HALLOWEEN 5, or One Sunday Afternoon

It doesn't seem possible, but it's been 20 years since HALLOWEEN 5 first stalked across North American movie screens. A 20th anniversary is usually a big deal for some pop culture creation, if only because so few pop culture creations manage to last that long, but H5 really owes any longevity it may have to the original HALLOWEEN, which goes back 31 years (which REALLY doesn't seem possible), and it's too minor a movie, in its own right, to justify making much of a fuss over, even if people do still sometimes talk about it two decades later. So why write about it?

Well...

The original HALLOWEEN is a genuine classic, virtually an essay on very basic, elemental horror. Its overall influence on horror cinema to date must, unfortunately, be judged as quite negative. The movie spawned the wretched slasher film, which became a boom industry in the '80s that overwhelmed the genre and severely stunted it during those years. The things that made the original work--the visual stylings, the consistently menacing atmosphere in an utterly everyday setting, the suspense, the killer-as-projection-of-the-mind, and so on--are all ignored by the subsequent FRIDAY THE 13th and its legion of imitators. Among those imitators are, unfortunately, also numbered the HALLOWEEN sequels. The slasher films as they emerged in the '80s began as stupid, chromosome-damaged throwbacks, and a decade of inbreeding had only worsened their condition. The year before H5, there had appeared HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, which perfectly mapped out the genetic degeneracy. H4 was a top-to-bottom, by-the-numbers generic slasher flick, a flat piece of cardboard cut to specs without a single original element, or anything beyond the title that could effectively differentiate it from the by-then wretchedly degenerate herd of slashers. It plays like an unintentional parody. And it made a bloody fortune. A lot of misguided souls still regard it as the best of the many HALLOWEEN sequels, remakes, reimaginings.

Fast forward a year and H5 appears, offering a different angle. Though still operating within the parameters of the slasher sub-genre, H5 tries to bring back something of the spirit of the original film, and to take the series in some new and interesting directions, instead of allowing it to follow the rest of the slashers into irrelevancy and death. The movie is partly hobbled by its creators' decision not to sufficiently deviate from what had become the slasher formula. Like its predecessor, it panders to the conventions of slashers in offering a body-count of extraneous characters who are written as little more than one-dimensional targets, and brought to the screen in "performances" with which the entire concept of "acting" is degraded by association. This is, fortunately, only a small part of the overall film. For the most part, the experiment is a success. The film is light-years ahead of its immediate predecessor in nearly every respect. And it bombed, and is, to this day, still frequently reviled as a waste of celluloid.

It's enough to make a loving cinephile start to wax existential over the tragic flaws of contemporary human society.

Well, maybe one who had lost all sense of perspective. The rest of us were content to grumble and perhaps curse a bit against the conservatism of too many horror fans. We'd been doing that all through the '80s anyway.

One of the key elements of the effectiveness of the first film is its plausibility. Viewers could directly relate to the film, because it removed most of the elements that had so often served to distance an audience from the dark fantasy on the screen. In HALLOWEEN, the killer wasn't a creature who stalked some 19th century Euro-Fairlyland, he didn't sprout hair and fangs by the full moon, he wouldn't disintegrate if religious trinkets were brandished against him. He was a serial killer, someone whose mind had snapped and left him with some strange impulse to kill. It's a specimen of human with which modern society had become all too familiar. His slaying ground was an ordinary neighborhood in an ordinary suburb in contemporary middle-America.

At the same time, those in the film spoke of him in mythic terms. His psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, calls him "Death," and says he isn't a man. The children offer the real myth in play in the piece, though; they call him the Boogeyman. Visually, he's presented as a sort of living embodiment of a shadow. He seems to be everywhere, always out of sight, always watching, always waiting for his chance to strike. These mythical elements in the narrative and visuals create an unrelentingly menacing atmosphere. At the same time, every viewer knows there's no such thing as the Boogeyman. Myers is an extremely dangerous man, but he's just a man; that's part of what makes him so creepy. This juxtaposition between the plausible and the mythical continues throughout the film, generating a marvelous tension that finally comes to fruition in the end, when Dr. Loomis finally catches up with Myers, whips out his pistol, and apparently blasts him to oblivion. When Myers manages to get up and walk away from this, it was such an incredible and creepy moment that the film ended on it.

In the slasher cycle that followed, the "plausibility" part of the equation was jettisoned almost immediately. The familiar settings were kept, but the killers, though supposedly human and in human form, became superhumanly strong, and inexplicably indestructible. By the time H4 rolled around, Michael Myers had become an unintentional parody of the depths to which such characters had descended in the cycle. Possessed of the strength of Spider-Man, the invulnerability of the Hulk and a padded-out costume to show it, he doesn't bother to do much stalking--he just walks right at his prey like a battle-tank, and is even more difficult to damage. He shoves a shotgun completely through one victim. He punches his bare finger through a man's head. He stands stock still while a guy smashes him in the head with a rifle, ballbat-style, without injury or even reaction. He singlehandedly liquidates an entire police station full of armed cops, and absorbs more lead than the dirt hill on a shooting range, again all without effect.

The slasher formula had been run to ribbons years before H4, and the movies' strict adherence to it precludes wringing any suspense out of the events on screen. The characters are awful, the performances atrocious, the ending nonsensical. There isn't a single original or interesting touch in the movie.

The next year, when H5 arrived, there were still some useless characters thrown in as targets, and they were still poorly essayed, but these tips of the hat to the slashers, which take up very little screen-time, are H5's most serious flaw. Director Dominique Othenin-Girard tried to return the series to its roots. Myers steps back into the shadows and becomes the methodical stalker again. Though he takes some abuse, there's no more Super-Michael the Battle Tank. The film is full of great flourishes and memorable scenes. Myers is humanized. Rather than merely a killing machine, he's someone with whom Loomis tries to reason, someone who experiences a moment of hesitation when poised to kill his niece. He even removes his mask and sheds a tear at the thought of the terrible things something in his mind is driving him to do. There are some fantastic moments of suspense; his niece hiding in a laundry chute, a car-chase across a field, one of the characters taking a ride in a car with a masked man she assumes is her boyfriend, but who is actually Myers. Donald Pleasance's long-suffering Dr. Loomis manages a spectacular final take-down of Myers near the end. Throughout the film, a mysterious stranger is in town watching these events unfold. At the very end, just when we think it's all over, he breaks into the police station with explosives and automatic weapons and springs Myers. H5 was packed with great moments that were worthy of the original, and it created hooks upon which subsequent writers could have built for quite some time.

Unfortunately, it just wasn't to be. The film bombed, was written off by many as a stinker, and the return to business-as-usual with the next entry marked the death of the original series.

I've sometimes wondered--when I find enough spare time to ponder such stupid questions, anyway--why H5 was so often reviled, while the awful H4 was praised. The only answer I've ever found is that it dashed expectations. People went from H4 to H5 expecting another mindless, generic slasher flick like H4 and got, instead, something a lot closer to a real movie. Dashing expectations--even such low ones--can be dangerous Look at what happened with Ang Lee's HULK. People went into it expecting two hours of a brainless monster breaking things and, as a consequence, one of the better comic adaptations in the history of comic adaptations is still, to this day, often written off as an atrocity on par with turkeys like ELEKTRA and CATWOMAN. It seems unconscionable to punish a film for being far better than anyone expected. That it sometimes happens is extremely unfortunate, and sends a terrible message to filmmakers ("don't even try to do anything better or original").

Maybe that's why I thought it was worth the time to write some remarks on H5. Maybe--and here's an even more ambitious notion--I thought I should because H5 suggested how the always-awful and by-then-moribund slasher flick could have evolved into something worthy of the film on which it's printed. It's like a road that could have led to better things, but wasn't taken. Maybe I wrote about it just because it's a slow Sunday, and I felt like it. Whatever it is, I've said my piece.

--j.

Once Upon A Time, The Revolution

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, reportedly made for something between eleven- and fifteen-thousand dollars, became the #1 box-office draw in the U.S. at the end of October, issuing a stern take-down to the latest entry in the mighty SAW franchise. At a fraction of the production budget of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, it has now eclipsed that earlier film as the most profitable ever made.

The Revolution is upon us.

We've seen quite a few no-budget DIY features in the last few years. It's a full-fledged sub-culture, but only a few of us pay it any mind. We're going to be seeing a lot more of these movies in the near future. All the pieces are in place. Features can now be made for the cost of a used car, and when you have talent behind the camera, these can be quality features, not glorified home movies.

The next several years are going to be a wonderful time for the cinema. Hits of this magnitude probably won't be common, but there will certainly be more of them, and there will be scores of more moderate successes, which, at such microscopic budgets, will be "moderate" successes only when judged against the numbers for something like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. When a film costs so little to make, it's easy to make a profit if you can get it seen.

That can be a big "if," admittedly. Not, I suspect, as big an "if" as everyone seems to think, though.

Technology has opened the field to a whole new breed of indies, filmmakers who can pursue their dreams without the threat of being financially destroyed if their project comes up a dry hole. If they're into it for a pittance, relatively speaking, and it never gets off the ground, just eat it and move on to the next one. Their only limitation: How much money they have in their pockets, how many people they know, how many resources they can tap to bring to the screen whatever they can dream up.

The Revolution is going to put the cinema in the hands of those who really love it. People, given access to the medium, will unleash their creativity. We'll have horror films, dramas, comedies, action pictures, variations on everything under the sun. Vigorous genre cross-breeding. Entirely new genres may appear. All the old rules will be scrapped. Movies will take on forms we can't even imagine. We'll hear from segments of society that have rarely had a voice in the cinema. All the ingredients for this are in the pot. People are picking up cameras. The success of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is going to make these films multiply like lab rabbits on Viagra. I think it's an exciting time.

Or maybe I'm just dreaming.

We'll see, I suppose.

--j.

THE MUMMY (1932)

Karl Freund really was a master with a camera. His cinematography is why the Bela Lugosi DRACULA is still remembered today. It holds up pretty badly on just about every other count, but damn, is it pretty to look at. Some extraordinary atmosphere. I've always suspected Freund was battling director Tod Browning over that one. I've been puzzled by the good reputation Browning had come to enjoy among genre aficionados in recent years. As a director, he is, in spite of a very few moments of inspiration, just wretched. Completely uninspiring, employing the blandest staging, and I always get the impression that, if he had the choice, he'd bolt the camera in place and never move it an inch in any direction. Freund, as cinematographer, is the one who made DRACULA work, and the next year, he hauled his substantial bulk into the director's chair himself with THE MUMMY, taking a similar story by the same writing team and brought to life by some of the same cast and upstaging the much-better-known DRACULA in pretty much every way.

Though it's often regarded as one of the lesser Universal horrors of that era, I've long held that THE MUMMY is, in fact, one of the crown jewels of that extraordinary run of films. It goes about its business much more subtly than some of the more highly regarded films in the cycle, but it works. Boy, does it work.

The "mummy" Imhotep, or "Ardeth Bey," as he calls himself after his resurrection, is easily one of Boris Karloff's best parts. I'm surprised it isn't more widely remembered as such. Boris is always revered for FRANKENSTEIN, but, one suspects, that's mostly because it was so wildly successful. Though the Frankenstein tales were great, and the part physically taxing, the role just wasn't that challenging as acting jobs go. Perhaps Imhotep isn't so terribly challenging, either--one could make the case that a lot of what Karloff is able to project through the part is a product of the director--but it leaves a remarkable impression. The part strips Karloff down to his strengths--his eyes, his face, his voice. The resurrected Imhotep is a tall, frail, dried-up husk of a man who moves slowly and stiffly and, one suspects, would crumble to dust under any real physical trauma, but Karloff, playing from his strengths, imbues the character with a remarkable presence. He's always the baddest dude in any room.

While it's demonstrably unwise to get in Imhotep's way, he isn't really a villain. His story is, instead, a grand tale of love spanning millenia and transcending death itself. Imhotep is an ancient Egyptian priest whose love for a princess leads him to defy the gods themselves in an effort to restore his love to life. He pays a terrible price for his blasphemy, but, resurrected in the present, remains defiant, and continues his efforts. He's a very passionate, driven fellow who is terribly, obsessively, single-mindedly in love, and, though the gods in the movie judge him harshly, I can't. I find him a glorious notion. I love it that he goes through so much hell and remains totally unrepentant.

Zita Johann is quite good as the sharp-dressing modern-day vessel of the reincarnated soul of the princess. Edward van Sloan is on hand to deliver his usual Learned Fellow Who Becomes All Christianly Righteous in the Face of Monsters, a routine he admirably reproduced in several of the early Universal horrors. Arthur Byron provides him with a solid foil, and David Manners gets the unenviable job of token Young Male Hero, who, in THE MUMMY, is essentially a non-entity. I get a kick out of the fact that Karloff warns Zita Johann against the love she has creeping into her heart for Manners. Typical of Hollywood at that time (when such conventions were obligatory), their "love" was a stupid plot contrivance, formed in mere minutes. I like to look upon Imhotep's remarks on the subject as a metatextual commentary on that convention. The movie makes it easy to read it that way; though the filmmakers included this inane subplot, they didn't make this contrived "love" the reason Zita wanted to live at the end--her concerns are, instead, entirely self-centered.

Jack Pierce, Universal's master monster-maker who designed some of the most iconic make-ups ever to grace the silver screen, turns in the greatest single work of his career in the initially-resurrected Imhotep. It's on the screen for, cumulatively, less than a minute in the opening act, but it's Pierce's finest hour, no doubt about it (and must have been pure hell for Karloff). His later "Ardeth Bey" make-up doesn't rise to that height, but it more than gets the job done.

As with most Universal horrors, particularly those involving Freund, the movie is creepy atmosphere from beginning to end, a masterful use of light and shadow, and probably a good place to start if trying to instill some appreciation of black & white in a foo... er... skeptic of the format. Karloff's eyes, lit just a little brighter than his surroundings and shot with his head at a slight downward tilt, practically burn through the screen. The effect is so impressive, Freund uses the footage of it more than once.

It's always hard to write about acknowledged classics, particularly one so long-lived as THE MUMMY. It's been with us since 1932, and when a flick hangs around that long, what can you say that hasn't already been said a million times, and usually better than you could ever say it? Still, I love THE MUMMY. In recent years, I've fallen to watching it on a pretty regular basis. It's become one of my favorites. I can't help but want to write about it, even if I don't have anything new or even interesting to say. I love it, and, in some little way, just wanted to say so. Sue me.

--j.

DANGER DIABOLIK (1968)

Mario Bava is one of my favorite filmmakers, but he's a difficult subject to cover. What, after all, can one say about Bava that others haven't said a million times? One ticks off the standard raves like items on a grocery bill: He's a masterful visual stylist, a brilliant special effects innovator, a veritable magician of the cinema who could take practically nothing and make it look like he had a Hollywood-sized budget. He made damn good movies. Over the years, he's become one of the most ripped-off filmmakers to ever sit behind a camera; if imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, Bava has been flattered by some of the best.

When it comes to praise of Bava, it's all become boilerplate.

It's become boilerplate, though, because it's true. Bava was a great filmmaker. Having now offered the standard praise of the man and his talent, I can proceed with the business at hand, namely composing what I expect will be an adoring screed about one of his works I've recently revisited after too long an absence. One of my absolute favorite Bava flicks is DANGER DIABOLIK, an adaptation of an Italian comic that certainly ranks among the best comic book films of all time.

Diabolik, its protagonist, is a character after my own heart, an anarchistic anti-hero, a romantic rebel who robs from the rich, a master thief elevated to the level of a comic book super-villain, who does what he does for no other apparent reason than for the sheer fun of it. He's sharp, resourceful, and never just one step ahead of the government goons who make it their mission to bring him in--he's always 20 steps ahead of them. They swoop down upon him like hawks after blood, but whenever it looks like his goose is cooked, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat and shows them to be nothing but a gaggle of turkeys. They have the entire government behind them, they're granted emergency powers, they bring back the death penalty to use against him, put a huge bounty on his head, ally with organized crime to bring him down, and they never even have a chance. He takes great pleasure in making fools of the lot of them.

In the broadest sense, DANGER DIABOLIK is about the joy of living life to its fullest. Diabolik, played with great flair by John Phillip Law, has cast off the soul-deadening drone culture that is most of so-called "civilized" society. He operates outside it, and by his own rules, and has a blast doing so, getting his kicks from forever testing himself with one impossible crime and escape after another, then returning to his massive underground Bond-villain-style lair and the warm embrace of his luscious lady love and constant companion (Marisa Mell). The film, particularly in the scenes in the lair, offers a visual sensuality reflective of their passion for one another and for life itself.

The words "Bava" and "visual stylist" deservedly appear in the same sentence with great regularity, and in Bava's filmography, DANGER DIABOLIK may be his most visually impressive. The director uses clever comic-book-inspired compositions to tell the story, and his trademark candy-colored lighting schemes work particularly well here, immediately invoking the brightly-colored pages of a comic.[*] He works in healthy doses of frenetic action, which are marvelously complimented by Ennio Morricone's typically brilliant music.

The film's plot consists, essentially, of a series of increasingly elaborate heists and other difficulties for our anti-hero to try to overcome. His battle with the government hilariously escalates into a full-scale war, with Diabolik blowing up tax records in order to choke the government of funds and threatening to bankrupt it after a large bounty is placed on his head. He meets every challenge with a wink and the same mocking laughter. He doesn't have any grand scheme to finance with his purloined loot. He doesn't even need it himself. He does what he does because he enjoys it. At one point, after he's just ripped off several million dollars, police officials are sitting around contemplating what he'll do with it. One darkly assures the others he will use it in "a way no mind but his could imagine." Cut to Diabolik in his lair, his grand plan for the money revealed: He's spread it all over his bed, and he and his love are rolling around in it, screwing like rabbits.

I've loved DANGER DIABOLIK since I first saw it some years ago, and I find myself wanting to rave about it at much greater length, but in the name of avoiding spoiling it for those who may read these words and haven't yet seen it, I'll resist the temptation, and conclude only by saying the film is a funny, endlessly entertaining romp, a masterwork by a master, and one of the finest productions of a very special age of Italian cinema. Do yourself a big favor and check it out.

--j.

---

[*] Though not the Diabolik comics, which were black-and-white.

INDECENT DESIRES (1967)

Given the state of exploitation filmmaking in the 1960s, Doris Wishman would be historically noteworthy simply by virtue of her chromosomes. Women simply didn't do what she did when she did it. She wrote, produced, directed--the whole schlemiel--and in a field that was an almost exclusively male preserve. She never struck it rich, but she did well enough to make a lot of movies over the years, and tonight, I got my first look at one of them.

The flick was INDECENT DESIRES, an odd little gem from 1967, and though it's true Wishman would have been one for the books simply for doing what she did while a woman, I learned by watching this film what I suspect is the real reason the cult around her work has only grown over the years: She's very good at what she does.

Pretty Ann has a good job, a good man, and her future is looking pretty bright, until, one day, into her life comes a creepy little slug she meets at random on a street corner. The slug never speaks a line of dialogue and is never given a name, but he's played by a fellow named Michael Alaimo, and "creepy" is an understatement--sleaze practically oozes from this guy's pores. He walks the streets during the day picking up odds and ends, things people have lost, thrown away, left laying around. He swipes them and takes them back to his apartment, for no apparent reason other than that he has a serious screw loose. One of these objects is a doll he finds in a trash can. Another is a ring, which turns out to be possessed of magical properties. When he meets Ann on that street corner, he's immediately smitten, and associates her with the doll

Here's the rub: when he dons the ring and handles the doll, Ann can feel it, too. Realizing this, he begins working out his fixation with her on the doll. He caresses it, molests it, fondles it, and, when angry, beats it and burns it. Ann can feel it all, and, having no idea what's happening to her, she slowly begins to lose her mind.

As odd as that sounds so far, it doesn't even begin to do justice to how truly bizarre INDECENT DESIRES really is. It's shot on a small number of sparse sets through a constant barrage of crazy, off-kilter camera set-ups--there's barely a "normal" shot in the film--and the soundtrack never stops moving. This is an exploitation picture, so there's copious nudity, but none of that pubic stuff that would have gotten the censors so full-frontally outraged, and Wishman has a delightful sense of the fetishistic which she indulges through the camera with some regularity.

This isn't just a weird film, though; it's a good one, a perfect example of effectively realizing an utterly personal vision on screen in an unique way with virtually nothing with which to work. The ending is particularly good, and has probably left a lot of slack jaws in its wake over the years.

It's been said of Wishman that if she was some Euro-director and her films were subtitled imports, instead of home-grown underground films, she'd be widely hailed as a bold, innovative filmmaker. I've read about her work for over 20 years. I've always been curious about it. I'd just never gotten around to seeing it. In general, it seems impossible that anything could even live up to that much stored up anticipation, much less surpass it. It has, nevertheless, happened a few times with me. With Wishman, it has just happened again, and if the rest of her filmography is of the caliber of the one I just watched, I'd say whoever offered that "what if" scenario about her films as imports was probably right.

--j.

PUNISHER WAR ZONE (2008)

Well, we've now had three attempts to bring Marvel Comics' Punisher to the screen, and after the first two creative abortions, I held out little hope for PUNISHER: WAR ZONE upon learning it would soon be coming to a theater near me. There were early reports that Lions Gate (the studio behind it) was insisting it be a wimpy PG-13 flick. I knew nothing of the director--if I'd heard, then, that it was being made by a female German kickboxer, it would have probably drawn a lot more of my interest--and, as it turned out, the movie was savaged by critics, and pulled from theaters by the studio almost immediately after its release. Sounds like another pooch in the Punisher pound, and I paid it little mind.

But the film grew a following. The internet buzzed with its words of praise, its persistent insistence that someone had finally gotten the Punisher right. This buzz drew sometimes angry retorts from those unfortunate souls--few but loud--who inexplicably found something of merit in the meritless Thomas Jane Punisher film from 2004. They resented these mouthy upstarts' insistence that their beloved turd of a movie had been upstaged, and insisted that WAR ZONE was just a dumb gorefest.

PWZ, as it turns out, was something of a dumb gorefest.[1] It was also an absolute blast from beginning to end. Saying it's easily the best screen adaptation of the Punisher isn't really saying much--neither of the other two films even tried. It isn't sufficient to say it's the best we're ever likely to get, either, because that sounds like we're settling for something that isn't as good as it could have (or should have) been. No, it's much closer to the mark to say PWZ is a great adaptation of the Punisher.

Over the years, there have been a few different "versions" of the Punisher, and it should go without saying that, as conceptually different as they are, no movie can be a great adaptation of all of them. PWZ isn't about the original version, which was, conceptually speaking, a top-to-bottom ripoff of Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan the Executioner character (had Pendleton ever decided to sue, Marvel would have lost a bundle). PWZ primarily adapts the far more interesting and original version of the character portrayed in Garth Ennis' very long run on the title.

Like Ennis, those behind PWZ knew what they had in the Punisher; a relatively simple pulp character who rages through a comic-book world of over-the-top-of-the-top ultraviolence, dishing out justice to superhumanly inhuman scum. That's what PWZ delivers in spades, a solid, violent, entertaining exploitation actioneer (albeit one made on a budget of which most exploitation films could only dream)[2]. And that's exactly what a Punisher film should be.

Noteworthies: Ray Stevenson, a dead ringer for the comic character, is rock-solid in the part, even if it does mostly just require him to look rock-solid, and Dominic West does a first-rate turn as the villainous Jigsaw. Director Lexi Alexander and cinematographer Steve Gainer tried an interesting experiment with the film's color scheme, attempting to replicate the color schemes of the comics. It succeeds, and makes for an interesting effect on screen. And the ending of the film? FANTASTIC!

Unfortunately, PWZ wasn't treated very well by Lions Gate. The production had been troubled from the beginning, and many of its troubles had been very public. Reading between the lines of the contemporaneous reporting, it seems as if the studio suits were determined to wring an anemic PG-13 film out of the material, and, when this wasn't possible, set out to intentionally make it fail in order to prove their "point." What isn't in any way speculative is that the film was dumped into wide release with virtually no promotion at all, then pulled from theaters after only a few days and written off as a flop. Few were even given the chance to hear of its existence, and, of those who did, memories of the earlier Punisher films, unleavened by any knowledge that this one would be any different, no doubt kept large swathes of potential audience away in droves. It was never even given a chance, and that it was deprived of any chance in such a dramatic way strongly suggests someone really had it in for the movie.

Now that Marvel is making their own movies, perhaps they should buy back their rights. I suspect they could get them for pretty cheap. Stevenson has expressed his enthusiastic desire to continue with the character as long as he's able. I suspect Lexi Alexander could be lured back for another go 'round. I'd like to see it happen. PWZ was the third attempt at a Punisher film, but it's the only one that earned what the others got--another chance.

--j.

---

[1] A "gorefest" relatively speaking, that is. For a contemporary "mainstream" film, that label would probably apply. For an action picture made these days--or, at least, one that isn't the latest RAMBO--it also seems appropriate. As a hardcore horror buff, I wouldn't personally regard it as a "gorefest" in general, but still, PWZ offers bloody deaths via various objects through the throat, one exploding head after another via gunshot, decapitations, cannibalism, a guy ground up in a glass grinder, a fellow hacked up with an axe, a man roasted on a spit over an open flame, and so on. For some reason, the filmmakers, in assembling their list of horrors to cover, missed necrophilia. Something to save for the sequel, I suppose.

[2] By upbudget Hollywood standards, though, PWZ is a very small-budgeted film. It cost less than the 2004 feature, but managed to be vastly superior.

Mainstream Scribe Makes Mess of Slasher Movie Meditation

Why would an allegedly intelligent professional writer try to pass off, as an informed, learned article, something he'd written about a subject of which he really knows very little? Does the thought that his ignorance is immediately going to be apparent to anyone who does know anything of the subject give him pause? Why would he do it?

The answer, as best I can tell, is that he assumed there aren't a lot of horror fans who read the Atlantic. In that, I'll admit he's probably right. But when it's put on the internet, everyone can see it, including those fans of dark fantasy who, randomly scanning the internet one night, come across it and immediately recognize it for the thin inaccuracy it is. Sometimes, they even feel the uge to come to their own little corner of the internet and rant about it.

The offender, here, is James Parker. His article: "Don't Fear the Reaper," from the April 2009 Atlantic. The subtitle: "Learning to love the slasher-film renaissance." The premise? That we're in the middle of a full-bore revival of the cinematic slasher sub-genre. The problem? The author doesn't know what a slasher movie is.

Slasher films, properly speaking, are a sub-genre that emerged in the 1980s in the wake of the huge success of 1978's HALLOWEEN[1] and, particularly, 1980's FRIDAY THE 13th (which proved HALLOWEEN hadn't been a fluke).[2] It's no accident of history that they proliferated so prodigiously in the Reagan '80s. The slashers were simple, reactionary morality fables wherein bad little boys and girls--particularly the girls--are punished for their "sins," those "sins" being any deviation from the sternest Puritanical morality. Take a hit off a joint, a shot of booze, party while the parents are away, or, worst of all, get laid and you're guaranteed to be laid to rest before the film runs its course.[3] Such sinners are destroyed in slasher films by a killer who, brandishing bladed weapons, is often little more than a cypher, a living embodiment of those Puritanical moral notions--gaze upon the blank "face" of HALLOWEEN's Michael Myers or FRIDAY THE 13th's Jason Vorhees.[4]

As a matter of convention, the killers were usually given some sort of backstory that began years earlier, and tied into this theme. There's usually a "final girl," the last to survive the killer's onslaught and who usually defeats him in the end. This, too, ties into the central theme. The "final girl" is always "virtuous," by the curious "morality" embraced by the films. She's not allowed to be sexual, to dissent from this stern "morality," to do much of anything to assert her independence. She's the one left babysitting while everyone else is out partying. And everyone else is merely a target, thinly written non-entities whose job is solely to sin and to die for it in various ways.

What I've just outlined doesn't make for a complete definition of the slasher movie, of course. Other conventions and clichés grew up around the subgenre, and there are other elements floating around on the outer strands of its DNA, but that basic reactionary morality fable was its core, its central defining characteristic, and the slashers were, with very few exceptions, rigorous in their devotion to the formula. By 1996, that formula had become so universally recognizable that it could be effectively parodied--and turned into a huge money-maker--in Wes Craven's SCREAM. The slashers are an identifiable group of literally hundreds of films sharing the same genes in incestuous fashion. Their family tree is, for the most part, a straight line. You can pull out virtually any dozen genuine slasher films at random, watch them back-to-back, and, with the exception of the obvious disparities in talent, different settings, and so on, you'd be watching the same movie over and over again.

I don't think much of slasher films. There were some good ones over the years, to be sure, but out of hundreds of productions, the good ones can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand, with fingers to spare. They are, for the most part, creatively bankrupt ventures that, at their height in the '80s, became a blight on the horror genre, nearly strangling it to death. Or perhaps "cutting its throat" would be a better metaphor. I suppose that's why I get all uppity when someone like James Parker comes along and writes an article about "the modern slasher movie" wherein non-slashers like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, and SAW are aggressively thrown on the same slasher pile as genuine slashers like MY BLOODY VALENTINE and the FRIDAY THE 13th movies. Parker seems to think the only thing a slasher film needs is a killer who slashes. A killer with blades does not a slasher film make, though.[5]

To be fair, Parker isn't alone in this. One encounters this same sort of thing all over the internet; whenever fans on message boards are tasked with compiling a list of great slashers, there are almost inevitably numerous non-slasher inclusions. It's a sign of the complete creative bankruptcy of the slasher subgenre that, out of the hundreds of slashers produced over the years, not even their most fervent fan base seems capable of compiling a simple list of worthy efforts, even one only ten movies long, without padding it with at least a few non-slashers.

"But why this press of remakes," Parker asks, "this slasher-jam at the box office, right now?" He hasn't made any case for any "slasher jam," though. Hollywood has been aggressively remaking every horror success story of the past for years, now; it was inevitable that it would eventually get to the slashers. It didn't just get to the slashers this year, either--it has been remaking them (along with everything else) for a few years now. Parker's assertion of a current "slasher jam" is partly premised on the current remakes of slasher films, but it also relies heavily on those numerous remakes of films that are not, in fact, slashers, and on more recent films that aren't slashers, either.[6]

Parker says "the modern slasher movie... is a child of the 1970s," but it is, of course, much more closely--and properly--associated with the 1980s. In the '70s, filmmakers were using horror and other exploit genres to present interesting ideas and radical points of view. Films like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT are much more sophisticated than the simple, Puritanical morality fables of the slashers. They follow no blueprint. No one in them is "safe." They dealt with big issues like American self-image vs. reality. They were made in an atmosphere in which "The '60s" had crashed and burned really hard and it seemed as though America itself was winding down, sentiment the films reflected. The evil you see in them isn't some sort of exterior force that can be made to vanish by waving a crucifix at it, or mumbling incantations over it. It resides within us. The slashers were the polar opposite of this trend. They think there is evil in us, too, but their notion of "evil" is infantile, and they're all about cutting it out, instead of thinking about it. They're like the dumbed-down revenge of angry, stupid, grunting conservatism, finally stomping out all those dope-smokin', fornicatin', long-haired troublemakers.

Parker is light-hearted in his comments. It would probably be wrong to be too hard on him. Most "mainstream" writers don't like horror films, and their work reflects it. That this one isn't openly hostile to the genre is, alone, a plus. And it certainly doesn't betray the shocking degree of ignorance and idiocy of a David Edelstein (He Who Created "Torture Porn"). Still, it is an uninformed piece, and, pretending to be informed, ends up dragging some good movies through the mud. I thought that was worth a grunt or two of protest.

--j.

---

[1] Though I recognize that it belongs there, I've never been entirely comfortable with including HALLOWEEN in the slasher category. The things that made HALLOWEEN work--the mythical element, the incredible visual stylings, the consistently menacing atmosphere, the suspense, the killer-as-projection-of-the-mind--are all pretty much ignored by the slashers that followed. FRIDAY THE 13th is the one that really popularized the by-the-numbers formula the subgenre would follow, and the long green it raked in was the point at which it really took off.

[2] Various commentators have unsuccessfully tried to make a case for the slashers starting earlier. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) is often cited by this contingent. The fact that the film was a failure, disappeared, and had no real influence wouldn't disqualify it as being a slasher film, but, among other things, it doesn't have the slashers' habit of lovingly lingering on the sinners getting their comeuppance, and, in fact, doesn't really offer the slasher movie morality fable at all. It's much more closely related to regular suspense films and thrillers. The full gamut of elements that would come to characterize the slasher film first congealed in HALLOWEEN.

[3] Women who express their sexuality in any way or who just get naked (even if no one but the camera is watching) are slaughtered without mercy, and the films always lovingly dote on the deaths of the women far more than the men, because female misbehavior is always thought far worse by this particular breed of moralizing.

[4] Those are extreme examples--slashers obviously didn't all go this way--but they were the most successful.

[5] Some would like to use that as the defining element of a "slasher movie," but doing so results in so many non-slasher horrors, thrillers, and mysteries being dumped under the classification of "slasher movie" that the HUGE body of work that legitimately falls under it, and that does contain the clearly identifiable elements that make a cohesive subgenre, is completely overwhelmed by these new additions, and the classification is rendered meaningless.

[6] He uses, for example, the SAW films, which aren't slashers. The first is quite good, and is really a throwback to the pre-slasher '70s, in that it has an actual story, a psychological approach to the horror, characters who are more than cardboard cut-out targets, and a killer with an intriguing point of view (it borrows heavily from SE7EN, which is also excellent).