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.

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[*] 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.

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[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.

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[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).

How To Get HAMMERed: A Reevaluation of Hammer Horror

When fans talk about movies on the internet, one of the most painfully overused words is "overrated." It's thrown around time and time again, usually when someone somewhere has just watched some widely recognized classic of a movie and didn't get any kicks from it. The fault, he decides, must lie in the movie, not in himself, so he logs on to the internet, punches some buttons, and gives birth to the latest overuse of "overrated" to describe his conclusion about the mediocre-to-lousy movie everyone inexplicably seems to love.

I offer this both as prologue as a bit of a warning; what I've just described is what I'm about to do. It's not exactly the same, of course. Mine isn't a momentary whim--I've thought about the subject I'm about to tackle for years. I've even written about it for years in various forums. I've had entire squadrons of angry fanboys try to decapitate me for the point of view I've offered. I've had more learned commentators intemperately dispute with me on the subject. And sometimes--just sometimes--people agree with me, too. But not as often.

Let me put my cards on the table.

The films of Britain's Hammer studios are some of the most beloved horror picture shows of their day, the movies that gave birth to the careers of icons Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, smashing successes at the box office, scandalized for their sex and violence and hailed for pushing the boundaries on both, credited with singlehandedly giving birth to "the modern horror film" and with the rebirth of gothic horror. That's the legend of Hammer.

The analysis I'd offer is a little different. As entertaining as a lot of the Hammer films undeniably are, the studio was a factory. In an era of wild experimentation in cinema, the stiff Tories running Hammer strove to impose--largely successfully--an unchallenging uniformity in their product. Even their staunchest defenders would have to concede their horror films were, for the most part, basically formulaic programmers, the filmmakers behind them competent jobbers without much to say. While it's certainly true their success helped bring about that new wave of horror films, the Hammer pictures were a part of that wave, not the leaders of it, and they were often put to shame, quality-wise, by the films that emerged from around the world at the same time. Hammer gets a lot of credit for pushing the boundaries of sex and violence in horror cinema, and while their content certainly resulted in a storm of controversy at the time (mostly from elderly British critics who, one suspect, were paid by the harrumph), it really wasn't particularly bold, and seemed the stuff of tame children's fare within only a few short years. Others were pushing those same boundaries much harder in those years.

Hammer films are, in a word, overrated.

That isn't to say they didn't do plenty of fine films. In this Bushite age of starkly drawn, irreconcilable, and perpetually combative dualities, I've often been dismissed as a "hater" when I've offered this line of commentary. That's not the case at all. Hammer turned out a lot of fine horror films. I recently gave another look at their version of THE MUMMY, and that's great work. I really like the first two Draculas, several of the Frankensteins, CAPTAIN KRONOS, COUNTESS DRACULA, their adaptation of DR. SYN, the first Carmilla movie--lots of good stuff over those years. I'm a fan of a lot of it, a big fan of some of it. I just think the merits of their films have been, overall, grossly overstated.

The state of horror cinema when Hammer first entered the field was the first block on which the Hammer legend was built. Straight horror films were terrible when they came along, and had been for years, pretty much since Lewton's RKO unit had stopped producing them. Gothic horror, in particular, had died a cruel death with a Lou Costello whimper in the '40s. Hammer films were great, indeed, compared to what had been passing for horror for years, but, contrary to the legend, Hammer didn't lead the pack when, in the late '50s, the world had ripened for a return to the good stuff. The modern horror film (and the modern gothic horror) began in Italy, where, predating Hammer by a year, Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava offered up I VAMPIRI. Hammer wasn't alone in giving birth to this new breed of horror, either; it began simultaneously popping up all over the world in the magic year of 1957. Produced at the same time as Hammer's initial entry were Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL (Sweden), Fernando Mendez's EL VAMPIRO (Mexico), and Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON (UK). All were vastly superior to THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the Hammer picture.[1] They were, in fact, superior to just about everything Hammer would ever produce in the horror field.[2]

What CURSE had that the others in the Class of '57 lacked was color.[3] The flesh-tones were warm, the blood was red, and no one had seen anything like it. The use of color in gothic horror was, indeed, a Hammer innovation,[4] and no doubt part of the reason those crotchety English critics were so shocked--SHOCKED!--by the level of gore in the film. For those who haven't seen it, there's virtually no gore in CURSE, but what little was present was, indeed, red, and that seemed to inspire those critics to portray the film as a nauseating bloodbath.

What Hammer's use of color lacked was any real artistic initiative. CURSE and the Hammer horrors that followed offered sumptuous, competently rendered color photography, often beautiful to look upon, but their use of color remained strictly matter-of-fact. Decorative, and nothing more. This is worthy of note because, while Hammer is so often praised for its use of color, it in fact fell to Hammer's contemporaries to show the world how it's really done. Roger Corman, in his Poe cycle, followed almost immediately (and even more impressively) by Mario Bava left the merely decorative far behind, offering up wild, innovative experiments in the expressive use of color. Hammer never matched it. Hammer never even tried.

Their conservatism with color was matched by their conservatism in their choice of stories. Their films were always set in a conservative, rigidly ordered moral universe, which arguably murdered any effort at horror right out of the gate. With a few notable exceptions, they offered simple good-vs.-evil tales. As horror buff "Squonkamatic," in one of the message board exchanges I've had on the subject, put it:

"Their stories tend to be about the status quo being upset and a quest to settle things down again. Even if the particular evil isn't destroyed or the story wrapped up into a neat bundle, there is always an emphasis on order being restored in the face of chaos. The monster himself isn't so much the antagonist as is the disruption of normal life and the moral or ethical disharmony that his/her influence inflicts on the community."[5]

While genre films were taking storytelling in different and interesting directions,[6] Hammer held to this conservatism throughout its time in the horror business.[7]

Hammer was routinely pelted with criticism in their native Great Britain for their violent and sexy movies, and that hail of rotten tomatoes has been converted, over the years, into a shower of praise for pushing the boundaries of acceptable content. Lost in the midst of both the decaying vegetation and the congratulatory wreaths is the fact that Hammer's use of sex and violence was actually extraordinarily mild. Mild in and of itself, mild in comparison to their contemporaries, and becoming cartoonishly mild in comparison as time went on. The insanely stodgy critics and censors of the House of Horror's heyday revealed everything about themselves through their reviling of these films, and practically nothing about the films themselves. Hammer's years of horror coincided with Jesus Franco's earliest work,[8] PEEPING TOM, Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore-packed extravaganzas, THE WHIP & THE BODY, BLOOD & BLACK LACE, and the rest of Bava's prime, ONIBABA, REPULSION, MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN, PSYCHO, etc. By the end of the '60s, Hammer had been left entirely in the dust when it came to blood and bumpin'-uglies-related business. We were getting items like THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL, Jean Rollin's early films, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the Blind Dead, MOJU, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, Dario Argento, pinku stuff from Japan, Paul Naschy's movies, and so on, movies that genuinely pushed boundaries like mad, and like they were mad.

Particularly odd are the hysterical howls of their early detractors regarding all that smutty sex stuff with which Hammer supposedly stuffed their productions. In the real world, Hammer always shied away from full-bodied eroticism. They had to--the British censors would drag out the scissors if they offered more than the vaguest suggestion, and often did, even when a scene was merely suggestive. Their films didn't even feature nudity until 1970.[9] Before that, the most you'd ever get from them was a little upper-jubbly cleavage from some busty (but fully clothed) barmaid, or a curvy vampire lass whose actions we're to regard as "sensual" because we're meant to substitute, in our minds, her sucking of her victims' blood for suction of a more wholesome variety.[10] To sample how truly backwards was Hammer when it came to more involved matters relating to the beast with two (or more) backs, look at the snickering, embarrassed, English-school-boy-being-naughty approach to eroticism in the first two Karnstein films, especially the second one,[11] and compare it to the way the same element is approached by Franco, Harry Kumel, Jean Rollin in their roughly contemporaneous films (on which the Karnstein flicks were meant to cash in).

For that matter, look at how just about everything was being handled by Hammer and everyone else, particularly from the mid-60s onward. It was a time of remarkable innovation in the genre. We're getting KWAIDAN, TARGETS, Jose Mojica Marins' Coffin Joe, and all of the other films I've just been rattling on about, and Hammer is cranking out DRACULA, PART 48 and FRANKENSTEIN, PART 34.

Hammer was a film factory, and, like most factories, those who ran it didn't see much merit in the idea that strength could come from diversity. On the other hand, the Hollywood axiom "nothing succeeds like success" had a lot of very dear friends among the management, there. When the studio started making horror movies, it had a big hit, then another, then fell into its cycle of formulaic programmers almost immediately. Its films weren't made by artists with a burning desire to tell a story; they were made by clock-punching jobbers,[12] skilled craftsmen working from a house style that was intended to obliterate as many signs of individuality as possible, and that mostly succeeded. That's why, when one isolates the films of any particular individual director, among the long-time Hammer hands, there are no identifiably consistent themes,[13] bold or unusual points of view, or even particularly innovative technical work that marks those films as the product of that individual. The house style shows some (mostly minor) variation over time, but, with few exceptions, Hammer horrors basically look the same, regardless of the director, whose job was little more than to show up, say "action," and say "cut." If they had a good story and script--and they were always assigned this; they never came up with the idea or developed it themselves--and the actors and crew were doing well, the picture worked. If there was a shortcoming anywhere in this chain, it didn't. Hammer was blessed with a large number of competent craftsmen who could make pretty things for an audience to look at, and could crank out a fine entertainment from time to time.

The blessing comes with a caveat, though; they cranked out a far larger number of mediocre-to-poor entertainments. I've always found a certain blandness factor in Hammer's horror films, even among the better ones. It isn't exactly true that, with Hammer, "if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all," but it feels a lot like that. That's part of the downside of too unyielding an effort to impose uniformity--it makes your best picture feel a whole lot like your worst one. My own feelings about Hammer are, as everything I've written about it here makes plain, mixed. but one thing on which I'm not of divided mind is that the common sentiment regarding the high quality of their films, the boldness of them, and the place they earn Hammer in cinematic history is absurdly overblown.[14] They are overrated.

Make of that what you will.

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[1] That isn't to say CURSE was a bad movie. Though one of Hammer's lesser films, it still had, among other things, a cracking good villain. The character of Frankenstein is said to have appeared in more than 200 movies over the years, but, for my money, Peter Cushing's is easily the definitive portrayal.

[2] Some would disagree, of course. Fortunately for them, they face no legal sanction for being completely wrong.

[3] And what it made was money--lots of it. The big bucks Hammer had rolling in from their initial productions added rocket-fuel to the production of this new breed of horror film.

[4] There is a perpetual argument among horror aficionados about whether gothic horrors even should be shot in color. I confess my sympathies lean more toward those who argue black-and-white is the proper medium for the sub-genre, but I'm no ideologue on the point. There have been far too many great gothics well lensed in color to dismiss it as a palette. Still, gothic horror is about generating a certain atmosphere, and a lot of the visual language that most effectively spoke to this seemed to get lost in the translation to color.

[5] That may be the first time in history someone known only as "Squonkamatic" was quoted in a text of this sort, and this may be the first footnote to cite such a source, too. I don't care. I'm feeling lazy. He said it as well as I could have--why rewrite it?

[6] Roger Corman, for example, constructed his Poe films around the idea that the "reality" they present is a projection of the disturbed minds at the center of the stories. Polanski's REPULSION (1965) visualized the delusional fantasies of its central character, a mentally disturbed woman.

[7] Hammer also remained committed to straightforward linear narratives right to the end, though the genre began generating interesting challenges to those narratives by the end of the '60s, like Jesus Franco's SUCCUBUS and Jean Rollin's early work. If this is judged a sin at all, it's a very minor one, but it does help make the case for Hammer's lack of any real innovative spirit.

[8] Franco's first horror, GRITOS EN LA NOCHE (1962), is a vicious little film, with onscreen surgery on bleeding human beings (a carryover from 1959's seminal EYES WITHOUT A FACE) and sporting, as a lead, a doctor who seems to have had much of his conscience surgically removed. The torture sequence in THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS (Franco's second horror outing) puts to shame anything ever shot by Hammer. A lot of the sex and violence in films of this vintage look quaint now--that KLAUS sequence is still jaw-dropping in its rawness and viciousness today. And both of those flicks (particularly KLAUS) feature all kinds of wild music, crazy camerawork, improvisation. They are innovative features, reaching for something new and different, not the dull, practically invisible house style adopted by Hammer for most of its time in the chiller business. OK, so this was really just an excuse to throw in a footnote about Jesus Franco movies. Sue me. I like the guy.

[9] In THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, a most excellent (if flawed) flick, that appeared nearly a decade after Hammer's contemporaries had began using nudity.

[10] Then, later, we're meant to cheer with some sexless Puritan drives a stake through her, ridding the world of suction forever, in the name of the Lord. Hallelujah!

[11] These were Hammer's first attempts at a plunge into lush eroticism. THE VAMPIRE LOVERS gets the striking Ingrid Pitt naked on camera--a good start, to be sure--but when, in the scene in question, a pair of fully grown women suddenly act like silly girls playing a game of tag, one suspects the jobbers behind the camera didn't quite understand the phrase "lush eroticism" (as one commentator has said, one expects them to break out into a pillow-fight at any moment). As for the follow-up, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, well, let me hear you sing it... "Straaange love..."

[12] I've gotten some static over that and similar phrases when I've discussed Hammer in various venues. It's said to be demeaning, which isn't the intention at all. As a matter of personal bias, if that's the right word, I do place artists at a higher level than employees when it comes to making art. Being a jobber can imply a lack of passion for the work. Obviously, an indie filmmaker who puts his all and usually every penny he owns, and a lot of pennies he has to beg, borrow, and steal from friends and relatives is going to put all of his heart and soul into a project. It's going to consume all of his time and money, maybe for years. It requires dedication, commitment, a sort of obsession. I know--I've been there for a few years myself. A jobber is someone who punches a clock every day, who is usually going to look upon his work the same way most of us look upon our work. It's just a job. This isn't always the case, of course, but my bias in that regard is, as I see it, reasonable. It's the same reason football fans prefer college ball to the pros. And none of this is to suggest the jobbers can't sometimes trump the artists. Warner Brothers, as a factory operation, produced CASABLANCA, for example, a film without which no list of the greatest movies can be complete. It's telling, however, that literally no one who worked on that movie had any idea how good it really was. They just cranked it out, moved on to the next one, and expressed disbelief in later years that it turned out so well. The difference between the artist and the jobber: for the latter, filmmaking a job; for the former, it's a life.

[13] Hammer's films had thematic consistencies, not the films of the individual directors.

[14] And no, Hammer fanatics, that's definitely not the product of a "divided mind."