tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15883082278780187092024-03-13T08:26:46.922-04:00Honors ZombieLadies & gentlemen I've traveled across five states to be here. I couldn’t get away sooner because I’ve been at film school. Ladies & gentlemen when I say I'm a Zombie Man you'll agree. I'm a zombie man, and like to think of myself as one. Of all the men who will review bad movies one in twenty will be zombie men. I assure you, whatever the others promise to do, when it comes to the gutmunching, they won't be there…Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.comBlogger224125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-53672905499747943872012-10-07T01:37:00.001-04:002012-10-23T00:48:12.773-04:00We're Gonna Need a Fourth Wall: My Favourite Film Volume 20Ok, we're going to take a diversion in the present so that we can find some truth buried in the past. Post-modernism and all its bastards (Irony, metatext, pastiche, etc.) have taken over. It's impossible to view anything through just one lens. A film is viewed through its influences before its judged on its own terms, nothing is in a vacuum. Anyone who's hung around these old hallways knows that I'm a lunatic about history and context, especially where the integrity of an idea is concerned, but I'm also aware that we often jeopardize a text by putting history between ourselves and it. We risk losing sight of what's meant to be achieved and what we assume about it based on its place in history and the end of a bloodline. Is it always fair to judge a kid by his parent's achievements? Now, this all sounds like I'm gearing up to use this as a defense of one of ten trillion little shark attack movies made in the wake of <i>Jaws</i>, but that's not strictly true. Trying to defend <i>Bait</i> based on its heritage in the Shark movie would be a grave mistake - no way does it hold up against the best of those, or really even have much on the worst of them, at least on the surface. <i>Bait</i> couldn't be much simpler or slighter and is pretty silly, but there's something in there that saves it from the rubbish heap. And it starts with the name Russell Mulcahy under the writer and producer credits.<br />
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Bait 3D<br />
by Kimble Randall<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgISG7VVzxGDgsfF-3VE9Q4tgq8hQ5O6mUspkKxohstjhhiwdEamSP4CcdEHo_VkWrICd_dxcmZOX5Zpg8cIpqNrLnc9j0aI3fNMQz-U1Sk9mh1-DPoNbSklSRdnzR3jv7K6rXO2vIaeTw/s1600/Bait-3D-2012-Movie-Image-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgISG7VVzxGDgsfF-3VE9Q4tgq8hQ5O6mUspkKxohstjhhiwdEamSP4CcdEHo_VkWrICd_dxcmZOX5Zpg8cIpqNrLnc9j0aI3fNMQz-U1Sk9mh1-DPoNbSklSRdnzR3jv7K6rXO2vIaeTw/s400/Bait-3D-2012-Movie-Image-2.jpeg" width="400" /></a><br />
Six months ago a lifeguard named Rory was killed by a great white shark. He was killed filling in for his friend Josh, still hungover from his bachelor party. Josh was engaged to Rory's sister Tina, but Rory's gruesome death put a damper on that. Josh has been living in self-imposed social exile ever since. Hearing news of a big storm headed toward the little Australian town he lives in, Josh heads to his local supermarket, a sort of Sam's club thing at least a storey underground, to stock up on supplies. He shows up just in time for a few errant plot threads to meet. Jaimie, rebellious daughter of a local cop, is caught shoplifting while canoodling with her store employee boyfriend Ryan. Her dad just happens to be the first on the scene in response to the manager calling the police. Meanwhile two thugs try to hold the place up, one as a favor to the other; the rowdier of the two hoods clearly has something on his partner. Josh walks in as their robbery is interrupted by the concerned father/cop and spies Tina and her new boyfriend, back in town after spending a few months overseas. Got all that? Ok, good. Now add to that the tsunami trapping everyone inside, causing an explosion that seals the entrance and the parking garage off from the outside world and killing everyone but the relevant characters (plus a pretty bystander in her 30s, an older man and a horribly shallow younger couple and their annoying little dog). Oh, and the storm brought with it two great white sharks, one for the people stuck in the garage, and one for the people in the store.<br />
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<i>Bait</i>'s plot is intriguing because of all the killer shark films since <i>Jaws</i>, I can't think of one that deals with its aquatic menace with so little flair - the human characters are trapped in a small space with sharks and they need to escape. Doesn't get much more basic than that. The sharks aren't super powered or even unusually aggressive (these being movie sharks they do a lot of jumping). They behave like real sharks, for the most part. The people they hunt are far more problematic. The leads are fine enough, though no one really ever seems all that frightened by the prospect of being eaten by a shark. The side characters run the gamut from sleepwalking to caricature. The worse of the two criminals is hammy to the utmost, the store manager appears to be speaking his lines phonetically, and the shallow couple in the parking garage occasionally beggar belief. Two things give me pause: the first is when Rory the lifegaurd is killed, it's via a needless, dumb 3D-enabled CGI shark jumping at the camera, eating the boy who seems to explode when it happens. That's by far the silliest moment in the film. What makes me question its existence, and indeed what led me to question everything I'd just seen is in the end credits.<br />
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Most horror movies end with metal songs, it's just par for the course since Dario Argento discovered power metal in the late-80s. Metal and Horror just go together. So when some fuzzy drop-tune power chords started up over the end credits I wasn't shocked. But it wasn't metal at all. It was a fairly low-key rock cover of "Mack The Knife", sung almost inaudibly by the director of the movie. Suddenly the whole film changed.
One invokes Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Vile at one's peril. As a playwright, Brecht famously smashed the fourth wall and purposely made his audiences aware that they were watching theatre. This is old news. Habitual listeners to Mark Kermode's podcast will have heard him backpedal on his stance on 3D when <i>Hugo</i> came out - he cited it as a Brechtian alienation device and not just a gimmick as it most definitely was in the case of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">My Bloody Valentine</a></i> or <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/12/powder-blue-powhatans-i-have-known-this.html">Avatar</a></i>. So...is it possible that this mostly forgettable shark movie made for almost no money was trying to have it both ways? Was the gimmick the point? And not just "here's some shit thrown at your face cause it's 3D." I mean did these guys make a 3D film because they wanted to make audiences aware of the fact that they were watching a movie in the 21st century with all the artifice that entails, and then did they throw a bunch of shit at your face? What a strange ambition for a horror film almost no one will actually see in the 3D they shot it in. There's a reason I don't have a problem believing that either: Russell Mulcahy. He was the film's producer and was going to direct it until his duties directing MTV's <i>Teen Wolf</i> reboot monopolized his time. Mulcahy was the reason I wanted to watch this film. When I thought he was directing, this became the film I wanted to see more than anything else in production. He'd tangoed with giant predators once before in his debut feature <i>Razorback</i>, one of my favourite films of all time, on which more in a moment. Even though his stamp is far less evident, its clear his fingerprints are all over <i>Bait</i>.
There's the location - the store and garage are designed and lit to take advantage of 3D's light loss - I watched it in 2D (I had no choice) and almost felt like it'd be more frightening 30% darker. Randall may or may not have much of a way with actors (the Brecht conundrum), but he's a decent composer of shots and a few images are absolutely breathtaking. When they first discover the shark in the store, he cavalierly, languidly swims between the two aisles that the stranded shoppers are stuck atop. It's terrifying simply because it looks like a real shark and may well have been. It's so rare that the animals in movies get to be themselves and show off how terrifying they are when not on the hunt. A wolf is scary no matter what posture it assumes. So seeing a shark swim as if indifferent to the people who are afraid of it is fantastically effective. It isn't hiding, it isn't showing off its teeth or size, it's just there. Similarly, in the garage, the shallow couple are trapped in their BMW and can only talk to Ryan by sticking their head out of the sunroof. First of all, that's a great, frightening idea. Secondly, Randall here scores the best shot of the film as we see the shape of the shark illuminated underwater by the car's dim headlights. Its positively chilling, even more so than when the shark starts attacking their windows a few minutes later. Later when the shoppers realize that a frayed wire will electrocute them if the rising water reaches its sparking end, they realize they have to shut off the store's power, which means swimming to the manager's office. Their solution is to put Tina's boyfriend in a suit made of metal wiring, weighted down by paint cans. On its face it looks positively ludicrous and I start humming "Alabama Song" just thinking about it. But it also...kinda makes sense. And it leads to the film's first actually effecting scene. Randall also scores points by not bludgeoning us with the resonance, either. There's a fatalistic attitude towards its outcome; the story dictates that it must happen, yet its no less tragic for its necessity. If anything it adds to it. Slyly, quietly, Randall and Mulcahy are playing with convention. When Josh gets a big action hero moment at the end of the film, it feels and looks stupid, but I can't help feeling like that's the point. It's a shark film as directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the early 60s.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-0yBFfvnbZPzAw9BvbzZEncqNtd2XAxDTyXaxKfa5PHS9RPU2TOKufyh-UP6C_8BmGuoKG8UcslxgEnF7oQKESmej6ucmRROGDUP6p-6r_ZnGJGoi6lS29sgIj7lvf2H5BcCl2hHvToA/s1600/BAIT-3D-paramount.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-0yBFfvnbZPzAw9BvbzZEncqNtd2XAxDTyXaxKfa5PHS9RPU2TOKufyh-UP6C_8BmGuoKG8UcslxgEnF7oQKESmej6ucmRROGDUP6p-6r_ZnGJGoi6lS29sgIj7lvf2H5BcCl2hHvToA/s640/BAIT-3D-paramount.jpeg" width="422" /></a><br />
Casting gorgeous Xavier Samuel as Josh also feels a bit like a stunt (Fassbinder would have approved) - the boy had just starred in a <i>Twilight</i> film after all (David Slade calls him Excalibur). Rounding out the cast are two alumni from the offensively terrible <i>Tomorrow When The World Began</i>, Australia's answer to both <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/12/mormon-vampires-i-have-known-this-year.html">Twilight</a></i> and <i>Red Dawn</i>. Phoebe Tonkin is, shockingly, actually very likable in <i>Bait</i>, and I had a hard time believing she was the same girl whose annoying voice-over runs throughout <i>Tomorrow</i>. Lincoln Lewis doesn't exactly stretch himself, but neither Randall nor Stuart Beattie ask much of him. And anyway Randall probably asked him to go broad because the whole thing is clearly supposed to remind you that you're watching a movie. I'm choosing to take it as a good sign that I don't know whether that works or not. At the end of the day, I liked <i>Bait</i>, warts and all, because of its minimal stylistic victories and the fact that I wanted Samuel's hero to do the right thing and save everyone. And I know part of my acceptance of the film, which I imagine won't win many other people with its limited charms, is because I want Russell Mulcahy back. He hadn't touched a <i>real</i> horror film since he first tried his hand at feature filmmaking in 84. And that friends is what I really want to talk to you about. Why do I think that <i>Bait</i> is smarter than it appears? Because <i>Razorback</i> is one of the smartest horror films of the VHS era. For years it was only available in that delightful analog format; a Warner Brothers DVD has I believe recently gone out of print, putting it in limbo once again. I read about it in an encyclopedia of horror films that also introduced me to the likes of <i>Basketcase</i> and <i>The Hills Have Eyes</i> back when I was no older than 9 or 10. A horror film about a giant warthog? "Put it in my brain!" I said. So I found it at the now defunct Hollywood Video a minute or two from my house and watched it with two likeminded friends. Though I was so overwhelmed by its peculiarities that I didn't notice how strange the film was (at 10 I admit to not having quite as keen an insight into film technique as I enjoy today) outside of the obvious, <i>Razorback</i> stayed with me. We quoted it endlessly to each other until the end of sixth grade when our going to separate high schools intervened. For my father's birthday six years ago I bought a VHS copy on Ebay before it made it to DVD. When my VCR died, I found a rip online that I watch from time to time just because any seven seconds of the film is so full of vitality and verve that it's like a shot of cinematic espresso. <i>Razorback</i> may not frighten everyone, but it is completely unique.<br />
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Razorback<br />
by Russell Mulcahy<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJJoY3OOOe8YGGg0K8GQ-e-tJNB-JioKvzLtxfKtruUWlPyGJ_gZuLDiAIJlJ9gQNGGwEROuR4ValijShhxbeqwdneyw9M9V67V0ziF0KwEYjAzNfX6PxtBjicJc9N_escszehXPj4X_0/s1600/razorbackFI.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJJoY3OOOe8YGGg0K8GQ-e-tJNB-JioKvzLtxfKtruUWlPyGJ_gZuLDiAIJlJ9gQNGGwEROuR4ValijShhxbeqwdneyw9M9V67V0ziF0KwEYjAzNfX6PxtBjicJc9N_escszehXPj4X_0/s400/razorbackFI.jpeg" width="400" /></a><br />
Beth Winters is a newly pregnant investigative journalist sent to the town of Gamulla, Australia to look into illegal hunting and the resultant meat industry. The locals are understandably tight-lipped. Not only is she a fiercely independent American woman (one of three female characters that I remember seeing in the entire film), she's an interloper out to expose some of the locals as immoral crooks. Benny and Dicko Baker, two of the most loathsome yahoos ever portrayed on screen (good luck getting the sound of their laughter out of your head. They're like two different kinds of rusty hinge!), work for Petpak, a processing plant, and take a particular interest in her activity. Beth wants nothing to do with the two hillbillies, except possibly to catch them with their pants down, for which she'll pay a price. For now though she's more intrigued by Jake Cullen, a grizzled old man who hunts boar for fun. "Something about blasting the shit out of a razorback brightens my whole day" he offers in explanation for his hunting habits. Beth makes the mistake of going out to Petpak with her camera to steal images of the gruesome goings on and is followed back to civilization by Benny and Dicko in their gigantic truck (somewhere Max Rockatansky's mechanic is calling his lawyer). They run her off the road and drag her out of her car. If her body were ever found, the authorities would have a hard time proving the two men molested her. Before Dicko can get his pants off, something far worse than two horny yokels shows up.<br />
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A few weeks later, Beth's husband Carl shows up in Gamulla looking for clues as to his pregnant wife's disappearance. He finds Jake Cullen, who spends more time talking about razorbacks than anything else - his young grandson was killed by one and he took the blame in the community even if there wasn't enough evidence for a conviction. Jake suspects that the Volkswagon Eurovan-sized warthog that killed his grandson and permanently crippled him is responsible for Beth Winters' death as well but he doesn't come out and say it in front of poor Carl, who is understandably going to be put off by that theory while in the throes of loss that Cullen himself knows so much about. Winters suspects foul play on four legs, alright, but is convinced they belong to Benny and Dicko. He goes to meet them and pretends to be a canadian looking for work. They take him right in and show him their hospitality (like the denizens of The Yabba before them). In the middle of the night they wake him to go kangaroo hunting - this doesn't go well. When Dicko shoots one of the poor creatures but doesn't kill it (suffering makes the meat better, don't you know?), Carl pukes everywhere, steals one of their knives and goes to finish the poor thing himself. The brothers don't fancy bringing a greenhorn out on their hunt, so they leave him with a blanket and go off to finish by themselves, promising to come back in five or six hours. That's all well and good until the freezing night starts to nip at the American's heels and then a bunch of angry sounding warthogs show up. He climbs the first thing he finds, a creaky old windmill, and belts himself to it to keep himself up there as he tries to sleep.<br />
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When Winters wakes up, he's so terrified and in such poor shape that he won't leave the lake the windmill falls in once he learns the pigs can't swim. When hunger and thirst kick in and the hogs wander off, he sets off on at least a day-long (if not longer) trek to get to Sarah Cameron's house. She's a local wildlife expert, tracking, studying and caring for just about every creature in Gamulla. Screenwriter Everett De Roche thankfully gives her none of the hallmarks of this kind of character - she isn't even as intense as Matt Hooper. She's independent and mannered and happens to be good friends with Jake Cullen (she was riding shotgun when he encountered Beth Winters). She's also played by the impossibly cute and much missed Arkie Whiteley at the absolute pinnacle of her adorability, so, yeah, I'd head to her house too if I was stranded in her neck of the woods. She nurses him back to health while Cullen goes off in search of the sight of Carl's encounter with the hostile pigs.
Cullen finds the big bad motherfucker, alright, but runs out of bullets before he can kill him - he does, however, manage to get one of Sarah's tracking darts in him. He also finds Beth's wedding ring. Thus the two men make decisions: that night, with his signal locked, Cullen goes out once again, this time to kill the beast once and for all. Carl for his part decides to go home to the states and try rebuilding his life. Benny and Dicko have other plans. They overhear that Jake has evidence about the fate of Beth Winters and think he's likely to turn them in for their involvement. So they find him and further hobble him in the middle of the night. Jake sends his dog out for help, but they kill the poor thing when they see it on the road. So when the razorback shows up for a proper showdown, it goes decidedly less well for Jake than he'd hoped all these years. This leaves only Sarah and Carl in any shape to do anything about the two murderous meatpackers and the giant boar they now know beyond a shadow of a doubt is lurking nearby.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ-FDfHgw0G1a4h36AfIusLRtGmfCQbbUIyNm9kEkaMHmVsMHBzj1bnVXkPu3CUc-M6Y6e73bC4NI0thVSgp5UxwYd8xB_LSmj3C5hMEiKWOvtCsV0QBEUAs57oZDRT6zmnEfnSdD1-wU/s1600/084322_005.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ-FDfHgw0G1a4h36AfIusLRtGmfCQbbUIyNm9kEkaMHmVsMHBzj1bnVXkPu3CUc-M6Y6e73bC4NI0thVSgp5UxwYd8xB_LSmj3C5hMEiKWOvtCsV0QBEUAs57oZDRT6zmnEfnSdD1-wU/s400/084322_005.jpeg" width="400" /></a><br />
It's clear from the first seconds of <i>Razorback</i> that this is a superior film - something wilder, more angular and stylish than nearly anyone in the genre game was attempting. Interrupting the first few credits is the image and sound of a windmill working at impossible intensity. The image is a familiar one - no one would be shocked to learn of Mulcahy's pedigree shooting music videos. Indeed he sort of coined the form when he shot the piece for "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Bugles. The windmill's sound is huge; deliberately overpowering. Then we see the outback, we know that's where we are because of the kangaroo in the foreground - we're less sure about the red skies that corrupt the rest of the frame. Not even the Road Warrior himself rode under skies this gorgeously oppressive. Then we pan behind the figure of Bill Kerr's soon-to-be-disgruntled hunter. The orange sky and the motion of the camera strongly suggest <i>Apocalypse Now</i> - the synth score does too. Moments later Kerr puts his grandson to bed and starts hearing the sounds. Grunting, squealing, but the music tells us there's menace in these otherwise innocuous sounds. He steps outside and the thing that drew his attention, the boar, breaks through his paremeter fence then tusks the man's leg, destroys his house and carries off his baby grandson into the night. The boar is obviously an effect, footage of a proper animal shot in perspective mixed with an unmoving prop shuttled through the set on wheels. This is deliberate. When they gave Steven Spielberg a shark that didn't work, he hid it. When they gave the same thing to Mulcahy, the young punk made its fakeness an asset, sending it hurtling through his set at top speeds. It's not real, clearly, but that doesn't stop it from destroying a house and eating a baby. The lighting and sound design sell it even as we're more than aware that it shouldn't work. Kerr's reaction helps in no small part. When he discovers his lost charge, he wanders into the yard and falls to his knees screaming in agony to the heavens when the titles eat the rest of the frame. Whatever else is true of the film, I can bet that you've never seen anything quite like this. This is the monster movie to end all monster movies.<br />
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The editing is relentless, somewhere between Eisenstein, <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/04/true-classic.html">Dawn of the Dead</a></i>'s apartment seige and Richard Lester. The compositions and camera movements reference seemingly every monster/horror film that had come before it, not to mention most major australian productions; Mulcahy's entre into the world of big budget filmmaking was by all means a hopeless assignment, so he takes down the likes of <i>The Race For the Yankee Zephyr, Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Gallipoli Wake In Fright, Patrick, The Last Wave, The Survivor, Walkabout, Stone, The Cars That Ate Paris</i> and<i> Long Weekend</i> while he was at it. It's an upstart move, saying in essence "You loved all this shit, so, I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to endure this movie." He also anticipated <i>The Coca-Cola Kid</i>, but I'd believe that was a coincidence if anyone told me otherwise. If the powers that be wanted him to play in the mud like Brian Trenchard-Smith and Rod Hardy, then he was going to outdo everyone in the game All the visual cues you recognize from those movies? That's Mulcahy saying "Yes, everything you've ever been told about this fucking country is 100% true. Animals roam freely in our houses, homeless natives hang out nearby, we drink constantly, murder those we don't care for, hunt kangaroos, tell off-color jokes, drive Road Warrior trucks and those who can't afford them ride camels." As if that weren't enough, he was also going to take the various styles shown in the likes of <i>Next of Kin</i>, <i>Patrick </i>and<i> Picnic at Hanging Rock</i> and outdo them all! No shot would be wasted, no lighting set-up half-assed, no sound cue unaltered. He was going to out-stylize Richard Franklin, Peter Weir, Colin Eggleston and George Miller in one go. And at the risk of deifying a man who has yet to live up to the promise of his debut, I say he more than achieves this feat. He may never have put all his energy to good use again but then how could anyone hope to recreate the success of a film like this? It shouldn't work (and as evidenced by <i>Highlander</i>, it wouldn't under any other circumstances), as he appears to try literally every flourish and trick that he was ever taught, but it absolutely does. Frankly any gimmicky approach you tried <i>but</i> straight-forward could <i>only</i> elevate the material (is there a sillier premise for a horror film, even in Australia where no premise was too outlandish, than a giant pig eating people?) so when Mulcahy decides that every single object would have a big-ass light source illuminating it, that every single scene would contain something completely unreal and/or nightmarish, that every single character would be a stereotype that he was deconstructing as rapidly as he was building, he was making a judgment call - love or hate the film but you would never forget it once you saw it. Just look at his version of New York that we glimpse for seven seconds; it's the same city that Jonathan Demme would capture in <i>Something Wild</i> two years later: Outsized and silly. Who in their right mind would choose to show a black man with a ghetto blaster on a street corner rife with old-fashioned taxis instead of just the goddamn Empire state building? It's the most recognizable landmark in the world and it certainly would have been in keeping with his purposely-tourist's eye view of the outback - kangaroos, aborigines, drinking. But he was after caricature. And though much of the film is stereotypical in microcosm, he frames and presents them so that you aren't ever sure what you've just seen. "Was that a guy with a ghetto blaster? Was that a car hanging from a baobab tree?" His goal is to both toe the line of Australia as a hellhole as propagated by most accounts of the place in pop culture (not to mention shoe-horning wombats, pigs, camels and other animals into as many shots as possible) and then make it seem far, far worse. This film was his ticket out of the outback and he's never gone back (except, hilariously enough, to remake the nearly perfect, but geographically/culturally inaccurate <i>On The Beach</i> for TV with Armand Assante taking over for Gregory Peck). He's also never made a film that works since.<br />
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Mulcahy is exclusively the reason the movie works as well as it does. Obviously the edit helps him greatly, but without his compositions, his bug-eyed imagery and the way he handles the creature, the film would simply not work. Despite being, like Ted Kotcheff before him, an expat, scriptwriter Everett De Roche was the Outback's answer to Dardano Sacchetti and had written a handful of the country's most beloved grindhouse films; there was almost nothing he didn't try at some point. Watching Mark Hartley's fantastic documentary <i>Not Quite Hollywood!</i> you could get the impression that unless Peter Weir was in town, De Roche was in some way responsible for any given Aussie horror film. That's not true, but I will say it's a damn good thing he got directors as game and skilled as Richard Franklin and Mulcahy because his insane ideas would have destroyed less capable and fearless hands. I'm not even sure that George Miller, no slouch, but with no distinct visual style from film to film, would have survived a De Roche genre exercise. In the B-picture game Franklin was Mulcahy's only serious stylistic competition until he made <i>Psycho II</i> and discovered his wacky sense of humour which put him in closer proximity to Philippe Mora and Trenchard-Smith. Watch <i>Link</i> sometime to see why he never quite made it to the big leagues. But between <i>Patrick</i> and <i>Road Games</i> you can see a fantastic talent stealing bits of Hitchcock to craft taught, unnerving thrillers from laughable De Roche premises. Arch Nicholson, Mulcahy's second unit director, comes a close second with <i>Fortress</i> and <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/06/dont-go-into-water.html">Dark Age</a></i> proving almost as grim and stunning as <i>Razorback</i>. Nicholson died shortly after completing <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/06/dont-go-into-water.html">Dark Age</a></i> so we'll never know if he would prove capable of sustaining his vision. In that time and in the studio system everyone seemed to be clamouring to be part of, chances are slim. Mulcahy sure couldn't. But for one film he was king of the fucking world. Even if no one knew it.
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Understandably what producers seized on was his ability to capture mood and so a stream of truly horrible action films like the first two<i> Highlander </i>movies, <i>The Shadow, Silent Trigger, Blue Ice, Ricochet, The Real McCoy, The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior</i> and as we've already seen, <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-boardroom-at-screen.html">Resident Evil: Extinction</a></i>, a film which utilized almost none of his strengths, were in his future whenever he wasn't collecting money directing music videos and TV. Rarely has a director with such a thorough understanding of cinematic convention, not to mention technique, squandered his gifts quite so splendidly. Not until Greg Mclean would Australia see a talent as cunning and ferocious arrive sui generis to reinvent the possible in the midst of an over-saturated generic landscape whose well had run completely dry. Mclean's <i>Wolf Creek</i> had just as much as style and beauty as <i>Razorback</i>, despite being twice as bleak. His follow-up, <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Rogue</a></i>, is the <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Eaten Alive</a></i> to <i>Wolf Creek's <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/come-hungry-leave-happy-my-favourite.html">Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a></i>, but it still gives me far more hope for Mclean's future than if he'd made <i>Highlander</i> (for instance I'm worried about Andrew Traucki, who last I heard was planning a thing about spaceship racing that I hope someone convinced him to table). <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Rogue</a></i> and <i>Wolf Creek</i> are just as knowing as <i>Razorback</i> and between them capture the earlier film's sensibility, but even Mclean doesn't have the Godardian sense of deconstruction and anarchy that Mulcahy favored. <i>Razorback</i> is a film completely alone in its use of popular style and convention; a horror film about horror films.<br />
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The images and individual sequences are first-rate, unmatchable. The film's centrepiece is also its high-point: Carl's trek through the desert. The attack on petpak during the finale has been compared in the past to <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i>, and I'd add <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/come-hungry-leave-happy-my-favourite.html">Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a>, Blood and Black Lace </i>and <i>Blade Runner</i> to that and it certainly is both thrilling and mesmerizing. But the desert trek is Mulcahy painting with his camera. Every new tableau Carl wanders into is distinct from the last, some looking like the hyberborian wastes of <i>Conan the Barbarian </i>(by either John Milius or Frank Frazetta), others like Salvador Dali. In one he wanders under a blaring red sun and just to his right is a crack in the earth that looks like the edge of a film strip. The peculiar fuzziness these shots acquire in VHS format makes them seem even stranger, like they were spliced in by accident. Their progression only makes them even more post-modern and strange: Winters passes a dead horse arranged like a scarecrow then walks for most of a day, then suddenly he's back at the horse. As he crafts shoes out of scraps of his clothing, the horse breaks out of the ground to attack him. When he runs away, it's back where we first saw it, except now its nodding and laughing at him like a jack-in-the-box. The film's best scare and one of its most indelible images is clear evidence that <i>Razorback</i> is about the genre as much as anything. After waking from his walkabout in Sarah Cameron's guest bed, he sees her sitting on the edge of the bed. He gingerly lifts one hand to tap her shoulder and when she turns around, her face is replaced with that of an angry looking pig, squealing maniacally. We've all seen this scare before. How many times did Freddie Kruger or some other bogeyman or demon hide behind something ordinary. This is <i>Razorback</i>'s version of the bathroom mirror scare or of Jason Voorhees/Carrie White's dream sequence coups de grâce. Again, it shouldn't work: is anyone frightened on paper of a warthog? Well first of all it's some kind of grotesque halloween mask, exaggerated and covered in hair. Second of all, it's so sudden that it could have been anything and worked. Then you have a moment where you realize you were frightened by a pig. This is his game. He will get you afraid or repulsed by his monster if its the last thing he does. Killing Beth Winters the way he does is pretty genius. Suddenly there's the whole fucking thing staring at her just outside her car window. Then it yanks the door off and begins eating her feet. Like the rest of the film, it'd be preposterous if it weren't so horrifying. Oh, and that line about blasting the shit out of a Razorback that Jake Cullen gives Beth Winters? That's this film's "We're gonna need a bigger boat."<br />
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Now the plot mechanics, I suppose, can only be attributed to De Roche and the source novel he drew from (which...who the christ thought this would make a good book?). But I'm going to give credit to Mulcahy for playing up the dynamics he does so well. Thanks to Jake Cullen's stoic single-minded pursuit of the beast, and Carl Winters' pregnant wife backstory, <i>Razorback</i> is both a pastiche/homage to <i>Jaws</i>, the film that started the mother nature's revenge film cycle once more and made it personal rather than epidemic, <i>The White Buffalo, </i>the most peculiar of Dino De Laurentiis' <i>Moby Dick/Jaws</i> riffs, and <i>Orca</i>, the Dino's <i>Jaws </i>rip-off that gave its antagonist not just a backstory but human emotions as well. Now the pig in <i>Razorback</i>'s only real breaks from reality are its existence, its laying low between attacks and its only ever killing plot-specific characters; No Alex Kintner is sacrificed to this monster. He's not greedy. He just wants to set forth the chain of events that will lead to his demise. Fatalistic in a way that not even de Laurentiis' tragic orca whale managed. He doesn't have emotions and Mulcahy frames him like a phantom, almost like Michael Myers. The moments where we glimpse him in profile on the horizon are fucking priceless. His existence is never less than galling, but it's never played for laughs. If any other actor but Bill Kerr dropped to his knees and screamed to the heavens (three separate times, no fucking less), as action heroes always seem to, it wouldn't work, but Mulcahy knows that it will. Every convention is in play and delivered with a straight face - you accept it in literally every other situation, so why not a giant warthog? After all far more care went into this monster than anything in <i>Frogs</i> or <i>Day of the Animals</i>. This is fourth wall breaking of the highest order; so good that its seamless. And the pace makes it impossible to stop and ask questions. Everyone on screen buys it, and so, too, do you, by the end.<br />
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So when <i>Bait 3D</i> opens with a cartoony looking shark jumping out of the ocean to eat someone, could it possibly be writer/producer Russell Mulcahy <i>literally jumping the shark?</i> That's the story I'm going with. As in <i>Razorback</i>, there are moments of real terror nestled in the stealth commentary about the decline of the genre. It's not as compelling as <i>Razorback</i> because you can only get it <i>that</i> right once. Perhaps the reason he's never done a horror film as well is because he said everything he needed to. After you've dissected the genre, what can you do but try to put it back together?Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-25828150285098669892012-06-08T05:42:00.000-04:002012-09-09T03:23:40.224-04:00The Meaning of LifeI'm at a crossroads. I watch film after film and want to share my thoughts about them, but a few things stop me. First of all, who has the time? I gobble the damn things up like a hungry, hungry hippo and don't ever want to stop to reflect. I simply consume. I'm greedy and the only thing I give back are films of my own, which no one sees as I have no way of getting them to people and ensuring the work of my cast and crew are fully appreciated. Also, I'm broke as shit. I have a job and all of my money goes to pay debt. And furthermore if I ever hope to make a living making films, is it responsible or nice of me to sit here and bitch about the work of hard-working professionals who <i>are</i> making a living doing the thing I love. Wouldn't do to piss on those who've made a life for themselves and who are already under so much scrutiny, especially if they're heroes of mine. And so friends I swallow review after review. Not because I don't love you and want to keep writing for you, my loyal and beloved audience, but because I'm a worrywort and a bit of a fraidycat. But occasionally something happens and it shakes me from paralysis, partly because it seems to know everything about me. Its creator seems to spend all day worrying about death just like I do. And so how can I resist? Especially when the man and his films have bookended my life so far, directly and otherwise. If you guessed <i>Prometheus</i>, perhaps you too know me a little better than you think. As you'll recall, longtime readers, consciousness begins at <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favourite-films-volume-9-aliens.html">Aliens</a></i>, James Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i>. Suddenly, there I was, a little human with a brain that would ever return to two things: death and film. For me, they are constants. The only certain things in life. And so I've spent my life watching, rewatching, examining, dreaming about, and writing about the films in the Alien universe. How fitting then, that on my 23rd Birthday, Ridley should give me this gift; another <i>Alien</i> film that is and isn't that. What it is friends, apart from appalling coincidence/synchronicity from Scott to myself, is a reminder that though we are confronted by many horrifying questions, we should never stop asking even more, demanding more from the universe. Sure, we get horrible films all year, but we don't have to. We don't have to pay money to see whatever thing Michael Bay has backed (ok, so I'm not done shit-talking. But what are the odds I'll ever meet the man. I'm sure he has people who are paid to keep pricks like me away from his fantastically adorned, two-car garage, six bedroom ego) we can instead pay money to see a film that asks far more questions than it answers. On this, the day I was put on earth, in the year we've been told will be our last, I couldn't ask for more...or could I? I will say that it's mighty fitting that a film about the nature of existence seemed designed to help me examine my own. After all, I'd felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to see this film, just as Ridley'd evidently been waiting that same amount of time to make it.<br />
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Prometheus<br />
<span style="text-align: center;">by Ridley Scott </span><br />
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On a planet we're meant to recognize, but not too well, a docile looking white humanoid alien infects himself with some form of poison and his remains are scattered into a waterfall. What are we witnessing? The end of life or the beginning? Meanwhile in a time and place we're meant to recognize, Scotland in 2089 (I do wish Ridley would have learnt his lesson from Blade Runner about picking years as settings), two archeologist/sociologists discover the final piece of a puzzle they've been assembling for sometime. A cave painting that happens to look enough like six or seven other cave paintings from impossibly distinct and far away cultures. They reason that this is proof that some other life form landed here, taught our many cultures and then vanished. Or, perhaps they did more? Perhaps they created us; living gods. Evidently they aren't the only ones with peaked curiousity, as Peter Weyland, a billionaire in rapid decay and none-too happy about it, has bankrolled a trip to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. The cave paintings depict a constellation that they've finally located and near it, a moon capable of supporting life. When our heroes wake up ready to land, the wide-eyed wonder of the now long dead Weyland has been replaced with the cold, watchful skepticism of mission director Meredith Vickers, the woman with direct ties to the money that put them here. They can go looking for their supposed creators, but they may not do anything that puts the giant, costly ship at risk, which includes talking to them or bringing them on board. </div>
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Their optimism isn't damped. Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway have been on this course for years, several of them spent frozen in space, and just because some humourless executive tells them to play it safe doesn't mean they're going to. And besides, her pet android David seems to be programmed specifically to poke around ever deeper into the mysteries that present themselves, so why shouldn't they? They land and begin investigating one of three oddly shaped mounds. David's been programmed to not waste a second's time wondering at the vast expanses of tunneling they find beneath the giant structure and has soon activated a primitive video playback which illustrates what happened to the architects of the thing. Something went terribly awry and they tried to make a quick getaway. So quick was their retreat that one of them had his head cut off by a door before he made it to their own version of cryogenic sleep. Shaw takes his decapitated head back to the ship to investigate. David takes his own souvenir in the form of a capsule of strange black liquid. See the door that closed on the poor alien's head also hermetically sealed him in, and now that it's exposed to the air again and all its toxic properties and heat, the liquid has started to bubble and melt, releasing...things...<br />
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Shaw attempts to shock the nerve endings of the head, but only succeeds in blowing it up after too much stimulation. David has a little more luck, if you could call it that. He isolates a drop of the strange liquid and then gives some of it to a despondent Holloway in a glass of rum. Holloway was very much hoping to carry on a conversation with his creator, but there's no evidence that any of them are still alive. Or so he thinks. The following day when they return to the pyramid, as they've taken to calling it, to retrieve two lost members of their party who were stranded by a toxic storm the day before, David discovers that one of them's still frozen and could be revived. So why doesn't he tell Holloway right away? That's just one of many secrets these people have all been keeping from each other. More pressing is that David's experiment in Holloway's body has worked; so much so that the man becomes terminally ill in a hurry with some horrid infection. Worse still, he and Shaw had sex just after it finished incubating. Things get ugly fast. In the process of trying to learn what created her and why, Shaw becomes an unknowing creator of life, or at any rate, she unleashes lifeforms that were otherwise arrested or unborn.<br />
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Let's start with the obvious. The filmmaking is top notch, Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender are fucking amazing, the cinematography and editing are fantastic, the effects are largely great and I appreciate the nods to other films though I could lived without them. This isn't<i> <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i>. Nothing is. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i> is a perfect film and Scott knows this as well as I do. He isn't trying to outdo himself, he's here to answer some questions, put others to bed for good, and ask quite a few more. In the middle category, he and his two hired screenwriters have pulled the ground from beneath <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/08/leave-la-france-chapter-5-death-by.html">Alien: Resurrection</a></i>, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/07/money-vs-decency.html"><i>Alien Vs. Predator</i></a> and <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/07/money-vs-decency.html"><i>Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem</i></a>. There are plot elements from all three films, weirdly enough, which I view as the resignation of a father bailing his blacksheep son out of jail. I gave you life, goddamnit and I can't abandon you now. And so in is the billionaire bankrolling one last trip into the unknown and the sense that capitalists with death phobias are the cause of our interstellar problems. Also in are some pretty icky biological equations a la <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/08/leave-la-france-chapter-5-death-by.html">Resurrection</a></i>. What I like about the ostensible lip service he pays here is that he's also saying "Yes, that all happened, but here it is in a much neater package so you needn't have your faith in my film raped by pretenders to the throne." So in essence, anything you would have gotten out of films 4-6 is here, so skip them and tell your friends and children to go straight here. Of course the script suffers for their inclusion but I respect the urge to clean up the mess made in his wake. Also causing the film to suffer, too many disposable characters (a tradition of the <i>Alien</i> sequels, I'm afraid, though you used to know and care about them), breakneck pacing (<i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i> was as splendid as it was languid), too much dialogue, a <i>Phantom Menace</i>-style slickening of production design even if it makes sense in context, and a fairly boring morality governing the action, even if the heart of the film escapes this. And though the film is a prequel to <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a>, </i>that too seems almost beside the point. Scott started the wheels turning with that concept, and then realized he hadn't asked questions of his audience in a very long time.<i> Kingdom of Heaven</i> gets at a lot of these issues, though they're hidden rather better under a very impressive, handsome and engaging historical epic. Scott's relationship to theology is one of the more adult in contemporary art; he gets that we made it up, but also understands why we did it. What he seeks to do is go deeper than it's possible for humans to go right now from our limited vantage point. This is his <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>, an epic that seeks to sniff out the genesis of evolution and our relationship to technology.<br />
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Ridley Scott's done something uncommonly brilliant and meta-textual here. He can't have been the only one who had questions left at the end of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i>. So in delving into the questions that would have led to the creation of his earlier film, he also answers those same questions about life. Both are as important to him. Like William Friedkin or Francis Ford Coppola, Scott was an artist who managed to produce great, shocking and sometimes even perfect work within the confines of the studio system. What are widely considered their best films (<i>The Exorcist, The Godfather, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i>) were made for massive consumption with overbearing producers and yet there they are. They had a stunning amount of control, but were still under the watchful eyes of the cautious and the greedy, and still made art that will hold up until the end of time so far as I can tell. So perhaps in trying to figure out what made him produce the best work of his life, Ridley returned to it as a vessel to ask a series of questions about how he's even here in the first place. And that's the meat of <i>Prometheus</i>. The aliens who may or may not have created us (they share our DNA, just as Gods are always drawn/painted/portrayed to resemble us) did so for a reason? Then why did they make us mortal? Why did they abandon us to a life absent of their voice and guidance? He also expands on the existentialist crisis that awaits all children when they discover that the universe is infinite, but that our sun will one day burn out. We're told as kids not to think about it as we'll be long dead by then. Well...what if we didn't have to be? If we could walk up to our "gods," our creators, and ask them to simply explain why we die, and perhaps get them to turn off the clock of fate that we each have wound up inside us, then we could simply hop galaxies until we found one with a better sun, right? I imagine in the sequel to <i>Prometheus</i>, he'll get around to asking whether eternal life's all it's cracked up to be. Let me say that I love that this is a movie about curiousity. How often do you see a fucking epic on this scale and realize that it's about using all the resources in the world to just keep looking for answers.<br />
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Worth noting is that Scott asks these questions because he doesn't know. So obviously the film has no answers. Which makes up for it being boilerplate at points and conventionally structured. A fascinating idea is stepped over in almost every scene, sometimes literally as when we open the decades-closed chamber containing the dark liquid and our headless demi-god and discover in the soil, maggots! How'd they get there? A product of this moon brought to Earth by accident? Something the aliens invented and bring with them wherever they go? Or simply a species that would evolve on any body in any solar system. The question the movie is concerned with that gets the plot in gear is what happened before Shaw and her team got there? Because the holograms and all evidence suggests that they came to some realization and then immediately tried to high-tail back to earth to kill all of us and, perhaps, start over. Did they figure out that they made us mortal? Or prone to violence and hate? Did they mistakenly make women child-bearers instead of men, which upset our hormones and made men more violent and less caring by nature? The beautiful thing? We may never learn it of our alien creators. We'll certainly never learn how much of our DNA was a mistake. It's a small comfort to know that despite the many songs and poems that state the contrary, we couldn't be anyone other than who we are. Existence isn't so random that you may well have been born a tree or whatever the goddamn. You are you, reading these words, simply because you were generated inside your parents. You have them hardwired into you. Which, to me, is a sublime idea. We are the only sure things about existence. You couldn't have been any other way, so for fuck's sakes own it! Of course some of us will always wonder/wander. Hence that splendid android. He has no biological father, just a programmer who states openly that he doesn't believe David has a soul. The robot in turns confesses he wouldn't mind killing his parents, as he goes searching for role models in the form of Peter O'Toole in <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i> (a film I also have a huge affection and attachment to). A much more fitting comparison than it initially seems; he too was sent to do a rather difficult and thanklessly complicated job for a benevolent father figure. Stripped of most of our existential crises by virtue of not having an expiration date, David is free to wonder with us once his father has stopped giving him orders and proven that there's no escaping death, so we might as well understand it and everything else, while we're at it. Like a broken jack-in-the-box, he may seem as though he's outlived his usefulness, but not so long as he can help open doors to more answers. I think he too understands that without a sense of purpose, there'd be no reason to exist, so he adopts one because it makes his existence as vital as if he'd been programmed to do a specific job. In other words, he's more human than he seems.<br />
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Life is short but astonishing. Ten years and 13 days before I was born, <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i> made it to theatres where my dad saw it, setting off a chain of events that has led to this day in my life. Scott returned to the film that defined my life - whether I'd have made films without him is open to debate, but I'm more than willing to concede that between my parents and Ridley Scott lies my purpose, and I owe them equally for the direction my life has taken. Nary a conversation between my dad and I doesn't somehow touch on the man and his films. We love talking about <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html"><i>Alien</i></a>. It's one of his favourite films, one of my favourite films, and Scott's work and influence besides been a constant in my life since I first snapped into realization of my surroundings and eventually what life exactly was. A lot of my life's been spent just trying to wrap my head around the idea of dying, and what that means for my life. And on my 23rd birthday I sit down next to my dad in a movie theatre to watch Ridley Scott question existence using as his vessel a directionless, undying robot who shares my first name and loves film. Much like Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg did eleven years earlier when they named their robot the same thing, made him my age and then sent him down a rabbithole of existential discovery. Further coincidental madness: my eldest sister Elena was born in 1986, the same year that <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favourite-films-volume-9-aliens.html">Aliens</a></i> was released. My younger sister Rachel was born in 1992, the same year <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-earth-everyone-wants-you-to-fail.html">Alien³</a></i> hit screens. I don't believe in a creator, but I do believe in film. I don't think Scott, Kubrick or anyone else made movies because they knew I'd be watching - they make films because they have to, because they hope that I, anyone, will watch. As do I, because of them. Humans are the only species with the capacity to make art to further our understanding of the universe. Even if we like to belive that, as David himself says, big things have small beginnings, we have no guarantee that we'll amount to anything. There is no Why to existence, but sometimes it's very comforting to look at a movie screen and know that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-4427255693972084162011-09-29T04:49:00.009-04:002014-03-08T14:37:36.444-05:00Alone Together<div style="text-align: left;">
Jean Renoir once said that the only real way to gauge the talent of a crop of filmmakers is to have everyone make the same movie. Unless everyone makes a western, how will you know whether their strengths transcend their obsessions? I like to think we've come to see that the eye-roll that used to greet Westerns and horror films critically is not only unfair, it's unproductive. The odd direct-to-dvd cheapie is going to piss on the buffet, sure, but let's look at the year 2007. Think about the few mainstream westerns that were given runs in a proper movie house; <i>The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 3:10 To Yuma, There Will Be Blood </i>and<i> No Country For Old Men</i> (if you will). At the risk of losing my academic edge, those films fucking rule. Granted, I'm sure they sure weren't pitched like Anthony Mann would have pitched <i>The Naked Spur</i> to studio heads, but they're grammar is all Mann, Ford, Huston and Boetticher. Actually that's not entirely true. There's also a shit load of <i>McCabe & Mrs Miller</i>, Robert Altman's gorgeous, opiate ode to the west. In Altman's filmography <i>McCabe</i> was sandwiched between a war film, a countercultural whiff, a trippy horror film, an old fashioned showbiz movie warped into a docudrama, a dystopian sci-fi lark and a dustbowl crime dramedy. Without genre films what the fuck would Robert Altman have done in the 70s? Without the genre film just what the fuck is the Golden Age of Hollywood? In fact, where the fuck does the establishment get off using Genre to describe anything other than gripping drama or films about jesus? Sorry, my point is that if you want to know what a director is capable of, if you want their style distilled to its essence, put them in charge of a western or a sci-fi film. This year Nic Winding Refn, Kelly Reicherdt, Takashi Miike, Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, Rupert Wyatt, Jon Favreau, Craig Gillespie and Gore Verbinski saddled themselves with the conventions of films outside of their usual mindblowing personal projects and all acquitted themselves admirably, if not actively making their previous work pale in comparison. But the person I'm here to talk about once again is Lars Von Trier. In the last two years Lars has released movies that, if you squinted, were genre exercises, but were really just Lars Von Trier films. Any director worth his salt makes a film that you could recognize a mile off as the work of its creator. Swanberg and Refn come out best on that score of those listed above but Von Trier has them beat hands down. From the first second we clap eyes on Kirsten Dunst conducting electricity through her fingers in slow motion, we know which demigod has created the universe we're now locked inside. Granted it took <i>Dogville, Manderlay, The Idiots</i> and <i>Dancer in the Dark</i> for us to know that, but the genre film is too important because as we'll see, it may be the only place the artist can still thrive.</div>
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Melancholia<br />
by Lars Von Trier<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBIzFrnF8fqFqNcbal9S7N3ftTeWipfqJ_Auiq1lwhAH7JKL_Lh4X8p3-1YxHufsZlR8TAkakmJeYU8Rfz10OMIEJE4Y8Fq8LqOQltr_idcVT9ccJFbL_UCba6Ez_b4T82ywvvisu5big/s400/80973_gal.jpeg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657709374072339362" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 225px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span><br />
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We meet Justine on what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life. Everyone tells her it should be the happiest day of her life. She keeps acknowledging that it should be the happiest day of her life. Yet every second she can give over to it is spent running away from the things meant to make her happy. She's just been married to charmingly simple Michael and her sister Claire and her husband John have thrown them a wedding that out-does Michael Cimino's most resplendent ceremonies in its lavishness and John is not about to let her forget how much fucking money he spent on this wedding, as if reminding her how much effort went into it makes it seem like any better an idea in Justine's mind. For despite everyone's best efforts, it's Justine's depression, not John's money, Claire, their horrible parents, her boss nor her husband, that is running the show. After every imaginable escape attempt, her husband finally takes the hint and leaves. Justine stays at John and Claire's enormous estate for as long as they'll have her but even that doesn't last long. Her depression is her only company in the week following her wedding so finally Claire sends a car to her house to pick her up. Justine might not be fit to get out of bed, but Claire's going to make sure that she's in bed near people who care about her. And just as Claire makes it her mission to cheer Justine out of her crippling depression for what must be the hundredth time, John starts worrying about Claire. The thing that has Claire having kittens is that a small planet has been spotted. Not just by astrophysicists either. Justine saw the damn thing on her wedding night and it's just gotten bigger since then. Claire has spent a little too much time on the internet and thinks that "Melancholia" is going to crash into the earth and kill everything on it. John, being the kind of know-it-all his wardrobe and wealth betrays, is something of an amateur astronomer and he concurs with the most reasoned argument that it's just on a fly-by course and will do nothing more than temporarily encroach on the atmosphere and impede everyone's breathing for a few minutes. That may be, but John's certainty betrays not only his insufferable behavior. After all, only so much of it is for Claire's benefit. He too needs convincing that Melancholia isn't going to kill all life on earth and the more he talks the more he sounds like he's trying to fool himself. In fact the only person who remains unflappable in the face of the greatest uncertainty in man's history is Justine. She seems certain that not only are they doomed, it's not even that big a deal. So who's right?</div>
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On its face <i>Melancholia</i> is one of the clumsiest metaphors in the history of film. A planet called Melancholy threatens to kill everyone on earth. Well...fucking duh. As someone with what I've always considered at least depressed tendencies (never diagnosed, never serious enough to consider diagnoses, won't pretend for a second it's as serious as those who have it, please forgive my attempts at empathy here) and who's had seriously depressed friends (To put it another way I've never been as hopeless as Justine, but I've certainly been Claire, spending whole days thinking of something to cheer someone up who won't crack, nor will they share their problem), I understand the urge to make a movie with this big and loud a message propping it up. It takes nothing so much as hearing someone argue about the wrong thing to have me thinking exclusively of how cruel and pointless life seems. All Von Trier (who has very publicly shared his depression) is doing is removing any and all associations and getting to the heart of the problem. There's death hanging literally in the sky. You can try to run from it, as Claire literally tries to, but what have you accomplished? Justine's insight into what is starting to plague her sister and her family is what keeps her grounded. This may be new for Claire, but this is just getting out of bed for Justine. Now here's the thing. I completely understand why Von Trier abandons subtlety here. He's a middle-aged man with probably very few friends and the world doesn't find his brand of humour all that funny. I, however, do. Not only do I understand him, I've made a film about death with at least as little subtlety as <i>Melancholia</i>, except without the metaphor. That film, <i>Tron Wayne Gacy</i>, is entirely about someone who thinks about death so much that it effects people he barely knows. This character is me, like Justine (and Charlotte Gainsbourg in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/11/talking-foxes-i-have-known-this-year-in.html">Antichrist</a></i> before her) is Von Trier. So, yeah, on paper, he made a film that could hardly be any more screamingly obvious, but in practice he made one of the few films that accurately depicts depression, and one of the most beautifully rendered cinematic love letters of the last decade.<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh52lQZIXudh88S4rvgfXN18CNC43dCWufbQrMLiitVFwImnrDR2CLW2TaSu_JH05MsYDmK_AbiLu22-gT9YWdbvSx3DVbylJgXrPxEZxbwZyVIwFC1FEtFraaMquuDrMBfWEHn1aTBt0w/s400/Melancholia-2011-film.jpeg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657709367337312802" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 251px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span></div>
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The reason I didn't notice how clumsy <i>Melancholia</i> is (except when John says the planet's name for the first time) is because Lars Von Trier's style is winning at the best of times and here, in a movie where characters are not actively out to destroy each other, it becomes as engrossing as a down bed with silk sheets. The opening montage of apocalyptic tableau bests even those corresponding shots in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/11/talking-foxes-i-have-known-this-year-in.html">Antichrist</a>.</i> The wedding is filmed so beautifully (and I can't express enough how much I love the setting and Von Trier establishes its boundaries) that it took me quite some time to recognize how miserable the lead is. Of course, that's not just the cinematography. It turns out that beneath an eminently, distractingly likable exterior, Kirsten Dunst is one of the finest actresses of the day. She commands the first half of the film with such ease, her actions slowly unfurling a complex and fragile personality. It definitely made me wish she was in the second half of the film as much more than the devil on Claire's shoulder. Watching her with Michael (fabulously underplayed by Alexander Skarsgård, whose father Stellan, plays Justine's overbearing boss) in the film's first proper scene is heartbreaking. You believe these two are in love. No, that's not right. You believe that he's in love, you slowly realize that she wants to be in love, but that someone as vanilla as Michael is never going to be enough to stop her from being herself. All he needs is that perfect midwestern accent to convey how fall short of the mark he falls. Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt play the overwhelming parents. They didn't need a single line of dialogue; their presence is shorthand. Hurt is a scatterbrained hellraiser, Rampling an ice-cold bitch. They needn't have said anything and we would know why Justine's suffering from depression. Gainsbourg is believable, as always, and likable as the supposedly normal one trying to keep everyone together while her sister simply does what's going to keep her sane from moment to moment. The other revelation is Kiefer Sutherland giving a fucking dynamite performance as the arrogant John. It's the part he was born to play. I'm glad that even when the other brilliant players went home after the wedding, he hung around. A word about the wedding. It takes up a little less than half of the film and is a showcase for Kirsten Dunst more than it is anything else. But what it is secondly is a Zentropa family reunion and as such I felt like I was invited in to something truly special, drinking wine with the only people who Lars Von Trier thinks of as family. Skarsgård, Hurt, Udo Kier (the funniest part of this occasionally funny film), Gainsbourg are all veterans of Zentropa productions and Brady Corbet and Jesper Christensen have proved their euro-arthouse cruelty credentials quite sufficiently to fit right in. The only surprise is that Kirsten Dunst leaves absolutely everyone in the dust. She's breath-taking, for one thing, and her child-like frustration and unpredictability makes it impossible to take your eyes off of her.</div>
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With as big a driving force as a planet maybe falling to earth, Von Trier doesn't even need to hammer home his big themes or human misery as cruelly as is his wont. No one hits anyone, no one raises their voice for more than a few seconds, no one is incapable of feeling. In fact I'd say these are the most human characters we've seen in one of the Danish auteur's films since...well, maybe ever. And as he's not too busy making sure everyone goes into histrionics or remembering imaginary boundaries, he lets the film student in his soul dress the set. Scott Tobias likened the film to <i>Solaris</i>, which by an interesting coincidence I watched not a day before seeing <i>Melancholia</i>, and that's certainly a possible reference point, what with its planet-as-legend-to-the-grieving-process motif. Dunst steps into Natalya Bondarchuk's adorable/sinister innocence for the first half of the film and Gainsbourg's frantically losing her footing resembles Donatas Bonionis dealing with his wife's appearances aboard the ship. But that doesn't quite cover it. If <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/11/talking-foxes-i-have-known-this-year-in.html">Antichrist</a></i> was his tribute to Tarkovsky, I'd wager what that means is <i>Stalker</i> and <i>The Mirror</i> with a hint of <i>Nostalghia</i>. There is the same studied grace of every person in the frame that came to characterize Andrei Tarkovsky's films (from <i>Andrei</i> <i>Rublev</i> on, his actors looked like they were cut from some ancient tree, crafted by the director himself) present throughout. Kirsten Dunst in her wedding dress is Von Trier's most active and personal creation. It's what people will be putting in their films to signify his influence years from now. Just as thanks to Andrei Rublev, the presence of a horse will always be shorthand for Tarkovsky, and perfectly sculpted hedges in the floodlights signifies Alain Resnais' <i>Last Year At Marienbad</i>, if the eventually claustrophobic party at a mansion didn't do it for you (or if you thought he was merely nodding in the direction of his one-time Dogme partner Thomas Vinterberg's best film to date <i>The Celebration</i>). And though <i>Solaris</i> is too obvious to ignore but the set-up comes right out of <i>The Sacrifice</i>, perhaps tellingly the Russian master's final film. In that movie Erland Josephson tries to thwart nuclear war by bedding a poor neighbor. Justine tries to cure her wandering displeasure the same way. The world maybe ending on an endless green landscape bonds the two films tightly, even if ultimately Von Trier emerges the better filmmaker in this case. Why? Genre.<br />
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A few weeks ago I saw a film called <i>Another Earth</i> whose sci-fi trappings were really just a springboard for an unconvincing romance and an exploration of grief that I'd seen before and better. The problem is that the makers of that film evidently thought they were making something greater and more important than sci-fi and spend so little time on the ramifications of a plot device not at all dissimilar from <i>Melancholia</i>. In that film the planet is identical to earth and not an ominous, lifeless wake-up call. The films work to opposite purposes. <i>Another Earth</i> uses its planet as a cure for one man's depression with the promise of hope and possibility. <i>Melancholia</i>'s planet is meant to remind us that we're entirely the fuck alone in the universe and that we have to acknowledge horrible things to really be able to face the idea of death. Tellingly, <i>Another Earth</i> spends so little of its run time on its titular plot device and comes across as achingly inessential despite its best efforts to be bigger than the two cloying romantics it centers on. It has important things to say about love and forgiveness. <i>Melancholia</i> has one thing to say and like <i>Solaris</i>, you can never escape it. Just as you're trapped aboard a spaceship for all but the opening 45 minutes of the film, Von Trier's opening montage ensures you never forget about his planet. Just because it's set on earth doesn't make it any less of sci-fi film than <i>Solaris</i> or <i>Moon</i> or <i>Sunshine</i>, even if it's a heady, unscientific sci-fi. Like those films, it takes one motif (the sun, the moon, another planet) to explore the human condition, the idea being we have to go there, to the farthest reaches of the universe, to be truly alone with ourselves and our problems. Von Trier figures there's no reason to leave and gets in the same punches with an even heftier emotional weight than the other movies. The reason <i>Solaris</i> is a better film than <i>The Sacrifice</i> (and the better known of the two) is because it hides its message in the fantastical, something cinema is made for. <i>The Sacrifice</i> is a big important movie about big important issues and for goodness sakes can you believe this cold war!? It's not relevant today, but by setting Solaris in the future and generalizing his crises, he made a lasting and beloved classic, at least among freaks like me. Sci-fi lent Tarkovsky a cushion for his ideas, just as it does for Von Trier.<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIZ6F5FxYxlb9k0H1_uwRHrJxJe-FBrpwAkfKVN8i5rMK8WsbwJJB5uVELKhxHbsJgsHks4GqKgBLukJ3uje6XsZA_-tdErrTK4iH5I3Zg11KXwGGTpXP4FwZKviixoj_9U4ILlRCtVHw/s400/Melancholia_Pol.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657709373029340114" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left; width: 292px;" /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span">I should come clean and admit that I've seen everything he's ever done. Von Trier is the White Stripes of the film world; they made some of the most incredible rock music of all time, but none of their albums work from start to finish. Jack White's uncanny ability with a guitar mimics the miracles Von Trier pulls with his digital imagery (the chapter markers in Breaking the Waves, the tableau of his latest work, the sheer audacity of the way he filmed Dogville and Manderlay - though I'd only call the latter of them really pretty) and Meg...no, you know, I'll go ahead and stop this comparison right here. This fucking thing is long and convoluted enough as it is. Suffice it to say The White Stripes broke up before they released their <i>Melancholia.</i> Anyway, Von Trier is an artist whose explorations are never less than fascinating. But the issue is that I can only stomach his genre exercises enough to watch them twice. Anyone who watches <i>Dancer in the Dark</i> for fun should probably find out who Lars is seeing about his depression and schedule an appointment. I was always kind of amazed that some of his movies were given DVD releases. Who the shit can sit through <i>Breaking The Waves</i> or <i>The Idiots</i> twice? I don't regret seeing any of his movies, but I never want to see some of them again. I've never been tempted to find <i>Dogville</i> again. Like Michael Haneke's best known works, the ideas work well enough that I don't need a second visit. Give me</span><i style="color: black;"> <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/leave-la-france-chapter-19-death-by.html">Time of the Wolf</a></i> <span class="Apple-style-span">over <i>The Piano Teacher</i> anyday (speaking of Tarkovskian...). But even though his films were hitherto like arthouse bootcamp, to me, that just makes <i>Melancholia</i> that much more special. His work and I have been flirting since we discovered each other and it took getting to know each other, a courtship that spanned at first only seeing youthful zeal and incredibly appealing aesthetics (<i>Europa, The Element Of Crime, The Kingdom</i>). This gave way to an untenable Marxist hardening, the equivalent of watching them date other people and mirror that person's personality to the point that you wonder if you'll ever get together (<i>Breaking the Waves, The Idiots</i>). But they broke it off eventually, and it was hard (Dancer), but personal growth showed me what I saw in them to begin with (<i>Dogville, Manderlay</i>). Then they played coy (<i>Five Obstructions, Boss Of It All</i>) but with the blanket of the horror genre, it finally seemed like it was time to give this thing a shot. She was certainly sending signals. And now, Lars Von Trier's films and I are on the same page. Not only could I see watching <i>Melancholia</i> again, I can't fucking wait to own it so I can watch it in perpetuity alongside <i>Apocalypse Now, There Will Be Blood</i>,</span> <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-100-favorite-films-volume-7-let.html" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Let The Right One In</span></a><i style="color: black;">, </i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/underdog.html" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Let Sleeping Corpses Lie</span></a> </span><span class="Apple-style-span">and <i>Inception</i>. It may have taken our whole lives, but it was worth the wait.</span></span></div>
Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-68249549853212931972011-08-10T15:29:00.007-04:002012-11-19T02:25:11.770-05:00Profondo Argento - L'AperturaIt took almost two years but <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/06/ok-lets-talk-current-events.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Giallo</span></a> finally saw a tiny theatrical release in England. It was the filmmaker's fault, they didn't pay Adrian Brody, for one, and as the man plays two roles and is basically the reason it got made, I for one don't have much sympathy for the moneymen. It got trashed, critically, of course. There was no way it wouldn't. It's not very good and suffers from the same things that have plagued Argento since he stopped making movies about witches. He's insisted on making, or at least releasing, every film in English. This means either terrible dubbing or directing in a language he doesn't know all that well. He may know what makes audiences squirm but lately he's been doing it unintentionally. Now I can't say I disagree with popular opinion, that he's past his prime, but where I do take exception is that they don't see that his prime ended directly after <span style="font-style: italic;">Inferno</span>. Argento's worst movies, to my eye, are the movies were made in the 80s. I like <span style="font-style: italic;">Phenomenon</span> well enough but he wasn't the man to direct it. <span style="font-style: italic;">Demons</span> is vile and nonsensical. <span style="font-style: italic;">Opera</span> is incredibly misguided and must be the only movie set in an opera house that has a score composed entirely of shitty 80s hair metal. How anyone puts up with it is beyond me. And <span style="font-style: italic;">Tenebrae</span> is so screamingly, indefensibly awful it must surely be called his greatest failure. So while I absolutely agree that <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/06/ok-lets-talk-current-events.html" style="font-style: italic;">Giallo</a> and really anything he made in the last decade isn't quite up to snuff, it's time to correct any misgivings about what that used to mean. Argento didn't rise to near legendary status without at least partially deserving it right? On this day, which coincidentally is also the very day that shooting has wrapped on his newest film, <span style="font-style: italic;">Dracula 3D</span>, let's start from the very beginning and figure out how high he set so high the bar that his critics now use to beat him. Let's get back to basics.<br />
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Bird with the Crystal Plumage<br />
By Dario Argento<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtzA8rleMvXd2B_ykME4mvPoORfMH-IOgR_7YHwGtw06TAFgtNV2Lrq-FPVIE58y7g-HhCCo0y7-Seh9tJ2MuHZmw74XElDK85AY3mcZsx7ZdBdtv3WjZFuqFbdUtaFJCTZ8Jjs4m7X4/s1600/birdwithcrystalplumagecap.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639321633647496322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtzA8rleMvXd2B_ykME4mvPoORfMH-IOgR_7YHwGtw06TAFgtNV2Lrq-FPVIE58y7g-HhCCo0y7-Seh9tJ2MuHZmw74XElDK85AY3mcZsx7ZdBdtv3WjZFuqFbdUtaFJCTZ8Jjs4m7X4/s400/birdwithcrystalplumagecap.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 171px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>While walking home one day, journalist Sam Dalmas witnesses an attempted murder. The police show up and question him endlessly but all he can tell them is what little he's certain of. He saw a man in a black leather coat and hat stab a woman in white on a staircase, then the man fled the scene. The cop in charge of the investigation, Inspector Morosini, keeps his passport all the same as Sam's the only witness and they have no other leads. This bothers him, as I'm sure you can imagine, as he doesn't think he can be of any more use, but on his way back from the station the killer shows up again and tries to cut his head off with a big-ass knife. So maybe he knows more than he thinks. After a few days of being pumped for information and continually reliving the murder in his head, Sam decides he's going to try his hand at solving the crime. He figures out that the girl was one in a long line of shopgirls who've been killed in Rome over the last few weeks. Monica Ranieri, the woman he saved, was only exceptional in that she survived. The killings resume a few days later and Sam increases the intensity of his investigation with his girlfriend Julia serving as his aid. Sam interviews a whole host of subjects, each stranger than the next, and the attempts on his life continue all the while. A man tries gunning him down in the street but gets away. Interviews with a pimp, a shop owner and an artist all bring him closer to the truth, but will it be too late?<br />
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The most remarkable thing about <span style="font-style: italic;">The Bird With The Crystal Plumage</span> is how unremarkable it seems today. The plot is totally by the numbers, especially if you've seen as many serial killer films as I have. It's slightly more effective than most gialli and/or Italian policiers of the day and certainly easier to sit through, but next to <span style="font-style: italic;">The French Connection</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Frenzy</span>, it looks naive. Ok, maybe that's not fair. Maybe hip or modern is the right word. It's a product of its time, and I don't mean just because of its being stilted or politically incorrect - only rarely does it fall into either trap. It's far more vigorous and youthful than either film, but it's combination of antique editing gambits, jazzy score and comic interludes prevents it from being anywhere near as terrifying as its most terrifying elements. Every single person that Tony Musante's character interviews is played for comic relief, which wouldn't be an issue if Argento had a better sense of humour. Although there are a few things here that still make me laugh. When picking perverts out of a line-up at the police station, a man in drag steps out, only to be recalled by Morosini. “How many times do I have to tell you Ursula Andress belongs with the transvestites, not the perverts!” To which the disgruntled queen replies: "Well I should hope so!” Never not funny. But the one thing you don't ever feel is the kind of oppressive mean spirit you get from most Italian horror movies. The comedy might be heavy handed but the rest of the movie is comparably light. It's fleet enough that it escapes the same class of brute that the Italian film industry was producing at the time. In fact there are moments where you could mistake its intelligent staging for an American film. The one thing you almost wouldn't mistake it for is the work of its director.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_a-bZgPp9HzOr0XQxwK0LqLHfTfG2XwuyOf1bCceutAWhmduk_DlwDyo8j2Z2myUa6onDSH7Ox9Dy0LwK2QcAKzGXTWZY43YdxFzkAInJXVH22sywrmXKaJ4cgQ5j1dT5bifM3CDqJPA/s1600/The+Bird+with+the+Crystal+Plumage+2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639321637919430946" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_a-bZgPp9HzOr0XQxwK0LqLHfTfG2XwuyOf1bCceutAWhmduk_DlwDyo8j2Z2myUa6onDSH7Ox9Dy0LwK2QcAKzGXTWZY43YdxFzkAInJXVH22sywrmXKaJ4cgQ5j1dT5bifM3CDqJPA/s400/The+Bird+with+the+Crystal+Plumage+2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 170px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>Having watched everyone of his movies (admittedly in the wrong order) I was ready for full-on rape and gore and screaming and crying and gnashing of teeth and to tell you the truth I was sort of dreading watching it. But this was Dario before he'd had his heart broken. The Dario Argento I like is the one who started as Italy's golden boy and turned into a real artist when he tired of what the genre could offer him. He'd worked as a critic and scenarist in the industry for many years until he finally got his big break. His dad was something of a mogul at the time and so when Dario stepped up to bat he had the keys to the kingdom. Working the camera was Vittorio Storaro, future DP of <span style="font-style: italic;">Apocalypse Now</span> among other things. The score was written by none other than Ennio Morricone, to whom Argento had the audacity to suggest avant garde music as an influence. It obviously worked because the music's minimalist percussion is gripping and ahead of its time. The young turk had all the resources he could ever need and did things his way. The result is everything you'd expect from a cinephile with a particular affinity for Edgar Wallace and Hitchcock. The filmmaking is energetic and fun. The use of the POV cam is so in-your-face it's almost percussive; North Americans wouldn't use it in this way for another few years. He took the principle from <span style="font-style: italic;">Peeping Tom</span> and the MO from Mario Bava and shot it like he imagined Alfred Hitchcock would have, but this is definitely its own beast. There are splendidly executed tracking shots. There's the famous scene where Argento put a camera on a bungee cord to simulate a victim falling to his death. The action moved so quickly that the focus puller was often too slow. Chances were being taken. The Italian film industry is so paint-by-numbers that you're lucky to find anything as exciting or demented as the best of Sergio Martino or Joe D'Amato, and they all followed Dario's lead. For a few years anyway, he wasn't making films like an Italian. Tony Musante makes for a much more likable hero than we usually get, someone not tainted by some ancient crime or other. His relationship to Suzy Kendall's character is also breezy and believable; a breath of fresh air, to be sure. The editing is straight out of Hitchcock; he even replicates the shower scene in a closet and makes it even more ghastly. Reggie Nalder even shows up, essentially reprising his role from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Man Who Knew Too Much</span>. The scene where Sam is trapped between two glass doors for the murder and its aftermath is truly wonderful. After a certain period, no one in Italy would give over this much time to someone simply being anxious and powerless. Unless a knife is being brandished the camera doesn't care. Here Argento lets Musante's helplessness sink in and lets us feel the seconds tick by as the woman bleeds and the killer gets away. It's exactly the sort of thing the master of suspense would have done in his heyday. The shot is also beautifully composed; like the rest of the movie it's far prettier than most of his peers ever cared to try for.<br />
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Dario was a crucial figure because like Mario Bava he was the filmmaker that the rest of the world saw and associated with Italy. Unlike Bava, he seemed to understand that he was part of film history. The referential quality of his images and editing put him in the same company as Corman's brats, but unlike Coppola or Scorsese he started out with total control. Look at the chase scene with Reggie Nalder. He shot it in such a way that conventional editing was impossible, so we are meant to draw conclusions. Its interesting to look at and he gave his audience far more credit than most directors, or rather understood that film required suspension of disbelief. It's better than real, or at least more fun. The police line-up, for instance, looks more like a movie screening for executives than an actual police headquarters. Mario Bava was the first director in Italy to make full use of the redness of blood and the mechanics of filmmaking to such an unreal degree, but he was far more interested in set dressing and gore. Dario would adopt this approach later but at first what he cared about was craft. How to edit together a stalking scene cleverly rather than deliver the most gruesome death scene. In fact all of the deaths in <span style="font-style: italic;">Crystal Plumage</span> are either cheats or off screen, something I didn't pick up on the first time I saw it, a testament to their effectiveness. The pace and tension are also maintained with a preternatural sureness. It is a detective story, not actually too dissimilar from the sort of thing Graham Greene used to write (Argento is not nearly so curtly eloquent, but that’s not the point), the largest difference being that we see things from the killer’s perspective. Which itself was not a new development but its intensity was second only to Bava and would become the norm for serial killer films, albeit indirectly.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_a-bZgPp9HzOr0XQxwK0LqLHfTfG2XwuyOf1bCceutAWhmduk_DlwDyo8j2Z2myUa6onDSH7Ox9Dy0LwK2QcAKzGXTWZY43YdxFzkAInJXVH22sywrmXKaJ4cgQ5j1dT5bifM3CDqJPA/s1600/The+Bird+with+the+Crystal+Plumage+2.jpg"><br /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJi_9T-dmWLt9AyCSwS5BWFytuQwUWVpclHtUkO7gQ0EiPpQsa_1U5myinMh8-6wJVedZIbMnhy7mM27IIgSMET2F-GocNmLcuaQUro0bY_CshuDFCrpcIcacxnREiR1pjNNhaIjB5ya0/s1600/bird_with_crystal_plumage_poster_02.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639321631932468178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJi_9T-dmWLt9AyCSwS5BWFytuQwUWVpclHtUkO7gQ0EiPpQsa_1U5myinMh8-6wJVedZIbMnhy7mM27IIgSMET2F-GocNmLcuaQUro0bY_CshuDFCrpcIcacxnREiR1pjNNhaIjB5ya0/s400/bird_with_crystal_plumage_poster_02.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 304px;" /></a>All this is one way of saying that Bird isn't the best movie you'll ever see but it's absolutely worth watching and absolutely better than most of the American slasher films that would steal from it indirectly in the decades that followed. Argento's enthusiasm is infectious and carries the film through its few weak spots. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Bird With The Crystal Plumage</span> contains all the elements of the gialli - black gloved killer, knives a plenty, wrongfully accused man, characters solving the murders along with the audience, last-minute bait-and-switch - but they're all a canvas for his homages and sly rule-breaking. He was essentially trying to fuse every kind of cinema that Italy was known for and influenced it in turn. Lord knows how many gialli came out in the years following its box office success with some animal in the name. I'm hesitant to call his technique new - though if I had to guess, I'd say it was at least novel - because he wouldn't truly come into his own until <span style="font-style: italic;">Suspiria</span>, but Argento's methods were at least new to Italy. He took something shop-worn and slapped a beautifully lavish coat of red paint on it. I'm glad the world responded as well as it did because he had a few more brilliant little movies in him, even if the giallo would eventually be his undoing.Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-82510863881795641562011-07-27T18:20:00.005-04:002012-10-16T02:25:57.099-04:00ReMarathon 2011, Part 3, And Soon The Nightmare Ends<div>
And now for the final installment! And this time...it's personal!</div>
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Children of the Corn<br />
by Donald P. Borchers</div>
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Well here's your problem, you hired children! You needed <i>actors!</i> If I was to count the ways in which this made-for-tv remake of an already terrible movie that last I checked was still producing execrable sequels fucked the dog, I'd need about a hundred more fingers. I mean fucking wow! The child actors are across the board horrible, each of them giving performances that might charitably be called performances. It's kind of astonishing to think that not a single one of these kids was worth a damn with the camera rolling, but here you have it. That'd be alright if the film had a solid anchor in its two leads but David Anders and Kandyse McClure manage to be even more horrid than the children. Sweet Christ, does this film shit the bed on the bad acting front. After a sermon that counts as the high point of the kid who plays Isaac's time in this movie, we meet the shrieking, horrible, no-fucking-way-are-these-dickbags-married, protagonists. Vicki and Burt are their names and they're headed christ knows where, literally <i>screaming</i> at each other the whole time. They hit a kid, stop in the town of Gatlin, get attacked by the cult, and are killed, but not fast enough for me. These two give shameful performances, but McClure really takes the cake. Right after Burt hits the kid, she takes the reins and doesn't relent. "It's <i>Maaaan</i> Slaughter!!!! Don't you wanna come and see? So you can tell all your NRA buddies what you bagged in <i>Ne</i>bra<i>ska!</i>" She delivers this horrible dialogue in a new kind of cadence that humans haven't gotten around to using yet. She's hysterically awful from start to finish and I'd say the movie was worth seeing just for her histrionic lunacy, but frankly it gets old after the first twenty minutes. A minute with Vicki Stanton is funny, two is hysterical, three makes you want to kill yourself. And from there it just gets worse. Truly, nothing goes right with this film and to top it off, Anders says "Why don't you put that in your god and smoke it?" To children. Who have probably never even heard the original saying before. Wow, wow, wow!</div>
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The Stepfather<br />
by Nelson McCormick</div>
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McCormick and Cardone at least stuck much closer to the outline of the original film, a great Reagan-era family values parable, but you have to ask why when they maintain nothing of that film's underlying motifs or importance. Subtext is verboten here, it's all about the murder, but even that takes its sweet ass time getting here. If the remake money ever dries up, these two would be at home making Lifetime originals. The murders in this film are too tame because McCormick doesn't have the balls so really it's all very whitebread and boring and you wonder why you're here. In order to draw the teenage boy set they hired Amber Heard, who's something of a fixture here these days. Mark Kermode hypothesized that McCormick stuck her in her underwear everytime the film was starting to lag. That woman's vagina gets more screentime than Penn Badgley. I'd like to ask a practical question: are these movies funded in part by record companies? Badgely's hero puts on headphones and they play songs that all sound the same, but I'm sure are from different bands. Why? There's no way this kid listens to this shit, so is someone paying to have these bands played? As for the movie, just fuckin' skip it, it ain't worth your time. Jon Tenney's the best thing about it and he's got ten minutes of screentime.</div>
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A Nightmare on Elm Street<br />
by Samuel Bayer<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPI9NYDXhSji1-mCOafur-pXNryKsLPXWb2Vqk-foXhmc-3exSutjTvJW5fO__zYVAHDueCxc9BHXq9wsIV6ogy_EDyn-Czia917JtXC2KR796QXuHS_d9OqwPvfbiRxJmfaw_zM9iEMk/s1600/Second_2010_poster.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475355840119938" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPI9NYDXhSji1-mCOafur-pXNryKsLPXWb2Vqk-foXhmc-3exSutjTvJW5fO__zYVAHDueCxc9BHXq9wsIV6ogy_EDyn-Czia917JtXC2KR796QXuHS_d9OqwPvfbiRxJmfaw_zM9iEMk/s400/Second_2010_poster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 270px;" /></a></div>
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Ah, well it was bound to happen I guess. And wouldn't you know that they fucked it up in one of the dumbest possible ways. Samuel Bayer, the guy who directed videos for "Stand" by Poison and Sheryl Crow's "My Favorite Mistake," a ghastly resume indeed, at least has an eye for visuals that escapes Dave Meyers, but this still winds up being one of the most rancorous of the Michael Bay remakes. Turning <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">The Hitcher</a></i> into a commercial slightly better than having your balls cut off was bad enough, but remaking <i>A Nightmare On Elm Street</i> and making it about molestation would be like remaking <i>Dr. Strangelove</i> and playing it as gripping drama. But that's exactly what Bayer and writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer did. I hope some day they remake fuckin' <i>Hostel</i> and make it even dumber just so this generation gets what its like to have your movie raped quite so bad as this. To his credit the movie is lit very well, but Bayer also manages to make Freddie Krueger seem more silly than anything else, and he keeps fucking with the dream rules. And as much as I like Rooney Mara (she got out of bad horror movie land but quick after this. Look for her, appropriately enough, in the remake of <i>The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo</i>), there is no performance here that makes this worth watching. Jackie Earle Haley embarasses himself as the villain and the screenwriters fuck up his motivation in one of the most egregious ways imaginable. They go right for the whole pedophile aspect, making that his sole motivator. The problem is this: he sexualizes the girls he kills, Mara especially. Can anyone tell me what pedophiles find attractive again? Oh right, children! Yeah, that's right. He wouldn't like these kids anymore. And worse still, you know without a shadow of a doubt that he did it, erasing <i>all</i> of the subtext from Craven's film. And as if that weren't enough, there's nothing dreamlike about the dreams. Craven's film is remembered as having revolutionized the way dreams are conveyed in film and his techniques are still being copied today. Bayer seems content to steal, except in one instance, and everything he steals that was practical and revolutionary in 1984, is cold, digital and stupid here. Bayer perversely changes nothing about the real world and the dream world in the vane hope of catching the audience off guard, but in doing so he negates what the fuck he's doing. Dreams don't look or feel real (if only he'd waited to see <i>Inception</i>!) but the ones Bayer cooks up are <i>supposed</i> to look real and confuse you because the characters don't know they're dreaming half the time. In other words, this movie gets less than zero right and its creators should be made barren at first light.</div>
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And Soon The Darkness<br />
by Marcos Efron</div>
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Well, at least they're remaking something relatively obscure. And managed another extraordinary feat: they made a horror movie of almost total predictability and safety. I can think of no one aspect to recommend it. It's bland and ordinary and one of the only mysteries in recent memory where the only suspects are actually the guys who did it. It might be them, you think it's them, it's them. The usually splendid Karl Urban is a non-entity. Odette Yustman and Amber Heard <i>lead</i> the cast. Odette Yustman's most unique feature is that she's better looking than Megan Fox. And Amber Heard; I've seen her in five or six movies, three of them recently and I don't think I could pick her out of a line-up if the other people were old chinese men. She exudes nothing but a willingness to appear in horror films. There's less than nothing to see here, not a shock or a scare to be found and has a future as one of those movies you rent thinking it'll be gory fun and then it isn't and your party sucks as a result. The only thing that got my attention about this movie was that it was produced by Anchor Bay, the one-time champions of schlocky home video. I was wondering how they were getting along these days and then realized they put <i>Children of the Corn</i> and our next film, <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> on DVD. And then I stopped caring.</div>
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I Spit On Your Grave<br />
by Stephen R. Monroe</div>
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The original movie had a hard enough time escaping controversy in '78 without a fuckwit like Stephen Monroe ignoring the subtext and making it a backwoods <i>Saw</i> clone with an emphasis on sex, if the poster wasn't a big enough clue. Using sex to sell a movie about rape earns you a one-way-ticket to hell in my book. Hobos should pee on you. Muggers should be given your address. I have no time for someone who'd turn in a second-rate piece of shit like this and name it after one of the most widely misunderstood/infamous films of all time, a movie that earned its reputation thanks to continued hand wringing over something people still won't talk about. It's happening today. Look at Lucky McKee's <i>The Woman</i>. That movie went out of its way to stare a very uncomfortable subject in the mouth because it had an incredibly specific point to make about the nature of white masculinity and people flipped the fuck out. Monroe's shitstain of a remake is in borrowed spotlight and has nothing to say. If they'd called this movie anything else, <i>Always Lock Your Door</i> or <i>She Waits In The Woods</i>, something generic like that, no one would have bothered with it because it turns rape into a supposedly compelling argument to turn into the Jigsaw Killer for a weekend. But Sarah Butler's performance is barely there (it's certainly nothing like it needed to be to acquit this movie of its crimes. Camille Keaton's performance alone answers any and all questions of mysogyny as far as I'm concerned) and Monroe never misses an opportunity to get her naked, which negates any argument he may have had in the first place. It's all boundlessly stupid and even more so considering that Steven R. Monroe makes shitty made-for-syfy movies like <i>Ice Twisters</i> and <i>Ogre</i> and the second he was done with this deeply unpleasant assignment, he went right back to making <i>Mongolian Death Worm</i>. Andrew Howard gives a good performance, but it's not worth sifting through shit to get to it. Before I go ahead and write this off and encourage you to do the same, I want to draw your attention to this bit of trivia from the IMDB:</div>
<i>According to director Steven R. Monroe, the studio submitted an uncut version of the film to the MPAA to see if by chance they would get an R rating. The MPAA came back and said "look, you've got an NC-17 movie, but we don't recommend that you cut it down because we feel like it's really impactful."</i> Yeah...I bet they said that.</div>
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Mother's Day<br />
by Darren Lynn Bousman<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475823120944882" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg12vQQhcRIPokG5S2R2NETnQbeJSIIc-NoUW3-upU2g-Iv5Q01Y-uxnzMADxpZWBmKJzG8MQRNkeI8uguGwcHR_vIEnNY6RxMOcb34bIIJ43NUJgKE4nsSPc_e0_39hgfFE5YLbcbdpc/s400/Mothers-Day-1.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 270px;" /></span></div>
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I admit that I was interested in seeing this, though not without reservation. It was Darren Bousman's first feature outside the <i>Saw</i> franchise, excepting his misbegotten musical <i>Repo! The Genetic Opera</i>, which he'd made once before as a short. So this was his first movie with a clean slate. I was willing to look past the Saw films because I really wanted to see if he had something to say. James Wan, left to his own devices, has less-than-nothing to say. After laughing my way through Insidious, I though perhaps Bousman had a better chance at my respect. Bousman's talent remains in question, though Mother's Day proves he's a perfectly decent director when he wants to be. If I compare this to <i>The Woman</i> again, just as it's the last thing I saw, I can say that though I thought that film smarter and more cunning, I have to admit that Bousman has a tighter grasp on mechanics. His screenwriting, on the other hand, needs work. The problem with <i>Mother's Day</i> is that it's made of punishing vignettes that pit people against each other in an impossible situation, which if you'll recall is what he spent the last ten years doing making <i>Saw</i> sequels. Call it <i>SawBurbia</i> but all that it means is that he didn't remake <i>Mother's Day</i> so much as <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/11/video-nasty-diaries-house-after-last.html">The House on the Edge of the Park</a>.</i> A woman and her insane sons crash a housewarming party after a botched bank robbery (think <i>Reservoir Dogs, </i>actually, no, think <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/11/video-nasty-diaries-house-after-last.html">Last House on the Beach</a></i>) under the impression that the house is theirs and that their mother is there waiting for them. It was, at least up until a few months ago when it was foreclosed upon and the newlywed Sohapis won it in an auction. There's just one problem. Ike and his brothers have been sending money to this house because they thought their mother still lived there. If the Sohapis and their guests want to leave alive they have to fork over the money, keep gutshot brother Johnny alive, not make trigger happy Addley mad and most of all not upset their crazy fucking mother.</div>
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Fitting that we should end our marathon remake fest with this one as it features cast members from <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">My Bloody Valentine,</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></i><i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">Sorority Row</a></i> and <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html">Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a>. In this movie's corner is tight if not particularly discerning direction from Darren Bousman and characteristically strong work from Jaime King, Shawn Ashmore and Briana Evigan, who I rooted for the whole film. You survive <i><a href="http://www.blogger.com/a">Sorority Row</a></i>, you earn my respect. That she's very cute helps too, but I digress. On the other hand none of the set-pieces that make up the film's second and third act haven't been done before and better; people beat each other to a pulp though they keep getting back up past the point of that being reasonable and I really can't shake the feeling that this was a bunch of <i>Saw</i> ideas recycled into another screenplay, just as Bousman's <i>Saw 2 </i>was once something else entirely that was retrofitted into the series. And beyond that the film's thesis is tired and without the green-and-grey scale or the amped up theatricality of the murders, I can kinda see why its producers shelved it so long (it wrapped in 2009 and has seen very few screens, legally that is, since then): it's a joyless slog. It doesn't matter how likable everyone is because you know pretty much from the beginning that no one's survival is guaranteed; it doesn't help that people are killed in that annoying "thought you were the villain" way that horror directors are so fond of. So why watch nice people get killed? Well, that's a question that you have to ask yourself before watching most horror remakes because 14 times out of 20, that's what you'll be watching. I'm not opposed to remaking a movie if you do it well and have a reason. Eli Roth talks a big fucking game about being able to do justice to Tobe Hooper's <i>Funhouse</i>. Guess what? Tobe Hooper did justice to Tobe Hooper's <i>Funhouse</i>. It needs Eli Roth remaking it like the human body needs heroin. I say unless you prove you can make your own movie, something Eli and the rest of this crew have proven rather sad at lately, you shouldn't be allowed to remake someone else's. Until then, do some research, find these movies and appreciate why they were optioned in the first place: they're worth watching....well, maybe not <i>Children of the Corn</i>. We'll just have to see if everyone learns their lesson in another ten years.</div>
Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-50959116757793172572011-07-26T23:44:00.004-04:002016-03-22T12:59:13.938-04:00ReMarathon 2011, Part 2<div style="text-align: left;">
Now, where were we? Oh yeah!</div>
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Black Christmas<br />
By Glen Morgan<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634881002698269778" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFwmLFOgItK4Xkodmqnxs1pE4DE5LMfdZxBnMdUGL5Ihc82Xvm8-lImctqP85XVBCWkZNgp_RI-wU1ObAAu-4wb0EFYnkP6R2U-PErxvU7G_dKfJ9q8nWlCKc1blvfhYJa9c6HAmr5Fd4/s400/black_christmas_ver3_xlg.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 271px;" /></span></div>
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Ok, finally. Here's a film that not only does something completely different from its namesake, but also uses the story from the earlier film in a clever way. So, this movie retcons the story of <i>Black Christmas</i> into a modern day plotline, or, well, that's not exactly true. For those of you who've seen <i>Black Christmas</i> (which I'll be reviewing before too long), you'll remember that the voice on the phone continually mentions two people called Agnes and Billy. Well, Glen Morgan's <i>Black Christmas</i> has weaved them a backstory. Turns out Billy and Agnes were siblings whose parents were totally insane. Billy responded by cutting his parents up, carving their skin into the shape of Christmas cookies and eating them on December 25th. The girls living in the sorority that used to be Billy's house celebrate this with a macabre little ritual. Mrs. MacHenry, the dorm mother, assigns one of the girls Billy when they do their secret santa giftgiving every year. The eight girls left in the house this Christmas are split about it. Heather the jesus freak doesn't like it, Lauren the alcoholic slut doesn't care for anything festive, Kelli doesn't want anyone to fight, Melissa takes Lauren's side because she doesn't like Heather, Dana doesn't have a personality, Eve is too much of a space cadet to take part in the discussion and both Megan and Clair are already dead. Now, the film plays it cool here. As much as we're all obviously supposed to assume that Billy has had a hand in the deaths of the poor coeds, we're also shown quite clearly that Billy has yet to break out of the insane asylum he's been kept in since cutting up his parents. Make no mistake, he does break out, and violently, but the question remains: who's the hulking blonde in the attic who's carving up the girls of Delta Alpha Kappa?</div>
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There are two words that spring to mind when I think about this version of <i>Black Christmas</i>: Fucking Insane. Every oblique angle shouts crazy, every few minute someone is murdered in the craziest fucking way possible, every new plot development makes someone either a suspect or a victim, blood and viscera shoot out of wounds like someone turned on a hose. People don't just bleed in this movie, they fucking explode. The lighting is absolutely nuts and the camera work matches it every step of the way. With <i>Black Christmas</i>, Glen Morgan has effectively out De Palma'd Brian De Palma. The swaths of red that litter the colour scheme, the jaundiced villain, the enormous slant on voyeurism, the presentational lighting, the is-it-stealing-or-homage quality that imbues every angle. Christ on a cricket, no wonder Morgan hasn't worked since. Weirder still, despite its sorority house setting and cast of not-quite stars, there's almost no nudity and none that couldn't be someone's body double. Now, here's where the problems start. I really liked <i>Black Christmas</i> but not without reservations. It has big problems, pacing chief among them; the thing moves at the speed of sound to no real ends. Characters arrive in time to make a hint of an impression before being killed and the girls who make the slightest impression last the longest. And I have to dock some points for the way Morgan so quickly dispatches Leela Savasta, a better and more courageous actress than two-thirds of the girls in the sorority. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, for instance, should have been the lead. She's the most memorable of the girls by far (Crystal Lowe a close second) and attacks her role, making it impossible for her to remain in the single-trait slot tat Morgan wrote for her. Katie Cassidy is the main character basically by default. She's by far the least interesting and charismatic of the girls. And I can't say I'm really on the side of a movie that carves up a bunch of well-meaning teenage girls (especially when the script makes such a huge fucking deal about the bonds of sisterhood), but style does count for something and this film drips with it. I knew Morgan trafficked in the unsettling after his redo of Willard, but this thing leaves that, and frankly everything covered here today, in the dust. It's not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach and it's not a <i>good</i> movie like the original was, but sweet jesus, it's deranged. I'm kind of amazed that there's no force in place to tell people about movies like this and <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/12/murderous-misfits-i-have-known-this.html">Orphan</a></i>, because they really need to be seen to be believed.<br />
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Hannibal Rising</div>
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by Peter Webber<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634159690612740962" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5xqHohQN4ZxSyoXuSJfQPtb52acS7UsLlbbEQ6_HIiuucq1b0QzMavRSVd0gRH4EBR-xiomUgEOPcIGY-Rl9aR40k1yxDvDHglJQ_Dq9luDd45PcUIHwQ5R2T9eHrw2Xy-FG_iyHJ41k/s400/936full-hannibal-rising-poster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 271px;" /></span></div>
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Now, ok, I'll admit that this doesn't quite count. <i>Red Dragon</i> can only be considered a remake in the loosest sense, in that it was only following the same novel as Michael Mann's first treatment of the Hannibal Lecter story, <i>Manhunter</i>. But it was clearly supposed to be more in keeping with the newest films on the world's most famous cannibal, because, well, Brett Ratner stole Ridley Scott's aesthetic even if he seemed to have been following Mann's earlier script. So with the last film in the series being as shameless a cash-in as <i>Red Dragon</i>, it was tough not to lump <i>Hannibal Rising</i> (why is my urge to always call this <i>Young Hannibal</i>?) in with the then-novel spate of glossy remakes. In fact it was this and Michael Bay's <i>The Hitcher</i> that I remember causing me to throw my hands up and start avoiding these things as a rule. I didn't realize that <i>Hannibal Rising</i> wasn't meant to grip the coattails of a franchise that hadn't made a dignified sound since 2001. The book that it's based on, however, was. Before it was an indifferent-to-poorly received movie it was a universally panned novel that took all of the mystique out of a character that not even a film as shitty as <i>Red Dragon</i> could undo. Thomas Harris, the book's author, apparently needed a bigger house, because there's no defensible reason for the book, and its written in such breathless, purple prose that you get the impression that he needed to finish it before the movers take the couch he's sitting on. He goes so fast that he fucks up several crucial, already spelled-out details from previous books, one of them kind of crucial as it's the reason he goes on his lifelong killing spree. The book's thesis was simple: Hannibal wasn't the embodiment of evil for <i>no reason</i>, he was evil because some Nazis killed and ate his baby sister. While all the angry literary critics who made up the books audience agreed that its not a bad impulse to suggest that all bad people typically have a reason to be that way, they also rightly posited that Lecter was a <i>fictional</i> character and no one gave a shit how he became evil, they just wanted him outwitting/flirting with Clarice Starling. It might not be morally right but its fucking entertaining, which is why people read the sort of thing Harris writes in the first place. The movie tries hard to stick to Ridley Scott's template and undo some of Harris' blind traipsing around history, trying to account for how someone with a vendetta forgot it and became history's greatest monster.</div>
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Hannibal's family is killed at the tail-end of WWII by some nazis played by ringers like Rhys Ifans and Kevin McKidd . He grows up with an awful big chip on his shoulder and outgrows the boarding school that has been set up on his family's estate. He escapes when he gets tired of the shitheads who run the place and the dipshits who go there and goes looking for his uncle. The older man is dead by now, but his mistress (the impossibly beautiful Gong Li, who, like everyone else in this movie, is better than this) takes him in and teaches him how to use a samurai sword in the film's dumbest scene. His killing technique refined, he tests it out on a collaborator who upsets his aunt one day in the marketplace. He escapes but not without arousing the suspicion of Inspector Popil (Dominic West, also way better than this. The way the man looks in his long coat is the second best thing about the film. The way Gong Li looks in a kimono remains the best, even if she looks tired and bored throughout) who can see that Lecter is probably guilty but that he's only killing evil men. It's the kind of conundrum that goes nowhere, because the movie then gets to its real business, Lecter hunting down and Saw-killing the nazis who ate his sister. And as with any prequel, there's no real tension because you know that Hannibal's going to be around for dozens and dozens of years after the events of this film. The only tension is whether he'll rescue his aunt from one of Ifans' traps, but even that ain't much. The movie's more like a grotesque painting than a proper horror film, anyway, pretty, but totally static.<br />
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Peter Webber was probably as good as this movie was going to do. But he's not a horror director and doesn't have the stomach for gut spilling. So in lieu of that, he makes the movie and all the characters and their houses as gorgeous as possible and mostly suceeds, but this wasn't supposed to be a sober costume crime drama, it was meant to be about Hannibal, but Webber's camera doesn't really like Gaspard Ulliel as Hannibal. He's the only active character in a landscape of well-worn, beautifully passive faces and he doesn't gel with the rest of the film. It's a movie that wants to be about the poetry of murder like Hannibal, but doesn't have enough to say on the subject of murder. It's got the same structure as a<i> Saw</i> film or the later <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> remake, and so should be a straight-up exploitation film but isn't. So it's all very pretty and perfunctory and boring and I hardly noticed it going by. Interestingly, this was the last film Dino De Laurentiis produced. Back in the day he was so miffed about <i>Manhunter's</i> success that he reportedly gave the rights to <i>Silence of the Lambs</i> up for free, which then went on to be one of the most successful films of all time, anyway you choose to look at it. Fitting that Dino died trying to correct his biggest financial mistake with an even bigger one.<br />
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The Hills Have Eyes 2<br />
by Martin Weisz</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634880993711375106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0xelo2er82MnRu4RcuqnncBKMCcFepdgH0F_Ei8Ur-SIBQWiIJTRKBCDiIdvXQqwBpOE-rWlJNY8ytQglQ5oaeG6iZuNaR8yuMD4YKDqBFeQGLDJBEytsoCLXvOm1AzZ4POD1YpeZEfs/s400/hills2_international.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 270px;" /></span></div>
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Joe Bob Briggs said of <i>Blood Feast</i> that it's a more interesting film to talk about then watch. This is true of the tortured history of the sequels to both versions of <i>The Hills Have Eyes</i>. In 85, a year before Tobe Hooper gave us the much hated sequel to <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/come-hungry-leave-happy-my-favourite.html">The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a></i> under the watchful wallets of Golan and Globus's Canon group, Wes made a sequel to his best film, <i>The Hills Have Eyes</i>. It was...shameful. And just as Tobe's film got something of a do-over sequel wise that was a totally grim and pointless affair (can't make a sequel to a film where the villain's had his chainsaw arm off), Wes Craven got to live vicariously through the sequel to the remake. Wes was a good deal luckier in his directors than Tobe, but ultimately both tarnished their own reputations because the mere idea of a sequel brings down the classiness of the original idea, even if the respective <i>requels</i> were slightly better than they wound up being. Alexandra Aja and Marcus Nispel were more or less evenly matched in America, even if Aja's debut was a touch more auspicious than Nispels. John Liebesman, however, had nothing on Martin Weisz's credentials. Weisz' film <i>Grimm Love</i> might not be the best thing I've ever seen, but it boasted two incredible lead performances and a David Fincher-inspired production design. On the other hand, he's also a fucking music video director, which probably accounts for <i>Hills Have Eyes 2</i> being totally throw-away. But back to Craven. I think he clearly saw an opportunity to correct past mistakes when Fox Atomic optioned the sequel. He and his son Jonathan even wrote the damned thing. And from the look of the trailer, you'd really think they'd nailed it. Seriously, check it out. It's one of the better trailers I've ever seen. That the film looked so handsome from far away is a little disappointing because there's nothing unique or interesting here. It's a touch better than these typically get, but that's all really. A bunch of guys with guns head into the desert, are hunted by cannibals and most of them get slaughtered. Its <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favourite-films-volume-9-aliens.html">Aliens</a></i> to <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/08/leave-la-france-chapter-5-death-by.html">Hills Have's</a></i> <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html"><i>Alien</i></a>. Except with a 65% drop in quality and suspense. The best thing you can say about it is that it is markedly better than the first <i>Hills Have Eyes II</i>. But, really so's anything...except this next film.</div>
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The Hitcher<br />
by Dave Meyers<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKZQrsE3xBu18n5YPVgYtMSF85ewwI34_lSiFrurfA-pyoerpCYZUJZCzI8n8rpkRNSPAAOfqYmY-hXojI9HzQfhB_DKDA__MrvV4kc3eHDkse-CX381OGPLfm5_zZed8qVh6GUJ0TK7Q/s1600/the_hitcher_2007_poster.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634159833244299618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKZQrsE3xBu18n5YPVgYtMSF85ewwI34_lSiFrurfA-pyoerpCYZUJZCzI8n8rpkRNSPAAOfqYmY-hXojI9HzQfhB_DKDA__MrvV4kc3eHDkse-CX381OGPLfm5_zZed8qVh6GUJ0TK7Q/s400/the_hitcher_2007_poster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 270px;" /></a></div>
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Michael Bay productions exist largely to sell tits and bad emo music, which is why his Transformers movies are scored largely by Linkin Park and the sound of Megan Fox's hips swiveling. It's also why when he gets what I'm sure are sticky, sweaty palms on a property, he'll find someone with less scruples than even him to direct it. Bay didn't direct The Hitcher, but it's tough to picture him doing a worse job than Meyers. Meyers' spooktacular CV include the music videos for The Offspring's "Original Prankster" (the one with the shit sandwich), Creed's "My Sacrifice" (the one where Scott Stapp pulls himself out of a river), and Dave Matthews Band's "I Did It" (the one that steals from movies as diverse as <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i> and <i>Evil Dead 2</i>, which proves that he's seen enough scary movies that he should hate his version of <i>The Hitcher</i> and especially the asshole who directed it). And boy does that show; the film is basically one long music video. The first image is terrible and the shittiness never relents. A computer generated hare steps out onto a desert highway and is hit by a car. Then, set to one of the many terrible songs this movie has up its sleeve, Jim Halsey calls his girlfriend and wakes her up. They're supposed to go on a road trip today! <i>OH NO!!!!</i> <i>She's totally making them late!</i> Yeah, it's that kind of film. Fucking shoot me. The movie plays out with exactly the same beats as the original except that Halsey isn't alone, and he doesn't end up being the lead character, though he certainly starts out that way. Already the movie is beyond saving. By giving Halsey company right away, the writers have already taken away the thing that made the first The Hitcher so compelling in the first place: Halsey's complete isolation. Even when Nash shows up, she's more like a mirage than a character and Eric Red's screenplay is pretty fucking vicious towards her presence. By putting Sophia Bush in the car, Bay has neutered the movie to the point of <i>ABSOLUTE Irrelevance</i>. No matter how good Sean Bean's performance might be (and frankly he's been better. He seems faintly embarrassed, like he knows he's being undercut by the dumb movie he's in at every turn), it doesn't fucking matter because Bay doesn't kill the only pair of tits in the movie.</div>
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And that's all before we consider that Ryder has morphed into a generic boogeyman. He's everywhere and nowhere and he's unkillable and has unlimited ammo. In the dumbest scene in the movie, Ryder appears in a Thunderbird to take down a squadron of cop cars while Nine Inch Nail's "Closer" also comes out of nowhere to score the scene. Man, fuck this movie. By the time we've gone through the most memorable scenes from the first movie, rendered useless because of the high school play level acting from its two charisma-free leads, we get to the conclusion. By this time Sophia Bush is by herself and Ryder has killed all the cops in the van taking him to prison in an impossibly dumb way. So she takes the sheriff's gun to go kill Ryder. But, best part, Ryder fucking takes it from her, and then kills the sheriff. So not only does she fail to kill him when it meant her boyfriend's life, she can't even do it when she has nothing to lose. So she finally gets ahold of <i>another</i> gun, which happens to be a shotgun that would knock her right on her ass if she fired that thing in reality and kills him. So her victory is hollow and the movie it closes has the dubious honor of being one of the worst films ever made. Nice work, everybody. Lunch?<br />
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April Fool's Day<br />
by Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores</div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634159693696787490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimiQ8Y1iIv6zOqfEv7XDRWZm-SsDnIa6SpW5iqIu_hwDXFqAlVRBhRhEVkL5mTuJkOBsupiS7gcOMf8ZevyR1_UAHAEvSaQ2gIgWYQYDdzd_1DIe0NmdK3HdTSB2S35eLnWeBorGOs9u4/s400/17683.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 277px;" /></span></div>
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Now, before we begin, a note. Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores would like very much like it if we called them The Butcher Brothers, which is adorable. After all, their movies couldn't be more harmless if they replaced every actor with a Jack Russell Terrier and called it a gallery installation. Having seen their rather terrible 2010 film <i>The Violent Kind</i>, I knew I was in for a treat when their cute pen name appeared under the words "Directed by." Incidentally that they don't add "Barely" is false advertising that I think could get you a class action suit going. The plot and gotcha twist at the end are in keeping with the original film, but my question is why bother. None of the people in this film are what you could call "actors" or if they are, Flores and Altieri convinced all of them not to act as some kind of experiment. Now eventually they settle into it (what's that they say about broken clocks?) but for the first forty-five minutes, we're privy to a movie in which exactly one person seems to be doing anything other than reading lines from a card. Holy Fucking Shit is it terrible. That exception, in case you were wondering, is Scout Taylor-Compton. She acts circles around these motherfuckers. If she made Chloe Moretz and Lori Heuring seem like they're trying too hard, then imagine how she decimates these clowns. And because the Butchers are such god awful filmmakers, the movie looks for all the world like an overlong episode of <i>One Tree Hill</i> or some damn thing. Even worse, they totally and utterly believe in their terrible, terrible screenplays so that all the non-actors deliver their lines as woodenly and sincerely as possible. Never a good combination. It's never less than absolutely embarrassing, like when the movie spends more than five minutes on a fake talk show discussing something we just fucking saw happen. We know what happened, we were there, yet they perversely go over the events of the crime in excruciatingly full detail. If they were actually related I'd say they dethrone John and Erick Dowdle as the worst family of filmmakers working today. Though try as they might, they don't succeed in making Scout Taylor-Compton look less than professional.</div>
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Prom Night<br />
by Nelson McCormick</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634159839757107458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBiL99WFH-0cyg0b2IUZVpe6nRu3CCwkEg_FJPgwABDq2tOmpnZIdAwTS2UYmcJ0V8tsu0BdmqWEWoeGRu4w4ntYWOhTdiXeppjb9SGq7XmlMipo5hlJaqW0EFplqjmJgAA34YuOTTuT8/s400/prom_night_2008_4747_poster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 287px;" /></span><br />
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Speaking of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/07/kids-are-alright.html">Wicked Little Things</a></i>, the script for the update of <i>Prom Night</i> comes from J.S. Cardone. This is a little odd to me because Cardone was active at the same time as the first <i>Prom Night</i>. In fact, Cardone's debut film <i>The Slayer</i>, one of the original video nasties, has a plot almost identical to Humongous, the film that <i>Prom Night</i> director Paul Lynch made in the same year. The plot here is a touch different from the oddball Canadian original; It has no name in common with Lynch's film and instead centers on Donna Keppel. About a year ago her whole family was killed by her math teacher who had a bit of a thing for her. They caught him and locked him up and Donna moved in with her aunt and uncle. She seems to be doing better in her new town and the chemistry she has with her friends is believable. The problem there is that it's too believable. Like "who gives a fuck about these vacuous teenagers if they're all going to get killed" believable? I really feel like Nelson McCormick and Cardone are better at the quieter moments in these films. They should really think about making films about the foibles of professionals and their less-than-professional children. I didn't really like the teenage characters (and what was Jessica Stroup doing in a prom dress? She played a commando in <i>Hills Have Eyes 2</i>, how old is she supposed to be?) but I believed that <i>they</i> believed in their own shallow nonsense. The best part of the movie is watching Linden Ashby and Jessalyn Gilsig at home acting like a concerned married couple or Idris Elba acting like a seasoned professional and doing preliminary rounds in the hotel he suspects a murderer might find or Brittany Snow as Donna and Scott Porter as her boyfriend in her bedroom after they think the trauma is over. The moments of calm the movie finds are superb and made me like it despite it being a cash-in with no sex and no real violence. The bitchy prom queen doesn't even get stabbed. What the fuck kinda slasher movie is this, anyway? I'd like to know from the people who really liked this (it made enough money to give McCormick and Cardone their next job, which we'll talk about soon enough) what they like about it? It's not particularly scary, sexy or bloody. If you read this, please go ahead and put that in the comment section because I'd love to know.</div>
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My Bloody Valentine<br />
by Patrick Lussier</div>
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This has roughly the same story as the original <i>My Bloody Valentine</i>, which was one of the better <i>Friday the 13th</i> knock-offs the early 80s-slasher boom produced. The key difference of course is that this became a springboard for the burgeoning 3D industry, then nearing its apex. This of course means that it looks like shit. I was under the impression that this was Lussier's first film, which would have excused the amateurish camera work (I chalked the look to the shitty 3D cameras, but there's no reason it should be so poorly filmed). But he's been doing this since <i>Dracula 2000</i>. Remember that piece of shit? Yeah, well he also did two fucking sequels. Yikes. Anyway, the movie doesn't work as a horror film and frankly the 3D is wasted as often as its used. For every time the pick-axe comes flying at the camera, there's ten tons of shit thrown by one character or another that isn't 3Dified. And the 3D murders end up looking incredibly lame anyway because they naturally couldn't actually throw a mining tool at their expensive 3D cameras, so instead they CG it in later in post, making the whole project totally useless. And then there are little irksome things littered throughout the movie. A woman is hit in the stomach with an axe and blood hits the wall? The killer manages to run through a grocery store and then out the door and around back in ten seconds and then when another character makes the same trip it takes about three minutes. In one scene the killer's shadow starts close to a character, then gets far away as he approaches her...? That's just shit filmmaking. And then the reveal takes us back through a few murders we've already witnessed and flat out lies to us about things we've seen. You might generously call it unreliable narrator, but I call it lazy filmmaking.</div>
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In fact the one saving grace was, like <i>Prom Night</i>, its relationship dynamic. I really enjoyed Kerr Smith as the sheriff being shaken up by wife Jaime King's former relationship with Jensen Ackles. Now Ackles isn't worth shit, but King and Smith are terrific and they're the only reason to watch this piece of shit. When Lussier starts casting doubt about Smith's innocence, it only works because of how firm a grip he has on the character. There's a moment about halfway through when he wants King to rat on Ackles but she won't do it. His anger there is terrifying and understandable at once, and it's probably the best moment in the movie. I wanted a film just about their marriage. Alas, I got a movie about 3D tits and poorly executed jaw removal. Sigh.<br />
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Sorority Row<br />
by Stewart Hendler</div>
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Now <i>Tayne</i> I can get into. <i>Sorority Row</i> is obviously a remake of <i>The House on Sorority Row</i> but it's really like all remakes in one. The ur text. There are elements of <i>Black Christmas,</i> <i>April Fool's Day, My Bloody Valentine </i>and<i> Prom Night</i> here and it's sleazy and bitchy enough for all of them. Thank christ, says I. If I had to sit through another film that doesn't even best its source material in body count, I was going to snap. <i>Sorority Row</i> starts with<i> April Fool's Day's</i> opening gambit: a prank. Garrett has fucked up, so his sister Chugs and her sorority sisters Cassidy, Jessica, Claire, Megan and Ellie have decided to fake something pretty fucking serious. They convince Garrett that Megan would get with him and to roofy the girl's drink and then film his bedroom as she fakes a reaction. They drive her out to a mine when she plays possum in the car and then take things just a touch to far. Garrett thinks she's really dead, so he opens up her wind pipe with a fucking tire iron, which says to me, he was going to snap sooner or later anyway. So with Megan actually dead, they agree that the only solution is to throw her down the mine and forget it ever happened. Cut to eight months later, the girls start disappearing. Not only that, anyone who even overhears them talking about it, also goes. Now, we know what's really happening: they gettin' fucking murda'd! But who is it? And what do they want?</div>
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The one thing you'll hear complaints about, I'm guessing is that there isn't nearly enough sex to make this a grindhouse classic. And the murders could be a little more frequent, but this movie plays the game and well. You don't like any of these girls because most of them go pretty far out of their way to earn the crazy ass fate they wind up with. Seriously the way these women meet their maker is pretty off the wall. In order to let them know that they are being killed because of what happened to Megan, the killer has crafted some kind of crazy fucking knife that's shaped like a tire iron, but consists of several kinds of knife. Between the horrid murders, coed showers, all the sex that's hinted at and Leah Pipes as the consciousless leader of the sorority, you're looking at one hell of a sleaze-fest. It's the kind of film that never looks over its shoulder and I appreciate its efficiency. It's ten kinds of dumb but I had a fucking blast howling at the screen with a room full of like-minded individuals.</div>
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Tune in tomorrow for <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-3-and-soon.html">the thrilling conclusion!</a></i></div>
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Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-77134212069917273022011-07-24T02:46:00.022-04:002011-07-26T23:53:12.761-04:00ReMarathon 2011, Part 1<div style="text-align: left;">From the opening seconds of <i>Quarantine</i>, you know instantly that they've fucked the dog. Jennifer Carpenter's human interest reporter looks into the camera and says that her name is Angela Vidal. But that's not how she pronounces it. She says it "Vie-Dell," which is how no one pronounces that name in any part of the globe unless they've been hit in the head with a hammer and recently. In the writer-director's attempts to give the film it's own voice, they managed to make one of the dumbest translation mistakes I've heard since Jesus Franco first fell in love with Lina Romay. Remakes, in theory, are a way to tell a story again on the off chance that there was something off about the original. In the case of, say, <i>The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo</i>, the movie was told much like a TV movie; it was uncinematic, slow and largely very boring. It was also wrapped up in an insanely complex niche of Swedish government. You fix those problems by giving it to David Fincher, a director renowned for his beautifully visual storytelling and distinct stylization. In a perfect world, that'd be the only way you remake something. Our world is far from perfect and so we get a remake every six months of something that either didn't need to be remade or could have used a remake but the folks in charge address problems that weren't pervasive in the original, inventing new ones on the way, kinda like giving someone with a broken leg an intubation. One out of every...let's say 21, for no reason at all, will have enough going for it to overlook the fact that it's pissing in a pretty important pool. But largely these movies could have been called anything, which means that they're cash-ins. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">The Hitcher</a></i> is pretty much exactly the same movie as its inspiration, except it sucks a grizzly bear's asshole. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">Prom Night</a></i> and <i>House of Wax</i> bear strictly nominal resemblances to their counterparts, which means they had nothing but cold calculation and dollar signs on the brain. Why call a movie <i>House of Wax</i> if it's got nothing to do with any previous version of <i>House of Wax</i>? Because a name is something, I guess. And producers assume people will come to see a movie that's already kinda sorta succeeded...if you call being slightly worse than <i>Friday The 13th</i> or not the most embarrassing Stephen King adaptation of the 80s when placed next to <i>The Running Man</i> success. Well, lately curiosity got the better of me and after checking out the totally horrible remake of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html">Friday the 13th</a></i>, I decided to run the gauntlet, as it were, and check out every one of the slick, new remakes to see if anyone had anything to say. As a hint for what's to come I will say I was totally in the mood for the kind of blunt, sexualized violence these movies promise when I started this experiment. Now that it's over, I want everyone in Hollywood to die a violent, embarrassing death.</div><br />The Amityville Horror<br />by Andrew Douglas<br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJexcPbdYNcOyuy2xN_wUwyFcfW1OncZCtwSRIHFDtgAzbTHdrJw03Q2WtJQrJ5nV_sTjCqu_FhuG0dju9oSIOr7EWD8i3kBYbFwRZb9tomVnERMVXAVFN8kMf2abWLIaIwVtU1bj5hjk/s400/amityville_horror.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633476128143677874" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 271px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">Now, look before I dig in here, I gotta lotta remakes to get through so if I rehash the plots of movies that you've already seen (or should have, if you call yourselves professionals) we'll never get home. The bad news is that the plot is exactly the same as the original, which is why it never goes anywhere. The good news is that Michael Bay didn't yet take hold of every aspect of these Platinum Dunes films just yet. He's writ large over <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html">The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a></i>, but that film was enjoyable enough if you shut your brain off. Here, he's made as good a choice as I think it was possible to make in giving the film to Andrew Douglas, the director of <i>Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus</i>. Just as John Stockwell seemed an odd but ultimately rewarding choice to direct <i>Turistas</i>, Douglas' involvement saved it from what might have been, so that now it's simply forgettable. He's not much in the way of a climax but he fills the movie with enough memorable and beautiful images that I wasn't offended. The story is dumb and it's loaded with cliche, but Douglas' steady camera and love for the natural imagery surrounding the house that Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George buy make this a markedly better film than its predecessor. If only that meant something. As it is, <i>Amityville</i> is so slight it almost doesn't exist. No one's in any real danger because there are no incidental characters and the best parts about it are mostly divorced from the plot. All in all, not a terrible second effort from Platinum Dunes, but they should have quit while they were ahead.</div><br />House of Wax<br />by Jaume Collett-Serra<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNjLUF2t2Luphz9T4-Xklj8wKb8PWMHRi6tFQ1ap3QPoOG9A1FsA02vzd8uXnvT-GQJy7JjIXmzQ68lwedsWrU7tbsywcQgXM6zJ4vM273vrEv4u0Q5_4KZMNdL7c23Lc0PlpR6eEhkFo/s400/house_of_wax.2005.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475832015456978" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 283px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">I guess the plot is required here as it has absolutely nothing to do with the superior Vincent Price film, or that movie's inspiration from the 30s. In this one, a bunch of fucking kids are going to see a football game, but stop arbitrarily in the middle of nowhere to camp. They piss off some locals on their way in, who stop by in the middle of the night to cut one of their fan-belts. Why they don't cut both of them is because the screenwriters are morons, which they've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by writing <i>Whiteout</i> and <i>The Reaping</i> in the years since this sad little movie. Anyway, two of them go looking for gas and find a town that doesn't appear to have any living relatives. In fact the only guy they find in town is in the middle of a funeral. He says he's got the necessary fan-belt, but that it's at his house and would they please wait for him to finish burying his brother. They agree and decide to hit the Wax Museum first thing. It's suitably creepy and even more so when Collett-Serra lets us know that there's some long-haired creep still working on the figurines in the basement. While retrieving the part, one of the kids is abducted, the other escapes and then their friends show up to help and are all killed and turned into wax people except the lead girl and her brother.</div><br /><i>House of Wax</i> has some of the angularity and baroque direction of the superiorly crazy <i>Black Christmas</i>, but isn't quite as insane. It's stacked to the rafters with talent poached from teenage-aimed television, including Jared Padalecki, whose since settled down in this world with his lead turn in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html">Friday the 13th</a></i> and a surprisingly strong performance from Chad Michael Murray, who just about vanished from sight after this. And then there's the reason this movie gained what little notoriety it did: Paris Hilton as one of the expendable idiots. She's bad but no more so than Camilla Belle in <i>When A Stranger Calls</i>. Her death scene sticks to the old truism about severed heads in horror films: they spent a lot on that head and by christ their gonna get their money's worth. To be fair this is as good as a movie with Paris Hilton could possibly be. It follows roughly the same trajectory as Marcus Nispel's <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html">Texas Chainsaw</a>, right down to the lead's boyfriend being operated on as an indication of how screwed everyone is. It's half-goofy tone reminds me more of <i>Tourist Trap</i> than anything Vincent Price did in the 50s. That is, until the gore comes out and all of a sudden this becomes a much grimmer affair then it started. The best parts of the film, other than how well Murray acquits himself playing a redeemable dickbag, are the opening sequence where we meet the killers as children and hints at how much better the film could have been and then the credit sequence, which was maybe the most compelling part of the movie. I have an inordinate love of the song "Helena" by My Chemical Romance, a band I otherwise have no time for. By putting that and then Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades" in sequence, Jaume Collett-Serra manages to make it seem like I didn't just waste an hour and forty-five minutes, even though I know for certain I did.<div><br />The Fog<br />by Rupert Wainwright<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif5xpUl1byvfTPxPpRC7y5hyphenhyphenQjaHYBM9POD5ByQnZ8oGPLHbLSDh5gMcBIIQl1VEMacfBO5rRTtl7kZ5RpBWX95YHIyPF2gafYzYC6_8R1hAv2bGB3drjEtlpX1i5TgHaDMIKbgdn7pwo/s400/fogposter.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633476123727552818" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 269px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">John Carpenter has terrible taste in films. As much as I like his best work, I've always known from his seemingly endless string of documentary appearances that he likes shit and hates great movies. Which perhaps explains why he not only allowed <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/zombies-of-kind.html">The Fog</a></i> to be remade, but produced the damn thing himself. That doesn't explain why it's the worst thing with his name on it since <i>Ghosts of Mars</i>. Well, maybe handing it to the guy whose credentials include the video for "2 Legit 2 Quit" and fuckin' <i>Stigmata </i>does. Anyway, the story's the same, except it's not scary, and they lose the ensemble aspect which made the original so interesting. And they lose the production design, which, though borrowed from the likes of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, was original enough in the context of American horror that the whole effect was all very pleasing. Here, we get a random collection of set-pieces that add up to nothing with an emphasis on stupid people being stupid and handsome people being handsome. It's all incredibly fucking boring and neutered and should be skipped.</div><br />When A Stranger Calls<br />by Simon West<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiiYBrcRl2li-yoZ8uIdSrI1nMpBDe-2xEJHR-1d_byfu79NrpcuUFz4dn_TwNhUGH0OoLN_30do5t_gpccocPIMX71b0Zrv7WAzlJhoX5Ie4Rl5lZTrnIHneWISHQ1meCDw58rb2GX8M/s400/When-a-Stranger-Calls-movie-poster.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475136634978386" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 271px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">There's a popular misconception that the original <i>When A Stranger Calls</i> is a horror film. It starts as one but the minute Charles Durning shows up, it's a procedural with an emphasis on suspense. And then you realize the whole thing was more a thriller than a horror film. Simon West is not half as smart or clever as Fred Walton, who also directed the original <i>April Fool's Day</i>, on which more in a moment. Though he's since parted company with Jerry Bruckheimer, the lingering stench of his influence is all over this movie. In fact, his first film, <i>Con Air</i>, is more often than not confused with the work of Michael Bay. Which is fitting because West does the same thing to the house that makes up the setting for most of <i>When A Stranger Calls</i> as Bay did to the house in his <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html"><i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i></a>. Except instead of decrepit and grimy, the house here is state-of-the-art and modern. So modern in fact that it's a stage set and never for a second looks like anything else. There's even a scene where the killer jumps through the roof of one of the rooms and you see that it's a set! And he does this ten seconds after he turns the master power to the house on. Last time I checked, the fuse box is never in the attic.</div><br />Anyway, there's no Charles Durning in this one, except for a few seconds in the beginning, it's all girl in the house. And I wouldn't mind except the girl is fucking wretched. Camilla Belle sleepwalks through her part, barely able to get up the energy to sound scared. Which, I guess, is appropriate because the guy doing all the calling isn't all that scary. He's just a guy. The whole thing feels engineered and never works to get you to suspend your disbelief. The opening is promising as we see the handiwork of the killer; the cops have to carry her out of her house in <i>several</i> trash bags, but the film fails to deliver on this promise. The only other thing to say is that this movie features the first appearance of Katie Cassidy, who we're going to seeing a lot more of.<br /><br />The Omen<br />by John Moore<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZspQx_-me9FqU-e0vDlbi_uhPAzdAMTw2a_9ZzuvSfID6nfrNv4-bIgXR-pIomdYdUjRAcioFLr6Gc2T6bcp-Wbdi6IdtDWqCH8Ry24f1b0FoCodXuwnOlJcm0trwDtB9hT1ToR-waHU/s400/The-Omen-movie-poster.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475152725569186" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">The only thing I'll say for this movie is that Liev Schreiber does a fine job and that they found perfect counterparts for the original roles in Pete Posthlethwaite, David Thewlis and I love any movie that casts Giovanni Lombardi Radice, but the beats are exactly the same, the effects are exactly the same, the child has a ridiculous haircut and Julia Stiles is no Lee Remick. The only part that seems to wake the film up is a seconds-long medicine cabinet scare, something these movies all traffic in. Barely there by all accounts and not at all worth your time.</div><br />The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning<br />by Jonathan Liebesman<br /><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuA_9KKAdvh4tbJLeYbSTWkS1vJNi3HkZEgi7CI1HFN5gcTcmWcBThGSGCfkeN2OPNaKd4V1qr1nzMoEhDtWkyul2BbLpZW7tEF0DYTyhE1z4o2GtKf6F27LDq5UAo8Jg6GXA4cmhusCo/s400/texaschainsawnewposter.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475156719239906" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 270px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">Now, look, I know I brought this one on myself (well, ok, I brought all of these on myself, but nevermind that) but I was still pissed off at this movie. First of all, they set this movie in the late 60s, yeah? How about some fucking commitment. You have, what? Seven characters in the whole film, and you couldn't find period costumes for them? Right out of the fucking gate, one of the girls is wearing a fucking La Perla bra, and she's supposed to be <i>poor! </i>And as if that weren't lazy enough, we're treated to basically the same fucking script and identical production design and cinematography as Marcus Nispel and Michael Bay's first <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/who-will-survive-and-what-will-be-left.html">Texas Chainsaw</a></i> film. The only real difference is that the cast is far less adept at selling the fact that they don't know what cellphones are. Oh and it's grimmer. A lot grimmer. I knew this going into it, it is a prequel after all, but I was still so mad at this movie when it kills off the last character. This is when I knew that these remakes were playing fucking dirty. Not only do you not know anything more about Leatherface than you did in the last eight <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> films, if anything, the issue is muddled even further. You see him being born and then his mother dies and he's adopted by a family of crazies. So, that explains how his insanity was nurtured, but what about his birth mother made him want to cut his nose off as a young boy? Yeah, see what I mean? And I know that the mere fact that this takes place before the events of the previous film and that none of the female characters place a revolver in their vagina means that they won't be around for the next outing, but what kind of sick fuckers make a movie about people who <i>have</i> to be killed with a chainsaw before the film ends. That's not suspense, that's torture. So what kind of sick people turn moviewatching into torture? Why Platinum Dunes, of course. This is the first of the Michael Bay produced remakes that I openly despised and could see the disgraceful, sweaty palm of Bay steering the production from the opening sex scene to the last grubby cheat that this movie calls a climax. There were a lot of things to explore in this movie; who belonged to the face Thomas Hewitt is wearing before he steals Eric Balfour's was nothing I cared about. And it's not enough to hinge a movie on otherwise devoted to killing likable people in the worst possible fashion. Don't watch this movie. Don't play their game, you'll lose every time.</div><div><br /></div><div>Quarantine<br />by John Erick Dowdle<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJKkXS8iLK8a_y9GQPYrDYodihPdJ5z-t0fMlmEF_m91Lty1YbF93DWIrRuIBPJf5Uc_IY8WzLPBy0ioLhwoXHQ2nLfSMH6iTvpPV0Z3iPz8t8BZDganFeAsCc33pMYAVS4f1k-btEpM/s400/movieposter.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5633475818397636530" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 269px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left; ">The movie they've raped this time is <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/11/truly-goddamn-terrifying.html">[Rec]</a></i>, a movie that I'd call very near perfect, it's effectiveness as a horror film occasionally standing in the way of any artistic aspiration, which prevents it from being an A+. But as a movie designed to scare you so bad you have nightmares, it's one of the best ever made and is so efficient that you like and believe everybody as who they're supposed to be. <i>Quarantine</i> is a movie run through babelfish. What appears an attempt to be spontaneous is all the more insidious because it's word-for-word the transcript of a brilliant screenplay. The beauty of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/11/truly-goddamn-terrifying.html">[Rec]</a></i> was that you couldn't tell if it was meticulously planned or largely and ingeniously improvised. Here the decision is obvious because aside from a few stupid exceptions (the business with the rats), the script is word-for-word the same. Except...well, let's put it this way: <i>Quarantine </i>is 90 minutes and <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/11/truly-goddamn-terrifying.html">[Rec]</a></i> is 75. The spanish film didn't fuck around and moved so quickly that you were constantly terrified and plot developments happened in a second. Here they take their time to make sure that you are made way more aware than you need to be about what's happening. They also deliver exactly the same lines, but take just as long to do so in English as it takes the actors in the first to do so in Spanish and they talk at three times the speed of your average english speaker. So not only are you aware that instead of writing a new script, they just copied down the subtitles, they made sure to have the actors mock the performances from the original, except more shrill and annoying. It's really kind of perverse, like watching a play by Max Fischer. As much as I hate <i>Let Me In</i> on principle, I have a hard time imagining it's more annoying than <i>Quarantine</i>.</div><br />John Dowdle is one of the worst directors working today and from his short resume, he and his writer brother Drew have absolutely no moral compass. After their hysterically stupid debut,<i>The Poughkeepsie Tapes</i>, their first project out of the gate was a remake and they've since made a film from an idea by M. Night Shyamalan, <i>Devil</i>, a movie unequaled in its offensively facile and downright childish worldview. And again, I wouldn't hate <i>Quarantine</i> so much if they hadn't copied and pasted <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/11/truly-goddamn-terrifying.html"><i>[Rec]</i></a> into Freetranslation.com. I can't quite express to you my contempt for <i>Quarantine</i>, which lumbers along with its dumb caricatures, its soundtrack negating the supposed verite aspect, its cutting when they think no one's paying attention, its generally treating its audience like an abusive boyfriend until it comes to its merciful close. At no point is it believable that the camera being wielded is the kind of camera used for its ostensible purpose or being wielded by anyone but a professional DP. Fuck this movie and fuck everyone involved. You guys screwed up one of the best horror films of all time. A<i> year</i> after it was released. I hope they put that on your tombstone, you fucks. Oh, and they put a bra on the thing in the penthouse, who shouldn't even be there because they changed the cause of the virus. Go fuck yourselves.</div><br /></div><div>Ok, woo...ok, calm...alright...ok, let's just cool off a second. Whew...Ok, I'm good. Join us next time as we <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">continue the saga</a> of the early twenty first century remake!</div><div></div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-35843464119000327592011-07-19T22:19:00.006-04:002012-04-27T00:13:33.800-04:00Who will survive and what will be left of them?<div style="text-align: left;">
Marcus Nispel, like Russell Mulcahy or David Fincher, had a big handicap starting out as a feature film director. He was a music video and commercial director for many, many years before making his cinematic debut. But he had a powerful ally who'd conquered the same disability, someone who has turned out to be just as big a help as a hindrance, no matter how you look at it: Michael Bay. Many people (myself at the top of the list) consider Bay to be the man working the guillotine which narrative cinema has been forced into. But say what you will, he gets your fucking name out there. The real question is what do you do with the spotlight, once you've got it. In Nispel's case, not much, and in fact all we've learned from his forays outside Bay's auspices is that he has nothing to say, which is a shame because if I had to pick one movie that Bay and any of his music video directing, tit-ogling friends were ill-equipped to remake, it was Tobe Hooper's fantastic <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/come-hungry-leave-happy-my-favourite.html">The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a></i>, by any measure one of the ten most important horror films since the introduction of gore into mainstream cinema and, by my count at least, one of the best horror films ever made. It's to Nispel's credit that his remake not only didn't make me furious, I actually kinda liked it until I went to film school. In fact as remakes go, it's still one of the most entertaining even if it has nothing of the original's craftsmanship or integrity.</div>
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre<br />
by Marcus Nispel<br />
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Instead of five kids out to do something fairly responsible and even a little admirable, the five lucky victims in this outing are just some homely hillbillies on their way <i>from</i> a drug buy on their way <i>to</i> a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. The year is 1973, though Bay and Nispel don't care enough about that detail to get more than the clothes right. Kemper and Erin have been dating for quite some time. Morgan looks like Jerry from the original, though he's meant to be closer to Franklin in that he's a serial virgin and the hardest to like. The four kids became five when they picked up Piper, a randy girl who looks considerably older than I imagine she's supposed to be, who immediately took up with Andy, the sweatiest, hunkiest guy in the van. Thinking they'd had good enough luck they agree its best to help the girl who stumbles out of nowhere. The fact that their van almost collides with the girl doesn't seem to phase her. They bring her inside and try to get her to talk but all she can manage are a few macabre hints. Apparently "they" are all dead and she's the only survivor. When the kids try to drive her to get some help, they inadvertently pass a sign she recognizes, which sends her into a full-on freak out. When they won't turn around despite her screaming at them that they're going the wrong way and that they're all going to die, she pulls a gun out of her vagina and shoots herself in the fucking head. The hand of Michael Bay seems all the clearer now...</div>
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So after a longer time spent on the kids reaction to this event than you'd likely find in a film directed by Bay, they agree to go look for help. The only snag in going to look for a cop is the piñata full of pot in the back of the van they picked up in Mexico. Kemper makes an executive decision to ditch the weed, though mostly I'm thinking he does this to please Erin. An interesting side note here: The others make fun of Erin right away for not drinking or smoking weed while in Mexico. The decision was made to excise the fact that this is because Erin is pregnant (the producers of <i>Deep Blue Sea</i> did the same thing to Jacqueline McKenzie). This would have made her more interesting rather than the typical Final Girl who simply doesn't do drugs because that's just what Final Girls don't do (thank you El Santo). She's also repulsed by Andy and Piper's frantically making out after having known each other for only a day. I'd like to offer Michael Bay a punch in his fucking face for that bit of horseshit. The reason <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/come-hungry-leave-happy-my-favourite.html">Texas Chainsaw Massacre</a></i> remains a classic to this day is because it adheres to none of the gender dynamics or cliches of the films that followed in its footsteps. Right off the bat the politics of the remake are no better than a rip-off. Anyway, let's get back to how fucked these kids are. They stop at a barbecue stand to report the girl's suicide to the police but curiously the woman behind the counter insists on making the call for them. Even curiouser, the sheriff's going to meet them by an abandoned mill. The kids, being fucking idiots, go anyway and wait.<br />
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At first waiting at an abandoned building appears to be the fool's errand it truly is, especially when a boy with (obviously fake) buckteeth appears to tell them that the sheriff ain't coming. He's at his house across the yard getting drunk. Kemper and Erin decide to go investigate and instead just find a legless old man sitting in a wheelchair. After calling the sheriff's office again, the legless man distracts Erin long enough that the biggest man in the county walks up to Kemper and kills him with a goddamn sledge hammer. She retreats to the mill, thinking he just left without her while in the basement the hulking man makes a mask out of her dead boyfriend's face. Meanwhile the sheriff has come and collected the dead girl's body and been as inappropriate and unprofessional as a cop could get away with and still keep his badge. I like to think this is how Michael Bay behaves on set. But you know why this is problematic, don't you? If the sheriff has just collected the girl's body, then who was on the phone with Erin? Andy decides to go back with Erin to look for the M.I.A. Kemper at the old house again. They get in but once Legless has had enough with the interlopers and signals the giant in the basement wearing Kemper's face who emerges with a big (and noticeably modern, nice job props department) chainsaw. He catches up with Andy but Erin gets away. She tries to warn Morgan and Piper but the sheriff, or anyway the man who put the suicide girl's body in his trunk, shows up again, finds some pot in their car and really starts giving 'em shit. He takes Morgan in his squad car back to a house that looks uncannily like...no, is, the house where the dude with the chainsaw and the man with no legs lives, leaving Erin and Piper with no way of starting the van. Not that that matters: the dude with the chainsaw finds 'em a few minutes later.</div>
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Three <i>Transformers</i> movies later the last act of <i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> makes a lot more sense. Roughly a third of the movie is devoted to Leatherface following Erin around various decrepit locations with his saw trying and failing to kill her. I initially pegged this as just following Hooper's lead, which saw Sally Hardesty running for her life for a lot of the final act. That theory doesn't really fit when you realize that the rest of Hooper's story has been altered. The killings are parsed out over the length of the whole film, the family is expanded, dinner with grandpa's been 86'd, and the ending is obvious a mile a fucking way. But by having Jessica Biel run around screaming for 40 minutes the film doesn't so much resemble the original as it does a <i>Transformers</i> movie. In the end of all of those films the plot stops dead so we can watch indecipherable robot fighting for up to an hour. The last act isn't homage, it's just bad screenwriting. The Deus Ex Machina is also easy to overlook in the moment, but it makes no sense that the family would have changed clothes and head to the restaurant in the pouring rain so that Erin can find them for revenge. I guess what I mean is that it's easier to like <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> if you haven't seen the original and if you shut your brain off. But as I rarely if ever get into the right mindset to do that (film school does that to you), I'm outta luck. Or rather, the film is. So basically if you're easily scared, this movie will definitely do the trick, but under scrutiny it's only half as good as I remembered it.<br />
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The blame for <i>Texas Chainsaw</i>'s shortcomings can only be chalked up to Bay to a degree. Sure it takes a particular kind of arrogant fuckface to think he can remake a modern masterpiece to earn a quick buck and to use Jessica Biel's tits to sell it, no less. And to be sure Michael Bay is a fuckface but it's tough to tell his influence apart from Nispel's direction. Nispel's trademarks are hard to know because his sensibility lines up so perfectly with Bay's. The movie is pretty in that kind of color-corrected way that Bay does with his movies, but subsequent efforts have shown this to be mostly a fluke: the color correction in <i>Pathfinder</i> is fucking crazy. I give Nispel credit for hiring Daniel Pearl to shoot the film as he was also Hooper's DP on the original. The production design is definitely new school despite the team's best efforts. There is such a difference between the bone room in Hooper's film and the music video/funhouse aesthetics of the new one. Empty the set of actors (well, maybe keep the legless guy) and you'd be forgiven for thinking Mushroomhead or The Esoteric were about to start playing unplugged electric guitars shaped like bats. Nispel doesn't quite have a handle on storytelling and every scene is undercut by overly dramatic music and I do think it's important to remember that none of the images here are original. And then there are minor problems like that none of these kids has a southern accent, none of them looks, acts or talks like someone would in 1973 and the clothes are more someone's impression of what someone wore back then, not anything you would have <i>actually seen </i>back then. And I can't tell if cutting out the most gruesome parts of the film was a wise decision or not. On the one hand these kids are likable despite their vacuousness (Jessica Biel's final girl is defined more by what she doesn't do than what she does) so I don't really relish seeing them have their shit wrecked by a chainsaw, to coin a phrase. On the other hand it does seem pretty fucking tame considering we don't see much more than we did in the original, thirty years earlier. Nispel amps up the cruelty a bit and makes you really feel the injuries, which is more than a lot of Bay's proteges can claim. The scares and tension still work reasonably well even though now the thing that stands out most in the last scenes is that scads of stadium light comes spilling in through the trees. Hooper and Pearl managed to use darkness and make it look like darkness. Nispel and Pearl worked no such magic. It looks every bit the music video its pedigree would imply and that's just not good enough when you take on one of the greatest horror films of all time.<br />
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In fact the only reliable thing in the movie is the crazy performance by R. Lee Ermey. It's really no different from any of his other performances but there's something so delicious about the way he says "What are you gonna do with your tickets, hot shot?" hands down the best few seconds of the movie. <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> didn't make a star out of anyone in particular but it did prove to Bay that by remaking movies with questionable mainstream reputations but undeniable name recognition, he could get away with doing as little work as possible and making a quick buck. In a few short years Platinum Dunes produced remakes of <i>The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher</i> and even a prequel to <i>Texas Chainsaw</i>. Meanwhile Nispel tried his hand at forcing auteur status to his name. Now I have to admit I'm impressed that even with a producer as fucking retarded as Michael Bay over his shoulder, the <i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> is still one of the more effective and least face-palming of the Platinum Dunes-style remakes to date. But a made-for-tv <i>Frankenstein</i> adaptation and a dvd burial for his boring-as-all-shit viking movie later and it was abundantly clear that he had nothing to say. He probably saw that the only way he was going to have a proper audience again was with Bay. So in 2009, with no critical success to his name and his eye for visuals thoroughly deadened, Nispel rejoined Bay for another fucking remake. The problem is that Bay's influence on <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> wasn't quite as damaging to its quality as it was to Nispel's style. Bay had graduated from the Jerry Bruckheimer school of douche bag filmmaking to become a name in his own right and had more money than christ, so my guess is any attempts to make their next collaboration even half as arty as <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> were shot down in favor of nude water skiing, misogyny and crassly slick set design, Bay's raison d'être. Even if the movie they were remaking was something as bad as <i>Friday the 13th</i>, you'd think they'd at least be able to meet its quality halfway but Bay and Nispel go so far out of their way to make their remake as bad as any of the also-rans that followed the original in the early 80s. Scratch that, their <i>Friday the 13th</i> is as bad or worse as the worst sequels to the original film.</div>
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Friday The 13th<br />
by Marcus Nispel</div>
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In two prologues we're given the events of the original <i>Friday the 13th</i>. A girl cuts off the head of Pamela Voorhees after she assures this girl that she's going to die like the rest of her friends. This girl is the last surviving camp counselor from Camp Crystal Lake, the rest of her peers evidently let her son drown and so Mrs. Voorhees is taking revenge. What she doesn't realize is that Jason is not only still alive, but he's watching all this happen. She's probably equally surprised when the girl cuts off her head instead of dying like the rest of the counselors. Jason collects his mothers head and moves into (and builds?) a system of tunnels beneath the camp ground. At least twenty years later, a group of dumb fucker college kids wander onto the camp grounds looking for an apparently massive pot crop. They find it, or rather the one kid with no girlfriend finds it while the other four have split off to have sex. But as soon as he does a giant with a bag over his head comes out of nowhere and fucking kills him with a machete. Then he kills the first couple by catching the boy in a bear trap and burning the girl alive by tying her up in her sleeping bag and hanging it over their campfire. The second couple are a touch more fortunate in that only the guy is killed for sure. The girl looks a heartbeat away from dying (and despite her showing up in the second act she'd definitely be dead if the scene had gone on another half second) but she's saved by the credit sequence. Later still we learn that this girl had a brother named Clay who's in town for the second time looking for her. Their mother has died and Clay's certain that his sister wouldn't simply skip the funeral, she's too good a person. In other words she's the kind of girl who survives a shitty horror film like this. Clay meets a group of dumb fucker college kids on their way to the lead douche bag's house for what I'm going to say might be senior week, but frankly who gives a shit? These people will all be dead soon, anyway and that's broadcast from twenty thousand leagues away. The lone holdout is Jenna, lead douche bag's maybe-girlfriend, who sympathizes with Clay's plight even as her boyfriend actively and pointlessly antagonizes him. Clay finds a kind of a dumb farmer living near the rich asshole's cabin and tries to show him the missing poster he printed out but the kid is too busy trying to sell weed to the bereaved Clay to offer much assistance. What's that, you say? Yes that does mean that the big pot plant in the woods is his, and it also means that the murderer and Crystal Lake are nearby. The big man himself puts in an appearance a few minutes later, murders the weed growing bumpkin and steals a hockey mask he has lying around his barn for good measure.</div>
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A moment's digression: Look, I know no one's expectations for this film were super high (though the screenwriters sure were, haigh-o! I laugh to keep from crying) but this scene is one of those things that always fucking kills me. Ok, so Jason's been living in this guy's backyard for who knows how long and he's clearly been the machete wielding giant he is now for at least a few years. Yet this kid manages to grow and care for a giant fucking weed patch without getting killed until this point. So what may I ask finally makes this clearly deranged body-builder finally snap? Some kids wandering into his house? Maybe, but the dude doesn't live there, he lives underground. Damian Shannon, one of the scriptwriters, has said that he thinks of Jason as territorial. Granted, but how the fuck did this kid manages to grow the weed then? Fuck you guys and your bullshit. And what are the odds that a kid in a town that dollars to donuts doesn't even have a roller rink has a fucking goalie mask laying around his barn? It's not like he's got any place to practice his skating. Or come to think of it, that's not even his barn, is it? What the fuck does the old codger who owns the place need with a goalie mask. And where the shit does a loner get a bow-and-arrow or even know what one is? He was fuckin' six when his mom died! FUCK YOU!!! Digression over. The kids immediately start earning their deaths by waterskiing topless, smoking weed, drinking and stripping and then Jason starts killing them in the most disgusting ways possible. At the same time Clay and Jenna go looking for clues as to where Clay's sister Whitney might be and slowly become aware that they're all being hunted by the lug in the hockey mask and he's using a series of tunnels to do it. But what Clay doesn't realize is that Whitney is being held captive in these tunnels and the only reason she's still alive is that she looks like his mother when she was a young woman, so young that there's simply no fucking way that Jason would remember her looking like that, so fuck you, screenwriters!<br />
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When my dad and I walked out of that abortion of a <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011.html">Fog</a></i> remake, he said something that I think about all the time. It really takes a shitty fucking movie to make <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/zombies-of-kind.html">The Fog</a></i> look like the vastly superior film. I like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/zombies-of-kind.html">The Fog</a></i>, but it's tone is so light and dreamlike that it doesn't scare so much as just sort of pleases but next to the piece of shit remake it was slapped with, all of a sudden it seemed like a masterpiece. Similarly, I hate the first <i>Friday the 13th</i> so much that I haven't been able to force myself to watch it again to review it despite its undeniable cultural importance. I like 9 out of 10 slasher also-rans more than I like the original <i>Friday the 13th</i> yet next to this fucking remake it looks like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/11/if-i-had-to-pick-one-film-to-show-to.html">The Thing</a></i>. Say what you will about the original (and believe me when I say that I sympathize with any gripe you have with it) it was made on the cheap and is now thought of as a classic. This movie drips with money and doesn't manage a fraction of that movie's questionable integrity. This is a movie that the dickweed who ruined <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i> with his horrid remake turned down the chance to direct. This is a movie that Michael Bay, the movie's fucking producer, walked out of. This is a movie so fucking bad it's almost unreal. First of all the tone is impossible to nail down. What to make of the first stoner singing aloud to Night Ranger's "Sister Christian" moments before his death? Or of Aaron Yoo's character's underdog chances at sleeping with one of the girls being thwarted by Trent, his rich asshole friend? He goes to an old shed and complains about how Trent is rich and an asshole, which is true, and we side with him and feel bad for him, and then he's fucking dead twelve seconds later? Same goes his friend Lawrence who is a genuinely interesting and sympathetic presence for all the ten seconds we spend with him, yet he gets punished for being selfless. This whole movie is a parade of people being really militantly hacked to pieces by a throbbing surrogate phallus.</div>
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The pace and intensity is relentless and once they've worked through all the horrible dickbags, all they have left to kill are nice people and fuck a movie that exists to kill nice people. Seriously. We spend half of the second act with Danielle Panabaker's Jenna, for instance and she's killed almost completely unceremoniously. I fucking hate it when movie's do that. I get that you're trying to be dangerous, but you're hiring actors. Twenty years ago you were hiring bathing suits, today you have actors and actresses who are really trying to do good enough work that they don't have to stock third tier horror remakes with bodies. So when you kill them, all you're doing is ensuring that not only is your movie not very good, it's also not fun to watch. This does at least answer my question about the death of minor characters in <i>Texas Chainsaw</i>. Chances are if they had really shown the characters in that film getting fucking destroyed by a chainsaw, it would have been unwatchable. I'm glad they pussied out. Because here it's fucking heinous and the impression I get is that Nispel left on his own might be a more vicious director but this movie couldn't be less personal or interesting. It's just slick and even when remaking something as cold and calculating as <i>Friday the 13th</i>, you need more than that to ensure that it escapes the stigma of the 10 sequels the movie fostered and how truly soulless the franchise had become. All this ensures is that its the cleanest and nastiest cash-in yet. Bay paid for the extra gloss and if he didn't like the sex, just what the fuck was he looking for? The movie has his name written all over it, yet even he was dissatisfied, turned off by how fierce and explicit and pointless it all was. Maybe he saw too much of himself in the character of Trent. I've been on a bad remake bender lately and while it's not the worst (that'd be <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011-part-2_26.html">The Hitcher</a></i>) it comes very close to being the most perfunctory. There ain't nothing to see here, it's all been done.</div>
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</div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-34276038269979938022011-07-11T18:25:00.008-04:002011-07-11T20:00:09.909-04:00Come hungry, leave happy (My Favourite Films Volume 19)<div style="text-align: left;">Think for a second about iconic filmic imagery. What comes to mind? I don't mean to push you one way or another, but if you feel so inclined, tell me what the first images that come into your head are down below in the comment section. I'll go ahead and wait here a second. Back? Splendid. I ask because I was watching Turner Classic Movies and they had a sampling of tableaux from iconic films as an interlude between movies and of the six or seven they showed, most were horror or sci-fi films. In fact with the exception of Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Godfather, From Here to Eternity and in the case of the TCM Montage The Graduate, most of the instantly recognizable cinematic symbols come from horror films. <i>The Birds, Psycho, King Kong, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/06/george-romero-month-film-9.html">Night of the Living Dead</a>, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-am-dreadful-and-i-bid-you-welcome.html">Dracula</a> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">or</span> The Horror of Dracula</i> and <i>Frankenstein</i> come immediately to mind, but then there's <i>Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera</i> or any number of the films Lon Chaney earned his nickname making. Stack that against other genres and what do you get? So why did horror become the deformed kid living the cellar? Why is it that some kind with a camera and a couple hundred bucks to blow's first instinct is to make a zombie film? Or a slasher film? Or a house full of freaks film? Horror films didn't start to become the exclusive domain of the maligned and misunderstood until the middle sixties; before then they were all business. Experimental films took care of the inside-of-the-subconscious movies well into the sixties (imagine what a Maya Deren-directed horror film would have looked like? Or Man Ray? Or Stan Brakhage?) but when people figured out you could make something as good as <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/06/george-romero-month-film-9.html">Night of the Living Dead</a></i> as cheaply as George A. Romero and Image Ten did it, then why not give it a shot? I bring this up because the best horror films, even ones that have a reputation for being cheap and squalid, are solidly made. I like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/underdog.html">Let Sleeping Corpses Lie</a></i> and <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/when-moon-turns-red-and-dead-walk-earth.html"><i>The Messiah of Evil</i></a>, but I understand that the reason they're not regarded as classics is because they aren't quite as well-made as their influences. I may hate <i>Carrie</i> for being stupid and witless but I understand that it caught on because it's very old-fashioned/conventional in its editing and art-direction. Which brings us to today's film, <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i>. If the backwoods and desert are where horror's reputation retreated to in the 70s, it's tough not to think of <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> as a big step in that direction. And yet, there's a reason it caught on. If it were as deranged as its name and reputation suggest it'd be unwatchable but Tobe Hooper was a lot more talented than people tend to give him credit for. If just being scary or gross were enough Guinea Pig and Toe-Tag would be household names. <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> managed to become one of the most iconic horror films of all time. You don't wind up as recognizable as something by Hitchcock unless you're doing something right. And you don't wind up something little kids brag about to scare their friends unless you're doing something <i>really</i> right.</div><br />The Texas Chainsaw Massacre<br />by Tobe Hooper<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitTS5SBwuOgbu2c0Fqvr_pR_Dm9jcppqk84aUaZkuawNk2dEm8ijM2qH9jYWjTOZ5Yp96vsLKR-G3VMt0-Gk1J_doz7ITZ8h75x-uRm-PrdnUXDbmcTl1Y59IxWz_HBBxayI5rdd4gSN0/s400/TheTexasChainsawMassacre1.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628246296676446914" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 218px; " /></span><div><div style="text-align: left;">As much as I appreciate the creepiness of John Larroquette's narration (I had the thing memorized by the sixth grade) I feel now it does too much to prepare you for the movie it precedes. The credit sequence is more than enough; it's one of the best ever conceived. Picking up where <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/06/george-romero-month-film-9.html">Night of the Living Dead</a>'s </i>end credits left off, we're shown bits of corpses by the light of a camera flash as one of the most instantly recognizable scraping sounds slowly plays behind a radio announcer describing just what the hell's going on. Someone has broken into the Muerto County (Texas, obviously) cemetery, dug up some corpses and posed them like dolls. The next day every family with relatives buried there comes by to make sure it wasn't their aunt or uncle who wound up an undead marionette. That includes Franklin and Sally Hardesty who roped Sally's boyfriend Jerry and their two friends Kirk and Pam into coming with them to check on their grandfather's grave. After determining that the old man is still underground they set off in the direction of home. The sweltering heat and the smell of the slaughterhouse nearby where their granddad used to work make them pity the hitch-hiker they spot by the side of the road enough to pick him up. Big mistake. The man's creepy enough to look at, what with the big red birthmark on his face, but when he opens his mouth he instantly makes the whole van regret picking him up. Franklin, being the kind of attention-deprived fat kid you all went to high school with, asks him all manner of baiting questions until the crazed little man puts an end to the interview by first cutting his own hand with Franklin's knife (smiling all the while) and then pulling a straight-razor and cutting Franklin's arm. Kirk gets the knife away from him and throws him out of the van.</div><br />Having had more than enough excitement for one day, they decide to make a pit-stop at Sally and Franklin's granddad's place to swim and carry-on for a bit to defuse the tension. They stop for gas and directions but only find one of those things, half-unwillingly, from the guy who runs a barbecue stand. He warns the kids to just drive home but only succeeds in selling them some barbecue (Hooper maintains that this movie is really just about a bad day). They're at grandpa's house a few minutes later. It's at this point that the film starts fucking with your sense of pathos. I guess I should point out that on top of being girlfriendless, Franklin is also in a wheel chair and feels incredibly left out when the others start exploring the house. Hooper's sense of the character and Paul Partain's performance is so fucking spot-on, you hate and pity him in equal measure. But I digress. Pam and Kirk decide to go for a dip but the swimming hole's gone and dried up in the years since Sally and Franklin were kids. Walking further along the path, they hear the sound of what turns out to be a generator in front of a house teeming with old cars and shit tucked away under tarps and behind fences. When Kirk goes inside to find the master of the house hoping to buy some gas from him, he instead finds a tall, stocky man in an apron whose face is hidden behind a mask of human skin. In a heartbeat the man lifts a giant fucking hammer and beats Kirk to death with it. When Pam comes in after him, we get a good look at how this man lives. The room she stumbles into is full of furniture made of human bones and skin, feathers litter the floor and bones hang from strings like mobiles. The man in the mask gets her soon enough, too. Jerry goes looking for the pair of them and doesn't come back by nightfall, leaving Sally and Franklin to go looking for them. They don't get very far between Franklin's wheelchair preventing them from getting through the thick brush and the fact that it's now pitch-dark, but the man in the mask knows the area well enough that he stalks them in the dark and gets the jump on them, sticking Franklin full in the chest with a chainsaw and then chasing after Sally through the woods, through his house and back out to the barbecue stand. Strangely he seems to stop chasing her immediately after she gets there. He promises to get help but when he comes back, it's clear the night has only just started for poor Sally.<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfH-B5hE7ANywo8NfmGhIEhzY1Qe2BD6OdNkd9R6xBXiBjYAtqPs68Gi64YgSXvoGXT1bS7gzG6M1_M-P4SXS8b9BaTh6KDgDhmcKe0Tb1G7dgPfz8ERr9_Yh0LRbqA5eLhslND0DP2N0/s400/the_texas_chainsaw_massacre_image.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628246289419104690" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 240px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">In the Fall of 2010, <a href="http://www.honorszombiefilms.com/2010/04/poorly-shot-interviews-over-coffee-7.html">I interviewed David Gedge from the band The Wedding Present</a>. I was really interested in talking to Gedge because he's a notorious cinephile and I wanted to know what his relation to film was. He liked keeping his distance from the mechanics of filmmaking because as someone whose spent his life in recording studios he can't listen to music without picking it apart in his head. He can watch movies and it's still magic to him; he doesn't want to know how they get made because they wouldn't be escapism anymore. I can sympathize with him to a degree because the more time I spend behind a camera, the less I can just watch movies. It's not impossible to watch movies and buy what's happening on screen as simply what it is, but if I'm not careful the movie's over and I've spent the whole running time paying attention to where the camera was put or mistakes in the sound edit. Sometimes this ruins films I love dearly, but just as often your assumptions about a director's intent are proved right and you feel a swell of pride in your heroes. When watching Tim Kincaid's <i>Kansas City Trucking Company</i> aroused my hunger for creepy goings-on in the South, I decided to revisit <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre </i>for the first time in what was easily three years. In the interim I'd seen everyone of director Tobe Hooper's films right up until the 1990s. And unlike Wes Craven or John Carpenter, Hooper's style remained pretty consistent. After <i>The Hills Have Eyes</i>, Craven very quickly figured out conventional filmmaking and by 1984 had left his peers in the dust. Carpenter's minimalism never went anywhere, but his personal stamp faded somewhere in the 90s and his movies stopped being scary. Hooper was someone who made an honest stamp at domestication but he was too wild to be tamed by an audience of all ages. <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> is not only his wildest, but his best film. I'm not the most polished or accomplished director, but thanks to years of watching movies and at least two making them, I know assured direction when I see it. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Eaten Alive</a></i>, <i>Salem's Lot</i>, <i>The Funhouse</i> and <i>Poltergeist</i> all show a progression, a mastery of technique, a cohesive style and a set of round characters who remained believable within the confines of the studio system that ended with the grandiose <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/alien-zombie-chainsaw-crocodiles.html">Lifeforce</a> </i>and the delightful throwback <i>Invaders from Mars</i>. He kept taking risks and even if people weren't always interested, he never stopped evolving, so long as the budget allowed for him to take chances. Funnily enough, Craven and Hooper found themselves in the same financial predicament that caused them to make sequels to their best movies within a year of each other. Both are slightly easier to sit through than the death of a relative.</div><br /><i>Texas Chainsaw</i> was Hooper's second film but from the masterful tracking shots to the truly stunning production design, Hooper's hand is steady throughout, a professional through and through. Which is amazing considering how truly off the rails the film goes, especially in the last third when Sally is at the mercy of the cannibals. Paying attention to mechanics pays off in a big way when you watch the climactic dinner scene. The things Hooper does with editing and particularly sound is so assaultive and disorienting that you wind up feeling like something a lot worse than three maniacs laughing is happening. I guess it's fitting that <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> is as recognizable a name as Psycho because there are plays taken right from Hitchcock's book. There are shades of Marion Crane's shower in the way Jerry, Pam and Kirk are yanked from the narrative (their deaths are also far less gruesome than people remember). Both films lift liberally from the story of Ed Gein - though neither gets the details right - but only Hooper's film manages to recreate the nauseating environs that such a character would live in. The lengths the production designers went to to make every inch of the house look not only creepy as shit but also lived in are remarkable. </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgHcZ_AQzxoQVQULFleXeLISlzFAvjDGqXEaoT15XoftpDSFf8BAbUAOuBxKiv6OooagRf_m_6mxk21BFSFIYs4OjYNlicb3eJxqrOChWs1mE9kTMzOo22FKlVfO2Wo3juBhV9Mt7dFNU/s400/image3.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628246279041271538" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 231px; " /></span></div><div>Then there are minor but important touches like the house that Sally's grandfather used to live in. It's rundown, that's nothing new, but Hooper captured an orgy of daddy long-legs in the top floor that Kirk stumbles upon. Hooper makes the entire property seem to actively eject normal people. Everything single thing they encounter screams "Leave!" but the kids are too good-natured to see it. In fact <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> is one among thousands of films that people say is about Vietnam that I can actually see working as a metaphor for Vietnam. Until Leatherface shows up, the movie works as a pretty marvelous time capsule, and Hooper's camera work and sound makes it look like he intended the movie to remain a period piece long after its premiere screening. The kids are dressed like...well, let's just say that with the van, they're a talking dog away from solving mysteries. I love their clothes and hair and their attitude is so perfectly 70s that it seems to both make perfect sense and really catch you off guard when these poor kids start getting killed. When squaring off against an indigenous crazy like Leatherface, all they could hope to do is escape with their lives, forever scarred by what they've seen. When they find out that the only reasonable adult for miles is pulling the strings, that's where I see the Vietnam comparison. You escape and the man puts you in a straight jacket and sends you right back into the shit.</div><div><br />Naturalistic to the point of vérité and still terrifying, <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> has outgrown its humble origins and become a cultural phenomenon. Two sequels, two remakes and a prequel later and Leatherface is now one of the most recognizable boogeyman in the annals of horror history, but no one (not even Hooper) has managed to make a better film using its most iconic creation. Leatherface is an action figure these days, so I could see some people assuming he can't be scary anymore (the fucking remakes and sequels sure did their best to neuter him) but when I watched this last, my dad (who's seen it at least as many times as I have) jumped when Leatherface comes running out of the darkness for the first time. So much of the success of the film rests on Gunnar Hansen's Leatherface. The costume design is killer, for sure, but Hansen plays him like a child, something the other films completely ignore. He appears to be running the show until the man from the barbecue joint shows up, then its abundantly clear that he's just a child afraid of his older brother(? The man could be his dad, but that's never quite straightened out). But his treatment of the dead bodies of his victims reminds me a lot of King Kong working the mouth of the dead Tyrannosaurus. And just <i>look at him!</i> What I've long loved about this movie is all you have to do is hear its name or see the man with the saw and you've crated a whole movie around them. Before I'd seen <i>Texas Chainsaw</i> I'd come up with what I thought Leatherface's voice would sound like in my head. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the film has more nuance than it ever gets credit for. </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBkYlulb4xNKNNsdEZDTY-b8Wca3jzjA0MFg3MEu_kD1iXZ3XMTbmbgTvPHrQFH2dZ4I83YYQfVesnMHRt6vaps4Gx_Z-3qQFKG49PAciCKJLfpWbInlSUO31uYdD60yMvofcWptR4E24/s400/tcmit1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628246280640392130" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 285px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div>As I put the finishing touches on this I'm reminded how important skill like Hooper's is in the crafting of a horror film. Watching Carl Lindbergh's <i>Bunnyman</i>, an obvious disciple, and seeing how half-assed the editing is, how poorly the sound is mixed, how completely free of tension it remains nearly half way through its running time, how the characters lack even the most basic motivation makes me so fucking mad that horror films aren't given credit for being as well crafted as the best of them are. The sound design on Texas Chainsaw should by rights have earned as oscar, the performances are perfect which makes them invisible so don't ever get praised (the characters are three dimensional and prove it within minutes of simply existing on screen), and Hooper's direction was at least as good as Fellini's for <i>Amarcord</i> or Milos Forman's for<i> One Flew Over The Cuckoo</i>'s Nest, considering he had a 16th of the budget and yet he lingers on in the basement, untouched by accolade except by nerds like me. I could only hope to ever make a film this good, horror or not.</div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-30397986888796530482011-03-29T23:30:00.008-04:002012-07-14T02:44:17.705-04:00Time To Take Out The Trash<div style="text-align: left;">
Once, what feels like an age ago, I asked a like minded-fan of sleaze, smut, blood and/or guts why it was that modern filmmakers had such a hard time getting trash right these days. Why is that despite remakes of every sleazy-ass backwoods horror film, no one manages to create anything that gets the balance of lovably shitty filmmaking and irredeemable yet somehow endearingly tasteless subject matter right? Why couldn't you even really improve over shit like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House on the Left</a></i>? The golden age (the 70s, ending I like to think, with <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/04/true-classic.html">Dawn of the Dead</a></i> ringing the bell on high) produced horror movies with just the right sensibilitiy. <i>Mark of the Devil, Axe, Alucarda, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Bird Cage</a>, Clan of the Forgotten Eight, Blood on Satan's Claw</i>...these guys knew what they were doing. But for whatever reason a great throwback is hard to find. <i>Stuck!, The Human Centipede, 2001 Maniacs...</i>they just don't do it for me. They either lack the strength of their convictions or are far too enthusiastic for their own good, running into a troubling dearth of funds or a criminal lack of understanding. They don't know what it was that made the movies they idolize so great, they just hone in on one aspect and then max it out. It rarely works and it's usually painful to watch. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/12/suburban-satanists-goofy-graverobbers-i.html">The House of the Devil</a></i> and <i>Black Dynamite</i> work because they pay attention to enough period details while still finding plenty of time to tell compelling/funny stories. Recent history is littered with the corpses of movies that tried and failed to recapture the glory days. What killed them this time? Pointless dialogue and an excess of winking in the case of today's double feature. There was so much dialogue and so much winking in one of these damn films that Quentin Tarantino decided that his throwback was too good to be part of a double-bill with the much more interesting, game and entertaining <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/04/its-about-time.html"><i>Planet Terror</i></a> and that his contribution needed to be a whole extra forty minutes longer to accommodate all his winking and talking.</div>
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Death Proof<br />
by Quentin Tarantino<br />
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Three attractive girls get together and talk in their apartment, then they get into one of their cars and talk, then they get to a convenience store and talk, then they go to a bar and talk, then three boys show up and they talk, then another girl arrives having been stood up and they talk, then the bartender walks over and they talk, then three of their girlfriends show up and they talk, then Kurt Russell shows up and they talk some more and then one of them gives Kurt a lap dance, but first they talk about it, then when it's done they talk. Then Kurt kills most of them in his car, then the police arrive and they talk, then it's a year later in another town and four other attractive girls get together and talk in a parking lot, another parking lot, a diner, then they go talk to a guy about buying his car, explaining why to each other through the very helpful narrative device of talking, then they drive the car away and then talk about what they're going to do, then one of them climbs on top of the car because Tarantino could find literally no better cause for a carchase with a woman on the hood of the car than because she's a stunt woman who simply does this sort of thing for fun. and that's what they call screenwriting. Anyway Kurt shows up and the rest of the movie is a pretty predictable car chase that's exciting for the first five minutes before it's interrupted by more talking and then the rest of it happens but all the tension's gone when the girls are no longer in any real danger and the cars are destroyed so it's not really fun anymore anyway. Oh and before it's over, the girls talk some more.</div>
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This movie's problem is simple but unfortunately it pervades literally ever aspect of the production from the music to the casting to the cinematography to the hood ornaments: <i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">MASTURBATION!!!</span></b></i> <i>Death Proof </i>has the dubious honor of being the film that perfectly captures what goes on in its director's head before he fouls up his boxers. Yes despite the film's initially scratched-look, its <i>constantly</i> name-dropping better movies, its music cues lifted from Italian horror films, its comparatively low-budget, its car-based murders, <i>Death Proof</i> is not the throwback it wants you to believe it is. It is the single most masturbatory movie ever made (note, this was true until I saw Zack Snyder's <i>Sucker Punch</i>). Quentin Tarantino used to be world-renowned for his dialogue, a sly blend of pop-culture references and an absurd amount of never-too-much swearing. Tarantino was cool and to be cool meant trying to be like Tarantino. The dialogue in <i>Death Proof</i> sounds like a man in his forties trying and failing to imagine what hot girls sound like when they're alone. Everytime someone speaks I missed the point of what they were saying because all I could hear anyone saying was "hello I'm the writer of this movie and I have concocted a clever manner of speech that all the characters engage in. It's great, you see they're all dropping the names of tv shows and movies that none of them could possibly know about ("You know that show <i>The Virginian</i>?" HAHA! Cause no one under 45 has seen that fucking shit! Or <i>Convoy</i>! Or <i>Vanishing Point!</i>) and then they typically make amazingly unsubtle sexual references that come off insanely mean-spirited and out-of-touch even though they're delivered with neck-swaying casualty." With that being shouted at me the whole time I had a hard time paying attention to just what the fuck anyone said in and around the car chases. It wasn't that I wasn't trying, it was just that I realized that absolutely, positively nothing said over the course of <i>Death Proof's</i> inexcusably baggy 114 minutes amounts to anything other than padding. A torturous second visit just reinforced my original assessment with a vengeance and made me want to throw myself down a flight of stairs because rankly it's not even fun to hear. It's all this constantly repeated, endlessly impressed-with-itself double talk that goes nowhere. Lines like: "Now there is one thing every girl in the whole world whose name is Shanna has in common with each other - we all hate the name Shawna. And we really hate when people call us Shawna," "What about "kinda cute, kinda hot, kinda sexy, hysterically funny, but not funny-looking guy who you could fuck" did you not understand?" and "how does one become a stuntman, stuntman mike?" are all insanely, monomaniacally unwieldy, especially when leaving the mouths of perpetually bored-looking actresses. Tarantino dialogue used to be the icing on the cake. Here it's a plate of lukewarm leftover tv-dinner masquerading as Bisteca Florentine and Baked Alaska; it's a metaphor drowning in another metaphor! Nearly half the screenplay shows up in the IMDB Quotes page and none of it is as clever as that implies. It's a movie filled with one-liners that resolutely fail to come alive in the mouths of a generation Tarantino didn't bother to figure out.<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589721208538873426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_kACC6_kRtV4R6cXqClsl-fUS_IhkGGzSTh7XAcvug4Qqtt8Iyyxde5y_mdB0BG-e3hYZugPrjbhRkQARk_aD_tF8o0aEJ2oSKNbc4Uu6Q6N8O-iWcOsF-1v_qp8aDRsnyI3uckZqxUk/s400/the70sgirls1.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 291px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span><br />
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I realize I sound like the world's most bitter man but I wouldn't be so furious but for the fact that until I saw <i>Death Proof</i> I was one of the biggest fans Quentin had on planet earth. I bought the script for <i>Pulp Fiction</i> in the seventh grade from my high school bookstore and had the thing memorized by the eighth grade. I watched <i>Reservoir Dogs</i> and <i>Pulp Fiction</i> on a nearly endless loop until <i>Kill Bill, Vol. 1</i> hit theatres. I liked it, but it seemed kinda long and like maybe there weren't enough solid ideas to keep the movie exciting for its almost two hour running time. <i>Vol. 2</i> was even longer and gave me an even stronger sense that he was just killing time, that he didn't have an ending, that he and everyone in the seats around me were just happy to be hearing his voice. I would have liked it if the movie actually felt like a cohesive unit instead of a collection of references. The climax of his two-part revenge cycle is twenty minutes of <i>talk.</i> Was I the only one who felt cheated? The whole movie was set-up and not a second of sword-play or kung-fu or <i>Jackass</i>-style trailer fighting between these two epic nemeses? Just fucking babbling on about comic books and dead fish and abortion. David Carradine's career wasn't the only thing that died when that film ended. Tarantino had stated that his intention with <i>Pulp Fiction</i> was to create something that you could start watching and leave at any moment and still get something out of it. Its references were myriad but they were quiet and unflashy, they helped construct a world of cheaters and bastards who can't help but collide with one another. It was trashy, it was lurid, it was fun, but most importantly it was incredibly well-made. After <i>Jackie Brown</i> showed him that audiences weren't interested in new ideas with an old coat of paint, he gave them what he thought they wanted after four or five years of reading and believing every thing ever written about him on then-new chatrooms and <span style="background-color: white;">damningly subservient</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;"> fad-books with titles like </span><i style="background-color: white;">Cinema of Cool</i><span style="background-color: white;">. They wanted cool? He'd give it to them! So began Quentin's turning his back on what he made his name on (taut but patient direction, incendiary screenwriting) and his films became games of expired Celebrity Taboo played with audiences who had no idea they were being sold second-hand ideas. This reached it's apex in</span><i style="background-color: white;"> Inglourious Basterds</i><span style="background-color: white;"> where he actually showed clips from other movies in order to explain </span><i style="background-color: white;">what was happening in his own movie</i><span style="background-color: white;">! He named his characters after obscure character actors seventeen people knew about and spent minute after minute rambling about the importance of G.W. Pabst, King Kong and Joseph Goebbels Vs. David O. Selznick despite these things never for even a second having a thing to do with the plot! </span><i style="background-color: white;">Death Proof </i><span style="background-color: white;">deviates from this only slightly in that it doesn't have a plot to deviate from. Everything that leaves the character's mouths is just one too-clever/not-clever-enough line that separates audiences from the car chases and lap dances that save this movie from total listlessness.</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589721104297395746" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_SomXby6Sb3d7ZmzRUX1zOdezfDJMluOiLa43knZetwS7ep_fiL0wJuMRWl2ptJhe2rXePlcrrwunaayrDalv4-77GnSUgqoCZYeoxDpf309jdMhTvyTzpo-RzqnksjCLj1qUjXUhnFM/s400/deathproof-poster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 265px;" /></span></div>
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My friend Tucker was one of the lucky few (and I do mean few) who actually saw <i>Death Proof</i> when it was just one half of the promising double feature <i>Grindhouse</i>. Tucker remembers vividly the feeling of watching the amazing, funny and lightning-fast <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/04/its-about-time.html">Planet Terror</a>, </i>watching a slew of hysterical bite-sized fake trailers,<i> </i>and then settling in for a post-<i>Kill Bill,</i> Tarantino car-chase movie, his hands rubbing together like a bandit about to look in the safe he's just cracked. Then that anticipation turned quickly to confusion, then boredom and finally anger. Quentin intended the whole endeavor to be a tribute to New World double features, but those films had one key ingredient that <i>Grindhouse</i> didn't: a producer breathing down its neck demanding cuts and a runtime people could stomach. Quentin was calling the shots and perversely when <i>Grindhouse</i> failed to perform at the box office he actually put footage <i>back in </i>and released it on its own, premiering it at the Cannes film festival. Which I have to say pisses me off more and more as I think about it. What <i>Grindhouse</i> was supposed to be was something your average gorehound would love (it's called motherfucking <i>Grindhouse!!!</i>) and instead Quentin decided his part was really an art film and not the sleazy, scratchy trash movie it was touted as in trailers. Not that I disagree with that particular point: it absolutely doesn't work as an exploitation film. There's nothing here being exploited except my desire to see an exploitation movie. On that end all I got was the music from <i>Tentacles</i>. Thanks Q! But <i>Death Proof</i> sure ain't no fucking art film, either. Its biggest issue are all those gorgeous women lining up to do whatever their odd creator wishes. The first scene sets the tone. After pornographic shots of the leads' feet, we're treated to a close-up of Vanessa Ferlito holding her crotch as she runs like a little girl to the bathroom. The humiliation continues as he pits an especially horrifying Eli Roth and friends against the girls, trying hideously to date rape them while spitting out just so much stilted, pointless, esoteric dialogue you can't make out a word of (Also, I'd like to point out that the line "hey Bj, where's the bear?" is not only stupid in the mouth of anyone who isn't Quentin Tarantino, it's also not funny in any context). And I'd like to reiterate that none of it matters anyway. The girls then pout when boys don't like them, do exactly what boys ask of them, then get their faces ground off and their legs removed by a guy three times their age. That the film is dull as sin would get it a low enough grade without the added bonus of being sexually regressive. Quentin reportedly cut out a scene of Kurt Russell masturbating in his wrecked car following the first crash. I get why he cut it; it's redundant. Anyone uncertain that someone was jerking off all over this movie wasn't paying enough attention anyway. His solution, to have some cracker sheriff spell it out in black and white, is an appallingly stupid compromise (To quote MST3K, "this is a <i>Motion</i> picture", we can show as well as tell!). On the plus side it's just as wordy and boring as the rest of the movie, so at least there's continuity! Nevermind that there isn't a shred of evidence to suggest that the car accident was anything other than a car accident. All the same it feels like a major copout not to have Russell's character in a compromising position after watching girls in hot pants doing impressions of girls in hot pants for a fuckin' hour. And not ever is it established why any of these girls talk to each other/are friends/have atrocious fake southern accents or say things like "Dick Department" with all the ease of swallowing a fistful of super bowl rings. To say that nothing works is to put it both nicer and milder than <i>Death Proof</i> deserves. Watching this again made me pine for a movie that at least got around to doing something, <i>ANYTHING, </i>just so long as it wasn't self-indulgent and misogynist. As it turns out, I could have searched a little harder but I will give my pallet-cleanser one thing: I wasn't bored.</div>
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Drive Angry 3D<br />
by Patrick Lussier<br />
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In a voiceover that explains nothing, we're told that hell just can't hold some people ("Bad ass motherfuckers", to be precise). And among those people is Nicholas Cage playing a character called John Milton, because Patrick Lussier and co-writer Todd Farmer took freshman english, I guess. Anyway, Milton has escaped from hell and he winds up in a generic vision of the American south (the same one we wound up killing time in in <i>Death Proof</i>) that's too clean to be as frightening or trashy as Lussier wishes it was. After fucking up two satanists and issuing a not-at-all cryptic warning (to tell "him" that he's coming for him) he meets about-to-be-cheated-on Amber Heard who has just enough reason to leave home and just little enough in her head to follow Cage as he cuts a path across the south looking for "him." "Him" turns out to a Satanist (Billy Burke in what I'm going to say is his second-worst performance, which is a shame because he's a good actor) who killed Cage's daughter and is going to sacrifice his granddaughter in order to bring about Hell on Earth. And we'd be more worried as an audience if Satan's personal Accountant weren't also on Cage's tail, trying to bring him back (albeit not very determinedly). And so begins a two-tiered chase involving cars flipping, old waitress banging, dumb cop shooting, and Tom Atkins swearing and looking as apoplectic as the most apathetic man on earth can look.</div>
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There are a lot of things stopping <i>Drive Angry </i>from being either as good or as wonderfully shitty as it should have been but the biggest problem with <i>Drive Angry </i>is that Lussier is too afraid to embrace the truly sleazy nature of his concept. A film like this doesn't need slow-motion unless it's the kind of slow-mo Sam Peckinpah used to use. It doesn't need music that isn't played by shit-kicking bar bands. It doesn't need super-cool car flipping or too-contained fight scenes or slick editing and cinematography or a reigned in, self-conscious performance from Nic Cage. It doesn't need someone like David Morse classing up the joint, or Amber Heard as the lead girl. In other words it's too 'cool' for it's own good. The idea of Cage fucking a waitress during a gunfight on paper sounds like the kind of Hal Needham or Peckinpah would have done with a straight face. Lussier on the other hand puts it in slow motion and plays The Raveonettes. Doesn't quite work; in fact none of his soundtrack choices work. Peaches and UNKLE aren't the soundtrack to a shitty car chase movie, they're the contents of a Canadian hipster's ipod. See the difference? The film's loaded with mistakes like that Heard's presence is too calculated and safe for a movie like this. Katy Mixon's cameo was more in keeping with the spirit of something <i>like</i> this (but <i>not</i> this), but frankly she's not even what you need. You need the kind of girl who you'd buy in a bar fight. Amber Heard puts on white trash for the duration, but you want the female equivalent of Strother Martin, someone who can match Cage's nutso charisma. And Cage is waaaaaay too calm for this movie. Where's the Cage of <i>Bad Lieutenant</i>? That's the crazy bastard I want escaping from Hell in a Challenger! Not the mildly respectable Cage we're stuck with here. In fact the only person who seems to fit the scenery is William Fitchner and he doesn't get nearly enough screentime. His performance as the Accountant is perfect and I wouldn't change it, I just want more of it.<br />
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I guess if you want to look at the problem in microcosm, let's examine the name of this beast. <i>Drive Angry in 3D</i>. It's no good. "<i>Drive Angry"</i> is a <i>Groundhog Day</i> reference. Already aiming way too high. "<i>in 3D</i>" sounds cheap and stupid, but really the 3D we're given is more in keeping with the trends of today rather than say the boneheaded audience baiting of <i>Jaws 3D</i>. This movie is too modern to be interesting simply because it claims the swagger of an old-fashioned drive-in movie. This is too self-aware and pretty to be the <i>Race With The Devil</i> remake it aches to be. What it needed was the kind of gimmicky shit that Tarantino tried to distract his audience with in the opening minutes of <i>Death Proof</i>. He once said that he'd "over-tweaked" <i>Death Proof</i> (on the list of things wrong with that film, that isn't even in the top twenty-five). The whole point of <i>Death Proof</i> (indeed the whole <i>Grindhouse</i> endeavor) was that it was supposed to look like it fell off the back of a truck on its way to the Capri in Cold Water, Michigan. If anything, when the movie stops doing the scratched-print and bad edits halfway through I just got more furious. No! Bring that shit on, says I! Otherwise, what the fuck is the point of the exercise!!!! It's just that kind of gimmickry that <i>Drive Angry</i> is missing. So while it was a perfectly enjoyable if regrettably stupid hour and a half, it wasn't the film I was promised. It was too cool to be filthy, too bad to be good, too good to be bad and so it's just kinda stupid; it didn't live up to its potential. What <i>Drive Angry</i> needed was someone who could have chipped the new paint and antiqued it a bit, who really understood the pantheon of shitty movies it was trying to enter. Just as what <i>Death Proof </i>needed was someone who could breathe some life into a DOA script and boring set-pieces.<br />
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There's a scene in <i>Death Proof</i> where one of the two wasted muscle cars drives through a marquee advertising <i>Wolf Creek</i>. Personally how Quentin gets off flipping the bird to anyone is totally beyond me considering he's apparently forgotten how to write and direct coherently/concisely, but that he's pissing on <i>Wolf Creek </i>of all things makes me especially furious. <i>Wolf Creek</i> is an art film that made it into an exclusive canon where the likes of <i>Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> and <i>Axe</i> sit happily sharing pictures of their deformed grandkids. A place that with no limitations imposed on them neither Patrick Lussier's big budget spectacle nor Tarantino's wordy ouroboros touched by a mile. It's not enough to pay lip service to the greats; it helps to have something worth saying. Otherwise, save your breath and let someone else get a word in. Oh, one last thing, minor, but I'm going for it anyway. I'd like to thank Tarantino for permanently associating dumbness with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. Shouldn't it be some kind of hint when your actresses can't even pronounce the name of the band that perhaps it has no place in the movie? Why can't anyone get this stuff right?</div>
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</div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-7353903698292002962011-03-09T02:36:00.005-05:002012-04-27T01:23:26.705-04:00"Aren't we all vampires...."<div style="text-align: left;">
Film can do strange things to you. Perhaps the silliest thing that's happened to me lately is continually seeing new horror films and thinking "Oh yes, I should review that!" and then having second thoughts that eventually force me to overlook said movies. Why? Because, friends, I'm trying like hell to be one of those unfortunate souls who paints a bulls-eye on his work and lets the world take potshots at it. Yes, students, I too have movies that are slowly making their way into the world. That's not to say I deserve the same respect as many of the artists whose work graces these hallowed halls, but I'm learning a thing or two about what that means. Whether I'm any good is for literally everyone on earth but me to decide. You wanna know something about directing and then showing your work? It's terrifying as shit, but it's also incredibly informative. You learn things about yourself and about film in general from trying to make movies that is simply not available to those who never pick up a camera and try it. I've learned that I'm a lot less anxious to criticize for the same reasons I would have two years ago, now that I know what's involved in making one of these things. As much as I relish the opportunity to be the next Tomas Alfredson or Danny Boyle, I can tell you I simply don't have the discipline of those guys. But can I tell you a secret? It's the bad films that teach me the greatest lessons. Where would I be without Mike & The Bots in the back of my head reminding me why film grammar and proper lighting is important with their characteristic wit and timing. Where else would I have learned the dangers of not doing second takes but the work of Brad Ginter, Umberto Lenzi and especially Jesus Franco. It was Franco who indirectly taught me so much about what I <i>didn't</i> want my films to be like. In that regard he's indispensable. Everytime I do a scene, I hear the dubbed dialogue in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-naked-and-well-naked.html">Devil Hunter</a></i> and <i>Women Behind Bars</i>. I think of everytime a public school is masqueraded as a courthouse, everytime Lina Romay accidentally walks into the camera, everytime Franco zooms in on some poor starlet's labia for what feels like an eternity. Franco's films are invaluable in figuring out how easily something can stop being affective and start being fucking hysterical. But the biggest lesson to be learned is just how hard everyone worked to make <i>Female Vampire, Eugenie De Sade, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/strange-personal-life-of-jesus-franco.html">A Virgin Among the Living Dead</a></i> and all of his nearly 200 feature films. People worked (and showed) their asses off for these films and mock though we may, it's always good to remember just how the hell hard it is to make a film worth watching for the right reasons. If you could follow the crew of a bad film in the making, you'd probably be pretty astonished by how devoted everyone was. In fact, that's just what someone did, during the making of Franco's <i>Count Dracula</i>, but before we can see what makes <i>that</i> film so amazing, we must first look at its source.</div>
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Count Dracula<br />
By Jesus Franco<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582123228867357602" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihkcTrCbesyOw1_CA4aMZrjK_TV7o7Ux2PKJ4PMkyoFPNbPl0gH0asZV6szYRpd11qMVa9yZ2k34pD6Yb1kmqRHI1ouRNZhz4sRI9TJVXP8w2ay9jJc6qLL3E0PRB9ckgoEiVaoMVbezQ/s400/jfdrac_draculabecomesyoung.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 300px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span></div>
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Ok, well there’s literally no one who isn’t by this point familiar with the story, so let’s just talk about what made this version unique. Specifically the involvement of some truly first-rate European talent in front of the camera: Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom and Christopher Lee. With Bruno Mattei in the editing room, they had less luck behind the camera, but… It’s actually kind of novel and fun to see Franco regulars Fred Williams and Jack Taylor in such well-worn roles as Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris, because you really feel like you’re watching a Franco film, and, shitty or not, a Jesus Franco film is a strange and beautiful thing. Lee was reportedly sick of the old fangs and cape because they offered him little chance to delve into the stuff he loved about the novel. And after playing the count a half dozen times for Hammer Films, he could safely say by 1970 just what they were going to ask of him each time he did it for them. So how did Franco convince one of the greatest horror actors of all time to star in this most terrible late-in-the-game Hammer knock-off? He lied and said that the film would follow the novel closely. It’s a good thing for Franco’s sake that they hadn’t yet invented home video because if Christopher Lee had seen some of Franco’s earlier films he would very quickly have seen that there was no fuckin’ way Franco had the resources available to make a straight adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. Francis Ford Coppola had more than enough money and he still couldn’t make a straight adaptation! Perversely, a few of the change Franco made to the script (which frankly could have been Lee’s idea for all I know) made the story make sense in a way it didn’t before. I always had trouble swallowing that Dracula happened to move in right next door to the sanitarium where Harker's fiance lived. But bringing Lucy and Mina to the Sanitarium to look after Harker, where they’re then attacked, makes all the sense in the world. Too bad Franco wasn’t as clear-headed on a few other points.</div>
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Things plod on at a decently ethereal trot, the atmospheric sets and the dubbing mostly counter-acting each other and making it as moody a Dracula adaptation as had ever been attempted, until Werner Herzog came along that is. And Franco pulls an interesting cheat that winds up creating a whole new kind of mood by shooting most of the nighttime footage in very early dawn. But you forget all that once we get to the borgo pass and then…that voice. Christopher Lee shows up as the coach driver and with just three sentences blows everyone in the cast out of the fucking water. You can see in one of Franco’s ubiquitous close-ups that Lee was still very much a young man despite having played the ageless count Dracula as often as Bela Lugosi did in his whole life; a testament to his not inconsiderable weight as an actor. Christopher Lee was one of the few titans of the stage who almost never left the genre. He was our Peter O’Toole, our Laurence Olivier, and even though the roles treated him with less respect over the years, he never did anything less than his best. And to his credit, you can tell that Franco was trying to make a respectable film. He took off all but his most simple baggage, settled in and got serious enough to make a mostly decent movie (between monumental mood-killers), even as it was clear he was becoming a less capable filmmaker by the minute. </div>
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There are a number of zany Franco touches that stop it from getting either too respectable or too dreary. Like that there’s simply no way that the house that Dracula buys is in London. That’s a villa in coastal Spain…there’s just no way around it. Then there’s the scene with the taxidermied animals. Now Jesus had been doing ok up until this point and it actually comes at a pivotal moment. Van Helsing, Quincey and Harker have just come from cutting off Lucy’s head and they then head over to Carfax Abbey to kill Dracula or at the very least sanctify the grounds but are instead met by a veritable menagerie of unmoving dead animals. There are dead weasels, dead boars, even <i>a goddamned ostrich!</i> And they start barking and roaring and every other thing (and in perhaps the most shameful shot in the whole movie, someone holds a stuffed owl and shakes it around, his hand unnecessarily just out of the frame) and best of all, these three men, trained actors all, have to pretend they’re terrified of something Franco couldn’t even bother to light properly or give spooky eyes. Or at least they try to seem vaguely bothered. I think everyone (or anyway, Lom and Kinski) understood that there was no one in the house who was going to believe what they were seeing, so didn’t exactly give 110%. Kinski doesn't do much but look bored and slightly feral as Rennfield. And finally, there’s the conclusion. Harker and Quincey race to beat Dracula back to his castle. They overtake his carriage on the road in and desperately trying to find his tomb to kill him and save Mina and the world by extension! “How do they know it’s his tomb?” I hear you asking…cause it’s got his name in big fucking letters on the side, that’s how! Just when Franco had me rooting for his ambitious little film, he goes and provokes a hearty bout of laughter and thus the climax is ruined.</div>
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<i>Count Dracula</i> moves faster than just about all of its director's other work. The seeds for his later ‘style’ are planted here, including zooms in place of actual tension. But even still there are a few other things to recommend <i>Count Dracula</i>, Lee’s performance the strongest of them. But then there are little curios that you wonder about the purposefulness of. Like the pronunciation of Lucy’s last name, Westenra as ‘Westerner,’ which gets to an interesting point about her place in the story. She and Quincey, who in the novel is a bit of an uncouth boor, bring their improper moral code and ideas about sex into polite society and thus both suffer. This would have made for a welcome addition to a slightly more literate adaptation where Quincey and Lucy are more characters than time filler, but it’s the only film I can think of where that little Freudian slip made it’s way into the dialogue. But like I said, go looking for a lot to write home about and you’ll find happy accidents. This is a workmanlike adaptation of a book that was already dog-eared by 1970 with one extraordinary performance keeping it from circling the drain. Ok, I take that back. There are two reasons why this needs to be seen. The first is Lee, the second is because seeing it gives a helpful context to place <i>Vampir Cauducec</i>, the astonishing documentary made on the set of Franco’s film.</div>
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Vampir Cauducec<br />
By Pere Portabella<br />
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While Franco was working overtime to make a film worthy of Lee’s commitment to the title role, a young Catalan director called Pere Portabella sat in the shadows with a 16mm camera recording it all. He processed it, edited it and turned what could have been an ordinary behind-the-scenes doc into one of the more stunning meditations on just what it means to make movies. Because <i>Vampir</i> is silent the performances are limited to the physicality of each actor (until the last scene, the only one with synch sound, when Lee reads aloud from the original novel and makes you weak in the knees). Christopher Lee, who can communicate several lifetimes in just his walk, still seems like the better actor next to Fred Williams (who looks like Han Solo thanks to the black & white photography and vague costuming) and Jack Taylor, though god bless him Jack tries, something he very obviously didn’t do on later Franco films. Portabella gets a lot of mileage out of something as simple as playing a broken record on the soundtrack as he shows bad special effects and cobwebs and smoke machines. “You’ve seen this before, you’ve seen this before,” he seems to say and when he takes the record off, he then has Lee take his make-up off and show you who he really is, a perfectionist intellectual who clearly enjoys getting into character and researching his roles, no matter how trivial they might seem (and it doesn’t get much more trivial than acting for Jesus Franco). One of the most fascinating bits of criticism ever handed to this movie is that Lee’s treatment by Portabella was meant to symbolize General Franco, and that we see how much work and clumsy staging goes into building the image of a monster. Only Pere knows, but you’ll notice no one bandying about this kind of theory about the movie he stole the performance from. It truly is amazing that the making of a movie can be inherently more interesting than what it produces.</div>
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There is a deconstructionist, almost Post-Punk aesthetic running through <i>Vampir</i>. The notion of this kid sitting in the bushes taking high-contrast black and white footage of a film in progress, in effect stealing someone else’s idea but appropriating it in a highly unusual context, is both exciting and radically impudent. By the 1970s artists were no longer content to simply play with genres or existing forms and Portabella’s treatment of the filmmaking process, leaving no secret like he found it, is refreshing to the point of avant-garde in its nakedness. To see the bat-on-a-string effects and the application of fake cobwebs (which for some reason makes me incredibly happy everytime I see it) is to show people what goes into horror films. ‘Here are the ingredients!’ it seems to say, now make the cake yourself. It put me in mind of a rather brilliant bit of skullduggery that The Clash pulled off on the song “Up In Heaven (Not Only Here)” from their under-appreciated album Sandinista! Instead of a guitar solo, they lower the levels of all the instruments while the song plays on for an unheard verse and play an obnoxious bit of isolated feedback, as if to say ‘here’s the feedback you wanted.’ I’m sure it’s been pointed out elsewhere (it’s simply too good to pass up) but Portabella’s film can be thought of as a vampire, sucking the blood from Jesus Franco’s film and making a shell of its former self do his bidding. Perhaps it’s cynical of me, but I largely prefer Portabella’s damned creature of the night to Franco’s drab beating heart. Notice how through excellently underplayed music and editing Portabella manages to wring some tension out of the scenes between Mina and Lucy, which doesn’t exist in the original. </div>
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Neither Franco nor Portabella could have known it at the time, but this was one of Miranda’s last performances and everything from her subliminal first appearance on treats with her a kind of reverence. They were still releasing Soledad Miranda’s movies up to four years after her death, making her something like the 1970s equivalent of Jay Dee (and no, I am not going to use the more obvious hip-hop reference. You want major label hip-hop metaphors? Go someplace else, you fucking philistine) which tells me that the public shared Franco's love of this unfortunate beauty. Miranda is, like everything else in <i>Vampir</i>, someone or something that happened to be on set, but she comes across as the most vivacious and exciting woman for miles. Her body language, her smile, the way she moves all convey a humanity, a timeless beauty and likeability that Franco never once captured despite his years-long obsession with her naked form. In simply catching her smiling, Portabella found her essence. Film may make liars of everyone who touches it, but there is no denying the truth in those few seconds she gets to laugh and be herself. It’s almost unfair that the man who had dedicated himself to putting her image on film forever completely failed to do her justice. Along comes a kid with what I imagine to be a spring-wind 16mm camera and in a few moments preserved her forever. Such is the cruelty of filmmaking.</div>
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And so you see why I’m reluctant to discuss the highs and low points of imperfect but incredibly likeable films like <i>We Are What We Are </i>or<i> I Saw The Devil</i> or <i>Prey</i> or even something like <i>Let Me In</i>, a movie I’ve been dying to gut like a blue fin tuna at a sushi joint. I know the pressure put on someone everytime there are actors in front of a camera and a clock to beat, so my saying "this shot was too short" or "I wouldn't have put the camera there" is personal, kind of annoying and doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. The point is that I know how fucking hard it is to get even the simplest things right. Not only could Jesus Franco not deliver the respectable adaptation of <i>Dracula</i> he promised Christopher Lee, he couldn’t even explain through images why he was so obsessed with Soledad Miranda. There is a lot I want to say and do and there’s every possibility I’m going to fail miserably at it, but at the very least I hope I have an understanding of how easy it is to fail and hard it is to do the same thing.</div>
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</div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-47265186851211011712011-01-13T17:24:00.006-05:002012-03-15T19:21:45.698-04:00Commitment<div style="text-align: left;">Once again, it's time to look at the ever harder to find line between sleaze and art. Unlike <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/12/thats-cinema.html">Pig</a></i> or<i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/12/thats-cinema.html"> A Serbian Movie</a></i> these two particular examples come loaded with baggage of their own. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/12/thats-cinema.html">A Serbian Movie</a></i> was known exclusively as "the movie with all the baby fucking" so it's not like people were exactly leaping over each other trying to defend it. The whole point is that it's indefensible; director Srdjan Spasojevic made sure of that. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/12/thats-cinema.html">Pig</a></i> has no reputation to speak of so there's still quite a bit to say if you cared enough to say anything; I suspect you won't. But what happens when the film in question comes swaddled in the comforting blanket of "Serious Art." The distinction becomes a little more difficult to make, at least to some people, but more than that it means that its detractors and supporters will be more or less evenly split. The reputations of both films preceded them and I'd read as many negative reviews as positive before I even looked into seeing either of them. And in both cases I had no interest in seeing them until I absolutely had to and nothing was going to stop me. Well, in the case of the first film, Gaspar Noé's <i>Enter The Void</i>, I knew pretty much exactly what was in store for me: a film redolent of, in Noé's own words, an acid trip. He was out to make <i>the</i> drug movie and while I usually don't have the patience for that brand of motherfuckery, especially because Noé's last film <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/08/leave-la-france-chapter-8-death-by.html">Irréversible</a></i> was, in my friend Tucker's words "the most pretentious thing I've ever seen." But for whatever reason I felt like meeting him halfway so I found semi-favourable circumstances for such an outing. One night, feeling a huge amount of pain from a cold that had turned into something meaner, I had already taken at least benadryl when I decided that further steps had to be taken to take away the immense amount of pain I felt whenever I swallowed anything and so took two hydrocodone left over from when I had my wisdom teeth out. That and robitussin with codeine made that about as close to tripping as I'll ever get and probably the most favourable frame of mind that I'll ever be in to watch <i>Enter The Void</i>. And while it certainly made the visuals cooler, I can't say it made the movie any better.</div><div><br />Enter The Void<br />by Gaspar Noé<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghCoW3PihebwqWbPDZ_S0q1LF284wTPay0Lfg41HDeiNHw8WChYMTOdPldn1JD0Lm2fULOwZQlnrnJ1iDGYIUDFuk7Kx34vHKxmACCQcLYiKqYDGPG4qrmYAjCUrnpJDN0JL80g0v5-ko/s400/enter-the-void_592x299.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561928250532147074" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 202px; " /></span>Oscar is a drug-dealer living in Tokyo. His only real contact with the world other than his costumers are his sister Linda, who he has a disturbingly close relationship with, and his best friend Alex, who's one of those insufferable hippies who loves talking about alternate realities and has his own bastardized form of eastern religion he lives by but mostly he reminds me of Andy Samberg in that one digital short where he keeps showing up in the houses of all of Ryan Philippe's family members. Then there's Victor, Oscar's connection. He has to meet Victor downtown at a club called The Void and as Alex has nothing better to do he walks the ten or twelve blocks with him and explains the plot of the movie: hey, did you know according to the Tibetan book of the dead, when you die your spirit wanders around looking after the people you knew and you'll relive old memories and just kinda float around until you find the physical form you next want to take? Hmm...no, I didn't know that. Anyway, Oscar walks upstairs into a police ambush set up by Victor. Oscar runs into the bathroom to ditch the pills he's got and makes the unforgivably dumb mistake of saying he's got a gun, which gets him shot through the door. So then he dies and his spirit wanders around looking after the people he knew and he relives old memories and just kinda floats around until he finds the physical form he next wants to take. Or two hours of light effects and triptastic visuals that are better orchestrated but not different enough from Laser Floyd to really be worth much in the cold light of day. And when we're not looking at lights and colours and music, we see the decisions and tragedies that led to Oscar's demise and how Linda and Alex deal with his death. Take out Noé's oversized visual ambition and you have a pretty dour and hateful love story leftover.</div><div><br /></div><div>What's that saying about special effects being the most important thing in a bad movie? <i>Enter The Void</i> is a film that wouldn't exist without post-production, which puts it in questionable company. Thanks to a childish script, a teenagers conception of femininity, and the fact that no one cares about the plot, <i>Enter The Void </i>is, for better or worse, the <i>Transformers</i> of the art world. The visuals really are interesting, interesting enough to watch the movie, but they don't make up for everything done wrong; and frankly they weren't even all Noé's doing. He stole a good many of them from Glenn Jacobsen, albeit with permission, but a film that spends so much time treating colourful synapses like money shots ought to have done everything from scratch. But there's a lot of borrowed material here so I guess it's in keeping with the rest of the production. It begs saying that like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/08/leave-la-france-chapter-8-death-by.html">Irréversible</a></i> but more so, <i>Enter The Void</i> is "My God It's Full of Stars" the movie. There is so much fucking Stanley Kubrick in this movie it's overwhelming. In Noé's telling, there was no other film director (other than Robert Montgomery, whose <i>Lady In The Lake</i> he stole the POV cam device from) and so <i>Enter The Void</i> combines his austere compositions, isolating sexuality and flare for colours and presentational lighting into a film that doesn't deserve any of them. </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGDnLbzONCkAzj4CkoFX83_27XiqMPq0pS6yeHFmY_cXwYBBmnwkBSc63MOiSR76tbq1aHNaIa-LqSIEIkKw0A7hMBXWIzuFr3tR84XF1OmqLcjqFKIO-hO25IAsltGmZYfI11fJu4vXw/s400/Enter-The-Void-11.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561928241899416562" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 232px; " /></span></div><div>The problem, as always, is that Noé was so entrenched in one aspect of his production that the script came out terrible. There is no one worth liking in this film and the more you know about them, the less you care. For instance when you learn that the reason Victor set Oscar up was because the hapless dealer was sleeping with his young friend's mom, you realize that the 23 year old who wrote the script didn't do any growing up before he became the 46 year old who's out promoting this movie. The script is the product of a series of trips earlier in his life that apparently he never revised. As someone with a stack of screenplays under my bed, I find it a little sad that the things that a drugged out wastrel thought exciting when he was younger are still dictating his multi-million dollar movies. Similarly the thing that drives Oscar is a relentless, creepy obsession with his sister that made me actively dislike the man whose soul we're trapped in. And then there's Noé's homophobia. Though it could have been swept under the rug in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/08/leave-la-france-chapter-8-death-by.html">Irréversible</a></i> because frankly everything in that movie is actively contemptible that you could mistake it for set-dressing. Taken with a key scene in <i>Enter The Void</i>, all earlier evidence is corroborated.<br /><br />The last segment of the movie which I've taken to calling the Love Hotel segment is what takes subtlety and shoots it a hundred times in the head. We spin through the walls of a hotel watching people have sex while rays of what I hope isn't scent flows out of everyone's genitals. Among the faceless young naked we see all the major characters engaging in coitus that's supposed to hint at their fate. Among the many bodies we see Alex and Linda together finally having ordinary heterosexual sex which is supposed to be so beautiful that Noé felt he could end the movie with it. But before that we see Victor giving a Japanese businessman a blowjob as punishment for his treachery. Even at 4 in the morning, even on codeine and hydrocodone, even trying to give this baggy mess the benefit of the doubt, I couldn't abide by Noé's fratboy homophobia (with just a dash of racism thrown in for good measure). After putting up with two hours of needless stripping, sex, authorial masturbation and more nude Paz De La Huerta than I'd ever wanted to see, that was the final straw. But of course there was still one last prank up Noé's sleeve. Once we see Alex and Linda having sex the camera goes through her navel and into her vagina where we get a front row seat to Alex ejaculating. I don't know if I'd call that particularly artistic but I guess I can honestly say I'd never seen that before. Did I need to? No. Did it add anything other than cementing the notion that our director was kinda just out to do whatever thing seemed the most extreme? No. And the final creepy revelation that waits before the end credits just takes everything one step further than I cared to go with it.<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXqP6rOD2bqCoB3L4ohcHS3gV8qOfR9_NW7rzBgTo4epb6z_7hu1J3p_TyRurzdKK0efFO7vmuOEXYyCnYqY2IpBO6tkAy7GSgzIzYmk-uPAYM1IrcHg-zLNo3HBBKFzgimuHCtX-HJPY/s400/19056137.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561928238063768210" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px; " /></span>The biggest problem with all this obscenity and overwrought psychedelics is that there was nothing behind it all. It was all (admittedly impressive) theatrics and no thesis. I'll go with your experiment if I think you've got something to say, but it better be pretty fucking good. Take for instance our next film. It couldn't any more nakedly an experiment but for whatever reason (maybe because I haven't seen anything else by its director so I'm not tired of his aesthetic) I actually enjoyed it even if the message is faint at best. What I liked most about it is that it answers a question that gets constantly sidestepped by the makers of the recent crop of slick horror movies. With <i>The Devil's Rejects</i> Rob Zombie went pretty far in trying to disguise itself as a 70s trash film. The rhythm of the dialogue was all wrong and the performances weren't right, but he came close. But as many films claim to want to delve into the psychology of serial killers and dissect the moments they emerged from. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2011/07/remarathon-2011.html">The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning</a></i> or any number of horror remakes are all given a chance to figure out what's behind the masks of modern horror icons. And largely they all fail. <i>Trash Humpers</i> goes a step further than I'd thought to and explains what the illegitimate children of Leatherface or Judd from <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Eaten Alive</a></i> would get up to on their own. Or if you like, just what killers like Frank Zito or Eddie Quist did before they were the subject of their own movies.<br /><br />Trash Humpers<br />by Harmony Korine<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF79ELObswLOOXc8F5f10aZIYGhjlOb_90CblOnS_Hx4NZMH0SeLOq-5F0fI4BvyAu5SYyvJWHCUWypxvkbo-Jv2Zt9p7JaLCJu8M3bbjSbGRRBOQBazMOXvph8eKGBwD6-t-XNBn87XU/s400/091109_trashhumpers_main2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561928233703948146" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 398px; height: 308px; " /></span>The plot is non-existent. Four overactive kids (two of them are played by Korine and his ridiculously cute wife Rachel) terrorize, albeit lazily, a suburb of Nashville in dollar store old-people masks. Their actions start out innocuous enough, mostly smashing condemned buildings and fucking every inanimate object in sight, thankfully with their pants on. They hire overweight prostitutes mostly just to play with them (they're kids, after all), they visit the many, many colourful characters that live on the fringes of polite society including two 40-something identical twin males joined by a stocking at the head, a guy with an electric guitar and some kind of out-of-shape beat poet among others. It all seems like it'll be more ponderous than a film this grimy should be; then we see the first body. When we see one of them on the floor with a bleeding corpse, it becomes clear that they're more than just misguided kids. But their actions aren't black and white. When they steal a baby out of its carriage like some kind of Grimm fairy tale, you hold your breath and I won't spoil what happens next.<br /><br /><i>Trash Humpers</i> and <i>Enter The Void</i> make for an excellent double feature because of their commitment to their aesthetic. Just as <i>Enter The Void</i> is loaded with colourful genitalia and acid fantasies galore, <i>Trash Humpers</i> is a laundry list of grimy suburban nightmares; a painstaking recreation of horrifying home videos from the 90s. Shot on bad, warped VHS with those great in-camera titles, Korine makes his film feel like the kind of thing you'd find at a garage sale after the creepy guy who lived down the block died of an overdose. It's like the 90s-equivalent of a stag-reel and that's a pretty impressive feat. The performances, down to the awkward posture and repeated phrases and songs, the warped post-production and the depressing real-life locations are all gross and real enough that they blend into my (and I suspect many of my generation and just above it - anyone who was caught on the first generation of cassette-based home video recording, I suspect those folks who did the filming will find this less endearing) unconscious recollection of time passing and the inescapable feeling of wasting your life. I for one found myself remembering the time I was forced to watch home video footage of my first girlfriend in her basement. She, her mother and her younger brother seemed fascinated by their exhaustingly boring former selves; I couldn't wait to go home and fantasize about the other girl I had a crush on, wondering why I couldn't have charmed someone who would never make me watch evidence that time was passing and death was approaching like a trash truck at the end of the street. There is something inherently depressing about home movies and amateur filmmaking; more people shoot the things than get around to watching them (it helps that tape formats changed every other year and you'd be hard pressed to find a way to play your old footage today) and the idea of sitting around and watching the people you used to be is really a recipe for disaster. Korine definitely understands this and so makes sure to overload the film with the kind of embarrassing-to-eldritch personalities you'd find hosting neighborhood barbecues or birthday parties, only taken to their logical extreme. For this reason I was definitely on the lookout for the kind of last-ditch redemption set-piece he hints at with the ending. After all, there's nothing we want more than reminders that the people we once were (hair, fashion, mannerisms, murders) might break out of the lives they were trapped in yesterday, whether they planned it that way or not. Korine doesn't go so far as to suggest that these creeps are going to change, but maybe within their addled brains they have the capacity to recognize that what they're doing is wrong. Somewhere, once, they had families too and even if they grow up to stalk Haddonfield, Illinois there's the faintest possibility that they'll look in a mirror and remember they were once just as scared.<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBcGAUnZDe1nVU5QDh2EIN6jcAfkEGRQOzsre8YOxEgVtXvOwkMkKEdEjElXELTUSOHABYsntZCXXdw8eh63nrAFf1wDjyJYUr8fOP4YcaQaq3ZPaR5L7Ya4BJMsxdN1kWJcmscTLgMNk/s400/trash_humpers.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561928356480917026" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 277px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div>And that is really the best thing about <i>Trash Humpers</i> (the worst is its title); the universality of what might seem farfetched and unrealistic to some people. To me this barely qualifies as fiction. These kids are no different than the ones I grew up with; they were in my schools and in my neighborhood. I can think of quite a few of these kids, who, removed a step further from the terrible upbringings they were in the thick of, could and would end up like these the titular troublemakers. Take away parents, school and even the slightest respect for the law and give 'em facemasks and they could be practically anyone I graduated the sixth grade with. So, though Korine spends literally no time making us think about the flawed education system or the plague of bored/apathetic parents out there, the message is there all the same. I blamed the parents until roughly the first murder, at which point it became slightly harder to pinpoint one source of guilt. That's not fair, actually. I admit to being fascinated by the movie, too much to start thinking about it's sociological underpinnings until after the credits had warped by. While I was watching it, I was back in that basement, which I suspect is where a lot of this film's audience will go. Some basement or other, wishing that they had nothing in common with these faceless destructive kids. But even in that there's some redemption to be found. They may be killers and rootless freaks but they have each other. They may sing scary songs, but they sing them together. There is something there even if Korine doesn't offer any kind of commentary. I much prefer that to Gaspar Noé taking his point, lighting the fuse and stuffing it in my mouth. I don't want to watch either film again anytime soon, but Korine wins for making me think instead of demanding I do the same. He also wins because while Noé wrongly assumes you're exactly like him, Korine takes for granted that people will recognize human beings under all that make-up, regardless of what kind of childhood you had.</div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-54866715248294827942010-12-24T20:13:00.006-05:002014-01-28T23:04:17.703-05:00That's Cinema!<div style="text-align: left;">
Sleaze and Horror have so much overlap that it often becomes very hard to know to how to treat the little anomalies that wind up in between them on the vendiagram. When a film with a huge dose of serious piles on the needless sex and drug use, is it fair to revoke its creators right to arthouse credentials, no matter how stylistically he or she makes their point? What about horror films that try really hard to be taken seriously but can't overcome their trappings? Or for that matter films that get so out of control with their need to shake up the squares that they either forget their message or lose any high ground needed to deliver it. This was certainly the case with <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-infamous-unforgiving.html">Cannibal Holocaus</a></i><i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-infamous-unforgiving.html">t</a></i> and what I find so fascinating is that the people who purport to be inspired by it (Eli Roth springs immediately to mind) also get so bogged down making sure they've pulled out all the stops that by the end of it no one cares what their message was. There is a line in depicting violence and once you cross it, your message is just not worth the trouble anymore and your audience checks out. Of course, it's much easier to think up gory set pieces than to figure out the point of no return and make sure you don't cross it; too often message movies become dare movies. Franco Prosperi and Gualtieri Jacopetti wanted to prove they weren't racists by shedding light on the conditions that Africans underwent during the American antebellum period. But instead all they did was ensure that everyone who painted them as horrible violent exploitationists was right a few times over. Similarly if Adam Mason and Andrew Howard wanted to say something about hillbillies doubling as metaphors for anything or if Srdjan Spasojevic had anything to say about life in post-war Serbia, I doubt very much if anyone's going to feel like wading hip-deep in shit to figure what that was.</div>
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Pig<br />
by Adam Mason<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbdVc7XggXXpGU0Taw_SoYOk_4BdT85Khpu6MBBrIFcu6BlA8c2-np4h_br4d2SCkn_YxHPUEP6X-d-wZCsfQHiFsr1PVujDYp6HvN6PB2vagSOgnIr9zE01CmWdXiyk6AcAiCNI64q6U/s400/vlcsnap1.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554441706624808370" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 225px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>A woman runs through the desert in what could potentially be any part of the globe (it's got a desert near sporadically grassy terrain and trees that look they could be found almost anywhere). She's covered in blood and from her heavy breathing has been running a long time. The thing she's running from pulls up in his truck a few minutes later, scolds her for trying to escape, inarticulately, in an angry southern drawl. He knocks her out, throws her in the back of the truck and drives back to a trailer in the middle of nowhere. There, he throws her on the ground, knocks her around all while his similarly nameless and pregnant girlfriend/slave moans and screams incoherently. He then leaves the girl for her brother who he has chained up about a half a mile away. He toys with him, shoots at him, lets him run away for a bit, catches up to him, kills him and then castrates him. Then he goes back and puts the dead man's guts all over his sister, puts on a dress and then attempts to rape the remaining victim but can't get an erection. Then he stabs her to death, cleans himself up, puts on a suit and leaves in his truck again. On the way to what turns out to be an airport he calls his wife and child in a posh English accent and tells them he's been hunting and that he'll be home soon before taking off in his private jet. Roll credits backwards?</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfv_QuTqmRSL2TEYhHBBAIVf8wUFpOiZq9wKSGWW0fFLdvRWTiyIjZHNnKGPjJOjznKMt9zrTGjyYR-BMo4ijmozPDZaoxN1etvDq6zlwn8o15sVi6R3kPrIaB0aZ6qdUY-q-KuME7Ab0/s400/vlcsnap41.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554441607294739074" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 225px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>I semi-apologize for giving away the ending, but not really. As entertainment <i>Pig</i> has nothing to offer, but as a piece of art, well, that's a little harder to pin down. The first thing to say is that it's incredibly impressive that Mason shot the whole thing in one take and he and Andrew Howard, who co-wrote the script as well as playing the depraved psychopath, managed to make it all feel fairly real. The only problem with that is all the writing seems to have been mostly of an orchestrating a general timeline rather than writing dialogue. There's just no way they wrote lines for this; the whole thing feels improvised and it probably was. So really what do they get credit for? An air of sustained grossness I guess which, I mean, is pretty impressive but putting on an accent and playing around in blood isn't really a huge achievement, even if you keep it up for ninety minutes. The stabbings and shootings are well done considering they had to have been planned well in advance, but they're few and far between. Mostly we watch a derelict fritter away his afternoon at the expense of two screaming hostages. As a piece of performance art I understand it and respect the preparation and certainly enjoy it more than most backwoods horror films or straight-to-dvd gore films but with all the filth and violence and craziness it all started to get monotonous, then unbearably dull, then utterly boring. Mason also pipes in music throughout pretty much the whole movie (doesn't help the monotony any), so <i>Pig</i> never feels as real as he'd like it to. And then with the reveal that this man isn't who he seems to be, it lost my respect entirely. If we're to believe that this was all an act and this guy falls into the <i>Naked Fear</i>, <i>Hostel</i> school of murderer, which changes this film for the worst. Then the point shifts from performance art to comment on the rich. And this has to be the most drawn-out, useless one of those I've ever seen. There's just no reason for the guy to behave the way he does with his victims if he was planning on killing them. Furthermore, who's the pregnant girl? Did he get her pregnant, did he cause her mental illness, did he find her that way? Evidence suggests they've been together a long damn time, but if this guy's only out here for the weekend, that doesn't add up. The twist makes a joke out what was before an incredibly committed, albeit grimy and dull film. Imagine if at the end of <i>The Devil's Rejects</i> Captain Spaulding had driven Rufus and Baby to the airport where they changed into tuxedos and landed in New York in time to start working on Wall street. Woulda kinda undersold the whole outsider art part of the movie, wouldn't it? And that's exactly what happens here; <i>Pig</i> goes from bold to not-as-smart-as-it-thinks-it-is in about thirty seconds after an hour and a half of set up.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0000ee;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Yqqwa75BxC7QdI6tzZ4a8q1WtBFxXLU9D1gyEzM-UNI67IZoBsUrM1xAooETbWUOZJJs3g8fLfjEtGWXCVFnVzmOzHIHcV0FsLLwhfO3o4XNc5ADfyN6qwrUgbDuCQ9NZSm5_-TTiDk/s1600/PigPoster2.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Yqqwa75BxC7QdI6tzZ4a8q1WtBFxXLU9D1gyEzM-UNI67IZoBsUrM1xAooETbWUOZJJs3g8fLfjEtGWXCVFnVzmOzHIHcV0FsLLwhfO3o4XNc5ADfyN6qwrUgbDuCQ9NZSm5_-TTiDk/s400/PigPoster2.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554441541338583058" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 270px;" /></a></span></span></div>
Now the other point that this ending skewers is that it meant that my trying to figure out what the fuck Mason and Howard were trying to say was maddeningly put to bed and then gassed in their sleep. So what was a grueling, pretty unrewarding experience became a tiresome joke that wasn't funny the first time someone told it. One take or not, <i>Pig</i> isn't worth the slog. If you're a performance artist or actor looking for lessons in commitment, I suppose you could do worse. But the problem is people not staying above the things they're out to critique. Just look at <i>A Serbian Film</i>. Though very well made and nice to look at (most of the time, anyway) <i>A Serbian Film</i> is just too stupid to be able to talk down to anyone, though boy jesus does it ever try to talk down to motherfuckers.<br />
<br />
A Serbian Film<br />
by Srdjan Spasojevic</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWXpEGOMOoTRjU-kgf7iHQ1kATKyyUOCqzR1Ct67lruNntZRukKczkJHuxpyyndTUWJqTDLoY1CSsW24skfKI_7bJyXD6iAM4S4QHCMDMaTrakMi4Zoy-hx-A7AEvqnHJPqcYFgAdhU2I/s400/serbian-film.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554441542637603858" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 179px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>Milos is an ex-pornstar who must have retired yesterday because the video his son finds of him shows a version of the man exactly like the one who walks in the room to pop the tape out of the VCR. He and his wife don't seem all that bothered by the fact that their son has just watched his dad screwing some blonde on a motorcycle. But forget all that, it doesn't matter. Milos is late. He has to meet his friend and former co-star Lejla because she has an offer for him. She's recently met an odd man called Vukmir who's willing to employ both of them in a new endeavor. Milos is a mite apprehensive, but he'd like to feel useful again and misses playing the stud so he lets himself get talked into Vukmir's increasingly strange scheme. Vukmir is an independently wealthy eccentric who has some kind of half-cocked idea about making art porn. A word about this: how often do you think some fucking European lunatic gets this idea? One of Nicholas Ray's last movies was a short, part of an omnibus feature released by Francis Mishkind, who was really not someone you wanted funding the works of one of the last great filmmakers of the studio era. Anyway, it's a terrible idea but Milos can't say no to the money and goes along with it.<br />
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His first day is supremely weird. He's blindfolded and driven to what I take to be Vukmir's house where he is then led down a series of corridors where he witnesses what are either rehearsed scenes or just bizarre acts of cruelty. All the while he's filmed by two of Vukmir's hulking bodyguards. First he sees a woman slapping her daughter, then just down the hall, a woman separates them and tells the mother that she's unfit to raise the kid. Then Milos is driven home. The next day the men are outside Milos' door again ready to drive him back. This time he and Lejla have sex in a dark room, but Vukmir puts on three television sets playing footage of children just sitting in dark rooms. Well Milos has a hard time keeping it up and the next day meets with Vukmir to tell him he's had enough with the secrecy but most of all he's had it with all the children. Vukmir's response, "Why didn't you say so?" isn't what Milos wants to hear, but the businessman insists that it has to be this way. He use to work with kids and understands their psychology and if Milos would just watch some of the other stuff he's been filming, he'll totally understand. What he shows the horrified porn star, a giant man delivering, then fucking, a baby, sends Milos running terrified out of the house. I'm sure you or I would have had the same response. Only trouble is that Vukmir has drugged whatever Milos was drinking and when he wakes up the next day pissing blood with a hangover, he knows he's been thrust deeper into the murk than he ever wanted to go and once he remembers what happened last night, there will be no recovering.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdZR7iRJE-VFJIMe__5x6YNBRBAU4VrT4DZGrYzzNFhPFqCn3UfWrLz3_OSZ1A514IkP1qYd1WMPHfHRdMQkdyl7TbQDdkF2_Ctki25CT0cvqZKnO25Wm4bjrVQsa0u7bdjfvsBsDrFlo/s400/A-Serbian-Film-006.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554441533771830930" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>In the documentary <i>Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape</i>, Neil Marshall mentioned that something was definitely lost in the transition from low to high budget horror films. The reason films like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-infamous-unforgiving.html">Cannibal Holocaus</a></i><i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-infamous-unforgiving.html">t</a></i> engendered so much fear and revulsion is because they looked like shit; if you were dumb, very open to suggestion or were looking for an excuse, you could make yourself believe you were watching the real thing. He complained that <i>A Serbian Film</i> doesn't work because despite its descending into the worst shit imaginable, it's too well made to be mistaken for the real thing. Which is why<i> Snuff</i> doesn't work, incidentally. Point definitely taken but the real problem with <i>A Serbian Film</i> is that it isn't as smart <i>or</i> as dangerous as it thinks it is. Let's talk danger: the film presents in no particular order baby fucking, skull fucking to death, sex that ends with decapitation and forced incest. Like most hard core pornography, all this becomes incredibly boring before too long. Like most films that decide to tow this particular line (Takashi Miike's <i>Visitor Q</i>, say) once you get that the filmmakers are only interested in showing you the most disgusting shit imaginable, you just accepted it, then wait to see what they have in store for you. In the case of <i>Visitor Q</i>, it was in the service of a single idea: the modern Japanese family has been corrupted. That in mind everything you see (a dad killing then fucking his daughter, a woman lactating during sex, a man raped by youths with his own documentary equipment) it's all furthering the metaphor about modern families and the climate created by new technology. Ultimately I stopped really caring about the time the dad starts having sex with his daughter's dead body, though at least Miike made his film incredibly threadbare and didn't stop every few minutes to say "Get it?" He just kept on with the filth and let it speak for itself. It's what he does. <i>Visitor Q</i> isn't a great film, but like its most obvious influence, Pasolini's <i>Teorema</i>, it works as a single-thesis text. <i>A Serbian Film</i> has a lot on its mind, none of which it finds more interesting than the penis as a murder weapon.<br />
<br />
An interesting idea, to be sure, if only Srdjan Spasojevic had done anything with it. Like Adam Mason, Spasojevic wastes his not inconsiderable craft and his desire to say something about modern life by instead making useless blanket statements and stupidly complicated plot contrivances. For instance, if Vukmir wants to craft some new horrifying brand of pornography, why the christ would he put all his efforts into doing it with someone who people would surely miss if he and his family went missing. Milos is not a nobody and it makes absolutely no sense that Vukmir would use him, especially to the degree he does. He doesn't even know him, so his vindictive treatment of him and his family makes no kind of sense either. Why wouldn't he find a criminal or a homeless guy, someone he could dissappear with no questions? Yes, yes I know the Serbian government and all that shit. But Milos seems perfectly comfortable, so what's the message? That the Serbs ruin middle class families? Why not the poor? Actually, come to think of it, who gives a fuck about Milos or his rich pornstar friends? He's an indifferent dad and husband and he lets himself get dragged in as far as he does without pulling the plug. I say who gives a shit! So, there goes the film's social relevance. So what's left? Penises killing people! So if you're super into that dig in! If like me you wanted a trifle more than just sex and murder being ramped up without actually changing anything, look away, you're not missing anything. It takes real talent to make that shit boring, yet here we are. And as if that weren't bad enough, Spasojevic takes every oppurtunity to make huge points about the state of the world and film and how dangerous it is and it all just feels like the most pretentious, unearned horse shit. Like because Spasojevic is as depraved as this he has the moral high ground somehow? Yeah, yeah and somewhere <i>Hostel's </i>being taught in colleges. I don't particularly like being taught by the guy who finds child rape so fascinating.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNO-SKQoFnXpXoLsHE8TqB091tbZwdobTrteknoRF1bV-iPoEiXepk75zrDlZ4nVYamC4m_y53MV0z99ym7_CDrI3zgHn391HmLc7E98ZPIX3CjqHmbrZx0VqO5mpYptWATCWDic-IHsg/s400/a-serbian-film-srpski-film-movie-poster-2010.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554441537243565842" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 284px;" /></span>And so we see that taboo shattering in and of itself isn't necessarily a worthwhile pursuit. Neither <i>Pig</i> nor <i>A Serbian Film</i> is really all that endearing or interesting a watch. One is shot really well, the other really audaciously and yet neither is worth watching as either pure cinema or as an experiment. <i>A Serbian Film </i>is well made but is undercut by its repugnancy; <i>Pig's</i> repugnancy carries over into its presentation which fits but doesn't do much to ingratiate viewers. And frankly it still falls under Neil Marshall's complaint about it being too well made to be real. The whole time I was just thinking of the prep that went into this or that set piece before they started filming, and because the action left a little something to be desired, that was all I was <i>ever</i> thinking about. I surely wasn't interested in watching a hillbilly molest two people in real time for 90 minutes. Just as I wasn't interested in watching a man rape his whole family for <i>no reason. </i>And all the while Vukmir stands back and says "That's cinema!" Not good cinema, that's for sure.</div>
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Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-89771806734656862042010-11-26T03:59:00.019-05:002012-03-02T16:23:40.542-05:00The Video Nasty Diaries - The House After The Last House On The Left<div style="font-style: normal; text-align: left; ">Hello. I'm Scout and I'm a completist. This has gotten me into trouble over the years. I mean how often do people really mean "author of one great film" when they say Great Director? I could have been spared <i>The Brothers Grimm, The Raccoon Princess, Bitter Moon</i> and so much more if only I hadn't been endlessly compelled to delve further into the recesses of some of my favourite director's minds. I could have sat out the fucking extended cut of <i>1900</i>, but no! Five and a half hours of my life....<i>gone! </i>I also could have been spared some of the least interesting/wrongly bolstered horror films of the 70s and 80s if only I didn't feel compelled to watch everything that was banned by the British Board of Film Classifications in the 80s under a summary ban that would later be dubbed the video nasties scare. In an effort to fight perceived obscenity, the board went to video stores all over the country confiscating video cassettes and slapping hefty fines on vendors. Now, while it's certainly interesting to examine what films were banned and why, the reasons all boil down to the simple fact that the BBFC were full of shit. Censorship in any form is regressive and counter-productive and the video nasties were no exception. By banning these films for poorly executed scenes of graphic violence (<i>Bloody Moon</i>) mixed with bizarre scenes of awkward sex and drug use (<i>The Witch Who Came From The Sea</i>) all they were ensuring was that kids would be impressed by the "BANNED IN 31 COUNTRIES" sticker on the box when it eventually found its way into the public's hands. The director of public prosecutions didn't watch half of these films (hence the now semi-famous story of the police snagging a shipment of <i>The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas</i> believing it was pornography - a mistake also made by Doctor Venture) and before the likes of Mary Whitehouse were sent packing, the video nasties would start eating themselves. when rumours circulated that when the ad campaign for <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-infamous-unforgiving.html">Cannibal Holocaust</a></i> backfired, the British distributors called in a raid on their own movie so they could regenerate publicity for the film by having it banned. Controversy could sell the unsellable; it could certainly sell shit like <i>Frozen Scream</i> and <i>Don't Go Near The Park</i>. Furthermore, sometimes all you needed was the promise or even the hint of controversy to tempt viewers. Today we'll see how the influence of even the lowest trash can be pervasive if the promise of scandal is going to put asses in seats. Specifically, let's just look at the influence <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>The</i></a><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i> </i></a><i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">L</a><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">ast House On The Left</a></i> had on the exploitation circuit in the late 70s when it made it's way to Italy.</div><div><br />Night Train Murders<br />by Aldo Lado<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifnB1JTZOcMZlEDkekVFYJH9STs9BLMiyRN39edlt2p0jDRLkr7I2tfIcMBp5XlDwSQmI9icixNuSDoGcoIllNo0x5YJBjevdh1v7ErHisNHQyLMq4YQtzadwDOauD6obGY05gWiVy8fE/s400/Night-train-Murders-horror-movies-6917197-650-355.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794338980108866" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 218px;" border="0" /></span>We see two parties making their way to the same train out of Berlin. The first is a pair of girls leaving for christmas break. Lisa is the more prudish of the two and by far the cuter of them (Laura D'Angelo made precious few films and this is the only one available in the states as far as I can tell) and Margaret is a little more adventurous. The other pair are thieves who can't quite decide if they're greasers, hippies or, as we'll find out, murderous gremlins. They are also two of the ugliest men in a country that produces some of the ugliest men on the planet at a time when you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting an ugly guy. Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi are fucking hideous, which is really a feat on Aldo Lado's part because they've looked presentable in other films. Flavio Bucci was even half-cute in <i style="font-style: normal; ">Suspiria</i> but here as Blackie, I can't think of a less appealing human face. Anyway, they soon find themselves sharing a compartment with Lady on the Train (which is all the name she gets), an aristocrat who talks in half-formed platitudes. This is one of those movies where people go ahead and just announce the theme of the movie at the first opportunity so they can get to the stabbing and raping sooner. It's the screenwriter's way of clapping his hands and saying "Well that takes care of that!" Anyway Lady on the Train, or Lott, as I'll call her from now on, takes Flavio into the bathroom for a sex scene that I wanna say was aiming at slapstick comedy, but who can say?There are far more zooms than I thought possible in a train bathroom, so kudos for that, but jesus is this weird.<br /><br />Anyway, so the train has to make a stop so all of our characters get off and transfer to a mostly empty train. This is where the personality development part of the movie not only stops, but gets erased. So Lott convinces Blackie and Curly (those are the totally awesome names given to the two guys) that what would be a gas is raping and stabbing both the girls, Weasel and Krug style. Then some dude shows up to spy on them and they make him take part in the gang rape, too. Then through circumstances far too stupid to go into, Blackie, Curly and Lott wind up at Lisa's parents' house and then through even more preposterous circumstances they figure out that their three house guests killed the two girls. And, I'll give Aldo Lado this, he skimps on the revenge aspect of this rape-revenge film just like <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html" style="font-style: normal; "><i>Last House on the Left</i></a>. Though at least Wes Craven went a little off the rails in that department; Lado just gets it over with, which is really fucking aggravating and unfair, I gotta say. The problem is that Lado assumed that because he has characters stop the action of the movie to discuss crime like they were aliens who'd just learned what happens in earth prisons he could show you the worst shit he could think of and it would all come out in the wash. The biggest tell is that when talking about the depiction of the rich in the movie in interviews, Lado makes constant reference to the middle class, but what he means is the upper class. At no point do we meet anyone who could be described as middle class and if there were someone more upper class in Italy than the Stradis and the neighbors who attend their lavish christmas party, than Lado really should have aimed for them because these people seem pretty Upper Class to me. And furthermore the lower class are presented as evil fucktards, even if the rich are pulling the strings. I'm sorry, that's not intelligent commentary, that's a blanket excuse to be an ignorant asshole. So, if Lado couldn't tell the difference, or didn't care, then he's full of shit and the idea that we should be taking cues from this dickbag is hysterical. Even funnier is that our auteur invited the whole of the Italian artistic community to the premiere and watched in reverent silence as the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci and Lina Wertmuller walked out in disgust. Lado had a big enough head on his shoulders to get great coverage of the train and more or less seamlessly mix studio shooting with locations and yet fails to make a case for his integrity and morals and thought that <i>any</i> response to his trashy ass movie was a <i>good</i> response.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqfRFFmCf4NMWjUQwLz7jnW5Nk2YW7ovsyYkWqOk3n4Wstk2eYczddXyPlylY2b6PspERqylwVoW_SC_2dyVKQnlbLqO5LqsVMVJ7eV8GQju1Ypch67hLdXMZBkyK4OHshH8anoUUti-s/s1600/nightrainukdvd2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqfRFFmCf4NMWjUQwLz7jnW5Nk2YW7ovsyYkWqOk3n4Wstk2eYczddXyPlylY2b6PspERqylwVoW_SC_2dyVKQnlbLqO5LqsVMVJ7eV8GQju1Ypch67hLdXMZBkyK4OHshH8anoUUti-s/s400/nightrainukdvd2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794344351540786" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 287px; height: 400px;" border="0" /></a>The way that Blackie and Curly finally kill Lisa Stradi is by stabbing her between her legs. If any image ever defined the ruthlessness of Italian Exploitation Cinema, it's this, in a first wave rip-off of one of the most hated/inappropriately respected films of the 70s. Blackie, Curly and Lott don't learn anything which tells me that Lado and his legion of screenwriters simply didn't get it. Tell me something, why for all the fucking screenwriters attached to every third rate giallo do they always play like braindead rip-offs of better movies? Seriously, when you can't one-up <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House on the Left</i></a>, you're in fucking trouble. Even with lavish production values and a killer Ennio Morricone score (Lado hilariously tries to make believe that De Grassi is playing the movie's theme on his harmonica when the man clearly doesn't even know how the instrument works) <i>Night Train Murders</i> is nothing but a trip into the sick and irredeemable, something the Italians did very well. In fact, that's just one of the things that <i>Late Night Trains </i>(alternate title) and <i>Hitch-Hike</i>, our next movie, had in common, that they were trips into the sick and irredeemable. For instance they both had Ennio Morricone scores and they were both first-wave <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House</i></a> rip-offs. Of course <i>Hitch-Hike</i> did <i>Trains</i> one better of actually getting David Hess, Krug from <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House</a></i>, to basically reprise his role. This was as much a blessing as a curse. Surely anything with David Hess would immediately confuse a public hungry for controversy, but it also meant having David Hess in your movie. Hess is almost as bad as his co-stars speaking in their second or third language. And even though Pasquale Festa Campanile is a little better a director than Aldo Lado, he still can't make a movie that outdoes <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House</a></i> in shock value.<br /><br />Hitch-Hike<br />by Pasquale Festa Campanile<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdRLSDf0d2juu_CoMXp-ihgN-sYcyMJ95Aaw19cbONGT3TOBUUldhDB1O7GE0tlnayPxjzYaSbLDVpET5sVdUU2cNu6pmsv33EpkoWseoL8ogjNej7BnSeI_2umWLDt6r29W4rZWZCluA/s400/34610_200909091624231.thumb.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793702887003106" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" border="0" /></span>Walter and Eve Mancini are maybe the fussiest and most annoyingly unhappy couple on earth. Walter is a journalist on leave who obviously misses the excitement of chasing revolutionaries for interviews. They're making a roadtrip through Italy...sorry, California, specifically near Barstow. Though, seriously, come the fuck on. Anyway, they stop at a campsight and get good and drunk while hanging out with a group of hippies. Walter gets so drunk that he falls and breaks his arm while trying to berate Eve for one of the many things he hates about her. The next day they pick up Adam Konitz, a hitchhiker who flips out at the sound of the news being broadcast on the car radio. A robbery, you say? Just down the road, you say? Killer still at large, you say? He's in the backseat, you say? Yes, Konitz has double-crossed his partners and made off with the money and now Eve and Walter are his hostages for as long as he feels like fucking with them. Mostly what he does (and Walter and Eve are all too happy to join him) is fucking yap endlessly about whatever the hell pops into his addled brain. We hear his take on the police, on journalists, on crime, on his childhood. My favourite quote, <span style="font-size: 100%; ">on his life as a criminal</span><span style="font-size: 100%; ">: "My head! My Head in the sights of their high-powered carbines! </span><i style="font-size: 100%; ">YOU DIDN'T THINK I WOULD DO IT!!!</i><span style="font-size: 100%; "> I'm Smarter than you think! You're a phony! You've always been a phony! You always will be a phony!" I realize that doesn't make much sense out of context but it's literally the best part of the film so I thought I'd share it. If you could maybe find it on youtube, you could skip the movie and save yourself two hours.</span></div><div><span style="font-style: normal; "><br />Pacing, or more plainly boredom, is <i>Hitch-Hike</i>'s biggest problem. <i>Hitch-Hike</i> couldn't be any more plainly a rip-off of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House on the Left</a></i> and even though it's an example of much more assured filmmaking, to be sure, but it's just interminable. What <i>Hitch-Hike</i> boils down to is a scenery chewing contest between David Hess and Franco Nero. Hess has his histrionic violent outbursts where he rages against things like our "Homosexual society" and that insane laughter on his side. Nero's got his accented world-weariness, which makes him sound like Andy Samberg from that one Digital Short where he's slept with everyone in Ryan Philippe's life, including himself. But really a terrible (over)acting competition can't sustain a movie so fucking long. Campanile manufactures a kind of dusty, hillbilly vibe what with the never-ending music and campfires almost like he was aiming at </span><i>Deliverance</i> and hit <i>Toon Town</i> instead. Honestly the film isn't terribly made, it's just pointless. Totally pointless. What the hell was the point of this movie other than to point out that, yes, David Hess characters enjoy sex and murder. But that's written into their DNA. Just look at him! It'd be a surprise if the man weren't a rape hungry psychopath. And yet, despite his being completely unable to act, the Italian exploitation machine wasn't done with him, but we'll come back to that. Let's take a quick detour to the US.<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilX7uEI960SkqonvZYPcBixOwtgKYYan6mQebUlHCLzBcSqA7Ry5KIqHuJ6Quu8b6BkUZh-IPuv5iaYPZB_yMvJq5X9pFioYliDEMCWlWEFs1dKQG5RX6MT816zPUPYMiIrw8IWdEal0E/s400/Autostop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793719488536274" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 270px; height: 400px;" border="0" /></span>In 1972, Roger Watkins poured a lot of himself into a film he called at the time <i>The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell</i> which was a labour of love and ran an unsupportable 175 minutes. It was the story of a psychopath who recruits some low-life friends and decides to kill some people who produce porn films and stag reels. The revenge motive probably made more sense when the movie was still called <i>The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell</i> or <i>At The Hour of Our Death</i>, another title Watkins tossed around. But in the world of drive-in budgeted movies with drive-in levels of gore and mayhem and especially something with as gross and depressing a moral as Watkins film possesses, <i>At The Hour</i> was never going to see the light of day in its original form. And such was the influence of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House on the Left</a></i> that <i>At The Hour of Our Death</i> was rebranded in its image. The Cinematic Releasing Corporation got ahold of it in '77 and shaved just about everything except for the skeleton of a plot and most of the gore. Watkins was livid and distanced himself from the whole mess and in fact didn't know the thing had been released until someone recognized him on the street as "the guy from that sick movie". There isn't much that <i>The Last House On Dead End Street</i> has in common with <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House On The Left</a></i> except for the graphic violence and post-modernism. But, it's way better and somehow even more full of despair.<br /><br />The Last House On Dead End Street<br />by Roger Watkins<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdXZOJspq0IBYOUAsZvHID2CDguZ0jJeXsjAOCIShhMdUO-RSqMxJIgexHOet6Yf5e-TLsm3ePZLKc-MkR4dcVzp-zHhtuweyPJc4PWrad8WcPfT-gsliO7ykwXn6j6paNj2rHCuYKPP8/s400/11.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793632047765090" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 303px;" border="0" /></span>Terry Hawkins has left prison an angry, spiteful little man. But, as his endless inner monologue tells us, he's going to do something they won't see coming! That'll show 'em! Somehow! His solution, rent a room and with some shady connections, start shooting porn/snuff films. His connection spent time in an asylum for having sex with a calf while working for a slaughterhouse, so you know he's game. His movies start to gain a reputation which get around to the ears of Jim Palmer, noted porn film producer who's star has fallen. During one of the most heart-sinking sex parties in film history, Palmer shows his latest film to his benefactor who's not pleased. "You're showing me tenth rate porn while your wife is in the next room getting her ass whipped and you have the nerve to talk to me about reputation!" Palmer promises to get some new ideas and Hawkins might just be his answer. Their arrangement starts sleazily enough when Hawkins shows up at Palmer's house and finds his wife alone and before too long the two are in bed. Nancy, Mrs. Palmer, having seen Hawkins films, asks him how he makes it look so real? The simple answer is that it is real. Hawkins' films, you see, are a potent mix of sex and murder that sells very well (which really was the truth in the early 70s). The only difference between typical grindhouse fare/porn is that Hawkins and his crew are actually killing people. And before too long Palmer, his boss and his wife have fallen into Hawkins' clutches. Palmer needed new material for his films; who knew he'd wind up solving his own problem?<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg2ef__xjRFclbSTL22Aw20g-uXT-ZQIkG9vLwLB1NQlD4rtY6PGRWyM-8T-u5E8MfTLkN78pVDfIlkH7-QOnZIFuKLfox9din24ZxITM6njQJVr6POQhL4jXIxdMiPtu30QSnNkU0GK8/s400/last+house+on+dead+st+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794061914483986" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" border="0" /></span>It's easy to call <i>The Last House on Dead End Street</i> disjointed and confusing, but it's not Watkins fault. The 175 minute cut probably explained why there are a few voiceover tracks other than the hero's, or why Hawkins felt the need to kill Palmer's boss or why Hawkins had the urge to direct in the first place. What won't be explained is why the film is so unremittingly bleak. <i>Dead End Street</i> is dark. Courageously dark. <i>Clockwork Orange</i> with no charisma, dark. Charles Manson's the main character dark. There's a woman being whipped while in blackface for christ sakes! Can you believe that shit? Holy fucking christ! The film's boldness starts and ends with Hawkins. He is really a punch-in-the-gut as a main character. He looks like Bill Hader in <i>Hot Rod</i> and he's out of his goddamned mind. The last half hour of the movie is dedicated to the surprisingly realistic depiction of three people being tortured and maimed with power tools while Hawkins directs and films it all. It'd be dark enough without the gore being so convincing - I'm 99% sure they used animal parts in these scenes as Michael Cimino hadn't blown up enough horses for that to be banned from film sets yet. But, yeah, it really doesn't get much darker than this and the music lets us know that Watkins understood how fucking miserable a movie he was making and he wanted it to be <span style="font-style: italic;">even bleaker!</span> The ending promises us that Hawkins was caught and he and his band were imprisoned but Watkins thought that ruined the whole film. He's not wrong in that it does take something away from the visceral snuff-feeling of the picture, but it also adds a kind of mysteriousness, almost like comic book villainy to the characters, which means that they stay with you.<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzSDJsPDpBAyRBAQgeoxGWHfDyMp-vWibkuk1xFVvcZQuPbg8EQ6dO7fu2vppoW71mzS1D6_B_ZE2HLOHVliYi_iw4TxF9GhwqWfgMQNzQ4h2RHUX39ncTYzmMr_vhLXGHVDPm8EQGRlg/s400/lhodes.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794337672969858" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 261px; height: 400px;" border="0" /></span><i>Last House on Dead End Street</i> might not be the best thing hidden from the sun but it is a film that is as strong as its convictions. It's dark and clearly didn't have much of a budget but as one of the great 70s mind-of-a-fucking-nutjob movie it really does the job. And it does a lot else well, too. Take the weirdly intimate and awkward conversation Palmer has with his boss as he tries to explain how to sell the mediocre pornographic film he's made with his wife as the star. It's tremendously uncomfortable but Watkins doesn't flinch. The humanity of these sleazy fuckers is put nakedly on display and it's a definite mark in favour of Watkins and his uncompromising vision. In an era where directorial excess runs rampant it's tough to think about watching a three hour cut of <i>Last House on Dead End Street</i> but I'm significantly intrigued by his one directorial effort that if the option ever presented itself, the stupidly stubborn completist in me might just force the rest of me to watch it. That same idiot completist was also running the show when he decided I simply had to watch all of the fiction work of Franco Prosperi, the ghoul behind <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/03/where-i-draw-line-volume-1-sands-of.html"><i>Goodbye, Uncle Tom</i></a> and <i>Africa Addio</i>. After all, how truly awful could <i>Last House on the Beach</i> really be? There's no way it'd approach the monstrous reality of <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/03/where-i-draw-line-volume-1-sands-of.html"><i>Goodbye, Uncle Tom</i></a> or the sheer witless exploitation of the likes of <i>Mondo Cane.</i> And yet, what fucking moron watches <i>Last House on the Beach</i> when he <i>knows </i>how bad its director can be? Who's got two thumbs, four years of film school and nothing better to do with himself? <span style="font-style: italic;">This guy!!!!!</span><br /><br />The Last House On The Beach<br />by Franco Prosperi<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-bx79UsWQqfGWt-EXmq1ph2jv2D_b6A8UhxkkQ2pB7PuOlUGPbnXoDcP2iXYxnVvnrlsbV9bX5S0wJQRt9VX6eSQudQpGLbfItqO-UoQrjTy1aZntzikhFZq_BfYS5QpvRSSczMYrZTE/s400/last+house+on+the+beach+9.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794324665089874" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 322px; height: 281px;" border="0" /></span>Sister Cristina is in charge of chaperoning a group of aspiring actresses while they study for their exams. Three bank-robbers, blah fucking blah, we spend the whole movie watching three guys rape and torment six women and then about eight seconds on the revenge the ones still alive reap. The first thing to say is that <i>Last House on the Beach </i>is an even lousier movie than <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House on the Left</i></a> in every respect. The only thing it doesn't have is 'comically' overblown racial stereotypes and banjo music. What it does have is a nude dance show on TV called "Program Babies," terrible continuity, a soundtrack that is on the radio as often as it's underneath the action of any given scene, a shit load of doing nothing by the pool, heterosexual men putting on make-up before gang raping a girl, and chase scenes where both parties seem to be just kinda jogging. It's lazy and seems completely unaware both of the horrid things its characters are doing and of how poor a job everyone involved was doing. Prosperi seemed to sense that he was working with a paltry budget and that his 'best' work was behind him because the phrase "phoning it in" just doesn't do justice to the series of yawns and half-nods that constitute his direction. Not even the usually sturdy Ray Lovelock turns in anything like decent work. He doesn't even have a beard to hide behind. In other words this is the blandest movie about rape I've ever seen. And make no mistake this is all about rape; hell, one of the characters is a nun! Everything's in place to make this the kind of thing Prosperi ousted himself from polite society with in the first place but for whatever reason he brought nothing of his shark-like intensity to the project. I mean on paper, and to a degree in practice, the film is truly tasteless and terrible, it's just that it is executed so lazily that to attack it hardly seems worth the energy. Prosperi had already been declawed by the industry that bred him. <i>Last House on the Beach</i> is a skeleton of a movie that can only offend people who've never seen anything of its type before and by now I've seen so much worse that it's instantly forgettable except when it's exceptionally silly, as when one of the rapists puts on the captive girls' make-up. I'd take issue with the fact that the women do away with their captors with brooms and rakes instead of the fucking guns they get hold of, but then that'd be playing Prosperi's game.<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWuY2thT6v64xnmH0Q1SsthsLLX2rWkE5ouWGbAtI7AiZMVW3nkhxPy1hHufG9MEgQ86kyYsBopCqzmpdG1ztjHBSRBOhFbBlaohGu8lnqAr0AHnaPaeBMpbimmz4XcBE3R3ClYVTo7sk/s400/la+settima+donna+-+jap.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794044055452898" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 294px; height: 400px;" border="0" /></span>And yet it's not even true that there wasn't power in the subject matter. I had thought that if Prosperi couldn't manage to get me to cover my eyes anymore, maybe no one could. Then I saw <i>House On The Edge Of The Park</i>. I'd been reading about Ruggero Deodato's second-most infamous film since I'd discovered the world of online horror writing around 2004/2005ish, back when I was trying to fill the hours working at my grandfather's biotechnical firm. This film, they all claimed, had teeth. And to be honest I was almost among them. But I realized the only reason I was cringing so bad was that I was watching it with my dad, who, while certainly more liberal than most parents, hasn't been dulled to the inherent motherfuckery of Italian horror films like I have. If I'd watched <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">House On The Edge Of The Park</span> by my lonesome, it would just have been another exercise in pointless "and then this happened" cruelty to no ends because after ten years of rip-offs, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House's</i></a> goose has surely been left in the oven and forgotten. But I did see that to the uninitiated, <i>House on the Edge of the Park</i> does have the power to offend. I have to give Ruggero Deodato that if nothing else. Although, it's not like he ever had trouble offending people...<br /><br />House On The Edge Of The Park<br />by Ruggero Deodato<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCO8ZrgXY3oDfe8BL3_MTFR4wnBSG0RTbd5LFjGBUuojPayfT8iTrrlfuK2D_pbfcVTMjnw-Jt8HEvRmketQmauRvwke-HWsg1vla63PnbpwEdTmx7p6RRodhzGYAueY5ykr4CB28PVk/s400/houseonedgeborromeogun.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794038508998850" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 225px;" border="0" /></span>Alex (David Hess once again. Kill me!) is a lowlife mechanic who (randomly? habitually? who the fuck knows?) picks up a woman in a cab on the streets of New York, pulls over and then rapes and kills his passenger. An indeterminate amount of time passes and we join Alex once again. He works at a garage with his mentally handicapped friend Ricky. A couple of well-dressed assholes pulls up complaining of car trouble. The last thing Alex wants is to be waylaid by these two - Tom and Lisa are there names - but he changes his mind when he sees that Lisa is played by Joe D'Amato regular Annie Belle. Well, not only does he fix their car after drinking Lisa in, he also decides that it's in his and Ricky's best interest to head to the party the two well-dressed yuppies are late for. He also decides he needs to bring the razor he killed that poor girl from the prologue with him. Let's now pause to say that the scenes of their El Dorado cruising around Manhattan is the last great thing to admire in this movie. Giovanni Lombardi Radice is Ricky is a close second, definitely, but Deodato made great use of his one night of location shooting. Anyway, back to this fucking movie.<br /><br />So they get to the party and when Lisa isn't leading Alex on (once the man gets naked, you'll have a hard time buying that any Annie Belle character would ever want to sleep with him - he's like 200 pounds of hairy, shameless ham) the rest of the guests take turns ridiculing Ricky and cheating him at cards. Alex gets fed up with their shit and decides he's going to just mess with everyone instead. This is where, I believe, the script was thrown out. Alex and Ricky find themselves in sexual situations with every girl present and at no point does any of it come off as motivated by the story. Alex rapes Lisa, but it's filmed like any soft core sex scene from the previous decade. Then Ricky is instructed to rape one of the other guests, but can't bring himself to do it. A little later she tries to escape and then they do have sex, though it's her idea...? Then a girl called Cindy shows up and Alex rapes and kills her in front of everyone else. And by this point he's humiliated everyone present, but of course our guests get the upper hand eventually and shoot Alex's dick off, but only after he's accidentally killed Ricky who was trying to get his friend to show some compassion. And then we find out what we should have guessed all along, that the girl from the beginning (remember her? You're not likely to if you're seeing the movie for the first time because Deodato does everything in his not inconsiderable power to make you forget you've seen anything other than whatever new horrible thing he's dreamt up) is actually Tom's sister.<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJDv8kO7w-4n5Hmc37jhPEabR3622hiDugW2MIDGYnZ8ylxih90-qbSNfmvHzUZUnsvqLtzCQOMKrzZzxs1oA2-L57-dLSY5ntmH5xO24aY_RSbx8SDAg-8R4Pjf2bpkgk_L2Fghyphenhyphen9qy4/s400/HOTEOTP+J+O.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793891497833938" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 220px;" border="0" /></span>Ruggero Deodato has what I call the Rob Zombie problem. He's a great filmmaker at his best, but he has never made a film I'd watch twice. His craft is wasted on some of the most vile pieces of trash that the Italian exploitation industry have to offer the movie-watching public. Starting with <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-dark-and-masculine_09.html">Jungle Holocaust</a></i>, he embarked on a streak of movies that dare you not to flinch that only Franco Prosperi has rivaled, although seeing as how Deodato is personally responsible for every image he created, that stacks the deck in his favour as the better filmmaker. Prosperi went looking for horrifying imagery as often as he thought it up; Deodato was a man possessed by a singular vision when it came to messing you up good. Now this of course makes his movies ever more problematic. He was a better and smarter director than his contemporaries with more skill and care at his command which means he had a greater responsibility. With <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">House On The Edge Of The Park</span> he totally blew it. He took the premise, clearly intended as a <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House</i></a> rip-off, and decided that rather than make an intelligent post-modern horror film he was going to focus on making single scenes make you queasy or turn you on, and didn't really care how it all fit together. Logistically speaking the big twist derails the whole plot. Why would Tom sit by and watch Alex rape his friends if he had a gun in the other room and was planning on using it the whole time? Why, if everyone was in on it, would they play along for so long even as they were humiliated, beaten and sexually assaulted? The simple answer is that Deodato didn't give a good goddamn about any of that. He was most interested in whatever was happening at that moment and if that didn't work for you, who the fuck cares? In his defense, was anyone going to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">House On The Edge Of The Park</span> for the subtext? Well, me, but these days I rarely run into people like me who ask more of horror films.<br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj01zJbRUQu2rwWdy88vi-YGMSpz6aQagq1dV1dwExtSmOrB1IrcX2QDpoC8-6W1R1ZHWTnkhfkR-mgTIRMBgDlXIZXbeCXA9Hx_x0a3AfStLCiO59b0Gt_Dxu1QMi-p0J97CHHxFQ-m4M/s400/2348-1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793698293684770" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 400px;" border="0" /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">House On The Edge Of The Park</span> is an unpleasant experience, but it's too dumb to be much harm. If you let it, it could probably get under your skin and watching my dad's reaction proves that, but these movies only have so much power and I do think that everyone has a point at which they can no longer be effected, your brain just doesn't allow you to get worked up anymore. It's seen enough! It stops seeing problems and just starts looking for things you like. And while I see that Deodato definitely has skill, I found nothing to like about <i>House</i>, which is a double-edged sword. After all, there are no comical fuck-ups, just upsetting ones that ruin the movie. When your brain looks for joy and finds none, it makes for a long hour and a half, but such is the tragedy of the completist. But, there is hope for us determined nutjobs. For instance, just as I was preparing to write this here confessional, I got word that there was one more <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House</a></i> rip-off I hadn't seen. It was by Joe D'Amato, of all people, my personal favourite Italianate lunatic and when the summary on IMDB is misspelled, you know you're in for a rare treat. Suddenly the future seemed bright. Joe's take on the cannibal film is easily the most palatable of them all, so natch his <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House</i></a> rip-off would surely make them all seem small by comparison. This film would restore all that was right and good in the world! It would reunite The Smiths! It would free Leonard Peltier from prison! It would make the Democratic Party stop behaving like such pussies and shove healthcare and equal rights bills up the GOP's ass and into the laps of the American public! And all this from a hardcore pornographic remake of a rip-off of a shitty Wes Craven film!<br /><br />Hard Sensations<br />by Joe D'Amato<br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWisWo1MqPx_j76tsmuHFC8NvdIyiO6exHkz-_TQX0H_ajdteFyo_r4N70_AkvM156lAfqKKvS43mFbr-aLGf4Glmg3mfqursYGts5ClyDfW4NjMKydfA4hAif8QSIsKPVbBCtjzIBIkA/s400/vlcsnap-2010-11-19-10h10m35s215.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543794493648716178" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 295px;" border="0" /></span>After an unbearably long credits sequence we meet our heroes, three girls who are being chaperoned by their super hot professor Mrs. Perez to an island for two weeks of relaxation after exams. And seeing as how all the girls are rich, their fathers have arranged for the two burly guys who operate the boat to the island to stay and mind them. Well they could have used three for no sooner have the girls started swimming topless and having pillow fights then three criminals show up on their island having just broken out of the joint! They kill the guards and look like their poised to do more but Clyde, the most levelheaded of the bunch, reminds them that murder, prison break and the remainder of whatever sentences they skipped out on will be bad enough without rape factored in. This holds up for awhile but Bobo, the real asshole of the bunch, can't chill his libido for another second longer and when he decides to shake things up, Mrs. Perez takes the bullet and sleeps with him hoping upon hope that it will keep him from attacking the girls. But soon not even Clyde's handwringing can curb Bobo's various lusts and he and their third companion tie Clyde to a tree and Bobo has his pick of the women. But of course, they've already started planning their escape.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thank christ and all his angels for Joe D'Amato. The man does smut right! And best of all even the things that go wrong (surprisingly few, actually) they don't particularly matter because this is a filthy goddamned porn film! But, as I don't watch porn for the same reason most of the rest of the world watches porn, I can enjoy its latent qualities! The dubbing in Joe's films is always pretty good and even though people talk in platitudes, they sound less forced and awkward then they would in a Jesus Franco film, at least. And there's even convincing overlap rather than the standard gigantic pauses between any two lines; it almost sounds like real conversation. The script makes sense: Clyde is legitimately smart about their situation and Bobo is as deranged as any of the protagonist of any of the last five films we've discussed. And here's a semi-interesting diversion: one of the escapees is gay. And because Bobo the rapist is the one who's seen as irredeemable, Joe gets in one for acceptance by giving him all the epithets. Bobo only ever refers to his second accomplice as "the faggot" and for once homosexuality isn't a source of derisive laughter, it's just something that separates a rapist from a criminal. Taken together that's almost progressive as these things get, especially because <i>Hard Sensation</i> plays almost like a corrective to <i>The Last House on the Beach</i>.<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2HmU3mURFxKoLwF0wx2e3PsC8cuiGBeJ2kaFvZ1eA35dQL_cpV9aAVTvdOJqZNRrpKAa7r5CpzIjrIID_F7b62jeGd4XZXXKLGQ_hQxElxQJ_pU1Ycwp8fdhJFP1ECkZFOL75qpTN814/s400/HardSensation2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793863974299874" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 295px;" border="0" /></span>With <i>Hard Sensation</i> Joe was faced with a dilemma: sex film vs. rape revenge film. The script was a retread of <i>Beach</i> and so calls for a certain level of violence but Joe was a zany humanist first, a lover of onscreen violence second. Frankly I'd love to know what the assignment was because violence definitely didn't win out. In fact if you take out the snapping and threats that start all but one of them and the rape in this film is about the gentlest example of rape you'll find in any movie. Joe didn't quite have the heart to follow through on the violence part of the sexual violence equation, so each rape turns into a straight-up sex scene, not because Joe viewed rape as something you could rebound from or enjoy, but because all he was interested in was filming sex scenes just as Ruggero Deodato was only interested in violence, his commitment didn't extend beyond keeping the plot alive when the clothes came off. The sex scenes are all of the consenting variety, even if afterwards everyone acts like something much worse happened. Joe's attitude toward sex might be called classical; the plot is window dressing and he's not going to let it get in the way of sex scenes his audience could rely on. The raincoat crowd was going to leave happy this time and the horror fans would have to wait for <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/06/cannibals-big-and-nasty.html">Anthropophagous</a></i>, but bless him for spinning the most believable of all the Italian <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House</a></i> clones when he wasn't filming sex scenes! Forgive me for sweeping the issue of rape under the carpet here, but considering that every one of the above films (<i>Dead End Street</i> excluded) treats rape pornographically on a thematic if not physical and very real level, <i>Hard Sensations </i>is almost refreshing. Not just because Joe doesn't make the audience suffer for his art, but because he was the only one of these guys to actually follow through and show sex as it is, rather than lie and use rape as only a justification for the lamest revenge scenes of any film.<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238);"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDNhjK2g4cNoHI6xz6A3Ufi-wY1t9Vh07-u6qOKm4RdvznZYPS482QqFjTNpEk60llN-pXIis_yWrtHmbIffZTh4aNSa3jkY6G6JYNmo6Puk8gi3-oP5InU2fwZhf2-qPQonfbTry8foA/s400/1068011_02290_hard_sensation_covers_123_346lo.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543793709062961970" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 289px;" border="0" /></span>And bless him for all the little Joe D'Amato touches that litter <i>Hard Sensation</i>. First of all the sex scenes all take place on the same island as <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/06/portrait-of-zombie-as-paradigm.html"><i>Erotic Nights of the Living Dead</i></a> and <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/06/portrait-of-zombie-as-paradigm.html"><i>Porno Holocaust</i></a>. At the start one of the girls reads Playgirl magazine - a first for Italian smut as far as I can tell. The masturbation that follows borrow liberally from the Jesus Franco school of zooming in and out like a goddamned pervy lunatic. And who but Joe could have dreamt up shooting the final rape scene from behind Bobo's thigh? There is just more imagination on display here than in movies with ten times the budget and pretension. If you take all the unbearable self-important bullshit that props up every film in the wake of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House on the Left</a></i>, including <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html"><i>Last House</i></a> itself, you have enough talk to prop up a piece of paper. Which is to say, your ideas are fucking nothing if you don't have the intelligence to make anything of them. The reason Joe D'Amato of all people makes these "serious artists" and their serious minded films seem like the tall-talking jagweeds they truly are is that he never once made a bigger deal of his movies than he knew they could support. If you don't understand your subject matter, how could you rise above it long enough to gain any kind of perspective? Joe had no pretensions and so he entertains because it's what he was born to do. He knew there was no point in getting haughty about porn and in the process of churning out a truly staggering body of work bared his soul completely inadvertently. How could you not? It's moments like this that I live for. I know what you're thinking: What the fuck kind of maniac goes <i>this</i> crazy for a goddamned Joe D'Amato porn film? Well, readers, I've seen too many assholes retroactively try and turn their shit grindhouse movies into one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century, so for once I'm sticking up for the factory filmmaker, the littlest little guy who never claimed to be anything other than the little guy, if he ever took the time to reflect on his career at all. Christ knows he didn't reflect on the films after he was done shooting once a few things were securely in place. And yet, <i>Hard Sensation</i> is hands down the best <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/where-i-draw-line-last-house-on-left.html">Last House</a></i> rip-off ever made. Go figure. And weirder still I haven't committed to seeing everything he's ever done. Maybe I'm cured...</div></div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-25680669529011643992010-11-05T22:46:00.010-04:002011-07-26T16:07:08.152-04:00The Horror Within (My Favourite Films Volume 18)<div style="text-align: left;">If I had to pick one film to show to an alien race to try and explain the concept of horror, specifically the horror film, I think I’d pick John Carpenter’s<i> The Thing</i>. It can be understood without any significant reading into the zeitgeist that produced it. You don’t need to be an American or have much understanding of the political climate of the early 1980s, you don’t need to have seen the Howard Hawks produced <i>The Thing From Another World</i>, of which Carpenter’s film was an ostensible remake, nor do you have to have read <i>Who Goes There?</i> the story by Joel Campbell, which both films take inspiration from. In fact you don’t need to know much at all; I was maybe 5 or 6 when I first saw <i>The Thing</i> and it scared the Christ out of me but more than that I connected with its desperate story and thoroughly enjoyed repeat visits to the cold Antarctic setting. As with <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favourite-films-volume-9-aliens.html">Aliens</a></i>, another childhood favorite, I could connect with the action in a clear enough fashion, enjoyed the brutality of both the heroes and the villain, the swearing, the creature design, the relentlessness of the story and as I got older came to see it as a film so carefully designed and meticulously constructed that the idea of calling it a horror film doesn’t really do it justice. It is a story of paranoia, of loss, of Lovecraftian terror, of men trying to apply science, reason and finally common sense to the unexplainable, of man’s multifaceted struggle with things he can only attempt to comprehend. Though to be fair it is first and foremost the story of an Alien that really wants to take over the bodies of twelve men trapped in an isolated location who in return really want to kill the thing. Because it is such a simple story, it’s possible to scour it for subtext (Vietnam, AIDS and socio-feminist related readings have all been offered) and while I think that’s a valuable and telling exercise, I’m going to simply judge it in terms of its place in the genre because it is in many ways the ultimate genre film.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Thing</div><div>by John Carpenter</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirgAE-pQqH2StwiGcY0QeMxpudjIz0bFsSi5dU3Hm3I1t1HM7yUDaCPyUPBgAz3ckOpFt95S5w_e6rEByDWlgVL61npHoHLXyK4ggZDsXTNiveiR_P2ZQ7Rv0Ujxsd4oXRnKW7creHF64/s400/the_thing2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536277917398026674" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 274px; " /></span>In the endless expanse of the Antarctic landscape, a helicopter and its two occupants chase after a dog. The dog looks back at them as they unload bullets and grenades feebly; it seems to be knowingly outfoxing them. The dog makes it to United States National Science Institute Station 4 before the two men can do much damage. The pilot accidentally blows himself and the chopper up with a grenade and though the surviving man tries to explain himself the Americans at Station 4 don’t understand a word of what he says; he’s Norwegian, you see. They understand when they’re being shot at however and the man is killed by Garry, the military official in charge of the station, when the Norwegian misfires and hits one of the men, Bennings the meteorologist, in the leg while aiming for the dog. The guys take the dog in and begin wondering what it is that would have caused two men to chase after a dog with intent to kill. The men, besides Garry and Bennings, are Norris, Childs, MacReady, Fuchs, Blair, Windows, Palmer, Nauls, Copper and Clark. After stitching up Bennings’ leg, Copper opts to go find the Norwegian camp and gets MacReady, one of the station’s two helicopter pilots to take him there. What they find is chilling, in every sense of the word. Looks like the fellow with one of Garry’s bullets in his crown got off easy; one of the men has cut his own throat with a straight-razor (but seems to have frozen to death before he finished bleeding) and another looks to have been burnt alive, though he doesn’t look all human. They also find a big block of ice that looks to have held something big that was recently extracted. They bring back the burnt man-like mass to camp where Blair attempts to perform an autopsy. Everyone watches in shock and horror as new discoveries are made but no one is more shaken than <i>the dog</i>; it’s almost as if he recognizes the burnt-up mass of flesh. When Clark the vet puts him in with the camp's other sleigh dogs that night, something rather unexpected happens. The dog quickly sheds it’s skin and becomes something unspeakably hideous and gooey as it wraps tentacles around the other dogs. The men burn it before it can lift itself into the rafters with the giant fists it sprouted from its back. </div><div><br />It takes some imagination on Blair’s part to discern what went on but considering that every man in the camp saw the transformation with their own eyes they’re willing to buy just about anything. Blair pulls the creature apart and finds evidence of it trying to look like a dog, like the thing was in the middle of imitating a dog when they killed it. After inspecting some tapes they collected from the Norwegian base, MacReady and Norris head to the spot where they pulled the block of ice from the snow. Not only do they find where it was pulled out, they find the charred remains of a gigantic spacecraft buried beneath a hundred thousand years worth of ice. MacReady draws a timeline which the guys take with a grain of salt; he’s no scientist after all. The Norwegians thaw the thing out, it gets to some of their bodies, they try to contain it by killing whomever it touches (and themselves to prevent being taken over), but it gets out in the body of one their dogs, which tries to occupy other dogs. Though that makes a kind of sense, it’s hardly a comfort to the men at Station 4. How long before the man-thing defrosts and decides it would prefer, as the film’s slogan promises, a nice warm-blooded body to inhabit? And if it can imitate any organism it wants to, how will anyone know who’s human and who’s not? It’s either going to be a very long or a very short winter.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv5AjXVkmUEcsjrNnUQNXRBR9YgKbH3rw7Ziq-BQNq0oVLSVfXL6seZX0ocVr6-fES2tcqRaxrPr4hKw_9mo7k1z2ed8aL-F5j_IPLSo7MLClaWIK3nhyf22vdeem9S6pNNQ4y6yNyFxw/s400/kurt_russell_thing_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536277907207243794" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 276px; " /></span><i>The Thing</i> is John Carpenter’s best film, it is one of the best remakes of all time, one of the best genre movies of all time, features some of the best special effects of all time and one of the most terrifying and interesting premises of all time. Not bad for a little sci-fi/horror movie with three locations, is it? It is superbly crafted to ensure that every scene shocks and surprises and to make sure you never feel at ease. It is only on second viewing do you understand how loaded every gesture is (even the simple act of a dog licking your face becomes foreshadowing in the take-no-prisoner’s world of Bill Lancaster’s script and John Carpenter direction). Every element that would ordinarily damn a film like this (simple sets, the odd bout of pseudo-science, the lack of female characters, the no-nonsense direction, a seeming reliance on effects over characterization [though under scrutiny this turns out to be false]) becomes a strength. The film had few allies upon it’s first release; if the critics of 1982 could see just what’s happened to some of the classics since Carpenter’s film, they’d perhaps have kept their mouths shut instead of trashing a film they didn’t understand. The problem was they were not willing to play <i>The Thing’s</i> game. They wanted a film that showed respect to them and to Howard Hawks’ original; Carpenter’s film does neither on its face. <i>The Thing’s</i> atmosphere is built in to every frame, the performances are invisible, everyone taking a backseat to the crisis on their hands, and the effects are quite gruesome. Carpenter’s characters are not exactly charismatic (though most are likable) and it's only when he kills them off at times you least expect it that you realize how much you like them. In some regards it seems like we have the makings of an Italian horror film; the scenes at the Norwegian camp resemble some gory painting halfway between Fulci and Argento, the Ennio Morricone music beautifully underscoring the action (of all film scores; the simple ‘dun dun’ theme gets the most impact with the least movement), even the characters seem drawn from an Italian film (Windows looks a touch like some Italian character actor, Fuchs like Richard Dreyfuss by way of Al Cliver in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/fulcis-trilogy-do-not-entry.html">The Beyond</a></i>, Bobby Rhodes would make a career pretending to be as naturally cool as Keith David is here and thanks to all that hair Kurt Russell looks like a cross between make-up man Rob Bottin and Ray Lovelock in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/underdog.html">Let Sleeping Corpses Lie</a></i>). Carpenter had shown his affinity for Italianate visuals and atmosphere in his previous film, <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/zombies-of-kind.html">The Fog</a></i>, but <i>The Thing</i> manages to synthesize the visuals of his and his crew’s inspiration (Argento, EC comics, Lovecraft, Hawks; I detect shades of <i>Jaws</i>, but Spielberg and Carpenter were both students of the same generation of teachers) and craft a language all it’s own. </div><div><br />Bottin’s visual effects are unrivaled, even today. Bottin and Carpenter were both wary of staying away from H.R. Giger’s designs for <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i>, still fresh in their minds when they began planning the film in 1981. I think it speaks volumes about their various successes that not only does <i>The Thing</i> not resemble <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html">Alien</a></i> in anyway, it completely avoids seeming like a sci-fi movie. I for one have never really thought of it as anything in the universe of <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favorite-films-volume-8.html"><i>Alien</i></a> (though check out the extra appendages on the queen at the end of James Camerson’s sequel; they’ve got Bottin’s signature writ large; that Stan Winston worked on the scenes with the dog thing I think could be seen as pre-proudction on <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-favourite-films-volume-9-aliens.html"><i>Aliens</i></a>) as it speaks a different language. The stories have a lot in common, though Campbell covered the ground in <i>Who Goes There?</i> before Ridley Scott had ever read Dan O’Bannon’s script. First of all, Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography is half-business, half-mood, all great. The gorgeous snowy landscapes and the scenes of the camp at night have a kind of blue-collar poetry about them; this is truly the end of the world. And what was Ridley Scott trying to achieve with his space ship if not the kind of broken down and hopelessly average interiors that Carpenter’s characters dwell in? Also I think that Bottin’s creatures avoid looking earthly in a way no one’s ever seconded. For all the genius behind the design of Giger's titular Alien (of which there was plenty), it does retain a humanoid shape. The only thing human about Bottin’s creations is in their feeble attempt at looking human. The rest is so far from normal, so freakish and distorted that they become works of art in their own right. Everyone from Stuart Gordon to James Gunn has tried their hand at copying Carpenter’s work with Bottin but no one’s come close. <i>The Thing</i> was, by Carpenter’s own admission, all about the monsters. If they weren’t the most fucking awesome monsters you’d ever seen, the film wouldn’t have worked.</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3mFo8lO0dFNKJXqeqQqTHdIQKGl_KOEybnfwT5syVkHkzhOrASi8bvss9LIPe-iHhHidyaTGWs9yMP6KGp0gyoxngM4xEqkr9R4Qe-JXaoLFmnOcmk0pHpnz9LydIc47PR8EckNIENT0/s400/thing_poster_02.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5536295937319108626" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 291px; height: 400px; " /></span><div>The reason I think that<i> The Thing</i> manages to be unnerving when we aren’t staring down the snout of some hoary beast, is because for the first and last time Carpenter and co. had total control over the look of the film; he had it once again on <i>Ghosts of Mars</i> but that film wound up a pale imitation in this and every other regard. Your average cinemagoer in the early 80s had no clue what an Antartic research station looked like so both the drab interiors (with their indefinably spooky corridors and maw-like doors) and the frozen exteriors all set the viewer on edge. The outside looks like a jagged and macabre ice castle in the thick of the falling snow and the lighting design, which was actually perfectly natural, is all manufactured blues and oranges. The frame jumps with strange colours once the action picks up and never rests. The film’s final location, the generator room is a special creation, the camp’s own inferno where the final and most terrible hell-spawn dwells (harking back to Harryhausen as well to every creature we’ve seen thus far). The lighting, all hellish chiaroscuro, compliments the final clash with the unknown perfectly just in time for Russell’s final put-down. The blue-collar aspect is most evident in the dialogue; when not in Hawksian rapid-fire yet lackadaisacal conversation, the men sound conspicuously like a couple of bored, stir-crazy working stiffs. How often do people attempt and fail at that sort of thing? I think Lancaster understood (and Cameron took note) that when ordinary people take on something, their fight becomes your fight in a way it doesn’t if you’re watching he-men or detectives or gladiators taking on something supernatural; they’re more likely to rise to the occasion. Carpenter’s guys don’t want the beast to win but mostly they don’t want to get killed; an impulse I think we can all understand. Even as paranoia mounts and no one’s sure about anything, their dialogue remains refreshingly human. The film’s best lines are gut reactions to some pretty horrifying images; I don’t know whether Keith David, Richard Masur’s Clark or David Clennon’s Palmer has the film’s best line, but almost everyone gets an instantly quotable zinger that would just be so much swearing in any other film. What’s more, upon further inspection, you realize that no line gets wasted. Take the petty argument about who’s going to search for Fuchs with whom; knowing what we do about everyone involved and who turns out to be a thing, it makes perfect sense. The dialogue and Carpenter’s camera miss nothing. In other words the film wastes no time, no words, no glances and no energy; everything helps the action along, everything contributes to the miasma of mistrust and the end soon comes hurdling at us at lightspeed. It is efficient, grisly and creepy, like the organism at the core of the story; and just like the thing of the title it gets under your skin. In other words, it is a horror film par excellence, full of writhing shocks and spider-legged creatures from another world; like the best of Lovecraft it knows no master, plays by no rules and scares you to death, but you keep coming back for more.<br /></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-13324085157109015952010-11-02T23:13:00.010-04:002012-10-09T04:20:34.445-04:00Forbidden Love (My Favourite Films Volume 17)<div style="text-align: left;">
Horror movies have always had champions over the years. In the 1960s small-time filmmakers like Roman Polanski and George A. Romero changed the discourse on the possibilities of the horror film. In the 1980 and 90s, all the taboos were shattered and the realm of post-modernism was opened up. In the 1920s, the makers of German Expressionism broke the mold but in the 1940s, horror had one innovator, one man who refused to make every other kind of ghost story or monster flick. Val Lewton and his division at RKO Radio Pictures turned American horror, which had already started to get stale by 1941, into something imaginative and artistic, akin to the work of Robert Weine and F.W. Murnau. With his protégés Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson, he crafted some of the most compelling fright films the world had ever seen. The first of his nine horror films is his best and remains one of the most daring and beautifully told stories we have. (P.S. I wanted this to be my 300th film, so be nice to me and pretend, won't you? Thanks terribly!)</div>
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<i>Cat People</i></div>
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by Jacques Tourneur</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5535167419749008386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0bkoZFkIiZTXF0W9mNTciDIgeM73v1O2UcM48svvsLQBxUuz21zX5e7b_F5vlLXivuVDfmCMPAUtF-4BFjyLEAE2aqxP5BZlyw-wiezOQGgDcfPy47aHxFdYbmLJkd2B6mvBUfa2WXco/s400/catpeople17wh8.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 288px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 384px;" /></span>Irena Dubrovna is a Serbian expatriate living on her own in New York City. She sketches a panther in the zoo but isn’t happy with the end result. When she throws her scraps away but misses the trashcan she hits the shoes of Oliver Reed. Oliver, a lonely young ship designer, approaches her and sweet-talks his way into an invitation back to her brown stone; Irena for her part seems more than happy to entertain the handsome Reed. She doesn’t have many friends in the city, in fact she insists on that isolation but Reed is different. He doesn’t demand anything from her, is more than courteous and seems genuinely interested in spending time with the beautiful young Irena. A little time passes and Oliver and Irena are in love, but as Oliver often points out, they’ve never become intimate; in fact they’ve never even kissed. Irena is grateful for the space Oliver has given her and insists she has her reasons. Although in fairness, the first time they met she outlined her fears in the abstract. Irena comes from a village that was raided long ago by King John, who threw out the Mameluks. The people in her village resisted Christianity and embraced devil worship so that when John showed up, he engaged in full-scale slaughter of the heretics. Irena, though she’s reticent at first to talk about it, believes that she’s been cursed by her homeland, that she’s descended from said devil worshipers and that grave things await her should she succumb to her urges. The history is patently false but it’s exoticism was enough for audiences at the time to believe her inherited evil, and I surmise the story had more to do with Lewton and Tourneur’s own exile from Europe than anything else.</div>
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Oliver thinks its nonsense but he loves his wife dearly and, a month of sleeping in different rooms after his marriage notwithstanding, he’s going to help his beloved in any way he can. His closest friend and co-worker Alice Moore suggests a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd, to help Irena work through her beliefs and feelings. Irena only goes to one session before she starts questioning whether she wants the curse lifted or not. Judd thinks she ought to seek professional help following the revelation that Irena seriously believes that she’ll turn into a predatory cat if she’s aroused, Oliver is worried sick about his bride, and Alice is brought to tears when her friend confesses how sad he is. When Alice lets slip one day that she has more than friendly feelings for Oliver, things take an ugly turn. Oliver, conflicted about his feelings and the state of his marriage, does not tell Irena, but instead spends more platonic time with Alice. Irena stops working altogether and begins following her husband around growing more suspicious and paranoid by the day. Soon it seems the only thing that brings her comfort is visiting the panther in the zoo. It comes as little shock when Alice begins having run-ins with what appears to be a large four-legged animal that always disappears before light can find it.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5535167412487742546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit49gxcO8MIADGav3DC0_l4yeH88YWPUTNmfO_HyvIF0rTppAXyf6B5G0_U66FGsJcnrtYodTxJm8zGM0Ktw8I6IpU6ZEUAkfXXTecDgNSlXmShKHa6sX4FDPDFtHJALEyZB9SmL9Oeso/s400/cat_people.png" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 300px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton were kindred spirits. Both were expatriates like Irena and Tourneur did some of his best work for Lewton as both saw the dramatic potential of shadow, light and insinuation. The first thing to notice about <i>Cat People</i>, before you’ve sided with anybody or got wind of the direction the plot will move, is how deliciously stylized it is but Lewton and Tourneur worked in an era before a fuss was made over these sorts of things. Lewton had very little money and the film is full of budget-conscious trickery that squeezes the most from what they had to work with. There’s the decision to make Reed a designer to make way for an endgame strategy (which, of course, relies on shadows) or how Tourneur and Lewton loaded every frame with feline likenesses and other strange objects. Then there’s the way the two men play with light. Take the first session between Irena and Judd; the way in which Tourneur frames her face is brilliant, if a bit unrealistic. Throughout the film Irena’s hair always sparkles with fill light and her face is never less than beautiful. Though she, like the audience, infers things that may or may not be true, she is still the victim and we must be able to sympathize with her. Enter the stalking scenes. A woman walks alone on a sidewalk at night. Suddenly, something horrifying lurking in the shadows jumps out at her…or does it? The scenes with Alice and Irena aptly playing a cat-and-mouse game set the standard for horror films for a half-century. When Alice starts suspecting that something is watching her, Tourneur works wonders by relying on the viewer’s imagination. Through expert sound design and, of course, those bold shadows some giddily frightening cinema results. These stalking scenes were the inspiration for millions of directors like Bob Clark, John Carpenter, Mario Bava and Dario Argento, who in turn inspired hundreds of other filmmakers. Argento even ‘pioneered’ having a female antagonist in gialli, the genre he worked in at the start of his career. Lewton’s films, with their contrasting light and dark and heavy echoing footsteps, can also seen as brothers to American film noir (I’ve taken to calling them ‘noirror films’), except that they prefigure the majority of those films by a number of years. Tourneur himself would go on to contribute one of the best, <i>Out of the Pas</i><i>t,</i> in 1947 (he knew that the sight of a lot of swishing overcoats just made things more gripping). <i>Cat People</i> pre-dates the best-known examples of the genre making its creators all the more innovative. Its innovations are legendary - the production team would repeatedly attempt what they called a 'bus' named after the first real scare of the film. The theory was simple: have the audience anticipate one thing and then suckerpunch them with something else harmless, diffusing one scare with another. Think for a second about the amount of times you've seen that in horror films. Can you imagine cinema without that scare? It's almost ludicrous to imagine that <i>Cat People</i> was the first movie to do that.</div>
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It would be one thing if the horror and stylistic presentation were all that worked but <i>Cat People</i> is more than ominous shadows and sounds. Dewitt Bodeen’s screenplay is even-handed and resists many of the temptations of films of the period. The dialogue is nicely downplayed so that the horrific moments really do come as a jolt. Though <i>Cat People</i> could be seen as an inversion of Curt Siodmak’s script for <i>The Wolfman</i> (the movie started as a title, after all, and there’s even a sly silver bullet joke in there), it also uses those elements it cribs in a much smarter fashion. Lawrence Talbot’s curse is always out in the open for us to see; Irena’s is, until more than two thirds of the way through the movie, uncertain. She also has emotion on her side. Simone Simon gives the performance of her life as Irena; if she weren’t so absolutely appealing, her descent into homicidal jealousy would not be nearly the blow to our expectations that it is. <i>Cat People</i> is one of the only films I’ve seen with the nerve to make their villain so patently adorable to mask her being obstinate and unrepentant, but Simone Simon is so masterfully understated that everything she does works. She has a terrifically expressive face that expresses quiet menace and deep emotional wounds equally well. If she were not someone you wanted to take care of, this film would have fallen flat. Imagine if they’d used Jane Randolph in the lead instead of relegating her to the straight woman. </div>
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Then there are the other players. As leading men go, Kent Smith as Reed is actually quite impressive. As a doggedly patient husband, conflicted friend and cowering victim, he does great things. When he and Jane Randolph’s Alice are cornered in their office the fear in his voice is real. And then there’s Tom Conway. Conway is one of my favorite character actors and Louis Judd is probably his best role. He sinks his teeth into the part of sleazy confessor and sells it with everything he has; his elegant voice, his devilish facial features and finally his feline physicality; he leers like a housecat when probing Irena about the nature of her condition. Incidentally, Bodeen’s decision to make psychiatry just as large an evil as old religious beliefs is characteristic of both Lewton and Tourneur films, but consider that these are the days of the Hays Code and Bodeen’s script seems a trifle more scandalous. Similarly shocking is that bare shoulder when Irena cries in the bath after her first transformation and that our heroes are in love out of, in fact in direct opposition to, wedlock. That scene in the bathtub, that moment of vulnerability is rare in portraits of villains (especially in the 40s), but <i>Cat People</i> is about transformation and defying expectations. Irena may be the villain but she has tradition and new-age approaches to wellbeing to blame for her undoing. She has first her fears of a curse to contend with, then her husband’s abandonment and finally the rapacious lust of her psychiatrist. She is a victim as much as the people she terrorizes and I don’t mind admitting that I find her easier to sympathize with than the 'victims'. I think maybe it’s the combined effect of Lewton’s design, the acting and the set design. Knowing that sets were re-used from <i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i> and that the team working here would work together nearly a dozen more times, makes the whole thing feel like the work of a family (the lighting in the film also reminds me very much of my own home, or at least the one in my memory – this wonderful movie has a way of making itself a part of your unconscious). The thing about <i>Cat People</i> is that it has the look and feel of familiarity. The lighting and Nicholas Musuraca's camera remind us of noir and so the film already feels lived-in, though crucially not tired - after all, what other horror film could lay claim to such a clear-headed narrative and such style at the time? Lewton was a master producer and Tourneur a marvelously assured director and the effect is that you feel you've known the film a lot longer than you have. I know that this film has worked its way into my brain and is now as comforting to me as Christmas; it's a memory you never made but has always been there. <i>Cat People</i> is not average by any standards; its semi-gothic design, grim sweetness, subtle yet poignant delivery, believably ordinary and lovable protagonists, unique approach to horror and villainy, and story wrought with preternaturally complex emotional underpinnings are all the sort of thing that horror films as a genre never receive the proper recognition for. Between you and me, sometimes it’s fun to be one of the few people in the know.</div>
Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-86729270688878102222010-10-18T14:31:00.007-04:002012-05-28T19:02:50.418-04:00"I AM DEATH!!!!"<div style="text-align: left;">
It took a pretty long time for the kids who grew up on Hammer films to find themselves with enough power to remind everyone how much of a bummer it was that their brand of horror died with them. Hammer were undeniably the best for their money at Victorian/Gothic horror but many people were just as enchanted by also-rans Amicus and I know I'd stand by the best of Tigon's output as steadfastly as I would the best of Hammer. Between them (and the odd one-off copycat) the three studios managed to bring the past into the present and interest a new generation in realizing that though there is a certain charm in being scared by things just down the street, it can't compare with the thought of how terrifying it was to live in a time where there was no alternative to superstition. There are fewer religious crazies than there once were (in a 'per reasoned person' kinda way) and when you combine zealotry with the absence of just governing bodies, steady work, reliable food sources and medicine for rampant incurable diseases living in the 16th century seems like a much less fun time than <i>Twelfth Night</i> makes it out to be. And so it made perfect sense that Hammer would set its best remembered projects in the past, both recent and distant, because vampires and mad scientists become much more frightening when you realize that even if you survive, you still might die of starvation, unintentional poisoning or consumption. Makes the triumphant endings of some of these films seem much less triumphant, doesn't it? Anyway, in the last ten or fifteen years those disciples of Hammer finally got around to paying tribute to the one-time masters of the olde-timey horror film, starting with Tim Burton's excellent <i>Sleepy Hollow</i>. But the two I want to look at were released almost simultaneously and though they approach the setting and time from different angles, the hopelessness is evident in both of them, even if only one of them has the balls to follow through on it.</div>
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Solomon Kane<br />
by Michael J. Bassett<br />
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A cartoonishly evil knight called Captain Solomon Kane wraps up a siege replete with murder and almost-humourous growling that he wants more people to murder by trying to steal treasure from a foreign warlord. Soldiers and a priest follow him inside but they're all seized by demonic hands that lurch forth from mirrors preceding the trophy room. And when Kane finally makes it past all the defenses, what does he find waiting for him but fucking <i>Satan</i>! If that ain't the worst luck! Anyway, the devil owns his soul now but before the big guy can take it, Kane extracts a smidgen bit of mercy from him. When Kane makes it back to England it's under the condition that if he ever harms anyone ever again, he's going straight to hell. Of course, this is tested immediately when he's mugged by a bunch of corpulent bandits. And then he's tested even further when he wakes up in the care of the nice prairie family set on adopting him a la <i>Shane</i> or any of the thousand other films these people occupy. The exception here is that Dad is played by Pete Postlethwaite who is one of the greatest living actors (ed - well, he was. Rest in Peace, Pete). So they make him dinner and he helps them out with their camping and cleaning and cooking and all that and plays with the son and flirts with their teenaged daughter despite him being covered in tattoos and in his late-thirties. But the reindeer games end when a gang sent by an evil god-king who's totally not Sauron fucks everything up. This fellow, Malachi is his name, has sent his damned minions out into the countryside killing and enslaving all who they meet. And they've been sent here to personally test Solomon Kane by killing the cute little boy he's befriended. His deeply religious parents cry out for this battle-hardened monster to kill everyone of these fuckers (thou shalt not kill unless they've recently done something bad to you) but of course he doesn't, new life path and Satan-on-his-back and all that. But then as soon as they leave, Solomon decides that only after they've captured virginal teenaged daughter does he need to table his non-violence and instead pick up the holy hammer of ass-kicking and personally murder everyone who stands in his way, up to and including Malachi, his estranged family and a big, CG Satan monster.<br />
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Isn't it funny how in just trying to relay the events of a movie you realize how much more is wrong with it than you initially thought. I mean this is still better than <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-i-let-you-in-on-secret-vampires-can.html">Van Helsing</a> </i>but that's unfortunately the first thing that came to mind instead of <i>Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter</i> which I'm sure Michael Bassett would have liked. I'll start by saying that I had too much fun watching <i>Solomon Kane</i> to rate it less than the C- it's going to get. I greatly enjoyed it when the big crowds of evil warriors are laid flat by James Purefoy as the Mon with no Kane. Purefoy is terrible for a lot of this film but when he's just grunting and looking like a medieval badass, which is when it matters most, I had no problem with him. Postlethwaite and Max Von Sydow are good even when slumming in the likes of this or <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-breed-of-terrible.html">The Wolfman</a></i>, but unlike that film, the movie wasn't so terrible that I spent the whole film wondering what they were doing here. Von Sydow only has two scenes after all and he's laying down in one of them. And it isn't even that the film itself is particularly egregious. It's a lot of fun in parts even when treading down a path so eroded by time that you wind up ten feet underground when walking it. The problem here is Michael J. Bassett's script has either stayed far too true to an 80 year old pulp fiction which may have been novel when it was released but now seems like a supernatural western with a change of setting. So in other words there's nothing here you haven't seen done better or much, much worse. In the better category, how about that big red satan creature Kane half-heartedly fights in the climax. When will filmmakers learn not to bother with CGI if they can't afford the good stuff? The final battle reminded me of the very first CG shots in <i>Young Sherlock Holmes</i> or the remarkably awful ones in <i>Mortal Kombat</i>, which is never a good thing.<br />
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But returning to the script Bassett puts too much in here that the story can't support. There's the great scene where Kane seeks sanctuary in a church only to discover that the priest has keeps his flock locked in the basement because they're all zombies. It comes out of nowhere and the story comes to a halt for it but it's one of the best scenes in the film. Bassett also makes the mistake of trying to stage a conclusion like the ones in <i>Witchfinder General</i> or any of Hammer's Dracula films but giving it no relevance to what we've already seen. Out of nowhere in a country supposedly overrun by Satan comes two or three guys who've put together a small revolution and are going to ride right into Malachi's castle to deliver it to him. Kane overcomes his cynicism and helps them but it ultimately doesn't matter because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if Satan's behind this why the fuck should it matter who's going to try and stop him? He's Satan!!! He and God have been knocking each other around for who knows how long to no avail. If Satan can turn guys into zombies by touching their heads (which one of his minions does), why can't he just reign down pestilence on everyone including the rebels? That's my problem with unambiguous religious horror films. The best films in this vein about being possessed by Satan, <i>Witchfinder General, Mark of the Devil</i>, et al. work because the big guy never shows himself. Or if he does it fails to do anything but derail the movie (<i>The Devil Rides Out</i>) unless he's completely shrouded in mystery (<i>Blood On Satan's Claw</i>). <i>Solomon Kane</i> makes Satan quantifiable and thus makes their hero invincible and the conclusion totally tensionless. In effect, what it says is that Satan can be scared and defeated in small doses. Not the scariest or most effecting idea is it? And so what if they've defeated one of Satan's minions? He's not Voldemort, he doesn't need a decade to recover. He's fucking Satan! Who's to say he didn't just crawl up Queen Elizabeth's ass and really get some work done rather than waste time with the duke of some hamlet in the middle of nowhere. <i>Solomon Kane</i> wants to simply exist as a western in Shakespearian clothing but it opens way too many doors it can't close. And frankly there's a fucking culture war on and any film that actively seeks to shut your brain off and fails is on the wrong side.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529521580669983714" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM_ApsvfalaisJx3SM9VHSgKCla5bKELLOo-fWe77wqLVcGLiniWba9dRZtloMm6UpP-YSGtc97OIz6kxyvnyRyD_M2npsPU_osQHoVmBVV1M7u5L5PHcgvmQpaW8Rsf-PfVbzsaTXTC0/s400/solomon-kane-poster.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 299px;" /></span>I'll come clean now and say that the reason <i>Solomon Kane</i> seems like such a de-clawed experience is because I saw it directly after seeing our next film, Chris Smith's <i>Black Death</i>. If I had to guess I'd say Smith probably had a lot less money than Bassett but let's just say he used it more judiciously. Instead of shooting his wad on cameos from the world's most respected character actors, he nabbed a few beastly underrated ones and crafted a story that gets by on implication rather than forcing a confrontation with a terribly realized demon and a scenery chewing Jason Flemyng, who so deserves better than this. <i>Black Death</i> is the antidote to <i>Solomon Kane</i> while still wandering the same desolate countryside. In fact, considering that <i>Black Death</i> came out at the same time as <i>Centurion, Valhalla Rising</i> and <i>Robin Hood</i> and manages to have a distinct personality and the most gut-wrenching plot of all of them, it amazes me how few screens it saw. While perhaps not as thrilling as <i>Centurion</i>, as expensive as <i>Robin Hood</i>, as silly as <i>Solomon Kane</i> or beautiful as <i>Valhalla Rising</i>, <i>Black Death</i> was the only one of these movies about large men in armor killing shit whose ending really thoroughly satisfied me. It's also the best and bleakest tributes to the old school period horror of Tigon and Hammer I've seen since maybe <i>Sleepy Hollow</i>.<br />
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Black Death<br />
by Chris Smith</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1W6pKlqdX4MlCrAMi0DCTdLUqPL_uz2NSctZaXEv7dHE09Nqeq5TzJ_9RdQdz11NI95aVkQZC-VshKKXrE6HbOd_x7GkCNXvQzqYKHpwjl5n00xzs4EsvRQc6wgve-eT4rkBRHysiDc0/s1600/061110blkdeath718.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529521201030246082" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1W6pKlqdX4MlCrAMi0DCTdLUqPL_uz2NSctZaXEv7dHE09Nqeq5TzJ_9RdQdz11NI95aVkQZC-VshKKXrE6HbOd_x7GkCNXvQzqYKHpwjl5n00xzs4EsvRQc6wgve-eT4rkBRHysiDc0/s400/061110blkdeath718.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 267px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>Osmund is a young monk whose faith has been shaken. There's the plague that's been killing every third person for miles that not even his superiors have been able to satisfactorily explain using religious thought and then there's the small matter of his girlfriend. Yes, for a man who's supposed to be living a life of celibacy, he certainly does a lot of making out. His girlfriend Averill who Osmund has known since childhood is just as scared as he is of dying and thinks the answer is getting as far away from their village as possible. Osmund's understandably torn between serving god and maybe surviving until the end of winter so Averill gives him an ultimatum with an expiration date. She's going to meet him at a clearing they used to play in when they were children every morning for a week and then she will be gone whether Osmund has shown or not. Fate makes up his mind for him when it throws open the doors to his church in the form of the knight Ulric, a grim figure indeed. He and his band of mercenaries are here to report to the church. They have heard rumours of a place untouched by the plague and this must be because they are in league with the devil. They'd be on the road right now but no one in his gang knows the way, they just know that it passes by a certain clearing. Osmund volunteers so fast it gives his superiors whiplash and despite their protestations he leaves with Ulric later that day.<br />
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Though their noticeably less intense, the men in Ulric's band are equally as unwelcoming. Of the five men who follow him Wolfstan seems to be human under all that armour. Their first encounter with civilization outside the monastery sets the tone for their journey. Osmund sees a group of people preparing to burn a woman to death because they believe she's a witch who poisoned their well. She claims she meant to bless it, but the villagers won't be appeased. Osmund won't stand by while they kill her and only when Ulric intervenes on her behalf are they quieted. But when he gently leads her away from the group and then slits her throat with his sword a horrible quiet falls over the scene. After this Osmund starts to have second thoughts about his chosen path if these are the men doing god's work. When they make it close enough to the clearing where he promised to meet Averill, things somehow only manage to get worse. Not only is there overwhelming evidence that she was killed but her killers, a tribe of men made almost feral by superstition and disease, show up and follow him back to camp. The group is one man short when they continue their hike toward the cursed village. But of course when they arrive nothing is what it seems. Indeed the place is clean, pleasant and inside they claim such distance from the ravages of the plague that it actually takes one man a few seconds before he remembers that it's killing hundreds of people every day. The men are given food, hot showers and plenty to drink and it's here that Osmund's faith in their absolute right is at its shakiest. When the village doctor invites him into the marshes to witness something while the others drink and scheme, his world is thrown even further into chaos. There in the woods the women of the village seemingly resurrect his girlfriend before his very eyes. He'd have a stronger reaction but the wine everyone partook of at dinner puts them all to sleep right at that moment.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529521215220756002" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimMd0D0HHL29wW3pFmPYW6tkGlNC9fXOndUkViQ5rlGdvp5I-A0riXi-JrMhskMTPzp1TOiwxvYqVABxk-VkV8YvtHNk3PSJ85qoRA_yHU0fW1k9mtquyKNn4E14Aut7muCwf9mIfivQ0/s400/blackdeath.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 267px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>I was wondering how Chris Smith could possibly make things darker than he already had but when Osmund and the knights wake up caged and immersed to the neck in freezing water while the whole village looks on, I had to applaud his conviction. I won't spoil what happens next but things get a lot darker from here. <i>Black Death</i> is a film that starts with the plague and then plunges you further down into the ice cold waters of hopelessness than you thought a film capable of going. A few things prevent it from being quite the nihilistic slog it sounds like. Barring a few scenes, the movie is too well-lit to be all that hopeless feeling, even as we see lines of men in hoods carrying giant crosses downstream for some unholy ritual involving animal bones. Also there's the casting. David Warner on the side of god isn't a good sign. He does a great job as the abbot and I was incredibly impressed that Smith got him for the part, knowing what kind of baggage he carries with him these days. Carice Van Houten doesn't have much to do but knowing that she was the girl from <i>Black Book</i> made me want to see how crazy she would get. She's the only person who seems totally in control throughout and she's ostensibly the villain. Sean Bean has, I think, once in his life, played a character you're supposed to like without reservation, and he certainly goes way out of his way to play the bastard here. The only problem with this is that even as a man who'll cut an innocent woman's throat if it means getting back on the road, I can't help but like him. The man was born to carry a sword in medieval genre films and if I ever get the chance I'm going to make a movie where he gets to do just that. If I can make a film where Sean Bean kills someone with a sword, I'll be able to die happy. Sean Bean is just too likable for me to hate him and this made for some fascinating stand-offs between Smith's intentions for the character and my expectations. John Lynch's Wolfstan, who is Ulric's ally, is really the only person you sympathize with (side note: why does John Lynch not get work? He's excellent. No one does wounded spirits like he does). I'd like to have sympathized with Osmund but Eddie Redmayne isn't even as likable as Sean Bean, slitter of throats. His unchanging expression and limited emotional range make him hard to commit to liking and after the ending I actively hated him. Don't get me wrong, I think the ending in the script is great and dark and really troubling in a good way, it's that Redmayne nearly dismantles it. Granted Smith wants us to see the effects of religion but the reveal he sets up has no effect on a personal level because I found Redmayne weak and passive at the best of times and don't really care what happens to him. He isn't motivated by the same strength of convictions as Sean Bean's knight or Chris Smith.<br />
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Smith's direction is very good but I found myself wanting a little more from the landscape. With competition like <i>Valhalla Rising</i>, Smith's cinematographer Sebastian Edschmid should have been working overtime to find the moodiest possible lighting for every situation. Because he didn't go out of his way to find truly intense dark colours outside in the wilderness and truly breathtaking ones inside the village, instead of looking angelic, the village just looks slightly less ominous. The quality of the light doesn't change drastically enough to evoke much feeling on its own and the performances alone aren't enough to do it either. We know that things aren't right because we just fucking know. We've seen ten trillion movies and of course something evil's going on, them's the breaks. Smith's problem is atmospherics. He paints in broad strokes and there are no little gestures to be found here. It's true that Hammer Films rarely dealt in subtlety and as a tribute <i>Black Death</i> gets an A+, but as a moody, cynical horror film that doubles as a treatise on religion, it loses points for playing the same hand over and over again. In the end it feels like a very slight film and doesn't mask it's budget cleverly enough. It also loses points for losing its way during the climactic set piece. At its worst the scene with the underwater cage reminds me of the execution scenes in <i>Red Zone Cuba</i> (never, ever a good place for your mind to wander to) though it does save itself in the end by matching grimness with even more grimness, one of the most badass quotes in film history and a death scene that simply has to be seen to be believed. But for a split second I found myself wondering if we were just going to watch one execution after another.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529521205666404802" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifEYLW1W_H22qTbZ84JYCIGrppS9gCY7NU-QQxqEOwYCACPXzELcBDPXwrMfb0kLZwxRVgi7xBCgPObKa59LO3U_d5dtIX6v_bXDpEEzEhT9NCjYAmXLbKqj4aAgrpmXXdWLOV4VHyzCY/s400/9d55a53ef667d8b8d25c341a418058ceb2449888.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 263px;" /></span><i>Black Death</i> is compelling from start to finish despite my complaints and considering that <i>Robin Hood</i> got an international multiplex release while this and <i>Centurion</i> saw almost nothing but festivals and press screenings is just baffling. <i>Black Death</i> is a better film than <i>Robin Hood</i> even if it wasn't quite as well crafted on a technical level. If the two films had changed directors, then both would be really terrifying. But <i>Robin Hood </i>is dull and pointless if very pretty and <i>Black Death</i> wants for some of that Ridley Scott visual magic. I think the key to a film set in this time period is that they have to act as window into how dark days really were. Smith understands how miserable the past is and lets reality feed the horror. Michael Bassett tried to do the same thing but he's playing with magic and so any realism he strove for doesn't amount to anything, which is a shame because they both stem from the same Religious-men-as-conqueror motif, which is powerful enough to make <i>Black Death's</i> opening half hour relentless and harrowing all by itself. Not one of the many knights-on-a-mission films released this year is perfect but the ones that come closest are the ones that eschew cliches in favor of the nightmare of living through that time period, or who simply work overtime to keep you riveted to the screen, which is why while <i>Valhalla Rising</i> wants for action it's never boring or why <i>Centurion</i> and <i>Black Death</i> are exciting all the way through. They hit familiar beats but they're made by guys who are hellbent on entertaining you quickly and furiously (another side note: if you haven't seen <i>Centurion</i> or <i>Valhalla Rising</i>, do. They're not quite horror films so I can't review them here but they are brilliant and well worth your time). Ultimately what needed to happen was for someone to look at the rushes and ask why the movie didn't look as a dark as it is. A few changes and <i>Black Death</i> might have entered the new classic pantheon. It's still great but it falls maddeningly short of perfection. </div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-83076913494623905142010-10-14T23:38:00.008-04:002010-10-15T19:17:33.260-04:00"....I've been working on the road now, I've been working by the sea...."<div style="text-align: left;">I'm kind of amazed that <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html"><i>The Big Bird Cage</i></a> isn't remembered as anything other than a minor exploitation classic. I mean really if <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html"><i>The Big Bird Cage</i></a> had never been made there's a good chance that American International Pictures would never have fronted Jack Hill the money to make <i>Coffy</i> and <i>Foxy Brown</i>, two of the most important blaxploitation films in history. The movie showed that Pam Grier could carry a movie and she went on to become the female black icon of the 70s. She made such a splash that years after the exploitation boom had been silenced, an up and comer called Quentin Tarantino would never have tried to revive his career in his third movie <i>Jackie Brown</i>, which opened to middling reviews and poor box office, which sent our young man into the business of making pastiche/rip-offs of his favourite genre films to standing ovations that have yet to cease. If <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Bird Cage</a></i> had never been made, Roger Corman, the head honcho at New World Pictures, would never have attempted to recapture the magic by making three additional Women In Prison films, one of which was the debut of an unknown novice director called Jonathan Demme who was beginning a few-picture tenure with NWP. Demme, along with future producer Gary Goetzman and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, had bigger things in mind than exploitation cheapies and thanks to their collective resumes cultivated under Corman, were able to establish themselves as quite the talents. But before all that Corman had to earn enough good credit while simultaneously running out of ideas. If the Philippines hadn't quit on him, he'd never have needed to relocate and it just so happens that two continental changes couldn't save the Golden Age Women in Prison film from dying a much mourned death.</div><br />The Woman Hunt<br />by Eddie Romero<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="http://a10.idata.over-blog.com/167x261/2/59/29/11/Comte-zaroff/Woman-hunt-dvd3.jpg" border="0" alt="" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 157px; height: 261px; " /></span><div style="text-align: left;">Silas, a slimy thug, is running around the jungles of the Philippines rounding up undesirable women who he thinks no one will miss. He's not the only one. A steely femme fatalle called Magda is out buying prostitutes from disreputable sources on the orders of the enigmatic Spyros, a man of power who's feared by most everyone. Silas has picked a number of forgotten women himself but he's also made the mistake of picking up foreign correspondent Lori, who isn't nearly as willing to go quietly as some of her fellow captives. After a botched escape attempt the girls (among them Pam Grier surrogate Billie and McGee, played by a very tired looking Pat Woodell). Most of the girls are pinay who won't be missed and even McGee seems fairly resigned to whatever Spyros has planned. Spyros is a corpulent ex-military man who has invited a group of his billionaire friends to his estate to coincide with the arrival of the girls. These guys have all made their money doing rather seedy things but what Spyros has in mind has even them shocked. He's hired a staff of bastards to go out looking for these women because Spyros plans to hunt them for sport. That's a new one even for these louts, but, then what do you get the man who has everything? Well this is the last straw for Billie, Lori and a reluctant McGee who orchestrate an escape with the help of Tony, one of the guards who's started thinking twice about his commitment to his lifestyle as a henchman. And because this is a film modeled both on <i>The Most Dangerous Game</i> and <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Bird Cage</a></i>, a happy ending for everyone seems pretty much out of the question, doesn't it?</div><br />Not that I particularly cared. <i>The Woman Hunt</i> is the biggest letdown of all the WIP films in the wake of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Doll House</a></i>. First of all, what a premise to squander! A sexed up version of <i>The Most Dangerous Game</i>? Sign me right the fuck up! When I learned about this movie I went into such a furious search for it that I didn't bother asking why no one seemed to have heard of it. Well turns out no one talks about it because there's a good chance that the seven people who saw it promptly forgot everything about it. And I went way out of my way to find a bootleg copy of this movie. So imagine my frustration when I was given not only a pisspoor VHS rip but a pisspoor VHS rip of one of the dullest sexploitation movies I've ever seen. I already forget most of what happens between character unremarkable, terribly lit death scenes. It would be bad enough if <i>The Woman Hunt</i> were only dull but it so fucks up the awesome potential of its story that I had to fight to pay attention during the last twenty minutes. The titular hunt doesn't actually happen, at least not in the traditional <i>Most Dangerous Game</i> mold. The girls escape sort of devolves into the hunt but its disorganized and the girls are equally well armed by the time the billionaires catch up with them. And yet the advantage is clearly with the women, which doesn't feel earned in the slightest. I can't tell you how anxious I am to make my name as a filmmaker so I can get my hands on someone's money and remake this thing pronto because this I can say without hyperbole that this is the greatest idea in the history of film given the lamest possible treatment.<br /><br />The problem is Eddie Romero, to oversimplify a bit. As a horror director he rarely disappointed. He was responsible for the brilliant <i>Terror Is A Man</i> and its staggering number of sequels, after all. But give him anything that doesn't have a touch of Dr. Moreau and he just couldn't deliver the goods. <i>The Woman Hunt </i>is listless from start to finish and any actor incapable of directing himself winds up personality-free. So that means that the only two people who exit the film having earned their paycheck are Pat Woodell and Sid Haig. Speaking frankly I wish Woodell had sat this one out. She is one of the best things about the wildly enjoyable <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Doll House</a></i> but it wasn't because of her chops as an actor. She was an idea given beautiful human form who goes out with two machine guns in her hand. She's the intangible, she's the revolution personified. Who wouldn't want to fight for her? Here she's apparently learned how to deal with no direction and her response was to create a character who barely has it in her to raise her head and yawn her lines. She's so often looking at her feet in dismay that I spent the whole movie wondering when the hell she was gonna show up. Her short hair doesn't help matters any. Romero not only wasted her, he neutered her and that shit is a crime. Sid Haig was a bit more fortunate. Oh to have been Sid Haig in the early 70s! He got paid to play himself with slightly varied accents in film after film for most of the 70s (he spent the 80s chasing paychecks into the likes of <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/05/nuclear-war-is-too-good-for-you-barkett.html">Zombie Aftermath</a></i> but I call that a small price for never having to learn how to show depth in order to pick up a well-earned paycheck). In fact if I had to reccomend <i>The Woman Hunt</i>, and I kinda do for this reason alone, it's because it features the oiliest, sleaziest role Sid Haig EVER PLAYED. I know, that seems like something you can't calculate, but his behavior in the first half of this movie is just...it's like Burgundy made in a used toilet. It's so disgusting, but it does down smooth. Once he leaves the story the film quickly runs out of steam and has to settle for fumes.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF9al1-g969cfbQW0XXLMuB-y0iDRR5TSQ3Mr0Q4uT2s0jZ0CGuVi3ZjKSJ532FpJHKgO7sHB_f-yGORaSklKkWhWg5eDcTi8I8CyrY7HIVbo_CPxvff0uUKMrgot6uG5rgCq2HvFu6-g/s400/woman_hunt_poster_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528409835205398290" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 276px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">And all that might mean a little more if <i>The Woman Hunt</i> weren't so ass-achingly dull. Romero posseses neither Gerardo de Leon's eye for composition nor Jack Hill's astonishing wealth of sleazy set pieces. His Women In Prison films all have the feeling of just going through the motions, putting emphasis on all the wrong things and missing the point completely. Just look at this film's nearly rapturous conclusion, which juxtaposes a pretty intense suicide with two characters frolicking in an Edenic oasis in the middle of the jungle after having murdered a bunch of motherfuckers. Romero just didn't have the knack for these things, though luckily <i>The Woman Hunt</i> is the worst of the three he made in all. Despite his having no talent for WIP pictures Romero was quickly poached by AIP which left Corman in a bit of a situation. Jack Hill was busy making <i>Coffy</i> and<i> Foxy Brown</i> for AIP (they really did take all his rising stars, didn't they?) but he still thought there was money to be squeezed from the caged teat. So he thought fast. Where could you make an exploitation film cheaply with people sympathetic to your plight? Where do you think?</div><br />The Arena<br />by Steve Carver & Joe D'Amato<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPlfvVeUmsLac3jHegbdXP_Rf485S2oDSDIfpHuMWPUro-QAxoTpBebb2OONo-mY2xUqtZ6GCVDkeTQFZNy_u9qRhcGBr1gJnw0mrkCHsWGCKSsSfNxJfeKmrK5u7h79Sf39qqw0Q0qHg/s400/ar23.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528408859200287202" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">That's right, Italy! Corman convinced Pam Grier to come back for one more New World film before she became the nearly exclusively property of AIP. The move to Italy and a partnership with the great Joe D'Amato meant a few things. Corman and director Steve Carver decided that they might as well play their location to the hilt and so converted their usual narrative to a setting more geo-appropriate. Instead of working for a crazed warden in the sweltering jungle, Pam Grier and newly-minted leading lady Margart Markov would reteam after <i>Black Mama, White Mama</i> as Roman slaves forced into gladiatorial combat. Now if that sounds like a genius subversion of the formula, it is, but <i>The Arena</i> is a film that fucks up almost as often as it kicks ass. For the other thing that the Italian location and crew meant is that costs were cut on everything, including synch sound, which meant dubbing all around. In an opening not all that different from <i>The Woman Hunt</i>, slaves are rounded up from all over the country side surrounding Rome and are bought at market by Timarchus and Lucilius, the guys who run the Gladiator bouts on the other side of town. These two are in a bit of a pickle; in one of those only-happens-in-movies-or-to-movies things, people are no longer showing up for Gladiator matches. Timarchus is running out of cash and he's got to spice things up a bit before people decide they'd rather just...i don't know, screw in the streets or something instead of paying to see grown men fucking kill each other with swords. Well a few extra women around, especially women as different as the former priestess Bodicia and the tribeswoman Mamawi, things are a little tense. The new slaves have not hit it off, to put it mildly. In fact they bitch and cut each other down so much that it only takes something minor for the girls to throw down their tools and start a giant brawl in the kitchens one night (the spectacle is not unlike your standard prison food fight). When Lucilius gets a load of this, he reasonably concludes that where violence alone fails to draw a crowd, violence and an erection is a combination no Roman would pass up.</div><br />The girls enter training with Septimus, the reigning champion at the arena, the next day. It doesn't go particularly well and the first fight is a bit of a joke. Dierdre, one of the newer slavegirls, gets wasted rather than face both stagefright and deadly combat and Bodicia pins her with no effort. The crowd is amused enough to let them both live and the next day Mamawi is set to fight Livia, the bitchiest of all the slaves. Livia, however, is a Roman citizen with a trick up her sleeve. She uses her citizenship to curry favour with the crowd, who won't stand by while woman of high birth is maimed and killed. So a girl called Lucinia takes Livia's place. This has some pretty serious consequences. Lucinia is Septimus' longtime mistress and once Mamawi is forced to kill her under threat of execution, everyone in the slave quarters has second thoughts about this whole female gladiators thing. Bodicia, Dierdre, Mamawi, Septimus and most of the other slaves (Livia's the hold-out) start organizing a revolt that will not only free everyone but cripple Lucilius and Timarchus for good. But, this wouldn't be a Women In Prison film without some pretty major hiccups in the plan.<br /><br />There's a reason you've never heard of Steve Carver. Aside from <i>The Arena</i> and the semi-famous <i>Big Bad Mama</i>, he never directed anything that amounted to more than a blip on anyone's radar. And if <i>The Arena</i> is any kind of marker for his style, I can't say it's all the surprising. <i>The Arena</i> is by-the-numbers and the only thing new or different about it were the few bits of set design that came standard with the period setting. And frankly the most exciting thing in that department is the sight of Pam Grier carrying a trident wearing what looks like half a burlap sack as a bra. And as boss as that image is it doesn't make up for the terrible cinematography, the airless direction and the most damning mistake of all, the atrocious dubbing. It's not even that they do a bad job synching up the lines to the moving mouths, it's that when you take away Pam Grier's voice, you cut her presence in half. Same goes for Margaret Markov, who I hadn't yet seen in <i>Black Mama, White Mama</i>. Thanks to the strained vocal performances The Arena is almost just another Italianate gladiator film, saved by its similarity to the New World WIP films and by the moments when Pam Grier's ferocity transcends language and her body language and inimitable sneer speak louder than whoever's doing her voice. It still can't be heard over the volume of the mediocrity, though.<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz7lWVu8uahD1y2YoixHPecpY0NQlhfansTnhT9G3wO5ewbdyxLkTiqIYd8EbRGZo3vhGqk_tDoAmKo78CLKXGOnthirN9ZyQ64vTnzH4sgkK4b8ncXtyGgYjucDEkCHptKTaJg9MirW4/s400/30nhwtz.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528408853869246082" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 241px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">The well wasn't completely dry by the middle of 1974 even if between AIP and NWP they'd done almost everything you could think of that involved both women and jail. After all, they'd never made a film set on their home turf. And where else did the inspiration for the first Corman-produced WIPs come from but the American women behind bars films of the 50s. So, Corman turned another fresh face loose behind the camera, one Jonathan Demme and whether he knew it or not, commissioned the last (great) Women In Prison film of the 70s. What he also probably dind't realize was that Demme was a kid with dreams. Like a confused young auteur by the name of Martin Scorsese before him, Demme took his cheap-ass assignment way more seriously than anyone could have predicted. But whereas Scorses turned <i>Boxcar Bertha</i> into a jerky, frenetic, ultra-violent tragedy, Demme pulled out every last stop in turning what would have been an ordinary and merely watchable exploitation film into one of the strangest movies Corman ever funded. From the avant-blues soundtrack to the bizarre camera-work to the hallucinatory dream sequences to the presentational performances to the aimless narrative to the fact that perplexingly this is the movie that usually gets ranked just behind <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Bird Cage</a></i> as best women in prison film of the 70s, <i>Caged Heat</i> is a strange bird, indeed.</div><br />Caged Heat<br />by Jonathan Demme<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtgOIrocrxBOXazKHUmJGftCOcWkf9273IBAiebDnUvt0fiQ2007MUKBJEsNYFcVDrmn9lPoabKIqkeN38j-OxfpHdS0aQgxV3lA2bM3d-ljU7iJv-Ezq0vmI63e1OyPHIzLQZo616VXU/s400/CagedHeat_012.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528408872081123794" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px; " /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">Right out of the gate things are pretty weird. We follow someone who turns out to be an undercover cop who kind of lackadaisacally walks into a crime scene where moments later three drug runners come out shooting. The sole women among the trio is Jacqueline Wilson and she's the only one of them who gets nabbed. It took me a long minute to realize what I'd seen before I could join the shootout, already in progress. Anyway, she's sent up the river to a prison run by the sexless Superintendant McQueen (one of the many, many subversions of masculinity in this flick). Her cellmates, or at the least the ones we'll concern ourselves with, are Belle the kleptomaniac (Let's hear it for Roberta Collins, making one last journey into the breach and looking like she could eat all these newbies alive), Maggie the bitchy latina, Pandora, this film's Pam Grier and Lavelle, the girl who sleeps in Jackie's top bunk. The dynamic here is nothing new. Pandora and Belle look out for each other, Maggie hates both the new girl and Belle, Belle's trying to either just break out or steal food, an operation that requires a kind of OCD countdown and memorization of the vents, and Jackie wants out but quick. The oppurtunity presents itself when Maggie makes a break for it during one of their labor days working on a farm up the road from the prison. Not thinking, just acting, Jackie runs for the truck even as the guards shoot at it and the two former enemies are now forced to work together to evade capture once again. It isn't long before they decide that the right thing to do is to go back and break out their friends (with the help of Maggie's acquaintance Crazy Alice), especially because they know what the prison's doctor is up to; Jackie herself was subject to his version of corrective treatment - shock therapy - and doesn't want him fucking with any of her friend's heads. And both girls would kill to get in one last crack at McQueen.</div><br />Now, this might seem like a kind of a thin plot for a short film, but even at only 79 minutes, there is a lot of weird shit going on here. The first thing I'd like to draw everyone's attention to is the name John Cale listed under soundtrack. John Cale was the organist/bassist/violist/occasional singer for The Velvet Underground. He left in late 69 to pursue a solo career that was split between making some of the best rock albums of the 70s and truly strange contemporary avant-garde music. The score for <i>Caged Heat</i> lies perfectly between the two styles. For every jew-harp-and-slide-guitar arrangement to emphasize just what a sweltering day it is there's a furious viola solo during a dream sequence or as a prelude to a catfight. Jonathan Demme is pretty famous by this point in his life as being someone who knows his shit record collection-wise, but even still; asking John Cage to score a Roger Corman-produced prison movie is a little like asking Daniel Day-Lewis to do a guest spot on <i>Burn Notice</i>. Yet, as I'm sure it would in my hypothetical, somehow it works. Then there is the wildly different styles of photography in use here. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto was a long way from <i>The Sixth Sense</i>, but he was clearly no slouch, even this early in his career. The first establishing scenes of the prison are gorgeous, solid tracking shots, the kind that you'd find in respectable films, yet somehow because it's <i>Caged Heat</i>, I respect them more than I would in, say, <i>Brother John</i>. And when he wasn't sneaking calling cards in, he was trying his best to help Demme craft some junior Buñuel-type surrealist images, like the two dream sequences which look directly influenced by <i>Los Olvidados</i>. That shit just doesn't happen in these kinds of films and if I didn't know better I'd say that this guy's crazy ass vision would have gotten him banned from major studios. Not that his crazy divergences aren't wholly welcome. I was sick to death of how predictable and tired these films had gotten and Demme managed to make a pretty good cup of coffee from day old grounds.<br /><br />And you know that he was someone who'd done his homework, otherwise what would Barbara Steele be doing here? Like Joe Dante and David Cronenberg after him, Demme used his limited resources and somehow got ahold of one of the finest actresses genre films ever laid claim to. Maybe because Steele, like most of her early collaborators, didn't realize what a talent she really was. Her spastic, twitchy brand of wheelchair-bound evil makes her seem human despite her villainess credentials. Demme makes something unique here in that he shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this woman is weak and probably just wants a hug but her actions are vile and unreasonable and yet they make perfect sense. That's synergy between an actor and a director if I've ever seen it. For instance her response to what has to be the single goofiest thing in the movie, the drag-variety show that Belle and Pandora put on, is totally unfair but just look at her face as she passes judgment. Her words are fierce and suitably tyrannical but her face betrays her. But as confusing and eccentric as the first half of <i>Caged Heat</i> is, the stuff that takes place in preparation for the big bust out is genuinely thrilling and smart. Take the scene where Maggie, Jackie and Crazy Alice (by the way, what a stroke of genius that was. If this film had nothing but Crazy Alice, it'd be an instant classic in my book) try to rob a bank and show up in the middle of some guys already robbing it. It's not crucial to the story but it's a divine little set-piece that Demme handles beautifully. The girls get the drop on the boys, then send them into the waiting arms of the cops before strutting off with the loot, cool as can be. But of course while they're doing this, we quickly lose interest in the goings-on back at the prison, which brings me to the biggest strike against this movie: Roberta Collins is wasted! No longer the feisty animal she was in the Philippines, she's desperate, vulnerable, and relies on physical humour in the first half and then spends the second half strapped to a gurney in anesthetized silence. That shit is just not kosher. It might not be as egregious as Pat Woodell's sleepwalking through <i>The Woman Hunt</i> but it was enough to make me rather disappointed.<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsZ1i0LGiHHg7WSNGpjf8jPU2oY1vjvVDw3DarLtmJ8B72pLi0Fl-x5NVpS5ISnwzZoB3IqPWyF5lgk4WzNlDc0NK6hFgWZZNKOR5wspzNSJRUXWpoa8ed1SOqNmsXnt1isf80DJsFDGk/s400/caged_heat_poster_01.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528408865788192738" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 262px; height: 400px; " /></span></div><div>And then on the seventh day, Roger Corman rested. <i>Caged Heat</i> was the end of the Women In Prison film as AIP and NWP knew them and they quickly went looking for some place else to strike. Taken as a whole these movies aren't quite as thrilling as when you view them out of context. It's hard not to judge everything by <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Bird Cage</a></i>, for instance, and maybe if I hadn't just seen it <i>The Woman Hunt</i> and <i>The Arena</i> might have been a touch more enjoyable. But then I'm pretty judgmental about the quality of sleaze films, so maybe not. All in all they make for a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of B movie production houses. No idea was beyond consuming way beyond its freshness date and, astonishingly, even after anyone could have convinced that another middling WIP film was a good idea out comes one of Corman's many talented proteges and he up and turns the whole game on its head. <i>Caged Heat</i> is a fascinating watch and a fitting close to something that started as brilliantly as it did. If <i>Savage Sisters</i> had been the last of these movies to hit screens, that would have been a damn shame indeed.</div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-74154626503976632882010-10-11T14:50:00.010-04:002010-10-13T01:43:47.497-04:00Is there life on the earth? Is there life after birth?<div style="text-align: left;">Obscenity is a term that has dogged cinema for a long time. In fact for every development made in technology or form there have been two steps back thanks to religious posturing and political illogic designed to provoke fear and votes. Every country in the world has had, at one time or another, a pretty harsh censorship board in charge of what people see, and I'd put money on all of these people seeking something other than just piece of mind by being there. But what no one has ever been able to define is just what makes something obscene. Never once have I encountered a satisfactory explanation of why and where the line is drawn. In fact there seems to be no rhyme or reason at all. The Hays Code and the Video Nasties Scare (just two of the more famous censorship benchmarks) demanded cuts and considerations left and right but if you look at the films that were altered under each, they have almost nothing in common. If someone were to look at each movie banned by the BBFC in the 80s, you'd be forgiven for thinking that anything scary was pornographic. When lines are drawn only for similar images, forgoing a look at content, what you do is essentially give terrible movies and great ones the same power because they happened to feature naked breasts or a graphic murder or two, the former of which half of every person on the planet has, the latter of which happens everyday. Yet restrictions of realistic depictions of the violence of warfare went uncontested, ditto drug use, misogyny/objectification in films, commercials and music videos, gun violence in westerns, nudity in sex comedies or depictions of racism or homophobia, both unflinching and 'comedically' overblown. Look at it this way, think back to your days on the playground: how many boys said they wanna grow up to be a cowboy/soldier vs. how many say they wanna grow up to be a serial killer based on what they saw on tv? Even someone as impressionable as me didn't identify with the many, many horror films I watched. Sure I may have pretended to combat some of the shit I'd see in horror films (even something as terrible as <i>An American Werewolf in Paris</i>, which I only ever saw the trailer for) but I never identified with the villain. None of us did. Mere exposure taught us that they were not to be identified with. That's why you rarely if ever find kids willing to be the indian. They're the other and movies made us see racism as ok, gun violence, smoking and drinking as necessary and cool, and caused many of us to parrot slurs we didn't understand because we saw them in films. I'm using my own childhood as an example here but it can't be unique. And yet there was never any kind of decree about institutionalized racism (incidentally I'm not for any kind of censorship. I happen to think that extreme cases, like hate speech, should be kept off of screens because of their active violence. It's one thing to <i>depict</i> violence, quite another to <i>call</i> for it against a whole ethnic group or religion). What can't you see on tv? Naked breasts. The very things that nourished you as a child. When you show something, it normalizes it, when you censor it, you give it power it never had before and you make it taboo. Why should all women feel they are born with something indecent on their bodies? And this is all the more jarring when you consider what a splash pornography, both soft and hardcore, made in America and Europe in the early 70s. You can't see women naked on tv, but your parents could go downtown and watch them blowing a guy in <i>Deep Throat</i>, <i>Behind The Green Door</i> or some imported blue film. Today porn makes up so much of the digital cable spectrum it almost outnumbers regular film channels. And yet? You can't say fuck or look at a penis but Pat Robertson's got his own show where he gets to say that feminists make women hate their children. It's exactly this kind of lunacy that Dušan Makavejev was thinking of when he made <i>Sweet Movie</i> in 1974. You like violence and unsimulated fucking, huh? Well, then, <i>this</i> should pose no problem at all. Except it did and he didn't make another film for almost ten years. Let's figure out why.</div><br />Sweet Movie<br />by Dušan Makavejev<br /><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgG5KA4gRnrU0vIRrUkxry47VD4vSefP-WyMStzPs4jH0I9HqFUN2yIIPQ3DNgXfGjYC_hs70fG00g6qZM29E3K3rFrd-temIv54Hs86LdGC2VmRsn-0jTiuKKw0wI5QAnUas9j_ETgWA/s1600/a+sweet+movie+PDVD_017.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgG5KA4gRnrU0vIRrUkxry47VD4vSefP-WyMStzPs4jH0I9HqFUN2yIIPQ3DNgXfGjYC_hs70fG00g6qZM29E3K3rFrd-temIv54Hs86LdGC2VmRsn-0jTiuKKw0wI5QAnUas9j_ETgWA/s400/a+sweet+movie+PDVD_017.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526897387073653554" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 246px; " /></a>The first thing we see is a chair, not unlike the ones you'd find in a dentist's office (or an OB/GYN) as it makes it's way to the Miss World Pageant. Hold on a second because whatever you were thinking that meant is way off. As our TV commentator and host tells us, the purpose of the Miss World competition is to find a wife for the world's richest man Mr. Abdemel (or Mr. Dollars as he's listed in the credits). The winning girl is set to inherit his billion dollar fortune, all she has to do is impress his mother, who's throwing the competition. The criteria for winning is simple. Dr. Littlefingers, a gynecologist and obstetrician, has to examine each girl's hymen and decide whose is the best, for lack of a more descriptive term. Miss Southern Rhodesia seems like a shoo-in, especially after the tawdry display by Miss Yugoslavia, but when Miss Canada walks in, the show's over. To a light and beautiful string arrangement, she walks out in furry knee-high boots and when she reveals that she doesn't have any underwear on, there almost doesn't seem to be any point to examining her, but when he does Littlefingers is confronted with a heavenly, golden glow springing from her loins like the briefcase in <i>Kiss Me, Deadly</i>. Let's meet her new husband.<br /><br />Mr. Abdemel is a brash, cartoonish billionaire who wants to pay to have Niagara falls shut off and who thinks Karl Marx shot archduke Ferdinand. The reception waiting for them at his house is nice enough, a hippie band bearing flowers, a beautiful estate (for a lout, Dollars has nice taste in homes), and a honeymoon that seems to be ripe for intimacy and genteel married sex. That is until Dollars starts rubbing Miss World down with alcohol and pulls out his gold-plated penis and starts urinating on her. Our heroine draws the line there, even with a billion dollars at stake She wants to escape but that won't look good for the mogul so his mother has her shipped off to France in a suitcase (after an interesting period of naked captivity with Jeremiah Muscle, her gigantic black servant). When she gets there she runs into all kinds of mishigas involving a singing Spanish heart-throb, a tryst on the Eiffel Tower that almost ends in tragedy, a stint in an actionist commune and finally as a model for a chocolate commercial. I should point out that we occasionally flash to Anna Planeta, the captain of a barge called Survival headed down the Seine with Karl Marx as the bearded figurehead. She takes on a soldier, a deserter from the battleship Potemkin, as her lover. She welcomes children aboard first enticing them with candy and then appears to seduce them. Before the police raid the boat, you realize that her commitment to an ideological extreme drove her more than a little mad, at least in the eyes of outsiders.<br /><br />And that incidentally is what most people thought of Makavejev when he released <i>Sweet Movie</i>. They thought that like Anna Planeta, his incendiary brand of socialism had driven him off the deep end and Sweet Movie was just excess unchecked. In one sense he is the captain of a great ship headed through a country that had once held so much promise and now seemed so quiet and conformist. He was looking for survivors and his movie was meant as a kind of password between members of the underground, but it seemed like he stood utterly alone. The most popular response was to simply stand aghast at the things presented, as if there was nothing else to the movie but nudity and baffling set-pieces. It's been described as a love it or hate it movie, though I don't think that's true. I certainly love it but I think that even if you didn't like the things you were being shown you could absolutely love the cinematography, the lush production design and the beautifully underplayed score, just as a for example. Pierre Lhomme's photography really is astonishing. Makavejev had said that he wanted <i>Sweet Movie</i> to be a love letter to colours and Lhomme was only too happy to oblige. Every room and person Miss World encounters has such a well defined and fun palette it's like the movie is set in FAO Schwarz (Otto Muehl, the leader of the commune, later called the movie pure kitsch, but the depiction of his group ought to have shown him otherwise). And because they're so clear, when we enter darker spaces, the colours become textures just like the wood inside the bowels of Anna Planeta's ship or the walls of the Therapie Kommune, when Lhomme's camera is noticeably handheld. There is something almost magical about these scenes and they're certainly ahead of their time. I remember watching these and being totally hypnotized, totally in awe of the fact that so much of this film could have been made yesterday. There are so many scenes that are enchantingly shot, especially when contrasted with the flash of the opening competition or the sight-gags that serve as the introduction to the sailor. The reason I think they work so well is because they make us feel like the cameras are spectators as much as we are; we're just observing this behavior and that's crucial in the Kommune scenes. If he'd properly lit and framed vomit and shit, we'd probably all puke ourselves. Instead the effect is that of a whirlwind of senses and events that no one is in control of and everyone is experiencing like an outsider. It's an intoxicating style that greatly helps one to get lost in this sea of political imagery and strange behavior. In fact it wasn't the revolutionary ideas that initially struck me initially about <i>Sweet Movie</i>. I remember the first thing that stuck out as being completely unforgettable was the song that Ann Lonnberg sings when we first meet Anna Planeta. That's the thing that always grounded every bizarre ass thing that happens in the realm of storytelling and film, rather than of weird-for-the-sake of weird. No one actually depraved could have gone looking for a song as perfect as this. And no one could have found so much beauty in hopelessness.<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghOk2HjaoHhHsRHTSE5TX_z7pN1zqI0LzGmYV4W9d3M3xh-p2U1mzqtQqZqXCCtKuq6mwqjXPs-fr44HQiGkBXZNi4vcLRi6REgnuSnlRAZurpV8htmj5Xv753TowLXVFOnifRRlziohs/s400/a+sweet+movie+PDVD_016.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526897495505173650" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 246px; " /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "></span><i>Sweet Movie</i> as a list of obscene set-pieces dares you to take it seriously, but in practice it's something much different. Sure there's sex, violence, implicit pedophilia, unsimulated pissing, shitting and vomiting but in the proper context, that is to say with an open mind and a little help from a sympathetic political viewpoint, <i>Sweet Movie</i> is more than the sum of its bodily functions. The thing I love about its portrayal of sexuality is that it's so unsexy. There's enough skin to satisfy anyone in a raincoat but not one encounter is without baggage. Take the two stories' climaxes. On board the Survival a final tryst takes place in a vat of sugar and ends with a rather sudden burst of violence. It's so conflicting and beautiful and otherworldly that by the time you have a fix on things, it all changes. In Miss World's story, she writhes naked in melted chocolate. It's fascinating as hell but it's far from exploitative and I wouldn't even call it sexy. So, yes, it hits the beats of a sex film but then it runs right past them until 'decency' and 'sexiness' have to be pretty seriously re-evaluated. I love reading negative reviews of this film because their problem stems from their being unwilling to look at things that everyone of us does every day. I admit that the vomiting is the one thing that will occasionally send my eyes to the corner of the room depending what I've just eaten but there is absolutely nothing in this film that I would call obscene or gratuitous. And I can't tell you how important that distinction is in a film like this. Intent is everything and Makavejev wasn't trying to offend anyone (their sensibilities, sure) but he was trying to wake people up and he seemed to know that this was the last chance he'd get to say anything so he made sure to say it all. In fact the movie's reputation became so great that Anna Prucnal, who plays Anna Planeta, was actually banned from her home country, Poland, for so long that she missed the death of her mother. This is why I so love film. What album or book has had this kind of impact in the last fifty years that was also artistically satisfying? People go crazy when confronted with the truth and in the cinema, they can't escape it; Makavejev blocked all the exits and lit the place on fire.<br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><br /></span></div><i></i><i></i><i></i>Dušan Makavejev was one of the first generation of Yugoslavians to have access to cameras and film schools and is one of the only people to ever break into the international scene in any meaningful way. He made four films in his native country (the best of them, <i>Innocence Unprotected</i>, is one of the best films about film ever made) before finally getting himself effectively evicted. The film that did it was <i>W.R. Mysteries of the Organism</i>, a kind of slavic <i>I Am Curious</i> that fuses documentary footage of sex therapy and sexual curios with a free-form narrative a la Godard about a woman who takes a break from hammering home Marxist dogma to seduce a figure skater who's the pride of the nation. His movies all drew lines between fascism and modern life and poked fun at Yosip Broz Tito's government with a knife. After <i>W.R.</i> pointed out that in practice nazism, Tito's communism and Nixon's republican government were not really all that dissimilar, the government film board gave him his pink slip and he went looking for money elsewhere. It didn't take him long to find it and before long he was using French, Canadian and English money and a cast of outsiders like Sami Frey, Pierre Clementi and Carol Laure. But needless to say it didn't go down quite so easily. Where <i>W.R.</i> had excited the international film scene and was the reason he so easily secured financing for another film, <i>Sweet Movie</i> made most people avert their eyes out of shame. Reviews were unkind enough that it waited almost thirty years for a DVD release and thanks to its showing the human body doing what the human body does it's still banned in England. Makavejev may have made other films after this, but none so unflinching and none as good (though Manifesto really is quite excellent). The reason no one wanted <i>Sweet Movie</i> is because the spirit of 1968, every new wave the world had produced and all the revolutionary fervour that had so captured the heart of everyone under thirty had failed. It was business as usual as far as everyone was concerned and they didn't need some foreign eccentric shitting all over their blissful conformity. All the strikes and rallies and progressive candidates were dead and Makavejev was one of the few people actively grieving. Hence the film's one foray into documentary footage, that of the Germans discovering the bodies of dead Poles in Katyn forest. <i>You</i> may have moved on, he seems to say, but these people are dead and injustice is still everywhere. <i>Sweet Movie</i> is thus a big, New Orleans-style funeral for idealism. Unsurprisingly attendance was low.<br /><br />As a statement it's perfect and I couldn't ask for anything more from it. Everything, down to the posters and trinkets that hang on Anna Planeta's boat like some Maoist TGI Friday's, have meaning to them. Nothing was accidental. To look at but a few almost imperceptible things that have no effect on the story. The sailor who boards the Survival is a cast away from the Potemkin. "Isn't that the revolution that failed?" she asks him. It is, but it's also the name of the flagship film of Soviet montage of which Makavejev was a fervent disciple. Soviet Montage influenced his first four films heavily and this is especially fascinating when we realize that Tito's government had broken from the soviets in Makavejev's lifetime. Makavejev went looking for inspiration in the culture of a national antagonist at a time when the man running the country wasn't above burying his enemies in quicklime. It's a small gesture, I suppose considering how new and insignificant the film schools in the country were when Makavejev was starting and by 74 he saw that his revolution, too, had failed and had only managed to get him ejected from his homeland. <i>Battleship Potemkin</i> is about one sailor causing a rebellion on a great ship, <i>Sweet Movie</i> is about the same soldier boarding a smaller one and being eaten alive by his own ideals. The authorities show up at the end of both movies and find revolutions in progress, except one is led by a woman alone surrounded by the bodies of her allies. And again, this is just in one piece of wardrobe and one line of dialogue. When you realize that such things appear every thirty seconds, you see why I'm so in love with this film's theory and design, to say nothing of its assaultive content.<br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(85, 26, 139); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="http://criterion_production.s3.amazonaws.com/release_images/560/390_box_348x490.jpg" border="0" alt="" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 348px; height: 490px; " /></span>I found <i>Sweet Movie</i> at a crucial time in my life. I'd landed at Temple University after having not been offered enough scholarship money to go to my first choice, Emerson College. I had, however, resolved to get into Emerson again and nothing was going to stop me. My time at Temple was short, cold, lonely and pretty disappointing. I couldn't function there; the classes were huge, no one, least of all the other kids, cared for my anarchic "do whatever feels right" attitude toward filmmaking, everyone was wary of everyone else, and I had few friends but it wasn't without its high points. I had already decided that I needed to be somewhere a little less hostile but I was also going to take advantage of everything here. I got to know Final Cut, the editing software, intimately, I wrote a lot, fine-tuning the script that would grant me entrance into Emerson and also writing a 350 page war film I don't have the heart to look back at. But the thing I'm most grateful for at Temple was their mammoth DVD library. I took out ten films at a time and watched all of them before returning a few days later to get more. I watched nearly everything the Criterion Collection released to date and began exploring the lesser films of some of my favourite directors. They also bought most new films and so when I started reading about<i> Sweet Movie</i>'s release I knew I had to see it. And when I did, I instantly fell in love. Along with <i>The Battle of Algiers, Playtime, The Human Condition, Children of Men, Au Revoir Les Enfants</i> and <i>If....</i> it filled me with contempt at all the broken promises made by past generations. How had we failed so spectacularly? Bush was still president and I was at a school where seeing a stretcher dispatched to collect a rape victim somewhere on campus wasn't uncommon. Where the fuck did the future go? I was filled with indignation and that kept me motivated enough to get out of North Philadelphia and into a school that I thought I deserved to be in. The intervening years have proven Emerson a place just as stubbornly resistant to my attitude as Temple and I'm still a disrespectful malcontent but these films, <i>If...., Children of Men, Sweet Movie</i>, keep me in check when nothing else does. If graduating gets me a step closer to making movies riddled with <i>Sweet Movie's</i> influence, then I'll write anything and happily listen to someone telling me there is one right way to make a movie. Makavejev had so much more to contend with that my problems frankly don't exist in the grand scheme of things and I can't wait to get my chance and blow it by asking just what the fuck happened. Why did the world get together and agree to forget him and his questions? <i>Sweet Movie</i> is a film that to love it means not settling for the violence of the modern world. Not settling for conformism, misogyny, racism and censorship. It means trying to love people and everything they do, committing to revolution so that we can make the world a little nicer, a little more sweet.</div></div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-74838293817998128352010-10-03T22:35:00.004-04:002010-10-04T00:15:56.778-04:00"....I've been working near them cane fields and I wanna be free!"<div style="text-align: left;">Evidently I wasn't the only one less than satisfied with <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/ive-been-locked-away-so-long-now-i.html">Women In Cages</a></i>. Roger Corman, never one to throw away scraps, decided that there was still money to be made in his newly minted modern Women In Prison genre and one sequel just wasn't going to cut it, especially one so low on the charm that gave him that license to print money. The solution? Return to basics. Jack Hill was sent back to the Philippines along with Pam Grier and Sid Haig and a bunch of fresh faces (I guess New World Pictures were hedging their bets on disassociating themselves from <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/ive-been-locked-away-so-long-now-i.html">Women In Cages</a></i>?) and re-upped their political fervour. This time the revolution wasn't just off screen and in smuggled letters, this time Haig and Grier were going to bring it into the prison themselves. They were going to teach it to every prisoner and then they were gonna either bust out and join the fight or die trying. And, luckily for us, the other thing Hill brought back was a sense of humour to go with his unrepentant lowbrow screenplay. For while there is enough merciless sleaze to satisfy anyone, there's room to breathe and enjoy it as something a touch more knowing than it would be in either <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html"><i>The Big Doll House</i></a>, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/ive-been-locked-away-so-long-now-i.html"><i>Women In Cages</i></a> or any of the WIP films that followed. <i>The Big Bird Cage</i> is really the best of the best: not only is it simultaneously fun and knowingly awful (and make no mistake things get awful), but it's also the closest thing to a real revolution the Philippines saw in the 70s.</div><br />The Big Bird Cage<br />by Jack Hill<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtdVPbaOZaooNeJdVYkVDxeAt-5YyrwQNTYDjuq8sSHuoWzV3Y_KWWC0of0gTae48BIV0n-OJsbZs4ZGczizxan8aKyMQ6VtqiAufTYuDL_M72Fzj5jDK7dx387yrUBjryxNc-HDuaXH4/s400/bigbirdcage1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524038366097149298" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px; " /></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "></span>I have to admit that the sound of delayed conga drums is now as welcome as the sound of birds chirping on a summer morning. Terry is a woman that every important politician in the Philipines has vied for at some time or another. According to the hushed tones that accompany her arrival at a dive bar, nameless powerplayer on her arm, the prime minister once fought a duel over her. So it's fortuitous that this particular bar is the subject of a robbery by a group of cash-strapped revolutionaries posing as the evening's entertainment. After their leaders, Blossom and Django (Grier and Haig), have cleaned everyone out they make a break for their hideaway but in all the hubbub Django is left behind. He grabs Terry as collateral and hijacks the nearest cab. But contrary to his expectations Terry's thrilled to have been taken, she even balks at the notion of the bearded gunmen having to force himself on her. Django's thrilled about this until he figures out that this is the girl who slept her way into the confidence of every decision maker in the country. Django realizes she's more trouble than she's worth ("They'd pay me to get rid of you!") and ditches both her and the car. The police willingly close one eye to the reality of the situation and send her to prison (well government work camp, but same difference really) as an accomplice to the crime and by extension a part of the revolution. And every politician she's ever slept with breathes a sigh of relief at the sight of the back of her.<br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><br /></span></div>Let's meet her cellmates, shall we? There are too many native prisoners to name in cottage #2 so let's stick to the ones who share a first language. There's Rina, a woman who arrives on the same boat as Terry who the former social-climber has taken it upon herself to protect, Mickie, the sassy black girl who loves torturing Karen, the tall, slender lesbian who evidently hasn't convinced anyone to bed down with her, Carla, this movie's Roberta Collins surrogate, Bull Jones, the would-be slut and running the place are Rocco and Moreno, the head homosexual guards and Warden Zappa, the guy who acts the vicious overseer of the camp. His pet project is a giant sugarcane mill run by the prisoners that extracts sugar from coconuts. It's where dissidents, informers and delinquents ends up so that if they happen to die in some unforseen accident, no one thinks twice. The mill is also the Big Bird Cage of the title, so you just know it's going to wind up being Zappa's undoing. Meanwhile Django finally hoofed it back to the revolution's secret camp in the jungle. Blossom assumes he's been away this long because he'd been making time with Terry but after a knife fight and some mud wrestling they quickly find themselves having house-shaking reunion sex. The sight of the whole house shaking gets the other guys thinking that if they had a few more girls around the average joe might be compelled to join the fight. Can you think of someplace with enough women to spare, just off the top of your head? You'll get there, take a sec. So Blossom and Django hatch a plan to get her incarcerated so she can organize a prison break, and him on the staff so he can dismantle the guards. I don't think it takes a genius to see that things aren't going to go exactly as planned.</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO3TRSOpC1lqoanlAReMT9zFnlhJIc59dsxjrBdu37NDew7wPgD2NoUUiYe7gEphnOqOQqO_YZ5XYw10oJHj6V73zxOBcXvJrPKqILSeYFtoDPouGcsNtLldn9L_J5HGrFrbdgitUCvHc/s400/05hostage.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524038356852452386" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px; " /></span><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"></span></div><i>The Big Bird Cage</i> hit theatres in July of 1972; by September president Ferdinand Marcos had refused to yeild to the constitutional limits of his reign and declared marshall law. The lead-up to this was a desperate time, to be sure, but Marcos was basically responding to his own opposition rather than any kind of need for change. His government had spent wildly and put the country thousands of dollars in debt. Students protested, shutting down every major university and the remaining communists in the country banded together and tried to rebel but lost as many people as they killed and when Marcos seized control he had all his remaining opponents either killed, imprisoned or forced into exile. Incidentally, one of the senators he arrested, Benigno Aquino, Jr., would eventually be his undoing, for after his release, he ran against Marcos for President in 1983; Marcos had him killed and didn't cover his tracks. It took time to prove it conclusively but by '86 he and his party were gone. There's a scene in <i>The Big Bird Cage</i> that actually predicts Marcos' attitude toward his country. In the early 80s he hosted Pope John Paul II and before his arrival publicly declared an end to his complete control over the government, but things went back to normal after the pope departed. In <i>The Big Bird Cage</i> some officials come to check on Zappa's progress and the whole time Rocco walks a few paces behind them pantomiming a big smile for all the girls to see. He might not have known it when he let Jack Hill back in the country but Marcos was the villain of <i>The Big Bird Cage</i>.<br /></div><div><br /><i>The Big Bird Cage</i> was the first of these movies to function nakedly as a metaphor. The camp is a stand-in for the country it was filmed in (or really any country undergoing totalitarian rule) and the stuff about sex is mostly window-dressing. You'll notice the sexual content is perfectly symmetrical. Terry's first escape attempt leads to her being gang raped by some local horndogs and her second one leads to one of the guards being gang raped by the prisoners. Carla's all encompassing need to get laid is matched by Django's fellow revolutionaries wanting to break into prison to steal women. Horniness drives everyone in the movie so it has to come down to politics. The women in cottage #2 were already looking for a reason to escape and though Blossom has to prove her point using brute force, she only suceeds because she has the revolution driving her to success. Her sleeping with Django is just an extension of that. And then there's the shift in the dynamic between Karen and Mickie. After the scene when the bird cage breaks down and Mickie is sent below to fix it, the metaphor becomes double what it was. Watching labour bosses ignoring work conditions to the point of fatal ignorance is the kind of thing you'd expect in a Jules Dassin film. So when Pam Grier puts a machete in the arms of every prisoner and organizes the raid she's not just starting a jailbreak, she's arming the work force and seizing (and destroying) the means of production. The machetes they work the fields with become the thing they hack their oppressors to pieces with. It might not mean much to some people seeing as how this is a movie that features the line "You can't rape me, I like sex!" but that I can find Marxist overtones in a movie I already like on dirty, shameful principle is icing on the cake. It's films like this that sent Mark Hartley looking into movies from the Philippines in order to find the rebellion the insurgents were never able to pull off.<br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjviJfQZSrbgEapqrivRQtGpz8pmHk4DSMgg56MqGYeMhyphenhyphene8jdRNqpeqp2Fb4eQa_K3OishCZpBFM0zd22L10zEmVtEt2lIwOZNtrGFJKiFcCQJDCHZvD8GVyFRtOiRiNzpxPkFSte-1XQ/s1600/000e5cd1.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjviJfQZSrbgEapqrivRQtGpz8pmHk4DSMgg56MqGYeMhyphenhyphene8jdRNqpeqp2Fb4eQa_K3OishCZpBFM0zd22L10zEmVtEt2lIwOZNtrGFJKiFcCQJDCHZvD8GVyFRtOiRiNzpxPkFSte-1XQ/s400/000e5cd1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524038362024747186" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 273px; height: 400px; " /></a>And while we're at it, let's talk sleaze. <i>The Big Bird Cage</i> has all the requisite mudfights you could ask for, as well as purple sex talk and all kinds of batshit imagery I can't say I've ever seen doubled. The scene where Karen covers her naked body in chicken fat so that the other girls can't grip her long enough to prevent her finally beating the shit out of Mickie is a stroke of mad genius on Hill's part. The sight of a woman as tall and thin as Karen McKevic running naked is weird enough without the addition of her choice of lubricant and the scene where Carla starts the huge rape of Rocco is pretty goddamned filthy, too. I can't get behind the use of gay stereotypes but I still like the methods Sid Haig employs to infiltrate the guards. It's hard not to laugh at lines like "Alright you silly bitches, back to your cottages" when delivered through Sid Haig's lisping southern accent and there is something kinda sweet about the scene where Rocco stares at Haig while he's pissing then hastily makes a comment about his shoes. It helps knowing that while he was giving the role of Django his all, Haig was also shooting second unit for Jack Hill. His chemistry with Grier is also endlessly watchable after the first viewing, where it's just kind of jarring because until now he's just been either psychos or generic heavies. But once you get used to it you really dig their brief time together and really love it when Grier smashes a guitar to snatch her machine gun and Haig grabs two .45s. Hill didn't call them his Tracy and Hepburn for nothing. Pam Grier for her part gives her best performance to date. When she runs onscreen after Django's return to camp and delivers easily my favourite piece of dialogue in the film "I told you I was gonna cut it off if you try to pull that shit on me!" she's no longer Roger Corman's former secretary. She was Coffy, she was Foxy Brown, she just needed a change of warddrobe and she could take down either white dope dealers in LA or Ferdinand Marcos. There isn't a moment where you don't believe she could kick your ass. Anitra Ford, Karen McKevic, Candice Roman and Carol Speed are all a lot of fun to watch and their respective subplots make for engaging detours from the revolution/prison break. And considering that the prison break is the only thing guaranteed by a women in prison film, this film more than delivers in so many ways. Hill had a bigger budget and was able to deliver a conclusion long on action and explosions, even if he still couldn't do better than that image of Pat Woodell leveling two M-3s at her captors. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/ive-been-locked-away-so-long-now-i.html">Women In Cages</a></i> proved that these movies could be perfunctory and still make a pretty penny and this one proved how good they could be. <i>The Big Bird Cage</i> is so much more than the sum of its parts; a sex-crazed, machete-wielding warrior that looks good in skimpy prison clothes.</div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-74548344156978329312010-09-30T22:15:00.000-04:002012-04-27T00:34:56.799-04:00"....I've been locked away so long now I forget my crime...."<div style="text-align: left;">
The story's old hat by now. Something sleazy makes a bit of money so a sequel gets hatched. With <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html">The Big Doll House</a></i> we had what was perhaps (according to Jack Hill) the most profitable independent production at that time. So a sequel was not just inevitable but a solid guarantee - don't forget we're talking about a property owned by Roger Corman. All the same they couldn't very well make a direct sequel; those of you who've seen <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html">The Big Doll House</a></i> know why. So Roger Corman put up a little money, probably even a little less than they had on <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html">The Big Doll House</a></i>, and turned over all responsibilities to a mostly indigenous cast and crew. <i>Women In Cages</i> is a little more muddy, features almost unbelievably bad editing and relies too heavily on actors speaking their second or third languages but it also features a much more confident performance from a returning Pam Grier and some excellent work from fellow <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html">Big Doll House</a></i> alums Roberta Collins and Judith Brown.</div>
<br />
Women In Cages<br />
by Gerardo De Leon<br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5521640287895045762" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSUe1wngbgrIGsrGYbEFP2R0Vcgn27hyphenhyphenXjmPVeWykGLUPJvkqColgbCvxU7b6A8GFC-qVHjv-VKSH_wrr3F2hAZzybgE9wy9bYywYAQ3ZerEPRJ0HlNCaAAZziz2YkDS0tTgZXQ1ot2ps/s400/women_in_cages_12.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 273px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>To the familiar sound of a delay-fitted conga drum we meet Carol Jeffries, a Filipino criminal's classy American girlfriend who has enjoyed the high-life enough not to ask where Rudy, her beau, gets his money. We join them on Rudy's boat just as the police show up looking to bust him on, of all things, drug possession. The boat is a whore house and gambling hall so that they have to go searching his pockets for something to bust him on is a little strange. Anyway, Rudy puts the dope they're after in Carol's purse and so she's the one who gets sent to the slammer. In short order she meets the sadistic Alabama (Pam Grier), the matron who runs the place with an iron fist, iron shoes, iron guillotine, iron maiden and a number of other torture devices in a room she calls the playpen. This place makes the torture scenes in <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html"><i>The Big Doll House</i></a> look positively tame. Her cellmates are an even rougher crowd than the last bunch we dealt with. Carol, or Jeff, as they all call her, is sharing the cell with the equally nasty Sandy and Stoke (Judith Brown and Roberta Collins) and a native girl and Alabama's pet Theresa. Sandy has it out for Theresa because of her constant dalliances with the matron, which everyone is fully aware she does to escape torment. Alabama, for her part, hates Sandy and Stoke and grows to loathe the reticent Jeff immediately because they're white. She spends more time accusing people of racism than Spike Lee but instead of heavy-handed agitprop, Alabama uses a whip to help get her point across. After Theresa gets a little carried away one night while massaging the matron, Alabama's newest form of pleasure is pitting the poor, rejected thing against the girls in her cell: what could be more fun than watching someone trying to murder the white bitches she so hates? All in all this place is much less hospitable than the big doll house.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5MWFyF88ptoQDYUxiC-ihf8wY9pbDk00wwD7T_lOJKmdaPWOfcexIzYvP5X-RPSpmmRxyEPsHfR0eWVHnmcKqUfjZcGeQO96a6KiJ78n54osjUO9q1dS4zwdA1_TY7FBLOYkG9cwvJNE/s1600/8c3iq74.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5521640301038073554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5MWFyF88ptoQDYUxiC-ihf8wY9pbDk00wwD7T_lOJKmdaPWOfcexIzYvP5X-RPSpmmRxyEPsHfR0eWVHnmcKqUfjZcGeQO96a6KiJ78n54osjUO9q1dS4zwdA1_TY7FBLOYkG9cwvJNE/s400/8c3iq74.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 300px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>And as if things weren't hard enough, the powers that be are making things even worse from the outside. Stoke happens to know Rudy and his people. The nervous gangster says he can get her an early release if she can kill Jeff before she can testify against the gangster. And after an attempted poisoning goes awry and a snake in the vents proves a close call, Jeff starts to get wise and Stoke starts thinking about other options. Meanwhile Alabama tries and fails to make Stoke her new bitch; the only thing her defiance gets her is a trip to the playpen. So between Theresa's hatred for Alabama, Stoke's fear of Alabama, and Sandy's resignation to her sentence, they're all ears when Jeff proposes a break-out. They've got it all sorted but some visiting officials throw a monkeywrench in the works. They ask Jeff what she thinks of the place and an honest answer lands her in the hole. It's not all bad news, however, for the hole has a weak spot: some bars that lead to a sewer can be easily removed and that's a much safer way out than through the jungle like they originally planned. Even if they had made it out, the prison keeps some trackers on staff that have caught everyone who's ever tried to escape. So all they have to do is land themselves in the hole and then it's a long crawl to freedom. That is unless Rudy's guys get to them before they find their way to sanctuary...</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKSkw0y10fl_BtWt3ZiQPv4jegYCo6WJMaZYOzVAbr7WypKXn1VOd1rvk2TwehAFGXNM0QG15YoyhMv6uzSKB0E9mIwfmArrLCGEwF9UvxLLJNfjzwkSs3R4V43K3HS6vdb2I0gk1kj_g/s1600/women_in_cages_10.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5521640306414093938" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKSkw0y10fl_BtWt3ZiQPv4jegYCo6WJMaZYOzVAbr7WypKXn1VOd1rvk2TwehAFGXNM0QG15YoyhMv6uzSKB0E9mIwfmArrLCGEwF9UvxLLJNfjzwkSs3R4V43K3HS6vdb2I0gk1kj_g/s400/women_in_cages_10.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 284px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>...the point of that ellipsis is that after the crawl through the sewers is done and the fates of most of the major characters have been assigned the film should have just stopped. Roberta Collins hangs around with no more dialogue, Pam Grier and Judith Brown's stories are wrapped up and all we have left is the D.A. coming to Rudy's whoreboat to arrest him and save Jeff, easily the least interesting of the cellmates. That part is poorly edited and frankly pretty uninteresting. The movie did nothing to make us care about Jennifer Gan's Jeff and I certainly don't give a goddamn about Rudy or the investigation into his criminal activities. The whole movie takes place in a prison cell and placing the climax back on the boat was a serious miscalculation. The three leads had all progressed enough to make me wish we'd spent the last ten minutes with them. Judith Brown basically plays Alcott from<i> </i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html"><i>The Big Doll House</i></a> this time around and Roberta Collins is like a mix of that film's Harrad and Bodine. Theresa is this film's Ferina and there's almost no difference between the two characters' behavior. Collins gets the bulk of the film's heavy lifting like the scene where she busts into the harbour master's cabin while he's screwing his girlfriend and she's the only one with conflicting motivation inside the prison. She handles addiction a little better than Brooke Mills though the post-fix reverie is note-for-note the same thing in both films. I'm sorry to make so many references to <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-long-time-woman-and-im-seving-my.html"><i>The Big Doll House</i></a> but it's hard not to judge <i>Women In Cages</i> as anything but a retread and cash-in by a less competent director. De Leon had an eye for composition that Jack Hill did not but it hurt as much as it helped. The scenes in the playpen are much more interesting and Corman-esque than those in Lucian's room but scenes like the beach-set confrontation between the gangsters and the police are as nice to look at as they are impossible to follow. Everyone's in silhouette so I didn't know who was still alive until it was over.<br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5521640291451274130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCajRVTY7seTaG3O-ND14y7qBR7z1lOxS8XO28eTsIO8n8lz6Xvj6nwJYfY-3hFOyVE5O6WZwuA02-wyMeH1M5U4zFNER4pOD4QbBUimdpINNyW8n0GhZoJaD7EDMM0gC-9JneyUOiZbo/s400/women_in_cages_poster_01.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 262px;" /></span>That said De Leon's craft does not extend to any other aspect of the production. The acting from everyone who isn't a native English speaker is terrible. Pam Grier wasn't <i>quite</i> Pam Grier yet but she was inching ever closer. Roberta Collins is gorgeous here and I'm really bummed that they waited until <i>Caged Heat</i> to put her in another of New World's WIP films. But I don't think we can chalk any of the performances up to De Leon. The editing, particularly where dialogue from angle to angle is concerned, is a mess. If the film hadn't been made in 1971 I'd swear someone pieced this thing together on iMovie what with all the inexplicable fade ins and outs and the nearly impenetrable darkness in some scenes. The film needed to be dark and messy, but that should have been <i>on</i> screen not behind it.</div>
</div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-27631761428967388752010-09-28T17:37:00.009-04:002012-09-15T13:31:02.020-04:00Happy Birthday Claudio Cassinelli, Rest In Peace<div style="text-align: left;">
As a sort of disclaimer, I'm not going to be fair to the four movies I'll be discussing today. Today, September 28th, is Claudio Cassinelli's birthday and I've been minorly obsessed with the late Italian actor since seeing him in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Big Alligator River</a></i> a few years ago. So if I don't give the films the breadth of attention I might ordinarily, its because I'm far more interested in Cassinelli's appearance in these movies (he was the reason I watched them, after all) than how they relate to anything else. In Italian movies, good performances are so rare that even if you saw one you probably wouldn't recognize it (dubbing makes this <i>doubly</i> hard, HA! Please don't leave....). Cassinelli was a special case in that I instantly knew that his performances were the thing I liked best about the second rate films he appeared in. He was always thrilling because he never suffered from the many ailments that plague most performers: crazy eyes, awful dubbing, <i>PROJECTING!!!!</i>, chronic whimpering, and inhuman facial expressions. He was a cool, if put upon, breath of fresh air, which is why most people don't ever draw attention to him. He just disappears, and, like the jungle setting of <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-lurid-and-sleazy.html"><i>Mountain of the Cannibal God</i></a>, he's taken for granted as one of the few things that work. Cassinelli's first film was Marco Bellocchio's little seen China Is Near and after languishing in little parts in little films (he was in <i>Flavia The Hereti</i>c and one of Vincente Minnelli's later films, which is about as lofty a name as you'll find on his resume, pre-77) became a favourite of Sergio Martino, who cast him in nearly everything he did after their first collaboration. And while we've already looked at him in Martino's adventure trilogy, we're going to take a look at the few genre films he made before he died in 1986, including the film that claimed his life, in the hopes of alerting you gentle, patient readers to the talents of one of the Italian film industry's few truly underrated talents. The world is full of people willing to scream the praises of Italian filmmakers who never once deserved an ounce of it, but Cassinelli hit his marks everytime and was one of the few people to walk away from terrible movies unscathed. He was a real talent in a world almost completely devoid of it, but he never once rose to brag about it so he goes unappreciated. Let's try and correct that.</div>
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The Scorpion With Two Tails<br />
by Sergio Martino<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096637505375698" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYH_FAsZOItbfCktlhZSszoTm8gE8WgZjEIu8gqKS4H7cIxEfH28Vp-CHs_02E_4cnGEaai4GfMxR3GizAv1hGYbUi9FVjJcbwQb7DT1xd3SNyR8S04HqxzsDERM9xatl2UPEqaIVJsPk/s400/scorpiontwo2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 225px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>Arthur Barnard (played by John Saxon, wrapping up a stint in Italy that had him star in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-rabid-and-shellshocked.html">Cannibal Apocalypse</a></i>, among others, before returning semi-triumphantly to the states for <i>A Nightmare On Elm Street)</i> is an archeologist who's stumbled upon some ruins he figures ought to bankroll whatever he decides to do next. He wants to ship the artifacts he finds in big crates back to the states and curiously his boss, Mulligan (played by a way over-qualified Van Johnson; aging Americans were something of a vice for Martino; he collected their performances like baseball cards), wants them sent straight to his house. Barnard doesn't have time to puzzle that one out because someone kills him before he can send them anywhere. This is bad news for Mulligan, but even worse news for his daughter Joan, who just so happens to be Arthur's wife. She rushes off to Italy to look for evidence concerning her husband's death and, along with nightmares and hallucinations replete with maggots, finds a plot as convoluted and intriguing as this movie is boring and pointless.<br />
<br />
Sergio Martino is by no means my favourite Italian director - either for actual quality or camp value - but you can typically expect professionalism and at least a shred of entertainment value in his movies. The professionalism in this film extends past the performances to Martino's handling of a few setpeices but the only entertaining part is Claudio Cassinelli. This was the first of his films outside the adventure cycle that I'd seen and it took me a minute to recognize him. In <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/adventure-time.html">Island of the Fishmen</a></i> he looked a little less assured of his leading man capabilities than in either <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-lurid-and-sleazy.html">Mountain of the Cannibal God</a> </i>or <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/12/picking-our-teeth-look-at-giant-gator.html">Big Alligator River</a> </i>and it looks like he completely abandoned any pretense about his looks in the years between his and Martino's last collaboration. When he walks on for the first time, you're looking at a man who has made one of the most graceful transitions from leading man to side-player in the history of cinema. Cassinelli so owns his performance that I was still looking for him when he was right in front of me. He becomes his character in a way I'd never seen before in an Italian film so it's a little ludicrous that he brought so much to a film that brought him nothing in return. I don't know that I've ever found a positive review of <i>The Scorpion With Two Tails</i> and other than Cassinelli I can think of nothing to recommend it, but as a fan of his, I do recommend it on the strength of his performance, but then not everyone is as wild about about combing through trash to find treasure.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096972457582194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYJ1Jotx1GwEoUeMQvVffwVfzc4rJUEN_4-S6RcDJTFEFXOIYAmztmp9_Ogg40l6Csao0eSszP1xu23TcXIIStRtHTAKqZQTHYsEAaJIuw9mDr5jPwORZhmQwZ8BCnJilSTJVUalk9aik/s400/vanjohnson3.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 277px;" /></span>Claudio mostly found himself in crime movies between <i>The Scorpion with Two Tails</i> and our next film and as I have zero interest in watching him play Zeus to Lou Ferrigno's Hercules in a Luigi Cozzi-helmed Conan rip-off, I haven't seen any of them....though I do think I'll be tracking down <i>Grog</i>, a film that pits him against Franco Nero and <i>Letter From Venice</i>, the last of four films written and directed by Susan Sontag. And for anyone who's seen him in the adventure cycle, I don't think it'll come as a surprise to learn he played Jesus Christ in a film by Pasquale Festa Campanile in 1980. Anyway, his new career as a heavy came to the attention of Lucio Fulci, a man for whom I have little time. Yet, the prospect of seeing a misguided<i> Road Warrior</i> knock-off by one of the worst directors ever regarded as great was just too great a chance to pass up. And, much to my surprise, despite its thickheaded treatment it's way ahead of its time.<br />
<br />
The New Gladiators<br />
by Lucio Fulci</div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096626833417154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwGQyI2teP7s4K3FEcvABVvcy9XRlMR7mhiThhsozsu_kbKTc4TF6-BPK4z9dlV8ayVCaMFXUN69Q6uHxCV7zZkZg5kOdY6XlaKM4jyl4xkqgKLLvWwWlBcVjXBaejUTYR2JXC6gaRNWI/s400/roma12.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 293px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>As the opening voice over helpfully explains, the world has fallen into disrepair and is now largely controlled by two warring TV stations. Intertelevision and The World Broadcasting System have built up a pretty serious rivalry with their shows, which provide a mix of torture porn and reality TV. Problem is no one's watching. Ratings have dropped on their staples, like a show where people are put in VR simulations of their worst fears (one woman thinks she's being taken apart <i>Pit & The Pendulum</i> style, for instance). So all hands are summoned to figure out a sure fire winner. The studios even drop their rivalry for an eleventh hour meeting to figure out how to keep people watching. The solution comes from Cortez (Cassinelli), a ruthless executive who proposes a show where criminals fight to the death like gladiators. The higher-ups like it, but how do you get the public interested in criminals: that's where Drake comes in. Drake is the star of a popular sport called <i>Kill Bike</i> and he's caught the attention of some very important network executives. They think that someone with so many fans could make the ratings for their new show skyrocket: the public loves a hero, eh? So they hire some thugs to kill Drake's wife and then pin the murder on the athlete so that they can put him on TV to fight for his, and the network's, future.<br />
<br />
And if this sounds familiar it's because that piece of shit <i>Gamer </i>had exactly the same plot. Granted the story (by veteran screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti) steals liberally from Stephen King's story <i>The Running Man</i> - thus making that story's adaptation seem like a much more expensive remake of this movie. Luckily for me, <i>The New Gladiators</i> spends so much time stealing from other movies (<i>Rollerball, Escape From New York, Blade Runner</i>...actually, come to think of it, the <i>The Road Warrior</i> got off easy) that it only rarely gets around to being something that reminds me of director Lucio Fulci's worst work. His direction makes me nervous because with every clumsy, handheld close-up I expect some poor woman to get stabbed in the face. Sci-fi, especially of the dystopian variety, is not something Italians get right and its about as far from Fulci's comfort zone as you're likely to travel. In fact if it weren't for the ideas driving the script (a few of which have actually become reality, while others have provided the impetus for a slew of dumb blockbusters of the last decade, <i>Gamer</i> chief among them) this movie would be too inept to watch. As it is there's no tension because you don't like anyone and all the action sequences are too muddled and slow to generate excitement. I did notice that the way the film is directed reminded me a lot of Enzo G. Casterllari's <i>Escape 2000</i>, the sequel to <i>1990: Bronx Warriors</i>. The frenetic (and poor) quality of the action, the ludicrous costuming, the parade of unlikable characters both behind and in front of the guns tie them together neatly. Cassinelli is fine but the stupid costume Fulci's got him in precludes anything he might have brought to the role. As the villain I suppose he does a fine job underplaying it, but he's too often sidelined by subplots involving some kind of mystic programmer, an evil computer, and the gang of interchangeable kill biking death row inmates. Fred Williamson is fun as Abdul, Drake's only real competition, but just like Claudio, he doesn't get nearly enough to do. It's better than <i>Escape 2000</i>, but only just. the script tries to wring interest from a lot of nonsense when really all I wanted from a film that promised me New Gladiators was people tearing each other apart.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096466830677826" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiohawi6QlCY9AApqQBHGlMRCroq4A-gVsRX1Hgr-pvAts9TruytQ4_AxvvKgg-ERHmOibJWuAl83khvow8DKuKeiMfhKn5ngnwSRlrffPERFMKL32hIIlS1Ka8CRXBJeqn4p6WKIcQ5Sk/s400/poster-rome2033.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 281px;" /></span>While it's not nearly as well thought out as, say, <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/fulcis-trilogy-do-not-entry.html">The Beyond</a></i>, it's still a lot easier to stomach. Now I'm not someone to talk to about the genius of Lucio Fulci, I think I've made my opinions of him perfectly clear...which is why I now need to backpedal and admit that I've just walked right into a trap of my own making. How was I to know that amongst his poorly dubbed, horribly violent, maybe occasionally artistic oeuvre, was a movie that one-ups the first ever giallo by co-opting its premise and handling it with something like restraint (in its quieter moments)? For when it's not dancing itself into a lather, killing any chance of its being regarded as even a minor classic, it is one of the most thoughtful Italian horror films I've ever seen.<br />
<br />
Murder Rock<br />
by Lucio Fulci</div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096457124164882" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVe_rOJFi0DtVxMdda-OcjArh34R4iIvxs17-3ZxvpoPrH1EwLErk6ZZvPf5lQTgNQvigfVVH7ZFh_W6eJhWlnCv9NVV5Xi7Q2i6txfa5dr98mYAlexi5ZjnA5LM-7VRL01h0kuFdiy3w/s400/mr_dream_1.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 218px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>Instead of <i>Blood & Black Lace</i>'s modeling school, <i>Murder Rock</i> takes place in a fictional New York dancing academy where they treat modern dance (read hideous post-disco writhing) as seriously as ballet. <i>Flash Dance</i> was released the year before, Murder Rock's most serious misstep is totally ignoring the film's plot. <i>Murder Rock</i> is most certainly a film meant to exploit <i>Flash Dance</i>'s box office performance but my guess is not one of the dozen screenwriters on Fulci's film had paid enough attention to know that you didn't go to the most prestigious school in New York to learn how to learn how to Jazzercise. Anyway, the top class is run by Candice Norman, a woman with a dark past. One night after rehearsals, one of the top dancers, up for a spot as leader of the company, is murdered by someone with a rag full of chloroform and a poisoned hatpin. Suspicions fall on the other members of the company and when the next day, another of the four finalists for the part is murdered in the same way, the police shift into overdrive. Meanwhile Norman and her second-in-command Dick Gibson are beset by other problems. Gibson has a thing for Norman, but gets that she's not into him - a rarity, to say the least. After the first killing Candice has a nightmare where a man in a leather jacket is coming to kill her. In one of the best bits of screenwriting in any Fulci movie, we've never seen the man before either. But one night while Gibson's giving Norman a lift home, they see the man selling scotch on a billboard. A few strategic phone calls gets Candice the man's name and address and in no time at all she's broken into his apartment looking for clues. Unfortunately for her the man, George Webb, stumbles in drunk while she's in there snooping around. She's so surprised that she runs out without her purse and has to call him the next day to ask him to return it to her. Webb is down on his luck and looks like he hasn't had a friend in years so has no problem giving his would-be burglar back the evidence. They get to talking and after Candice learns that George used to be a model and actor she not only puts in a call to an agent she knows with the intention of jump-starting his career, but the two wind up <i>dating</i> soon after.<br />
<br />
Now, all this might seem to have nothing to do with an ever-thinning group of dancers, but the more we learn about George Webb, the more we start to think maybe Candice Norman's nightmares are prophetic. He was implicated in the murder of a colleague years ago and when he comes by the school to pick Norman up one day Gloria Weston, one of the dance students also up for the same spot as the dead girl, starts making out with him before he pushes her off. Something's off alright, but everyone in the film has motive enough to be offing the dancers, so just where do we start? The only person we know didn't do it was Willy Stark, the impish male dancer who gives a limp confession when the police arrest him. Between Gibson's jealousy, Webb's hidden past and everything Weston stands to gain the only thing we're certain of is that the police aren't going to stop the killer in time.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_gKHX8LPdLUJin1P4Wp3zWnCws_Fx1uwVcSK5XfiU70GdVHibf01mRE0FYObHvea_OOIP8n56UfcxVQpmKZi4LkwXr3vh7PScPNLRE3aucqbR_Coq_PtEnsS6NtPPGrxXDZzI715klNE/s1600/protectedimage.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096618765734050" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_gKHX8LPdLUJin1P4Wp3zWnCws_Fx1uwVcSK5XfiU70GdVHibf01mRE0FYObHvea_OOIP8n56UfcxVQpmKZi4LkwXr3vh7PScPNLRE3aucqbR_Coq_PtEnsS6NtPPGrxXDZzI715klNE/s400/protectedimage.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 217px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>I....kinda like this movie...I don't know what to say. It's a Lucio Fulci film that rips off <i>Flash Dance</i>; I should fucking hate this! Yet the editing is crisp, the camera work is almost expressionistic at times, the performances are largely underplayed, the music is either enjoyably terrible or terribly enjoyable, the girls are cute, the murders aren't too horrific to sit through and anchoring it are two excellent performances from two of Italy's best B actors. Cassinelli is in top form as Gibson, the meddling, defeated official and matching him effortlessly is Ray Lovelock as George Webb; Cassinelli was a little like Italy's Sterling Hayden and Lovelock is a little like the country's Christian Bale. Lovelock gives the only decent performance I've ever seen him give (I loved him in <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/underdog.html">Let Sleeping Corpses Lie</a></i>, but he was mostly just a well-dressed presence. Here he's handsome but there's definitely something behind that smile) and played against Cassinelli it's almost like the film has something like internal conflict. Lovelock is a bit more noticeable though he's clearly trying to scale it back and Cassinelli never likes to call attention to himself, so together you have two kinds of quiet intensity that, against all odds, work really well together. In a movie stacked to the rafters with kids fulfilling the Rock of the title, it's good to have lifers like Lovelock and Cassinelli silently giving the movie weight. And though you'd expect this to loaded with sex and gore (it being a Fulci film and all) there is no gore or sex to speak of and the nudity is confined to the studio shower. Granted what the film lacks in the bedroom it sweats out on the dance floor. With all the costumed jiggling that stops the movie dead and lines like "You're here because you're the best!" You wouldn't be wrong to call this movie "<i>Flash Dance</i> but with murder", but a more apt descriptor might be "<i>Flash Dance</i> but with more realistic camel toe". There is a dance scene maybe twenty minutes into the film that shows a woman practically exploding out of her leotard; it's by far the sleaziest thing in the movie, which is a relief because I know how Fulci likes to kill people, but it's still going to catch you off guard. The murders have all the nudity, which is fitting, I think, and they're even handled in a more-artistic-than-usual fashion.<br />
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In other words there are moments here that I plainly thought out of Fulci's reach. Moments, like the first dream sequence, that approach Dario Argento's visual sensibility, which is convenient, because Argento had all but discarded it but 1984. Or like when Candice Norman's phone call with her agent reveals that Webb may have killed a girl years ago. When Lovelock grabs her shoulder after the phone call. Oh man...I was really under this ludicrous movie's spell. Tension is something I thought Fulci incapable of, yet here it is. There's Impressive footage of New York that rivals Ruggero Deodato's in <i>House on the Edge of the Park</i>. There are even a few memorable lines, my favourite being: "No, he's not a psycho, he's an asshole!" Though if one thing's going to sweep you off your feet about <i>Murder Rock</i>, it's the astonishing quality of the digitally remastered print. Thanks to recent work, Murder Rock really looks like something Adrian Lyne might have done rather than a mostly forgotten and totally out-of-touch murder mystery from a guy most famous for lurid zombie films. <i>Murder Rock</i> has some of the clearest and most impressive camera work of any Italian film of a similar vintage and it's even weirdly appropriate given it's subject matter. I spent a few minutes thinking that it should have been lit more presentationally or more naturalistically, not the middle ground Fulci and cinematographer Giuseppe Pinori filmed in. But then I realized that <i>Murder Rock</i> is meant to look like the world's most ambitious music video and then I kinda gave in and admired it. I've given Fulci a lot of shit over the years but he knows how to shoot a dance number, even if his costume designer wasn't quite as cooperative as his lighting cameraman. If one thing dates this film (beyond the God awful Pan-disco music that highlights the whole movie) it's the ludicrous costume design. Weirdly it isn't even that this film suffers from the enthusiastic colour blindness of something like <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2008/03/fulcis-trilogy-kill-director.html">Zombie</a></i> or <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2007/03/nightmare.html">Nightmare City</a></i>. The colours are all muted and tasteful, it's the shape of the unitard and the novelty of making an all-dancing Giallo that plants <i>Murder Rock's</i> glittery ass in 1984. The central performances escape the time and display what these guys could do at their best.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096457768028066" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXtUz6hqrihp_Rt4pk7zD8bM0mR0FIM3B3-zW_5N1DM59herKs2bzgDsc6Nhvqn1B6q9L_8y33Miwv8n5I8WIZdp3iZR7mLI2WzvhSezaDfqdiej5eez6CnwzgBiH0TvfAi4x8VT76jvc/s400/Murder-Rock-Poster-1.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 283px;" /></span>Up next for Claudio was mainly miniseries for European television and one final movie for his longtime friend and collaborator Sergio Martino. This time money called the shots more than anything else: what we have here is a late-in-the-game <i>Terminator</i> rip-off with none of that film's steely cool or ambition. As per usual with this sort of thing, Martino just added a whole bunch of extra subplot and baggage that gets in the way of the one thing that works. The conceit of <i>Steel Hands</i> is one that would be repeated with roughly the same success in <i>Terminator: Salvation</i>: a robot who doesn't know he's a robot. It's bullshit here, too, but at least <i>Hands of Steel </i>has the language barrier and an industry known for greedily shoving logic aside to blame for its shortcomings. <i>Terminator: Salvation</i> <i>only</i> has greed to explain it's total fucking failure.<br />
<br />
Hands of Steel<br />
by Sergio Martino</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522115190632299042" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj2NtDz7qOdBUvtTKHlbyk7sS8mZ5XinS8y2kvGhG6Beqq8cu064VAbgGxESmCDeyeG3pIKhKkq6Nl5Ms1VwVZVSF_h2-sMQG2AkC2yg2RH5HdTDe3m9K_vc0iGanF-2KD14-FxfZmYiE/s400/twozk2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>Paco Queruak is a cyborg, programmed to receive orders from a powerful organization. For reasons too irrelevant and dumb to get into, he's sent to kill a scientist but can't do it. He goes on the lam to avoid being destroyed by his employers (played by John Saxon, who I think probably agreed because of his relationship with Martino and the fact that it was shot in the Southern United States rather than Italy) and winds up in a shithole cantina run by Linda (Janet Agren, who found herself in another <i>Terminator</i>-related project, <i>Red Sonja</i>, featuring none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger). He decides to stay and help her with the local toughs by beating them in an arm wrestling competition, <i>Over The Top-</i>style. He even finds time to fall in love with Linda before the corporation sends Cassinelli's well-dressed hitman out to undo him. The conclusion stops making sense after Paco's confrontation with John Saxon and ends on a note of guitar-themed aggressive ambiguity.<br />
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<i>Hands of Steel</i>, technically speaking, is one of Martino's worst films, and worse it's been forgotten so it looks fucking terrible, not that this thing seems like it ever looked good. The effects are terrible (especially the laser guns - by 1986 you'd think someone would have let the Italians know that they couldn't do that), the cinematography is uninspired, the movie itself is largely pretty boring, and the script can't figure out what kind of film it wants to be. To its credit it subverts <i>The Terminator</i>'s plot cleverly but does nothing with it. In fact once Paco goes on the lam, the movie becomes a Canon-esque love story broken up by visits with the corporation's attempts to track their rogue cyborg and the law's attempt to figure out who tried to kill the scientist. At the risk of sounding like a sentimental idiot, the love story is the only thing in this movie that worked for me (Cassinelli's role gave him nothing to do but glower). Daniel Greene wasn't much of an actor but his attempts at passing for human mixed with Janet Agren's callous world weariness (and I believe anyone who worked for Umberto Lenzi really is world-weary) worked for me; they truly seemed like two people who need each other. Their romance is pretty cartoonish but I liked it enough to watch until the end, but it all but ruins Martino's best efforts to sell their falling in love. It's like someone leaned over his shoulder in the editing room and whispered "Don't forget this is an action film, pal!" and sabotaged the film's emotional core. And the tragedy doesn't end there.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522096452794937826" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCDWWrUwuDqqow7LuYHOhCO7iBgScLQO6ZuYt7plsQc93uUz4EjHLoouR0q0vXfOmTAJPN6QIw-G_Q8B75pEvtJ_s2TwnOk4vreTQNoqFeRrnUM7OWw63qVe9SI9K-7YUMutdyaXIZHA4/s400/hands_of_steel_poster_02.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 272px;" /></span>During an off day during the shooting of <i>Steel Hands</i>, Claudio Cassinelli opted to go up in one of the many helicopters used in the filming, I think because he wanted to see what it was like or something equally harmless. Something went wrong and the helicopter crashed, killing the 46 year old actor instantly. Along with Vic Morrow, Cassinelli was one of the few actors to be killed (by a helicopter, no less) in the line of duty. And though there's a lot I find infuriating about the accident (Martino kept right on making films, Cassinelli's role was too small in <i>Steel Hands, Steel Hands</i> itself is as forgettable as it is forgotten, Cassinelli never got to carry a movie again) I do find it somewhat touching that he died working for someone he seemed to have a great working relationship with, doing what he was best at. Cassinelli is one of the few Italian film personalities to come out of the B horror world that I would loved to have worked with or at the very least met. Like Robert Ryan or Sterling Hayden, he was always great because of his inconspicuous place in any film. He was never too big or too loud, he was always just right for his parts and was frequently the only good thing about a movie. Craftsmen like Cassinelli were something the Italian film industry was short on and it's a shame he's never gotten the respect he deserves.</div>
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Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-27108519037662134282010-09-24T23:51:00.009-04:002012-04-27T00:28:54.864-04:00"I'm A Long Time Woman and I'm Serving My Time"We have Roger Corman to thank for a lot more than I feel comfortable thanking him for considering how much shit he's produced over the years. I guess I can't blame him, he was only ever trying to make a buck, though his directorial skills were at their best pretty excellent. But the shear number of genres and careers the man made commonplace is staggering. We have him to thank for the biker movie, the psychedelic drug movie and the women in prison film as you or I know it. Sure he didn't invent them, they go back to the 30s and matured in the 50s before festering and dying off, but he brought them back to life with a vengeance. Corman was famous for basically taking elements no one had played with and mixing them or modernizing them. He would later become famous for slipping in rip-offs before the things he was stealing from had made it to theatres. I think he probably loved gangster films from the 40s and 50s because so much of what came out of American International Pictures and New World Pictures were just rehashes of some of the most beloved crime films of all time. And if he didn't then his many proteges certainly did and the WIP films are proof positive of Corman and Co's genius with efficient moviemaking. When he got into business with Filipino filmmaker Eddie Romero in the late 60s he quickly learned a few things that would save him quite a bit of money in the early 70s. Firstly: working in the Philippines was dirt cheap and came with all the crew and extras you could ever ask for. Ferninand Marcos was still a few years away from declaring marshall law but anyone willing to torch the constitution to stay in power was probably pretty receptive to some Americans coming in and paying them a tiny dividend to make movies there. The country was still a shambles and didn't have the moral high ground to wonder whether Roger Corman was maybe exploiting their workforce. After all Marcos was <i>definitely</i> exploiting them and at least winding up in one of New World Pictures' women in prison films meant that you might have a chance to be noticed outside of the country. Secondly: you only needed a few new ideas stapled to a few well-worn ones to make a film people would pay to see. So with a script containing elements from movies like <i>So Young, So Bad</i> and <i>Women's Prison</i> and a cast of mostly unknowns including Corman's secretary Pam Grier, AIP wunderkind Jack Hill was sent to the Philippines to work with his old friend Eddie Romero (they'd collaborated on <i>The Snake People</i> and a few other unseen trifles) and produce what would turn out to be one of the single most important grindhouse films of the 70s.<br />
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The Big Doll House<br />
by Jack Hill<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5520726482815694290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJyjF-ToyOrXCxYks9Q7d2Qk5JM57DBg4wSIr0eSauCC5EXwkBlZeiSBnit99TtBjagZwdaSfRShLFh1aQkr740Pi9NokFAGIrAYCaxYFo3t4PcTti04mER3IpjqLx9PPSuqa4Z6BrCyo/s400/big_doll_house6.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 302px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>In one of my favourite openings to any film, Marnie Collier is sent straight from the courthouse to a horrid Filipino prison while a song called "Long Time Woman" plays over the credits. Proving that she really must have dug her heels into Corman (thank heavens for that, by the way), the woman singing is none other than Pam Grier. Collier doesn't go into the specifics of her crime with the prison doctor Philips but suffice it to say the trial was fake. After meeting the bitchy wardress Lucian she's put in her cell which she shares with five other girls. There's Grear (now that's screenwriting), the only black girl in the prison, Alcott the feisty blonde, Bodine the revolutionary, Ferina the local girl with the pet cat and Harrad the drug addict and Grear's bitch. The following morning they attend the funeral of O'Connor, the girl who's bed Collier's now sleeping in and Alcott tries to tell the prison head, Miss Dietrich, that she wasn't killed trying to escape, which is the accepted story. Unfortunately she makes this complaint in front of the wardress which lands her in a world of hurt. Dietrich hears her out in private a little later on, but between you and me I don't think that's going to do much. The only people who can do anything to stop the brutal reign of the wardress are all sitting behind bars.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5520726491032721026" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoKGJXOg-dxHyurDesrFGWqLK-8X4K98dGq_fBBRHwASUF-MmgVG2mPhwva-xaXNWGGdgdDBgnfaMrE-bAZh0lqC8jvU6f0DmpZ53bTabPAkxau3CGhy7IXhYa7wqkH5JG5puIU8JkHE8/s400/big_doll_house8.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 307px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>And while that's going on we get a chance to meet the only other guys in the movie. Fred and Harry are the supply guys and although Fred's new and seems ok, Harry is played by Sid Haig, who would play this kind of dirtbag for most of the 70s, so you know what that means. Risible doesn't even begin to describe the sex jokes he makes. When they pass through the cell selling fruit (after bribing Leyte the shift commander) Harry loves every second of attention he gets from the sex-starved female prisoners. He has a particular hold over Grear; he convinces her to let him feel her up for what feels like hours in exchange for a letter that isn't even for her. The letter, from Bodine's revolutionary boyfriend, is discovered during fieldwork and Bodine winds up in the torture chamber later that day where Lucian subjects her to waterboarding and naked whipping while hanging by her arms all while the mysterious Prison Official General Mendoza watches from afar. The rest of the movie proceeds much like you'd expect it to: shower scene, attempted male rape, torture scene, mudfight, food fight, torture scene, and finally the girls in Collier's cell band together to escape right around the time that Dr. Philips gets it in his head that he's got to stop Lucian from torturing prisoners. Of course things don't quite as planned. Chief among those things: my really caring about the fate of these girls. I certainly didn't see that coming.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5520726493494481730" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIxz1NT8rJxwPWt73W-GGnq1cf36qLlTSL7Spvfc0gSakn95Khj8GpssnW109J1p6W0XudHmLQz0CclNnNoqgyvjRHaOAEuwwiDBjV-sMMtgeI_OLJprH120up6SsjpKVnp5WvMgy_RX4/s400/bigdollhouse2.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 302px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></span>Even as I watched <i>The Big Doll House</i> and noted how poorly it was shot, how terrible the performances are, how cheap the sets look, how awful the dialogue can be and how it's essentially the epitome of misogyny, I found myself liking it more and more and by the end I was totally in love with this terrible little movie. I know exactly why: even in a film as tawdry as this I can't help but get behind a film that depicts women taking on men and coming out on top (and quite spectacularly I might add). My feminist side has to compete with my love of shitty movies and their completely undignified view of empowerment <i>and </i>with my admitted weakness to seeing women firing machine guns. It's not much but you have to take it where you can get it in a movie like this. Compare it to something like <i>Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS</i> and the victor is clear but I'd never try and add it to the curriculum of a women's studies class. At the same time if you don't have a sense of humour about the things you care about, you tend to be a big fucking bore. So while I get why it'll offend some people I'd defend its merits up and down the block because when you consider all the strikes against it, it still manages to get you excited for the conclusion. <i>The Big Doll House</i> was nakedly just another moneymaking venture but out of it came a film that almost transcends its trashy trappings. Consider this: a movie made by guys telling women to take their clothes off <i>about</i> women who take their clothes off to trick men into giving into their demands and the men both in <i>and</i> behind the movie were in thrall to the women. No women, no women in prison, right? So while it would have been more than easy to make, say, hardcore pornography, Hill and Corman built a movie around women who couldn't quite act and managed to sensationalize them to almost the point of folk heroes. It helps knowing that the Philippines were being run by a megalomaniac warmonger who winds up being the spiritual villain of the piece. Bodine's wish to get back to the revolution and her willingness to die for it was as close to a manifesto as that poor country got during Marcos' time as President; hardly the sort of thing you expect in a sexploitation film from the director of <i>Spider Baby</i>. And I don't know about the rest of you but the thing I remember most about <i>The Big Doll House </i>is Pat Woodell throwing off her shawl and, a grease-gun in each hand, going down in a hale of gunfire and a blaze of glory. It's not only one of my favourite conclusions to any movie ever but it's also brilliant because it's an empowering image that rose out of a film that should have nothing of the kind. It's terrible, yes, but I defy anyone not to love the shit out of this thing after the conclusion.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; color: #0000ee;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5520726479965189890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUj9VbjdnILtF5zsp1MCSFX50mgHlqGz0uhFmxD9tswhtR-nGY69zHmlsaZHqmZ_78TsM3mq7D_iejs3Cv93oAE3xtAJh3z_Zp-MRHZZs9963wYOmHzSHNlDS31GPJK2C9p1SGJBItCms/s400/big_doll_house_poster_01.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 262px;" /></span><i>The Big Doll House</i> was also the film that paved the way for Pam Grier to become <i>the</i> 70s black action star, eventually dwarfing the likes of Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson. She wasn't yet the Pam Grier everyone fell in love with but she has moments that hint at how great she'd become. Woodell and Roberta Collins' performances seem much better in hindsight and on second viewing, with the images from the film's climax in your head, you see them not as bit players given too much responsibility but as gun-toting ass-kickers to be. It helps too that Collins looks like a more alluring Nicole Kidman. Neither Jack Hill nor Roger Corman come off as good as the leads because while the performances can win you over, Hill's sweaty, grubby direction and Corman's calculating production never grow on you in the same way. The script is full of twists and turns that largely don't mean anything. The final one should be a kick in the stomach but considering what we've already seen it's just maddening, perfunctory and kinda disheartening. For the record I think the last lines were added in post when Hill couldn't think of a satisfactory way to end the movie. I still think the character they try to sell as a rat isn't one at all. At its best the movie comes across as a bargain basement version of <i>The Guns of Navarone</i> but most of the time it's exactly what it is: no good, just a lot of fun. Anyway it was fun enough to gross over 10 million dollars, which was 80 times its 125 thousand dollar budget. If that ain't success, I don't know what is. It led to something like six more Women In Prison films by New World Pictures with similar cast members, plot elements, and soundtrack cues (those delay-heavy conga drums would make an appearance in at least two more of these things). The movies would get better but they'd rarely feel as raw and reprehensible. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/09/ive-been-locked-away-so-long-now-i.html">Women In Cages</a></i>, the movie that followed, was a less successful retread with a pointless criminal subplot that sucked the life out of the third act. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-near-them-cane-fields.html">The Big Bird Cage</a></i> is a better movie but the conclusion isn't quite as powerful. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-on-road-now-ive-been.html">The Arena</a></i> makes the mistake of dubbing Pam Grier and Margret Markov and cuts their impact in half. <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/ive-been-working-on-road-now-ive-been.html">The Woman Hunt</a></i> is dull and lifeless even by Eddie Romero's standards. And so on and so on. The thing these mostly wanted for was Hill's flair for dialogue and his double edged view of women. Hill may have been a mediocre director but he had a way with making threats and swear words sound like they were lifted from the "I Have A Dream<i>"</i> speech. <i>Doll House's</i> successors and copycats rarely featured dialogue as good as "Action, big mouth!" and "You stupid bitch, do what you're told!" Out of context I realize how generic they sound, but they're hard to beat when you're watching Collins and Woodell barking them. <i>The Big Doll House</i> comes out swinging and pins you down until long after it's over.</div>
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</div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-32181475854579431442010-09-18T17:14:00.009-04:002010-09-23T22:15:09.277-04:00A New Breed Of Terrible<div style="text-align: left;">The time has come for change. I realize that as I write more and more of these that there needs to be a line drawn; I need to be more constructive in my criticism. When I started handing out Z grades to movies I knew that though it was a step in the right direction, it didn't really satisfy me. It didn't say quite what I needed it to. You see, when a movie is so offensive it stops you in your tracks, you surely want to warn people. But when a movie is jaw-droppingly terrible or delightfully, irredeemably sleazy and you want everyone to rush out and see it as quickly as possible, you are equally driven to alert the masses. So, clearly I need to start making that distinction, otherwise I might give people the wrong impression. I don't want people to go see <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/12/powder-blue-powhatans-i-have-known-this.html">Avatar</a></i> (but boy did they) but if you were planning a party I could think of worse ways to spend it than by howling along to <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2007/01/mad-murdering-zombies.html">Zombie Lake</a></i>, <a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/05/cannibals-naked-and-well-naked.html"><i>The Devil Hunter</i></a> or <i><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/06/cannibals-seedy-and-fun.html">Massacre In Dinosaur Valley</a></i>. Sometimes there is a grey area, as when a movie has a few rough spots and I'm drawn to it time and again after being disappointed by it. So as in the case of a movie like Joe Johnston's stupendously awful <i>The Wolfman</i>, I know it's terrible even if I've watched it twice now in the hopes that it'd show me something I missed. It hasn't and though I'll probably watch it again I don't for a second recommend that you watch it even once. Clearly I need to start being more proactive about pointing students in the direction of something they'll enjoy watching for the qualities that make it so terrible versus something that either means to offend or simply doesn't know how far it's gone. In other words, I need to let you know about movies that I would watch over and over or never again. So from now on be warned: if you watch a movie I've given a Z minus rating, you do so at your peril.</div><br />The Wolfman<br />by Joe Johnston<br /><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuwRLCd_PwTXqEELH_QoBUweSc-HdF4XnyGWA6AuOI5sPsFChXWHXPnhSfm55GZYxJS6KlMdsV2vsUfJVm1Ov8HbdYsZge3LrWm8jazSfhbnMOUJubtxGZjwv0izP_XLzRLA66gkME7_I/s1600/TP_0009R.jpg_rgb.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuwRLCd_PwTXqEELH_QoBUweSc-HdF4XnyGWA6AuOI5sPsFChXWHXPnhSfm55GZYxJS6KlMdsV2vsUfJVm1Ov8HbdYsZge3LrWm8jazSfhbnMOUJubtxGZjwv0izP_XLzRLA66gkME7_I/s400/TP_0009R.jpg_rgb.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518481006181251794" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 216px; " /></a>We open on the first of many, many great mistakes that <i>The Wolfman</i> has in store for us. A man we'll later learn is called Ben Talbot is out on the grounds of his family's rather large English estate. He's able to call out for someone once or twice before that person (or thing) steps out of the dark and cuts him in the throat and stomach with two large claws. He manages to run a pretty good distance despite this before the creature claws him to death on the steps of a mausoleum. To start a movie with someone's guts getting spilled is basically announcing that you should put your monocle away. And that's fine, but then the movie tries so desperately to be taken seriously for the next twenty five minutes and just can't quite get us to forget the opening. What I take to be little more than a week later Lawrence Talbot closes a night of what looks like the most lifeless performance of <i>Hamlet</i> I've seen since I was in the sixth grade. Backstage a woman announces herself as Ben's fiance and Lawrence quickly clears the dressing room to hear her story. Evidently they haven't found Ben's body since his attack so no one knows yet the hairy, toothy fate he met. Lawrence isn't really keen on going back to Blackmoor; he hates his father, always has, and hasn't seen his brother since they were kids. Plus he's been paid to sleepwalk through Shakespeare for another 30 performances. But seeing as how Gwen is played by the unfairly gorgeous Emily Blunt I guess I'd probably quit my day job, too. So, for better or worse, Lawrence finds himself on a train to Blackmoor a few days later. Curiously the man he shares his car with is none other than Max Von Sydow and after mentioning a werewolf story of his own (name dropping a much better movie than this in the process) gives Lawrence his silver cane. This will serve no function in the story, defying Chekhov's third act rule and proving how utterly confused the screenwriters must have been.<br /><br />By the time Lawrence gets to the Talbot estate Ben's body's been found and he's obviously quite dead. Gwen's distraught as anything. Not only has her fiance been murdered but his dad, Sir John Talbot, refuses to stop creeping her out. When he and Lawrence aren't bickering about petty bullshit John won't stop staring at Gwen like a blind rapist. Because, once again, she's played by Emily Blunt, Gwen persuades Lawrence not only to stay at Blackmoor but openly investigate Ben's murder, which he does that very evening. The problem is, as Sir John warns him, whoever killed Ben is probably still out there. And as luck would have it, as Lawrence is paying a visit to the Gypsy Camp on the edge of the forest that surrounds Blackmoor, who Ben used to barter with, the same murderer strikes again. After a lot of airless comic-gore set-pieces, the creature corners Lawrence in a sort of mini-Stonehenge and bites him on the shoulder. The police bring him back to Blackmoor where Gwen, John and the family servant Singh, tend to him. From here we're treated to the requisite healing-too-soon stuff and falling for Gwen (fucking duh) and then when the full moon comes around John engineers a situation whereby Lawrence is locked outside when he turns into a werewolf and kills a bunch of superstitious townsfolk. The next morning the authorities find Lawrence covered in blood and cart him off to the looney bin. But this wouldn't be much of a Werewolf movie if he didn't get out.<br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVZdDTgQZPS3zRd05bqjzM6350bXKmmE14QNOb8zC-vDEb7WZykzwYfXi3bLIXs57-FLQiMUlbAnnMoeUfr910j33NUnorTGRG6SzyPqFWp6f9OMW-SHfe-7wLf5sZfteg4tmLy6uKxnM/s400/anthony_hopkins_wolf_man1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518481030973470274" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 202px; " /></span>But even still this isn't much of a werewolf movie. It isn't much of a horror movie, it isn't much of any kind of a movie. In fact it's fucking terrible. In <i>The Wolfman</i>'s favour is Anthony Hopkins swimming effortlessly above this shipwreck doing the thing he does when he isn't being directed - making it up and still being the most capable and assured performer in the movie. The monologue he gives when he visits Lawrence in the asylum is the best part of the movie, hands down. I'd call Emily Blunt's myriad appearances in mostly flattering Victorian garb the best part but her role is so underwritten that she looks in danger of falling asleep at any moment. She's crushingly attractive and a fierce talent, and unfortunately Joe Johnston didn't make use of either of those factors. Apparently he was too busy getting the worst performance Benicio Del Toro has given maybe ever...certainly since <i>The Usual Suspects</i>. I love Benicio Del Toro and I give him a pass for this because, well let's face it, he's earned his life pass by this point: <i>The Way of the Gun, Che, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 21 Grams, Traffic</i>, etc. After earning his Oscar Del Toro probably decided that he had enough staying power that he could safely do basically one movie a year and would only donate his time to projects he believed in. And even the films of his I haven't yet seen post-<i>Traffic</i> (<i>The Hunted, The Pledge</i>) have big name directors attached and I could easily see that even if they don't meet his usual standard the prospect of working with Jack Nicholson, William Friedkin and Sean Penn was a big enough draw in and of itself that I'd see why he signed on the dotted line. But the things the script asks him to do as Talbot - brood, get mad, prevent himself from falling in love - he could do in his sleep but it actually looks like he tried to do just that. The problem with his casting is simply that he's too old to be either skipping stones or running around the moors at night. In his defense he's been a huge fan of the original <i>The Wolfman</i> for many, many years and when he signed on it certainly didn't look like <i>this</i>. And frankly if they'd made it how they planned to, when they planned to, he might have looked the part but I wouldn't be surprised if the process of getting <i>The Wolfman</i> made didn't turn his hair grey. Nearly every aspect of the film was changed from when the film was announced in 2006 and finally tripped into theatres in February 2010.<br /><br />The screenplay was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, the man behind the <i>Seven</i> script but when Johnston signed onto direct (after Mark Romanek had parted after hearing how the studio wanted the film to turn out. As I understand it Johnston gave them exactly what they wanted), just a few weeks before shooting was to start, he had David Self rewrite it. This is maybe why so much set-up goes on unrelieved by the time the credits roll. Take for instance the silver cane. Horror novelist Jonathan Maberry was given an early draft of the script in order to write the novelization which is so much better than the movie it's almost ridiculous to consider that he got his ideas from such a muddled script. Maberry told me that when he saw the final cut he recognized passages from his book that he'd fabricated to fill in the gaps; the producers had simply lifted dialogue that was better than what their people had come up with. By this time the film was already such a mess that any hope that his book (based on what I think was the first draft of the script) was going to save their movie was just so much dreaming. Just as Johnston and Self weren't the first directors screenwriter, the editing has an equally problematic story. When the movie was finished, everyone involved knew how bad it sucked and that the only chance of making it watchable was to get someone in the editing room to work a minor miracle. Naturally they went to Walter Murch because though he hadn't worked on Francis Ford Coppola's <i>Dracula</i>, the movie <i>The Wolfman</i> wishes it was, he had worked with the director a number of times. He demanded that they bring him an antique Steenbeck editing table and even still he couldn't make this shit play. And keep in mind this guy made sense of <i>Apocalypse Now</i>.<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_AdpgGMqji_5G73f45UY0XrXcYUOUyMxF2vpLP6GXOaOoJYYcigjMq05offbgnBdVV-07Fix8lZQKy5eks71zyZiwn2Q0al4tz_8CVRcfRT-WF8vYqh6LdcGhzOA-KyawcnweECZ12Hk/s400/the_wolfman_58.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518481008836334578" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 273px; " /></span>So with all this talk of stock shuffling and drop-outs and add-ons, just what does it look like when vomited at us through the screen? Well, the problem is that though the movie is nicely shot, the costumes and production design are rich in detail and the people all look the part there is not an ounce of tension or a surprise in the plot or a special effect that doesn't actively hurt the film. Self's screenplay paints in broad strokes: the townsfolk are superstitious and violent and most of them pay for it, a priest delivers a sermon that acts as voice over in one scene only, Del Toro drops his brooding exterior for Emily Blunt alone, Anthony Hopkins' character couldn't be anything but what it is, the gypsies are full of ancient wisdom about curses, everyone arrogant loses their footing, the climax plays out exactly how you expect it to, the CG adds nothing and is nothing you haven't seen a hundred times. And in Johnston's hands the few diversions it has from its own hopelessly derivative structure explode into chaos. Take the scene in the asylum. Lawrence's hallucinations ought to be cool, except until that point <i>The Wolfman</i> has not film that can support such flights of fancy. It's already filled with dream-lake flashbacks and we know very well what the werewolf looks like by this point (he's not scary) so what did Johnston think he would accomplish by showing us what we've already seen just at a higher volume and quicker? There is brief respite in Hopkins' speech about his history with wolves but then it's back to too-little-too-fast. In the asylum Lawrence is looked after by the amazingly overwrought Freud clone Dr. Hoenneger. After days of dunking Talbot in cold water (for no reason) he presents him to a room full of colleagues in a scene that's probably supposed to mimic Van Helsing's introduction in <i>Dracula</i> but comes off like one of the worst Abbott & Costello routines never made. Hoenneger blathers on and fucking on about how it's all in Talbot's head and how the moon will do nothing to him. Then he turns into a wolf and kills him (he even throws him out the window he makes specific reference to not being able to fly out of). Such dogged meeting of expectations comes off as sad and almost perverse. Could a film be so out of ideas that they need to add something like this?<br /><br />And all this is bad but it's proven worse by it's dramatic incongruousness. If like Francis Ford Copolla's <i>Dracula</i>, this film's obvious inspiration, <i>The Wolfman</i> had gleefully thrown everything at the wall then played with it with like a bunch of special ed kids it might have been worth watching. The problem is that Joe Johnston (or somebody) decided to keep a veneer of professionalism about the joint so everytime it goes off the rails, there's someone there trying to make it look it happened on purpose. Slapstick gore scenes, CG action scenes a la Underworld or Van Helsing (in whose company this film belongs) would be fine if they were this film's sole elements, but contrast it with the constant references to classical literature and the quiet romance between two actors as seasoned as Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt and they tear the movie down. Subtle, candle lit flirtation and scenes like Del Toro teaching Blunt how to skip stones don't exactly gel with a Wolf aping King Kong on the rooftops of London (like so much of <i>The Wolfman</i>'s "humour" that pun was intended). Emily Blunt's character and the sadness she brings to it outweigh a scene of two hirsute stuntmen doing wire work in the Talbot's living room. Aside from Rob Bottin and Tom Savini, Rick Baker is easily my favourite make-up artist and his talents are many. Here they fail him. Del Toro's Wolfman looks exactly like a man in a shitty, unflattering wolf suit (somewhere between Oliver Reed, Lon Chaney, Jr. and <i>Teenwolf</i>) and Hopkins looks exactly like a CG werewolf who behave nothing like a proper wolf. And when did we stop hiring real animals to appear in movies? I kinda get the wolfman but A CG bear and a CG deer that do nothing but stand there? That shit is just fucking lazy and annoying. And will someone tell me what Hugo Weaving is doing in this movie. His character does nothing, adds nothing and has no bearing on the proceedings. If he was simply excised the movie would have been exactly the same minus a few close-ups. In fact if his character was removed we'd have been spared another pointless tangent about Jack The Ripper that goes nowhere. If they'd played that up even a little it could have paid off. In fact if they'd stuck with any one element long enough for it to make a dent in this cliche-tastic screenplay maybe <i>The Wolfman</i> would be worth your time.<br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIOGBcu9UP5MYiigLEti8g9tjCA0LH1dz6d2cF5hHd6O6NcO2ucLVI_RdGeXBuB9B2aVEqzpPkP_N4Op5xj-JprdKimKEtHrkGv7ZHnU0U3vpEFoRY_bG3tgOw0pKLlbH6F1rBDJGoZ1Y/s400/rsz_the_wolfman.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518481018886954738" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 242px; height: 400px; " /></span>There are things that work <i>occasionally</i> but there is no <i>fun</i> to be had with <i>T</i><i>he Wolfman</i>. It's out and out terrible and that is what gets you a Z- around here. The movie so often shoots itself in its big hairy feet that I simply can't stand everything that surrounds its best parts. If someone recut this movie or better yet remade it as a character study with someone like Tom Hardy or Karl Urban as Lawrence Talbot and just focused on the relationship between Lawrence, crooked Sir John and gentle but cautious Gwen and never left the estate, not only would I pay to see such a film I'd fucking bankroll it if I had the money. But what we have is a kitchen sink film, a movie that changes tone every five minutes and always fumbles. So, in summary, I will not be watching <i>The Wolfman</i> again if I can help it and as the Z Minus below will let you know, neither should you...at least not without silver to protect yourself.</div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1588308227878018709.post-33606698385835163312010-09-12T14:14:00.007-04:002012-03-02T16:37:22.436-05:00"Go To Sleep...."For whatever reason the latter half of the 40s and the early 50s saw very little fanged activity. Vampires had been run into the ground with the rampant revision of the Dracula mythos and guest appearances in terrible comedies. Aside from <i style="font-style: normal; ">La Vampiro Negro</i>, an early Argentinean horror film by Román Viñoly Barreto, there wasn't much caped trouble brewed up. Though match point goes to England's Hammer Studios for introducing vampires back to the world's audiences, no one attacked the subject of vampires with quite the same zeal as the Mexicans. After Hammer's <i style="font-style: normal; ">Horror of Dracula</i> opened up the fanged floodgates, other countries threw their own entries into the mix but I rather think that Mexicans made the most out of their threadbare source material (though you wouldn't actually be able to find all of Stoker's novel unless you watched every vampire film from 1957 to 1975). Indeed many saw the vampire movie as a way to explore new special effects techniques and as a way to really build a solid genre film industry in their country. If we go back to the very beginning, we have Abel Salazar to thank for some of Mexico's finest horror films. He decided that though acting was going well, he wanted to produce horror films and that's just what he did. His company Cinematográfica ABSA produced around eight horror films before ceasing in 1963 with <i style="font-style: normal; ">Curse of the Crying Woman</i>. Aside from the truly bizarre <i style="font-style: normal; ">Braniac</i> in 1962 there wasn't really a dud among them but ABSA's vampire films really display his company's strengths. They excelled in gothic horror and could conjure up really awesome visuals when they wanted to.<br /><br />El Vampiro<br />by Fernando Méndez<br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3g4_A5IVuaAvRWYuGWD3jPxSSK5PdyvEuIZNtAtkJ98d7QfL3mKY6OTsHnZtIQyUjGPKlnN39IrL32YID2VVjkstJTy6zyBLjHc7f-0t7eBHl1ZL8Iu8pn6jsLsYYhLFJV44T5X2T5ls/s400/el-vampiro-poster.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516116785194665090" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 303px; " /></span>Marta Gonzalez is home to see her aunts, both are apparently sick. Her arrival in their home town should tip you (and her, if she had any sense) off that she's about to endure a weekend full of unspeakable evil. There are no carriages around to take her from the train station to The Sycamores, her family's estate. The surrounding town is filled with superstitious types who scoff at the idea of Marta headed up to her family's house and the only carriage willing to take her is full to bursting with boxes of dirt. She manages a ride halfway to town along with fellow stranded train passenger Enrique (played by Salazar). Enrique seems like affable enough company even if his reason for being in town seems suspect at best. When they arrive at the Sycamores there is a lot of bad news waiting for Marta. Her Aunt Maria Teresa's illness, whatever it was, has claimed her life and Aunt Eloisa seems not so much changed as a completely different, exuberant person. She's rebounded quite nicely from her sister's death and now wants to sell the Sycamores to a neighbor, one Mr. Duval, as it happens the recipient of all that dirt. After Eloisa takes Marta up to her room, Enrique stays behind to grab a word with Uncle Emilio. Enrique is actually Dr. Enrique and he's not just a traveler looking for a place to stay; Emilio invited him here after the simultaneous sicknesses of his sisters and their equally simultaneous condition changes. Enrique is actually an expert on the occult, specifically vampires and he thinks Emilio's got 'em. So all he's got to do is catch Duval and Eloisa in the act with the help of Emilio and the serving staff, charm and save Marta who he's got to fall in love with and then serve up a bit of stake-shaped justice. In the meantime it's secrets and intrigue for dinner and lies and murder for desert.<br /><br />It's funny after so many Vampire movies that you can be charmed by a little change of pace or in this case setting. Mexican horror films don't have much of a reputation and in spite of that they went back to basics. Abel Salazar wanted to take one of the most successful horror films of the sound era, <i style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-am-dreadful-and-i-bid-you-welcome.html">Dracula</a></i>, and bring it to Mexico and not only did he do that, he, writer Ramón Obón and director Fernando Méndez managed to make it resonate with Mexican audiences and they also made a film much more thoroughly satisfying movie. Obón's script doubles down on the complicated plot but Méndez managed to make every character with lines a real person with a personality. One of the people I found myself most concerned about was Anselmo the butler, not because the other characters weren't as interesting but because Méndez managed to make him seem like an unfortunate victim. How often do the serving staff of doomed manors wind up the victims of vampires and other horrid creatures? Anselmo was given the kind of consideration that you'd only find in latter day Hammer films. Then there's the emphasis that Obón puts on family, something only given the faintest attention in Browning's film. And it helps too that everyone is likable, a feet Browning never tried to pull off. Salazar, our hero, is an interesting choice which hints at Mexico's more humane view of stardom. He's the hero of the film and he's a bit paunchy, a little smug and kinda goofy. Good luck finding him outside of a Leo McCarey comedy in the states. And yet I like him more than nearly any male lead in a horror film from that era in the English-speaking world. Celebrity in Mexico was more about crowd-pleasing than superficial definitions of such; how else could they idolize a fat man who wore a mask for most of his adult life? And opposite Salazar? Germán Robles, bridging the gap between Lugosi's foreign charm and Christopher Lee's youthful vigour and charisma. Robles looks a touch like Lee (though he predates him as Dracula) and his cool demeanor never waivers. He's also a touch more charismatic than anyone who'd donned the cape beforehand.<br /><br />Méndez also proved himself quite an ace at creating mood and atmosphere as well as tension. <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i> takes as much if not more time than <i style="font-style: normal; ">Dracula</i> setting up the climax but unlike that film it utilizes its quiet moments well. The scene where Marta confirms our suspicion by singing the eerie song she keeps hearing in her bedroom. I'd wondered if it was meant to be something we were both hearing, but when she starts cooing "Go To Sleep...." to Salazar, I realized Mendez was playing with a full deck. The Sycamores makes for a perfectly spooky setting for the conflict and intrigue to play out over. It's an old villa and its owners haven't been quite up to running it lately so the cobwebs that have accumulated and the general mildewy feel of the place feels natural, rather than like a movie set (though that too comes across at times, like in the tunnel connecting Duval to the Gonzalez's house). The smoke outside helps bring the place to life; the Sycamores would become the template for most of ABSA's horror films' settings. There are a few nifty visuals here but my favourite is the teleporting light that Duval uses to get around; not only does it look cool but it establishes that ABSA was playing by different rules. The most obvious sign of their dissent is in the fangs that these vampires wear. <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i> was the first film to put in over-sized canines on its vampires and though, again, Hammer made it fashionable ABSA deserves credit for thinking it up first. And that Méndez delivers a film worthy of such innovation is much to his credit. <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i> has its weak-spots but there's never a moment where anyone appears to have forgotten where they are. Salazar's facade never drops around Marta and even when trying to comfort her he never plays dumb or too mawkish; the secret is always just behind his smile. And furthermore between the breathless array of poison and loaded questions at dinner and the fist fights, reveals and chases, <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i> picks up in a big way to make up for its dull spots. It's a film that feels like the work of people who cared about more than how much they'd gross and that's more than even Hammer can boast for all their professional sheen and Shakespearian artistry.<br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoQ5-_tsPcPox2RjjzEXKHi_gwWeeQaYTS_fyJ_VlpNdAzR9A9WIRUSuc_bc6xrMCygcQ3MuX5-atW2l-7B9VlplyXt9s2LNiIItSitNl1fGYOaO4GEgPD9d_EAxE1UYXsRmCxiGeoNUE/s400/el_vampiro_poster.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516116793471604914" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 301px; height: 400px; " /></span>As it happens I wasn't the only one who loved <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i> so whether or not they cared to, ABSA found themselves in a situation where the smartest thing to do was to make a sequel. So like Universal before them and Hammer alongside them, a sequel they did make. Unlike either of those studios, theirs was almost completely different where style was concerned. Mendez found a cinematographer who could really attack the new urban setting and even got to keep his three leads from the last film. Altogether a crisper, more streamlined vision, <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Ataúd Del Vampiro</i> or <i style="font-style: normal; ">The Vampire's Coffin</i>, is just as thrilling, if perhaps not quite as revelatory, a watch as its predecessor.<br /><br />The Vampire's Coffin<br />by Fernando Méndez<br /><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkh2Q8VwEcL0gry9e_Ikb0LJgeChly8Z7LgRvPDcPANP98eL4flf79bnqo0rzAh3qTfa6AA2lbxz7JLtjpRQrV-Xny2TT68IiygsyFRyUpvJIiL8XgYVA5Ki2vby25ZnvwubqdF3DGhR4/s1600/Vampires+Coffin+Girl+Shadow.jpg" style="font-style: normal; " onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkh2Q8VwEcL0gry9e_Ikb0LJgeChly8Z7LgRvPDcPANP98eL4flf79bnqo0rzAh3qTfa6AA2lbxz7JLtjpRQrV-Xny2TT68IiygsyFRyUpvJIiL8XgYVA5Ki2vby25ZnvwubqdF3DGhR4/s400/Vampires+Coffin+Girl+Shadow.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516116853727831266" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 309px; " /></a>In an opening more redolent of a <i style="font-style: normal; ">Frankenstein</i> sequel than a Vampire movie, we start with a little graveyard larceny. Dr Enrique (still the affable Abel Salazar) is back doing what he does when he's not out killing vampires, practicing medicine. A colleague of his, Dr. Marion, heard all about his tangling with Count Lavud, and was so impressed with the idea of the vampire that he's dug up the body with the help of a grave-robber. Anyway Enrique is sympathetic to the ambitious Marion's ideas about what he could do by studying the vampire, but he also knows what a stupid idea it is and how catastrophic it would be if Marta were to see his body there. She just happens to be on her to way visit as they stand there talking so Enrique quickly distracts her but frankly she's too caught up in her dancing to notice anything like a coffin in his office. Everything seems perfectly professional until the graverobber comes back and tries to take the pendant from around Lavud's neck. The only problem is that damn cross holding it in place, but he pulls it out no problem. You could write the rest yourself, no? After taking on the graverobber as a slave and stalking the streets for a few days he finds Marta in time for her big performance and Enrique finds him soon after. The conclusion may not be better than the one in <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i>, but it's brilliantly filmed and the setting is even cooler.<br /><br />The first thing to say about <i style="font-style: normal; ">The Vampire's Coffin</i> is just how awesome the cinematography is. It's right up there with the likes of <i style="font-style: normal; ">The Third Man</i>, <i style="font-style: normal; ">M</i> or anything by Billy Wilder. Fernando Méndez was still calling the shots and though <i style="font-style: normal; ">El Vampiro</i> was excellently moody it has none of the crisp compositions or brilliant chiaroscuro lighting set-ups so I think credit must be given to new director of photography Víctor Herrera. The scenes that immediately come to mind are the ones in the streets just after Lavud breaks free from the hospital, and then the chase down the huge staircase before the climactic fight in the torture museum, shades of <i>Phantom of the Opera</i>, making this quite the Universal homage. It's worth pointing out that filming in a torture museum was a stroke of genius, but there isn't a dull moment visually in the whole film and the end chase just happens to be the best moment in those terms. You could freeze any moment here, frame it and throw it up at the MFA for my money. The story isn't quite as memorable as the craft it took to make the film but that's ok as it followed on the heels of one of Mexico's greatest horror films. To try and top it would have seemed like megalomania and frankly <i>El Vampiro</i> worked so well because it was really a number of little things that combined to make one solid movie that felt bigger than it was. To be fair I've been on the lookout for an heir to best early vampire movie ever since being soundly disappointed with Tod Browning's inexplicably beloved <i style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-am-dreadful-and-i-bid-you-welcome.html">Dracula</a></i>, and in that search either of these movies will do, but <i>El Vampiro</i> has enough slightly off about it that works that when you step back you see what a balancing act it must have been. Abel Salazar, nor indeed really anyone, had never produced a horror film and he was taking a risk putting himself in the lead role. The production design probably would have come off looking rather cheap were it not for the amazing work with shadows, fog and cobwebs. And the trick photography is actually really effective. In <i>The Vampire's Coffin</i> I was totally hypnotized by just how beautiful the whole movie looks and so was willing to overlook the few faults that definitely show up before the credits role (Mexicans were no exception to the rule that to make a vampire film, people thought you needed the biggest, cheapest looking rubber bat you could find). There are moments here - one of the main characters confessing their fear of death, the fact that the script references the events of the first film so practically, the excellent use of the vampire's inexplicable cape in shot composition - that make this just as endearing a watch.<br /><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPHtH9L5hOsFfm6wOiJMBmmAIxzANYgppuRFzqXuffvSdMYwY8u5f2ik-4x6PrRsuCcajHdTv8gg-8sWV64HOWTZN3ra7oBRrTr-TFJfryLSaE0JMZI9o-kAocXU1wMpTk94WZfeuNTHA/s400/20340222.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516116813317429586" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 279px; height: 400px; " /></span>Considering how many American vampire films preceded it and that Hammer films were attempting the same trick at almost exactly the same time, both <i>El Vampiro</i> and The <i>Vampire's Coffin </i>make for pretty entertaining treatments of the same well-worn subject. Abel Salazar succeeded in his efforts to bring horror films to Mexico and ABSA would produce several more classics before folding. Indeed they would even continue to breathe new life into the vampire film before all was said and done. While <i>The Horror of Dracula</i> is better remembered and comes off as being effortlessly entertaining where <i>El Vampiro</i> looks like the work of professionals straining to keep up, I have to say that my respect lays more with this little production that could. Bringing horror to new lands is something that I think we should all support. When a country has a means to express itself, especially during times of crisis, it always helps maintaining sanity....even if that means showing people losing theirs.</div></div></div></div>Scout Tafoyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107866561078736445noreply@blogger.com0