Handsome Richard Egan is summoned to investigate some inexplicable murders at a top secret government lab in the middle of the desert. With an old flame/blonde bimbo as his guide, Egan questions the five eccentric head scientists of the lab. The inevitable conclusion, of course, is that it's not the scientists, but the mighty NOVAC, that fantastic computerized brain running the high-tech lab, and his incredible army of two robots, Gog and Magog, behind these murders. Or is it?

There are four main things one goes into a 1950s sci-fi scare movie expecting: 1. Sexist attitudes. 2. Commie terror. 3. Quaint ideas about science and the future. 4. The robots and sets, either for the awe they inspire or the laughs they elicit. This movie has all four in abundance, including a meaningful exchange about how, "In space, there is no weaker sex." But until then, ladies, keep the sandwiches coming.

Of course, what we're really looking for is a little more. Sexism and commie terror have their pleasures, but how about intellectual stimulation, deep characters, moving plot developments, and fascinating props and sets? Yeah, how about them.

Gog could have had more, but it clumsily falls short. The first act of the film introduces us to the top secret science being studied in the lab, like trying to perfect cryogenic stasis and building giant space mirrors that can burn entire (Commie) cities in one blast; that can boil whole (Commie) oceans in minutes. Those Commie fish deserve it.

Then we get the murder investigation. This section is the most enjoyable and should have been even better. Egan's role is to descend the five levels of the facility and, at each level, interview the oddball scientist in charge. This Perecian structure is strangely pleasing to the intellect; executed well, it could make great cinema. The problem is the scientists aren't really odd enough. They're not developed as people or even as bundles of quirks. The best quirk the writer could come up with is to make one scientist obsessed with watching girls in zero gravity experiments. A specific enough perversion, but one many warm-blooded males would share.

I get the feeling we were supposed to suspect a few of these scientists. However, we don't. Their possible motives just aren't developed at all. The only suspect scientist is the inventor of NOVAC himself, Zeitman. He bristles at having company and being questioned. He's a genius, dammit, leave him alone! Anyway, he does enjoy showing off his, yes, robots! Gog and Magog, named after some apocalyptic forces from the books of Ezekiel and Revelations. This is the fun part. We got close-ups of their clumsy little hands pawing at things.

Eventually the robots go haywire and, lest their unsteady, fragile, little arms choke everyone on Earth!, Egan has to fight them with flame-throwers. Meanwhile, a few more murders occur, all of which are fairly creative, making imaginative use of the environment of a top secret science lab. Will Egan and his bimbo be able to triumph over the deranged NOVAC? Who is really to blame? (The Commies, of course.)

Facetiousness aside, who is to blame? When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the Earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. Not only are the robots named Gog and Magog, but it is the secret and violent technology in the facility that leaves the victims open to Commie attack. The Commies of the film are never seen, a vague influence from outside that seem to function more like a force of nature than a real enemy: open a window and the storm comes in. The window, in this case, is the horrifyingly violent technology being studied in the lab, namely the space mirror that can boil entire oceans. The sheer inhumanity and irresponsibility of this goal almost makes one side with the Commies. So the Commies are almost karmic, punishing the American scientists for their violent intent and for their arrogance.

Unusual for a science fiction film, where technology is usually inert and positive, in Gog the technology is active and susceptible to malign influence. Yet the responsibility is not on the shoulders of the malign influence, but on the scientists for using their skills and talents in the service of War--Gog and Magog are, after all, of 'our' own creation, not of Commie creation--and on the whole socio-political system that sanctions this use of science.

Despite a bland visual design and a boring tour through such advanced science as what the sun is and what nuclear power does, there are still some good ideas that, although they never realize their potential, shine through. Gog is a curious and, for the patient, enjoyable '50s scifi picture. Also, the robots are kinda cool.

Don't Go To Sleep (1982) and 80s Domestic Horror

2011-06-15T09:14:00.002-04:00

The essence of a subgenre is formula and the power of formula is in the control over difference. When two objects participate in the same formula, the variables that can be altered are limited otherwise the formula simply evaporates. Thus in a formulaic film difference from another formula-participant, which is to say, how the variables are set within the formulaic limits, is the source of significance.

In the '80s, a very popular formula was the Disintegrating-Family film. A nuclear family, usually moving into a new home, is besieged by a spiritual influence and often torn apart. Burnt Offerings (1976) is one of the first of these films. It's followed by Stranger in Our House (1978), The Amityville Horror (1979), Poltergeist (1980), Don't Go to Sleep (1982), Invitation to Hell (1984), Pet Sematary (1989) (the novel was written in 1983), and others, many of which are TV movies capitalizing on the success of Poltergeist. Even the Europeans got involved in the trend, with films like Fulci's The House by the Cemetery (1981).

In most of these films the spiritual influence is symbolic of, or a phenomenological manifestation of, guilt. In Poltergeist, for instance, the spirits from an Indian burial ground torment a nuclear family of privileged, White Americans. The torment even begins coming from the television, the modern family's hearth. The ghosts represent White Guilt quite plainly. This fulfills the need for (subconsciously guilty) privileged, White filmgoers of the '80s to see that privileged life attacked in fiction, where it's safe, so they can go home and comfortably continue living their privileged lives guilt-free. Pet Sematary is of the same mould, except it doesn't allow the audience to leave with the comfortable re-repression Poltergeist provides. In Invitation to Hell, the spiritual influence is a little more direct, the demon-owned country club representing instead the drive to material success at any cost--even one's soul! The film is nevertheless shaming the audience for their materialism and privileged lifestyle while allowing them to go home with this shame repressed, assured that they too have the willpower to put family first. Burnt Offerings is a little more subtle, its modus operandi being to have the house play nuclear family tensions against each other: the father attacks the child, the mother becomes obsessed with housekeeping, the father becomes a wimp, and so forth. The film shows how the American family has lost its way, becoming a sacrifice to (a burnt offering to) the comforts and luxuries that should be at its service.

Don't Go to Sleep is one of those made-for-TV Poltergeist clones. A family moves into a new house, of course, and the little girl of the family (of course) becomes convinced her dead sister is talking to her. At first she's frightened. But as the sister starts telling her to do malicious things to her family, she comes to trust the ghost. That sentence may not make much moral sense, but it's what happens. Unlike Poltergeist, however, the family doesn't escape intact, but rather, as in Burnt Offerings and Pet Sematary, succumbs to the evil influence, leaving nearly everyone either dead or mad.

Don't Go to Sleep falls into the guilt category as well. The guilt isn't in this case ideological, however. The family has lost a daughter in a car crash and now everyone in the family, grandma, dad, mom, little sister, and possibly little brother all blame themselves and each other. And why shouldn't they? Grandma pressed dad into drinking an extra martini. And mom agreed. And dad was driving. And sis and bro were playing that prank. Well, they shouldn't because it was all an accident. And because guilt is an extremely destructive emotion.

What I liked about Don't Go to Sleep is the way it deals with the issue of guilt itself rather than making it a weapon against traditional family structure and/or privileged White folks. (Being White, having money, having a happy family isn't anything to feel guilty over, anyway.) Rather than getting much-needed psychological help, which the narrative's psychologist recommends to them, they try to press on and endure the tragedy. The longer they wait, the more powerful the guilt becomes and soon the little girl begins to murder her family under the guise of avenging her dead sister.

By dealing with guilt in this way, Don't Go to Sleep actually takes the opposite approach of its fellow Family Disintegration films: the family is not being destroyed because it deserves it; it's being destroyed because of the feelings of guilt, it's own subconscious desire to be destroyed. Most importantly, the film acknowledges that this guilt should be overcome. This privileged, bourgeois, White, nuclear family is innocent, but is being destroyed because it has internalized the guilt found in films like Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, Pet Sematary, and Invitation to Hell. A film like Poltergeist implicates the affluent, White family in guilt but refrains from punishing them. The family flees to safety. Thus some critics have seen Poltergeist as vindicating the traditional family structure. Don't Go to Sleep doesn't have to vindicate the family; the family needs to stop--excuse the irony--beating itself up. And this is a much more enduring truth than the ideological messages in the other films. While it may or may not be true that the bourgeois, nuclear family is oppressive, its oppression won't last forever. But guilt will always be oppressive.

Also interesting is how the film places the responsibility for what happens upon the family. With Poltergeist and all the others mentioned, the family is assaulted from without: Satan disguised as Susan Lucci (Invitation to Hell), a parasitic house (Burnt Offerings), a poltergeist. With Don't Go to Sleep the assault is from within, the guilt-ridden madness of the girl in a family of self-absorbed (because also guilt-ridden) people. With its downbeat, creepy ending, Sleep perhaps wakes its audience to the need to forgive itself, through therapy if necessary.

While these permutations in the formula fascinate me, the way the film itself plays out is only moderately interesting and occasionally laughable. The first thirty minutes are strong, even creepy at times. But the domestic drama and the dull machinations of the little girl soon take over. Ruth Gordon, as ever, steals the show with her eccentric grandma. Unfortunately, she leaves the film halfway through and the unintentionally funny little girl becomes our lifeboat.

Deadrise (2011) - 3/4

2011-06-05T08:52:00.011-04:00

Horror films have long been associated with nightmares, so much so that some critics analyze them as one would a dream. The ease with which horror films depart from normality and what we perceive to be our reality lends them a generally oneiric quality. Some horror films, playing off this tradition, deliberately introduce ambiguity between dream and reality. From Europe, Bergman's Hour of the Wolf and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders are prime examples. From America we have Carnival of Souls, which we discover is ultimately a nearly feature-length death dream, Mulholland Dr., and Slumber Party Massacre II.

Deadrise is a languid, almost hypnotic, horror-drama, starring Xena's Renee O'Connor as Paula and According to Jim's Larry Joe Campbell as Vigs, firmly planted in the tradition of Ambiguous Reality horrors. What there is of a plot is quickly summarized: Paula is looking into an old ship for the historical society when a piano is dropped on her car and she's forced to stay on the ship, with its caretaker Vigs, having one surreal nightmare after another. As in Slumber Party Massacre II and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the films Deadrise most resembles, we're rarely certain whether she's still dreaming or awake.

The film begins with Paula taking a celebratory lunch, alone, in a hotel restaurant. She gets some spicy salmon, shows the waiter a picture of her daughter, checks out his ass, then falls asleep following a report on blood-sucking eels. We never see her wake up. The film simply cuts to Paula's drive toward the ship. Perhaps all that follows the blood-sucking eels is a dream. Moreover, when the piano falls on her car, the long shot reveals no-one standing beside the car. Cut to a medium shot and suddenly Paula is there. Perhaps the continuity girl was hit by a bus or, more likely, Brauer is giving us a taste of Carnival of Horrors, by which I mean Paula could have died there and all that follows is a death dream. After meeting Vigs and being given a room, she goes to sleep and we're then treated to an arabesque of dreams-succeeding-dreams until the end of the film. Perhaps, too, everything up to this point is reality and what follows are the dreams.

Defining where reality ends and dream begins is important in such films for determining just what information, if any, we have about a character outside of what the dream reveals. If gestalt theory tells us everything in a dream is a depiction of oneself, then one needs the paten to decode the dream; and that paten is some significant knowledge of the dreamer's conscious life. All we know of Mary Henry in Carnival of Souls is that she's an organist and dies in a car crash. Of Courtney, in Slumber Party Massacre II, however, we know that she lost her sister and witnessed the murders in the first Slumber Party Massacre. And of Valerie we know that she's hitting puberty, is an orphan, and lives with her religious grandmother. In the cases of Courtney and Valerie, we can analyze the events of the films according to what we know of their consciousness: Courtney is working through the trauma of what she endured in the driller-killer murders and Valerie is working through her sexual awakening. With Mary Henry, all that we see, if it tells us anything about her soul, can only be very generalized, as we know so little about her.

All we know of Paula for sure is that she's had some success for the historical society, has a daughter who wants a puppy, ate the spicy salmon, and was disturbed by the blood-sucking eels. We could add her driving up to the ship. We could add further her meeting with Vigs and all he tells and shows her. Granted we have more information about Paula than we do about Mary Henry, the information we do have about Paula is yet not particularly salient as the cause of a psychosexual phantasmagoria. Unlike Courtney and Valerie, what we know of Paula's life does not seem sufficient to cause what we witness in the film, nor, by that token, sufficient to explain a lot of what we see.

At any rate, it's the viewer's pleasure, or not, to read the subconscious of the character of Paula on the screen. The momentum is a therapeutic one towards a sort of self-realization, the first important step of which, whether in dream or reality, occurs with the destruction of her car by a piano. The next is the loss of her cellphone in the water. Because we have so little relevant information on Paula and only minimal motivation to analyze Paula's subconscious journey to psychological or spiritual health, this aspect of the film can be mystifying, tedious, or simply uninteresting.

I made no effort at trying to understand Paula's issues, traumas, or crises, and chose to simply enjoy Paula's dreams for the quirky and amusing set pieces that they are: Paula attempts to dispose of some disgusting sausages, but finds her plate infinitely stocked; blood-sucking eels pour out of a shower; Vigs has several conspiracies going on involving the eels, poison, and sausages. These sequences are enjoyable, well-written, well-filmed, and creative within budget.

It is strongly to Brauer's credit that his style can be characterized by patience. While there are a few awkward edits and shots, particularly one in the restaurant, the shots never seem cut before their time; they're held as long as is needed for the performance to take place and sometimes held beyond what the subject requires. The camera's position is rarely obtrusive, its movements fluid and congenial to the physical surroundings. This generosity with time allows the viewer to get a feel for the space in which the characters inhabit, for the environment acting upon them. We also get a sense of depth to the characters, a feeling that they're really thinking before they speak. There's a reality and genuineness to the film that gives one a real feeling of being there.

Nevertheless, the pacing will be boring to many viewers. What keeps the film from becoming boring is a strong sense of wit in the writing, a wit expertly handled by Campbell and O'Connor, both veterans in television comedy. They have interesting screen chemistry, reacting to one another's thoughts and ideas in a very amusing way. Campbell, as the highly eccentric Vigs, is particularly funny. The character is just so odd and yet oblivious of his oddness; Campbell seems to be channeling a bit of Chris Farley here.

If one enters this film with the right temperament and expectations, ready for more mood and character than thrills, more surrealism and oddness--sometimes funny, sometimes grotesque--than horror, one should have an good time. Though certainly not as sophisticated as Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or Hour of the Wolf, Deadrise is an enjoyable hour and a half spent aboard a derelict with two interesting people--or maybe it's just one person--and, of course, their dreams.

The Unforgiving (2010) - 1.5/4

2011-06-01T05:41:00.004-04:00

South Africa is puzzling insofar as it is a civilized, democratic, European-ized country and yet continues to partake of the barbarisms that afflict many other African nations. According to the IRIN, there are roughly 500,000 rapes committed in South Africa every year, 15% of which are under 10 years of age. A CIET survey found that 60% of school-age children, male and female, believed forcing sex on another is acceptable. The worst of all is that the authorities themselves appear to be complicit.* When I found The Unforgiving, a horror film made in South Africa, I had a hunch it would involve cycles of violence, possibly rape. And I was not disappointed.

The Unforgiving, a film by newcomer Alastair Orr, begins with a police interrogation of two victims of a serial killer. As they're being interrogated, you'd be correct in assuming they are survivors. The killer wears a gas mask and performs his work in some urban ruins in the South African roadside desert. These killings involve a degree of torture and teasing, cat-and-mouse games, before the final blow is dealt. Each survivor tells a story that isn't entirely consistent with one another's and is, in fact, seemingly full of holes. The detective probes further to find the cause of these discrepencies.

During the interrogations, we're treated to what appear to be flashbacks. However, the flashbacks aren't consonant with what is being stated in the interrogation. Nor do they seem to overlap with one another's statements. These apparent flashbacks are the film's strongest point, keeping the viewer mystified while in fact being ordered quite neatly. The closer one comes to the end of the film, the more one is able to piece together the chronology of what has been seen, some flashbacks and some, in fact, flashforwards.

The story finds its center in an incident of sexual sadomasochism and its cause that results in a cycle of brutal violence. Every character in this film gets their head smashed against the ground at least a dozen times. The statement is simple. Whatever poingnancy is gained by virtue of commenting on the South African situation is flattened and largely uninteresting by failing to have any interesting content. A comment in a work of art should say more than the wikipedia article. Consider this a rule of thumb.

Unfortunately, while the film is very well structured, and for this Mr. Orr, as writer, can pat himself on the back, it is not a particularly enjoyable film to watch. The characters are little more than abused-and-abusive husks of blood and expletives. To support a message about the violence in one's society, one owes it to that society as an artist to represent it in an emotionally potent manner, placed in characters that are real people. However decent a job the actors do--and they are quite good--these characters are not real people; and worse, they're annoying. That our glimpses of these characters are caught through unnecessary close-ups on their eyes, mouths, and possessions, wildly shakey camera-work, and very brief shots, as short as 1/5th of a second in action sequences, does not help humanize them at all.

In torture films, of course, one is free to just enjoy the brutality for its own sake. While there are some good efforts at brutality in The Unforgiving, it largely amounts to bloody snouts. No matter how many times a man's head is smashed into the ground, he gets away with blood over his nose, mouth, and chin. Other attempts at brutality we're prevented from seeing with sneaky edits.

From the title, indicating the inability to let go of abuse, onward, The Unforgiving tries hard to have significance and to be crafty. Its success is very moderate. The chief pleasure of the film is to be found in mentally putting together the chronology puzzle Orr creates in structuring. Otherwise, the same content has been portrayed elsewhere, as in Hostel (2005), Penance (2009), I Spit on Your Grave (1978/2010), Last House on the Left (1972/2009), and many other torture and rape/revenge films, much more effectively.

* - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_South_Africa

Primal (2010) - 2.5/4

2011-05-18T05:23:00.006-04:00

Here's something original: a group of young adults find an excuse to drive into Middle of the Woods, Nowhere, where something bad happens and they start getting killed. Even more original is that half of the group is male and the other half female, guaranteeing sexual banter and activity. Thus is the plot to Primal, a film about an ancient cave painting and its surrounding grounds that seem to have the uncanny ability to transform animal life into ravenous monstrosities of a very high order. Dace, an anthropology student, survivalist, and, of course, part-time bodybuilder, leads his five friends to the undiscovered painting for the purposes of producing the greatest thesis ever, but finds, instead, sex and violence.

Since the title is 'Primal', we may as well begin with primality. The primal human is driven not so much by considered desires but by biological necessities: to survive and to reproduce. Survival involves hunting and defending himself and his own. Reproduction obviously involves a man spraying semen in a woman. So, primality involves sex and violence. What's most interesting about Primal is the dynamic it creates out of its characters' attitudes towards primal behaviours.

The obligatory car ride into the jungle economically acquaints us with these in three pairings: Dace is the sexual and rough alpha male; Mel is a flirtatious, sexual and domineering female. Chad is a bookish alpha-male-wannabe who obliges his girlfriend's (Mel's) sexual urges, but isn't always 'into it'; Kris is a girl-next-door whose greatest dream in life is to make babies. Warren is a joker who remains detached from sexual politics and interests except for comedic purposes; Anja is intelligent, independent, and more introspective--the Final Girl, in short. The first pairing is the most sexual and most capable of violence; the second stage is the ordinary and average; the third stage the more introspective and least capable of violence.

The journey from cultivated university life to the primitive jungle parallels an interior movement from refinement to primal behaviour that emphasizes the sex-and-power politics hidden beneath the veneer of civility. Chad's submissive character, for instance, fills him with resentment toward his girlfriend for her emasculating strength and Dace for his dominant personality, and toward both for their mutual flirtation. Mel insists on talking about her genitals and tries to force Anja to say 'cunt'; she also plays flirtatiously with every male.

The film's symbological structure emphasizes this movement. The film's activity is divided between a few locations that all have culturally-accepted phenomenological significances: the campfire, with its connotations of civilization, is the place where the group tries to fight back the onslaught of primality; the murky pond, a stock-image for the subconscious, is the place the infection derives from; the dark, stifling cave, in which the source of the infection resides, is a conceptual cognate of a womb, where the most primal of a being and/or species dwells.

Naturally it is Mel and Dace that are first affected by the forces at work in the film. Mel becomes a savage huntress, all fangs, stalking the prey of her former friends. Soon she finds a co-hunter and mate in Dace. This leaves the surviving members of the party to escape one way or another. The behaviour of each character is an expression of the tensions set up in the car trip that comprises the film's first act. Chad will face Dace, Anja will face Mel and, of course, the cave, and Kris will endure a poetic, if blackly comic, fate.

This is not to say the film's characterization is particularly strong. They are for the most part stock characters one finds in any commercial horror film. The bulk of characterization is put on Anja--as is the lot of the Final Girl--and what there is of it is pretty shallow: she is afraid of dark, enclosed places. Caves, for instance. The film's strength is in playing these stock characters against each other in a situation where their stock characteristics, viz. their attitudes toward sex and their position in the social hierarchy, really are salient points about them and about humanity. A sort of meaningful generality is drawn out of these stocks by virtue of the film's emphasis on dynamics of sex and power.

Where the film does faulter is not in its content, but in its form. When sitting at one's editing software, it's perhaps easy to imagine that highly-kinetic camera movements combined with fast cutting is going to lead to heightened intensity for the viewer. To a certain extent, it does. If the camera moves too fast and the cuts come too soon, however, the effect is lost. The cinematographer of this film has difficulty standing still during any intense scene and the editor can't hold an idea for a second. There are also a series of zoom-ins and zoom-outs that occur at these moments, whether added in-camera or during editing I don't know, that distracted from the action even further. The director, no doubt, desired to have the audience share in the confusion of the characters. But an audience can be trusted, with some subtle assistance, to empathize their way into feeling that confusion without unpleasant camera-work. For a film that otherwise uses conventional style, the subjective camerawork is neither necessary nor helpful.

Nevertheless, Primal does contain a fair number of suspenseful moments and is deftly able to sustain its mounting tension to the climactic moment. The director makes skilled use of his stock characters and claustrophobic situation to pull the audience toward a surprising and fascinating conclusion that, hopefully, will make you think of what I've said in this review: Primality is all about eating and screwing.

La Horde (2009) and Mutants (2009)

2011-01-24T14:33:00.006-05:00

Mutants and La Horde are two French fast-zombie movies that follow the Romero format: hole up in a building for shelter and fend off sieging flesh-eaters while the survivors fester from within. Since these films are superficially so similar, I am reviewing them together.

La Horde (2009) - 3/4

Amongst the many zombie genre trends to come from the films of George Romero, one I've never been keen on is badassery. Badassery is common in American cinema, deriving from the Western, in which tough-as-nails gunslingers have to show one another just how tough they can be. The Italians made badassery so ridiculous with films like Django that Terence Hill and Bud Spencer turned it into comedy with considerable success in the Trinity films. Romero, like, but perhaps not to quite the same extant as John Carpenter, is influenced by these western tropes. The cockfight between Ben and Cooper in Night of the Living Dead, the bluster of the scientists and military personnel in The Crazies, the opening of Dawn of the Dead, and most extremely the entirety of Day of the Dead, all show these tropes. Day of the Dead is an apotheosis of badassery and its messiah is Captain Rhodes, who yells to the zombies eating his intestines, "Choke on them!" Captain Rhodes is really responsible for the profusion of badassery in zombie films. Rough, tough guys who are always ready to kick ass, zombie or human, and who never go down without a fight: that's a badass.

Since Day of the Dead, there is scarcely a zombie picture without a healthy dose of badassery: Army of Darkness, Dead Alive, The Undead, Romero's own Survival of the Dead, just to name some well-known films; there are also the multitudes of straight-to-video films that are assembled of crumbs from Romero's table. The latest in this trend is La Horde.

La Horde is ambitious, however: it doesn't want to be just another badass zombie film; it wants to be the badass zombie film. That's not to say the film is badass, as some synonym for epic, but that all of the characters are 90% Captain Rhodes, 10% unique personality. We begin with a team of rogue cops agreeing to storm a tenement and get revenge on the gangsters within for killing a cop. Not only are the rogue cops a collection of badasses out for blood, and not only do gangsters, much like western outlaws, get by on their badassery, but when they're put together, they must constantly strive to out-badass one another. Explosions from the city and the sounds of creatures from within the building interrupts their conflict and, wouldn't you know it, puts the cops n' crooks together to be a badass team of badasses.

I claimed not to be keen on badassery and I should say why. Let's go back to Romero. What makes Day of the Dead an inferior entry in the series than Dawn for many critics is that Day is emotionally exhausting. Emotional exhaustion is acceptable in a film that earns its emotions. But in Day the exhaustion is due to characters constantly throwing tantrums at one another, making threats, and "getting up in each other's faces." They're trying to get the dominant position over one another, to out-badass the other. These displays of power, a necessary part of badassery since no badass can give in to domination, are pissing contests; and pissing contests grow very dull and tiring when the bladder never empties, if you'll excuse the strained metaphor. Badassery is a social ritual within the group, symbolic action that is stylized, formal, repetitive and grows tedious very quickly because we sense the artifice behind it. It works best in small doses, like the saloon fight in Shane, or when played tongue-in-cheek like in Army of Darkness. If overused characters never have an opportunity to simmer down and talk reasonably; they can never be themselves: every moment is a tense moment of heightened emotion while they play the badass. Flourishes like the famous Rhodes death scene are very effective and the reason badassery continues to get deployed. However, filmmakers don't seem to realize that it must be used with temperence.

Dawn of the Dead works so well because once the characters get to the mall and have peace, they don't need to be badasses anymore. Even Day offers moments of respite amongst the three protagonists. La Horde offers no respite of any kind. The characters never for a moment stop struggling to prove what badasses they are. This brings with it a host of problems. Badasses often forget to think, for instance. In La Horde, these badasses never figure out that zombies must be shot in the head or indeed shot at all: There are two lengthy hand-to-hand fights with zombies that amount to choreographed fights with growling punching bags. These two scenes are kind of fun, if too protracted. A life-long viewer of zombie films, I just kept commanding them to just shoot the zombie in the head. With Romero's zombies, punching might work; but these zombies are inexplicably faster and stronger than normal humans.

We also get, as in Day of the Dead, the exhaustion. These characters are forever yelling at and threatening one another, pointing guns, getting face-to-face for slowly- and gravely-spoken "This is how it is" moments. With the life-threatening situation raging around them, one would think they'd set the badassery aside and focus on staying alive. Not so. They're all Captain Rhodes. For anyone who found the constant badassery in Ghosts of Mars tedious, La Horde will be found considerably more tedious. However, as with Captain Rhodes, this does yield some impressive moments, including a one-versus-dozens moment guaranteed to get anyone cheering. And in the midst of the tedious badassery, La Horde does manage to deliver some tense moments of zombie pursuit and exciting zombie action.

Zombie action and badassery aside, there is also a political component to La Horde that most outside of France won't get. France has a lot of riots. We all know this. The reason they have so many riots is that they've allowed loads of refugees, who could care less about France, to become citizens. These people do whatever they want, because France isn't their home and they have no respect for it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them and they're well-armed. These are the film's gangsters, all Africans or Czechs, now put alongside the cops and made to feel what it's like to be a helpless victim in a country they thought was theirs. The zombies' behaviour is holding up a mirror of sorts to these invaders, showing them how self-destructive it is to work against the country that gave them freedom and security. Not being from France myself, it's difficult to say exactly what is the political message, whether a plea for cooperation or rather an invective, even against the very badassery the pervades the film for tearing the country apart and leaving it vulnerable to much worse potential situations.

Mutants (2009) - 2.5/4

The perfect antidote to the ostentatious and egocentric behaviour that is badassery: love. Other-centered, self-effacing is genuine love. For at the center of Mutants is the necrophiliac love story between a doctor and her zombifying husband, who must resist the urge to eat and/or rape his wife with all his inner resources. They hole up in an evacuated hospital and she struggles to save him and get help while zombies and a band of badasses with guns get in her way.

Zombie love stories have been done before. Soavi's Cemetery Man is probably the most famous instance and a tough precedent to beat. Arguably, it has been overcome already with Yuzna's underrated Return of the Living Dead 3. Yuzna follows the trajectory of his couple's relationship through the zombification process and shows a fascination for the effect of the zombie infection on the thoughts and emotions of the infected member, Julie. She describes the agony and hunger of being a zombie, the way it changes her, and yet she never does abandon or harm her lover. Without any explicit mention from the characters, we can see that love can overcome the desire to eat brains.

Mutants isn't quite as sentimental as Cemetery Man and RotLD3. While the doctor and her husband do love one another, practicalities override affection. When her husband seems dangerous, she doesn't hesitate to chain him up and he doesn't hesitate to put a gun to his own head. Where RotLD3 culminates in a Romeo and Juliet moment, Mutants culminates in the stark realization that maybe infection wins and maybe what seemed to be love can be reduced to simple biology. There aren't many optimistic zombie movies, are there?

Unfortunately Mutants doesn't focus on the husband and wife relationship. As with so many of the recent French horror movies, Mutants seems afraid of allowing interiority and emotional space privilege over a barrage of external events. That's fine if the promise or hint of interiority is not offered, as in La Horde. Here filmmaker David Morlet tantalizes us with the necrophiliac relationship, but would rather give us a group of badasses with guns barging into the hospital and slapping the doctor around rather than allow more than a few minutes emotional development between the couple. Had these characters been in the film from the beginning, their presence would have constituted interesting dramatic tension. However, they only make entrance toward the end of a film with a meager 80-something minute runtime. We simply cannot care about them; they just distract from the more interesting matters. These characters are, of course, an excuse for zombie and human carnage. But we've all seen zombie carnage before. Zombie films need some new contribution, new idea to rise above the rest. Mutants had an opportunity to give that, but sadly failed to appreciate the opportunity.

Perhaps the film's attention defecit issues are simply a result of its cynicism. Practical reality, such as infection, zombies, idiots with guns, and the need for supplies do consistently override love. And if pregnancy is the film's symbol for love, a protective force throughout, the film's ambiguous final note may be the most cynical of all. If this is so, the film sacrifices not just its opportunity to investigate love in time of zombie apocalypse, but also some of its entertainment value: The inconsistency makes it difficult to enjoy the film's action, as it never sustains interest in anything, the relationship, the human conflicts, or the zombie-killing. Although what it does offer of each is competent and occasionally fascinating.

The Twilight Saga - 3/4

2011-01-16T15:10:00.005-05:00

As a relatively little-read internet reviewer, I question the wisdom of writing about the Twilight series. What can I have to say that hasn't been said? I don't care to wade through all the internet literature on Twilight; I can only hope I, as an impartial outsider, have some fresh insight to contribute. For my part, writing about the films will satisfy a need to express just why, despite not being the target audience, I find these films so fascinating. ("These films," incidentally, refers to Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse.)

The gist of the series is as follows. Bella, a fairly normal albeit melancholic and diffident teen girl in her senior year of highschool, returns to her hometown to live with her father. While fitting in with the normal students, she's drawn to the strangely contemptuous and pallid Edward. Soon they fall in love and she learns he's a vampire. The complication comes from Jacob, a childhood friend with whom she also falls in love and who happens to be a werewolf. Throughout the films Bella learns about both vampire and werewolf society and of the antipathy between them. She realizes she's not being fought over by two attractive young men, but by two whole societies. To choose one is to preclude herself from the other. The indecisive Bella dicks both men around for an inordinately long time and causes both conflicts and truces between the societies as she does so.

What most interests me about the films is Bella's dilemma. I suppose that's what interest teenage girls as well, but for different reasons. I'm fascinated by her dilemma because of what it represents, namely, class conflict. The vampires have extremely white skin, traditional nuclear family structure (despite not being related to one another), high education, elegant clothes, a spotless and modern-design mansion, and impeccable manners. The werewolves, in contrast, all have tanned skin, a loose and shifting family structure (follow the character Leah), trade learning (motorcycle repair), wear nothing but shorts, live in wood cabins, and often roughhouse.

The contrast is between what Nietzsche classed as Apollonian and Dionysian impulses; between cultured life and natural life (i.e. the Noble Savage). Cultured life has always been seen as high class and natural life low class. On the other hand, as in Rousseau, cultured life is seen as phony and natural life truer and purer. These prejudices have been in place as long as human civilization. There are certainly virtues to both 'sides', if indeed it's necessary to have sides. Cultured life can be seen as too secondary, detached from lived experience; too effete in situations that really count. A library science scholar is useless in a survival situation; a mechanic isn't. However, sophistication has attractions: artistic and poetic beauty, deep conversations, romance and comedy.

The sexual implications, however, are at the forefront of Twilight. The sexual implications of the class distinction is, as in Twilight, centered upon the men. Women are supposed to, and often do, want men who are aggressive, muscular, tough, good with their hands, often sweating and getting dirty--"manly" men. On the other hand, they like men who are romantic, poetic, witty, and intellectually stimulating--cultured men. The men who are of the "manly" variety are made to feel inadquate for their lack of refinement; the refined men are made to feel inadequate for not being manly enough, as though culture is feminizing. (The arts are oftened considered 'sissy' stuff by the uncultured.) Hence the depiction so often found in Hollywood of a woman who marries a cultured man then has an affair with a brawny, working-class man. The lower class is seen as good for sexual stimulation, the upper class as good for intellectual stimulation. (It is on this prejudice that the whole of interracial pornography seems to thrive.) Bella's position in the film is in choosing between the two ends of the spectrum women desire: men who can be wild and men who can, as Shakespeare put it, word them.(1) Edward can word her; Jacob can thrill her.

This distinction is represented faithfully in the films. Edward is always seen as having to restrain his passion (his desire for her blood), Jacob is always free to express his passion. Where Edward has graduated from school countless times, as he's perpetually 17, Jacob spends his time roughhousing and cliffdiving with his fellow shirt-allergy sufferers. (McConaughey and Danzig would make good werewolves.) The most revealing scene, presented so chastely for the teens of course, is when Bella is being kept safely on a frosty mountain. While she freezes in the tent, the undead Edward, whose body produces no heat, is unable to keep her warm. Jacob, however, produces more body heat than the average human. So he has to slip into bed with Bella to warm her while Edward sits, observing. That's the distinction in a nutshell: hot/cold in bed, good/bad with words, restrained/unrestrained emotions.

Of course, the distinction is objectionable to men. Cultured men are not incapable of being wild lovers or aggressive fighters; 'uncultured' men are not incapable of being poets or sensitive lovers. What is unfortunate about the Twilight Saga is that it never provides an alternative. Rather than suggest that this dichotomy is unnecessary or an illusion created by over a century filled with penny-dreadful romance novels, soap operas, and pandering movies, Twilight takes us into the mind of a girl who is indeed choosing between the sides and never learns how erroneous that is. A bildungsroman Twilight is not. The progress is not interior; it is merely exterior. She chooses and that is all. To be fair, Edward, at least, does not fit his stereotype; he is able to thrill her in between his sullen, soft-spoken speeches. Also to be fair, Bella herself is choosing between the individuals as individuals, not as archetypes.

While both individuals Bella has to choose from are admirable. It would be difficult for any woman to really find either Edward or Jacob anything less than desirable. Both are very handsome young men; both are very sincere and loyal; both are a teenage girl's dream come true, albeit in different ways. Bella's insistance on keeping both men on a leash while she chooses thus makes her a rather unpleasant character. One might argue that Jacob is a puppy that doesn't give up. Rather, he's a practical man who needs to be given a clear and straight-forward denial, which is not forthcoming from Bella. She prefers to keep him around so she can dangle in front of him like a carrot, leading him to do whatever she wants but giving nothing in return. Edward, on the other hand, she keeps closer, but frequently humiliates when she wants to make sure Jacob doesn't leave her grip and thus throws him a bone. Why either of these genuinely nice young men want anything to do with her is puzzling to me.

But it's just a girl's fantasy. I'm taking a fantasy too seriously. The films are and must be seen as the fantasies of a girl as she daydreams on a rainy day, listening to indie rock on her iPod. The dream is of two implausibly attractive and generous young men fighting for her; of whole cultures fighting to protect her, because she's the fairest princess in the land. Because this is her fantasy, it doesn't matter if she's kind of a bitch. Because this is her fantasy, we can set aside the realism and just enjoy it for what it is. Hopefully girls who fantasize this way will grow up and learn that real people can be so much more than cultured and wildman archetypes.

The events of the series that are not directly concerned with Bella's dual love are caused by it. An evening game with Edward's family attracts the attention of some renegade vampires. The rest of the series deals with the repercussions. Both vampire family and werewolf family strive to protect Bella for the sakes of their smitten members. This results in some conflicts between the families and some temporary truces. Bella's interference with the cold but cease-fire relationship leads to a perhaps more amicable peace. I would like to relate this to the class-conflict issue discussed earlier, but I can't, except as a dream of risible optimism. The point is that a shared love unites classes and cultures. But of course, all people do love and long for the same things and it hasn't worked yet.

Each film manages to include some fantastical fight scenes. These are enjoyable for their kinetic and aggressive qualities. Vampires can take and deliver punches that are just impossible in real life. In other words, the fights are very much descendents of The Matrix's fight scenes. Either you like this sort of fight choreography or you don't. Personally I prefer traditional, Jackie Chan-style fights; but there's undeniably quite a lot of enjoyment to be had in seeing a werewolf tearing a vampire to pieces.

What isn't fun is the constant posing. Before a fight, after a fight, and sometimes randomly, the characters, usually the vampires, will strike book-cover style poses. The artificiaility is cloying. Nobody randomly poses in real life. And I don't remember it being the plight of vampires to randomly strike poses. It's an artifact of the filmmaking, allowing poster-shots mid-film. The results are silly and tedious.

Overall, the series is surprisingly entertaining. They are indeed geared for a female audience, a girl's fantasy. But girls fatasize much as men do. Men fantasize about fighting for girls; girls fantasize about being fought over by men. Our fantasizes couldn't be more compatible. We still have fights, love, sex, suffering, more fights, and more love. So choose a side and dive into the fantasy. I chose Edward, if you must know.

(1) "He words me, girls, he words me." Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.

Top 9 Most Subversive Christmas Horror Movies

2010-12-21T19:26:00.002-05:00

As a special treat this Christmas, I've prepared a video instead of an essay. Each film is introduced much more shallowly than I would allow in writing. The video is intended to be light and easy. Still, I hint at how each film can be understood in light of subverting Christmas themes. After all, subversion of the normal, transformation of dream into nightmare, a glimpse at what lies beneath the conscious, cuddly order--this is what horror is all about. Enjoy!

The Hole (2009) - 2.5/4

2010-12-05T04:04:00.013-05:00

Horror as therapy: this is a remarkably consistent, usually implicit theme in horror cinema. One might say it's simply the nature of a strong narrative to have characters transform through their experiences; and when that narrative concerns horror, unsurprisingly the transformation is due to experience of horror. That is to some extent true. But one wouldn't refer to just any transformation as therapy. There's something peculiar about horror that is therapeautic. Horror is facing not just a fear, but an unpleasant truth about ourselves and suffering for it; it's simultaneously an indulgence and a punishment. In Robin Wood's account of Hitchcock, he suggests this therapy is for the protagonist first and for the audience identifying with the protagonist second. For both it is a nightmare come to life that must be encountered and understood if it is to be transformative.

There are many instances. Take a recent film like Vacancy (2007). A feuding couple, haunted by the accidental death of their son, are put through such a horrific ordeal that the guilt poisoning their relationship is entirely remedied. A similar dynamic is present in the classic Straw Dogs (1971), in which an easily-cowed intellectual kills a group of yokels who raped his emasculating wife and, as a consequence, is happier than he's ever been in his life. His marriage is ruined, clearly; but he's transcended his wife. He has become a strong male, capable of violence, through the ordeal: this is a good thing in Peckinpah's universe. Romero often uses the therapy structure as well. In Monkey Shines (1988), for instance, an alpha male is placed at the mercy of a female monkey; he only triumphs because he has learned, through his ordeal, to view a woman as an equal. In all films the horrific situations fix the protagonists of some imbalance, some psychological or social fault. This taps into the same well as a host of familiar platitudes: "Everything happens for a reason," "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," etc.. However, the therapy dynamic occurs on a subtler, less triumphant level as well. As Carol Clover argued, the Final Girl tradition in slasher films is really about fixing an excessively independent girl through horror. Her friends have already gone too far and perish; she alone has the option to turn back and be a Good Girl.

With that prologue in mind, let's dive into The Hole, directed by old master Joe Dante and written by the author of the aforementioned Vacancy, Mark L. Smith. A magic realist story, the film concerns a teen boy (Chris Massoglia) and his younger brother (Nathan Gamble) finding a bottomless pit--cleverly concealed with a trapdoor beneath a throw rug--in the basement of their new home. With nothing else to do in the small town, the brothers and their sexy*, teen neighbour begin probing the hole for answers, but find themselves the probed instead as the hole gazes into their deepest fears and confronts them with what it finds.

Each of the youths gets a fear to confront. The young boy must face clowns, the older boy his father, and the girl a tragedy from her past. They of course don't realize what the hole is doing until the contrived moment in the narrative where realization must dawn. Prior to that, it all seems to be random creepiness. Upon discovering the hole's sinister effects, they research the hole by consulting Creepy Carl (Bruce Dern), the previous tenant of the house and a character we've seen a hundred times before: the antisocial kook who provides a piece of key information. They implausibly get all the right information at just the right time in every instance and set about facing their fears one-by-one.

If the above plot description doesn't make it clear, the film's narrative is riddled with cliches. How the characters come to the conclusion the the hole makes them face their fears, how they realize simultaneously that one of the hole's manifestations is from the girl's past, and the relationship between the mom and her teen son is all the lazy and contrived sort of plotting and drama-building we've seen in countless other films. One might say the film is aimed at a younger audience, and indeed it is; but twelve-year-olds, already pretty media savvy, do not need such a primitive, dumbed-down structure. The film plays like an episode of Eerie, Indiana--Joe Dante's contribution to the world of television--extended by an unnatural forty-five minutes.

Not only the narrative is diluted. The film has a pretty heavy-handed moral I found displeasingly trite: All you have to do is face your fears, understand them, and they will have no power over you. To be fair to Dante and Smith, their definition of 'fears' is broad enough. The two teenagers seem to feel more guilt than fear. The boy feels guilt for the abuse he and his brother have suffered at the hands of his father; the girl for the event in her past. Although in what sense guilt and fear are related emotions is, of course, not explained, it's fairly obvious that these emotions feed one another in various ways.

The moral itself is arguably not that problematic. Psychoanalysis is all about understanding and facing our repressed fears, guilt, and desires. The way the film presents the moral is what's disappointing. First of all, understanding and facing fears is not a quick, simple process. One can't merely destroy a clown doll to overcome one's fear of clowns or throw a belt buckle at an abusive father to overcome the fear, guilt, and shame he's instilled in one's psyche. This is a ridiculous and cavalier treatment of the psychology of children. Compare to a film like Curse of the Cat People (1944), where the child's creative impulses and fantasy life are repressed until they bubble up in the form of an imaginary friend: her father's deceased first wife, the individualistic Irena of Cat People (1942). Curse of the Cat People takes child psychology seriously. The Hole does not.

Second, the hole itself is clearly some sort of mirror to the subconscious. The signifiers are all present: it's in the basement, bottomless, dark, refuses to be covered up once opened, and produces what the children don't want to face. Creepy Carl refers to the hole gazing into its victims and that's what it does: it looks into the mind and manifests what's negative, makes the children face it. This is a really clever device and mirrors what horror films generally do. As I claim above, horror films, like the hole, make us face our repressed anxieties and desires; we leave with them either freshly repressed or destroyed. (Increasingly, however, we leave the theater or turn off the DVD with the monster triumphant. Arguably this is better. But that's a discussion for another day.) In a sense, the hole is offering the the children the same therapy horror films offer us. We know the hole will never kill the children, so like a horror film, it's a non-threatening way of facing those repressed fears.

But this is the problem: repressed fears are never straight-forward. If the hole is mirroring the subconscious, one would expect it to be considerably more inventive. The subconscious is beyond logic, realism, order, language; a realm of nightmares, to push the spatial metaphor. The bottomless black pit that is the hole suggests Dante and Smith are aware of this--of course they are! Yet, all the hole manages is the most superficial horror: clowns, abusive dads, and a traumatic experience. As Bruce Kawin writes, "One goes to a horror film in order to have a nightmare...whose undercurrent of anxiety both presents and masks the desire to fulfill and be punished for certain conventionally unacceptable impulses."* Similarly, when Robin Wood writes of Hitchcock's therapeutic films (Rear Window, Marnie, Psycho), he notes the film follows indulgence in some deviance before the therapy. A fear of clowns is most likely a subconscious mechanism for evading a more pressing and disturbing repression, a fear of a part of oneself and the consequences of indulging it; that would have been much more fascinating to explore in a horror film. Instead, we get a creepy clown doll anyone would be frightened of. And a fear of an abusive father is hardly a deep-rooted, subconscious fear; it's a pretty reasonable thing to fear, in fact.

The basic idea of having children developing by facing their fears was done much more interestingly and with a more imaginative touch of surrealism in an episode of the '80s television series The Real Ghostbusters, entitled "The Boogieman Cometh." When a film compares unfavourably to episodes of syndicated television cartoons, even very good ones, there's a problem. Considering Smith could have had the hole do just about anything, it's so unfortunate it was limited by his imagination to the most banal ideas. We have no symbolism, no psychological depth, none of the rich imagery the history of horror films have yielded.

I brought up the therapeutic structure found in horror films at the beginning of this review because The Hole employs it quite explicitly. The hole only loses its power when the fears it presents are faced. Creepy Carl, who padlocks the hole and leaves the house is merely repressing his fears, not overcoming them. When the hole is re-opened, he pays for his repression. Undergoing horror therapy is the only solution. The problem with this film is that the fears are so shallow and their solutions so immediate and brute that if it's therapeutic for the characters, the audience does not share that therapy at all. And since we can't share the therapy, the climactic confrontations with the hole really lost my involvement. Not because I was thinking of therapy, Bruce Kawin, and Robin Wood while watching, but because it was all very unimaginative.

Even Joe Dante's visuals, one of the pleasures of the film, could have used more imagination. He gets what milage he can out of the Screenwriting 101 screenplay, treating us to some fun expressionism where he's able. (In one of the film's many sight gags, there's even a reference to the German expressionist classic, Orlac's Hande.) The climactic decent into the hole yields some pretty impressive visual ideas in a Dali-esque deterioration of childhood memory. Also particularly enjoyable is the stop-motion animation of the various creatures from the hole. Before one thinks this is a remake of The Gate (1987), the creatures from the hole are mostly human. Yet they move like puppets. There's something alarmingly uncanny in that, not unlike the unsettling denizens of a Svankmajer film.

My concerns suggest the film is lacking in ambition, a little too complacent and lazy. But that needn't stop a film from being fun, right? Indeed, The Hole is still an enjoyable experience. From my own memories of watching Eerie, Indiana as a child, I suspect children of twelve and under will find it very enjoyable. The relationship between the brothers is playful, the girl next door charming in a Lolita sort of way, and their investigation into the nature of the hole had the natural pull that any investigation into a mystery will have. Moments of seriousness, such as the obligatory Chat with Mom scene in which she asks her teenage son to help her make things work, are thankfully few and far between, so we can continue to watch Joe Dante play with toys. Why else does one watch a Joe Dante film if not to see him playing with toys? Still, this is a far cry from the brilliance of The 'burbs (1989) and Matinee (1993).

*1 - If you feel guilty for finding the young lady in The Hole sexy, I'm pleased to inform you that Haley Bennett was in her twenties when the film was made.

*2 - from Kawin's classic essay, "The Mummy's Pool."

Short Reviews for Dec. 6, 2010: French and Cheese

2010-12-04T05:47:00.007-05:00

La Rose de Fer (1973) - 3/4

Iron, fog, and stone
Are met with perky nipples
Amidst skulls and bone.

Ils (2006) - 2.5/4

A film so economical couldn't begin in kindergarten for nothing.
So I guessed correctly.
Still, the suspense of the picture is undeniable.
I had to suspend my belief three, four, five times!
Still, the terror of the picture is undeniable.
How Strangers took a page or two from this book!
Oh, but found a prettier deathtrap.
Tis only in Romania floors and walls are the same colour.

I could watch her in her panties all day.

House of Wax (2005) - 3/4

Remake: Firstly, to call House of Wax a remake is tantamount to libel. Against whom, the original House of Wax (1953) or the present House of Wax, I couldn't say. The only thread they share in common is a murderous wax artist. Where The Thing (1982) and Thing from Another World (1951) share the arctic setting as well as the alien invader, House of Wax has nothing but the wax museum in common with its predecessors House of Wax (1953) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

Ambition: Both Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax were technologically ambitious films. Mystery of the Wax Museum is perhaps the earliest feature-length colour horror film. And House of Wax was famous for its 3D. (The paddle-ball guy is infamous.) There is no technological innovation in House of Wax (2005). But the art direction is surprisingly ambitious and fulfills those ambitions handily. The film is arguably even more ambitious than its predecessor, insofar as it makes not just people out of wax but entire buildings. It really is impressive.

Narrative: The narrative is needless to say a Dead Youngster Movie. A group of young people are offed by the maniacs for no good reason other than "They're maniacs!" By making the youngsters slightly older, around 25, the film has a certain emotional maturity not too often found in such films. Moreover, the body count isn't high. Still, despite the paucity of characters, several are sidelined and entirely undeveloped.

Subtexts: Unlike many films of this sort, the girl and her boyfriend aren't the protagonists, but a girl and her brother. This is predictable to some extent, as the film's major inter-character conflict is between them. Any horror film that tries to give itself a little depth a la Screenwriting 101 does this: a personal conflict amongst the characters to parallel the more pressing conflict with the villains. You see it used clumsily in Vacancy (2007), The Strangers (2008), and many, many other run-of-the-mill screenplays. And this is indeed a run-of-the-mill screenplay. For some reason the serial killers are separated siamese twins. An homage to de Palma? I'm not sure what's going on there. Blood is thicker than goopy, hot wax? I dunno.

Scares: Scares come from vulnerability. If a character stands in front of a dark window, we automatically grow tense, because she's vulnerable. The tension reaches its peak and simultaneously dies--like a supernova--when the attack is launched. Jump scares are consequently the weakest of scares because they begin, peak, and die all in one fell swoop. House of Wax uses NO jumpscares. Instead they use this other trick: You think a protagonist is hiding somewhere, the maniac goes to check that spot, and while the POV is with the maniac, the protagonist has slipped away out of frame. So we expect to see her get caught, the tension mounts, mounts, mounts and BOOM--she's not there! Tension is relieved without peaking, but it's still effective.

So that's House of Wax (2005). It's entertaining, inventive, and capable enough to never become annoying.

Unrated: The Movie (2009) - 1.5/4

There are these bimbo actress babes walkin' through the woods, right, and they're not wearing woods-walkin' clothes 'cause they're stupid bimbos. And there's this Eastern European-lookin' dude with a camcorder and he keeps sayin' "Action!" but there's no script--kinda like this movie--and he falls down a lot, which is funny, 'cause there's comedy sound effects like BOING.

And they get to the house and they're all like, "Sheeeat, this house stank," 'cause it's just a dirty cabin in the woods and the establishing shot was made in photoshop. So the bimbos are yellin' at the dude and then at each other, sayin' like, 'Old bitch!' and 'Piss bitch!'--taxing all their creativity. So one bimbo leaves. And the dude just whacks off to pictures of the director.

And sometimes they try to say stuff in like a conversation, but nobody knows how to make a conversation, so they're just kinda sayin' stuff in the general space of each other and nothing's really reachin' anyone and they keep repeating the same things over and over and it's really frustrating for everyone involved, including me.

Then SATAN shows up, and he's a chick with beams of light coming from her nose! Whoah! And she has this spider and a little screaming worm thing, but he feeds the worm to the spider 'cause, I dunno, the spider's gotta eat. Then BOOM! lightning dislodges a book. And they've never seen a book before, but they're thinkin' it's cool. But it's not. It's bad. And the chick who left suddenly appears in a reaction shot, which is also not cool. It's bad.

And the monsters start comin' out of the book. And there's like this melty latex guy and he's all like BLARGH! and this fat zombie guy and this other guy named Karl who sings a song in broken English about 'desaster' and this chick with huge, fake tits and she does a little dance on TV and never stops rubbing her funbags 'cause it's probably cold.

So they neuter the dude. And the chicks are all like, "This is too much, we don't even have our own trailers!" so they start kicking the monsters. And uh the monsters don't like that too much so they rip the bimbos up, even the old lesbian one. And the chick who was supposed to have left, well, she hasn't heard anything, 'cause she had water on her face. Then her face just melts, I dunno why.

But there's this other bimbo who has like some character development goin' on 'cause her parents were murdered and she even gets a dream sequence during the murders and doesn't wake up 'cause the 12-foot cabin is just so big who can keep track? Finally she gets up and the monsters are all there, but fortunately so are the machine guns that were never in the movie before and she's like shootin' them BANG BANG BANG and suddenly she's in a g-string and she keeps shootin' 'em and there's this song about rainbows and unicorns and then she machetes them and then she shoots them summore. THEN she calls them cocksuckers and that sends them to the pits of hell and stuff 'cause they're homophobes. Then she starts posin' for the camera with her machete and gun and g-string, which is kinda hot but kinda stupid--just like the rest of the movie. And then it ends, 'cause the experience taught her she doesn't have to feel guilty about her parents' deaths anymore.

This is a really stupid movie that's half-way Lucio Fulci film (audience-pleasing gore-fest) and half-way Chris Seaver film (a collection of in-jokes to amuse the filmmakers--and only the filmmakers). Sadly, the flavour of Seaver overwhelms the delicate Fulci undertones, making this a rather unappealing dish, despite the tasty garnish of tits and lesbians. I think all the dialogue that goes nowhere, token character development, and narrative chaos is intended as some sort of parody of bad horror filmmaking. And y'know, it kinda works. And just as a parody of film noir is itself a film noir, this is a pretty good instance of bad filmmaking. Unrated: The Movie is the cinematic equivalent of an idiot savant. Make of that what you will.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 3.5/4
Comedy sound effects: 18
Humour: 3.5/4

Short Reviews for Nov. 29, 2010: Wynorski and Misc.

2010-11-28T22:43:00.005-05:00

Three Jim Wynorski Films
Sorority House Massacre II (1990) - 2.5/4

Jim Wynorski to the rescue. If you weren't already confused, in the stunning sequel, Wynorski gives you flashbacks to SLUMBER PARTY Massacre instead of SORORITY HOUSE Massacre, which this is supposed to be the sequel to. So even the director can't keep 'em straight. No matter, 'cause Wynorski takes all that was right about Slumber Party Massacre--great titties--and gives us more, more, more. Wynorski contrives every event and every angle to show us more T&A, bless 'im.

Five bodacious babes who wear only underwear. Greatest thighs in a motion picture, Robyn Harris. Stacia Zhivago, who looks like Laura Dern as a pin-up girl--later became a doctor. Melissa Moore, a bit of a butterface, but what an amazon. Michelle Verran, the sweetest rack in the film. Dana Bentley, a raven-haired cutey with big nostrils, now surgeried herself into Pete Burns territory. Low-angle panties. High-angle cleavage. On her knees. Out in the rain just to get wet. Orville Ketchum, the man who never dies. Bridget Carney as Candy, the stripper with a booty so fine you'll cry tears of semen. Random racism from Abdul and Schmabdul. Satana the remarkably unsatanic stripper. Jealous lady cop. Random showers. Ouija board seance. Drunk titties. Angry titties. Betrayed titties. Afraid titties. Squeakin' titties. "Let's work together" titties. And of course, ass-kicking titties. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 2/4
Tequila-swillin' sluts: 5
Humour: 3/4

Sorority House Massacre III (1990) - 3.5/4

AKA Hard to Die (a much more appropriate title)

Read my review of Sorority House Massacre II? Well this is the same film cranked up to 11. Really, some scenes are lifted almost exactly from SHM2. Except this one's set in a upscale lingerie shop and not a sorority house at all. The temps are in for inventory and what kinda temps do they hire? College kids? Mike and Joel? Nope, they hire lingerie models! who wear lingerie and high heels almost the whole movie--except for when they take turns having a shower scene.

But that's not the essence of the film. No, this is an epic battle between good and evil, the great demon-hunter Orville Ketchum versus the diabolical spirit of Hokstatter, brought to its final chapter. Both are HARD TO DIE--the question is, who is HARDEST? Me, after watching these sexy babes romping around in their upscale panties with big guns.

Babes in lingerie. Titties squeak when you wash 'em. Orville still eats raw meat. Scared tits. Bloody tits. Soapy tits. Possessed tits. Gun-wielding tits. Bouncing tits. Naked tits. Wet tits. A few dead tits. Stabbing, shooting, stapling, paper-pick stabbing, ball-kicking, head-pounding, and choking. Weirdest Chinese food delivery costume ever. Burning weirdest Chinese food delivery costume ever. Babes with guns. Babes running. Babes bouncing. Babes climbing stairs. Babes moving boxes. Babes moving filing cabinets. Gratuitous porn shoot. Several gratuitous showers. Gratuitous dirty feet. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 1/4
Babes with guns: 3
Humour: 4/4

976-Evil II (1990) - 2/4

That wacky, Satanic calling service returns, this time without Sam Ritter (No? Google Image Search, safe search off, enjoy.), and unleashes more nonsensical terror. The film gives no further explanation, so why should I?

Hotline to Satan. Creepy old man. Evil creepy old man. Lecherous creepy old man. Waste of good POA. Bad Vincent Price impression. Good Vincent Price moustache. Great set piece: It's a Wonderful Life...with ZOMBIES! Death by television. Death by phantom car. Death by prop stalactite. Pizza attack. Oven attack. Daddy's little girl: nice tits and slutty, cut-off jeans. Half-wit cop. Exploding drunk. Tough guy on a bike--named Spike. Puttin' the move on Daddy's girl. Eatin' fries. Drinkin' beer. Ridin' the hog. Warnin' about the number. Breakin' n' enterin'. Scrutinizin' phone bills. Astral projectin'. Turnin' down Brigitte Nielsen circa 1990--he's gay. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 0/4 - Really? In a Wynorski flick?
Gore: 1/4
Times you think, "That's not what a phone sounds like": 14
Humour: 2/4

Bikini Girls on Ice (2009) - 1/4

Bikini car wash meets random killer at a rundown gas station--the title tells the rest.

Lots of girls in bikinis. Cinematographer couldn't light his way out of a paper bag. Smart girl with deep voice, reluctant to wear bikini: obviously the Final Girl. Her peppy, cute friend with a touch-o-the-slut: obviously destined to be killed in a harrowing moment. Car washing montage. Prostitution. Pointless sex scene with a bonus, "Don't touch me!" Slutty girls. Bitchy girls. Lezzy girls. Nerds with a bus. Old man with a warning. French tourists with a gas can. Killer can move faster the light--screw you, Einstein. Killer makes no sound--obviously a ninja. Obsession with ice baths--definitely a ninja. Girls keep wandering off alone--guess what happens? Dead dog. Dead slut. Dead tourists. Dead bitch. Absence of girls with their bikinis OFF. Absence of interesting kills--unless black-outs interest you. Absence of interesting gore. Stupid, stubborn victims. Stupid, unimpressive killer. Deus ex machina--we saw that coming. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 0/4!
Gore: 1/4
Times a victim asks the killer, "Why are you doing this?": 6
Humour: 1/4

As a Quebecer myself, I apologize for my fellow provincemen's lack of ambition and for such a disappointing waste of a good title and several good pieces of ass.

Hack-o-Lantern (1988) - 2/4

Produced and directed by Bollywood rejects Raj Mehrotra and Jag Mundhra respectively, Hack-o-Lantern is a preposterous satanic cult/slasher hybrid about a young man groomed by his grandpa to take over his cult.

Dad wants grandpa to leave the boy alone, so he's gonna head on out there. Turns out 'out there' is just next door, where a satanic cult is practicing a ritual no-one seemed to know about--just next door!

The boy grows into a moody, muscular loser who listens to metal and works out all day. One day he listens to metal and fantasizes a random '80s music video, in which a black girl struts down stairs, sticks out her tongue, and shoots '80s lasers at the band until only the boy is left.

Meanwhile, his sister is getting ready for a Halloween party and sets her best friend up with her normal brother. Normal enough. Then her brother screws her best friend in the cemetery on the first date. The best friend tells the sister about it and, rather than be disturbed, they go back to the cemetery together to look at the spot. Don't all sisters do that? Stare at their brothers' fresh hump-spots.

It's almost at the climactic showdown when a comedian (the great Bill Tucker, remember him? He's famous for being the comedian in Hack-o-Lantern!) steps out and begins doing a lengthy impression of a one-eyed turkey. What? I don't know.

Sexual harassment. Lecherous grandpa. Very campy grandpa. Incest. Truck full of pumpkins. Graveyard sex. Sex on top of a dead body. Satanic cult. Gee, grandpa's evil, whodathunkit? Random '80s metal video. Random awful comedian. Random snake lady. Geisha. Cowboy. Scary cult of... uh, about four people. '80s lazers. Satanist vs Satanist showdown, with pitchforks. Patricide. Matricide. Infanticide. Turkey impressions. Bald beaver. A few titties. Bad jokes. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 2/4
Gore: 2/4
Awful puns: 5
Humour: 3/4 - kinda in Troll 2 territory here

Short Reviews for Nov. 22, 2010: Yuzna and Russo

2010-11-22T14:27:00.009-05:00

This is a new feature on Lair of the Boyg. Because my reviews are usually so long and in-depth, I find I don't get to write about even a tenth of the films I'd like to write about. With a Short Reviews feature, I can provide lighter, free-form, more playful reviews that cover films I either can't or don't feel inclined to write about in depth.

Three Brian Yuzna Films:

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (1990) - 3.5/4

Sometimes you really do find a brilliant film buried in a sequel. Brian Yuzna's SNDN 4, for instance, subtitled 'The Initiation' is a Cronenbergian attempt to deal with the man-hating popular feminism of the '80s from a reasonable man's point of view. Borrowing ideas from the history of horror cinema, the film tells the story of an underappreciated but ambitious woman who takes a news story against her boss's wishes and finds herself sucked into the trap of a coven of witches. The film poses a lot of interesting questions about guilt, resentment, bigotry, religion, and oppression; and, gratefully, it doesn't really give answers.

Clint Howard. Inadequate, half-eaten hamburger. Giant, freaky centipede thing. Cockroaches everywhere. Abrasive, ambitious overachieving chick--everyone thinks she's a bitch and they're right. Her boyfriend thinks she's a fine piece of ass, and he's right. Giant cockroaches. Vomiting in the toilet. Spontaneous combustion. Lezzy, witchy bookstore owner--I've known a few of those. Rosemary's Baby-style coven. Fat naked guy with a nose-boner. Gratuitous violence to Clint Howard. Abdominal insect penetration. Insect-vomiting. Insect-crushing. Hideous adult birth scene. Resentful, man-hating women. Women who say, "But he's a man, what does his life matter?" Men who say, "Women belong in the kitchen!" Girls who say, "Get off of me! You're like a dog in heat!" Bad beer jokes. Lots of gooey stuff. Human sacrifice. The secretary from Moonlighting playing basically the same character. Body-morphing a la Videodrome. Flame-shooting arms. Combusting legs. Gratuitous violence to a bigot. They're burning Christmas. Judaism vs Christianity. Christianity vs Paganism. Apatheism wins. How quickly children forgive. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 1/4
Gore: 2/4
Icky, gooey stuff: 4/4
Humour: 2.5/4 - come on, it's got Clint Howard.

Rottweiler (2004) - 2.5/4

Yuzna's killer dog film about an American in a European country who escapes prison and is pursued by the prison's cyborg dog. Probably the most ambitious killer dog film ever made. Not that the competition is fierce.

- Hero and dog are linked on some level, destined to destroy one another.
- The loss of the hero's girl and the robotic mechanism of the dog occurred together.
- The hero hallucinates the dog, making it a spectral sort of conscience, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Jealousy, guilt, and guilt for jealousy.
- The chase itself is really just an excuse for a dark, even morbid picaresque romp involving thieves, drug dealers, whores, female rapists, flower-picking little girls, crazy industrialists, bounty hunters, and more.
- Symbolism of the fog as our fumbling toward a destiny we can't escape.
- Symbolism of the scorpion, the cruel sting of death we can't escape.
- Dystopian world with countries run by a crazy industrialist Paul Naschy.
- Privileged thrill-seekers trying to escape ennui by infiltrating forbidden nations, getting in over their heads. At least the ennui is gone.
- The game of infiltration: infiltrating the mind and soul.
- The progress of self-realization, as the hero flees the prison of ignorance and arrives on the open shores of understanding.
- The supernatural visions, omens, hallucinations that pervade the story like fog make the film more expressionistic than realistic.

Despite some of the silliness, cliche moments, stupid writing, and sometimes-CGI, sometimes-puppet, sometimes-real dog, Rottweiler is far better than any made-in-Spain evil-robot-dog-movie has any right to be.

Nekkid: 0/4 for dudes, 1.5/4 for the ladies
Gore: 2.5/4
People the dog kills for no good reason whatsoever: 8
Humour: 1.5/4

Beneath Still Waters (2005) - 2.5/4

Yuzna ever seems to be in Stuart Gordon's wake. First with the Re-Animator series, now with heading over to Spain and shooting a Lovecraftian evil town flick. Gordon made Dagon (2001) and Yuzna gives us Beneath Still Waters (2005). How does it stack up?

Screenwriting 101: deepen characters with tragic backstories; have the male and female confide their tragedies to one another in a moment that ends in a kiss; the tragic backstory must come back to haunt the hero in the climax. Monster left over from The Resurrected or Castle Freak. Very '90s feel here. Effeminate evil sorceror. Kid-killing. Kid-eating. Jaw-breaking. Tongue-eating (is that what he's doing?!). Evil book. Evil fire. Evil seaweed. Spooky flooded town. Chained up satanists. A-hole cop. Cute Spanish girl in bikini--is she legal or isn't she? is it right to wanna plough her or isn't it? Oh, her bimbo friend looks old enough, must be okay. But her mom is young and bangable too--what a conundrum. Botoxed-out reporter. Wet-suits a-plenty. Annoying kids a-plenty. Awkward melodramatic exits a-plenty. Awkward character exposition a-plenty. Frog. Two-headed deformity. Self-mutilation. Magic mutilation. Characters who sit around watching murders. Orgy time! Titties on cake! Cake on titties ("Frosted flakes")! Man-on-man dry humping! Spanking! Whipping! Attempted screwing! Riding! Stripping! Impromptu bondage! Pretty tame stuff from the guy who gave us Society. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 1/4
Gore: 2.5/4
Number of times Marcia is pronounced Mar-SEE-uh: 8
Humour: 0.5/4

Three John A. Russo films:

John A. Russo, the other Night of the Living Dead guy--kind of the 'loser brother' to George A. Romero--has had an interesting and uneven film career. Let's have a look.

Midnight (1982) - 3/4

A girl runs away from home, hitchhikes with some dudes in a van, and becomes the captive of some backwoods Satanists. Will daddy come to the rescue in time?

Religious fanaticism. Drunken stepfather. Rapey stepfather. Rendered unconscious stepfather. Takin' to the road, 1960s roughie style--with one bag n' a gee-tar. Random sexual proposition. Nice guys in a van. Sensible black guy. Fun with shoplifting. Rejected chips!!!! Preacher with a long, boring story and a cute daughter. Good samaritanism. Campin' under the stars. Random racism. "White boy!" galore--that's more racism, isn't it? Yes, black racist. Fat, cackling hick--didn't Russo steal that from Just Before Dawn? Guy with tight, stuffed pants. Gratuitous frisbee game. Satanic rituals. Talkin' to dead mother. Girls in little dog cages--is it wrong I was turned on? Head removin'. Hippie shootin'. Girl slicin'. Preacher killin'. Hick shootin'. Body disposin'. Grocery stealin'. Christian prayin'. Hick burnin'. Hick clobberin'. Blood drinkin'. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Kind of a summary of 1970s exploitation genres: Summa Exploitica.

Nekkid: Nein!
Gore: 2.5/4
Racists: 9
Humour: 1/4

Dark Craving (1991) - 3/4

A soft-spoken physician is burned as a vampire/witch for his experiments in curing diseases, helping people, not sleeping with his brother's slutty wife and similarly sinister activities. Centuries later he emerges from a landfill alive, well, naked, and a vampire with venomous saliva. He finds friends, enemies, romance, and despair in our strange, modern world.

Accusations of sorcery, like puss-drinkin'. Genteel vampire. Evil antique dealer. Naked guy emerges from a landfill. Not only is he a vampire, he's a no-good dirty Tory! Chat with a priest about fluid exchanges. Tom Savini weightlifting. Tom Savini shooting things. 1980s American thrash soundtrack. One of the most interesting explanations for vampirism I've ever heard: superstition and the accusations themselves have transformed an innocent, victimized man into the feared monster. Antique dealin'. Museum visitin'. Accidental little girl killin'. Bikini girl assaultin'. Saliva secretin'. Street thug killin'. Catholic confessin'. Inept vampirin'. Girl stalkin'. Vampire macin'. Vampire shootin'. Priest killin'. Needless backstory for police officer. Moon Unit. And a lot of romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: Just that vampire guy's ass.
Gore: 3/4 - Tom Savini
Useless information about minor characters: Lots.
Humour: 0.5/4

Santa Claws (1996) - 0.5/4

A boy murders his mother and her santa-suit-wearing fat boyfriend. The detective calls this "piss-poor behaviour", but the boy is allowed to roam free to become an adult and die-hard fan of scream queen Debbie Rochon (playing Brinke Stevens, basically). But who's gonna die hard? The men who are using, abusing, and trying to take away the lovely scream queen.

Debbie Rochon's titties. Camcorder cinematography a-plenty. Lots of hot girls showing titties and pussywillow. Milf titties. Hairy, old fat guy gropin' milf. Crazy scream queen fan. Lengthy discussion about what pathetic losers scream queen fans are. The glamorous life of a tittie photographer. Creepy neighbour no-one seems able to notice is extremely sketchy. Murder with tiny gardening hook that could barely pierce a half-inch of flesh. There is a santa costume at some point. Bitchy mother-in-law. Bitchy sister-in-law. Did you contact the divorce lawyer yet? Scream queens just get no respect. Makin' out with a mannequin. Nerd dream sequence. How many times are they gonna say Scream Queens' Naked Christmas? And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 2.5/4
Gore: 0.5/4
Times you think, "Russo should have known better": at least 50.
Humour: 0.5/4

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) and the Sexual Mythology of the Slasher

2010-11-10T22:30:00.010-05:00

The original Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was written by feminist and novelist Rita Mae Brown as a reflection on the genre's subtexts, a metafilm as it were: a juvenile fascination with nude women and sex, a nearly omnipotent and nearly motiveless killer, a phallic murder weapon, are all appropriated from the genre to point out the gender politics in the slasher film. Contrary to popular belief, Brown had not written a parody; the comedy was added in an extensive re-write by director Amy Holden Jones. Apparently not a feminist, Jones took the material and, to the best of her ability, played the subtextual structure as a tongue-in-cheek slasher. The result is an over-the-top instance of the slasher, the archetypal instance of the cheesy '80s slasher, not to be confused with moody '70s-style slashers like Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), and He Knows You're Alone (1980). The goggle-eyed killer earnestly drilling nubile young girls is too ridiculous to take entirely seriously and yet Brown's subtext shows through, or perhaps is helped by the comedy: this killer is a frighteningly aggressive male sexuality dead-set on drilling the nubile girls. The same goes for the gratuitous showering, girls who hide about as well as a four-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek with her grandparents in the nursing home, and dialogue gems like, "Hey, it's not the size of your mouth; it's what's in it that counts." All of it is a joke and simultaneously a statement on the psychosexual dynamics of the slasher film.

As the film is definitively neither thoughtful metafilm nor over-the-top cheese-fest, whether The Slumber Party Massacre is taken as one or the other is ultimately up to the viewer. Both possibilities resulted in sequels, curiously enough. Jim Wynorski's Sorority House Massacre II (1990) and Sorority House Massacre III (1990), confusingly sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre rather than Sorority House Massacre (1986), take the over-the-top qualities and push them into comically extreme territory. In the Sorority House Massacre sequels, the driller killer of The Slumber Party Massacre becomes a malevolent spirit capable of possession. He then terrorizes increasingly big-titted babes with decreasing skin-coverage. The comedy elements reach their peak when both the potential victims and the villain refuse to die, no matter how many bullets are sent into them. The Slumber Party Massacre sequels, on the other hand, written and directed by women, sided with Rita Mae Brown over Amy Holden Jones. Slumber Party Massacre III (1990) does so by making its killer a sexually impotent victim of childhood molestation. Slumber Party Massacre II is by far more interesting; the rest of this essay will be devoted to why.

The plot of Slumber Party Massacre II ostensibly picks up where The Slumber Party Massacre left off. In the aftermath of the tragic incident, one of the survivors is in a mental hospital and her sister, Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), is trying to hold her own life together. On top of her over-protective mother, she has to contend with a series of disturbing dreams partially remembrance of the harrowing ordeal and partially filled with gruesome imagery presided over by a leather-clad, rockabilly driller-killer. Once her mom allows her to attend a weekend in a friend's country home she begins to suspect the dreams are premonitions. Unfortunately--the plight of the seer--no-one heeds her concerns until it's too late. After a series of hallucinations that leave her friends thinking she's crazy, the rockabilly driller-killer emerges from her dreams and, all while rocking some killer tunes, slays her friends one-by-one with his guitar-drill.

What makes the film so interesting is Courtney's dreams. A throw-away line in the film explains that dreams are the subconscious mind's way of dealing with trauma. Dreams give the trauma some sort of order that makes sense in the pre-rational depths. For perhaps the first time in horror film history, we're treated to a sequel that seriously deals with the psychological aftermath of a trauma like seeing one's friends drilled to death by a maniac. The result is, then, a very peculiar slasher film that is itself entirely a damaged mind's way of dealing with the content of a previous slasher film: it's a meta-film, in short. This allows writer-director Deborah Brock to take her investigation of the gender politics and sexual dynamics in a slasher film much farther than Rita Mae Brown could.

Courtney's dreams take a dualistic form: although they're all sexual in nature, there are the positive sexual dreams and the negative sexual dreams. The positive, or good dreams are those centered on the sweet, handsome Matt, her desired boyfriend. He's always shirtless and engaging in some sport that emphasizes his muscularity, or smiling at her from a slight low angle--she's literally looking up to him, in both adoration and sexual submission. Whenever she dreams of getting closer to Matt, however, her dreams are invaded by the negative. The negative dreams are centered on the darkly handsome driller-killer, with his leather jacket, brylcreemed hair, and guitar with a drill in place of a fretbar. While he's killing her friends, most importantly Matt, he's pursuing her with misguidedly amorous intent, not unlike Pepe Le Pew. Where Matt represents a clean, pure female sexuality, fantasizing about the physical beauty of the sporty boy-next-door, the driller killer represents that darker female sexuality that is drawn to dangerous, sadomasochistic relationships. Matt's sexual aura is comprised of his physique, winning smile, and sports. The killer's sexual aura is comprised of rock n' roll, leather, sexual dancing, and violence.

There is clearly a relationship between Courtney's pure, one could say socially-sanctioned sexuality, and the violent sexuality that terrifies her. Whenever she begins to fantasize about Matt, the rocker intrudes. What this seems to suggest is that the ordeal she survived in the first Massacre has affected her ability to engage in a mutually satisfying sexual relationship; she instinctly transforms it into a sadomasochistic relationship. A slight twist on this point, she may just on some level perceive all male sexuality as destructive, all female sexuality as trapped in sadomasochism. In the first film, Courtney, still a young girl, witnessed a man sticking a phallic drill in nubile girls wearing skimpy clothes. This image seems to have impressed itself upon her as the only course sexuality can take. By the same token, she automatically punishes herself for her sexual desire. She seems unable to cope with a sexual desire that is as pleasurable for her as it is for the male.

At the level of fantasy, Courtney's negative dreams are much like bondage: an attempt to transfer what one fears into an environment one can control. While often viewed as a perversion, bondage is little different than a man with a fear of heights going skydiving. Courtney dreams of the rocker so she can, on a subconscious level, deal with her fear of her own sexuality impressed upon her from the first Massacre. As the fantasist of a rape fantasy doesn't really desire to be raped, Courtney doesn't really desire to be subject to the driller-killer's terrorism.

At the beginning of the film, Courtney is seemingly in control of these dreams. Like any dream, they run without explicit control. Yet she's cheerful and undisturbed as she eats her breakfast. Once she leaves home and sees a dead bird--just as in her dream--she begins to worry that she's lost control of her comforting fantasy. As the film goes on and sexuality begins to impinge upon her more and more, her hallucinations increase in frequency. After she overhears her friend having sex, she hallucinates her bathtub filled with blood and then her friend's head overtaken with a gushing zit. These are all revealed to be hallucinations, much to her relief and dismay.

(Note: Major Spoilers from here on.)
The turning point is when, finally, her dreamboy Matt takes her to bed. When her positive dream becomes a reality, so too does her negative dream. By allowing herself to engage in sexual pleasure, she releases the sadomasochistic fantasy into reality. The killer immediately drills through Matt, destroying Courtney's hope for a normal sexual relationship. He pursues Courtney through the house, singing his lines and performing sexualized rockabilly dances while terrorizing the girls. The editing becomes expressionistic, giving him little music videos. This shows he's in control; he's no longer a subconsciously contained fantasy, a safe exploration of danger and fear. Gradually he manages to drill through everyone until it's just he and Courtney.

For better or worse, Courtney is unable to embrace this aspect of her sexuality. The film doesn't make entirely clear where it stands on this subject and it is by no means self-evident. As noted, the sexuality Courtney has with Matt is a mutually satisfying one. One might therefore assume the film is against an abnormal and sadomasochistic sexuality. However, feminist filmmaking is characteristically against perceptions of what's normal or abnormal in sexuality. Matt is, after all, a very much socially sanctioned object of female desire. Perhaps the driller-killer represents a fear of her more adventurous sexual interests that ought to be embraced. At one point he states, "You and I are one until we go all the way." Courtney's sister (in her dreams), however, says, "Don't go all the way!" In the context of the genre, though, I would suggest that the film can be taken at face value. The driller-killer, in the lineage of slasher villains, is an essentially patriarchal force that exploits females and denies them the right to their own sexual pleasure. Feminist writers, like Carol Clover and Linda Williams, have made much of this, from the phallic choices of weapon (although, what weapon isn't phallic?) to the relentless pursuit of girls engaged in sexual behaviour and the ultimate survival of the virginal heroine. This was made more explicit in The Slumber Party Massacre than any prior slasher; and Slumber Party Massacre II makes it even more explicit, indeed, as I've been showing, the very central dynamic of the film.

The film's final shot, to some very disappointing but to us the most interesting of all, reveals the whole film to have been a dream. Valerie Bates is not the sister in the mental hospital, but rather Courtney herself. Suddenly that throw-away line about the mind dealing with trauma seems all the more relevant. Cowering in her hospital room, she imagines the driller killer piercing her room--a visual euphemism for penetrating her, of course--just as she's imagined all we've seen in the film. Had this not been the case, the fantasies of the ideal Matt could be chalked up to a reflection of reality. However, once we realize there is no Matt, we see he's a purely idealized vision of a young woman's sexual desires. He's infinitely attentive to her needs, impossibly handsome, and while talking on the phone wears nothing but cut-off jeans and poses like a poster boy. Brock, moreover, directs the film such that Matt is consistently represented in a dream-like manner, with strange, subjective shots of him looking into the camera.

The intrusions of the driller-killer are thus not just about sexuality. A normal sexuality is co-extensive with a normal life altogether, which the traumatic events of the first Massacre have prevented Courtney from enjoying. The sadomasochistic fantasy perverts not just her sexuality but her whole world. He destroys her friends, destroys her romantic dreams, destroys her boyfriend, till it's only him left in her world. Her final attempt to exorcise him from her dreams with fire is a failure. If the film represents her struggles at self-therapy, the therapy fails; she remains a frightened, broken girl in her hospital room.

Sexuality is central, however, because just as the events of the first film are contained within a highly sexualized slasher format, so Courtney's means of dealing with the events are themselves contained within a sexualized slasher--albeit from a notably more feminine point of view. Brock is able to engage, in this way, not only slasher genre tropes, but also criticisms of the genre. In her 1984 essay "When the Woman Looks," Linda Williams argued that any woman who dares to grant herself the privilege of desire in a horror film is punished with her own reflection in the monster, a creature of abnormal power, and simultaneously victimized by it. If this dynamic is what Courtney witnessed in The Slumber Party Massacre, she's now internalized the experience and is cursed to perpetually punish herself in her own dreams for exhibiting sexual desire. The first-person relishing of the beautiful Matt is an instance of female gaze, female desire enjoying the spectacle of a beautiful male. It's genuine and not salacious; it is, for once, female pleasure acknowledged in a slasher. For this Courtney punishes herself, having internalized the slasher dynamic.

Moreover, Carol J. Clover's 1987 essay, "Her Body, Himself," which Deborah Brock could conceivably have read prior to writing Slumber Party Massacre II, argues that the 'Final Girl' in the slasher film, the girl who survives the ordeal, is purged by her experience. The most self-denying of the female characters, virginal and serious, usually a tomboy, the Final Girl is stripped through the horrifying experience of any desire to seek out pleasure for herself. Courtney was already a Final Girl. In this film, she's dealing with the results of this purgation. As I've noted, Courtney punishes herself for fantasies of mutually satisfying relationships. These fantasies pervert themselves into sadomasochistic relationships with a primal male sexuality she can't control. In an instance of Freudian repetition, she's forever reenacting in her fantasies her own ordeal as a Final Girl, repeatedly purging herself of her healthy sexuality. But the purgation, in Brock's film, is itself extremely unhealthy and leaves the female with an unbalanced, pathological sexuality.

The film's message, if we may call it that, is not that women watching slashers will, like Courtney, internalize the sexual dynamic and become sexually unbalanced. Courtney witnessed the Massacre from inside, not safely projected on a screen or popped in a DVD player as we do. (Although the names of the characters--Bates, Voorhees, Krueger--suggests Courtney's watched her fair share of horror films.) But if slasher films are to some extent reflections of a social disorder, a disorder based upon repressing female sexual liberty, then Slumber Party Massacre II suggests the dangers of propagating such a disorder. Film is a very powerful medium and what viewers of that medium can and will assimilate would astound. Freedom of sexual desire is sexual health.

Wrong Turn (2003) - 2.5/4

2010-11-01T19:42:00.003-04:00

Imagine you open your eyes and see before yourself a dog standing on a beach ball and being chased by a clown. Yes, you're at the circus; you'd just nodded off. Suddenly, in your drowse-inspired detachment, you're struck by the realization that the universe has been developing for billions of years according to unbending laws of physics so consistently, so unerring, so determinately that it could be said the entire universe has led up to this point: the clown and the dog on a ball. Granted countless other things are occurring in the universe simultaneously; but it did take billions of years for you to watch a dog on a ball. One can be extremely amused by the mock-epic implications; one can also be a little disappointed in the universe. It's such a trivial thing to spend billions of years working towards.

Fifteen minutes into Wrong Turn, I knew I'd feel a similar disappointment. The plot is simple: a doctor takes a shortcut through West Virginian woods to avoid a traffic jam, strikes an unexpectedly-placed SUV, and the whole group that goes looking for a phone is hunted by violent, inbred hillbilly cannibals. The moment I noticed three girls and two guys in the SUV group, I knew who would survive the film. But with that prediction (an accurate one) came this disappointment: that all the horror, violence, agony, death that occurs within the film does so just so the handsome, square-jawed man and the pretty, resourceful woman can 'get together.' This is the unspoken progression of the film. All the premises and how they work out leads to this conclusion: the handsome man and the pretty girl develop a romance.

I don't mean to imply Wrong Turn gives us pointless love scenes: it never does. But the film does conclude with the surviving pair together. It was predestined. The moment we spot Eliza Dushku, we realize she exists for the doctor and he for her. They're written that way. And everyone else, who should have a separate and meaningful-in-itself existence actually exists for these two to get together. The ordeal doesn't take on any symbolic implications for the implausibility of any two people coming together; it is concrete, particular, regarding these two people in this universe set up just for them. Because in the movies, pretty yuppies getting into a relationship is the most important thing in the universe. Hence my disappointment. Like the dog on the ball, to end the film on the predictable couple getting together and driving off into the sunset seems to trivialize all the came before; it trivializes the characters, the events, the horror all.

A more interesting though no less predictable film with a similar progression is House of Wax (2005). While that film also subordinates the existence of all other characters and all the events to the relationship of a brother and sister, it seems somehow more meaningful. Their relationship, for one, predates the events we witness and, while hardly well-developed, has a specificity to the characters. The relationship in Wrong Turn is entirely generic; it is, as I said, handsome man and pretty woman, but nothing more.

The said, the film offers some exciting chase action, including a siege on a fifty-feet-high watchtower and a battle in treetop branches. The success of these chase sequences depend very much on setting logic far aside. If Johnny is so inbred he can't learn spoken language, how likely is it he'll be a master archer or as nimble as Tarzan? These hillbillies should be club-footed special-care charges barely able to feed themselves. Yet, as is so often the case with the Hollywood depiction of hillbillies, the only parts damaged by inbreeding are the face and conscience. Amazingly proficient at anything physical, able to plan out sophisticated strategies, they are entirely incapable of moral reasoning. This is useful for creating a monster the yields thrilling suspense sequences, as when the protagonists hide in the monsters' lair, and chase sequences, as when the protagonists flee through the woods. But one wonders what else it's useful for. That is to say, what is accomplished on a social and psychological level by depicting hillbillies in this fashion?

The victims of hillbillies, from a genuine classic like Deliverance (1972) through cult classics like Just Before Dawn (1981) and Rituals (1977) on to Wrong Turn, are always middle- or upper-class and educated. In Rituals, they're all doctors. In Deliverance they're successful businessmen. In Wrong Turn one character is a doctor and the others all seem well-to-do. The hillbillies are, of course, living in poverty and without education. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that we, the predominantly middle-class and educated audience, are being confronted with two monsters of our world: the enormous failure our economical and educational systems to distribute goods justly over all; the possibility that education and success has made us weak and unable to fend for ourselves in situations of real danger. Hence the logic-defying physical capabilities of the hillbillies in Wrong Turn and trapping skills of the hillbillies in Rituals. When the hillbillies are finally beaten down by our cityfolk protagonists, we can return to the world at ease with our social and economic systems: the monster has been repressed again. If the extremity of the backwoods horror tropes in Wrong Turn are any indication, the repression has only exacerbated the situation. The hillbillies are Wrong Turn are more hideous, more heinous, more horrendous than in nearly any of its predecessors.

But I'm not here to preach social justice. Wrong Turn, for all its decadence, delivers on terror, even if it does show its hand a little too early and is, behind the gloss, a generic backwoods horror. Still, it would take a very uncooperative viewer not to cheer the film's final punchline, at least in his heart. If the universe has been following those unbending laws, maybe there is no such thing as a 'wrong turn.' This is how inbred hillbillies ought to be repressed.

The Family: Un jeu d'enfants (2001) and Promenons-nous dans les bois (2000)

2010-10-28T00:19:00.009-04:00

(I wrote the following essay(s) in October 2010, but for one reason or another it was never completed to my satisfaction and thus never published. Reading it over, I think it is publishable; however, as my memory of the films, not to mention my own train of thought at the time, is too diminished to complete it, it remains in incomplete work. - JR, Sept. 28, 2011)

Un jeu d'enfants (2001) - 2.5/4
Promenon-nous dans les bois (2000) - 2.5/4

The horror film, for its ability to fly under the radar, to directly target the emotions, and to push against or beyond the limits, has often been considered as both the most subversive and, paradoxically, the most conservative genre. More paradoxical still is how subversion and conservation are achieved in the same stroke according to such critics as Robin Wood and Bruce Kawin: the monstrous and subversive force is allowed to roam free only to be destroyed at the end, leaving the audience to go home with their catharsis. Of course, horror films have never been so simple. The films of James Whale are intentionally more subversive than conservative. In Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, the Bride rejects the male for whom she was made, her expression of free will being the film's very climax. The slashers of the '80s, on the other hand, are considered by many feminist critics to be the height of ideologically conservative films.

Some filmmakers, moreover, strive to be subversive and unwittingly create a conservative film; sometimes the very converse happens. I have no knowledge of the filmmakers' intentions in Un jeu d'enfants and Promenon-nous dans les bois; but whatever their intentions, one has turned out a decided assault upon the traditional Western family form and the other a fierce protector of its sanctity.

(These reviews contain some spoilers.)

The Conservative: Promenons-nous dans les bois

Promenons-nous concerns a group of young actors who are invited to the mid-forest chateau of a rich eccentric in order to put on a panto performance of Little Red Riding Hood. The fun-loving, attractive youths find him an uptight, wheelchair bound homosexual living alone with his nearly-catatonic grandson and gamekeeper. After the performance of the play, the sun sets and the group is targeted by murderer in a wolf costume.

What the film emphasises, in the midst of the unremarkable slasher material that ensues, is two very different but equally non-productive coupling forms. The company of actors is promiscuous, their relationships ephemeral. For lack of a better term, they're 'fornicators,' without a family form. The group, in fact, contains only a single heterosexual couple. One male is single and potentially bisexual, one female lesbian, another bisexual. It is a voluntarily non-productive group that directs its actions to pleasuring itself. Taking the group as a unit, it is essentially masturbatory.

On the other hand, the situation into which the group enters is a family consisting entirely of men: the grandfather and the little boy. The gamekeeper has a sometimes-submissive and sometimes-dominant role in relationship to the grandfather that at times flickers wife-like. So this unit is similarly non-productive, albeit for different reasons. If the group of youths are non-productive from an excess of Eros, the chateau denizens have a deficiency of Eros and instead embody Thanatos. The grandfather, indeed, compulsively repeats Little Red Riding Hood tropes from his own youth, but curiously treats the wolf as the protagonist, Hood as an invader. (The repetition of the past is, in psychoanalytic theory, a function of the death-drive, Thanatos.) The gamekeeper has a taxidermy hobby and is a rapist. The chateau is thus committed to merely subsisting, consuming but producing nothing.

The climactic reveal of information is, significantly, pertaining to the family situation of the chateau. The grandfather's daughter, while pregnant with the boy, tried to escape the family and, mid-flight, was caught by the grandfather and the gamekeeper; they cut the child from her womb and left her to die. So not only is the situation deprived of female presence, it is openly hostile to the necessary female presence in sexual reproduction, to the family situation that is ordered around sexual reproduction. It is as though she were killed for her productivity.

I mentioned James Whale above. The film can be compared, in subtext, to Whale's far superior film The Old Dark House. In The Old Dark House, a group of youths (or what passed for youths in the '30s) enter a non-productive family of old eccentrics, the women masculine and the men feminine. The only vital presence in the household is Boris Karloff's butler character, whose energies are devoted to one of the effeminate men. Whale went so far as to cast a woman as the family patriarch.

In Whale's film, normality is represented by the young crowd who enter the house seeking shelter and who ultimately leave the house in flames, normality restored. Whale's sympathies, however, seemed to lie in the titular Old Dark House, not with the sentimental young couples. Promenons-nous doesn't divide its sympathies from its results, going a step further than Whale in both restoring normality and approving. In Promenons both the family and the youths are abnormal; their collision results in both groups being destroyed and the remnants assembling into a makeshift family. Of the chateau only the boy survives, of the group one male and one female: the makings of a nuclear family. The boy, nearly-catatonic throughout the film, for the first time smiles as he drives home with the surrogate mom and dad; and on that the film ends, with happiness gained by destroying promiscuous heterosexuality and essentially non-productive homosexuality. In short, finding happiness is co-extensive with maintaining the ideological order as it pertains to sexuality and family forms.

The Subversive: Un jeu d'enfants

Un jeu d'enfants begins with an ideologically perfect family: a work-at-home mom, an office-worker dad, a son and a daughter, both around seven years of age. With their financial security they take an enormous apartment which may turn out to be their undoing. An elderly brother and sister pair arrive at the door one day requesting a tour of the apartment in which they grew up. The mother obliges the decidedly creepy couple, briefly loses track of them, and escorts them out without incident. However, once the couple leaves, strange things begin happening and the mother is convinced the old couple had something to do with it.

Jeu is not exactly a haunted house film, but the concept of place is important all the same; nor is it a possession film, but the loss of identity is also important. Somehow merely inhabiting this apartment, where an earlier family ended in tragedy, begins to tear at the fabric of the well-ordered family. The essence of the patriarch is to earn the money, so naturally the father, when he begins attacking an imaginary offender at work, loses his job. The essence of the wife is her fertility and fidelity, so naturally the mother begins having random sexual encounters with servicemen. The children, however, are the most affected, seemingly taking on the characteristics of the elderly pair and thus becoming independent beyond their years.

The ways in which the apartment effects these changes in its occupants remains mysterious. In fact, Jeu is so committed to ambiguity there's not much one can be certain of. The elderly pair seem not to exist outside of the wife's mind; the adulterous liaisons the wife engages in may not have occurred at all, given the bizarre way the servicemen are represented. The repairman, for instance, screws her as methodically as he works on the washer, calmly walks away when she tells him he's done. One wonders if there isn't a psychedelic fungus in the apartment. But the film gives no basis for this in the narrative, so we're left with a family disintegrating in their new apartment for no other reason than that a previous tragedy occurred there and some occult forces have determined the next must follow suit.

Ultimately Jeu is a nightmare of the middle-to-upper class nuclear family, the tensions of which arise from individuals resisting the roles the structure thrusts them into. In Jeu, the home, the central place of family life, perverts each individual into the opposite of the role they are expected to occupy: the patriarch becomes impotent and dependent, the mother a whore, and the children begin to dominate the family. When the fate of the family situation is decided by the children, it is inevitable that it is consumed.

The Ghost Writer (2010): A Political Ghost Story

2010-09-14T05:25:00.017-04:00

(This essay contains spoilers.)

"Unfinished Business
The primary reason for ghosts to be sticking around. They want revenge, their story to be told, or simply to be informed once and for all that they are, in fact, dead. To get rid of the ghosts, the hero or heroine will have to either do extensive research in old newspaper articles or communicate somehow with the ghosts. Once their business is finished, they vanish in a flash of light."(1)

But what if the ghost and the hero are unwittingly the same person? The first ten shots of The Ghost Writer show a vehicle deprived of a driver aboard a ferry, then a man's body, deprived of life, lying in the surf on a beach. Over the final shot in the series, a long shot of the body, Ewan McGregor's voice begins, "You realize I"--cut to him eating lunch with his agent--"know nothing about politics." By the eleventh shot Polanski has already let us know that this character (who never gets a name of his own) is the ghost of the body in the waves. He's not literally a ghost, of course; but in effect his raison d'etre in the film's world is to settle the unfinished business of that body and he will haunt all the places, from room to vehicle, that body has occupied during life until the business is finished.

The body on the beach is a long-time aide of former prime minister of the UK Adam Lang and ghost writer of his memoirs. McGregor's character, "The Ghost", a soft-spoken Englishman, is hired to ghost-write the memoirs into more marketable material than McAra had left them. He's taken to an island off the coast of New York where he has a month to get the book ready under the watch of Lang's wife, Ruth, and political aide and mistress Amelia Bly. As political controversy explodes around Lang when it's discovered he had authorized the torture of four terrorist suspects, all British citizens, McGregor begins finding traces of McAra's research that lead into a conspiracy way over McGregor's head and sends him running for refuge with the very man heading the investigation into Lang's war crimes. McGregor believes Lang had been recruited by the CIA, but his questioning is cut short when Lang is assassinated. During the opening gala for the memoirs McGregor has successfully ghost-written, he gets the last hint and discovers the wife, Ruth, is the CIA agent and Lang had been her puppet, and thus the puppet of the United States, all along. McGregor is then unceremoniously killed off-screen by a mysterious black car.

The reason McGregor can be killed so unceremoniously is that he's a ghost. Once he's discovered that Ruth is the CIA agent and informed her of his knowledge, he has finished the business for which he exists and ceases to be. Polanski prepares this progress carefully. When McGregor is first given the job as ghost writer, he's shown leaving the publishing house headquarters and hailing a taxi. When McGregor exposes Ruth (only to us, alas), he's shown, fittingly in the film's final shot, leaving the same building and hailing a taxi in the same spot; this time, however, the taxi ignores him and he exits the frame, where a car speeds after him and, well, into him. So, Polanski actually rhymes the moment the ghost is given his 'unfinished business' and the moment after he finishes it. By having the story come full circle to the publishing house a fatalistic sense is imparted, suggesting that the moment McGregor accepted the role of ghost he had signed his doom.

Between these moments a dialectic reminiscent of Polanski's The Tenant (1976) begins. The Tenant is about a man assuming the apartment of a woman who committed suicide and becoming increasingly paranoid that the other tenants are trying to transform him into the suicidal previous tenant. The Ghost Writer, similarly, has McGregor resisting assuming McAra's life, resisting, as it were, haunting. He refuses to use the BMW he's offered because the groundskeeper tells him McAra loved it. He resists taking over McAra's room on the island and, once in the room, is disgusted to find the man's clothing left behind. Upon removing the clothing, however, he uncovers McAra's secret research taped to the bottom of a drawer. This is the moment he assents to being McAra's ghost. He then sleeps with Lang's wife, as it's very possible McAra did, and finally takes the BMW. Furthering the ghost motif, he finds McAra's directions still programmed into the vehicle's GPS. He decides to follow them, further ghosting McAra, just as ghosts are said to perform functions and frequent places they used to do while alive. He then calls the telephone number on the back of a photograph in McAra's research and finds himself in contact with Lang's enemy Rycart, betraying Lang just as McAra had done.

Of course, McGregor is hired to be Lang's ghost, not McAra's. Where McGregor is a ghost who struggles unsuccessfully to have identity of his own--throughout the film he only introduces himself as a 'ghost' and we never learn his name--Lang's problem is that he's all identity without any real soul of his own. He has too many ghosts. Everything is decided for him. In one scene McGregor is asked to draft a statement to send to the press. In the following sequence McGregor returns to his hotel and sees a member of the press on television quoting his words as Lang's. Innocence is lost then; we realize a prime minister is not so much a person as a team, the minister himself or herself a silver-tongued figurehead at best. So Lang has been. The first paragraph of the manuscript McAra has written states that 'Lang' is from an Old English word meaning 'tool.' Lang has been a tool manipulated throughout his whole career. He himself is strangely empty, void of content. Rycart confesses not understanding the man after working with him for fifteen years. Just as a shot-by-shot analysis of Plan 9 from Outer Space would prove mystifying, Lang is mystifying if only because there's nothing to puzzle out. He was a skirt-chasing, handsome actor not the least bit interested in politics and in him the CIA found something malleable. He has been a face used by the United States, through his CIA agent wife.

That is rather abstract, however. Lang is, of course, a human being with as much a mind and personality as anyone else. It is as a political entity that he is empty. As a person, he is a fascinating character insofar as he may be the only entirely honest character in the film. When Lang tells McGregor that he entered politics because he fell in love with Ruth, Polanski gives us no reason to doubt him. He's wrong, but he seems to believe it. In some sense perhaps it is still true; we don't, after all, know the depth and extent of Ruth's manipulation: did she ever love him? When confronted by McGregor, Lang asserts that he has never taken orders once in his career. That's very likely as well; that is to say, it's likely he believes this.

What McGregor and Lang have in common is the way they are easily manipulated by others under the guise that they have free will. In a key sequence early in the film, McGregor's first conversation with Ruth, she states two important points: McGregor's presence is her idea and she doesn't like Adam being out of her presence because, she implies, he's incapable of thinking for himself. Both men are joined in how they fall under her will. McGregor, like Lang, is chosen for his position for how easily he can be controlled.

If Lang did indeed enter politics out of love for Ruth, one could easily wonder what happened. Throughout the film, Ruth is one of the most bitter, vindictive, acerbic characters in recent cinematic history. Scarcely a line she utters isn't barbed and venomous. What makes The Ghost Writer such a great film is how so little is given to us directly, yet all the information is there, much as the threatening information is indirectly present in McAra's manuscript. Ruth is clearly much more intelligent than her husband and had always been the more politically motivated of the two. Her faustian agreement with the CIA, represented by the Mephisto-esque Paul Emmett, has led her down a road of unfulfillment as merely a footnote in the political career of her inferior husband. When asked if she never wanted to be a politician in her own right, she snaps back to McGregor, "Didn't you want to be a proper writer?" Even her apology to him is dripping with vindictive sarcasm, "I've hurt your feelings." In her unfulfillment she's become increasingly bitter, leading her husband to stray to Amelia Bly (an older woman) and, as she confesses, to stop taking her (i.e. the CIA's) advice.

Throughout the film, Bly is associated with light and Ruth with rain and darkness. Lang even tells us that he first met Ruth in the rain. The obvious effect is to make us feel gloom and depression when she's in frame; Polanski lets her affect us much as she affects Lang. The presence of rain also tends to suggest the malign, conspiratorial influence. The first shots of the film, when the BMW is discovered empty, are in rain. The final shot of the film, when McGregor is killed, is in rain. When Ruth learns an old man knows McAra's body was planted on the beach, she suddenly rushes out into the rain. Amelia (a name meaning "better") offers Lang freedom and Ruth, as always, has been a manipulative presence. After arguing with Ruth, we see Lang against the window like a fly in a jar. He's attempting to have a will of his own. McGregor's death comes as a result of leaving Amelia to send a note to Ruth informing her what he knows. Ruth and the clandestine political machinations she stands for consistently brings misery and death.

Ultimately Lang's, and Ruth's, salvation is in assassination. Stripped of a physical existence, Lang becomes pure image, as he was always expected to be; he is now a total tool, and more powerful than he had ever been in life. During the gala, as McGregor discovers the truth about Ruth, Lang's face is everywhere, watching, from the covers of the book McGregor wrote, the "voice from beyond the grave." If Lang has become a sort of ghost himself, he casts off his treacherous ghost writer and gets his revenge. Lang's face, as you can see above, peers out from behind a building, presiding over the murder of McGregor. With both "the ghost" and McAra dead, his legacy is secure. Even Rycart has to bow to the power assassination grants and call the 'war criminal' a patriot. Thus ends the ghost story, a victory of a political ghost over an ethical ghost.

Politically the film's target is clearly America on the one hand, and a very uninformed populace on the other. Lang's assassin kills him because he holds Lang responsible for the death of his son in Iraq. Lang's responsibility for that death is negligible. Lang is not even responsible for the war crimes of which he's accused. Nor is his wife. The importance of a figurehead like Lang is to absorb the accusations, to be the figure of blame. When contemplating getting mugged for a decoy manuscript given him by Lang's lawyer, McGregor calls himself a 'tethered goat'; at the same time, a news flash is running about Lang's involvement in the torture of the four terrorism suspects, thus linking McGregor's incident as a decoy with Lang's investigation as a war criminal. Lang is, similarly, a tethered goat, then. If people knew that the political world is a world of ghosts, wills working without being seen, they'd know how ridiculous it is to hold Lang responsible for what a whole system--ultimately the national security agencies of the United States, the supreme ghost in the film--moves him to do. But as McGregor confesses in his first line, we "know nothing about politics."

America is, however, more of a symbol than a target. The film's real theme is the identities, emotions, and energies of individuals that get swallowed by a political machine beyond any individual's control. Ruth, for various reasons--being a woman and her admittedly poor public speaking skills--couldn't become the politician she desired to be, but accepted being relegated to a politician's wife. Lang, a real person who enjoyed acting, is transformed into a political figurehead, or, as McGregor puts it, 'a craze.' McGregor, the ghost, the common man, doesn't even have an identity in this system. The moment these people start asserting their own wills and emotional needs against the system, they are put in danger of being destroyed. In the cases of McAra, McGregor, and Lang, this danger is realized.

Another of the film's themes is the essentially dubious nature of second-, third-, fourth-, nth-hand information. The film's climax is a tracking shot of McGregor's note passing hand after hand on its way to Ruth. The information in the note has been encoded in the manuscript McAra wrote. But whence did McAra get this information? Research and Google, perhaps? Is it even correct? We don't know. The nature of a ghost-writer is to convey information as though written by someone else; it's an inherently deceptive role. The information McGregor finds himself given is itself sometimes deceptive, such as the dates Lang confuses. McGregor's own words are, as I noted, reported on television as Lang's. We live in a world where we're inundated with information--Google, books, television screens in bars, airports, hotels--but rarely have any idea where it really comes from. Some of it is trustworthy, based on painstaking research; some of it is mere surmise; some of it is mistaken; some of it outright deceit. McGregor's position in The Ghost Writer is attempting to sort out to which of these categories the information he's given belongs and we needn't believe his sorting is necessarily correct.

In many ways The Ghost Writer, though from source material not original to Polanski, is a summa of Polanski's film career. The island location reminds one of Cul-de-Sac. The investigation into overwhelming intrigue and the failure of the protagonist to be a hero recalls Chinatown. The political conspiracy recalls Frantic. The paranoia over loss of one's identity recalls The Tenant. McGregor's character also reminds one of a softened and British Dean Corso of The Ninth Gate, which also dealt with books. Lang and his relationship with his wife recalls, indeed, MacBeth.

So, as with many Polanski films, but perhaps with The Ghost Writer more than any other, what you see and think you know upon first viewing becomes questionable upon rewatching. So little is given to us as direct information, so much has to be surmised both by McGregor and by us viewing the events through McGregor's perspective, that our surmising could be completely mistaken. McAra's death could have just been an accident. According to Ruth, he did indeed like spirits. The vehicle's path to Paul Emmet's house could have been Ruth's, as Emmet was her tutor and thus an old friend. McAra's belief that Emmet recruited Ruth could be totally erroneous, a mistake grounded upon a google search. (Most of the information on conspiracy websites is rubbish.) Neither Rycart nor Lang had heard Emmet is with the CIA, even though it's the second or third result on a google search for his name. Are they stupid or do they just not believe every foolish conspiracy theory? Is Lang the puppet he seems to be? And finally, although I maintain the car's path seems too deliberate, it's been pointed out to me that McGregor could just have been hit by a car accidentally. He was, after all, standing in the road. What does remain is that in the order of the film's universe, the Ghost is discarded once the business is finished: both Lang's business and McAra's business, and perhaps the audience's business.

(1) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfinishedBusiness, 14/09/2010.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009)

2010-09-04T18:53:00.007-04:00

Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) has murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) and barricaded himself inside her house with two hostages. The film's tagline tells us, "The Mystery Isn't Who. But Why." My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? "Inspired by a true story" of a man who killed his mother with a sword after over-identifying with a character he was playing in The Eumenides, Orestes, who also kills his mother. Herzog doesn't accept such a simple explanation as "over-identifying." The whole film is constructed around answering the 'Why?'. However, contrary to the tagline, understanding the 'Who?' is the key to understanding the 'Why?'. Most of the film is comprised of a series of flashbacks triggered by Detective Hank Havenhurst's (Willem Defoe) questioning of Brad's fiancee, Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny), the play director, Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) and the neighbours, Mrs. and Miss Roberts. The flashbacks reveal to us the strange life and behaviour of Brad in the time leading up to the murder. We learn there are two major events that precipated Brad's crime: he visited Peru for a rafting trip and came back hearing the voice of God; and he starred in The Eumenides. In other words, no explanation at all.

There are two very important shots that reveal more about Brad than Ingrid and Meyers do, each in one of the two flashbacks to Peru. In the first, we see Brad standing before the river, splitting the frame in half: one half is the green land, the other half is the white rapids. Gazing toward the river, Brad yells at his meditating companion that the river is reality. So in this shot, Brad is still facing reality. In the second flashback to Peru, the group has moved down river some. Now Brad is sitting on the rocks, facing the opposite direction of the river. One companion tells him he's behaving strangely and he says, "I'm just looking at the river," which is patently false. Brad is now no longer facing reality. Ingrid and Mrs. Roberts tell us Brad changed after his trip to Peru, but they can't explain why. Ingrid thinks it's the death of Brad's travelling companions, but the flashback clearly shows Brad's madness setting in prior to their deaths. Temporally, we can't see what happened in between the flashbacks to suddenly trigger his madness.

However, Herzog gives us one flashback--which occurs suddenly, without trigger, and is not told by or to anyone--between the two Peru flashbacks. It's a quiet shot of Brad's mother poking a piano key, then walking over (the camera follows her) to Brad, who sits at a drum set. She complains that Brad never plays his piano or his drums. We can also see a guitar at the bottom of the frame when she's at the piano. Brad tells her that she's the one who "tried to persuade" him to want the drums. We have no idea when exactly this moment occurred in Brad's life, but Herzog plants it between the two Peru flashbacks for a reason: in between facing reality and not facing reality is Brad's lack of direction in life, his inability to commit himself seriously to any vocation. As the film goes on we learn he used to play basketball, was into New Age thought (along with his fellow rafters), briefly got the notion to go whitewater rafting, decides to become a Muslim and ditches out of the rafting, decides to become a stage actor, and even, as he's being taken away by the cops, announces "I have taken a new vocation as a righteous merchant." He's a dilettante: he wants to do everything but will commit to nothing. He wants to continually remake himself according to each new fantasy and, in doing so, withdraws further from reality until fantasy and spontaneous self-reinvention takes over.

Brad is a model of this generation's malaise. We live in a wonderful time when so many options and opportunities are open to everyone. I decide I want to be a film critic, so I start this website. If I want to be a filmmaker, I can easily pick up a camera and put out a casting notice. So many options are open to us, as they are to Brad, that in this generation we have difficulty choosing just one or at least having the discipline to stick with one for a reasonable length of time. Brad's mother has made every opportunity available to him. He seems to have no job, yet he travels to Peru and Tijuana, owns a car, spends all day doing whatever he wants. He does nothing, ultimately. The answer to the titular question, "What have ye done?" could well be "Nothing." Brad is a disappointment.

So in the two shots that illustrate Brad's turn from reality, we can say that he has turned from reality because he doesn't have the ability to face it. To face reality would be to accept that he must commit himself to a vocation, a career, certain people in order to exist in the human world. One must limit oneself in order to be oneself. To be everything is just to be nothing. Brad isn't the only character unable to face reality. The companions with whom he goes rafting are equally unequipped to face reality. Brad correctly tells them the rapids are too dangerous during the rainy season, yet one continues meditating and the other only says, without much thought, that the challenge is why they've come. They know nothing about whitewater rafting, they're not athletic at all. When Brad later tells them he's not interested in their herbal teas and talking to 'Indians' in sweat lodges, we gather that they're New Agers. What could be a better summation of flakey dilettante lifestyle than New Agers, who grasp onto every new self-centered fad until the next one comes along? So they're pampered Californians with lots of time for flakey New Age thought thinking they can just master the rapids. They face the river, which, as Brad noted, is reality; and they die. They leap into a reality they're unequipped to face. Brad, at least, knows he's not equipped to face it and avoids it via retreat into fantasy.

One would think, given some of Brad's more erratic behaviour, that someone would have tried to get Brad help at some point. Yet none in his life are willing or able to face that reality. Brad's mother clearly lives for Brad. One particularly awkward scene shows her bringing drinks into Brad's room for he and Ingrid; she stands in the doorway for what feels like three minutes (it's around fifteen seconds, actually), until Ingrid at last thanks her. She lives to serve Brad and asks for gratitude only. She also still sees Brad as a child, to the point that of attempting to spoon-feed him. In that particular dinner scene, Herzog frames the shot so the window opens behind Brad and Ingrid, but the curtain covers the outside behind Brad's mother. If Brad has a whole world of opportunity for himself and is unable to commit, his mother has stripped herself of the world through her obsessive devotion to Brad. Their madnesses mutually feed off each other.

If Brad is a crude but accurate caricature of my generation, a generation of people unequipped to face reality, Brad's mother is equally a caricature of the problem, parents who live for their children and give them endless opportunities but no direction, no demands. (And those parents, in turn, are a product of a whole history of Western, materialist culture, which Lee Meyers might call our "Tantalate House.") Direction is what Brad lacks, his energies considerable but uncontrollable. Hence the importance Brad puts in the play The Eumenides. Lee Meyers, the play's director, is literally giving Brad direction. Meyers is the only character in Brad's life who has any sort of control over him. Meyers's relationship with Brad is vaguely fatherly as well: he's affectionate and spends more time with him than his job requires. Although Meyers actually kicks Brad out of the play for being disruptive, Brad calls only Meyers and Ingrid before committing the murder. Clearly they have mutual respect. Unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality now, the direction of the play becomes his direction in life. He has a sense of destiny, killing his mother an act of necessity and fate. After killing her, he casually tells a detective who is unaware he's the suspect, "Razzle them, dazzle them, razzle dazzle them." Life and performance, reality and fantasy, have been conflated. He claims to hear the voice of God, which warned him of the danger in Peru; but as soon as he's barricaded in his home, and immediately--in the film's time--before the key flashback, he tosses "God" (a container of Quaker oats) out of the house saying he no longer needs God. As soon as his 'performance' is over, he's again without direction.

The film concludes with the victory of reality. The first shot of the film is a train driving through a field, on its way to San Diego. The train's motion is rhymed with that of the river. The final shot is of San Diego traffic flowing by behind a basketball in a tree (so placed by Brad). The flowing traffic is like the flowing river and the flowing train: reality rushing on. Inability to face reality doesn't make it go away. The police surrounding Brad's house are a part of that reality, impinging upon Brad's existence in his mother's uterine, pink house whether he likes it or not. Brad has no choice but to eventually meet the reality they represent in some form.

Of course, the film shouldn't be over-intellectualized. Much of it is felt and not quite understandable, much as Brad is not quite understandable and the murder is not quite understandable. The inability to rationalize is a part of encountering the film. The music, for instance, is sombre, sorrowful, and seemingly out of place with the images, producing uncomfortable dissonance. Herzog's decision to make his actors sometimes freeze also produces discomfort as we wonder why they've stopped, yet are clearly blinking. Sometimes they even look directly into the camera. Much of the film's oddness seems present primarily to keep us in a state of confusion, Herzog's use of film form complementing the content so that the mystery of human behaviour and the problem of knowing becomes characterized in the very style. Herzog's camera movements are hypnotic, always moving slowly and gracefully in steadicam, reminding one of some shots in Touch of Evil (the detectives are named Vargas and Hank, coincidentally). So hypnotic are the movements, that I've become drowsy each time I've seen the film. These soporific qualities, the confusing weirdness, leave us as lost as Ingrid and Hank (who are not privy, as we've seen, to the film's key flashback) and all the more disarmed for the jarring moments when Brad explodes. This is only skimming the surface, a brief brainstorming session: Herzog's style in this film could and should be investigated in much more depth.

That Brad McCullum would be a monster for Herzog is no surprise. Considering Herzog's films are famed for their depictions of monomaniacal men, who are quasi-heroes of Herzog's films, a man unable to devote himself to anything as Brad McCullum is monstrous. Herzog focuses on one brief obsession in McCullum's existence, but its brevity and the ease with which it's forgotten make him a model of what Herzog doubtless despises. That Brad is a monster for us has more to do with his unpredictability. As there is no explanation, no good reason, for Brad's behaviour, predicting it is impossible. This keeps not just other characters like Ingrid and Lee on edge, but also the viewers. Though we already know his crime, Michael Shannon's intensity and conviction in every insane line and gesture makes McCullum frightening to behold. Shannon has shown himself to be one of the best actors in America with his performance in Bug, able to put total conviction in the silliest lines, deep menace in the most banal lines. In My Son, he is not nearly so histrionic, his performance more subtle, but the more frightening for it.

I've seen My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? four times now and it's only improved in my estimation each time. Yet, strangely, my perception of it changes with each viewing. The horror of the film struck me the first time. The second time, the comedy of it. Much of what happens in the film could just as easily be humourous as disturbing, or both at once. The last time I was struck with sadness, the film's title encapsulating it. The title is the final words Brad's mother utters when she's stabbed, words gently chastising, yet overwhelmingly sad: this woman who has lived her life for her son and is moved to tears by his gratitude has her life taken away for no good reason. The film's mysteries remain, perhaps magnified, and so does my obsession with it; I think I'll watch it another four times.

The Lady in the Water: Storytelling and Hope

2010-08-22T19:05:00.004-04:00

The Lady in the Water is a complex and sophisticated story about stories and storytelling. The pre-credits sequence is a primitive oral tale, complemented with cave-painting-like animation, detailing the allegory at the heart of the film: humans live by stories and die by war. A long time ago, the story tells us, sea nymphs inspired humans with stories; one day humans left the sea side to go conquering and fighting in the mainland, gradually losing all contact with the sea nymphs. War is the opposite of storytelling, the state of non-communication, where we cease listening except to our own voices and seek to destroy when we hear the Other. In modern society, as Shyamalan seems to see it, we're perpetually in a state of war, because we don't listen to one another's stories nearly enough.

So begins the film's story with the arrival of a sea nymph, named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), sent amongst humankind to inspire them once again. The water in which she lives is not the rolling sea, but the swimming pool at an apartment block. The people she is to inspire are not senators and poets, but ordinary residents of the apartment block. She isn't quite sure why she's there herself; all she knows is that once her mission is done, she'll be swept away by a giant eagle. Fortunately she's able to enlist the help of the block's super, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a meek, kind, somewhat defeated-by-life sort of man. As he tries to help her, he grows to know all the residents of the block much better, looking within them for their cosmic significance in the "grand story" of Story. Some of them prove important, some not so much; but they all become involved in Story's life and hold together as a unit in their mutual dedication to helping Story fulfill her destiny.

The epic tale Story herself brings into the lives of these people isn't itself so important. The main plot, about gathering the right people together to hold back the "Scrunts" (dogs made of grass that try to eat Story) and summon the eagle, is almost throw-away epic fantasy. This central story exists to unite the denizens of the building. Of course, all the characters must believe in the importance of Story's story--and it is indeed important within the narrative--for its chief effect to occur: the realization that everyone's story is important and interconnected with everyone else's to form a greater, cosmic story. The epic story is present, on the allegorical level, as a stand-in for cosmic destiny. Story's inspiration, ostensibly to inspire a man (played by Shyamalan himself) to finish his political manifesto, is most importantly the unseen effect on everyone, inspiring them to listen to and engage with one another.

As Shyamalan constructs the film, with its sequential investigations of individual apartments and the variations on theme he develops (for instance, the obsession of several tenants with language and communication), the influence of Rear Window is undeniable. In an age of homage, however, Shyamalan surprisingly rebukes Rear Window for its distance from others, its lack of sharing, its idly curious interest in the lives of others. At the same time, Rear Window at least shows the innate interest we have in the stories of others. The protagonist of that film, Jeff, does save a woman from suicide and uncover a murder, after all. Lady in the Water, however, is Rear Window from the inside. There's no Jeff watching from a cold distance, spying comfortably; we don't get to watch from a distance. Shyamalan's camera sweeps us through the corridors and up the stairs in an early sequence, as Heep leads a tenant to his new apartment, passing other tenants and being brushed by their lives along the way--the man who works out only half of his body, the woman with the cats who has a door mat for every day of the week, and so on. Heep replaces Rear Window's Jeff and is easily a superior human being. Heep gets involved in these people's lives, superficially at first and, with the presence of Story, in depth.

Everything about human life is a story. Serious philosophers have advanced the theory that what makes us human more than anything else is our storytelling abilities, our construction of narratives. Our very personalities, they tell us, are self-narratives. We relate to one another by our stories about ourselves, about each other; through our collective stories, myths and histories, bedtime stories, fairytales, or even idle gossip. We have stories about our country that tell us what it stands for, stories from religion, stories about our family. There's no sense in which we're starved for stories, but there is a sense in which we're deprived of someone to listen to our stories. One tenant calls Heep to her apartment to fix the plumbing only to send him away when her husband reveals it was fixed in the morning. She must have known. But while Heep is in her apartment, she's able to tell him some (rather over-informative) stories about her husband's bathroom activities as we gradually dolly backward to the bathroom. She called Heep because she needed to tell a story and he's always around to listen.

Heep's knowledge of his tenants is, however, superficial when we begin. He introduces the cat lady to the new tenant (a film critic), suggesting they'll get along. During the next tour through the block, trying to locate the writer Story is to inspire, we find out Heep was right and the critic learned she once wrote a book. Heep hadn't known. This story of the cat lady's life just never came up. Looking for the writer leads Heep to discover the rich albeit ordinary lives of the people in the block. Once he finds the writer, he has to find a "symbolist," a "healer" and a "guild", so he again tours the block, finding out more about these people, becoming surprised with the depths of their lives. A poignant scene gives us Heep's own backstory, a story nobody in the building is supposed to know. The film continually shows us that everyone has stories that are important. Most important of all is perhaps the bedtime story a Korean tenant knows, revealing piecemeal the legend of the sea nymph. The more this tenant tells bits of the story, the more she warms to the Westerner and becomes willing to reveal more.

Not only do people have stories, but most of the people in the block, and Shyamalan himself, are obsessed in some way with communication and language. The Korean tenant, for instance, is unable to speak English. She must communicate, somewhat reluctantly to begin with, through her daughter Young-Soon. This slows the scenes down, but gives them a poignancy and allows us to focus on the power of communication to cross language and culture. One scene has Heep passing a cellphone back and forth with Young-Soon's mother so Young-Soon can translate between them. There is a man who is a master of crossword puzzles. A group of slackers try to invent a viral term ("blim-blam," as it happens) with moderate success. Story herself, not permitted to speak of her world, is introduced to oblique ways of communicating, such as touching her ear to say 'Yes.'

The sense of the interconnectedness of these people and their stories is fostered by the film's unusual style. Shyamalan frequently has the background or even the foreground blurred, while activity takes place on another plane. This was used and perhaps abused in Sergio Martino films back in the '70s. Shyamalan uses it more artfully. A butterfly lands on a woman's shoulder in the foreground; Heep is blurred in the background. The image seems to tell us the butterfly is connected to the woman. We learn later (a mild spoiler, I'm afraid), that the butterfly is connected to Heep. In another sequence, Young-Soon tells Heep more of the sea nymph legend, her head blurred in the foreground while Heep is focused. However, we learn Young-Soon has importance in the sea nymph legend herself. These set-ups are of course intentional, revealing our ignorance of the interconnectedness of stories, the blurred and fuzzy as much a part of the story as what is sharp and in focus. We're all connected without knowing it and we're unaware of our own significance. Stories told in some scenes return in later scenes; a phrase uttered once can be casually re-used; seemingly throw-away information becomes important later. The apartment block, like the world, is a web deeply interconnected through communication. As the film progresses in this way, fewer blurs occur.

The film might strike some as the height of contrivance. What are the odds, for instance, of someone knowing the legend of the sea nymph just where a sea nymph shows up? There are reasons for this sort of contrivance. For one, the apartment block is clearly intended as a microcosm. Moreover, Shyamalan displays a strong sense of destiny throughout the film. Story is able to reveal the future of different people, how many children they'll have, when they'll do, and so forth. This apartment block is thus a sort of chosen place for the fulfillment of Story's destiny. One also just has to accept the fantasy elements for the sake of the beautiful message they contribute; if we were less cynical, we might see past the contrivance and just enjoy what it reveals about communication and the need to talk to the people around us. Sometimes the stories we need really are just under our noses.

Another moment of some contrivance is the presence of the film critic. He's a man who has dedicated his life to studying stories, albeit in the cinematic medium. Shyamalan depicts him as a man who watches films as a job. He's weary of stories. He doesn't believe in the possibility of a new story. He is perhaps more monstrous than the scrunts, because he can't even see the importance in stories any longer. When Heep seeks his help in figuring out Story's legend, the film critic gives horrible advice and puts Story in danger. This seems like a cheap jab at film critics. In the context of the film, there's nothing cheap about the jab. If someone puts a lot of time, effort, and heart into putting a story out there, how awful is it for a critic to tell that someone her story isn't good enough, isn't important, to tell others that this story isn't worth their attention? In a film about the value of stories, a man who makes a living judging the value of the stories of others is truly a monster.

We live in a cynical age. Shyamalan hardly seems to fit this cynical age. His films have always been so hopeful. The Sixth Sense trusts in the power of communication to reach beyond the grave. Signs trusts in the power of people to hold together in the face of an assault. Compare Signs to a Romero film and one sees how radical Shyamalan's optimism is; Romero's pessimism is more in line with our times. In The Lady in the Water, Shyamalan challenges our credulity when he has his apartment block, almost without question, unite to help a sea nymph get rescued by a giant eagle; but this is consistant with his optimism. Shyamalan really believes in the power of communication to reach others, really believes in the power of stories to affect people and change the world for the better. The Lady in the Water is a fantastically hopeful film and in that hope is so full of beauty. I can be cynical myself, but Shyamalan broke me down. His hopefulness is, as I hope I've demonstrated, not composed of manipulative and glib cliche, but is based upon a sophisticated view of the human spirit.

Where I can't get behind Shyamalan, however, is his view of destiny. The ancient legend that can be followed precisely as instructions to help Story complete her mission, Story's ability to read the future: All of this shows us a world of stories that are already written. Story can read the future of the wrter because his story is already written. A discussion on whether destiny and freewill are compatible--a subject which occupied Voltaire most of his life--is far beyond the scope of this review. Yet, despite the hopeful message of the film, the notion that I'm not writing my story, but it has already been written for me, is uncomfortable. But this is a problem of philosophy; not a quarrel with the film itself.

Where I might quarrel with the film is the arbitrary nature of the fantasy story. Since Young-Soon's mother gives the story piecemeal, the effect is, in some sense, of making the story up as they go along. Perhaps that's the effect Shyamalan desired, the sense of crafting one's own story, making one's own destiny. If that's so, the rules that are created as they go along and the need for everything to be "right" so that destiny is fulfilled contradicts this. Whenever something is supposed to work and doesn't, a new portion of the legend is happily uncovered and they can go on. The most arbitrary invention is the guardian tree-monkeys who are supposed to punish offending scrunts, but take their precious time. They're also supposed to destroy whomever sees them, but they neglect that as well. Perhaps Shyamalan wanted to depict the trial-and-error sort of progress we all go through in discovering our individual destinies, taking new paths when old ones stop working. This theme doesn't receive much reenforcement from the rest of the film, however.

As I say, there's no sense in which we're deprived of stories. Books and movies come out faster than we can ever consume them. On blogs, on reality TV, on call-in radio stories are constantly being told. The realization that our stories are all important and interconnected, the ability to listen to the stories of others and see their importance, is what we're missing. One can never have too many stories or know too many people. The Lady in the Water reminds us to be more open to the stories of others and to love stories, to be less cynical about the stories we hear, including its own story: I found it to be a deeply moving film.

Giallo (2009) - 2/4

2010-08-16T11:43:00.004-04:00

There is considerable presumption in titling a film, even a film directed by Dario Argento, Giallo. The giallo film is, of course, a highly-influential subgenre of horror-thriller that flourished in the '70s thanks primarily to Argento, as well as Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, and, the maestro, Mario Bava. For Argento, after making giallo films for nearly four decades, to make a film called Giallo is tantamount to promising us a total summary of his career thus far, a summa of the whole subgenre, from The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) to Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005). Giallo does not keep that promise.

Giallo concerns a killer, known as "Giallo," who kills for abstract sexual gratification. A hideous, troll-like man, he targets women whom he could never bed and traps them in his taxi cab. As a proxy for real sex he tortures and kills the women. One of the women is a model who happens to be using her cell phone when kidnapped. Her sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) thus has a lead and works closely with the maverick inspector Enzo (Adrien Brody), whose mother was murdered before his eyes as a child. The film is a straight-forward police procedural of trying to find the killer and save the girl.

Giallo, alas, is not written by experts, but by casual fans whose previous works have all been CGI monster movies for the Syfy channel. Had the film been scripted by Argento himself, it may have attained some sublimity. Sean Keller and Jim Agnew, however, only understand the superficial conventions of the giallo film: sadism to women, an opera (referencing Opera (1987)), a taxi (referencing Suspiria (1977)), and the man-woman detective team (referencing Profondo Rosso (1975), amongst others). Imagine a Hitchcock tribute film consisting primarily in close-ups of keys. This is indeed a link to Hitchcock, but a very superficial one. Similarly, Keller's and Agnew's grasp of the essence of the giallo film is superficial.

The essence of a giallo film, more than anything else, is grounded in amateur detective work. From The Girl Who Knew Too Much onward, the police are scarcely a presence in solving the crime in a giallo. The police proceed by a rational methodology, much like the viewer weened on Sherlock Holmes stories, that proves ineffectual. The protagonists are nearly always individuals who are by chance privy to a sliver of information they can't fathom. (That, incidentally, is an important trope left out of the Agnew-Keller screenplay.) Like the symbolism of a novel, one must reach the end before the significance becomes clear. The detective process is thus not one of deduction, as in Sherlock Holmes stories, but one of hermeneutics, interpreting material as one interprets a poem; the amateur detective uses lateral thinking, following instinct, personal inclination, and sometimes ideas that are entirely inexplicable. The masterpiece of hermeneutic detective work is Argento's own Profondo Rosso. In that film, Marcus Daly first remembers a lullaby he hears during an attempt on his life; he is then informed that the lullaby was written of in a book of local legends; he then tracks the book down and finds a picture of a house inside; he then inquires from a florist about the plants in the photo so he can locate the house, even though he has no idea if the house is significant. After finding the house, we realize he's actually stumbled into the site of a murder we witnessed in the film's prologue and on it goes until he does indeed stumble upon the killer. Marcus's detective work is not a process of deduction. He couldn't logically draw any links between the moves he makes. Yet, he finds the killer while the detectives eat sandwiches and shrug their shoulders. That is the essence of the giallo.

Starting with The Card Player (2004), Argento started to evade this giallo convention into flat-out police procedural. I would go so far as to argue The Card Player is not a giallo at all, but that's a discussion for another essay. Giallo continues the style of The Card Player, following a detective, Enzo. Enzo claims to not play by the book, yet his investigative procedures are basically logical, tracking evidence and waiting for lab results. The only unorthodox feature in his method is how he treats the criminals. Basically, he kills them. I'll come back to that later. Enzo does get an assistant in Linda, the sister of the killer's latest victim. While she aids in the investigation, her discoveries too are purely logical. She deduces from the last words of a victim, "yellow," that the killer probably has a liver disease. That makes too much sense for a giallo. So one of the most fundamental aspects of the giallo tradition is absent. The investigation in Giallo is not a hermeneutic effort, but a deductive one.

Complementing the amateur detective work is the audience involvement in the investigative work. Ordinarily the killer kills for a motive of sexual perversion so convoluted as to be virtually un-guessable, such as the gender confusion in Four Flies on Grey Velvet. That the amateur detective manages to figure out who the killer is comes as something of a shock. And yet, when the motive is itself illogical, how could anything but an illogical investigation uncover it? The method of investigation ideally suits the object of investigation; the form fits the content. One might even go so far as to say the elegant murder set pieces that occupy a traditional giallo (also absent from Giallo) are works of art that demand not investigation but interpretation to solve. The consequence, at any rate, is that we never know more than the protagonist. In fact, as the protagonist's leaps of "logic" can be difficult to follow, we often know less. Discovering who the killer is and why the killer has been killing all along is one of the singular pleasures of the giallo tradition, sometimes outstripping the coda of Psycho (1960) in sheer over-explanation.

This, too, is absent in Giallo. We're shown the killer around the middle of the film, before Enzo and Linda find him; and when they discover who he is even by name, we can only shrug. He's just a guy. There are no red herrings--a fundamental feature of giallo films, especially Sergio Martino gialli--leading us to think it may be one of several familiar characters. Even The Card Player featured this trope. Giallo does not. The killer is a man named Flavio Volpe ("Blond Fox"). This is not a spoiler, as you will never meet him except as the killer. And his motive is uncharacteristically simple: He's ugly and gets his sexual gratification from torturing girls. The sexual perversion trope is indeed present, but highly simplified in comparison to Argento's earlier pictures, such as the baroque Trauma (1993).

All of this discussion is to say that Giallo is not a summa giallica; it may not even be a giallo. This wouldn't be significant were the film not obviously representing itself as the ultimate giallo, or, what the screenwriters themselves called a "kitchen sink giallo," were the film not superficially attempting to be a summary of giallo tropes. That does not, of course, mean the film is necessarily a failure. Even if it isn't a giallo, it can still be a good crime-thriller. But it isn't that either.

Enzo is a frankly charmless detective, very far removed from David Hemming's Marcus Daly in Profondo Rosso. Brody, himself a very charming screen presence, struggles to make Enzo appealing with minimal success. The notoriously wooden Emmanuelle Seigner, moreover, is fiercely arborial thanks to her vapid character. This leaves the twisted Giallo to amuse us and he actually does, with broken English lines like, "No move or you blind" and the general glee with which he sets about torture. He's seen reading a pornographic comic at one point. A knowledgable friend informs me the comic is a Final Fantasy 7 comic depicting one of the main characters sexually engaged with a dog. So he masturbates to cartoon bestiality as well as pictures of the tortured women. What a guy. He's a grotesque portrait of slacker/doper culture, inhaling aerosol and masturbating all day. Unfortunately, we spend much more time with Linda and Enzo than we do with Giallo.

The film's strongest point is in drawing a link between Enzo and Giallo. Both characters have suffered trauma and both characters have turned to violence in response. Enzo, as mentioned, witnessed his mother's murder. We see this in a beautiful flashback. Giallo also gets a frankly implausible flashback to his in utero existence, where his heroine-abusing mother ruined his life from the start. Giallo mutilates women, perhaps as revenge on his mother and perhaps out of sheer resentment. Enzo plays maverick detective. Once he finds a killer, he kills him. He never explicitly says so, but the film strongly implies this is what he does and that the chief employs him for cases that require this maverick behaviour. He's a police assassin and his current target is Giallo. This creates the narrative's sole moment of moral complexity: If Enzo kills Giallo, they may never find the girls he's kidnapped. Satisfying his bloodlust would therefore be as selfish an act as Giallo's self-gratification.

The film's weakest point is in the near absence of female content. One of the most curious stylistic choices of the film, and one that's repeated too often to be unintentional, is having helpless women yelling out repetitive insults at men from the background. Men dominate and women are helpless and irritating voices of outrage, chastising them from the background or from out of frame. Rather than have any emotional effect, these moments are annoying. One of the victims yells at the killer, as he goes about his business, that he's ugly and he's sick. She yells this a good two dozen times, mostly from out of frame. A later rhyming scene has Linda yelling at Enzo from the background for far too long. I can see what Argento and the writers were trying to achieve. For one, they again link Enzo and Giallo. They also represent women as a damaging influence from behind--the background and offscreen serving as a metaphor for the past, haunting both Enzo and Giallo. But the effect is just to make the only women in the film with any significant screentime extremely annoying. They are shrill voices, banshees, assaulting from out of frame or out of focus. An interesting but ultimately flawed stylistic choice that poisons the few glimmers of femininity in the film.

Despite the multitude of flaws, Argento's visual style pulls one along so that the film never quite becomes boring. Occasionally it insults, occasionally annoys, but never bores. Nevertheless, one hopes Argento either return to writing his own screenplays, or find much better screenwriters in the future. Argento's style just couldn't save the film from a hopeless and misguided screenplay, or, to be fair with the blame, his own peculiar artistic choices.

Torso: A Masterpiece of Misogyny

2010-08-14T23:33:00.004-04:00

Perhaps my former Catholic background has made me distrustful of the psychoanalytic feminism employed by Mulvey and most feminists since; perhaps, however, my experience as a man is sufficient. Mulvey and many subsequent feminists have argued that women in films are sexual spectacles, objectified by the male gaze. This, they claim, demeans women as pure object and empowers men (or rather, allows men to remain safely in power). Life experience as a man readily contradicts this conclusion. When a woman is an object of sexual objectification for one's gaze, she's in power. If I lust over her, especially if she doesn't lust over me, she has considerable leverage over me. She's in a position of dominance, able to make requests of me I can't make of her.

When the woman is a very attractive woman, a woman whom many men find attractive, she has even more power. She may choose any of the many men for herself; but only one man (or a few men, as she wishes) will be chosen by her. Note the passive voice. She chooses; the man is chosen. She is active and he is passive. He can't make himself chosen. He can only try to appeal to her tastes so she chooses him. The highly-abstract, nebulous notions of male gaze and objectification seem, in such an instance, ridiculously academic in the face of lived experience. So the men are 'objectifying' her sexually. Humans are objects; being a sexual one is not necessarily a weakness. In fact, as we see in lived experience, it's usually a strength. The 'objectification' gives the 'objectified' female power over the males. She is the object of adoration. Her commands will be met with obedience if only to become the object of her adoration. The males seek to be sexually objectified by her.

The Western prejudice is that a man pursues and a woman acquiesces. Her process, we're to believe, is passive. She says 'Yes,' and nothing more. The man does the rest. However, in reality the woman tempts and the men acquiesce to the temptation of the woman. What makes western heroes like Django such powerful examples to men is that they aren't manipulated by feminine wiles. Usually the women lust after them and they can choose the woman they want. The other men in the film, weaker men, are more like the men we encounter in real life: they see attractive women and can't help but look, can't help but mention to their friends large tits and a nice ass; they are overpowered by the sexual desire they feel for the woman but can only hope, with a hope that depends upon that woman's whim, to realize. Men who aren't very self-conscious or introspective react in this way instinctively. More meditative men, intellectual men, are more guarded and feel manipulated by attractive women. They recognize that to give in to objectifying her is to submit to her.

This honest interpretation of male-female interaction is the central dynamic of Torso (1973), a misogynistic splatter-giallo. The misogyny of Torso is so pronounced one could not mistake it for a bubbling forth of subconscious attitudes; the treatment of women in the film is too consistant and too hyperbolic to be accidental. The film intentionally displays women as sex objects and it intentionally presents men as imbeciles readily captivated by these objects. Nearly every man in Torso is a sleazy, libidinous creep and nearly every woman is sexy and sexually dominating. This, I will argue, is done for a purpose.

[Note: In what follows I will be discussing the motives of the killer. I will not, however, reveal his identity, though some red herrings will be spoiled.]

The film concerns a maniac who begins killing and mutilating attractive, sexually active women on a Roman campus. When the maniac was a child, a young girl requested his brother fetch a doll from a cliff-edge on condition she flash him her panties. His brother agreed, fell, died; and he was traumatized. The event formed his attitudes toward women. If they are sex objects, they are "dolls" and therefore without significance as human beings. In fact, not only are they dolls, but they're dangerous and impure dolls that deserve destruction. The doll becomes a symbol of female sexual power, its eyes staring blankly in the flashbacks as his brother unsuccessfully reaches for it. The maniac has kept this attitude repressed and has lived a normal life. Then two college girls sleep with him, take pictures, and blackmail him. This is the first scene in the film. During coitus he punches out a doll's eyes, indicating some return to potency and normalcy: he's not the object of their gaze, but they're the object of his. He is the Mulveyan Male. When he's blackmailed, he realizes he wasn't in power at all; rather, he was trapped. That moment sparks his subconscious misogyny. These attractive women used their sexuality to manipulate him and to potentialy destroy him, just as a girl destroyed his brother with her sexuality. He made the mistake of "reaching for the doll." He won't reach for it any longer: he will destroy it.

The first two victims of the film are the women who try to blackmail the killer. (What's somewhat perplexing is that the second blackmailer doesn't go to the police after her co-conspirator is murdered. She is, at least, shown to be on drugs.) He catches the first victim in the middle of a sexual encounter with her boyfriend. The second victim he catches prostituting herself to two bikers at a free-love party. Again, he targets them when they're sexual objects, overpowering men with their sexuality. The second victim is especially powerful, walking out on her johns after they try to unzip her jeans.

The killer strangles and mutilates the girls, his mutilations becoming more gruesome with each victim. He fondles then cuts open the torso of the first victim. He fondles, pokes out the eyes, and cuts open the second victim. The Italian title of the film, The Bodies Showed Traces of Carnal Violence, also suggests he rapes the bodies. As in Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (1962), the killer can only have true sexual dominance over women when they're dead, when they're doll-like corpses. Torso and The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock were, in fact, written by the same screenwriter, Ernesto Gastaldi, a prolific screenwriter in Italian horror and, as we see, an auteur. Where Gastaldi's Dr. Hitchcock is a man with a fetish and strong sexual insecurity, the killer of Torso is more of a man-on-a-mission, targeting what he deems a social flaw represented by attractive and sexually active women.

Gastaldi and Martino give some credence to the killer's social philosophy. Throughout the film men are depicted as easily conquered by female attractiveness. A scarf salesman falls to his knees, pretending to check his stock, just to get a glance up the second victim's skirt. A girl, Daniela, is ogled by her uncle from a crack in the door. Stefano pursues Daniela for years, even to the point of enrolling in the university's faculty of fine arts just to be near her. Most impressively, however, is a scene in homage to L'Avventura (1960). In L'Avventura, all the men of a small town stare at Lea Massari as though they'd never seen a woman before. In Torso, Daniela and her friends are sent by her uncle to a country villa to relax; their arrival in the nearby small town brings out all the town's men to stare with lust. The girls remain perched atop their vehicle, long legs stretched out, seemingly oblivious of the attention they're drawing. They couldn't, of course, be oblivious; they're just accustomed to having that power. The camera allies us not with the girls but with the men of the town, panning over the long legs and ogling the statuesque beauties. A later scene shows a milkman physically frozen to the spot when he brings milk to the villa and finds the girls sunbathing naked. Significantly, he is freed from his unusual plight by Jane (Suzy Kendall), the film's protagonist and the only girl wearing clothes. Jane doesn't sexually dominate men, though she easily could if she so desired. The same milkman is later heard giving his friends an enumeration of the girls' parts, "Eight legs, eight tits, four asses." Men are, in Torso, totally overpowered by women. Men are no match for female sexuality.

Stefano is an interesting case. His obsession with Daniela has lasted for years and she never returns his affection. He is totally under her spell, yet unable to exert any power at all over her. He tries to regain his sexual potency by hiring a prostitute. He finds himself unable to handle the prostitute, however. He realizes that he's paid for her; she hasn't come after him. His masochistic pursuit of Daniela is not relieved. The prostitute consents too willingly. And yet, not willingly enough. He would, perhaps, rather she pay him. When he doesn't touch her, she calls him impotent. He may not literally be impotent; yet psychologically he is. As she begins to mention payment, he becomes angrier, ultimately beating her. Stefano's pursuit of one woman has made him a failure as a man, a psychological eunuch. He beats the prostitute out of frustration. Also out of an attempt to restore his potency. But as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, sadism, a step beyond sex for domination, is no more successful at regaining power through objectification as sex is. Stefano has been destroyed as a man by his lust for Daniela.

Jane's sexually-adventurous friends (they let men ogle them) are, to the killer, mere dolls. They weren't involved in the blackmail plot. That plot, rather, set the killer off on (what he believes to be) a righteous rampage. When he kills Jane's friends, he doesn't merely cut them open, he cuts them to pieces. Their bodies, the objects of their power over him and men in general, are to be destroyed. Jane alone is spared for literally not being a part of the group--she sprained her ankle and under the influence of medication slept through the murders. She is also metaphorically not a part of the group. As noted above, she doesn't use her attractiveness to dominate men. She dresses conservatively and relates to men, such as her professor, through intelligent discussion. Her professor goes so far as to congratulate her on not being a usual American object, which, in my analysis, amounts to a congratulation on not being sexually overpowering. When the killer discovers Jane was a part of the group, however, he decides that she too is a doll and must be destroyed.

Jane's saviour is, of course, a man. Importantly, he's not just any man: he's the one man in the film who never ogles any women. A very handsome doctor, he is actually the object of female sexual interest. The second victim eyes him as he buys a scarf. Jane and her friends remark on how attractive he is. We also see a female patient pretending to have illnesses, obviously just to spend time with him. He, like Django, James Bond, 'The Blackmailer' from Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970), is sexually attractive enough to have power over women and to not have to submit himself to them. He doesn't have to objectify women. They already give him power by objectifying him. On the conceptual level, Jane can only be saved by a man who has sexual power over women, which is a role only the handsome doctor fills. So the film ends with the pure and non-manipulative Jane walking off with the sexually powerful doctor, much like the end of The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock when Barbara Steele is saved by a handsome, young doctor. These are the perfect man and the perfect woman in Gastaldi's world.

While I claim Gastaldi gives some credence to the killer's philosophy, he doesn't for that reason give credence to the killer's behaviour. There's no question that the killer is just a lunatic. Yet, curiously, the killer is just what feminists like Mulvey think all men are in patriarchal society. In her nebulous, Freudian readings, she sees the objectification of women as just was the killer sees: women become non-persons, dolls. Gastaldi's point is that men don't think this way when they objectify women. Only lunatics do. I don't know for sure if Gastaldi had read any feminist criticism--although it'd be hard to miss it in the '70s--but Torso stands as a sophisticated challenge to their claims, making those claims appear as fictions from the ivory tower.

There's no question that Torso is indeed full of beautiful women, often naked, on display for male viewers to enjoy. That male viewers do enjoy is our being overpowered by Sergio Martino's film. The girls seduce the male viewer, capture us. We gaze at them, like Stefano, unable to obtain them. As objects they dominate us. The film dominates us when we enjoy it for its T&A. Gastaldi's script liberates us by destroying all the beautiful bodies that dominate us on screen, giving men an empowering catharsis and yet honestly presenting men as sexually weak. The film is thus exultantly misogynistic. But it is misogynistic, or rather uses misogyny, for a distinct purpose, a purpose that Gastaldi returns to frequently in his many screenplays, from The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, through Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, Death Walks on High Heels (1971), and of course Torso. The purpose is to make clear to us the real balance of power in the sexual world. For Gastaldi, men are dominant through violence, women through sex.