THE DIG

Pretty Much WALKING DEAD Already

2012-01-07T14:56:00.013-05:00

As I've noted in my very sparse entries in the last 14 months, I haven't really been up to writing much lately. I'm still not. I have managed to see THE WALKING DEAD, though. I don't think it's a very special show, particularly now, but I end up watching it every week, because I have a friend who enjoys it, but doesn't have AMC. He comes by, we look at it, and I'm glad for the company. The show disappoints me. In little dribs and drabs, I've written, collectively, a lot about it, mostly on the message boards of the Internet Movie Database. My thoughts on its many shortcomings have often led to heated debates, there, with the series' defenders. I thought I'd try to organize them, here:

[I've cross-posted this over at my comic book blog, which I've neglected even more severely than this one.]

American Movie Classics used to be a cable station that specialized in a wide variety of classic movies from every era of the cinema, screened uncut, without commercial interruptions, and usually shown in their original aspect ratios. It was a must-have for movie lovers. Several years ago, the sages charged with running it decided to change things, and, under their wise guidance, it became, instead, a cable station devoted to a very limited selection of mostly recent movies that were either outright awful or that everyone had already seen a million-and-a-half times, screened chopped to ribbons, usually panned-and-scanned, packed with as many commercial interruptions as could be squeezed in, and then repeated ad infinitum. Perhaps because no one wanted to look at such a station, the AMC gang started dipping their toes into the potentially much more lucrative field of original programming. As it turned out, they were extremely lucky. Two of their early acquisitions, MAD MEN and BREAKING BAD, proved to be some of the best television on television, and though not particularly huge ratings successes, they did well enough, and brought AMC some things it hadn't had since the format change: respect and even prestige. AMC played up the angle. "AMC: We know drama," the ads proclaimed. Or "AMC: Telling the best original stories on tv." Those who write about such things agreed--or at least bought into it--and were usually discrete enough, when singing AMC's praises, not to bring up the fact that it was still mostly just a channel that re-re-replayed lousy, way-overscreened movies.[1]

Such praise makes for good ink, and, to an extent, the mystique it generates can act somewhat like teflon when it comes to future projects, which have little hope of measuring up to those early successes. That mystique can make some be much more forgiving toward an offering from the Masters of Drama at The Great And Powerful AMC. It can also become a curse, as well, though, because it can make others expect a great deal more than the merely mundane that is most television.

Given the remarkable surge in the popularity of zombie tales in the last few years, it was inevitable that a zombie-centric project would eventually make its way to American television, and the gang over at AMC made a good call indeed when they decided they were going to facilitate the creation of a tv version of THE WALKING DEAD, a popular comic book set during a zombie apocalypse. AMC's signature dramas were adult, complex, well-written, and what the PR boys call "edgy." As these were the very qualities that had made the comic a success, it seemed like a match made in heaven. Fans of the comic, fans of AMC's dramas, and the larger community of genre fans, who had been in love with zombie tales for years, greeted news of the project with enthusiasm.

It started very strong. The pilot movie, "Days Gone Bye," was a direct adaptation of the first few issues of the comic. Helmed by Frank Darabont, the series' showrunner and general guiding light, it debuted in October 2010, after a massive promotional campaign, and became the highest-rated cable series premiere of the year. The series had a successful but brief first season (only 6 episodes), and returned this past October for another, which, in its first 7 episodes, has garnered even higher ratings (as of this writing, the series is on mid-season hiatus until February).

But while everything about TWD on television has come up good ratings, the first season became, in some ways, creatively problematic almost immediately. The series, overall, didn't live up to the hype. In fact, by the high standards set by AMC's signature dramas (and by some of the other great television of the last few years), the episodes were frequently mediocre-to-terrible. The much higher standard set by the pilot wasn't matched by anything that followed (and, to date, still hasn't been), and a slow but steady decline set in.[2] Collectively, though, these first six installments were still relatively good by the generally low standards of television, and set up what could have grown, with a little polish and fine-tuning, into a solid series. Unfortunately, this brief, flawed first season, even with warts and all, quickly began to look like the good ol' days upon the inauguration of season 2, when the quality of the series crashed as dramatically as a truck full of pianos charging over a cliff. By the time the mid-season ender rolled around, its title, "Pretty Much Dead Already," looked like a metatextual comment on the series itself. Many successful television series suffer a "sophomore jinx," and, for whatever reason, just can't get it right in their second season. TWD has to be one of the most extreme examples of this in the history of the medium.

How has something so full of potential and based on such solid source-material gone so terribly wrong?

TWD would be a difficult property for most commercial television outlets. It's a very dark story, set in a bleak, unforgiving, relentlessly dangerous world that, on a regular basis, forces tough decisions on its characters, the kind that could utterly alienate a mainstream television audience. Where such audiences typically demand a stable cast of familiar characters, no one in TWD has script immunity; anyone can be killed at any moment, including your favorites, and they routinely are. AMC's prestige dramas aren't mainstream fodder. They don't have to draw the ratings of NCIS. They go in directions that, on a regular network show, would be unthinkable. That's why there was hope, when it was announced AMC would be creating the series, that it would be done justice on the screen. Of course, when it comes to screen adaptations of literature, everybody knows the movie ain't never as good as the book. Ideally, an adaptation aims to capture the spirit of the original work, if not necessarily its letter. Even in departing from the source material, though, it can rise on its own merits. In the first season, TWD was passable entertainment, but, as an adaptation, strictly weak tea; in the second season, it completely lost its way on both counts--it has been both a terrible adaptation of the comic and a terrible show.

When it comes to adapting print to the screen, there are a lot of legitimate reasons for changing things, and this is particularly true with regard to an open-ended project like TWD. Obviously, the creators of any ongoing series will want a certain amount of freedom, and not to be tied, in an overly restrictive manner, to the material they're adapting, but when it comes to changes, the creators of TWD have exercised absolutely wretched judgment. In almost every instance, the extensive changes they've enacted in the comic story and characters significantly weakened both, are completely unnecessary, and have caused, in themselves, all manner of problems.

For example, our hero Rick Grimes is a very stoic fellow in the comic. It's one of the things that makes him a natural at being the leader he later becomes. He isn't made of stone, by any means, but he's very controlled, takes things in stride, and isn't easily upset. It takes a lot to make him completely lose his composure, and when he finally loses it, it can be quite a sight. The series began to dispense with this right from the pilot. In both the comic and series, Rick is a Kentucky police officer who is left in a coma after being wounded in the line of duty. He awakens from it to find the world has been overrun by walking, flesh-eating corpses, and no living people to be found anywhere. He immediately goes to his home, finding it abandoned, his wife and child gone. At this moment in the comic, he looks around, finds nothing, and walks back outside, looking puzzled and a bit frustrated. On tv, he finds the house abandoned and, in an ominous sign of things to come, has a big emotional breakdown, sobbing into incoherence--completely hysterical.[3] Unnecessarily amping up the melodrama to 11 in this way becomes a major problem, in general, as the series progresses, but it's a particular problem when it comes to Rick. In season 1, he does still manage to demonstrate significant leadership skills. By season 2, though--the point where most of the more serious problems with TWD kick in--he is devolved rather spectacularly. The writers still wants to follow the comic in making him the leader of the survivors, while, at the same time, constantly undermining the things that made him a natural choice as leader. Rick has been shown, throughout season 2, as overly emotional, weak-willed, and just plain dumb--no leader at all.[4]

As that suggests, no real thought seems to have gone into many of the changes, which, at times, made a real mess of the plot. For example, in both comic and on tv, the dead rise and overrun the world while Rick is comatose. As the zombie situation starts to become a concern, Rick's friend and fellow officer Shane accompanies Rick's wife Lori and son Carl to Atlanta, where Lori's parents live, leaving Rick at the hospital at which he's been receiving care. In the comic, they end up stranded on the outskirts of Atlanta. Lori is distraught about what's happening--Atlanta has fallen to the dead--and, in a moment of weakness, has sex with Shane, who'd been secretly carrying a torch for her. A one-time thing, and something she immediately regrets. About a week later, back in Kentucky, the hospital is overrun, and Rick awakens. He deduces Lori's likely destination and sets out for Atlanta. A fairly simple scenario. Too simple, it seems, for the tv writers. Rather than having Shane accompany Rick's family to Atlanta while the hospital is still operational and the zombie problem not yet at a crisis level, the series offered up a flashback showing Shane present at the hospital at the very moment it was being overrun. He unsuccessfully tries to rescue Rick, and ends up leaving him behind, believing him dead. At the same time, the series also changes that one-time sex business to an extended, passionate affair between Shane and Lori, carried on after they'd left Kentucky, and after Shane told her Rick was dead. But if Shane was present in Kentucky for the hospital's fall, there's no time for the extended affair with which we're presented. Rick awakens at the hospital within, at most, a day or two of its being overrun--maybe even on the same day it was overrun--and, after a night spent with a pair of local survivors, drives to Atlanta the next day, and is reunited with his family.

To be fair to the pilot movie, neither the the extended affair between Rick and Lori nor the flashback showing Shane at the hospital were present in it. These items were added to subsequent episodes, creating problems where none existed. This wasn't the only time something like this happened in the first season, and the pilot, though pretty good overall, is by no means innocent of this sort of thing, either. When, for example, did the zombie uprising begin? The writers never got it straight twice running, and none of their various answers were even remotely reconcilable with either one another or with what we're shown. In both the comic and series, the zombie apocalypse takes place after Rick is shot and left comatose. It hasn't started before he's hurt; he has no knowledge of what's happened after he awakens. In the comic, he's asleep for about a month. The series never says exactly how long Rick is comatose, but its creators' habit of making unnecessary changes kicked in and made a hash of it. Whereas in the comic, Rick's wound was basically healed at the time he awakened and was never an issue, Rick's wound, on tv, is still enough of a mess that it needs to be kept covered, and will have to be kept covered for some time after. This would suggest it had been two weeks or less since he'd been shot. Before the pilot had even concluded, though, problems arose. The first survivor Rick meets relates to him what's been happening, and says the zombie situation got really bad a month earlier. Even if one stretched enough to allow that Rick was in the hospital for a full month with a wound that inexplicably refused to close, this still implies the zombie uprising had been going on for quite some time before even that. As impossible as this is to reconcile, it gets even worse with subsequent episodes. In episode 5, set three days after Rick awakens, a lone scientist, still working on the zombie phenomenon at the CDC in Atlanta, makes a video log stating that the zombie virus first appeared 6 1/2 months earlier and went global 63 days ago. This means that the dead began to rise over 5 months before Rick was shot, and that, at the time of that shooting, a full-scale global zombie apocalypse had been underway for over a month, and neither Rick nor anyone else noticed.[5]

What it actually means is that the writers on the series have problems. Showrunner Frank Darabont must have noticed--after the first season, he fired them and brought in a new team. The results, however, have been disastrous. The sorts of things I've been outlining, here, became, in season 2, an every-episode epidemic, while the quality of the show--the thing that made one willing to be somewhat merciful toward them--plummeted. The new team didn't even seem to know or care what TWD was about. TWD is, as the comic legend says, a "continuing story of survival horror." Robert Kirkman, the comic's co-creator (with artists Tony Moore and, later, Charlie Adlard), said his idea for the book was to show what happens, in a DAWN OF THE DEAD-type world, after the helicopter leaves the roof at the end. The central theme of the comic has been exploring, on an open-ended basis, how this harsh, unrelenting world changes the characters, and is forever breaking down their, broadly speaking, civilized values. In order to survive, even the best of them end up having to do some pretty horrible things, at times. In season 1, the writers often de-emphasized the horror elements, in what I suspect was a misguided effort to "mainstream" the show.[6] Their plots always flowed from survivalist concerns, but, because they were muting the horror elements, they were also soft-pedaling these concerns. In the comic, when the characters are out on the road, they're short of everything, starving, stinking, at the mercy of the elements, of zombies, of other humans, and are rarely far from devastating harm. There was little sense of this in the series, and the atmosphere of desperation it produced was almost entirely absent.[7] But while the 1st season writers were soft on these things, those comprising the new team behind season 2 apparently had no interest at all in writing either a horror story or a survival story. They aggressively removed as many of the horror/edge-of-survival elements as they were able, and seemed to resent the whole zombie apocalypse thing, as if it was just some inconvenient angle toward which they were sometimes forced to offer a tip of the hat, rather than the basic premise of the entire project. Instead of trying to capture something of the spirit of the book, their work is like some twisted mirror image of it. The book is set during the end of the world; they remove the end of the world. Where the book perpetually challenges those civilized values, they try to perpetually reinforce them.[8] The book is printed in black-and-white, but deals with moral dilemmas that are distinctly grey; their work is filmed in bright color, but they've kept the morality rigorously black-and-white. The book is great; their work sucks.

"What Lies Ahead," the season 2 opener, begins with the survivors driving the freeway, and, in a situation that will become a painfully apt metaphor for everything that follows, they're brought to a complete stop by a large traffic snarl. As things progress, Sophia, a minor character who, up to that point, hadn't spoken more than two or three lines in the entire series, is lost. Astonishingly enough, the search for her--a character of absolutely no consequence about which the audience has been given absolutely no reason to care--becomes the thing around which the writers organize the first seven episodes, over half the season. They don't dedicate a moment of those seven episodes to giving the audience any reason to care about Sophia, either. They make a fundamentally wrongheaded decision to strip the series of nearly every horror and survivalist element, and the characters end up camping on a farm for the duration, free of the troubles of the zombie apocalypse, and looking, looking, looking for Sophia.

The end of the world as they've known it becomes a thing about which they still sometimes talk, but the disconnect between that talk and both what we'd expect to see in such a situation and what we're actually shown, episode after episode, is so severe that it plays, at times, like a Monty Python sketch. By episode 6, Rick has discovered Lori is pregnant and they stand around having an emotional moment, full of the clichés bad writers mistake for existential angst about whether it's right to bring a child into such a horrible, fucked up world, and the entire scene is shot against a backdrop of absolutely beautiful farm country, the birds chirping, bugs buzzing, the sun sinking low in the evening--there's even a windmill in the background. And, of course, it comes after we've watched them spend episode after episode on what amounts to a camping trip in the same idyllic country setting.

Yeah, that's a really terrible world you've got there, Lori.

It's hard to overstate the extent to which the end of the world is pushed aside as the season lumbers along. In one typical sequence (from the 4th episode), Glenn and Maggie, two of the characters who are becoming close, take a trip to a drugstore in the nearby town, which is presented like a deserted version of Mayberry. It's a leisurely horseback ride in the sunshine, Glenn and his favorite gal running errands for Aunt Bea. They tie the horses up outside, even though zombies eat horses, the good town druggist has been kind enough to leave the door unlocked with a sign telling passers-by to take what they need, and everyone else has been kind enough not to loot the place. They go in, pick up what they need, and even take a break for some sweet afternoon delight, without a care in the world. Tension and a sense of danger and of what has become of the world could have been imparted to this simply by including a brief shot of something watching them pass from inside one of the buildings, or by throwing in a glimpse of a shuffling ghoul in the background of one of the long-shots, or by just putting a dead body in the street somewhere. Instead, there is, as with most of the season, nothing.

The zombies themselves didn't entirely disappear, but the writers adopted an apparent quota system for them. There's usually at least one brief, token zombie encounter per episode. Sometimes, they're written in to serve some plot need. When Glenn and Maggie make that same trip to the drugstore again in a later episode--repetition being the soul of TWD this season--there was a need for Glenn to convince her that the rotting, people-eating walking corpses that had overrun the world weren't just "sick people"--obviously a very bright girl, right?--so the writers put a zombie in the drugstore, had it attack Maggie, and had it survive an attack by Glenn that would kill any living person. Other times, it's just a filler scene, tacked on to meet the quota and eat up screen-time. In episode 4, for example, the characters discover a zombie that has fallen down a well on the farm. The farm has four other wells around the property, and dealing with this would seem to be a simple matter of closing off the well, and just using the others. Instead, they decide to try to get the zombie out. They opt not to shoot it, because that would contaminate the well, and if anyone present realizes having already had a rotting corpse in the water for weeks makes this an absolutely absurd concern, they don't bother to mention it. They adopt a ridiculous plan that involves lowering Glenn into the well in the hopes that he can get a rope around it so they can drag it out.[9] Glenn succeeds, nearly being eaten in the process, and as they're pulling out the waterlogged corpse, it splits in half, spilling gouts of guts into the water. Looking over the carnage, T-Dog, one of the underused characters, offers, in response, the best line of season 2. "Good thing we didn't do anything stupid, like shoot it." More metatextual commentary? Perhaps, but the writers did manage to burn through a few minutes of the episode with this, and the zombie quota was met.

Once the quota is met, the rest of THE WALKING DEAD features little of the walking dead. Rather than coming up with anything original or--heaven particularly forbid--anything uniquely in line with the premise of TWD, the writers filled time by turning, for inspiration, to bad television and movie drama, particularly that bastion of high-quality entertainment known, colloquially, as the soap opera. Actually, I'm pretty sure the word "inspiration," with its connotation of originality, can't be sufficiently stretched to cover their practice of precisely replicating cliché'd scenarios and scenes such programs have done to death for decades. At the same time, the word's positive connotation means it seems wrong, in a different way, to apply it to their practice of replicating the soaps' glacial pace and insanely overwrought melodrama. Let's just put it this way: if imitation is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, the hacks who have ground out these awful programs for all these years ought to be feeling pretty damn appreciated by TWD writing staff just now. With the zombie apocalypse removed, this season of TWD has wallowed in missing child melodrama, love-triangle melodrama, baby-daddy melodrama, and they've even managed to burn through a lot of time with a Woman Who Refuses To Be A Victim Anymore melodrama, among other well-toasted chestnuts of the genre.

Replicating the snail's pace of the soaps,[10] the writers concocted only about two episodes worth of actual plot then stretched it out over seven. Most of the running time for this season, to date, has been made up of padding. The eternal search for Sophia--the central plot--was stretched over the entirety of this time. Lots and lots of scenes of planning, planning, planning to look for her, followed by lots and lots of scenes of people looking, looking, looking, and finding nothing. With mind-numbing regularity, the characters repeat exactly the same scenes, the same conversations. After Rick's son Carl is shot in a hunting accident and hovers close to death, Rick has to be told--cliché alert--that his place is with his son (because he wants to run off and tell his wife). Then, he has to be told this again (because Carl needs some medical equipment from a nearby school, and he wants to go, instead of Shane, to get it). Then, he has to be told it again (because Shane doesn't return as soon as they'd hoped). And so on--all in extended fashion. The farm being such a safe and idyllic location, Rick wants the group to stay, so he talks it over with Herschel, the farmer who owns it. Then, he talks it over with him again. Then he talks it over with him again. And so on. With Carl hovering close to death, Lori and Rick get into that cliché'd version of existential angst, wondering if it would be better if Carl didn't make it. Then, they do it again. And again. When, as I wrote earlier, Rick learns that Lori is pregnant, they do it yet again. And so on. Every species of filler has been on full display.

Of all the many changes the writers made to TWD in bringing it to television, the one that has always seemed, to me, the biggest departure from the comic is the tone the writers imported from the soaps. In their treatment of the characters and their interactions, the writers mercilessly jettison any hint of subtlety, complexity, or maturity in favor of extreme, jacked-up melodrama, with everyone nearly going glassy-eyed from being so perpetually wide-eyed and overwrought. The contrast between scenes that happen in both comic and series is striking. When Lori discovers she's pregnant, it turns into a ridiculously overwrought multi-episode melodrama. She's emotionally devastated, because she just can't understand how she's going to manage a pregnancy and baby in this awful world. She decides not to tell Rick or the others. She has to tell Glenn, because she needs him to secretly retrieve the pregnancy test to confirm it. Then, Glenn is so overwrought and, as he puts it, so bad at lying that he's seems as if he's going to spontaneously combust if he has to keep the secret (we're meant to find this humorous). Then, Lori has him retrieve "morning after" pills, which can't abort a pregnancy, but Lori, being the bright girl she is, thinks they will. Wild-eyed, she tears them open and swallows them. Then, she becomes uncertain, and makes herself throw them up. Rick returns to their tent, finds the pills, and goes out to confront her in the big, emotional scene I described earlier. Anger, frustration, perspiration, wild emoting, yelling at one another. In the comic, when Lori feels pregnant, she immediately tells Rick. Her concern with this is written in her sober, earnest expression. She solicits his thoughts. Both clearly understand the potential difficulties, but he is cautiously optimistic. And that's it. No extended melodrama, no overwrought emoting, the matter handled in a simple, mature manner, and it took three pages. And Lori, from the comic, lived in a much harsher world than her television counterpart. Everything on the series is handled in the same stupid, overwrought manner as this; it stands in stark contrast to the tone of the comic.

Even beyond the lobotomy demanded to bring the character in line with the soap approach of the series, Lori has been much abused in the translation to television. The writers' clumsy tinkering with the details of her affair with Shane meant that, almost immediately after thinking her husband dead (probably within mere hours), she started having regular sex with Shane. If Rick had died, the body wouldn't have even been entirely cold, and this makes her the subject of a lot of hatred on internet message boards, but I suspect that's just because it's an easy target, and that the rest of the story behind the extreme reaction to her is that, in every scene the writers have ever given her, they've gone out of their way to make her stupid, selfish, bitchy, totally unlikeable and totally unsympathetic. They've abused every one of the female characters in this way,[11] but their treatment of Lori has been the most extreme--unlike some of the others, she's never gotten a single scene or line of dialogue that gives us any reason at all to be on her side. Sarah Wayne Callies, who essays the part, hasn't helped, as she has played the character with one expression throughout: standoffish.

As astonishing as it may sound to those who only know the tv version, Lori is actually a good character in the comic. Not always agreeable, but smart and likeable. She and Rick, unlike their television counterparts, have a good marriage. Some of the other characters who, in the comic, brought interesting dynamics to the group were gutted, those dynamics tossed, but not replaced with anything nearly as interesting (when replaced at all). In the book, Andrea is, like Lori, utterly likeable. She goes through the tragedy of her sister's death to emerge as a sort of female version of Dale (to whom I'll get in a moment). She would spot trouble, among the others, and try to head it off. On the series, she's written as a moronic, self-obsessed woman-child. Comic Carol was young, beautiful, and rather desperately clingy, her radiant exterior often concealing her pathological need for love in a world that didn't have much of it; the series made her older, the cowed wife of a batterer who, most of the time, is just a quietly passive non-entity. The children Carl and Sophia were much younger in the comic, maybe five or six years old. They became chums, and Kirkman used them to great effect with poignant, Peanuts-style mouths-of-babes type observations on whatever was happening; the series made them older, nearly teenagers, and took away anything of interest they had to say.[12]

Other characters have suffered in translation for other reasons. In the comic, Dale is a careful observer of people who often gets in everyone else's business because he's trying to head off potential conflicts before they balloon into problems that could endanger the groups' survival. Though the television version of the character is made to express himself in the same wide-eyed, mouth-agape, overwrought way as everyone else--that soap lobotomy--he is otherwise an almost direct copy of his comic counterpart. The reason this has become problematic is that, while season 2 has moved along, the writers have retained Dale's behavior, while removing its rationale--the horror/survival elements. With the group in no danger, Dale doesn't appear to have any strong, logical motive for his prying, and has started to come across as just a nosy old dick.

It's hard to overstate how profoundly awful the writing has been this season--incompetence cross-breeding with indifference, generating plot-holes and logical problems in their wake at every turn.[13] Carl is shot in the midsection in a hunting accident and very nearly dies before Herschel is able to perform emergency surgery on him. A little over 2 days later, story time, he's walking around as if nothing had ever happened. When Rick came to Atlanta in the pilot, he brought a bag of guns and 700 rounds of ammo, which, during a zombie apocalypse, would be second in value only to food and water. Rick gave some of the guns and something less than half of the ammo to another group of survivors who were guarding a nursing home. That's the last ammo the group picked up anywhere,[14] but this season, the writers decided the group would start holding shooting practice. Eight or nine characters, standing on a range, shooting at bottles and cans. If Rick had kept, say, 400 rounds, this would be gone in a matter of minutes in such a situation.[15] And it got worse, because at the end of the mid-season finale, still having made no effort to secure any more ammo, they spray more rounds than the Wild Bunch taking out a large group of zombies. When, in season 1, Lori discovered Rick hadn't died in the hospital, she angrily tells Shane (who had told her Rick was dead) to stay away from her and from her family. Three episodes later, he attempts to rape her. In the very next episode--the season 2 opener--her son Carl is trying to solicit fatherly interaction with Shane, Shane is cold toward him, and Lori, apparently furious that her would-be rapist may no longer be acting as her son's role model, starts bitching at Shane over it. And so on.

A likely contributing factor in the series' precipitous decline is that AMC instituted deep cuts in the budget for season 2. Reportedly, the budget, per episode, went from $3.4 million to $2.75 million.[16] Then, some sort of unspecified technical problem rendered unusable a lot of the footage from the intended season opener, presumably meaning another episode had to be produced on even slimmer money to fill the order for 13.

Showrunner Frank Darabont couldn't understand the logic behind cutting the budget of one of the most successful cable series of all time, and when he griped about it too often and too loudly, he was fired, less than 2 months into the production of season 2. Internet fans of the series, shell-shocked by its decline, have often tended to attribute that decline to Darabont's firing, but I've always been skeptical of that. When Darabont was given the boot, he was still trying to edit the intended first episode, the one with the problem. Even that work was never used. Instead, the last few minutes of footage from it (footage unaffected by that technical issue) were tacked on to the intended second episode, creating the slightly longer season 2 debut that actually aired. Darabont probably didn't see, to completion, even a single episode of the season, and given the rushed, down-to-the-last-minute nature of television production, that means what actually made it to the screen is probably different--maybe quite different--than it would have been if he'd finished it himself. Jeffrey DeMunn, Darabont's friend and long-time collaborator who plays Dale, has, for example, spoken publicly about how extensively Darabont had his hands in the editing of the series, and how his absence has been apparent in that area. Still, his contribution to the first 7 eps is, by every report, significant. He signed off on the writers. He approved the scripts. He oversaw the filming of at least two episodes, and maybe one or two more (he was fired at some stage of advance preparation for episode 5). The decline had clearly started under his reign, and the 1st season, over which he had full control, was hardly classic.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was, though. It gave birth to the modern version of zombie tales back in 1968. THE WALKING DEAD came about because those tales have become so remarkably popular in recent years. An ongoing series set during a zombie apocalypse is something no one has done before, and among those of us who were fans of this sort of tale, who have seen such tales done right and who realize their potential, I can't imagine how the series can be seen as anything other than an unfortunate waste. It isn't the absolute bottom of the barrel, to be sure--that slot, at present, is occupied by such brain-dead rubbish as the RESIDENT EVIL films--but TWD, this season, has scraped close enough to that edge to pick up splinters

Horror is all about metaphor, and zombies are one of the richest metaphors in horror. "They're us," as Fran correctly notes in DAWN OF THE DEAD. Twisted reflections of people. Their potential is endless; one can use them to tell literally any kind of story. Zombie tales have been actioneers, romances, comedies, character studies. They can be (and have been) used to address any matter of social concern, or, indeed, any aspect of the human condition. I suspect the genre could never be--forgive me--done to death. Those who take to message boards to complain about TWD's sparsity of zombies are inevitably met, by the show's defenders, with the assertion that TWD is about the living people, not the zombies. I've always found the innocence of this somewhat charming. One way or another, zombie tales have always been about the living. The best of them operate at a much more intellectual level than most horrors, and most who try their hand at it fall short because they either don't really have anything to say, or don't have the skills to say it. With TWD, it's probably a lot of both, and perhaps that robs any point from any impassioned lament over its creators' terrible, terrible shortsightedness in turning the series into just another bad tv melodrama and treating the zombie premise as if it's something they resent and try to avoid whenever possible. But I've rarely been one to avoid an impassioned lament when the spirit is on me, so I'll do my best to make the rest of this one short. An ongoing zombie tv series is unique, and the rich zombie premise rendered through that unique format, means those behind TWD have, in their hands, a creature that, if they would (or could) embrace its potential, would allow them to tell stories--stories of any kind--that have never been told, at least not as they could tell them. Instead, they seem content to badly tell stories that not only could be told on any other show but have been told on every other show. And told. And told. And told. They could be engaged in an ambitious project. The comic they travesty certainly is. Instead, they're just adding another shitty project to all of the other shitty zombie projects already out there. With zombies, as with anything successful, you always end up with a lot of lousy knock-offs, rip-offs, and remakes. The good stuff still turns up, though. I wish TWD was among it.

--j.

---

[1] Maybe because, by then, they weren't pan-and-scanning as many of them?

[2] When it came to the writing on season 1, plotting was a problem--plenty of plot-holes, dumb ideas, some manufactured drama, etc.--but the dialogue and the character interactions were often quite strong, for television, and certainly one of the series' biggest pluses.

[3] For another contrast, in both the comic and season 2 of the series, Rick's son Carl is accidentally shot. In the comic, when he sees the boy isn't dead, he hurriedly takes command of the situation and deals with it. Through he's exhausted and looks worried to death, he keeps his composure throughout the ordeal, and does what he has to do. TV Rick, on the other hand, has another hysterical breakdown, his reason departing him entirely.

[4] This is an example of another problem that will arise repeatedly. The comic's plots are driven by the characters' personalities. When those personalities are fundamentally altered, the plots that flowed from them, in their original form, no longer make any sense. The series radically alters the personalities, then tries to use the plots anyway.

[5] Like Biblical apologists who try to "harmonize" the contradictory gospels, fans of the show attempted to construct a timeline at Walking Dead Wiki that would incorporate everything we've been told about the zombie apocalypse. This unintentionally hilarious effort has Rick in a coma in the hospital after it fell, without any supervision, care, food, water, etc., for an incredible 55-60 days.

[6] For me, the loudest illustration of this phenomenon is Jim's end, from the first season. In the comic, that's a seriously grisly piece of business, and it haunts one's brain well after one has read it. Jim is a character who lost his family to the dead, ends up bitten by a zombie, and, as he's dying, he has the others abandon him near Atlanta, in the "hope" that, when he comes back, he may be able to find his family in town and be together with them again. On tv, they just made it into a generic drama scene we've all seen a million times in a million movies and tv shows. All that business about his finding his family removed, they just leave him under a tree, with him saying what a nice day it is, the director using a hammer to the face to tell us we're supposed to be sad about it. More generally, the cast and crew of TWD don't, by and large, bother with subtle touches that would suggest the characters live in a frightening environment. No offering up an occasional paranoid glance at an odd sound, no speaking in controlled tones, or anything like that. When it comes to shooting the show, we don't even get any menacing angles, unsettling camera movements, or sinister lighting. Nothing. For that matter, the cinematography, in general, is flat, dull, and totally uninspired. It shows no ambition at all, and no originality--not even so much as an unorthodox camera angle.

[7] Oddly enough, the CDC plotline, which was pretty dumb, was one of the only times the series briefly featured the sense of desperation that hovers over the characters in every issue of the comic when they're out in the open. With the exception of that one story (which mostly just paid it lip-service), the series does very little to convey this.

[8] To, in the words of the announcer at the beginning of DAWN OF THE DEAD, "pitch an audience the 'moral' bullshit it wants to hear."

[9] It's completely ridiculous, and both it and its subsequent execution wouldn't be at all out of place in a slapstick comedy, but here, they're treated entirely seriously.

[10] I'm not really bothered that much by the pace of the show. The complaints about it are by no means limited to those without attention-spans (who are the most frequent complainants against pace), and I certainly wouldn't dismiss them, but to me, TWD has so many other problems, pace is too far down the list to give much time.

[11] The writing of the women on the show this season has drawn charges of misogyny, and, in fact, every female character has been presented as a Clueless Male caricature's negative caricature of women. They're selfish, cartoonishly over-emotional, bitchy, stupid, whiny, totally uninteresting, and totally unlikeable. They're generally treated like children, then written in such a way that justifies that treatment. One, Andrea, constantly bitches about being denied a gun. She gets a rifle. She draws down on what she takes to be a zombie approaching across a field. Her target is actually Daryl, one of the other survivors. She's facing into the sun, at long range, and can't even clearly see the target at which she's aiming. Another group of characters are between her and her target, and could be hit if she fires blind. All the males tell her not to shoot, but, out to prove herself to the boys, she does it anyway, and hits Daryl in the head, nearly killing him, and confirming, in the most dramatic way possible, the wisdom of the menfolk in having, earlier, parted her from firearms.

[12] Most of the characters that are original to the show have been very poorly drawn, as well. Some were nameless cannon-fodder, destroyed during a zombie attack on the survivors' camp. Others were non-entities: one fellow and his family left the larger group to go their own way, while another, a woman, committed suicide by staying at the CDC as it was about to explode (a profoundly stupid plot element). Merle, the racist redneck of the first two episodes, became very popular. It wasn't that racist rednecks were suddenly in fashion; it was that the most excellent Michael Rooker was playing the part. It's unfortunate that Rooker wasn't given a larger role in TWD--if Rick was written for television the way he is in the comic, Rooker would have been great in the part. After Merle disappeared, there was a great deal of enthusiasm among fans for his return. Season 2 obliged, but, being a series that wallows in cliché, only brought him back as an hallucination his brother Daryl has after being injured in a fall. Daryl himself, played by solid Norman Reedus, has become a fan favorite in season 2, but he was a horrible, stock one-note character in the first season, with nowhere to go but up; his standing could have been improved merely by giving Reedus something to do besides being really angry.

[13] A very minor example happened only minutes into season 2, when the characters encounter that traffic snarl. A lot of the cars involved are filled with mummified corpses, which is impossible, because if these were people who had died where they were, they would have come back as zombies, and if, for whatever reason, they hadn't reanimated (or if someone had come along and shot them while they were in their cars), they'd have only been there a few weeks, not even remotely enough time to mummify. That's a very minor example, of course, but indicative of the lack of care that would follow.

[14] The details of that episode underlined the importance of weaponry. Rick, upon entering the city, was swarmed by thousands of zombies and separated from the bag, then led a group back into the city on an incredibly dangerous mission to retrieve them. In the course of this adventure, he was prepared to launch a firefight to the death--one there's very little chance he or anyone with him would have survived--against what he took to be a gaggle of gangbangers, rather than give up that bag. The "gangsters" were actually defending the patients of that nursing home, which is why Rick shared a little of the hardware. An entire episode, from a season of only six, was devoted to this story.

[15] In the comic, they also held target practice, but only after Rick and Glenn raided a gun store, securing a huge supply of ammo. Many in the group had no experience with firearms, and teaching them to shoot is a good idea, but making them somewhat proficient requires a lot of ammo, which the group, in the series, does not have. To state the obvious, if you burn through all your ammo, all you have is a bunch of people who now may be able to hit the broad side of a barn--they're not going to get much better than that with such a microscopic supply--but no longer have any ammo with which to do so. That will certainly help when the next zombie herd comes along.

[16] That should still be more than adequate--most of the great zombie features have been made for far less, and, in any event, very little of the $2.75 million made it to the screen anyway. In four of the seven episodes, there wasn't, excepting pay for the cast and crew, more than a few thousand dollars actually on the screen, or, more precisely, there wasn't anything on the screen that, under competent management, would have come to more than a few thousand dollars worth. In any event, if you have less money, you write something that doesn't take as much money. The creators of TWD weren't up to that.

DEATH WISH 3 (1985): Charlie Don't Need No Rockin' Chair

2011-08-05T00:30:00.006-04:00

Hello, all. The past 9 months have been really hard for me. I won't relay the full details, here--who wants to read about others' problems, right? Suffice it to say I'm having a very hard time dealing. It's been hard to write anything. It's been hard to do anything. Just being has been a pretty difficult and unpleasant thing. Creating content for this blog, in particular, has seemed impossible (for reasons I'll spare you). Earlier tonight, I jotted down what became this new article. It's pretty short, and I don't know if it's the beginning of a return to form, or just a fluke. It has a light-hearted air about it I'm not really feeling, but apparently, I was able to tap into the memory of when I could feel it. Anyway, it's new; here goes:

With the third entry in the DEATH WISH series, Paul Kersey, Charles Bronson's introspective vigilante from the 1974 original, is finally boiled down to what the Reagan era mistook for his essence, shedding those niggling bits of humanity that made him interesting in the original and going straight one-man-army on yo' ass, and, more importantly, on the asses of a gang of no-good punks in what seems to be a ruined city at the end of time. This is the flick that finally answers the question, "What would it be like if Paul Kersey was plunked down in an Italian post-apocalyptic action flick?" Most of the no-doubt legions who contemplated this intriguing question in the early '80s could scarcely have imagined they'd one day see it so prominently answered.

Bronson's Kersey responds to a friend's call for help, returning to a version of New York that looks suspiciously like a version of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK as rendered by an Enzo Castellari or a Sergio Martino. In a burned-out, collapsing ruin of a once-a-neighborhood, the five or six Law-Abiding Citizens, who seem to be the only somewhat normal people who remain, are perpetually menaced by an entire army of '80s gang-bangers, who wear their era on their lack-of-sleeves from their denim vests (the standard-issue '80s Movie Gangbanger fashion) and in their strict multi-ethnicity (in the cinema of the '80s, racial divisions don't extend to subhuman villainy--all bad men are brothers). The simpering victims suffer heaping helpings of rape, murder, arson, and rape, and bewail their fate with appropriate drama and melodrama until Charlie shows up intent on cleaning up the town.

Charlie is the God of Bad-Ass-ery among mere mortals in this one. A relentlessly grim man on a mission, our elderly hero don't need no rockin' chair, or no Medicare--at a spry 64, he's able to run down and out-fight healthy 19-year-olds who are a lot bigger than he is. He can beat them down, gun them down (with guns that are also bigger than he is), and blow them up all day long, then go home at night, hop in the sack, and put a big smile on the face of a Token Love Interest young enough to be his granddaughter. By the end, he's racked up a body-count that makes Rambo look like Beetle Bailey, and, as the cherry on top of this slaughter souffle, liquidates his nemesis, the reverse-mohawked leader of the villainous gang, with a rocket fired from a few feet away, reducing the sadistic thug to atoms without even mussing his own hair.

The original DEATH WISH earns its status as a gritty classic, in part because it was genuinely Thought Provoking. The team behind DEATH WISH 3 apparently identified this as a problem with that earlier film. And, with DEATH WISH 3, they certainly remedied it. The film does manage an impressive feat of its own, though. Aggressively awful and without a single other redeeming characteristic, it still manages to be utterly, relentlessly, even mercilessly entertaining. Sometimes, that's all a movie needs.[1] A poster on one of the IMDb boards this morning reviewed it and rated it 9 out of 10. I don't deal in number ratings, of course, but if I did, I suspect I would probably put it somewhere closer to 12 out of 10.

--j.

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[1] An alternate interpretation: DEATH WISH 3 is perhaps the only unintentional surrealist masterpiece in the history of cinema. Can there be any doubt that if Buñuel had made an '80s action picture, it would look an awful lot like this? Except maybe Martin Balsam would have been in a dress at some point.

Things Zombies Love

2011-03-30T14:35:00.006-04:00

Here's a little something that's just about as far removed as possible from the dismal mood I'm in, a little blast-from-the-past I threw this together ages ago when I first went on Facebook. All sorts of dumb lists were circulating. One that caught my attention was "Things Zombies Love." I like a good zombie movie, and I've long ranked the two best as two of the best films ever to emerge from the horror genre, so I took a few minutes and prepared my own horror-nerd-heavy list. I'm not feeling the laughs now, but maybe one of my other two readers will see it and smile:

"Things Zombies Love"

1. My imagination (They've consumed it, of late) [Editorial note: I was writing a series of stories featuring the living dead at the time.]

2. George Romero (He makes them SUPERSTARS!)

3. Paraplegics (They put up the least struggle)

4. Sarah Palin (Politician who, though alive, still "thinks" at their level)

5. Tyler Perry movies (Who else is going to enjoy them?)

6. Long walks

7. NEKROMANTIK (From a zombie's POV, a tender romantic comedy)

8. Paramedics

9. Cops

10. Hardcore fans of the 1990 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remake (The dead sense their intellectual kinship)

11. Dracula (Their James Bond fantasy, shows that even the living dead can be suave and sophisticated, and get the ladies)

12 The Cryptkeeper (Proves that even a zombie can become a mainstream star)

13. Jesus (Also rose from the dead)

14. "Slow Children At Play" signs (Handy lunch tips)

15. Soylent Green (It's made of people!)

16. Jennifer Connolly (Yes, it's true they want to eat anyone who is alive, but can anyone doubt they'd probably like to eat her just a little bit more than all the others?).

17. Marvel Zombies (Their heroes)

18. CPAC (A place they can go and inconspicuously mingle with the living)

19. Zombie movies (Being extras in such films usually being the only paid work they can get)

20. Shuffleboard

--j.

David F. Friedman Has Died

2011-02-14T16:48:00.006-05:00

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, David Friedman went into America's cinema underground as a younger man and, by the time he was an older one, had become a legend in the exploitation film trade--as he put it, with his typical carny-barker's flair, the Mighty Monarch of Exploitation. Among his accomplishments, he gave birth to ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS (though that isn't one in which he took much pride), and, with Herschell Gordon Lewis, he invented the gore film. He turned in over 50 movies in his long career, specializing in sex films, where his formula was at least one straight scene, one spanking scene, one lesbian scene. "Something for everyone," as he put it.

Asked, about 25 years ago, what inspired him to make his first movie with Lewis, Friedman said "I owned a drive-in theater in Joliet, Illinois that was playing a lot of junk on the weekend. One day, I said 'Christ, I can make a better picture than that!'" The two made a string of pictures, but really struck gold with drive-in-classics-to-be BLOOD FEAST and 2000 MANIACS.

Friedman was a good, jovial fellow, with a great, bawdy sense of humor (usually present in his films--sometimes omnipresent), and he was absolutely brimming with fantastic lore from his days in the biz, when he'd palled around with many of the founding fathers of exploitation. I'd grown quite fond of his work, courtesy of Image's "Something Weird" discs (his many, many commentaries on those releases were sometimes better than the movies themselves).

He died this morning in Anniston, Alabama, at the age of 87.

The king of sexploitation dropping dead on Valentine's Day seems as if it should inspire a much grander sililoquy than I've managed here. Unfortunately, my life has me pretty down just now, and, my troubles of the romantic variety being compounded by the fact that this, of all days, is my birthday, I don't have a better one to offer than this: I'll miss him.

--j.

DEAD SET (2008), & What It isn't

2010-11-09T16:20:00.005-05:00

Is it fair to judge a movie for what it isn't? Obviously, if it's rubbish, no one could deny it's the prerogative of those who have suffered through viewing it to rip into it like a Romero zombie horde, and that would include roasting it for all the much better things it failed to be, but what if it isn't really bad? What if it's actually a somewhat entertaining little picture, but one that just spectacularly fails to live up to its potential?

October saw the U.S. television debut of just such a picture, and I had just that sort of reaction to it. It's DEAD SET, a British horror "series"--in this case, essentially a movie carved into half-hour segments--about an outbreak of flesh-eating zombies that overruns the UK, and, apparently, the world.

Literally overruns it, in this case. The premise may be that of George Romero's epics, but DEAD SET eschews Romero's mournful, shuffling ghouls in favor of the hard-charging sprinters popularized in Danny Boyle's (non-zombie) 28 DAYS LATER (2002) and the godawful 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD. When it comes to the living dead, I'll confess a general partiality for the slower, stiffer breed. When trying to sell an utterly fantastic premise to an audience, it's best to try to make it as plausible as possible, and it helps if what are supposed to be reanimated corpses actually look and move like one would imagine reanimated corpses would.[1] Some who share my preference are quite dogmatic about it. While my own view is that, as a rule, slower, stiffer zombies are best, if a movie works I wouldn't give that question a second thought. I'm certainly no rabid fanboy on the point.

Simon Pegg is, though. Sort of. The star of SHAUN OF THE DEAD wrote a very good mini-essay on the subject, a piece that also featured some thoughtful insights into what makes the best zombie cinema work. In particular, Simon is--forgive me--dead on in awarding the zombie "the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster." Zombies, as Romero used them, are such great fodder for film because they're cracked reflections of human beings. They're driven to try to eat the living, of course, but, other than that, some semblance of what they were still fires through the synapses of their putrefying grey matter.[2] They're people reduced to their impulses.[3] One can use zombies to tell just about any kind of story.

The kind of story DEAD SET creator/writer Charlie Brooker and director Yann Demange were telling is about a zombie uprising that lays siege to the Big Brother house. Big Brother is a noxious--and depressingly popular--"reality" show contest wherein a diverse group of shallow fame-seekers is confined to a house for months and forced to live together, entirely isolated from the outside world, and under constant surveillance. They're given various challenges, and, one by one, they're eliminated, as viewers vote to "evict" them from the house.

Eviction Night is a big deal on Big Brother, and that's where DEAD SET begins, with a gala event featuring a loud crowd of rabid fans gathered to see off the evictee. That's also where it begins to fall short. Some shots of these screaming, overly-excited fans would have made a great contrast to the later shots of hordes of rabid corpses laying siege to the house. The parallel is so obvious, it positively begs to be drawn. Unfortunately, DEAD SET doesn't bother to draw it, and its absence is palpable.

The series had a premise that was absolutely ripe for a relentlessly caustic satire. I'd even hazard a guess that the desire to create just that is what gave birth to the initial idea for it. By virtue of taking place around a lame-ass "reality" show, it begs for that sort of treatment. And, in fact, we do get the odd nod in this direction. One of the characters, surveying a scene of zombie carnage for the first time, blurts out, "Does this mean we're not on tele anymore?" Another, scavenging through a drug store for supplies, is excited to come across a tabloid with his picture on it, then becomes upset by the less-than-flattering story in it. And the ending of the picture is sheer wicked brilliance. Unfortunately, these moments only serve to underscore the missed opportunity inherent in the decision to treat the rest of the picture like a more-or-less run-of-the-mill survival horror story. Of course, DEAD SET doesn't have to be anything other than another survival-horror movie. It had the potential to be a great deal more, though.

As a regular movie, it's entertaining enough, even if it is mostly unexceptional. There's plenty of mayhem and gore. Brooker wrote some great dialogue. Most of his characters are entirely unlikable and tend to be one-note stereotypes, which is appropriate, given that they're contestants on Big Brother (a fact that even led me to forgive their relentlessly stupid behavior throughout the proceedings). My favorite was easily Patrick, the unbearable Big Brother producer. Essayed by Andy Nyman, he's DEAD SET's version of Capt. Rhodes from DAY OF THE DEAD, a mouthy, dictatorial prick from his first appearance to his last.[4] His dialogue mostly consists of creative insults, and he dominates every scene he's in. His "finest" moment comes when he gets the idea of chopping up the now-dead Big Brother houseguests and using the pieces to bait the zombies away from the gate so they can escape. Everyone else is horrified by the suggestion, so he gets a knife and starts hacking on the bodies himself. He's hacking away, pulling off body-parts, and getting absolutely covered in gore, and he never stops ranting at the others the whole time he's working, going on about how he has to work for a living, how, on the other hand, they're just fame-seeking "twats" who want the easy way through life, and so on. The scene is way over-the-top hideous, and should have been absolutely hilarious, but, yet again, DEAD SET proves not to have the stomach for that sort of humor--the moment is juxtaposed with shots of the other characters, at a distance from the carnage, crying as Patrick rants, while somber music plays over it. Too bad.

So what am I to make of DEAD SET? As a survivor horror tale, it's entertaining. A bit long [5] It has its moments. It has some problems.[6] I wouldn't call it "great," and I don't see myself revisiting it often in the future. Where it really fails is in blowing what could have been some great material. The project had potential to burn. It just doesn't live up to it, and the overwhelming impression with which I'm left is one of disappointment, because I can see where some better choices would have made it something very special. Is it fair to judge a movie because of what it isn't? I don't know, but with this one, I suppose I have.

--j.

---

[1] Running zombies lead to other logical problems, as well. If they maintain the strength and coordination to sprint, why are doors and even flimsy fences a barrier to them? Particularly when they're in force. It's never a good sign when a movie makes one start thinking of things like this, and DEAD SET does.

[2] ...and, in that respect, eating other people doesn't seem so much the exception to their humanity as my wording, there, would suggest.

[3] ...which is why I dislike another trend in zombie flicks also followed by DEAD SET, the complete dehumanization of the zombies. They already eat people. When they also have utterly inhuman (rather than just dead) eyes, emit animal sounds, and run harder than they ever could in life, they may make ghoulish apparitions, but we entirely lose any connection between them and ourselves, and all of the rich metaphorical material that comes with it. They may as well be invaders from Mars.

[4] His last scene, in fact, directly references Rhodes.

[5] Nearly 2 1/2 hours, a consequence of stretching a story for a feature-length film over five episodes. It isn't dull, to be sure, but the middle portion is a bit middling, and the whole project is a bit padded. A subplot, for example, about the boyfriend of one of the Big Brother assistants trying to get to his girl eats up a lot of screen-time, and doesn't really go anywhere--it could have been entirely excised without any real loss, except for one moment it provided which I particularly liked. The line is "I liked our farmhouse." See it in context, and you'll like it, too.

[6] Something I really disliked was the tiresome shaky-cam-on-steroids, which is used in all of the suspenseful scenes. The technique doesn't bother me the way it does some. It's just that it has been done to death, and rather than being an artistic choice, it's usually a substitute for one. Like the running zombies, it's blatant pandering to the zero-attention-span crowd, and no one who is serious (or worthy of being taken seriously) should be concerned with pandering to them.

The Many Frankensteins of Peter Cushing

2010-11-05T17:55:00.006-04:00

Brian, over at "The Scarecrow's Blogspot," has written an appreciation of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the film that, in 1957, heralded Hammer Film Productions' historic entry into Gothic horror. He doesn't say so in his blog, but I believe he's even said (over on the Internet Movie Database) that this is his favorite Hammer film.

I wouldn't go that far. It's not among the best of even the larger Hammer Frankenstein series. Still, it does have its charms, the primary one being Peter Cushing in the lead role. Brian likes him, too:

"The ultimate success of the Hammer series derives from Cushing's making the part all his own."

Cushing is very good in the part. I'd rank him the definitive screen Frankenstein, except that probably wouldn't be entirely fair, because he doesn't just play one Victor Frankenstein in that series--he plays about half a dozen.

It's fortunate that Terence Fisher directed most of those movies, and not just because he was a competent director. Like most of the Hammer hands, he was a craftsman, rather than an artist, and while his lack of any significant cohesive personal vision for the series allowed for discontinuities galore,[1] it also meant we got lots of different versions of Frankenstein out of it.

One--the one introduced in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN--is the relatively one-note mad scientist playing at being a god, and, in the end, being punished for it. The next was introduced in the next film, THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and is almost the polar opposite, a compassionate (if, shall we say, sometimes overzealous) fellow whose work has a genuinely humanitarian aspect but who, in the end, is undone by the ignorance and bigotry of others. The succeeding films all offer either variations on one or the other, or combinations of both.

I'm divided on which I like best. I find the REVENGE version a lot more interesting. It's certainly a more complex character, and he's partly likable because he really is partly likable (as opposed to being likable for being so charmingly evil). The CURSE Frankenstein doesn't have a great deal of depth, and I've never cared for the idea of a scientist being punished for traipsing into the domain of God--it has an inherently anti-science bite to it I find quite distasteful.[2] On the other hand, Cushing is an absolute blast to watch when he's playing Just Plain Bad. In my favorite moment from CURSE, Paul, Frankenstein's teacher-turned-assistant-turned-critic, objects that what he's doing is inhuman. Victor retorts, "I'm not harming anybody. Just robbing a few graves." On a page, that doesn't look like much. The thing that makes it so great is Cushing's delivery--it's done offhandedly and with utter sincerity, thrown out while he continues what he was doing, as if he can't even imagine how anyone could possibly object to it. It never fails to make me laugh. It's no accident that the film featuring the most extreme example of this version of the character--FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)--is also one of the very best of the series.

Fortunately, I don't have to pick a favorite. Cushing played them all, and he was very good at every one of them. Even when some of the ideas embraced by the films went right off into the ozone, Cushing could still keep a straight face and sell them to an audience. Hammer's Frankensteins, like all its series, are uneven in quality[3]. Even in the lamest, though, Cushing is always spot-on. He was a constant in the role. Only once was he replaced in it, and the resulting film sucked like space, which just underlines more strongly that, to the extent those films can be said to work, he was a very large part of what made it so.

--j.

---

[1] That shouldn't be read as a slam of Fisher--continuity within all of Hammers' horror series was tenuous, at best.

[2] The theme doesn't really feature in the original Mary Shelley novel to which it is generally attributed, either. Shelley hinted at this as a theme of the book well after it was written, presenting it as a kind of moral treatise, perhaps in an effort to beat back criticism of its ghastly content.

[3] Though not, it should be said, as uneven as most of the others.

The Legend of Wagon Wheel Joe

2010-11-03T18:14:00.000-04:00

Director Joseph H. Lewis used to tote around a box of wagon wheels when shooting the cheapy Westerns he made early in his career. Whenever a scene was uninteresting, he'd plop the wheel down in the foreground and shoot through the spokes of it. The nickname this earned him, "Wagon Wheel Joe," was meant as a put-down at the time. In retrospect, it's emblematic of why Joseph H. Lewis should be a lot more widely remembered than he is.

Lewis was one of the great Poverty Row B-picture artists of Golden Age Hollywood. He didn't let perfunctory stories, trite scripts, bad actors, or budgets that more closely resembled the catering bill for A-pictures slow him down. Film is primarily a visual medium, and if the other raw materials with which Lewis had to work were wanting, he could at least make the movies visually interesting. That's where those wagon wheels came in. And they were just the beginning. Lewis rebelled against the traditional "invisible" Hollywood style, shooting, instead, tight, expressionistic cinema, filled with unusual and inventive camera work. Odd angles, odd staging, utterly individualistic. It's said to have driven his editors nuts, but it pepped up what would have otherwise been a lot of entirely forgettable--even awful--films.

Lewis cut his teeth on those cowboy quickies. He wasn't stuck with the shortest of short ends for long, though. While he remained firmly ensconced in B-level productions for most of his career,[1] his budgets, his actors, and his scripts did improve, and soon, he wasn't just the only good thing about a bad movie. With more resources with which to exercise his resourcefulness, he came into his own as a movie-maker, and proceeded to make some damn good movies.

He usually tried to hook viewers early, and was frequently very good at drawing in an audience with his first scene.[2] GUN CRAZY (1950) begins on an adolescent demonstrating an almost sexual attachment to a pistol in a store window. So overcome is he that he just can't resist breaking the glass and stealing it, only to immediately trip over his own feet and send the gun skittering across the rain-soaked street to come to a halt at the feet of someone revealed, as the camera moves up, to be a grim-faced policeman. The pre-title sequence of TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN (1958) is one of my favorites. There's Sterling Hayden playing a beefy Swedish whaler. Totally out of place in a Hollywood Western. He's marching through town, a crowd gathering behind him as he comes to a particular building and calls out some badman. The villain--in black, so we know he's a no-goodnik--has a gun on his hip, but Hayden is hefting a harpoon on his shoulder as his weapon of choice. They're about to have it out, and we cut from the scene to the opening credits. There's no way in hell anyone is going to watch that and not stick around for the rest of the movie. More subtle, but also effective, is the opening of MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945), wherein we follow the lead character through the street in pouring rain, up to a rooming house, then inside, where our heroine's situation is set up via a conversation with the housekeeper--Lewis doesn't let us go until we're into the picture.

Lewis had an affinity for close-ups, and favored elaborate staging and long takes. Not static ones, though. His camera is always on the move, always gliding from one set-up to another without cutting. He would sometimes even allow it to pass through apparently solid objects like windows. He was very good at using his set-ups to comment on a scene. In CRY OF THE HUNTED (1953), a prison warden stuck in a swamp is trying to call to those searching for him, but finds he has no voice--his POV is shot through a bank of reeds that look like prison bars set between himself and his would-be rescuers. In SO DARK THE NIGHT (1946), a--what other kind could it be?--dark thought crosses the mind of a character sitting at a desk in a fully lit room; the lights abruptly dim, leaving only the characters' face illuminated from below in an extraordinarily sinister way. The thought quickly passes, and the light in the room returns to normal. Later, in the same film, a heated fight is photographed through the flames of a fire.

Lewis had range. He shot a wide variety of films--melodramas, a war picture, period adventure, musicals. For his last feature, he returned to the Western and gave us the aforementioned TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN. Much more than just a run-of-the-mill oater, the film was an open challenge to McCarthyism, ghost-written by Dalton Trumbo and Lewis's friend Nedrick Young when both were still blacklisted. Making it was a bold move, but, probably because he intended it as his last picture before moving to television, Lewis not only shot it but cast the blacklisted Young as the villain. The movie has a lot of the usual problems of low-budget productions, but Lewis went the extra mile to make it a visual tour-de-force. It's almost like an homage to his own previous films. I liked it.

Lewis's best work, however, was in film noir. ...JULIA ROSS and SO DARK... were solid, visually impressive efforts in the genre, while THE BIG COMBO (1955) was a genuine classic. It was also a bit notorious for one scene in which Richard Conte apparently goes down on Jean Wallace. Conte is standing behind Wallace, nuzzling her, and drops down out of frame, as Lewis moves the camera into her face, which bears a look of resigned pleasure, and holds the shot for a moment. The scene initially got Lewis in hot water with the studio censors, but, as he told it,[3] he turned the tables on them. Faced with their insistence that he'd shot a "filthy" scene, he professed not to understand what they were talking about. The intimation of oralism was fairly obvious, but it was shot in such a way that it relied upon the viewer's interpretation. Apparently, the suggestion that they, themselves, had willfully chosen to interpret, as "filthy," a scene the director (disingenuously) insisted was innocuous sufficiently embarrassed the Breen boys that they allowed it to remain in the film.

The flick for which Lewis is best remembered today, though--the only one for which he's widely remembered--is GUN CRAZY. A directionless gun fetishist hooks up with a sexy, sharp-shooting sociopath, sparks of passion become a twisted obsession, and soon the two are hard-charging down a path of self-delusion, robbery and murder that can only lead to their destruction, the whole of their rise and downward spiral sensationally photographed by Lewis's off-kilter camera. Easily Lewis's best picture, and one of the best films noir of all time. Paul Schrader also says it's "one of the best American films ever made," or at least they quote him as saying so over on the Turner Classic Movies site. I certainly wouldn't characterize the assessment as hyperbole.

Lewis has very nearly been lost in time. Even among film nerds, he's an obscure figure. Too obscure. His work deserves better than that. A lot better. I just wanted to say so.

--j.

---
[1] The one exception I've seen is DESPERATE SEARCH (1952), which apparently had a much bigger budget than Lewis's other projects, and also seemed to be an effort at a more "mainstream" film. Though not without its moments, the movie is, for the most part, depressingly average. Lewis ditches most of the visual flair of his other pictures, and the result is the least interesting Lewis movie I've yet encountered.

[2] In THE TYPEWRITER, THE RIFLE, AND THE MOVIE CAMERA, Jim Jarmusch recounting Sam Fuller's advice to him on screenwriting: "When you start your script, if the first page doesn't give you a hard-on, throw the goddamn thing away." Lewis seems to have had the same attitude. Lewis's brashness, his disregard for the conventional, and the hook-'em-and-keep-'em tabloid aesthetic his films often radiate reminds me of Fuller.

[3] On PBS's American Cinema series.

"Finally, I swear upon what I believe in, the cinema..." (UPDATE BELOW)

2010-05-20T05:03:00.000-04:00

In some places in the world, being both an humanitarian and a filmmaker is enough to put the connection between one's head and neck in jeopardy. Corrupt autocrats don't like some uppity liberal humanist type calling them out on their abuses, and when the troublemaker has a camera and talent and can put the whole sordid business before the entire world, well, the autocrats sometimes decide the world would be a lot better place without such a character.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi has learned this the hard way. Being an humanitarian put him at odds with the malevolent mullahs who hold power in his country and don't so much rule as afflict the nation like a cancer. In March, they put the pinch on him and slapped him in the clink--a darkly infamous clink, at that--for no stated reason, at first, later amended to the allegation that he was committing the unpardonable act of "making a film against the regime..." He wasn't, but he's been plenty critical, in the past, of the pernicious effect their way of doing business has had on Iranian society. The mullahs don't like that sort of thing in quiet times; when the country began to revolt against them after they fixed the "election" in favor of their dog Ahmadinejad, the word "restraint" has largely slipped from their vocabulary. They've locked Panahi in a hole, and apparently haven't bothered extending to him much that could be mistaken for due process.

Things have just escalated. On Tuesday, Panahi was able to get a statement out of Evin prison, and it looks as if, one way or another, these events are soon going to reach a conclusion. The full text:

---

I hereby declare that I have been subject to ill treatment in Evin prison.

On Saturday May 15, 2010, prison guards suddenly entered our cell, no. 56. They took us away, my cell mates and I, made us strip and kept us in the cold for an hour and a half.

Sunday morning, they brought me to the interrogation room and accused me of having filmed the interior of my cell, which is completely untrue. Then they threatened to imprison my entire family at Evin and to mistreat my daughter in an unsafe prison in the city of Rejayi Shahr.

I have eaten and drunk nothing since Sunday morning, and I declare that if my wishes are not respected, I will continue to abstain from drinking and eating. I do not want to be a rat in a laboratory, victim of their sick games, threatened and psychologically tortured.

My wishes are:

--The possibility to contact and see my family, and the complete assurance that they are safe.

--The right to retain and communicate with an attorney, after 77 days of imprisonment.

--Unconditional liberty until the day of my judgment and the final verdict

--Finally, I swear upon what I believe in, the cinema: I will not cease my hunger strike until my wishes are satisfied.

My final wish is that my remains be returned to my family, so that they may bury me in the place they choose.

---

I hope this isn't Jafar Panahi's epitaph.

--j.

---

UPDATE (14 June, 2010) -- It turned out not to be Panahi's epitaph. After he declared his hunger strike, Iranian authorities finally granted him a hearing, and, a week later, he was released on $200,000 bail. This doesn't appear to be over, though. After Panahi's release, as related by Ian Black of the Guardian, "the Tehran prosecutor's office said that Panahi's file and the charges against him had been sent to a revolutionary court that deals with security offences. It did not detail the charges." Stay tuned.

Joe Sarno & the Good Works of SOMETHING WEIRD

2010-05-07T17:28:00.000-04:00

For some time, now, I've wanted to write some little something about Something Weird Video, but it has, unfortunately, taken a little-noted death to finally spur me to take the random thoughts on the subject rattling around in my cabeza and try to whip them into something worth reading. Something Weird is, in my view, most worthy of praise. So much worthy, in fact, that I know, before I start, that no matter what I write, I'll never be able to do it justice. I can't praise it enough, so I'll just praise it as much as I can at the moment, and alert the reader, right up front, that whatever I can manage isn't going to be enough to pay the bill that's owed.

That bill, by the way, is owed, by every fan of the cinema, to the folks at SWV, who have literally rescued, from oblivion, a chunk of cinematic history. It's a big chunk, too. The less enlightened--a category to which, I trust, my readers don't belong--may conclude that oblivion was the only fate earned by many of the films making it up. SWV specializes in, broadly speaking, exploitation films. Horror pictures, action pictures, nudie cuties, stag loops, blaxsploitation, sexploitation, hicksploitation, and name your any-other-sploitation. Or, depending on your perspective, your poison. Pictures with titles like BLOOD FEAST, ALLEY TRAMP, THE ACID EATERS, DRACULA THE DIRTY OLD MAN. Mostly, but not exclusively, American films. A lot of small flicks that, for decades, had small releases in various localities and that, in most cases, all but disappeared after their brief runs. A great many of them, in fact, did disappear. Went missing for decades and would have likely remained lost forever were it not for the efforts of the SWV gang to unearth them.[1] With a very few notable exceptions, no market existed for most of these flicks until SWV came along and made one for them.

SWV provided my first exposure to the wonderfully cracked work of Doris Wishman (her INDECENT DESIRES was as good an introduction as I could have hoped), to Michael and Roberta Findlay's bizarre "Flesh" trilogy (an insane, visually inventive series of films about a misogynistic murderer that plays, at times, like an old fashioned serial adventure gone very wrong), to Dave Friedman's larger body of work (he really is "the Mighty Monarch of Exploitation," but before SWV, I'd seen only his legendary gore-filled collaborations with Herschell Gordon Lewis, which SWV also handles), and to Joe Sarno's sizzling sexual melodramas of the '60s, among so many others.

I became quite fond of Joe Sarno's movies. Actually I became quite fond of a great many of the filmmakers SWV first allowed me to see, but Sarno's movies were my most recent infatuation among them before I landed out of work and too broke to significantly pursue cinematic love affairs. Joe Sarno died last week. It didn't seem right to me that I hadn't really written about him yet, but it seemed positively criminal that, on the occasion of his death, so few others seem to have done so.

Alongside politicians, ugly buildings, and whores, it seems we can add makers of dirty movies to the list of things that sometimes become respectable if they last long enough. Or maybe not. Sarno spent nearly his entire career making low-budget sex films of one breed or another, over 100 of them, and he did sort of achieve some little degree of "mainstream" respectability. This is loudly touted by many of his admirers, but, as the overwhelming silence that has greeted his death helps attest, this didn't really extend much further than the loud praise of critic Andrew Sarris many years ago. I've never had much use for "mainstream" respectability, anyway, and if Joe did, he never cashed his in on the career in larger "mainstream" pictures he could have easily had. Sarno's work speaks for itself, and doesn't need the praise of slumming Establishment types.[2]

The match-made-in-heaven (or elsewhere) mating of Sarno and skin-flicks happened in the early '60s. As the decade came to a close, Sarno, by then an accomplished hand at the art, packed up his ruck and left his native U.S., bopping around Europe and making most of the movies for which he became best known (if you aren't old enough to remember, or well-read enough to have learned of it, look up a little film called INGA--it was quite the sensation in '68).[3] SWV's Sarno releases, however, deal with his earlier films, that 1960s series of steamy, soapy sexploiters wherein Sarno first worked out the psychological approach to erotica that would become one of his trademarks.

These early films were incredible little dramas about regular people lost in the modern world. Bored, lonely, alienated, they begin to look, often desperately, for an escape from the emptiness of their very Normal Lives, and, usually at the urging of some status-quo-disrupting element, find it in sexual exploration. Sarno tells his stories from the point of view of the women involved, and he's always sympathetic to their plight, even though the way they deal with their problems doesn't, in his telling, always pan out for the better.

Sarno's imagery is often mercilessly subversive. In SIN IN THE SUBURBS (1964), he takes a typical-for-its-time idealized representation of a normal suburb, filled with commuting husbands, overly wholesome teens, and dutiful housewives, and begins gleefully ripping it to shreds. In an early scene I've always found particularly amusing, a frumpily-dressed housewife, after chiding her departing husband for the long hours he works, finds her teenage daughter's boyfriend at her door, playing hooky from school. She invites him into the den, puts on some music, and, as they're more-or-less innocently doing the twist, it becomes quite apparent that they're both allowing their minds to wander into thoughts of doing a different kind of twist together. It's very well done,[4] and, after writing about it just now, I realize my description doesn't even remotely do it justice.

Sarno was a master of generating and maintaining sexual tension. His interest was in the psychological component of sex, and he managed to dig it out time and time again, but for all the heat his early flicks generate, the sex happens off camera. Often just off camera, admittedly. Surprisingly, there isn't even much nudity in these early films. Even when Sarno began to make generous use of naked flesh in his later softcore pictures, he remained a minimalist when it came to displays of rampant rutting.[5] In pursuit of verisimilitude, he encouraged his players to unsimulation when it came to stimulation, but he photographed their fevered undulations sans any shots of penetrations. Until he went into hardcore films, anyway. Hardcore destroyed the market for the soft stuff so near and dear to Sarno's heart (and other organs). Like many of the old softies, Sarno held out for a long time, but the hard stuff meant the writing was on the wall, and he eventually bowed to the inevitable, though often behind the guise of a pseudonym.

Sarno and his wife and longtime collaborator Peggy (known, on screen, as Cleo Nova) contributed two commentaries to SWV's releases, and that the gang at SWV arranged for this sort of thing is another part of what makes their work so special. Some years ago, SWV went into partnership with Image Entertainment to release a huge number of films on DVD, usually in double- and triple-feature discs, and the SWV gang treats each disc as a mini-lesson on the history of exploitation cinema, packing them with trailers, shorts, and artwork related, in some way, to the featured attractions,[6] and tracking down those involved in making the movies to get them to do commentaries. SWV founder Mike Vraney brags that they pack each disc to capacity.

Vraney says he doesn't care so much for doing the commentaries, probably because he's done so many, but a lot of them are just priceless; rare opportunities to hear from a relatively obscure and interesting group of filmmakers. Sometimes, the commentary is far better than the film itself. That's certainly the case with David Friedman's commentary on GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES. It's a "nudie cutie," and, as a mere film, dull and forgettable (as "nudie cuties" tend to be). Turning on the commentary improves it immeasurably. Friedman is quite a character, an endless encyclopedia of exploiteer lore who loves to talk, and is always entertaining (he's done perhaps dozens of commentaries for SWV).

The SWV deal with Image ended not long ago, but Image keeps the discs in print. You can buy them and many other films in the SWV collection at the official Something Weird site, where the films are also available for digital download.

SWV is a big treasure chest. Collectively, it amounts to the most extensive history of underground American cinema ever assembled. And how's this for some praise? SWV belongs alongside the Criterion Collection and Mondo Macabro as the most important DVD labels we have. The films with which SWV deals were made in a world so different, they can often seem as if they're from another planet entirely. They're one-stop shopping for those of adventurous spirit who may be burned out on the same-ol' same old and are looking for something unusual, something different, something weird.

And I can't praise 'em enough.

--j.

---

[1] Mike Vraney, SWV founder, admits to a fetish for film negatives, and he's acquired quite a pile of them over the years, but some of the movies with which SWV deals are known to exist, today, only in battered, scratched, spliced prints. Watchable, but not the best choice for those who prioritize showing off the capabilities of their fancy entertainment system over love of cinema.

[2] If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Joe has been flattered by some of the best. Stanley Kubrick lifted significant portions of EYES WIDE SHUT from Sarno's SIN IN THE SUBURBS; Hollywood did the same with the premise of Sarno's THE LOVE MERCHANT, turning it into INDECENT PROPOSAL.

[3] Seduction Cinema's Retro- label did a series of releases from Sarno's Euro-period, including INGA.

[4] On the commentary for SIN IN THE SUBURBS, Vraney says the movie has sold very well over the years, and has become one of the favorites among SWV's fans. It's certainly a favorite of one SWV fan.

[5] PASSION IN HOT HOLLOWS features an interesting cinematographical experiment, as Sarno and his crew make some unique uses of light and shadow to obscure parts of the many-bodies-in-much-motion.

[6] Some of the ad campaigns for the movies, documented in these extras, are as entertaining as the films themselves.

Snoots v. Horror on the IMDb

2010-04-28T23:15:00.000-04:00

A huge, supernaturally powerful monster plagues a community, attacking the residents, literally eating them alive, and leaving only pieces of them as evidence of what's happened. The local sheriff deduces the problem, but, as officialdom is adamantly indifferent/openly hostile to his explanation and the killing continues, he enlists the aid of experts, who join him as the monster goes public, starting a panic and forcing officialdom to get behind our heroes. The tale culminates in an all-out effort to destroy the monster, one in which the hunters become the hunted and are, themselves, nearly destroyed before launching a final desperate ploy that manages to take out the menace.

The plot, in this case, is that of JAWS from 1975, but nearly every significant element of it had been standard fare in horror movies since the 1950s, movies of which JAWS is a lineal descendant. Nominally based on a novel by Peter Benchley, the film bears only a passing resemblance to the book. Its cinematic influences are primarily those earlier horror tales, beefed up with a more visceral approach to visceral matters, a healthier quotient of blood-spilling, more attention to characterization, and a helping of post-Watergate cynicism toward authority.[1]

That last wasn't really a new element in these films. While their heroes were usually drawn from officialdom, their monsters were very often unleashed via ill-advised government nuclear tests. JAWS revived the specter of malevolent authority in a huge way, and it quickly became a cliché in the horror movies of the decades that followed.

That's only part of the profound influence JAWS had on the horror genre. It truly was a landmark. There probably isn't a monster movie that followed it that wasn't, in some way, influenced, directly or indirectly, by it. It spawned three direct sequels. It began a very long cycle of direct rip-offs. Derivative but less rigidly duplicative man-vs.-nature films sprang up in its wake to such an extent that they became a virtual sub-genre unto themselves. The lineage of the film was widely recognized, and, where many of the older movies subtextually (and sometimes textually) converted their creeping, crushing killer critters into ambulatory critiques of an aspect of Cold-War-ism, these derivative pictures often featured a modern twist on the same theme--human tampering with the earth's ecology was often what produced the problematic plague of monsters packing these pictures.[2] Nearly every aspect of JAWS, from its editing to its tension-building score, proved inspirational to more future productions than can be easily counted. It even managed to make some very classy use of such shopworn horror movie elements as jump-scares.

Scares are what the movie promised, and scares are what it delivered. JAWS became one of the most successful horror films ever made, and in much the same way PSYCHO had generated a great deal of anxiety about showering, a lot of people, in the summer of '75, suddenly stopped going to the beach. The film became an omnipresent reference in the literature on horror cinema in the decades that followed, claimed a place on more critical "best horror movies" lists than can be easily counted, and was uncontroversially regarded as a horror film by entire generations of viewers.

So where am I going with this?

It seems the inclusion of JAWS in the horror genre--the genre that birthed it, the genre over which it subsequently had such a tremendous influence--is now being called into question in certain quarters. A breed of snoots have appeared in recent years. They regard horror cinema as, inherently, something between low-brow trash and entirely worthless junk and, as a consequence, they hold that no film as well-made as JAWS could possibly be rightly included in the genre. These snoots are not deterred by the fact that their fanciful "position" requires ignoring the entire history of something like JAWS. Indeed, they often turn the universe on its head by accusing horror fans of trying to appropriate the prestige of such a film by falsely associating it with their disreputable genre.

Over at the Internet Movie Database, where users are allowed to submit data about the films covered by the site--all films, in theory--the snoots have been trolling of late and systematically removing "horror" from the genre classification of large numbers of films that, while clearly horror movies, have achieved acclaim or popularity. They replace "horror" with "mystery" or "fantasy" or "action" or "thriller" (probably the most popular replacement genre). Movies caught up in the snoots' crusade include ALIEN, JAWS, THE SIXTH SENSE, PSYCHO, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and many others, all of which have routinely had their "horror" genre classifications inappropriately removed.[3]

Fans on the IMDb boards, particularly horror fans, noticed this development and began to take offense at it. Some of them even decided to make a fight of it, and actively work toward countering the snoots. It's been a recurring brawl on the site for a while, now. It recently flared up again, with posters Zombie CPA, Golgo 13, and Gertflump, among others, taking up the cause. They pointed out that, while JAWS and ALIEN had been inexplicably stripped of their "horror" tags, their sequels still carried them; the sequels were promptly stripped of their horror tags, as well. ALIEN recently recovered its tag, but JAWS remains, in the IMDB, a "thriller." Any user trying to change that classification in any way is met with this:

"Our genre manager has determined that this title is not an action or horror movie."

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is currently tagged "crime" and "thriller." Unlike most of the others, it's a film about which legitimate arguments can be made,[4] but try to add a "horror" tag to it and here's what appears:

"Our genre manager has determined that this title is not a horror picture."

The genre classification on these (and probably other) films has been locked, so it can no longer be changed, which points to the most significant aspect of the snoots' crusade, and why I decided to write this piece: Officialdom, in the person of IMDb's "genre manager," has inappropriately sided with this tiny, noisier-than-knowledgeable minority, carving its inane, ill-informed, and inaccurate assertions into stone, and even ignoring IMDb's own genre guidelines in order to do so:

"Horror should contain numerous consecutive scenes of characters effecting a terrifying and/or repugnant narrative throughout the title."

That is, frankly, terrible as a guideline, in that it excludes, from "horror," a large percentage of the total horror films ever made, particularly the older classics.[5] More to the point, though, some of the movies it definitely doesn't exclude are the very ones the snoots have challenged. ALIEN, THE SIXTH SENSE, SE7EN, PREDATOR, and both JAWS and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS--both officially and permanently excluded from the "horror" genre by the genre manager--not only fit the definition, but couldn't fit it more precisely if they'd been intentionally designed to do so. Only by willfully ignoring even this excruciatingly narrow guideline--so narrow as to be, practically speaking, worthless--can they be excluded from "horror."

The practical effects of all of this is that "horror" is in danger of being reduced, in the database, to an absurdly truncated category, shorn of many of its best-known films, while the genres usually used as replacements for it are, by this abuse, being stretched to the point of meaninglessness. Someone attempting to actually use the database to find horror movies ends up getting a very incomplete selection, while those looking for things like mysteries and thrillers end up getting tons of movies that are neither. A portion of the database is being rendered increasingly useless by the actions of the snoots.

For my part, I don't like the snoots. I don't like the poisonous blend of loud arrogance and complete ignorance they demonstrate when they crawl out of their holes to offer their idiotic assertions in public.[6] I don't like people who are supposed to be responsible moderators who, instead, abuse their power by becoming partisans of such idiocy by ignoring even their own guidelines in order to carve it into stone and place it beyond challenge.

I do love movies. I do love horror movies. I like the IMDb Horror board, even for all of its shortcomings. It's the liveliest of the IMDb boards, and I'm fond of a lot of the folks who post there--they've been the ones bringing attention to this problem, and I'm certainly with them all the way. To them, I would say, you're right--don't ever give up. Feed the snoots to the damn sharks, and let them explain, as they're being gobbled down, if the experience is thrilling or horrifying.

--j.

---

[1] It's also a sort of follow-up to an excellent, stripped-down monster movie director Steven Spielberg had made three years earlier. In DUEL, the "monster" was a lumbering behemoth of a semi (whose driver is never seen), which pursued motorist Dennis Weaver across desert highways with murderous intent, and JAWS makes plenty of references to it (Spielberg has said he viewed it a sort of sequel to DUEL).

[2] The idea of horrors being generated by man tampering with nature is an element of horror cinema with a lineage stretching back nearly as far as the film medium itself (since at least Thomas Edison's 1910 adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN).

[3] The database allows for a film to carry multiple genre classifications. Some have as many as six or seven. This makes the snoots' insistence on removing "horror" from movies that are clearly horror films even more offensive.

[4] A note to those who do make those arguments over this movie: I'm not writing about you when I'm writing about snoots.

[5] And the "horror" definition is only one of many prominent problems with the guidelines.

[6] JAWS features a 25-ft. long great white shark (the largest verified great white on record was only 21 ft., and it was found over a decade after the movie), one that is supernaturally powerful--we see it uproot a pier, drag around a large boat, and haul multiple barrels full of air beneath the surface of the water. Rather than being nomadic, like real sharks, it vindictively plagues the same island community. It makes human beings its regular diet, and even jumps on to a boat to sink it so that it may eat its passengers. It's a movie monster, and literally nothing about it is normal, yet when I started writing about it in relation to genre classification over the weekend, "Motley moth," one of the most clownish of the snoot clowns, wrote, to me, "You need to study marine biology. There is nothing that happens in Jaws that could not happen in real life. Everything the shark does has been observed in real life. There is nothing in its behavior that is unnatural, bizarre, or previously undocumented. It was a scientifically accurate portrayal of a large predator in its natural environment. I'm not trying to insult you. I'm just giving you the facts."

SWAMP THING (1982)

2010-03-19T22:09:00.000-04:00

"Not long ago, in the unexplored reaches of an unmapped swamp, the creative genius of one man collided with another's evil dream, and a monster was born. Too powerful to be destroyed, too intelligent to be captured, this being still pursues its savage dream."

Some clunky wording, but an opening that does manage, at first, to strike a chord of myth, and with it begins Wes Craven's SWAMP THING, a movie as uneven as the legend. Its full-scale rise-to-the-level-of-mythical moments are there, to be sure--they're just few and far between. It's moments of thud-and-blunder are there, as well, and while they don't entirely sink the project, they do condemn it to failing to live up to its potential.

It's potential was quite significant, too. The then-defunct DC comic on which it was based is excellent, and excellently suited for screen adaptation. Creators Len Wein and Berni Wrightson crafted a dark fantasy world where evil wizards in foreboding castles schemed to take their revenge against the society that had spurned them, and red-eyed werewolves haunted fog-shrouded Scottish moors, and dark caves held Lovecraftian creatures-from-beyond who plotted the downfall of the universe, and, at the center of it all, a man made monster by science. "Swamp Thing" was part of a renaissance of moody, excellent--and utterly under-appreciated--horror comics that appeared in the 1970s as long-standing Comics Code restrictions on the genre were lifted.

The movie falls well short of the comic, but in much the same way as the Grand Canyon is a bit of a ditch, there's a bit of a gap between the standard set by the comic and Bad, and, overall, the movie falls into it, often frustratingly so. Craven, a horror specialist, was a solid choice for director, but, oddly enough, his adaptation isn't a horror picture. It's an uncomfortable cross-breeding of a contemporary action picture with what would, in the '30s, be classified as a "weird tale." The weird end of it works. The action end of it mostly doesn't.

The cast is a genre fan's dream. Ray Wise is Alec Holland, a brilliant scientist working on a super-secret government project to build a better vegetable, plants with a stronger survival instinct capable of averting a future famine. Holland has set up shop in a particularly photogenic--and particularly swampy--swamp in Middle of Nowhere, U.S.A., and, as the film opens, we enter his world via stunningly beautiful genre fave Adrienne Barbeau. She plays Alex Cable, a new agent assigned to the project (her predecessor having been eaten by a gator). Barbeau has a great part in this; her character is smart, resourceful, and gets to kick a lot of ass as she thwarts the bad guys at every turn. The head bad guy on the end of all that thwarting is Anton Arcane, a shadowy villain intent on stealing Holland's work and using it to blackmail an increasingly hungry world. Louis Jourdan is probably the only actor in the world who could have made Arcane work, as written. The character is the sort of soft-spoken, laid back mastermind villain who sits around his posh estate sipping brandy while telling one of his doe-eyed followers how brilliant he is. It's the sort of part over which most actors would tend to ladle the camp. Jourdan instead plays it utterly straight, and utterly sells it. One of his followers of a significantly less than doe-eyed variety is David Hess, the World Champion of Cinematic Sadists, who, as Arcane's chief henchman Ferret, gets to run riot through all his boss's very dirty work. It's the kind of work Ferret really seems to love, and the casting of Hess represents another perfect mating of actor and role. Arcane tries to put the snatch on the plant project, Cable makes off with the notebook containing the secret of Holland's formula, Holland ends up doused in his own chemical stew, and it combines with the swamp into which he dives to transform him into a muck-encrusted, ambulatory humanoid plant-monster, played by Dick Durock. Holland, now the Swamp Thing, spends the rest of the movie trying to protect Cable from Arcane and his thugs.

That's the point at which things go awry. There are some good and even great moments thrown in along the way--the monstrous Holland's return to his now-destroyed lab, some great bits with a country-store-minder named Jude (Reggie Batts, who steals every scene he's in), a great scene between Cable and the creature when she discovers he's Holland--but, for the most part, much of the film's mid-section drops into underplotted-action-movie mode, and becomes a repetitive--and increasingly tedious--series of chases and escapes with Holland's notebook as the MacGuffin. A lot of it is badly done, a consequence of insufficient budget, the restrictions inherent in a PG-rated film (even the far more liberal PG rating of 1982), and just plain ill-conception. All of it looks as if it belongs in an entirely different movie. Harry Manfredini's score has the same problem. In its quieter moments, it's excellent, understated, and perfectly suited to the material. The opening piece can even make the word "weird" pop into your head. When it switches to action-movie overdrive, it's loud, booming, with martial elements in the mix, and, while it does what it can to build suspense and is well mated to what's on the screen, it's just as out-of-place.

The movie recovers in its final act. Lots of weird goings on, some strange images, a final showdown between Holland and Arcane. Like the opening act of the film, it's much closer to the spirit of the comic, but "closer," there, shouldn't necessarily be read as making the movie a horse-shoe or a hand grenade. It's entertaining. It could have been great.

--j.

Ang Lee's HULK, and the Tyranny of Low Expectations

2010-03-09T01:11:00.000-05:00

There's a reason practically nothing that ever comes out of Hollywood is original. The business suits holding the purse-strings at big studios don't want to take risks. They want the tried-and-true, over and over again. A successful formula is regarded as a priceless commodity, to be milked until every dime has been squeezed from it, then shelved, so it can be pulled out in 10 or 15 years, dusted off, and put through another good milking.

Upbudget "blockbuster" movies in particular aim for the lowest common denominator. They're designed around the theory that, if the viewer is given anything unfamiliar, the film will lose some of its potential audience, and is to be regarded as a risk rarely ever judged worthy of undertaking. The old dictum "nothing succeeds like success" is taken to its most ridiculous extreme in these films. They're almost invariably heavily derivative of some past success. Dialogue is kept to the absolute minimum, and what little is allowed is kept to the absolute simplest--usually a string of time-tested clichés, present for no other purpose than to act as a sort of obligatory glue holding together the explosions and CGI effects. These films don't want you to have to think, because doing so would alienate non-thinkers. Those clichés are easier. After all, they became clichés because people reacted to them before. The movies are even designed to tell you exactly what emotion you should be experiencing. It isn't enough for Spielberg to show you the horrors of the Omaha beach landing in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN--he then has to show you the tearful soldier, and give you the long, slow pan over all the scattered corpses to somber John Williams music. In case anyone got the idea it was a pleasant experience.

Even idiots, I suppose, need entertainment. The problem with most Hollywood fare--particularly the "blockbuster" breed--is that almost all of it is aimed at idiots, and actively alienates anyone else. Movies like the TRANSFORMERS atrocities, the last three abominations traveling under (and travestying) the name of STAR WARS, or anything ever touched by the hand of Roland Emmerich may be great for selling tickets to cretins and peddling plenty of tie-in merchandise, but they're dreadfully stupid, unengaging, and actively insulting to anyone who isn't a complete moron. They make lots of money, of course. There are lots of morons out there.

This doesn't mean there are no good, big pictures. It can be taken as a truism that personal art films don't get hundred-million-dollar budgets, but Hollywood's "nothing succeeds like success" ethos does create a hierarchy of certain filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of generating box-office gold, and, while many of those who rise to the top of the heap are pop hacks, studio stooges, and shit merchants like Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay, and Brett Ratner, some of them are genuinely talented, and, as proven successes, are sometimes allowed to take a crack at the big pictures, and are often given a much freer hand than would normally be allowed on a show on which the budget had taken serious wing.

Ang Lee is one of the latter. A few years ago, he helmed HULK, Universal's uber-budget screen adaptation of Marvel Comics' mighty, gamma-irradiated Jekyll-and-Hyde. In real time, critical response to it was mostly quite positive. The popular response was very different. HULK suffered massive box-office drop-off after its first weekend, was written off as a flop (though its eventual gross doubled its budget), spawned a sequel constructed around the idea of making a movie as different from the original as possible, and today, nearly 7 years later, is routinely reviled by those who haunt the internet, and placed in the company of ELEKTRA and CATWOMAN whenever the worst comic-to-film adaptations are discussed.

In general, I consider the state of contemporary film criticism to be rather poor. HULK, however, was a case where the pros mostly had it right. It is a big-budget "blockbuster" flick, with all the baggage that implies. No film of that origin is ever going to be RASHOMON. It is, however, also an excellent film, one of the best comic-to-screen adaptations we've ever had. It isn't perfect. There are a few scenes that don't work, some corners that are cut, a clunky line or two in the script, and an epilogue that should have been better, but with all it's flaws, it's still a mini-masterpiece, and when measured against nearly everything else that's produced on a budget with a comparable number of zeroes, that "mini" seems more like an extraneous qualifier.

HULK tells the story of Bruce Banner, a brilliant but emotionally repressed scientist whose calm exterior conceals repressed childhood trauma. When a lab accident reacts with his unique physiology (a product of medical experiments by his batshit crazy father), the cork pops from the bottle, and all that concentrated bad mojo is unleashed in the form of a full-body transformation into a huge green monster that grows in strength as it grows in rage. Jennifer Connelly plays Bruce's scientist colleague and estranged love, who is drawn to Bruce because his emotional distance plays into her daddy issues. And the daddy she's trying to find in another and fix by proxy is none other than the man who put away Bruce's own crazy father decades earlier.

It's a long story.

And that's one of HULK's strengths. The story is complex and involving, the polar opposite of the typically brainless excretions of the blockbuster factories.

That's also the beginning of HULK's problem with the audience it initially drew. Far too many of those who, in 2003, trekked to their local movie-houses to take in the opening-night show assumed they'd be getting a typical big Hollywood summer picture. With their heads filled with anticipation of two-plus plotless hours of a brainless monster brainlessly breaking things, they were utterly bewildered by having, instead, stumbled upon an actual film; well plotted, well paced, well played by a first-rate cast. Dashing expectations can be a risky proposition, when it comes to movies. Usually, when a film so exceeds our expectations, though, it's taken as a source of pleasant surprise. Not so with HULK. In a chillingly perverse twist, the movie, instead, has stood repeatedly condemned for, in effect, being better than was assumed it would be. Worse, it routinely took (and still takes) lumps for even trying to be more than just another disposable popcorn flick. It's both a "summer blockbuster" and a movie based on a comic book, and there's a prevalent attitude that projects in those categories are supposed to be mindless rubbish for dazzling bumpkins. "Fun," defined in the most reductionist manner, and nothing more. Any pretense of being something more is just that--a pretense. An affectation of importance. An attempt to blow up the material into something more than it is. HULK, it seems, just doesn't know its place; it commits the sin of aiming for something more than mediocrity. In a sense, this is a testament to the film's quality. It clearly doesn't cater to such low expectations.

But that's a big part of why it took a beating from a loud segment of the public. Even allegedly professional film critics like Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum complained about the lack of "big dumb fun." Ang Lee, as she sees it, "anesthetizes his Marvel Comics mutant with a mopey psychological back story that leaves little unanalyzed space for fun." Charles Taylor, the gibbering git who used to grind out what passed for movie reviews over at Salon, dismissed HULK as a "leaden, pretentious flick" that is "just schlock art for the NPR set." It takes itself too "seriously." Lee "has no taste for the low." Lee "seems to be under the impression that he's working from myth instead of a good pulpy premise." And so on.

This is Beavis-and-Butthead level "criticism," albeit dressed for Madison Avenue by a few words of more than two syllables. It's also, substantively, fairly typical of (if slightly more literate than) the standard grief the film gets from its detractors on the internet in the years since its release. In general, those who fulminate against it fail to make any real case for it being a deficient production. Honestly, on what planet is a movie rightfully considered problematic if it isn't dumb enough?

And that's only the beginning. Feeding off one another, advocates of HULK's irredeemable suction roll out a small, standard litany of related complaints with a regularity that numbs the mind. That's also the effect generated by the complaints themselves, which--hewing, always, to that same Beavis-and-Butthead level--amount to anything-and-the-kitchen-sink efforts to rationalize a dislike of the movie that, in truth, doesn't really seem to be connected to any of the proffered reasons. The movie is said to be poorly paced. It isn't. This is an effort to portray a personal shortcoming of the viewer as a problem with the film itself. Modern viewers with no attention span be advised up front that you may find HULK challenging. The CGI Hulk character is bashed, and it became fashionable to demeaningly compare it to Shrek. Other than both being green, the two characters have no similarities, and the larger complaint, even if taken in any way seriously, falls into the category of whining about superficialities. Special effects aren't a story; they're just a means of telling one. I'm not a fan of CGI, but the CGI Hulk was competent, and, for its time, state-of-the-art. If the criticism isn't aimed at the technology itself (and it isn't), it is without substance. You find few HULK detractors who don't knock the movie by noting that, when the mutant dogs appear, one of them is a poodle. And so on.

That's not to say the film isn't subject to any number of legitimate criticisms. It's just that most of what it gets doesn't fall into that category. Simply put, anyone who would throw out HULK in a discussion of all-time-worst comic adaptations, or, worse, mention it, in this same context, in the same breath as something like ELEKTRA or BATMAN AND ROBIN is, to put it bluntly, a clown. Further, criticizing a movie because it isn't sufficiently dumb actively discourages even attempting to rise above the level of such failed projects, and I find this to be reprehensible. Ang Lee was aiming for something more, with HULK, and he succeeded admirably.

That is, of course, my own conclusion, and no one is bound to agree with it. I don't insist that a fan of typical Hollywood summer fare actually offer some rational critique of the picture--I'm not a cruel man. I do, however, insist that, for anyone who expects to be taken seriously, HULK must be accepted or rejected for what it really is, not for having fallen short of some inane standard invented solely for the purpose of making HULK fall short of it. For my part, I think it's a misunderstood, if relatively minor, masterpiece, a film in the same vein as (if not necessarily on par with) BLADE RUNNER, EXCALIBUR, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST--all generally snubbed in their day, all eventually rediscovered, all now just as generally hailed as classics. I'd like to think this is the fate that one day awaits HULK. It certainly deserves it.

--j.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)

2010-02-04T04:11:00.000-05:00

Last night on Turner Classic Movies was an overly rare airing of INHERIT THE WIND, Stanley Kramer's most excellent epic tale of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, wherein a high-school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee was criminally charged for teaching human evolution in the classroom in violation of a recently-minted state law banning the practice. The movie doesn't represent the history of the actual trial, not by a log shot. It's closer to what would, today, be called a "reimagining." The reimagining in this case being the work of the 1955 play on which the film is based.

It isn't history.

It is, however, a great history lesson. It's just that the history in question isn't the Scopes trial; it's the McCarthy era. The environment recreated in the film isn't that of Dayton in 1925; it's that of the U.S. in the years immediately preceding the play's creation. The dour, sour, assbackwards herd uncritically following mouthy demagogues to the point of threatening to blot out the spirit of inquiry itself is a representation of those who mindlessly fell in behind the likes of Joe McCarthy in those dark, early-Cold-War years. This is what the film really portrays, and this is what it resoundingly, thoroughly, and very effectively repudiates.

The man in charge behind the camera, the always-socially-conscious Stanley Kramer, cooked up a whole slew of classics as both a producer and a director over the years--HIGH NOON, THE DEFIANT ONES, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG--but this one is definitely one of the best (and my personal favorite). He masterfully melds what is, on the surface, a snarling, snapping cage-match between free inquiry and superstition with the obvious McCarthyist subtext to form a firm alloy of daringly first-rate drama that starts with a bang and doesn't let up until the final curtain. One way in which the movie is very true to the spirit of the real Scopes trial is in presenting the atmosphere surrounding it: It was one big show. A whole town and trial proceeding-made-carnival. In 1925, the whole world really was watching, and everyone in that little town with the big spotlight on it seemed to revel in it. The movie is a very loud, unsubtle, gloriously bombastic tale about Really Big Issues, writ really large, and writ damn well, as well.

That "damn well" is brought to life by as good a cast as one could ask. Long-time Hollywood hands Spencer Tracy and Frederic March take the top billing and center-stage, squaring off as the film's stand-ins for real-life Scopes trial combatants Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Twenty-nine years earlier, in 1931, March had starred in an excellent version of DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE. Ten years after that, Spence took over the role for a solid remake. The two films are rightly considered the best screen adaptations of the tale, and one wonders if this may have been part of the reason their stars were chosen for INHERIT THE WIND. Tracy and March both get to show a little Jekyll and a little Hyde in the course of it. Gene Kelly doesn't dance a step, but does kick all sorts of ass as the H.L. Mencken stand-in who gets some of the funniest lines. Always-rock-solid Claude Akins is suitably misguided as the awful town preacher who reigns rhetorical hellfire and brimstone down on his earthly enemies, in a subplot that gives March's Bryan a look at the terrible genie he's unbottled. Dick York is, to be honest, a little undercooked as the films' John Scopes stand-in, but his part isn't as loud, and he can't help but look a little small when everyone else is chewing the scenery as vigorously as they do here.

And chewing scenery they do, indeed. Tracy's Darrow and March's Bryan are old pals, but they couldn't disagree more over the issue at hand, and they go at each other like two great, carnivorous dinosaurs, locking horns with blustery elan over a choice piece of meat. Their two-man riot comes to a head in the film's climactic setpiece: Tracy's Darrow, prevented from presenting a defense, opts for the unusual maneuver of calling to the stand March's Bryan--the prosecutor--as an expert on the Bible. The antagonists turn the froth up to 11 and try to bash one another into oblivion, with the prize being the future itself. INHERIT THE WIND makes the issue that big--The Future Itself. It's incredible to think this big courtroom showdown really happened. It seems like the sort of thing that could only happen in a movie, but in spite of this movies' many liberties with the historical record, it does, in fact, lift a great deal of that epic battle royale directly from the trial transcripts. March-as-Bryan holds his own, at first, giving the sharp quips as well as he gets them, but every McCarthy eventually has his Joseph Welch moment. He represents religious myth given the force of law against free inquiry, and as the examination moves along, Tracy-as-Darrow digs in, mercilessly exposing him as without knowledge or even curiosity about the world in which he lives. The implications are as obvious as they are devastating.

Forget that O.J. Simpson bullshit. This was the trial of the 20th century. INHERIT THE WIND, it's true, isn't really about it, but it effectively takes some of the issues it raised, used them to comment on McCarthyism, and its message is as important and, in the age of Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys, as current as it ever was. And it's a damn good movie.

--j.

SMALLVILLE: Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating Superboy

2010-01-25T03:37:00.000-05:00

[Note: the remarks that follow are based on the first four seasons of SMALLVILLE, and are written without knowledge of subsequent seasons.]

SMALLVILLE is terribly addictive. The ongoing revisionist tale of Superman's youth was several seasons old before I first jumped on board. Exposed to it by a friend, I started at the beginning and found myself fanatically absorbing the entire first season in four days and most of the second in a few more before, other life matters intervening, slowing my intake to a more leisurely pace and, at the dawn of season 3, putting it aside entirely. I picked it up again in recent days and, in spite of some naysayers who'd told me its quality dropped off at that point, found it no less captivating. I've flown through season 3 and most of season 4, and decided, tonight, I'd finally sit down and write about it a little, under the title I conceived for a review of it after I first started watching it nearly five years ago.

SMALLVILLE is Stan Lee's version of Superboy. Stan, mind you, has had nothing whatsoever to do with the production of SMALLVILLE, and he never wrote DC Comics' Superboy or any of the Superman books on which the show is based, but the show's debt to Stan is, like the comic medium's debt to him, virtually incalculable. When he hit his stride, Stan was the proletarian poet of pathos, a prolific pioneer of funny-book fantasy who fashioned fascinatingly flawed characters, relentlessly burdened by brimming barrels of almost unbearable angst. In his hands, their extraordinary abilities were often as much curse as blessing, and their lives were divided between living out soap-opera-ish personal dramas and bravely battling their way through grand, operatic adventures filled with wicked irony, plentiful plot twists, resounding triumphs, and torturous tragedy. And Stan loved alliteration. Credit where credit's due, SMALLVILLE picked up its own penchant for same from the DC books from which it was drawn, but it's definitely Marvel, rather than DC Comics, to which the show is most indebted. Even those viewers with no knowledge of Stan's work would immediately recognize the show in the description I just offered. If Stan and the Marvel gang had created Superboy back in the 1960s, this is how it would have been, and if Stan and the Marvel gang hadn't done what they did then, there wouldn't be a SMALLVILLE today.

A lot of people on the internet, it seems, wouldn't find the latter to be so terrible a thing, and though my overall assessment of the series certainly differs from theirs, I'd even agree with a lot of the criticism they've directed at it, but they'd be wrong to refract my remarks about its addictiveness as quips about addictions often being bad things. SMALLVILLE, it's true, suffers from many of the same weaknesses as the '60s Marvel books it so resembles. It has a lot of their strengths, as well, though, and there's a very good reason why Marvel, in that era, became the industry leader in this sort of story and remained so for nearly five decades while DC's post-Marvel history became, primarily, a story of repeated efforts to copy what Marvel was doing.

Rather than bland stuffed shirts, Stan wanted his characters to be "real people with real problems." As Spider-Man, the Thing, and so many others learned under his direction, sometimes it sucks to be a superman. With great powers came great responsibilities, but the same abilities that could allow one of sufficiently altruistic bent to be a great benefit to mankind could also make one's life a real mess. Clark Kent, SMALLVILLE's embryonic Superman, learns the hard way that living with a secret identity means living a perpetual lie that requires daily deception of almost everyone around him. Adolescence is hard enough as it is, but Clark finds it's even harder when--X-Men style--it brings sudden manifestations of new powers he doesn't understand and can't control very well. Trying to live something akin to a normal life can, in any case, be rather tricky when one is forever having to run off and save some damsel (or dude) in distress, or battle some dangerous mutant. Throw in the revelation that he's from another planet, and that his alien birth-father may have intended him to conquer the earth, AND that said father seems to have left a computerized simulation of himself on earth to "guide" Clark to that goal, whether he likes it or not, and you've got a serious angst-fest on your hands.

Stan loved constructing his little soap-opera subplots and milking them for all they were worth, and SMALLVILLE lifts a page (or two, or a thousand) from his many books, setting up a love triangle between Clark, Lana Lang (the girl he adores), and Chloe Sullivan (a girl who adores him).[1] The fourth party to the affair is Clark's secret, which, like that of Stan's Spider-man, perpetually fouls him up with both women. Clark's affection for Lana has always seemed very contrived to me, because it's something that has never been given any sort of real foundation. Lana isn't someone with whom Clark falls in love because of who she is. She's just Clark's dream girl, and why he would find her so compelling is never explored. Making it worse is the fact that Lana (Kristen Kruek) is, unfortunately, never really allowed to be very interesting. It's hard to say much about her character--she doesn't really have much of one. Chloe, on the other hand, is a keeper. She's an original creation of the show, an intrepid girl reporter for the school newspaper--essentially the series' stand-in for Lois Lane.[2] One of the shortcomings of the tri-angle is that Chloe--so well-written and so vibrantly brought to life by the beautiful Allison Mack--is so much better a character than cold fish Lana that it's almost impossible to believe Clark (or anyone else) would prefer Lana to her. It's impossible to watch and not think "Clark is an IDIOT!" But, warts and all, the dynamics of this triangle underlie, to some degree, nearly every episode after it's introduced, and the series has managed to wring some very touching moments from it.

Then, there are those pesky Luthors, who are forever trying to uncover Clark's secrets, and have limitless resources at their disposal toward that end. SMALLVILLE appropriates the notion of a teenage friendship between Clark and Lex Luthor, the man who will one day become his greatest enemy. In the early seasons of the show, Lex has some sinister quirks about him, but he isn't a villain yet, and the series has, as an aim, charting, alongside Clark's rise to hero-hood, Lex's decline to dastardly no-goodnik. By way of character motivation, the Super-comics posited, for decades, the notion that, as teens, Lex and Superboy were friends, but that this ended in a lab accident for which Lex blamed Superboy--the decades of feral enmity that followed were laid at the feet of Luthor's anger at Superboy/man over losing his hair in that accident. A fellow so brilliant he could create devices that threatened entire worlds thus tragically spent much of his adult life trying to kill Superman, rather than simply joining the Hair Club For Men. Fortunately, those behind SMALLVILLE had a much better idea, and brought it to large life in one of the series' great original contributions to the Superman mythos, the character of Lionel Luthor, Lex's father. Lionel is expressionistic foreshadowing personified--he is the very bad guy Lex will one day become.[3] Lionel gives Lex something he didn't have in the comics, a past that plausibly explains why he turns out the way he does. Lionel and Lex go at each other like cats and dogs, their relationship a perpetual feud between a seemingly omnipotent chessmaster and his unwilling understudy. Lex is horrified by the thought of becoming his father's son, and goes to great lengths to resist it, which makes for an interesting character study. The series makes good use of the fact that the viewer already knows how it turns out in the end by making an interesting, well-played, and original tale of how it happens; it's a story we've never seen, and it's a good one.

Michael Rosenbaum is spot-on as Lex, who, in his hands, is aloof, obsessive, and seems possessed of a terrible darkness lurking just below his calm exterior. If I have one serious complaint about the show's treatment of Lex, it's that I dislike how so many bad guys who come along are allowed to so easily makes him their bitch. His father is always ten steps ahead of him, and that always seems about right. Lex, however--even young Lex--needs to be at least ten steps ahead of everyone else (and with most "ordinary" people, he is). Lex Luthor doesn't call some security firm to deal with tattooed thugs who phase through walls, rough him up, and blackmail him--he gets his hands on some badass Anti-Tattoed Phasing Thug technology and makes them wish they'd never been born. In the first two seasons, he ends up on the wrong end of abuse way too often, and comes across, as a consequence, as far too ineffectual. You can't build an arch-villain that way, even if those abusing him are possessed of super-powers.

A lot of people end up with super-powers in Smallville. Clark's arrival on Earth, as a child, was accompanied by a punishing "meteor shower"--a hail of Kryptonite, the radioactive chunks of Clark's destroyed home planet Krypton. In the comics, Kryptonite is lethal to Superman, but harmless to humans. The creators of SMALLVILLE decided, instead, to allow it to affect ordinary people, making its radiation a source of all manner of bizarre mutations. This offered a handy means of providing Clark with super-powered adversaries, but the basic plotline--someone is exposed to Kryptonite, gains super-powers, goes nuts, and is, in the end, stopped by Clark--was, for the longest time, repeated almost every week. The repetitiveness of the "freak of the week" formula became a top complaint by the show's detractors.

The show is, of course, guilty as charged on the point. It did run the formula to ribbons in the early seasons. Whatever one makes of the stories for which the freaks were used, there are other types of stories to tell in a series of this nature. Relying so heavily on the formula didn't give them a lot of room to be told.[4] The freaks, who are mostly one-shot characters, are sometimes allowed to take up too much of an already-limited running time, time that would be better spent with some of the regular characters and extended plotlines. And a small town in Kansas were, nearly every week, someone gains super-powers and goes on a murderous rampage, and practically no one notices? Please.

But I do think those who most harshly criticize the freaks tend to overlook the good use the writers get out of most of them. SMALLVILLE's writers have demonstrated an enduring fascination with creating parallel storylines that compare and contrast the characters and their lives by holding them up against various mirror images of themselves--it's virtually the defining characteristic of the show's storytelling. The freaks have been especially useful in facilitating this. Taking another page from Stan Lee's playbook, the freaks are expressionistic constructs. They have quirks, obsessions, cravings that mirror those of the regular cast, and, gaining powers that allow them to act on such impulses without restraint, are made to serve as twisted, amped-up-to-the-nth-degree alternate versions of the series regulars. Even given the repetitiveness of the basic "freak of the week" formula, this has allowed for some first-rate storytelling. Clark is forever pining for Lana? The writers throw in a freak who is utterly obsessed with her, and eventually decides to do something about it. Chloe craves the warmth of a romantic relationship? Send a freak her way who craves warmth, as well--he drains the body heat off those around him, leaving them corpse-sicles. SMALLVILLE is a show on which the characters are learning and growing as they go, and this provides a useful means of dramatizing part of that process.

While the freaks sometimes take away from time that would be better spent elsewhere, they also often raise themes that are, unfortunately, too rich to properly mine in the time alloted. One of the rare freaks who made a return appearance, for example, was a shape-shifting girl who assumed the identity of others, one after another--as a consequence of doing so too often and for too long, she'd lost her own. A very appropriate theme for SMALLVILLE. Her return appearance in which it was broached had the potential to be a real keeper, but, squeezed into a single, already-cramped episode, the idea barely got lip-service.

That isn't to suggest the series doesn't find something closer to the right balance more often than not. It does. There are weaknesses in the writing, though, there's no denying that. The generous rehashing of the "freak of the week" plot isn't the only repetitive element in the writers' work. Among other things, Chloe and, especially, Lana are stalked, kidnapped, and otherwise menaced far too often. It's a convention of the genre, it's true, but if it's going to be so overused, the writers need to at least show a little more imagination in how and why it's done. Blatantly contrived drama rears its ugly head from time to time. Clark's inexplicable attraction to and preference for Lana is only one example. Another is Clark's horrified overreaction, in the pilot, to learning he was an alien. Still another is a pair of episodes with a telepathic kid who is dying. Clark becomes very attached to him and starts speaking of him as his brother, but the episodes never establish why he would come to feel this way, and the viewer can't even come close to buying it. It just comes across as hokey and insincere[5] The series is woefully in need of something that establishes a firm rationale for Clark keeping his powers secret from his inner circle of friends. We haven't really been given one, and, watching episode after episode, it's impossible to believe he would be so secretive for no real reason, given how badly it disrupts his life. To their credit, the writers do seem to recognize this, and make an occasional effort to address the matter. Never, in my view, particularly satisfactorily.

One of the least forgivable shortcomings in the writing is the terminal underwriting of Clark's adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. For large portions of the early seasons, the writers treated them as little more than props. They were almost entirely undeveloped as characters, and, after the show established itself, were given virtually nothing to do. Their function too often became standing around looking grimly concerned about Clark, reciting cliche homilies, and repeatedly offering the same two or three canned sentiments warning him against the many dangers he may face in anything he may decide to do. Their dialogue eventually became virtually interchangeable from episode to episode. In the second season, Martha started getting some other things to do, and season 3 saw the beginning of some work on Jonathan, but as of 3/4 of the way through season 4, both characters are still terribly neglected.[6] One could argue it isn't really their show, but it seems gnawingly shortsighted when the parts are essayed by John Schneider and Anette O'Toole. They do their best to breath life into the characters, and do, at times, manage some nice touches, but it's unfortunate that, with two such solid talents at their disposal, the writers haven't shown more vision.

That isn't the only case of shortsightedness by the series' creators (though it is, in my view, the most glaring). While individual episodes are often quite good, the writers don't always keep an eye on the bigger picture. The show is going somewhere. They tend to lose sight of this. Continuity gaffes also crop up from time to time. Martha Kent, at one point, goes to work for Lionel Luthor, which inflames Jonathan, but, after Martha discovers that Lionel has accumulated a tremendous amount of data on Clark (one of the series best plot-twists yet), Jonathan starts to see the benefit of having her in a position to keep tabs on Lionel's activities. This happens at the end of an episode; by the beginning of the next--only seconds later, when watching it on disc as I do--it's as if that never happened, and, after having gone into a rage at Lionel, Jonathan stands credibly accused of his attempted murder.

All these caveats aside, though, the writing on the show is, as a rule, quite good,[7] and that Quite Good makes a good mate with all the Quite Goods I've already mentioned. And there are plenty of others. The series' cinematography is of the quality of a feature film--rich, expressionistic, beautiful. Lots of imaginative camera-work. The production design is uniformly first-rate. The series' technical elements are superb in every aspect. It's a regular breeding pool of Quite Good that vastly outweighs the series' shortcomings, and its ultimate offspring is, in my view, the best thing other media have done for the Superman mythos since the first Donner movie.[8] It is endearing, and, I suspect, will prove enduring (if, with 9 seasons under its belt and more likely to follow, it can't already be said to be so). Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster would have Quite Good reason to be proud of it.

Stan Lee, I think, has even more reason.

--j.

---

[1] Actually, this was preceded by another Stan-esque triangle involving Clark, Lana, and Whitney Fordman (Lana's beau as the show opens), but Whitney was edged out of the picture very quickly--he'd been effectively gone for some time before its made official.

[2] It's hard to overstate how well she's done; Chloe is a solid-enough character that she could carry a series of her own.

[3] While the series creators deserve a round of applause for their part in crafting Lionel, the real kudos belong to John Glover for making such an evil bastard such a relentless delight to watch; Lionel gets some of his complexity from the page, but Glover is really the one who brings it to life and makes it work, and he so owns the role, it's difficult to imagine anyone else pulling it off, and impossible to imagine anyone doing it as well.

[4] But, to be fair, the series does, eventually start telling some of them.

[5] The second episode, in which the boy dies, also strikes one of the most monumentally false notes of the run to date. The boy is dying, and this provides the basis for a story built around the theme of Clark coming to grips with his limitations. The boy's impending death is used to demonstrate that Clark can't help everyone. And then, of course, Clark does help the kid, taking the boy up in a hot-air balloon as he'd always wanted.

[6] The consequences of leaving them so underwritten is that the viewer can never develop a feel for who they are. This is particularly problematic in Jonathan's case, because all we ever saw him do in the early seasons is obsess over the need to maintain Clark's secret and serve up one mindless rant after another against "the Luthors." These rants were frequently astonishingly unfair, when directed at Lex, and made Jonathan come across as a real prick, with little to contradict the impression (when, in one second-season episode, Lex finally tells him to shove it, I felt like cheering). He's also prone to other behavior that makes him not only unlikeable but a rather poor father to an embryonic Superman. Several times, now, he's blindly rushed off in angry--possibly murderous--rages at other characters. Because it was never given a proper foundation, his behavior toward Martha's father, when that character was introduced, came across as remarkably petty and even cruel. Ditto regarding a character in another episode who mistakenly thought she was Clark's mother. No one writing the show seems to realize this, or think about it.

[7] In spite of the fact that it does have too much overly serious, underly naturalistic talk about "destiny," SMALLVILLE mostly avoids the stilted, unnatural dialogue and over-the-top delivery so many filmmakers impose upon genre projects of this sort. When, in season 4, Lana Lang is possessed by the spirit of a dead witch and is handled in that way, it's surprisingly jarring.

[8] From shortly after I started watching it, I began to wish Warner Brothers would simply let the show evolve into the Superman feature-film franchise it was then in the process of rebooting. After the unfortunate SUPERMAN RETURNS, I felt even more strongly that this would have been the course to follow.

APPALOOSA (2008)

2010-01-12T03:46:00.000-05:00

I like a good Western. I love a great one. I watched APPALOOSA. It's a Western. Wanted to love it. I liked it. Watch it, and you'll understand why I'm writing this way.

All right, enough of that.

APPALOOSA is the tale of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, a pair of no-nonsense town-tamers-for-hire who rent out their law-enforcement skills to the town for which the film is named after a no-good cattle baron murders the town marshal and his deputies. Westernalia ensues. There's a love interest, Indians, gun-play--everything you'd expect in a Western. The film runs nearly two hours but only has enough story for about an-hour-and-a-half, and while, overall, it isn't really a great movie, it's a reasonably good one, and certainly enough great work went into it that I didn't feel it wasted any of my time.

The movie has several things in its favor.

The first is its dialog. Fantastic writing, a crossbreed of short, clipped, stylized, Hemingwayesque hardboiled, and quasi-aristocratic 19th century formalism. Very much unlike--and even against the grain of--what's usually found in Westerns. Very good.

Ed Harris directed as well as co-starred, and you can tell an actor was behind the camera, because it's all about the characters, which can be a problem in movies directed by actors, but in this case is actually the second thing working in APPALOOSA's favor. They're good characters, or mostly good, and the cast that portray them is as rock-solid as it gets, starting at the top with Harris and Viggo Mortensen, all the way down to the bit-players. A hell of a cast.[*]

Its third strength is a subtlety in the storytelling that is quite striking. Striking as subtlety goes, anyway. APPALOOSA doesn't go for emotional or visceral manipulation, not once--it shows what's happening, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide what the characters are thinking. This gives us some ambiguity with which to play, which means every viewer, by filling in the gaps, makes it a different movie in his or her own head, and that's not only good filmmaking; it's a kind I find particularly appealing. Of course, the problem with it is that those who don't want to (or can't) use their heads will probably just end up hating it, because it seems, to them, as empty as their own heads. But a movie comprehensible to a complete moron isn't a goal particularly well-suited for the creation of quality cinema, either, in spite of what Hollywood's money-men seem to think.

APPALOOSA's fourth strength is its score, which is, like the storytelling, subtle, and often quite good. Some of it isn't at all the sort of music you generally hear in Westerns, and while some of it isn't particularly standout-ish on the scale of Really Frickin' Impressive, it does work with the picture, really coming through very well at several points in the movie. This and its original elements certainly make it worth a mention.

The film's major faults are really only two. First is that it didn't quite have enough story for its running time, which meant some padding. No big deal, really. Second, and the major one, is that, for all it has going for it, it fails to be really great. I love a great Western. I liked APPALOOSA.

What else can you say?

--j.

---

[*] Renée Zellweger, the female lead, has been singled out as an exception to this in some of the commentary on the film, which often marks her as an example of awful miscasting. I can see that perspective, but I think it's more a case of her just having a thankless part.

PANDEMIC (2009)

2009-12-31T01:58:00.000-05:00

I have a buddy. He loves movies. He's not as picky as I, though, about what he chooses to love. As he has no close family here locally, I have, for some years, now, had him spend the various holi-days with me and mine. He did this year, as usual, and brought a pile of movies to watch, as usual. Generally, he is, to be honest, terrible at picking movies--goes by whatever box cover looks cool. This year was no different. He appeared on Christmas Eve with a large pile of space-wasting genre features, as usual, and, over two days, we nevertheless watched them all, as usual.

One, in particular, stood out as exceptionally awful, a shitty little ditty called PANDEMIC.

How to put it?

One can actually feel oneself getting dumber while watching PANDEMIC, a film seemingly created by complete idiots for an apparently like-minded audience. As it went along, I made little then no effort to resist the nagging temptation to point out its many idiocies. Talking during movies is usually a no-no, but this one was just too much--it was draining some part of my soul. Even my buddy, who, having chosen it, can sometimes become defensive over that sort of thing, laughed at it with me as it went along. It gives me a sharp pain to think someone gave perhaps as much as a few million dollars to the poor fools who made it (the holiday season being an appropriate time for undue mercy, the latter shall remain nameless).

PANDEMIC is a thrill-free thriller about a small town in New Mexico that becomes infected with a disease that kills both livestock and humans. After a horse, a cow, and a rancher become infected and die from it, the town vet gets together with the town coroner and, inspecting the rancher's corpse (with "sterile" gloves left laying openly on the same table as the bloddy, diseased corpse), decide to call the Centers for Disease Control, as officials always do when a disease is so dreadful it kills a cow, a horse, and a rancher.

Within half an hour of their call, a huge military contingent arrives and quarantines the entire town.

As always happens when one calls the CDC, right? Particularly after such a terrible death toll.

The military boys don't seem to be under the command of, say, the President of the United States. They are, instead, under the command of a general who, though not the president, has, we're told, the power to issue executive orders with the force of law to the civilian population! And he does so, we're told repeatedly, under the authority of some conduct code internal to the military. And this internal military conduct code gives him the power to seal off a U.S. town from the entire world. He doesn't just keep people from moving in and out--he cuts off the mail, phone communications with the outside world, including cell phones (quite a trick!), and--horror of horrors!--even turns off the town's cable! This is said to be a town of only a few hundred people, but our veterinarian heroine is seen driving through it, post-quarantine, in one of those awful music-video-inspired existential-crisis-as-montage sequences, and there are perhaps hundreds of cars driving the multi-lane streets. An idiot character included solely for the purpose tells the second-in-command among the military brass that he's been feeling sick, fears he has the disease, has heard rumors that there is a "vaccine," and requests that he be made a test subject for it. A vaccine, of course, is worthless to those who already have a disease, but the colonel in question says there is one, and even gives it to the fellow.

And so on. In the end, the whole thing turns out to be a bio-weapon test, and one is as unsurprised by this generic turn of events as one is wholly unconcerned by it or anything else in the movie by the time it is revealed. It's hard to understate how profoundly bad is PANDEMIC. It has a script that would insult the intelligence of a 12-year-old from the sorriest excuse for a school in the U.S., and those who made it had the money to get Ray Wise and a shitload of military equipment for it (and, I'll admit, the thought that this happens in a world in which I, in an effort to finance my own film project, have had to resort to rubbing quarters together in a vain effort to get them to mate probably didn't enhance my viewing experience, either).

The mind boggles.

But at least it had a cool cover. I suppose.

--j.

A Critical Peek At What Some Critical People Wrote About SILIP

2009-12-15T05:33:00.000-05:00

Sometime early last year, I got my first look at a 1985 film called SILIP: DAUGHTERS OF EVE. It was a movie I'd bought more-or-less blind when the good people at Mondo Macabro brought it to DVD. My initial impression of the film had been that it was something of a blood-and-thunder masterpiece. A few nights ago, I pulled it off the shelf for a rewatch, and found I enjoyed it even more than the first time around.

The obligatory exposition: SILIP is set in an isolated, seaside Filipino village, and tells the story of Tonya and Selda, two locals who look at the world very differently. Tonya, lost within an extremist version of Catholic dogma, is sexually repressed to the point of near madness. She's harsh, bitter, never smiles, and divides her time between trying to beat back her natural physical urges and trying to indoctrinate the village children in her joyless ways. As the film begins, her childhood friend Selda, who has been living in Manila for some years, returns, those Big City ways having rubbed off on her. Selda is exactly the opposite of Tonya. She's sexually open, smiles, plays with children, enjoys having fun. The villagers don't much cotton to either of them, though, and, as Tonya and Selda make their way through a journey of self-discovery, a series of events lead passions to flare, jealousies to erupt, hypocrisies to rear their ugly heads, and our two protagonists to meet a terrible, tragic end. The movie is of a genre that, in its native Philippines, came to be called "bold," and it earns the word in every particular. It tells its thoughtful, multi-layered story through a sheen of wall-to-wall nudity, sex, and bloodletting that apparently led some to mark it as the exploitation film.

I was going to come here and write about it, but some impulse led me to do a little Googling first. I thought it was a great movie. I was curious as to whether anyone else had thought so. I found a like-minded assessment by Kurt Halfyard at Twitch:

"Speaking without irony or hyperbole, Silip is a bona fide masterpiece."

I can get behind that. The "m" word is overused by people who write about movies. It is, however, entirely appropriate in the case of SILIP. Halfyard has a lot of nice things to say about the film:

"It is not often that this type of essential cinematic discovery comes along..."

"Kudos to UK label Mondo Macabro for bringing this intense film out of obscurity and hopefully into a beloved place in cinema history. Surely it belongs beside Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo as one of the defining films that go after the extreme side of the human condition."

"Unlike many films labeled as extreme or exploitive cinema, Silip is a meticulously plotted, delicately structured and textured film that finds a sublime balance between thematic depth and shocking (occasionally even absurd) imagery. The two hour plus film wraps it all up in package that speaks volumes about human repression, how people individually and collectively deal with guilt and the inevitable unleashing of the beast within if things remain bottled or suppressed for too long."

And so on. Halfyard said a lot of what I would have said about the movie, if I'd just decided to write a full-scale review of it, and he probably said it better than I would have managed.

Kurt Dahlke wrote about it over at DVDTalk, and he, too, recognized it as something special. Noting that it was being sold as an exploitation film, Dahlke wrote "I can assure you that Silip is not your usual empty-headed sleaze show," and spoke glowingly of the production. "Bold viewers are Recommended to check it out." Hear, hear.

But some of Dahlke's comments about the theme of the picture suggest some confusion on his part. He talks about its "potentially disagreeable message," and, toward the end, fleshes this out:

"While the 'women are the root of all evil' message is ultimately distasteful, the truths exposed, and the path we're lead down in getting there, consists of quite a sumptuous, sensuous journey."

I wouldn't take issue with Dahlke's agreeable estimation of the film's merits, but the notion that SILIP has, as a theme, the idea that "women are the root of all evil" suggests he wasn't paying very good attention. In the movie, the villagers do, indeed, come to lay all of their ills at the feet of Tonya and Selda, the two women at the center of the story, but the film makes it very clear they're completely wrong to do so, and Dahlke even makes note of this elsewhere in his review. Imputing a pretty ugly misogynist theme where there really isn't one unfairly tarnishes the movie, and I was left wondering how Dahlke had come to a conclusion he, himself, seemed to refute.

That's when I came to Gordon Sullivan's review, over at DVD Verdict, and immediately realized this is the thing about which I was going to have to write.

Some film critics who come to be seen as a little too smart for their own good often get a lot of ribbing for cooking up overly elaborate interpretations of a movie that have little or no real connection to the intent of those who made the movie, and sometimes that ribbing is, indeed, earned, but far more often, it's the product of a basic misunderstanding of the art. Art is almost always subject to multiple interpretations. Producers of the new (awful) V television series, for example, confess surprise that their alien invaders are so widely seen as a metaphor for the ultra-right's insanely paranoid view of the Obama administration, but, watching the show, that interpretation is absolutely unavoidable. The real measure of a proffered interpretation isn't usually the stated intent of the filmmaker, it's whether or not that interpretation is supported by the film itself. V supports the Obama interpretation--positively begs it, in fact. That's why people read it as they do.

Reading a lot of film criticism, as I do, one inevitably comes across the occasional instance where a reviewer completely misses the point of a film, but I submit that no possible reading of the events in SILIP allow for Gordon Sullivan's "interpretation" of it:

"The entire story lays the downfall of humanity at the feet of women, repeating the same ridiculous biblical tripe that has subjugated women for millennia. The 'daughters of Eve' referred to in the title are raped and then burned for desiring to control their own sexuality. It's not enough that the story is this ridiculously conservative, but it's reinforced with continual violent imagery, including beatings, hot sand to the crotch, and animal killing."

Sullivan calls the film "misogynist" and asserts that, in it, "the blame for everything wrong is ultimately placed on women."

The movie doesn't adopt that point of view, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The villagers who blame Tonya and Selda for their ills are clearly shown to be wrong, and the film is utterly unsympathetic to them, and sympathetic to the two women who fall prey to them. The movie offers one of the most shocking portraits ever committed to celluloid of small-town prejudices, hypocrisy, and mob mentality overwhelming all reason and leading to a dreadful end. Tonya and Selda are presented as particularly tragic because, by the time they're set upon by the mob, they'd reconciled their conflict, come to realize they'd each made a mess of their lives, and the possibility of a better life seemed to be before them. Sullivan concedes that the men in the movie "don't come off as anything other than violent brutes," but that undermines--and, in fact, destroys--his case for the film's misogyny, its "misguided message, reinforced by the horrific fate of the protagonists," as he puts it. The women are victimized in a ghastly, protracted fashion--no one could possibly identify with their persecutors, nor does the film, at any point, ask the viewer to do so. The film's final image, dismissed by Sullivan, refutes, in rather spectacular fashion, any notion of the film as a vessel of misogynist Christian doctrine.

SILIP is excellent, and, like most works of art, subject to multiple interpretations. The things Sullivan and I write are sort of like that, too. So what am I to make of Gordon Sullivan? Is he one of those too-clever critics who out-clevered himself this time around? A simple imbecile? Someone who chose to write about a movie to which he'd paid almost no attention? Or am I the dumb one missing the point? I suppose the best anyone can do is watch the movie, read what we've written about it, and come up with one's own interpretation of who got it right.

--j.

Much Ado About Roger Corman's Oscar

2009-12-06T22:53:00.000-05:00

Roger Corman has been called a lot of things. Shrewd. Miserly. Maverick. He's been given titles like King of the Cult Film, King of the B-Movies, and the Pope of Pop Cinema. The last is probably the most appropriate, and not just because it sounds cool and Corman says he likes it. For over 50 years, Corman's particular breed of low-budget, action-oriented, socially conscious exploitation fare has graced the cinema, to the persistent delight of audiences and, in turn, to his significant profit. He's brought his talents to bear on every genre under the sun, and has even invented a few of his own. He has a finely-tuned eye for talent--it's only a little exaggeration to say it would be easier to list the big name Hollywood directors, writers, actors of recent decades who didn't get their start with Corman than those who did.

For a fellow from whom a lot of the present Hollywood Establishment sprang, though, Corman has never been an Establishment kind of guy. Far from it. For all his money and all his concern about making more of it, he's always been anti-Establishment to the core. Critics higher of brow than of cinematic acumen look down upon Corman's little operation. It's the usual complaint from this quarter: budgets too small, goals insufficiently lofty, too much concern for commerce mixed with the art.. A Corman film is far more often dismissed by such snoots as free of merit for what it is than for whatever merit it may actually possess. It was made to turn a profit--how could it be anything but terrible, right?

To put my cards on the table, it has always been my view that labeling such a perspective as worthless unfairly maligns the merely worthless by the association. I don't mind a little film snobbery. I've been accused of it myself. What I dislike is the sort of film snobbery born of this misplaced blend of ignorance and arrogance, wherein respectability can only be attained beyond a certain budget level and free from all but the mildest hint of commercial considerations, and wherein things shot quickly, cheaply, and with a vigilant eye toward Mammon are reflexively looked upon with, at best, suspicion, and, in general, with contempt. Here are the facts of life: Film is an art; it's also commerce. Making movies involves both considerations, to some extent. That's just the way it is. That's what movies are. If you don't like movies, you don't need to be watching movies.[1]

Not long ago, it was announced that Roger Corman would be receiving an honorary Academy Award for, in the words of the Academy, "his rich engendering of films and filmmakers." It was a token accolade for which a lot of his fans had been clamoring in recent years, and it would be hard for anyone with any knowledge of Corman's work and its impact on cinema to argue with the appropriateness of the award. That doesn't mean some didn't want to argue. When he picked up the trophy a few weeks ago, one of the snoots couldn't resist a snort at the very idea of bestowing such a vaunted prize upon such a lowly specimen:

"Corman, who has directed more than 50 films and produced nearly 400 (!), has never been nominated for an Oscar, probably because all of his movies are terrible. But apparently the Academy is rewarding quantity now, too. So don't give up, Uwe Boll! Just make another 300 movies!"

This snide remark by Eric D. Snider at Cinematical drew a mild retort from Scott Weinberg, a Cinematical colleague, who argued that Corman did, indeed, deserve that honorary Oscar. Snider couldn't leave bad enough alone, and returned to the subject, his premise, stated flatly, that "Roger Corman doesn't deserve an Oscar."

Snider conceded Corman was "not the worst filmmaker of all time" and thus his Uwe Boll comparison "might have been an exaggeration" (wording that suggests assertions that Snider may have any insight into the subject might have been exaggerations). He admitted he didn't really have any basis for saying "all" of Corman's movies "are terrible"; he hadn't seen them "all," of course. How many of them has he seen? The reader is left to guess. And if Snider's generalizations about Corman's body of work more closely resemble the prejudices of the snoot than the observations of one with an intimate familiarity with any significant portion of that body of work, the reader can draw his own conclusion.

Snider's peripheral arguments are weak. He rejects the idea that Corman should get an Oscar because he nurtured the talents (and usually began the careers) of such a vast array of great filmmakers. "Giving Corman an Oscar for helping them learn the ropes is like giving a high school teacher an award because his students went on to graduate from the top of their college classes.... To me, that's a weak reason to give someone an Oscar." That is, of course, a judgment call, but, as Weinberg noted in his reply to Snider, the Academy has given out these sorts of honorary awards for decades, and to recipients whose contribution to cinema was far less significant than Corman's. Snider offers a list of individuals he feels were more worthy of Academy Awards than Corman, but that never received them. Even filtering through Snider's errors (some he lists actually did receive awards, and some have been dead for decades) and his sometimes horrendous judgment[2], this argument, at best, amounts to past injustices being used to justify new ones.

Of course, Snider wouldn't see it that way, because he wouldn't see denying Corman an Oscar as an injustice. His central argument is his weakest one, hilariously outlined in sentences liberally laced with unintentional irony:

"If the Academy is giving out Oscars based on the production of quality work--which, last time I checked, was the basic idea behind the Oscars--then Roger Corman does not qualify. The vast majority of his output is mediocre at best. Some of it is downright awful. A few films are good enough on their own, but not to where any of them would deserve Oscars individually. Even as a body, those moderately good Corman movies don't outweigh the dozens--literally dozens and DOZENS--of cheap, forgettable clunkers. Producing a huge quantity of work whose overall entertainment or artistic value averages out to be somewhere between 'mediocre' and 'mediocre-plus' isn't worthy of Academy Award consideration.... Corman... never tried to make great films. He wanted to make cheap, profitable films, and to crank them out in a couple weeks. He's been extraordinarily successful at it, and there's definitely a place for that kind of product in moviedom. But again, that doesn't mesh with the philosophy of the Academy Awards, which is to reward artistic excellence."

To the snoot, it's a truism that "cheap, profitable films" could never be "great films," certainly never worthy of the notice of the Great And Powerful Academy, which prefers to honor such "artistic excellence" as was found in GLADIATOR, BRAVEHEART, CRASH, FORREST GUMP, and a mountain of other such worthless upbudget rubbish tall enough to blot out the sun. Snider asserts that none of Corman's films "would deserve Oscars individually." That just begs the question of what does win these awards, though. As I outlined in a piece last year (dealing with Best Picture awards), those in the Academy generally do a wretched job of picking winners. They tend to pass over the more deserving of their own nominees, and the genuine best pictures from most years are never even nominated at all. A lot of the films honored by Oscar are so bad, they're almost entirely forgotten within a few short years (anyone remember THE ENGLISH PATIENT?).[3] Corman, on the other hand, could take the crew of his "quick-and-sloppy movie poop factory," as Snider calls it, put together some actors, a nothing budget, and, in a few days time, create a movie that people are still watching and loving decades later, and that even manages to acquire some degree of critical respectability. Are his films really so vastly outclassed by something like CRASH? The "artistic excellence" that allowed CRASH to win Best Picture consisted solely of a massively-financed lobbying campaign aimed at Academy voters. The movie itself was terrible, more closely resembling a bad made-for-television film (or After School Special) than anything that should ever be considered for any sort of award, and the prize it did win was almost immediately recognized, widely and with little real dissent, as one of the all-time worst Best Picture decisions. Would anyone be willing to seriously argue that it was more deserving of being honored than, say, HOUSE OF USHER, Corman's first Edgar Allan Poe adaptation? Does the embarrassment that is GLADIATOR stand head-and-shoulders above DEATHRACE 2000? NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN tackled a theme Corman had handled decades earlier--and far better--in BLOODY MAMA. There are dozens--perhaps hundreds--of similar examples. In a head-to-head clash with a lot of the movies that have actually won Academy Awards, Corman's pictures would do just fine, and all the harrumphing of all the Sniders of the world wouldn't make the former any better, or the latter any worse by comparison.

Roger Corman has spent his long career crafting a wide array of entertainments of every conceivable variety and degree of quality. Plenty of them were, admittedly, awful, some even as bad as a lot of Hollywood summer blockbusters, a few as bad as Eric D. Snider would have people believe. Plenty of them were great, too, though, which is why they've endured. As a director, he was a proletarian gem. As a distributor, he brought to U.S. shores some of the best foreign films of the last few decades.[4] As a producer and mentor, he nurtured a lot of the best filmmakers we have. I have no position on the question of whether Roger Corman deserves an Academy Award. He is not of the Establishment. He doesn't need its praise. Told, a few months ago, he was under consideration, even he didn't think he'd get it. Given the Academy's history, I'm not convinced he won't be as tainted by it as honored. Still, if anyone in moviedom deserves some respectful recognition for their work, it's Corman. For anyone offering an award that symbolizes that, he's as good a recipient as they'll find.

Besides, he's always looking for ways to save a buck--the Oscar would probably make a great paper-weight.

--j.

---

[1] And my last card, if it isn't apparent, is the fact that I'm an unabashed fan of Corman. I'm someone who, in high school, was waffling on the question of the feasibility of filmmaking as a career and finally committed to the notion after reading Corman's autobiography, which is still one of the best books about moviemaking ever written.

[2] Snider points out some legitimately glaring oversights by Oscar, but cripples his case by heavily padding his list with numerous minor figures. And when you suggest it's a travesty that Corman has now been given an Oscar but that master thespian Marilyn Monroe hasn't, your case enters the realm of walking, talking, and sounding just like desperation.

[3] With his snoot's view of Corman, Snider could say his award was par for the course, but he's precluded by his snoot's view of the Oscars, that they "reward artistic excellence."

[4] He's been the American distributor for Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut, and others.

The Wolfman Passeth

2009-12-01T23:36:00.000-05:00

The news apparently went out this morning. Jacinto Molina, better known, over the last several decades, by his screen name Paul Naschy, has died from cancer at the age of 75. I didn't turn on my computer until this evening, and I suppose I may be a little late to the wake. Hopefully not too late.

Over the years, Paul Naschy essayed his own unique variation on every sort of traditional horror character in the book--a rampaging mummy, a gleefully evil warlock (who spent half the movie in which he appeared as a severed head), a way-too-healthy Dracula, a hunchback (one who operated in not just any place, but a morgue, and not just any morgue, but the Rue Morgue). But, of course, it was Waldemar Daninsky, Naschy's Byronic wolfman, which became his signature part. It was the one that launched his career, the one he obviously loved the most, the one to which he always seemed to return, and the one that gave him a lot of his best movies, and a lot of his success. FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR, Naschy's first turn as the wolfman, is what first brought Naschy to the U.S. at the dawn of the '70s. WEREWOLF SHADOW, his 3rd wolfman outing, became a massive international hit, raking in a fortune all over Europe and making him a star. Naschy returned to the character a dozen times over the years, with, at times, better results than others.

It's easy to understand the character's durability. Naschy, a former competitive weight-lifter, was a stubby fellow with a power-lifter's build perfectly suited for a classic wolfman, and Naschy brought to the part a ferocious physicality; he looked every inch the wild animal out for blood who, darting hither and yon through the night, would just as soon rip you to shreds as look at you, and he looked mean enough to carry out the threat implicit in how he carried himself. Naschy was better, as a wolfman, than anyone who ever donned hair and fangs and loped across a set. As the human Waldemar, he was always a sympathetic sort, a likable chap who suffered under an horrendous curse, and for whom love itself was usually a death sentence--as he went along, Naschy added, to the films, a piece of lore that said a werewolf could only die at the hands of someone who loved him.

Naschy's specialty was Gothic horror. He was first exposed to it as a lad when he encountered FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, and it clearly made a strong impression on him--his films were, for decades, littered with references to it. When Naschy entered the horror field in the late '60s, though, the Gothic tales near and dear to his heart were rapidly going out of fashion after more than a decade of genre dominance. The decline progressed rapidly until Gothics often seemed like museum pieces, but Naschy stayed in the ring, undeterred, still plugging away at it decades after much of the world had seemed to have moved on. Considering the state of horror over the years he was working, it's remarkable--and a real credit to his tenacity--that he was able to keep making these kinds of movies. He's gotten a lot of respect for it over the years. He deserves every bit of it.

Naschy's horrors were always awash in traditional Gothic trappings--moonlit nights, crumbling castles, dark, cobweb-bedecked corridors, and ancient curses--but, though steeped in this tradition, he was an inventive writer who never felt constrained by the conventions that accrued around it. His scripts are marked by a seeming willingness to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, which, at their best, makes them a delight, and, at their worst, can often also make them a delight, but, of course, for very different reasons. Usually, you never know what's going to happen next. Over the years, Waldemar the wolfman encountered (and often battled) vampires, aliens, an abominable snowman, even the formula of Dr. Jekyll. His Dracula could be vicious, but he, too, took on an utterly sympathetic edge--as it turned out, he did what he did not because he was evil incarnate, but because he was on a mission to resuscitate his dead daughter. He abandons this quest for love of a mortal, only to have his love reject him. Unable to bear it, he commits suicide by driving a stake through his own heart! Naschy keeps it in the Gothic, but his is definitely not your grand-daddy's Dracula movie, and though choppy and seemingly hastily assembled, COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE is definitely a keeper. I thought this mad, audacious, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach reached a particularly cacaphonous crescendo in HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB, a gleefully insane film that's one of my all-time favorite Naschy flicks.

After reading about Naschy's work for decades, I only got around to watching his films a few years ago. I've become rather fond of them. Before falling on some economic hard times, I consumed every one on which I could lay my hands--quite a few in this wonderful era of DVD--and in a few cases, I was sort of an unofficial evangelist in the cause of Naschy fandom. Only last night, I'd pulled out FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR and given it a re-watch. My mother, of all people, came by while Naschy was on the screen in the midst of his first werewolf rampage. She usually hates horror movies, and wouldn't know Paul Naschy from Paul Bunyan, but even she stopped for a moment to watch him work. "He's good at that," she said.

He was.

I'm going to miss him.

--j.

HALLOWEEN 5, or One Sunday Afternoon

2009-11-08T18:21:00.001-05:00

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 not in any good ways), 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, our fear of the dark personified. 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.

---

[*] In general, the film's detractors offer a small, standard litany of gripes (a product of detractors repeating and feeding off one another ad infinitum). These gripes divide into two genres. The first, and by far the most prevalent, is Stupid Complaints About Things of Little-To-No Consequence. The Myers mask looks bad, the filmmakers changed the interior of the Myers house from the first film, the comic-relief cops are awful, and so on (though the cops are certainly a mark against the film, they probably don't take up 5 minutes of screen-time in the entire film). The second genre is The Bastards Did Something Different. Pretty self-explanatory--the efforts at a little more psychological depth, the mystery of the man in black, and pretty much anything else that made H5 more than another FRIDAY THE 13th clone like H4 stand condemned under the heading.

If, after listening to an H5 detractor rattling off this litany, the reader is left with the unmistakable impression of someone grasping at straws in a desperate effort to justify their hatred of a movie that doesn't earn it, the reader is paying attention. HULK gets the same treatment from its critics, and for the same reason.

Once Upon A Time, The Revolution

2009-11-02T21:10:00.000-05:00

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)

2009-10-13T01:42:00.003-04:00

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 haven't sampled enough of Browning's silent output, but in his sound pictures, he's terribly uninspiring, employing bland 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)

2009-09-14T03:01:00.000-04:00

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)

2009-08-17T01:16:00.000-04:00

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)

2009-08-15T05:15:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-07T03:00:00.000-04:00

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).

How To Get HAMMERed: A Reevaluation of Hammer Horror

2009-06-30T11:45:00.000-04:00

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.

---

[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."

A Minor Meditation on the Matter of Lobbing Metaphorical Manure at Lousy Movies

2009-06-26T02:16:00.000-04:00

My recent Jesús Franco article, posted over at Bob Monell's excellent Cinemadrome board, drew some words from Bob about a pet peeve of his--scatalogical references used as a substitute for competent film criticism. I'd quoted some references of that sort from Franco-bashing reviewers, and he recounted recently seeing the same sort of comments being directed at Dario Argento.[1] In the grip of a manic fit, I thought it a topic worth addressing. Briefly, anyway. Bob:

This kind of "language" tells us little, if anything, about the films or filmmaker, but tells a lot about the writer's impoverished critical vocabulary. "I don't like it... so it's shit!" What banal, totally unegaging language. I don't care what this person thinks, if there's any thought at all involved, which I doubt. This is reactive writing. Self centered writing. Bad writing.

Most of the time, that's probably true (and I'd add "lazy writing" to the roster).I do think, however, that scatological references are sometimes useful shorthand, and even appropriate. Someone who calls a Brett Ratner movie "shit," for example, is expending only slightly less thought than went into making the movie itself. One could write a detailed article about all the ways in which the Ratner film sucked, but if such an article was competent (that it would be very long is a given), one would, by definition, be expending far more thought on bashing the movie than went into making it.

Sometimes, this can be an amusing exercise--I picture Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog at a picnic table combing through old books in an effort to find arcane profanities for Kinski to hurl at Herzog and his films. Most of the time, it's pointless, because most upbudget Hollywood rubbish--the movies that most merit that treatment--isn't, shall we say, up to Herzog's standards.

The "summer blockbuster" season is well underway, Hollywood besieging us with their annual roster of "tent-pole" movies, a parade of brainless CGI-laden inanity that seems to find no denominator either common enough or low enough. How does one write a thoughtful, intelligent critique of a movie like ARMAGEDDON or THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW or INDEPENDENCE DAY or this year's X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE? Such films wear their cretinous idiocy and complete lack of value on their sleeves. Their mere existence is an insult to the universe itself, particularly given their budgets (which run into the hundreds of millions of dollars). They're the soulless, putrefying leavings of a system of once-mighty studios who, decades ago, stopped living and became mixed-up zombies. And not in any good way.[2]

And if one doesn't want to waste the energy necessary to detail, about them, deficiencies already patently obvious to anyone with more than a few functioning brain cells, I think it's all right to just call them shit.[3]

--j.

---

[1] As this suggests, at least some little part of the objection to the use of defecation metaphors is that they're so often so poorly aimed!

[2] Think about this: 70 years ago, the studio system gave us THE WIZARD OF OZ, Laughton's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, GONE WITH THE WIND, GUNGA DIN, STAGECOACH, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE YOUNG MR. LINCOLN--more great movies than can be counted. This year, we're getting a FRIDAY THE 13th remake, X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, PAUL BLART: MALL COP, a LAND OF THE LOST rehash, a remake of THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123, YEAR ONE, and TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

[3] After all, is the bashing I've just given them here that much different? Some windier prose, some whimsical alliteration, some big words, but, when all is said and done, all I've done is call them shit in a fancier way.

My Movie Madness

2009-06-24T20:20:00.002-04:00

As I was out to-ing and fro-ing a week or so ago, I ran into one of my old customers. That isn't so unusual for me. I've worked with the public in one way or another in every job I've had, and when you live in such a small town in such a small country as I, you sort of get to know everyone after a while. This was a customer from a video store I owned a few years ago. It was called Movie Madness. It operated for three years before bowing to the inevitable. Before opening it, I'd worked for four years at another video store in town, so I'd put in quite a few years in movie rentals before I had to pack up my ruck and call it a day. When I closed, a lot of my younger customers had been renting from me since they were kids.

The fellow I saw on the day in question was among them. I hadn't seen him since I'd closed up my shop three years ago. I remembered him well. I just couldn't remember his name! He remembered me and my name very well, and you'd have thought, from his reaction upon seeing me, that he was some crazed fan who'd just randomly encountered whatever rock star to whom he secretly built shrines in between stays at the local mental health facility. He was very pleased to see me.

And I was pleased to see him. I run into my old customers all the time--practically any time I'm out in public. I'm always particularly glad to see the old customers from my Movie Madness, though. The store was an impossibility. I opened it with $2,600, and ran it on a shoestring from opening to closing. Ultimately, it failed, but I did give it a sweet try for a few years, there, and my customers were the ones who made it possible. There are a lot of good people among them. I'm grateful to all of them.

Well, all but the ones who stole my movies. Not so big on those.

Thankfully, this old customer wasn't among that mercifully small group. He was a diehard loyalists, and he wanted me to know how much he missed me and my Movie Madness. Expression of this heartache was practically the first things out of his mouth. The next was about how there's no cool place like Movie Madness to go to anymore.

I'd tried to make my Movie Madness a place that would provoke that sort of reaction. Not just a sterile, impersonal rental house, but a sort of shrine to cinema, the way video stores had been when I was younger and they first began popping up. In those Dark Age days, before cable and satellite television had penetrated my neck of the rural outback, a trip to the video store was a special thing indeed for a young cinephile. The stores were all independently owned. They featured a remarkable diversity of films, much more so than in the years that would follow. You got to know whoever ran the place, and they were usually movie lovers, too. As they learned your tastes, they could point you to a dazzling array of fine films you'd never seen, and, often, of which you'd never even heard. Vigorous movie-watching became part of the culture, and browsing the selection, you ran into other people from around town, and you'd kick recommendations back and forth between you. Sometimes, you'd just pull odd items off the shelf that looked interesting, and even if you were burned by them two times out of three, the one that clicked made it seem worth the dig. When I built my Movie Madness, I think I wanted to make a place that was sort of like that, a place that would build a loyal base, and that would advertise itself.[1]

Because of money--more particularly, because of my lack of it--my Movie Madness was necessarily limited, to a significant degree, by the bounds of popular taste. A big part of its budget was consumed, every week, by whatever the new, popular material was at the time. That's what pays the bills at any video store. Still, I tried to make of it something different and special, even working within those limitations.

One of the ways I made the place my own was through my selection of older films. I'd been assembling Movie Madness in my basement for years before there was ever any store, or even the name. When I first hung out my shingle, video libraries had all but disappeared. When everything went from VHS to DVD (a process still underway at the time I opened), those older movies--all on VHS--were bundled up and sold for whatever they'd bring, with no effort to convert popular older titles to disc. It wasn't uncommon to go into a video store and discover it didn't carry a single title that was over three or four years old, with most being of much more recent vintage. Older movies are lower return items, but they're also cheaper. I wanted my library to be part of my hook, the thing that marked my store as different and that drew people in. With no real libraries around, my thinking went, I could fill a vacuum. Much of my library of older films was carefully chosen. I went for cult films (which people rent repeatedly)[2], classics, movies that were good but little known, those kind of movies people have always heard about but haven't gotten around to watching, and, encompassing all of these concerns, I wanted quality movies to which I, personally, could mate viewers. For the longest time (before I'd opened), I wanted to call my store "Video Eclectica," but there was no way that would fly in a small town in Georgia. Even if people could pronounce "eclectica"--which they couldn't--they'd have no idea what it meant.

Throughout the years I operated, I always sought out new old stuff whenever I was making a little money. Film cultists swoon over the things I'd dig up, but odd items caught the attention of Joe Average renter, too. I had the old original NOSFERATU, magnificent silent German Expressionist fare from 1922. Conventional wisdom says you can't pay people to take silent films, especially in the culturally desolate environs in which Movie Madness stood, but this particular version was the Arrow release scored by the music of Type-O Negative. I rented it like gangbusters! One guy even gave me a $20 tip, after seeing it, just for having such a cool store.[3] I did business with TOUCH OF EVIL, mostly by telling people how great it was, then noting that this was the movie about which they'd always heard in which Charlton Heston plays a Mexican. I had REEFER MADNESS and THE COCAINE FIENDS, infamous, unintentionally hilarious anti-drug films from the 1930s--I stocked them in the comedy section. People loved them. I had PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Ed Wood's wonderfully incompetent epic. I had it in comedy, as well, and it was so popular, it was stolen. Not once, but twice. As much as it made for me, I didn't mind buying it three times.

Many of the sections in which I divided my library reflected its eccentricity.

I had a section devoted entirely to ancient world Epics--nothing but sword-and-sandal flicks and Roman emperor-related titles. I had a great (and extensive) section devoted to films based on comic books. My section marker was a great collage of comic characters (I designed all of the section markers, and my pal John printed them up). I had a Film Noir section, one of my personal favorite genres, and quite a nice selection of films, many of them from my personal collection. My marker for it was the cover of a Raymond Chandler anthology. I had sections devoted to the old cliffhanger serials (which I've always loved), and to Japanese anime. Never had much of either, but they weren't that popular. I had an extraordinary War Movies section. No exaggeration, it would be easier to name the great war movies I didn't have than the ones I did. And where do you ever see a war movie section in a video store anyway?

Even the "normal" sections of the store were marked by an eclectic selection.

My Western section was made up of things like spaghetti westerns, the complete KUNG FU series (GREAT show from my youth, released in the years I was in business), Sam Peckinpah's blood-drenched sagebrush sagas, and so on. My tips of the hat to "normal" were things like the YOUNG GUNS flicks (very popular), and even a copy of HIGH NOON (a great movie no one ever rented). My section-marker was a black-and-white Clint Eastwood from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES with "Western" written over him in red Marlboro font. Over the rack on which they stood, I had a reproduction of a great poster from KEOMA (also available to rent).

My children's movies were marked "Kids' Stuff," and, again, odd choices. The animated LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, the Betty Boop collection, and so on.

The section-marker for "Sci-Fi" had a then-new image of the surface of Mars taken by a Russian craft--I downloaded it, made the marker out of it, and had it on foam-board over my sci-fi films within three days of it being taken. I had a "Fantasy" section, too, where roamed Ray Harryhausen, THE ODYSSEY, CONAN THE BARBARIAN.

My collection of softcore "Skinemax" type movies, and most of the films that ended up being "unrated" or NC-17ed for sex were posted under a section labeled "Lovin'." I had a great section marker featuring a cut-away of Shannon Whirry obviously enjoying the attentions of some beefy fellow, and the words "Lovin'", in a very ornate font to the side. I put up my section devoted to wrestling and Ultimate Fighting events on a large rack beneath the "Lovin'" films, in a section marked "Fightin'," which had, as a marker, Popeye, fresh from eating a bait of spinach and charging into action. So you had lovin' and fightin' in the same place. The stuff of life![4]

My "Horror" section was to die for. There was quite a bit of good horror being released when I was open. DOG SOLDIERS, WRONG TURN, the GINGER SNAPS trilogy, 28 DAYS LATER, CABIN FEVER. I had Jesus Franco flicks, Jean Rollin, when a lot of it was out of print[5], and lots of Italians, alongside Roger Cormans and Hershcell Gordon Lewises and George Romeros and John Carpenters, among a plethora of great, obscurities I'd found. I had lots of odd posters there, and all over the store. I had a reproduction of a German poster for James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN. I had a Gil Elvgren print of a witch--actually, one of Elvgren's typical smiling beauties in witch duds riding a broom that is visibly tied up with a string. I had a reproduction of an old 1933 KING KONG poster. I had long one-sheets of CASABLANCA and OUT OF THE PAST.

And so on.

DVD brought forth the proliferation of "special editions," and "director's cuts," and "unrated" or "expanded" versions of movies. When there was one available, I always tried to get the nice edition. Most people didn't care, but my core clientele of cinephiles certainly appreciated it. I wanted them to have the longer editions of the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, not just the radically shortened theatrical releases all the other stores had. A new, much revised release gave people who has already seen the films a reason to rent the new version. I made a fortune on UNDERWORLD in its original version; when the unrated, extended edition was released, I got it, too, and made another fortune.[6]

My customers bore the blood that kept my cash-anemic project afloat, and I loved them for it.[7] I ran the store myself, and made it a point to interact with everyone who came in. They became like friends and family. I always kept a cooler of drinks in the front for anyone who wanted one. Sometimes (though, admittedly, not often) I had food, and I'd share that, too.[8] The real meat-and-potatos of my Movie Madness, though, was always movies. I love movies. At Movie Madness, I got to talk about them all day long and get paid for it. A little, anyway. Some of my customers would stick around for hours yakking about them. A large part of my solid customer base was younger people, and because I was so knowledgeable and passionate about movies, many of them came to regard me as some sort of film guru, which always seemed to amuse me, for whatever reason. People would pick a movie from my store, ask me if it was any good, then find it hilarious if I told them it sucked. I never misled anyone for the sake of a rental.

There are a lot of funny Movie Madness stories. The ever-collapsing toilet, the amusing struggles to creatively heat the place in the winter, the underhanded hijinks of the competition (they launched a whisper-campaign aimed at suggesting I was running a porn shop). It was a lot of hard work, but it was a labor of love.[9]

Some years ago, a Movie Gallery had moved into town and helped kill off the local independents. I was the only one to open my doors after they arrived on the scene, and the last holdout to fall after they'd finished off everyone else. This is a small town, but it used to support five video stores. Now, there's only Movie Gallery.

And, as my old customer I saw a few days ago put it, "Movie Gallery sucks."

In a very real sense, an era was buried with my Movie Madness. I put up the best fight I could with what I had.

I sometimes doubted myself on that point, though. Was I really putting up the best fight? I would often walk the length of my store and wonder if I'd made it too much like me. Too eclectic. Was I hurting business by making a trip through my library too much like a trip through a corner of my own mind? I mostly concluded it didn't hurt. I think it probably helped me hold out as long as I did. My enthusiasm could be infectious. I developed a strong cadre of clients to prove it, many of whom even followed me when I had to move the store out to the styx for its last year of business, and when I run into them today, they're still going on about the place. There just weren't enough of them. And, really, who cares if I did do any harm by making the store my own? It's been over for years. I ran into another of my old customers online last week, and, talking with her, I came to realize something about my Movie Madness that should have been obvious to me all along:[10] It was more than just a store. It was art. I've always been an artist, not a businessman. Movie Madness was one of my works.

Well, this has been a bit of a rant, and on a bit of a strange subject. I started my Movie Madness because I thought it would make the money I needed to fund things I really wanted to do. This is hilarious in retrospect--I barely made anything at it. I do think I created something unique and worthwhile. And if my own film projects ever get off the ground, it will be through the efforts of people I met through my Movie Madness, so, in a sense, it helped "pay" for those projects after all. I don't think I'd ever want to go back and do it again. Well, that isn't exactly true. I'd love to do it again. One of these days, maybe someone will come up with a way to run a business like that without the incredible amount of stress my Movie Madness involved. If that ever happened, I'd jump back into it in a second. Seems pretty unlikely, though. The age of the independent video store is, unfortunately, over, now. It really was a lot of fun while it lasted.

And I did finally remember your name, George. Don't hold it against me that I forgot.

Forgive me if this has been boring. It's just something I did with my life for a while.

--j.

---

[1] Word-of-mouth really is the most valuable advertising. When I opened, I had a massive box of flyers printed. I don't remember how many--probably a thousand or two. They acted as a coupon on a rental. I, my friends, my family, and whatever other poor souls I could rope in handed out flyers. We put flyers in the local businesses. We hung flyers. We taped flyers to mailboxes. We coated the world in flyers. In all the years I was in business, I got exactly one customer from all of those flyers and all that effort. There was, on the other hand, one guy who lived not far from my store. He was a real movie buff--came in with his girlfriend, fell in love with the place, told all his friends. I probably got a dozen regular customers from him. Thanks, Jerry.

[2] Film cultists are choice customers. They want to see BLAZING SADDLES or MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL for the 10,000th time. They're predictable and profitable, so I tried to find and stock as many Blazing Saddles and Holy Grails as I could (and to spend as little on them as possible). These renters also multiply well; they talk up these movies so much that they make people who have never seen them want to see them, and I got their business, too.

[3] Thanks, Jason.

[4] Those softcore flicks were the most popular item with thieves--during my years in business, I lost more from that section than all other sections of the store combined.

[5] My preference for obscurities meant I had a lot of movies on the shelf that, over time, went out of print. Incredibly stupid--setting myself up for theft--but I was fortunate enough to never lose one of them, and cinephiles certainly appreciated me for having them.

[6] I also had it in the back of my mind that having all these nicer editions would make the library worth more, if I ever wanted to sell it.

[7] And I still do, Darren, Adrian, Melanie, Bryan, the Jerrys, Jason, Deforest, Mike, Christy, and more others than I can fairly list. You all made it happen. You're the greatest.

[8] And sometimes, they'd bring me food and other goodies. Once, one of my regulars brought me some exceptionally good barbecued pork, right off the grill--thanks Bryan.

[9] The only part I definitely don't miss is the stress. There was never money for anything, and, for most of my time in business, I lived on stress sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner, to the point that my health was adversely affected.

[10] Thanks, Melanie.

Figuring Out Jesús Franco

2009-06-22T21:39:00.000-04:00

Kurt Dahlke, over at DVDTalk, just doesn't get Jesús Franco. Reviewing the admittedly poor DEVIL HUNTER, he opines that

Jess Franco is a suck-hack... IMDb lists 189 films to his credit--and almost as many pseudonyms--that's about 4 films a year for the last 50 years, and he's still working. The viewer is punished nearly every time, yet we still come back. I just can't figure it out.

He's far from alone. Scanning the internet, one finds many reviewers similarly mystified by the prolific Spanish auteur, his films, and the following they have accrued. Over at Eccentric Cinema, the very negative review of Franco's excellent FEMALE VAMPIRE is actually accompanied by an audio clip of a particularly juicy-sounding fart. Alan Simpson, at Sexgoremutants, goes scatological, as well, in his review of KILLER BARBYS:

Let's get things straight right off the bat, Jess Franco is a hack. Don't let any deluded Francophiles tell you otherwise, the guy makes movies faster than I can take a dump and they are rarely as satisfying.[1]

I'm certainly not opposed to scatological references in and of themselves, of course. I'm sure I've probably used them myself at various times to describe the dismal "work" of the likes of Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg, Brett Ratner. In a lot of his worst work, Franco himself earns a few. Some shit work, though, does not a reeking sewer make, nor some hack-work a hack. I've never seen "hack" as a particularly bad word, anyway. Everyone hacks it out sometimes. It's usually not terribly difficult to distinguish that from the real stuff.[2] Many of Franco's critics aren't always so good at making such calls, though.[3]

Franco often faces a lot of unfair criticism, and his genuine shortcomings are always radically overstated by his critics, but something I've discovered, through my increasingly extensive delvings into his work, is that those shortcomings have probably also been radically overstated by his admirers. You find reviews all over the place hailing a given Franco film, but prefacing laudatory remarks by saying something like "a lot of Franco movies are worthless dreck, but this one...." I'll be the first to acknowledge Franco, at his worst, can churn out a complete waste of cinematic space with no redeeming value (OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES, I'm callin' you out!), but I've come across a lot fewer examples of this than what most commentary on his work suggests. His resources are limited, but he really is a top-notch filmmaker, and, in context, the pooches in his pound come across as simply the inevitable consequence of having made so many movies for so many years, and for so little money. No one can be at the top of their game that often and under those circumstances. It would, in fact, be a remarkable credit to his skills as a filmmaker if he'd only managed to turn out even two or three really good flicks at the impoverished budget levels and breakneck pace at which he worked for decades, but he has dozens of bona fide classics under his belt. I think he's been terribly underestimated, even by many of those of us who admire him.

To return to the main topic at hand, though, there are those who just don't understand why he has any following at all, so, Franco being one of my areas of cinematic interest, I thought I'd try to explain.

A key to understanding a lot about Franco and his work is that he's a jazz musician, and that he carries this over to filmmaking. Like jazz, a real appreciation requires study.[4] It's often said of his films, by his admirers, "you've never seen one Franco until you've seen them all," and, while that's obviously hyperbole, I certainly agree with the sentiment behind it.

Franco's visual style is born of jazz. He's not one who is usually going to spend a lot of time on elaborate set-ups for note-perfect renditions of a piece--there usually isn't the budget or time for it. He's improvisational, experimental. He operates the camera himself, and plucks the images it records from the air. He's able to do this quite well, as a rule, because he's extremely well-versed in cinema--he knows it top-to-bottom and front-to-back, and he can reference that encyclopedic knowledge on the fly, bringing it to bear on whatever is before him at any given moment. These days, the zoom lens is frowned upon; to Franco, it's frequently indispensable. He gets a lot of heat for this, but he's often able to use it to remarkable effect. VAMPYROS LESBOS, to mention but one example, is less a film that a living entity. We know it's alive because it has a pulse, and the zoom is what creates it. Back and forth, it never seems to stop. It digs out new images from what's happening before it with the regularity of a heartbeat.

Franco is a self-confessed voyeur, and being a jazzman (and an artist of Euro-cinefantastique), he puts a premium on dreamlike narratives, and this, like much of what he does, can be alienating to a "mainstream" audience. His narratives are usually very loose. They don't follow any hard line. They tend to drift along, going wherever the director wills them. If the viewer isn't as caught up in what Franco is filming as he is, his work can often seem dull, indeed. It's the musician on a stage, working his mojo on a piece, giving it his all, getting really into it, and the audience just ain't diggin' it at all. There's a very long striptease sequence in NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT (an unfortunate title, to be sure) that had this effect on me. It was comprised of very little, and just seemed to go on and on. The director is clearly into it; I wasn't.[5] Other reviewers have written of having the same reaction to Lina Romay's frustrated writhings in FEMALE VAMPIRE. I didn't. There, I achieved some sort of synchronicity with the director, and when you can tune into those vibes, it works.

Franco has made every sort of movie under the sun, but he has a number of stories (and story elements) that intensely intrigue him, and he's filmed them over and over again, all different variations on the same thing, all, for the most part, totally different than the ones that have come before. It's, again, a great jazzman at work--the same thing never sounds the same way twice. VAMPYROS LESBOS is MACUMBA SEXUAL, FEMALE VAMPIRE is DORIANA GREY, THE PERVERSE COUNTESS is TENDER FLESH, THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF is FACELESS, THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z is SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY. He's told the same stories a dozen times, but, except for the basic story, the themes, etc.--the things that interest him--every telling is different. He puts his own interest/personal quirks/obsessions on the stage, and has spent decades wringing them out.

Franco's subjects are often very dark, the worlds he weaves for them to play out in claustrophobic and unyielding. He embraces the aesthetic of sleaze, and often manages to make it seem almost respectable. His sense of humor, little commented upon by either his critics or his detractors, can be both broad and sharp, and and he's often quite clever in how he works it into a piece. Love, in his films, tends to be in a form of twisted obsession that most would regard as quite unhealthy but in which Franco seems to revel, even if it does usually end in tragedy. His characters' strange passions burn twice as brightly if only half as long. Franco doesn't always approve of them, but he is fascinated by them. He's particularly fascinated by women. His camera worships them. They're virtually always the protagonists in his stories. Franco's sympathies lie with them. They're forever struggling against the seemingly inexorable destinies that Fate tries to impose upon them (which can be read in more ways than can be easily listed). Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they don't. They often "win" by dying. Not, perhaps, the most audience-pleasing method, but it works.

Franco isn't a crowd-pleaser, that's for certain. He goes where he wants with his work, and where he usually wants to go is in various dark corners well off the beaten track marked Mass Appeal. He's unconcerned with playing to the built in expectations of an audience; he plays things his own way.[6] For Franco, film isn't a job; it's a way of life.[7] Filmmaking, for him, is all about the filming, and he's a lot less interested in what happens with a project after. He dislikes his own movies, though he always seems willing to talk about them, and always gives great interviews. He never offers any pretensions of being an artist--he always says he considers himself a pop filmmaker!

His rejection of artistic pretensions notwithstanding, Franco is a great deal more than merely a creator of exploitation movies, as he is so often pigeonholed. He's a jazzman, a journeyman, a hack, a carny barker, a magician, a dirty old man, a master poet of lurid romanticism, a mad scientist of cinema. Those who go into Franco films unprepared can find them quite difficult. I read about Franco for about 15 years before seeing any of his movies. I was so enthralled by what I read that I was positively giddy about finally getting to see some of it with the advent of DVD. Very rarely can anything live up to the anticipation accumulated over so many years. Usually, it's not even close. Franco not only lived up to it, he exceeded it by a substantial margin. Even I'm surprised by how much my admiration for him has grown. I used to try to pick a favorite of his films every time I wrote anything about his work, and I've finally decided I can't. There are too many of them that are too good, and that are too different to compare, even when they're telling exactly the same story. I can prefer one to another, but I always feel as though I'm unfairly slighting the one I don't denote as a preference. I've stopped trying to pick a favorite. I am a Franco fan. That's enough for me. He's one of my favorite filmmakers, and he has, in my view, been terribly underestimated.

--j.

---

[1] To be fair, Simpson did seem to come around on Franco after seeing EUGENIE and JUSTINE.

[2]Though often, with Franco, even the hack-work has some extraordinary element that makes it noteworthy and raises it above most work of its breed.

[3] To be fair, they're often poorly served by their choice of movies on which they grade his work. For example, neither DEVIL HUNTER nor BLOODY MOON (the two most recent Franco releases from Severin) are good places to start, and any of Franco's films from the last decade or so would leave the unprepared utterly aghast, and not in a good way. Still, it seems far too many reviewers form a negative opinion of Franco's work based on a small handful of his films, often work-for-hire movies about which he didn't really care, and which are completely unrepresentative of either his best work or of his larger body of work.

[4] Many find the pretensions behind such assertions comical when offered in reference to a director who has made a movie called--and about--LULU'S TALKING ASSHOLE, but I maintain the assertion--pretensions and all--is entirely appropriate.

[5] Franco also wears boredom on his sleeve like few other directors. When he's cooking, and the audience isn't with him, he can bore, but when he, himself, is bored, he can really bore.

[6] This tendency, mated with his eccentricity, gets him accused of contempt for a paying audience, accusations that are often hard to refute.

[7] In recent years, Franco's work has turned up on the Sundance Channel, My reaction was "IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME!" Franco is indie cinema. He has been for nearly 50 years. His films are the sort of thing Sundance and the Independent Film Channel should be showing, instead of so many of those "independent" films that come from big Hollywood studios.

SIMON OF THE DESERT (1965)

2009-06-20T21:01:00.000-04:00

Writing about a widely recognized classic can be a very daunting task. We cinema buffs of a literary bent love our classics, and feel compelled to write about them sometimes, but the truth is that it's usually an exercise in pointlessness. What can you say about, for example, CASABLANCA or about Orson Welles' films or even about something like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD that hasn't already been said a million times, and probably better than you could ever say it? At best, one could manage a hopeless redundancy somewhat concealed behind a snappy wit or quirky style.

For one who reportedly once said "thank God I'm an atheist," Luis Buñuel can appear something of a godsend as such a subject. He's a classic. One of the greatest artists the film medium has ever produced. Everyone recognizes it. And there's been plenty written about he and his work over the years. Buñuel is a filmmaker about whom there will probably always be plenty to write, though, no matter how much is written. One of the wonders of his films is that they're so elaborate, so byzantine, and yes, so ambiguous that they invite, require and effectively support nearly as many interpretations are there are viewers. The father of cinematic surrealism is a bottomless reservoir for critical commentary.

He still has some pretty obscure works, too. My favorite of his films (so far) is one of them, a short piece from his Mexico days called SIMON OF THE DESERT. I first saw it years ago on Turner Classic Movies. I watched it again last night, and, at the risk of being pointlessly redundant (and maybe a tiny flickering of hope that I won't), I decided I'd write about it.

The movie tells a wickedly humorous tale of a fanatical Christian monk who renounces all worldly things and, in a fit of piety, spends years of his life standing on a column in the desert to keep himself above the earth and its corruptions. The locals all think he's a saint. Buñuel has a less charitable opinion, both of Simon and of saints. The director never made any secret of his own heathenism. He didn't think much of Christianity and its trappings, and neither does the movie.

Uber-ascetic Simon (Claudio Brook) is a good Catholic's model of saintly piety. And that's the problem, really. The model of saintly piety is a guy who wastes his life standing on a column in the middle of nowhere. His contempt for the worldly leads him to snub his own mother, though we later learn he secretly dreams of coming down from his pillar and being with her. Being of the mortification-of-the-body school of sainthood, he scowls at a young monk for being too clean, and he takes a sour attitude toward anyone who seems to be having fun or enjoying life in any way. He's something of a hypocrite in this--at one point, while somewhat delirious, he admits that he blesses things in part because it's fun to bless things--but for the most part, he does make a game effort at being utterly contemptuous of any good life in this world may offer.

Not that this doesn't come with perks. Simon demonstrates genuine supernatural powers. At one point, he causes a man who'd had his hands lopped off for thievery to grow a new pair. Very impressive, but, the film seems to ask, of what use are such abilities if, to tap into them, one must live the deprived, harsh, cruddy, joyless existence chosen by Simon? What use is he or his piety to the world?

His basic uselessness is recognized by those who gather beneath his column to dutifully gawk at the saint and ask his blessings. Even when he performs supernatural acts before their eyes, the locals seem almost bored by him. Going before him is like going to church, something done begrudgingly, in mechanical fashion, out of a sense of duty, and not from anything they actually gain from the experience. Near the end, one of the local priests scales the column and discusses, with Simon, the problem the idea of "yours and mine" presents to the world. He illustrates by pointing to the bag Simon keeps for hauling up provisions from the ground, and claiming it as his own. Simon protests, at first, but when the priest insists the bag is his, Simon relents and tells him he can have it, at which point the priest hands Simon his bag and tells him that, while his attitude is admirable, it doesn't do the world a whole lot of good.

Throughout the film, Satan appears in the form of a beautiful woman(Silvia Pinal). She pesters, questions, tempts Simon, tries to get him to come down off his column and live a little. Even tries to discredit him in the eyes of the locals. He tells her to repent of her wickedness. In reply, she asks if God would restore her to her former glory if she did. Simon makes it clear that would never happen, no matter what. It seems a god must have a villain. Unsurprisingly, Satan sees a god like that as pretty worthless.

In a sense, Satan is the hero of the piece. Some years ago, when I first saw the movie, I was extremely depressed. It had me laughing myself silly before it was over, but the funniest moment--maybe because it was the nuttiest yet so entirely appropriate--is when Satan whisks away Simon near the end. I won't give away any details--it's something that should be seen rather than described.[*] Suffice it to say it's a doozy.

Back in the '70s, movies like SIMON resulted in the Vatican denouncing Buñuel and Jesus Franco as the "most dangerous" filmmakers in the world. I sort of wish they'd put that as a blurb on every new release of every movie from either of them. Redundant, perhaps, but not pointlessly so.

--j.

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[*] SIMON is available. After far too many years lost in the wilderness, it has finally gotten a DVD release. It's a Criterion disc, which means it will be both overpriced and of excellent quality.

Viva Cinema!

2009-06-03T00:56:00.000-04:00

Earlier today, I was poking through the message boards at the Internet Movie Database and came across a rather thoughtful post that suggested the horror genre was dying in the U.S.. The author listed several reasons why he thought this to be the case--elements of the films, trends in marketing, etc. Many of them were solid points, a few not so much so. The solid ones had, as I saw it, a single source, but it was unstated--and perhaps unrecognized--in the article, so I jotted down a few comments aimed at outlining my own thoughts on the matter. The author had offered the view that bigger budgets were a factor harming the genre at present, and, while I thought he was right in most of his details, one line in particular caught my attention, and I used it as a point of departure for my own remarks:

It might appear shortsighted to say a bigger budget would have a negative effect on a film. The more money spent, the better the film will be, right? Not always.

Actually, it's practically never, and anyone who thinks otherwise has no understanding of how films are made. More money means more money-men running the show, instead of creative people. A gaggle of suits pulling the strings almost inevitably means the final product is dumbed down, watered down, unoriginal, slick, mass-appeal trash. And not trash in any good way.

The "problem" with horror cinema today is the same it has been for years: Hollywood.

In horror's last great era--the '60s and '70s--film was still somewhat affordable and with all sorts of markets for all sorts of movies, crazed maverick indie filmmakers popped up everywhere, and, with a few bucks, a dream, some bologna sandwiches, and a whole lot of heart, they were turning out crude, brilliant mini-masterpieces. Lots of crap, as well--95% of everything is always crap, and that applies here too--but the gems so outshined the fool's gold that the latter do almost nothing to drag down our gleaming estimation of that era.

Hollywood barely touched those years. The big studios coughed up a few soulless, upbudget hairballs like THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN over those years, a very few jewels like JAWS, and a few of them, good and bad, made lots of money, but the era largely belonged to the little guy.[1]

All of that ended with the coming of the '80s. Film began to radically escalate in expense, while the physical venues that had provided the market for the small fry rapidly dried up and died, and a wave of conservatism made the existing markets hostile to the radical notions that had underpinned so many of those original productions from the '70s. By the early '80, it was all but over--by the mid-'80s, it was certainly history.[2]

The risk-averse, never-do-anything-that-hasn't-already-been-done, make-'em-slick, dumb-'em-down, keep-'em-tame big studios took over. This is why the intervening years have been so terribly desolate. Every so often, a good, small movie will squeak out. Sometimes, even Hollywood produces one (usually because a filmmaker who has amassed enough clout to get his way decided to make one). But not often. Anyone who listed "the late '80s" or "the '90s" as a Great Horror Era would rightly be dismissed as a clueless clown.

The end of the '90s did, however, give us the film that, a decade or two from now, will be seen as pointing the way to the future: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. It was, for film, dirt cheap, embodied the finest tradition of maverick indie horror cinema, and made LOTS of money, demonstrating there was, indeed, a market for this sort of film. It was slightly ahead of its time, though. Film was still too expensive (a lot of BWP was shot in Hi-8 video, which wasn't really a viable option for future productions), and the physical market for this kind of film wasn't in place yet (BWP had gotten into the corporate multiplexes via studio backing, which isn't something films of its kind are likely to ever get in any noteworthy number). It pointed the way, though.

A technological revolution in recent years has finished setting the stage. DVD came along. The discs are dirt-cheap to create, they've become omnipresent in society, and they're so popular that they've surpassed theatrical distribution as the primary source of revenue for films. At the same time, audio and video equipment has improved in leaps and bounds. Progressive scan video cameras that emulate the look of film, computer editing, and so on--much more versatile than film, but at a microscopic fraction of the cost of actual film.

What all of this adds up to is that quality features on virtual used-car budgets are now possible, and a viable physical market for them is now in place. The coming years are going to see a flowering of indie films, including horror films, like we've literally never seen before. It has already begun, though still in its barely-born infancy. We'll get a lot of crap out of this new wave, as is always the case, but in the coming years, we're going to be seeing the emergence of some extraordinarily talented people making some really beautiful, ugly, wonderful, terrible art.[3] It's an exciting time to be a fan of the cinema, and I think it's going to be a great time to be a horror fan.

So keep your chin up. Things-as-they-are may look bleak, but the Revolution is coming.

--j.

---

[1] Now, decades later, Hollywood has spent the last several year remaking every classic film of that era, instead of trying to create any new original classics anyone may be interested in remaking in the future.

[2] I focus on horror movies, here, but they weren't the only casualty--all of the other exploitation genres went through the same thing.

[3] I hope to be one of them.

CITY OF THE DEAD (1960)

2009-05-20T13:51:00.000-04:00

Over the years, CITY OF THE DEAD has gotten a lot of play under the title HORROR HOTEL. There isn't a city of the dead in CITY OF THE DEAD--it's set in a broken-down little town in some New Englandish Middle-of-Nowhere--and there really isn't a "horror hotel" in it, either, though a peculiar inn plays a prominent role in the proceedings. What the film does have is fog. Not just a little fog. We're talking major clinging, oppressive accumulations of it, swirling through a town on the edge of reality where the sun never seems to shine. It's a town where the dominant ethnic group seems to be ghosts. Not just any ghosts. They're the spirits of witches, pitilessly burned at the stake by fanatical 17th century Puritans. They're hungry ghosts, we soon learn. Exactly what they hunger for forms the substance of CITY OF THE DEAD, a neglected minor masterpiece of atmospheric horror that emerged from the same year that gave us Hitchcock's PSYCHO.

That last is a significant little factoid, because the film employs an unusual narrative gimmick also used in PSYCHO, and there's been some speculation, in the last few years, as to whether one ripped off the other, and if so, who did the ripping. I don't think the question is particularly important. The movies stand on their own merits. Hitchcock is much praised for this gimmick; I think it works a lot better in CITY OF THE DEAD.[*]

And no, I'm not going to say what it is, on the off chance that some poor, unschooled soul reading these words may be unfamiliar with the subject. Watch both movies--you'll be glad you did.

As all that darkness and swirling fog suggests, CITY OF THE DEAD is about atmosphere. Menacing atmosphere. A persistent sense of unease and even dread. Old school horror at its best, and of a breed that's almost a lost art these days. One suspects a part of the reason it's so near to extinction is the falling out of favor of its genre of cinematography. CITY OF THE DEAD is shot in glorious black-and-white, and it's a great example of why the format should be called glorious. This is a film that simply wouldn't work in color. The black and white and all the greys between are integral to the atmosphere it generates. Light and shadow. What is revealed and what is concealed. Register my standard complaint: The loss of appreciation for black and white, these days, is most unfortunate.

The film stars Christopher Lee, in an early role, as a college professor who directs one of his students--studying the history of witchcraft persecution--to this very mysterious town, and the plot deals with the events that follow, but this is definitely a case where the plot isn't as important as the air of foreboding the film invokes.

That air is the emission of director John Llewelyn Moxey, who manages it like a master, and on what we're told was a rather modest budget. Moxey's career hasn't lived up to the promise this effort showed, but he did go on, a decade later, to direct the excellent NIGHT STALKER movie that first introduced television audiences to Darren McGavin's truth-seeking, monster-battling Carl Kolchak, and garnered, in the process, the highest ratings a television broadcast had ever achieved up to that time.

Some other good news about CITY OF THE DEAD is that one can get it just about anywhere, and for cheap. There are probably hundreds of "grey-market" DVD editions floating around, usually under the title HORROR HOTEL, often priced at $1, and, unlike so many such releases, most of them offer prints that are quite good, but I would strongly recommend to both fans of the film and those seeking it out for the first time spending a little extra and getting VCI's "Undead Collector's Edition" disc. It has as good a print of the movie as you'll find anywhere, and it's loaded with great extras. The major goodies are a feature-length commentary by director Moxey, a feature-length commentary by Christopher Lee, and interviews with Moxey, Lee, and star Venetia Stevenson. The Lee interview is particularly good, running nearly an hour and spanning his entire career. Put simply, one couldn't ask for a better DVD presentation of the movie. It's one of those rare discs about which it can be said, without any hyperbole, that "no horror fans' collection can be complete without it."

--j.

---

[*] One filmmaker who, some years later, did do some ripping on CITY OF THE DEAD was Italian hack Lucio Fulci, who definitely saw the end of this one before making his own CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD.

W. (2008), Oliver Stone's Bush Countermyth

2009-05-17T12:41:00.001-04:00

Life hasn't been a lot of fun for me this year. Since February, it's been a painful, stressful, frustrating soap so ridiculous that, if I wrote it as a fictional tale, no one would believe it. My health has taken a hit--I lost 26 pounds in a matter of weeks. In the prosperous, porkulous Civilized World, most people would no doubt be elated by this development, but they definitely wouldn't want to go through what I went through to lose it. Things have gotten pretty bad. So fewer entries here. Owing to these circumstances, this one may not be among my best. I suppose I'll know soon enough:

For an upbudget, big Hollywood kind of guy, Oliver Stone can be a very interesting director, often a great one. The major focus of his work, throughout his career, has been historical subjects, mostly big historical subjects, mostly of recent decades. W. is his attempt at a profile/biopic of George W. Bush, who was--let's just speak plainly on the matter--one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States, and hadn't yet left office when the film was completed and released. When the project was announced, it was assumed, in most quarters, that Stone, a well-known lefty, would use it to seriously strip the bark off Bush and his administration.

Those expecting that sort of well-earned thrashing will be terribly disappointed by W..

Stone has an unfortunate habit--in his historical films, at least--of falling in love with his subjects. Perhaps "love" is too strong a word. He doesn't always like them, but he makes them too sympathetic, and in his quest to humanize them, he ends up essentially lying for them--making them into much better people than they are. He did this with JFK (with Jim Garrison), he did it with NIXON, and he's done it again with W.. The film has massive holes, and they're present because Stone is trying too hard to make Bush likable. Most of the uglier parts of Bush's early life--his drunken driving arrest in the '70s, his defense of horrific student hazing, and so on--are left entirely on the cutting-room floor, while his service--and more particularly, his lack of service--in the Texas Air National Guard, which he used to escape Vietnam, are obliquely mentioned in only a single line.

Stone's thesis--that in Bush-as-President, we're presented with a moron who was completely out of his depth--is quite correct, and Stone is right to present, as the
defining moment of Bush's presidency, the infamous press conference wherein Bush can't think of a single mistake he's made or lesson he's learned while in office. Where Stone fails is that, in trying to humanize Bush, the director sanitizes him by presenting him as virtually a clueless child being led around by ill-intentioned (or foolish) advisers. But a moron isn't necessarily an innocent. A moron can also be ill-intentioned, and Bush is the best example of it. The incredible cynicism of that administration is almost entirely absent from the film.[1]

Most of the portions of W. dealing with the Bush presidency is devoted to the buildup to the Iraq war, and on that subject, its sanitizing of events is most egregious. Throughout the film, we get the cabinet principals stating, in private, things they were saying in public about Iraq. In the film's dialogue, their public pronouncements are just ported directly over into their private conversations, when we've known, for years, that what was going on behind the scenes--the cynical manufacturing of the case for war from practically nothing--bore no resemblance to what was being said in public. By turning the public pronouncements into private dialogue, the film gives Bush and his underlings a pass on all of this, rendering virtually the entirety of the segments of the film dealing with the Bush presidency worthless, insofar as the real history is concerned.[2]

That isn't to say an historical film must be entirely historical. Very few of them ever even try to be. Strict adherence to history is, for a number of good reasons, usually problematic to dramatists. What the best of them try to do is distill the essence of their subject; to get to a truth about it, even if every event isn't presented exactly as it happened. In W., Stone failed at this, and it's a movie that's hard to judge as a standalone drama without reference to the events it portrays. It's easy to watch, well-paced, technically competent, as one would expect. The cast is certainly top-knotch in every respect. Josh Brolin becomes Bush. Richard Dreyfuss is at least as solid as Dick Cheney. He gets one of the best scenes in the movie when Cheney explains, with great vigour, his Grand Plan for the Middle East. The script offers a number of well-written scenes like that. Unfortunately, one suspects from the final product that the movie began life as a series of random scenes, and didn't move very far beyond that. It's stitched together like a patchwork quilt, jumping between various moments in Bush's life without much of a common thread holding the scenes together, other than Bush himself. Without reference to the real-life events they portray, these scenes aren't much of a drama, and with reference to those events, they aren't much of a history. At the end of the day, they don't really add up to much of anything. In that respect, they're like Bush himself, so I suppose one could argue Stone got some little something right after all.

--j.

---

[1] Stone presents Bush, for example, as a committed evangelical Christian. It's a matter of public record, though, that the fundamentalist community to which Bush appealed with his public professions of faith was openly mocked within his administration, the office of "faith-based initiatives" blatantly used as a publicly-financed campaign apparatus of the Republican party. At the very least, this adds an important perspective to Bush's professions of faith.

[2] Bush isn't the only one sanitized when it comes to Iraq. In one scene, Bush suggests, to British PM Tony Blair, setting up Saddam Hussein by trying to get the Iraqis to fire on an intentionally mismarked plane in order to act as a pretext for war. Blair reacts with barely disguised disbelief. This was a real conversation that happened in early 2003, only weeks before the war was launched. Bush really made this suggestion. Blair was not stunned by it. It's a matter of public record, in fact, that he and Bush had, by that point, been involved, for months, in a conspiracy to try to goad Saddam into some sort of action that would rationalize a war.

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (1987-1994)

2009-03-08T20:04:00.000-04:00

I'm a STAR TREK fan. Grew up watching the show in syndication (it inhabits some of my earliest conscious memories), experienced all of the feature films as they went along, read all sorts of TREK books and related materials. I think it's the best show of its kind, and among the best things television has ever produced. When STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION was announced (I feel a grey hair poking through when I realize this was over 20 years ago), I was very excited. To say the series that subsequently emerged was a disappointment is to commit bold understatement. A few years ago, I dashed off a short little piece about the series and its problems. Life is being rather hard on me at the moment, so here's my vintage rant:

30 Dec., 2004

Where to begin? The characters in ST:TNG were just dreadful. The crew was a collection of shiny, happy, perfect, cold fish, with no depth, no passions that ever seemed more than a put-on, and who were evocative of nothing--the sort of people you'd send millions of miles away just to get rid of them. This was probably inevitable, given the circumstances of their creation. Most of them weren't created as "characters" at all, but were conceived as nothing more than line-item gimmicks--an empath, a Klingon, a teenager, a Pinnochio-modeled android, a blind man at the helm.

Whatever glue Gene Roddenberry was sniffing at the time convinced him that the last--a blind man leading them--was a fantastic metaphor. Perhaps sensing an unfortunate metatextual truth behind this, given what the series became, the show's creators eventually packed the blind guy off to Engineering.

Most of the show's significant elements were cannibalized from earlier projects. Storywise, a gap of about 80 years is supposed to exist between the original series and TNG, but they're still using exactly the same technology, in the time of TNG, as they were in the original. All of the same equipment, with all of the same capabilities and limitations; technology hasn't advanced an inch in eight decades. TNG's one technological "innovation" was the holodeck, and even it was lifted from the STAR TREK: PHASE TWO project from the '70s (which had mutated into ST: THE MOTION PICTURE, sans holodeck). That project also provided two of the other central TNG characters: Will Riker was Will Decker from STP2, with Troi as Ilia, the empath with whom he'd formerly had a relationship. They'd actually carried over into THE MOTION PICTURE, but were rehashed into TNG anyway. TNG also lifted the theme music from that film. A move dictated by budget? Who knows? It can't help but add to that retread feel, and the first feature film is not a project a wise creator of a new series would want to invoke.[1]

TNG also cannibalized the original series for stories. The first season of TNG was littered, from beginning to end, with plots and other elements lifted directly from the original. This unmotley crew of gimmicks spent their first season blandly going where the original Enterprise crew had boldly gone before. The show improved significantly later but its major defects were structural, and stayed with it throughout (which is why it's so hard to watch in re-runs). The improvements shouldn't be overstated, either: TNG ran for 7 seasons, and if one were to extract all the good-to-great episodes from the entire run, there wouldn't be enough to fill a single season. I found much of it unwatchable on first run, and it holds up even worse on attempted subsequent viewings.

The show reflects all the shortcomings of its age. It's pretentiously moralistic, cringe-inducingly preachy, boring ("violence" on tv was a big no-no at the time, which meant, in practice, little action), and so politically correct it can barely stand even itself.[2] Like the characters, everything about the production design screamed the blandness the show delivered. The bland crew was dressed in bland uniforms that made them look like hotel porters, which was appropriate, because the bridge of the Enterprise looked like a hotel lobby. Aliens were inevitably plastered with gratuitous (and bad) prosthetics about the head and face. Even Romulans, who, being an offshoot of the Vulcans, had always looked pretty much like Vulcans, had to get the bumpy-headed treatment.[3] The writers seemed genuinely committed to the notion--and this is one of the things I hated most about TNG--that meaningless technobabble is a substitute for competent writing. In real TREK, Kirk would stop the planet-killing machine by flying a starship into it, escaping by the skin of his teeth, and blowing it up from the inside. In TNG, on the other hand, the ultimate outcome of what seemed like dozens of episodes hinged on whether a polymorphic induction framistat could be made to generate a positronic field, or whether Geordi and the robot could rejigger a 10 power electron thingamabob to elliptically convert alpha waves into magnetized mercury particles. "Make it so, Number One." And he does, and the universe is saved. Except that's really, really stupid, and about as unengaging as it gets. This was a problem TNG never overcame.

Overall, TNG was just a really awful idea, done, for the most part, badly.[4] Unworthy of the STAR TREK name, it stands primarily as a monument to TREK creator Gene Roddenberry's declining creative powers toward the end of his life.

---

[1] I've always wondered if all that rehashing was Gene Roddenberry's way of thumbing his nose at Paramount. He'd had a great deal of input into THE MOTION PICTURE, and it had been pretty disastrous. Afterwards, he was made a mere consultant, and spent the rest of his life with a feeling that the original TREK had been taken away from him, and bitterly complaining about the directions in which the franchise was taken--directions which produced some of the finest work in its history. It's almost as if he wished to return to the point at which he'd lost creative control and continue from there. All the cannibalization could have been (and probably was) merely laziness--it's easier to cannibalize older work than do anything original--but it makes me wonder...

[2] The ship was a military vessel, but Roddenberry--down on "militarism" in his declining years--populated it with entire families, children and all. That this wasn't given the two seconds of thought necessary to dismiss it says much about how well-conceived was the series.

[3] This injured a storyline involving Spock (from the real STAR TREK, but still alive at the time of TNG)), and his efforts towards managing a reunification with Vulcan--he certainly wouldn't be able to pass as a TNG Romulan with his prosthetic-free forehead.

[4] Q was pretty cool, though.

--j.

Shortcomings of THE EXORCIST (1973)

2009-02-03T15:39:00.000-05:00

THE EXORCIST (1973) was a massive crossover hit in its day, drawing in big bucks from large audiences who would ordinarily have never watched a horror flick, and it became a legend based largely upon their impression of it as one of the most frightening things they'd ever seen. When lists are assembled of "greatest horror movies" or "best horror movies" or whatever variation is preferred by those who go about assembling lists of that nature, the instances in which it is absent are far more noteworthy than those in which it is present. It's exceedingly rare to see a list like that without a prominent slot for THE EXORCIST.

I don't like THE EXORCIST. I don't even think it's very good.

From a technical standpoint, of course, it's absolutely outstanding in pretty much every respect. The direction is first-rate. The performances are top-notch. The cinematography, the make-up effects, the sound editing--all superb. It's a well-paced film, as well, and not, for a moment, "boring," as is so often charged by some (mostly younger) viewers crippled by lack of attention spans as a consequence of too heavy a diet of today's quick edits, awful CGI, and cheap, corny jump-scares and other shock-effects every three seconds.

That isn't to say it lacks those things, particularly shock effects. We aren't pelted with shocks with the same regularity we get from some of the horror cinema of more recent years, but the film is fairly bursting with them; virtually built around them, in fact. We're assaulted by spinning heads, pea-soup puke, inhuman growls (and other sensory displacement), single-frame jump-scares, bloody cross masturbation--the entire film is a catalog in over-the-top shock tactics.[1]

Therein lies the beginning of my problems with THE EXORCIST. Shock effects are cheap and superficial. To note the obvious, shock effects can only work if they're shocking. When it comes to getting a rise out of an audience, they can sometimes work the first time around, sometimes even the second, but continued exposure to them does kill their effectiveness in all but the dimmest of bulbs. In THE EXORCIST, Friedkin's efforts to assault the audience with outrageousness rise to the level of unintentional self-parody well before the film is over. The first time we see the possessed Regan's head turn around too far, it can be shocking. Later in the movie, when it makes a complete circular rotation, it's just stupid. And it was already pretty stupid the first time around, if we give it a moment's thought. The shock effects in THE EXORCIST are like that--so over the top as to become utterly ludicrous. And as silly as they are, on their own merits, they're even more silly in the cold glare of history, as such ludicrous excess has come to be played for laughs in more recent decades. It's common, now, to see people on message boards saying they find THE EXORCIST quite funny, and, in fact, the beating heart of the film--the scenes with the possessed Regan--could probably be turned into an episode of SOUTH PARK with barely any changes.

The secret of the film's success, though, isn't its wall-to-wall shock tactics. There are two elements that made it a hit, and that have made it endure.

The first is the religious element. The film isn't just a basic good-vs.-evil story--it's a very Christian god-vs.-devil story, with a human soul as the prize. It's immensely appealing to a Christian audience, and its downbeat ending, its ruminations on the nature of evil, and its subplot about Father Karras questioning his faith make it appear more sophisticated than the usual fare in this vein.[2] This context also means mainstream audiences will allow the filmmakers much more latitude in the use of shock effects. While the over-the-top shocks are a constant assault on the suspension of disbelief necessary to make any film of this sort work, Christians will cut it a lot more slack when it's being done in this context. The film's Christian character also serves to immunize it from criticism, to an extent. To the more extreme among the devout, trashing the film can come to be seen as something akin to blasphemy.[3]

My problem is that I'm not a Christian. I don't hold to any fundamental faith to which this element can appeal and make me suspend my critical faculties, and in and of itself, it doesn't do anything for me, either.

The second element behind the film's incredible success with the general public is its equation of the onset of adolescence with demonic possession. I confess this is the part of the film I find outright reprehensible. Puberty is hard on everyone. To parents, their doting, dependent, loving babies suddenly become back-talking, opinionated individuals. As hard as that can be for them, though, that's nothing compared to how hard it can be on the adolescent. Unfortunately, a big part of the reason THE EXORCIST was such a runaway success is that everyone who has ever raised children found their own anxieties--and their worst efforts to suppress their childrens' growing individuality--rationalized by the movie. The natural, necessary process of growing up becomes demonic infestation. The message: The kids aren't all right. This plays to the most thoughtless, reactionary impulses in an audience.

It also plays to plain old stupidity. Think of the conceit of the film: you have to accept that a demon--a being of evil incarnate--would have nothing better to do, if unleashed upon the world, than possess the body of an adolescent and make her behave badly. "Evil" isn't, to use a then-contemporary example, the U.S. government overthrowing democracy in Chile, bringing Pinochet to power, and supporting his extermination of thousands of human beings, there. That isn't the sort of thing a demon--evil incarnate--would stage-manage, if unleashed upon the world. No, "evil" is adolescent girls masturbating and cursing and being rebellious and showing contempt for religion and disrespect for authority figures. What on earth could be worse, right? A demon wouldn't try to engineer economic collapses, natural disasters, famines, or wars. It would take over your daughter, and make her lay in bed and curse.

All of this is idiocy, but it directly--and perfectly--reflects the myopic anxieties and viewpoint of the film's target audience. That's why they've been eating it up like popcorn for more than 30 years.

I'm not big on idiocy. I don't think the views that grow from it are worth much respect, and those narrow anxieties it can produce are fundamentally misguided, and, though often understandable, they're an understandable weakness, not something we should embrace. I think the kids are all right. I think THE EXORCIST does them a great disservice. Moreover, I think the way in which the film plays to their parents' suspicion of and hostility toward their growing individuality is appalling.

These two elements are the secret of the film's success. For someone like myself, who finds nothing appealing in them, the movie has absolutely nothing to offer. All that's left is an offensive promise, and increasingly silly efforts to shock. Unintentional humor, wrapped in such an overblown effort at seriousness that the effort itself becomes part of the joke. And one need not subscribe to my own heathenism, when it comes to the religious aspect of the film, to share my view of the film itself--I would, in fact, guess that the film's critics are overwhelmingly Christian.

I dislike the reputation the film has, in some quarters, acquired as some sort of seminal horror film. It isn't one. It is, in fact, a very traditional, very conservative horror story. Regan is clearly an innocent. The mother, the priests, and so on are clearly on the side of the angels, and that is offered literally in the film. The "evil" is an entirely external force. The universe in which the film occurs is the traditional Christian one, and operates entirely by those rules. Regardless of its pretensions of greater sophistication, it breaks no new ground where it counts.

In context, it was released in the midst of a very important cycle of superior horror films that were taking the genre in new and interesting directions. This cycle began in the late 1960s with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and ran throughout the 1970s, items like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, RABID, and DAWN OF THE DEAD. The Europeans were part of the same explosion, and this was the prime time of Jesus Franco, Jean Rollin, and more Italians than can be easily counted. The movies produced as part of this cycle were wildly experimental in terms of storytelling, and were openly and mercilessly subversive of just about every element of the traditional horror story represented by THE EXORCIST.

They packed it where it counted.[4]

That's why there is the present mad scramble to dig them up, dust them off and release them on DVD, then re-release them in a string of increasingly special special editions, why new films are constantly appearing that have them as an inspiration, and why Hollywood seems to be devoted to remaking every one of them.

The cinematic legacy of THE EXORCIST, by contrast, is very sparse. Its influence was three-fold. It spawned a cycle of direct (and mostly awful) rip-offs. These had pretty much played out in a few years, though a stray one does still appear from time to time (the dreadful EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE being a prime recent example). It also helped continue a series of similarly slickly-produced, bigger-budget Hollywood movies that aimed for mainstream approval. The first of this cycle had been ROSEMARY'S BABY, and it continued, after THE EXORCIST, with items like the OMEN series, AUDREY ROSE, THE LEGACY, etc.. Its major influence, though, is probably one that would make its creators least happy: a long series of films that, though often great, were devoted to satirizing the sorts of excesses it introduced. Things like the EVIL DEAD movies, RE-ANIMATOR, or the early work of Peter Jackson. Excess played for laughs. That's pretty much as far as it goes, insofar as a cinematic legacy is concerned--awful, direct replicas, some Hollywood trash, and people making fun of it.

A lot of fans want to elect THE EXORCIST to the pantheon. I think it's more at home in the footnotes of film books.

---

[1] More than once, I've encountered, from various admirers of the film, the bizarre notion that this big, noisy exercise in sound and fury, and blood and thunder--and thud and blunder--is some sort of understated psychological thriller. My advice to those who proffer this view is always the same: Try actually watching THE EXORCIST before commenting upon it next time around.

[2] The film is quite sophisticated for a Christian god-vs.-demon film, but "sophisticated" is, in that context, distinctly relative. Among other things, the over-the-top-of-the-top nature of the film makes Karras' struggle with his faith completely ridiculous. He's sitting in the same room with a girl that is obviously possessed--you don't need to do anything more than look at her to know it--she barely even looks human by the time he's on the scene. And if anyone could possibly manage any doubts after a glance, they melt as soon as she opens her mouth.

[3] That's a very extreme view, though. I've encountered it, but not often.

[4] Prior to them, horror films had primarily been focused outward, playing on our anxieties about those who were outside of us and different from us. Look, for example, at the rash of Cold War metaphor horror flicks from the '50s. We were always given rock-solid heroes, whose motives we weren't to question, as they were representations of us, and we didn't question ourselves. The bad guys were always "out there" somewhere--the red menace in the form of alien invaders. This is reactionary horror, which is, in my view, almost inevitably the poorest brand of horror. Things that try to rationalize fears that are often completely irrational. When, on the other hand, the mirror is turned upon us, and the fears and anxieties upon which a film is playing is really something we fear about ourselves, there's nowhere to run. The horror is not external, and there's no heroic military man to smack down the appeaser scientists and put the voltage to the Commie Carrot Man who wants our blood. The horror is in our own hearts. That's when a horror film really works. That's why those '70s horrors packed it where it counts. They turned the mirror on us.

--j.

HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004)

2009-01-29T16:52:00.000-05:00

Zhang Yimou's decision to move into action pictures raised some eyebrows. Snootier observers will often do this Mr. Spock Shuffle when confronted by a much-acclaimed director of "arty" pictures deciding to go pop on them. Such directors, reads the Gospel of the Pretentious, debase themselves by making films for the unwashed masses; they cast aside their souls for a paycheck. No one likes a sell-out, not even me. I just don't have much use for the excruciatingly narrow definition of "serious" cinema on which this particular breed of judgment is founded, or of the elitist pretensions of those who offer it. Show me someone who thinks art and popular cinema are inherently at odds, and I'll show you an imbecile who hates movies. As it turned out, Zhang did pretty damn well with his first foray into genre. HERO was a damn fine movie. Significantly less fine, however, was his follow-up, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, which did, indeed, play to the prejudices of those eyebrow-raisers. My remarks on it, composed in the immediate aftermath of my viewing of it:

April 20, 2005

What if we had images Salvador Dali may have doodled in his spare time? Not when he was busy creating some masterwork or other, but at more mundane moments like when he was vegging out, maybe laying in some hammock popping grapes or sitting on the toilet. Maybe those doodles would be interesting. No one would ever confuse them with masterpieces. They're just things that offer some glimpse into the mind of the artist at some random moment when he was working an idea, goofing off, or or just wasn't terribly concerned with creating art.

They'd probably look something like HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS.

I went into this one cold, having seen nothing from it and knowing nothing of its story. With Zhang Yimou behind the camera, I suppose I'd have had a right to some high expectations. A few of his films have been real classics; HERO (2002), his previous foray into wuxia, was one of the best films of the previous year. I was terribly curious to see HOFD.

I just finished it.

And it ain't good.

HOFD is difficult to simply dismiss outright as a "bad" movie only because Zhang Yimou is a master craftsman who is clearly present in the work. Sort of like the Dali doodles. While calling it "bad" poses some difficulties, it would be hard to understate the case for its "ain't-good"ness; for a film about which I knew literally nothing going in, I haven't been this let down in a very long time.

First and foremost--and this represents a major break by Zhang with his previous work--the film isn't about anything. Whereas HERO was, to paraphrase one of reviewer, "exploring a profound theme in a very ambitious way," HOFD is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There are no underlying themes, grand or modest, to be found anywhere in its two hours. It's barely more than a series of random (frequently quite tedious) scenes thrown together. About an hour into the film, you get a "big reveal."[1] Most movie goers will, I suspect, have seen it coming from only minutes into the film--I certainly did--but when it finally arrives, you think you're about to see a major theme emerge having to do with identity. Everything has been heavy-handedly pointing toward it for a while. Unfortunately,[2] it's dropped, immediately and permanently, and a cloying soap opera introduced, which is allowed to consume the rest of the film.

And it isn't even a good soap. To be effective, a soap must be emotionally engaging on at least some level. In HOFD, the film goes out of its way to be exactly the opposite. The structure of the film denies the viewer even the most basic knowledge necessary to have any feelings at all for the characters. Everyone is lying about who they are for most of the movie, and when this is revealed, the viewer is never offered anything to fall back on. You don't know who they are, and can't feel any sympathy for them. Their very bad behavior, after the "big reveal," makes this even worse--by then, you're actively disliking them, and, before the movie is over, you just wish everyone would die. Further crippling this entire stretch of film is the Spielbergian structure adopted by the director which is constantly telling the viewer he's supposed to care about them.

Then there are the set-pieces. HERO was packed to the gills with fantastic set-pieces; during its running time, you were faced, on perhaps dozens of occasions, with astonishingly original and beautiful images which floated around in your mind long after the movie was over. HOFD has much more action than HERO--there seems to be an action sequence every three minutes or so--but it doesn't manage a single such image. Not one. The action sequences, in fact, were, almost without exception, blandly choreographed exercises in unbearable tedium. More than once, during HOFD many dull donnybrooks, my finger crept toward the fast-forward button, and, at two different points, I was unable to resist the temptation. In HERO, the fights were highly stylized; lots of wirework, emotion, close-ups. It wasn't supposed to be "realistic." It was like a cinematic adaptation of a feeling. It was like a dance. It was like an opera. Beautiful wuxia. In HOFD, it's like a really silly cartoon, full of awful, awful, awful CGI-"artist" masturbation of the kind that have rendered Hollywood's "summer blockbusters" unwatchable. Every battle in HOFD sees scores of badly-computer-generated arrows, swords, and daggers cut around corners, and bounce off targets only to reset themselves in midair and try again. They behave in more ridiculous fashion than the JFK "magic bullet", and the movie exploits every visual cliché in the book in displaying them--for what seems like hundreds of times, you get the standard traveling shot following a CGI weapon in the foreground to its target. HERO had a few moments where fights were ill-conceived (the chess parlor fight and the fight over the lake) or dragged on a bit too long (like the incredible fight in the autumnal forest). All of HOFD's fight sequences were like this.

The conclusion of this mess is just awful in every possible way, and is not in the least camouflaged by the inexplicable snow-storm Zhang threw in to try to confuse the matter. It's the sort of ending you tack on when there's no real point to anything you've just seen. There's no way to create a real ending, because, the film having told no story, there's no story to play out. Throw in some more fighting and a sudden snow-storm, and maybe no one will notice (Zhang foolishly draws attention to the Flying Dagger plot he'd so abruptly abandoned for soap by tossing in a shot of the soldiers creeping up on Flying Dagger HQ near the end--should have let us forget about them, Zhang!).

In short, HOFD looks exactly like what an upbudget Hollywood attempt to duplicate a film like HERO or CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON would look like. Its remarkably positive critical reception in the United States is a very damning comment on the state of contemporary film criticism. I don't deal in thumbs, and don't like numerical ratings for films. I suppose one measure of a movie's impression is whether you find yourself looking at it again. I've seen HERO a few times now--I don't anticipate I'll ever be sitting down to HOFD again.

---

[1] The "big reveal" makes rubbish out of several things you've already seen--this one would hold up really badly on subsequent viewings, when the viewer is aware of everyone's real agenda beforehand.

[2] "Unfortunately," because at least it would have given the film some point.

--j.

"Best" Picture?

2009-01-24T09:55:00.001-05:00

With as much fanfare as they can muster, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just announced this year's Oscar nominees. I don't like the Academy Awards. The reasons are legion, too many to list. I think those Oscar statues are far too often held up as the gold standard on quality cinema when, far too often, they're really emblematic of conformity, timidity, and mediocrity.

A few years ago, I participated in an internet discussion touched off by the unconscionable decision to award the wretched CRASH the Best Picture Oscar. Everyone seemed to agree, at the time, that this was one of the historically bad Academy awards, which means there may be some hope for mankind after all. The discussion expanded to include other Best Picture travesties, of which there have been a great many. I wrote the embryonic version of this piece then, but I don't think I ever actually posted it anywhere. As I recall, I found it sitting unfinished one day and, having some time on my hands and not wanting to throw away the research, began embellishing it for further reference. I've tinkered with it several times since. In compiling it, I've stuck almost entirely to "mainstream" films, which is arguably just as questionable as the procedure that leads to the actual Oscar picks. My rationale in doing this is to beat the Academy at its own game. I don't demand they recognize the cutting edge--I play with their own toys in their own back yard. In the cold glare of history, where movies either gain the esteem of classics or are discarded, the list of films that weren't even nominated is even more damning of the Oscar process than the bad calls.

This is the latest version of the piece, Best Picture travesties major and minor:

1941 - HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY beats CITIZEN KANE. It also topped THE MALTESE FALCON that year. While Kane, the Falcon, and even SERGEANT YORK (also nominated) are still watched, quoted, satirized, and loved today (and KANE is widely--and rightly--regarded as one of the greatest motion pictures ever filmed), no one even remembers HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. It doesn't even seem to be fondly remembered by John Ford fans.

1946 - THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES beats IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, but at least both were nominated. Far better than either of them are the wholly unnominated THE BIG SLEEP, THE KILLERS, and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, in a year when THE YEARLING wasted a nominee slot.

1950 - ALL ABOUT EVE beats SUNSET BLVD. Two great films, but an obvious bad call. To understand the full scope of its badness, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, IN A LONELY PLACE, and THE THIRD MAN were entirely unnominated that year, while FATHER OF THE BRIDE was nominated.

1951 - AN AMERICAN IN PARIS beats A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, while THE AFRICAN QUEEN, DETECTIVE STORY, and THE THING went unnominated.

1952 - THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH beats HIGH NOON and THE QUIET MAN (not a fan of the latter, but I can't argue that it has survived).

1956 - AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS takes the prize, a win which is one of the most widely-acknowledged Best Picture travesties. Unnominated that year was THE SEARCHERS (not a movie of which I'm very fond, but still far better than the one that actually won), THE KILLING (a real classic, and far better than either of those), and--most importantly--SEVEN SAMURAI, now universally acknowledged as one of the greatest works the medium has ever produced. The director of the latter, Akira Kurosawa was, like Orson Welles, one of the greatest talents to ever sit behind a camera, with over half a dozen undisputed masterpieces to his credit (and many, many more excellent films besides). He was never honored as Best Director, and none of his films ever won Best Picture (or even best foreign language feature). Near the end of his life, the Academy did belatedly give him a lifetime achievement Oscar.

1958 - GIGI wins. Ludicrous in itself, made far more ludicrous by the fact that neither VERTIGO (easily Hitchcock's masterpiece) nor TOUCH OF EVIL (one of Welles' many classics) were even nominated.

1960 - THE APARTMENT wins--admittedly a solid film, but INHERIT THE WIND, its better, was never nominated, in a year when SONS AND LOVERS, THE SUNDOWNERS, and THE ALAMO were. Also left unnominated were PSYCHO and SPARTACUS (I'm not a big fan of either, but their reputations and longevity--and the films that actually were nominated in their stead--make them noteworthy)

1965 - THE SOUND OF MUSIC beats DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. REPULSION goes unnominated, while DARLING, SHIP OF FOOLS, and A THOUSAND CLOWNS fill out nominee slots.

1967 - IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT beats THE GRADUATE, while COOL HAND LUKE, THE DIRTY DOZEN, POINT BLANK, and Welles' CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT go unnominated.

1968 - OLIVER! beats Zefferelli's ROMEO & JULIET. OLIVER! over nearly anything would be a travesty. In its year, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY joined both PLANET OF THE APES and THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY in the not-nominated pile, while both RACHEL, RACHEL, and FUNNY GIRL were nominated.

1969 - MIDNIGHT COWBOY beats BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. I wouldn't give the Academy too much hell for that. The travesty comes from the fact that THE WILD BUNCH, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (probably the greatest Western ever committed to film) weren't even nominated, while the Academy found room in its list of nominees for both HELLO DOLLY And ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS.

1979 - KRAMER VS. KRAMER beats APOCALYPSE NOW. A monumentally poor call, one made even worse by the final line-up that led to it: Unnominated, that year, was DAWN OF THE DEAD, THE CHINA SYNDROME, ALIEN, BEING THERE, ...AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, and Herzog's NOSFERATU, but the Academy still had room for nominations of the likes of ALL THAT JAZZ, BREAKING AWAY, and KRAMER VS. KRAMER (which had been entirely forgotten only a few years after it had won).

1988 - RAIN MAN beats DANGEROUS LIAISONS. That, alone, would be an unbelievable travesty (as would RAIN MAN winning over just about anything), but, as usual, it's even worse: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST wasn't even nominated, in a year when WORKING GIRL was.

1989 - DRIVING MISS DAISY beats GLORY, while DO THE RIGHT THING and Kenneth Branagh's HENRY V go unnominated.

1990 - DANCES WITH WOLVES beats GOODFELLAS. Absolutely no way to justify that. Excluded from nominations were HENRY & JUNE, THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER, and INTERNAL AFFAIRS, while dogshit like AWAKENINGS and GHOST were nominated.

This is only one of the many years in which Martin Scorsese deserved honors and went without them. The Academy breezed through MEAN STREETS, ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, GOODFELLAS--an entire career of genuine classics--without granting Marty the prize. This was only recently "corrected," but even that turned into a bit of a travesty--Scorsese was honored for THE DEPARTED, one of his distinctly lesser films, over more deserving competition.

1994 - FORREST GUMP--trite rubbish--beats out THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and PULP FICTION.

1996 - THE ENGLISH PATIENT beats FARGO. Far better than either, however, were the unnominated: SLINGBLADE, THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, and LONESTAR. And THE CRUCIBLE, down the scale but still far better than the winner, didn't make the cut, either. 1996 should have been a very competitive Oscar year, like one of the years from the '70s, but, instead, it was bogged down in a lot of lousy nominees. JERRY MAGUIRE and THE ENGLISH PATIENT--both embarrassing rot--seemed to turn up in every major category in place of all of these films.

FARGO is a good movie, but I've never really thought of it as Best Picture material; it's certainly one of the Coen brothers' lesser films. The Coens' two greatest films were O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU (a genuine American classic) and BARTON FINK, neither of which were even nominated in their respective years. O BROTHER wasn't given a slot among the nominees in a year in which TRAFFIC, GLADIATOR (!!!), and ERIN BROCKOVICH (!!!!!!!!!!!) were. Worse, the Academy couldn't find a place for FINK in a year in which they stuck BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (!), BUGSY (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), and THE PRINCE OF TIDES (!s to the point of requiring scientific notation) on the ballot.

The Academy has continued to be clueless about the Coens--last year saw Best Picture delivered over to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, in reality the Coens' biggest creative misfire since THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, and a film even further divorced from everything that makes their regular work special than was FARGO.

1997 - TITIANIC beats L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. BOOGIE NIGHTS--the legitimate Best Picture of 1997--wasn't even nominated, nor were THE SWEET HEREAFTER or IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (all better than either TITANIC or L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.)

1998 - SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE wins. The fact that it beats SAVING PRIVATE RYAN always comes up in discussions of Oscar travesties, but I don't agree with it as an example of poor decision-making. SPR is one of the most overrated excuses for a movie of the last two decades. Every element that comprised it had been done, done better, and then done to death years before it was even on the drawing board. Much of the film is embarrassingly awful, and so cliche-ridden that, while watching it (and being incredibly bored), I was able to describe, with remarkable accuracy, what would happen next. My friend to whom I was offering this commentary thought I'd lied about having never seen the movie. In a sense, I had--it was just that I'd seen it in all the other war movies from which the cliches it employed had emerged, the movies from which all the scenes it ripped off had come. I don't dispute those who say SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE probably didn't deserve Best Picture that year. I certainly wouldn't have given it the award, but its advantages over SPR--originality and intelligence--are glaringly obvious, and SPR's failure is not some sort of martyr to bad decision-making. In that latter category, instead, falls some of the other awards SPR was given (including Spielberg's Best Director nod).

It would require a book to fill in all the full-fledged Best Picture travesties.

Look, for example, at 1995, wherein you had, as nominees, APOLLO 13, BRAVEHEART, IL POSTINO, BABE, and SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. None of these even deserved nomination, much less to win.

While second-stringers and third-raters of that ilk filled out the nominee roster, films left entirely unnominated that year include SE7EN, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, LEAVING LAS VEGAS, ROB ROY, STRANGE DAYS, Ian McKellan's RICHARD III, and (far down the list) TO DIE FOR.

That list of unnominated films wouldn't have made a more credible Best Picture list than the ones actually on the list, and any of them would be more deserving of Best Picture.

For that matter, the unnominated films I've mentioned for several of these years would have made more credible Best Picture lists than the ones actually nominated.

The Oscars do sometimes get it right (AMERICAN BEAUTY's many wins seem almost miraculous, as bad as things have gotten in recent decades). They certainly aren't any sort of gold-standard for quality when it comes to Best Picture, though (and a list of directors who were never nominated or won would probably be even more damning than this one). Sometimes, they go to movies that shouldn't even be up for any sort of award, and the undeserving beat the deserving as often as not (far more often than not, in recent years). I don't have much use for them.

--j.

HBO's ROME (2005-2007)

2009-01-17T04:18:00.000-05:00

HBO has gotten a tremendous amount of critical praise in recent years for several of their productions, and, while it's true they've sometimes done some of the best work on television, it's often the case that this hype turns out to be a lot of hooey--mediocre and even poor product elevated beyond any reasonable estimation of its merits (BAND OF BROTHERS, SIX FEET UNDER, OZ, to name but a random few). One project showered with this sort of profuse praise that actually lived up to--and exceeded--its hype is ROME, a massive two-season, 22 chapter epic set in the last days of the Roman Republic.

We've seen a lot of Roman epics over the years, of every conceivable degree of quality (mostly bad, though), but there's never been a project like ROME. HBO, co-producing with the BBC, gave the series the red-carpet treatment, shooting in 35mm film in Rome itself, devoting five acres of the Cinecittà backlot to recreating sections of the city, and spending something in the neighborhood of $200 million for the entire run. The amount of attention given to every detail of the physical production is almost absurd--you can see it in every shot.

So it looks pretty, but how is it?

Excellent. As a drama, ROME would still rank among the best we've gotten from television if it was staged on cardboard sets with wooden swords. The series covers about 20 years of history, from Julius Caesar's victory in Gaul to the ascendancy of Augustus. We follow events through parallel storylines involving, on the one hand, the major players (Caesar, Mark Antony, Brutus, etc.), and, on the other, a pair of regular Roman plebs, and their families and associates.

The latter, Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), are legionaries serving in Gaul as the story opens. Though their names are drawn from actual soldiers mentioned in Caesar's commentary on the campaign in Gaul, the characters are entirely fictional, and owe much more of their substance to buddy comedies and action movies than to Caesar. Besides being a damn good drama, ROME serves as an almost anthropological examination of life in ancient Rome, and Vorenus and Pullo serve as our eyes into that society. We're given story arcs related to their military service, their efforts at returning to civilian life and taking up regular trades, and they even put in a long stint as officially sanctioned gangsters. McKidd, Stevenson, and pretty much everyone else in the cast are uniformly excellent. Bruno Heller, who is really the creative force behind the show, is quite clever in finding ways in which to work these characters into the major historical events covered in the series.

We're given a rip-roaring, first-rate take on those more familiar events, as well--Caesar's victory in Gaul, his conflict with Pompey, his rise to dictator and eventual death, and the power-struggle between Antony and Octavian that followed. There's much behind-the-scenes political maneuvering by everyone involved. The series offers an almost entirely fictionalized version of Octavian's mother Atia as a wonderfully devilish schemer, brought to life with much enthusiasm by Polly Walker. One ongoing storyline deals with Atia's battle with Caesar's lover Servilia (Lindsay Duncan, bringing to life an equally fictionalized version of a real historical figure). It culminates, late in the run, in extremely dramatic fashion, capped by the funniest line of the series (watch it--you'll see what I mean). Bringing to life the major players is another excellent cast. James Purefoy in particular gives us the screen version of the Mark Antony those of us with an interest in this history have always imagined.

The series isn't without flaws, but most of them are very minor. Its conclusion, I'll concede, isn't very good--probably the series' weakest point. There have been some quibbles among commentators on the show about historical accuracy. These seem grossly misplaced to me. Jonathan Stamp, the series' historical consultant, has said ROME aims for authenticity, not necessarily painstaking historical accuracy, and the most brutal of scoffers on this point would be hard pressed to deny that the show has authenticity in spades, but it's also pretty good history. Corners are sometimes cut, events are somewhat altered at times, a lot of the show deals with fictional characters (or fictionalized versions of real ones), but it still manages to hit pretty close to the mark, when it comes to the historical record, and, by the usual standard of such projects (see, most recently, GLADIATOR), it may as well be a history textbook.

Well-written, thoughtful, violent, funny, moving, meticulously staged, and with more layers than could be fully absorbed in half a dozen viewings, ROME is a first-rate production all the way--worthy of every rave it drew. This is probably the closest anyone can ever hope to get to being in pagan Rome, and it plays out well enough that we may experience some little feeling of regret at that fact.

Both seasons of ROME are available on DVD, but, unfortunately, HBO continues their practice of confusing their wares with those of the Criterion Collection when it comes to pricing. The DVD releases are as good as the series, and packed to the gills with excellent extras, but upon their initial release, they were insanely overpriced--many times reasonable, and far more than I'm willing to pay. They've come down quite a bit, but contemplating the current $80+ price-tag for a 22-episode series, I can't help but reflect on the irony of the fact that, in this age when we hear so much of piracy, the talk is always centered around some teenagers downloading files on their computers. I ended up purchasing my copies of ROME used, at a fraction of what they cost new, which is probably the best way to go. Or just rent them. But see them.

--j.

EUGENIE DE SADE (1970)

2009-01-11T23:28:00.000-05:00

Last year, Blue Underground released a fantastic disc of Jesús Franco's EUGENIE DE SADE. My review of the film:

Fri., 11 April, 2008

Jesús Franco is a fellow about whom I've written here in the past. One of the most prolific filmmakers the medium has ever seen, he was one of the fellows Phil Hardy covered in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HORROR MOVIES whose work sounded utterly fascinating but was virtually unknown in the U.S. Tim Lucas wrote a groundbreaking survey of it in FANGORIA in the 1980s, and he was featured in his own chapter of Tohill-&-Tombs' IMMORAL TALES, but it wasn't until the advent of DVD that his work began to circulate like mad, here, and, exceeding even the decades of anticipation enthusiasts had stored up, he became a full-fledged cult legend (after nearly 50 years in the business, his movies are now financed by his fans).

One of his absolute best films (and, to be clear on the point, Franco has a lot of those, and you've never seen one Franco until you've seen them all) is EUGENIE DE SADE, from 1970. The movie has been released to North American DVD twice, once by Wild East, which mostly specializes in spaghetti westerns, and next by Blue Underground, which specializes in just about any sort of arty--or not so arty--cult film.

The movie--obsessive, disturbing, and still darkly romantic--is based on "Eugenie de Franval," by the Marquis de Sade, but updated to a modern setting. It tells the story of Albert Radek, a quite brilliant but very twisted writer (played by Paul Muller), and his step-daughter Eugenie, whom he has raised from birth. Because of censorship concerns, Franco didn't make her his real daughter, as in the book. In the film, Muller's wife had already been pregnant when he married her, she'd died not long after giving birth, and he'd raised Eugenie himself. But not necessarily out of fatherly love. He had a much darker agenda, as we soon learn, one that would have raised the hackles of censors if she'd been blood kin. Radek has, in fact, raised Eugenie to be his perfect companion, a lover and a collaborator in his various and sundry crimes. He kills people. He does so just because he likes to do it, and, more importantly, because he likes to prove to himself that he can get away with it. Eugenie loves him. He's been her entire world for her entire life. When he reveals his purpose, she's sucked into his madness, and the movie records it all.

Eugenie is played by the ravishing Soledad Miranda, then one of Franco's regular stable of performers, and she has never looked better than in this film. Only 26 at the time, she pulls off a balancing act, in her performance, that would have been impressive for an actress of twice her years. Eugenie willingly participates in all of her step-fathers' horrors, yet still retains an air of innocence--she is a victim as well as a perpetrator. One online review of the film said Paul Muller is totally miscast as her stepfather, and I couldn't disagree more strongly. His intensity is piercing, and he nails every note of his performance like a virtuoso. It is, in fact, difficult to imagine anyone else in the part.

Jesús Franco often writes himself into his own films in some way. These aren't token cameos in Franco's hands. Rather, they're like his own running commentary on himself and on his own work. In EUGENIE DE SADE, he casts himself as a writer named Tanner who seems to be wise to what's happening with Radek and his step-daughter. He shadows them throughout the picture, but doesn't want to stop them or turn them in. He just wants to watch, and to record it all. It's through his efforts that we hear the story. (In an interview included on the Blue Underground release of the film, Franco, apparently feeling a bit cheeky, rejects rumors that he and Soledad Miranda were ever lovers, saying their relationship was more like that of a father and daughter.)

Special kudos belong to the films' excellent score, another shot out of the park by Bruno Nicolai. Like Eugenie herself, it suggests both innocence and corruption, interwoven into a single tapestry. It's quite beautiful, and its use in the film a perfect marriage of image and sound.

Appropriate to the material, the atmosphere in this one is stifling, at times. It's dark subject matter, and the film, while never flinching in its display of the more disturbing elements, eschews any moralizing. Instead, we're told the tale through a subjective, dreamlike narrative offered by Eugenie herself to writer Tanner/director Franco. I imagine some will feel the need for a shower after watching it. One shouldn't feel too dirty, though; this is great movie-making.

--j.

Cahiers Du Cinema's Top 100, or How I Learned To Stop Making Lists & Just Love Movies

2008-12-24T02:20:00.000-05:00

The long-running French film journal Cahiers Du Cinema (I can never pronounce it right) recently released their latest list of the 100 greatest movies of all time, as voted by French critics, directors, industry poobahs. I've never cared for such lists. I suppose this one provides as good an opportunity as any to demonstrate why. First, here's how they rank 'em:

Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) - Jean Renoir
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (L'Aurore) - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
L'Atalante - Jean Vigo
M - Fritz Lang
Singin' in the Rain - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) - Marcel Carné
The Searchers - John Ford
Greed - Erich von Stroheim
Rio Bravo - Howard Hawkes
To Be or Not to Be - Ernst Lubitsch
Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
Contempt (Le Mépris) - Jean-Luc Godard
Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) - Kenji Mizoguchi
City Lights - Charlie Chaplin
The General - Buster Keaton
Nosferatu the Vampire - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Music Room - Satyajit Ray
Freaks - Tod Browning
Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) - Jean Eustache
The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin
The Leopard (Le Guépard) - Luchino Visconti
Hiroshima, My Love - Alain Resnais
The Box of Pandora (Loulou) - Georg Wilhelm Pabst
North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
Pickpocket - Robert Bresson
Golden Helmet (Casque d'or) - Jacques Becker
The Barefoot Contessa - Joseph Mankiewitz
Moonfleet - Fritz Lang
Diamond Earrings (Madame de…) - Max Ophüls
Pleasure - Max Ophüls
The Deer Hunter - Michael Cimino
The Adventure - Michelangelo Antonioni
Battleship Potemkin - Sergei M. Eisenstein
Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock
Ivan the Terrible - Sergei M. Eisenstein
The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola
Touch of Evil - Orson Welles
The Wind - Victor Sjöström
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman
The Crowd - King Vidor
8 1/2 - Federico Fellini
La Jetée - Chris Marker
Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard
Confessions of a Cheat (Le Roman d'un tricheur) - Sacha Guitry
Amarcord - Federico Fellini
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) - Jean Cocteau
Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder
Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli
Gertrud - Carl Theodor Dreyer
King Kong - Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
Laura - Otto Preminger
The Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa
The 400 Blows - François Truffaut
La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini
The Dead - John Huston
Trouble in Paradise - Ernst Lubitsch
It's a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
Monsieur Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer
À bout de souffle - Jean-Luc Godard
Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick
La Grande Illusion - Jean Renoir
Intolerance - David Wark Griffith
A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne) - Jean Renoir
Playtime - Jacques Tati
Rome, Open City - Roberto Rossellini
Livia (Senso) - Luchino Visconti
Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin
Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat
An Affair to Remember - Leo McCarey
Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Scarlet Empress - Joseph von Sternberg
Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi
Talk to Her - Pedro Almodóvar
The Party - Blake Edwards
Tabu - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Bandwagon - Vincente Minnelli
A Star Is Born - George Cukor
Mr. Hulot's Holiday - Jacques Tati
America, America - Elia Kazan
El - Luis Buñuel
Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich
Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone
Daybreak (Le Jour se lève) - Marcel Carné
Letter from an Unknown Woman - Max Ophüls
Lola - Jacques Demy
Manhattan - Woody Allen
Mulholland Dr. - David Lynch
My Night at Maud's (Ma nuit chez Maud) - Eric Rohmer
Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) - Alain Resnais
The Gold Rush - Charlie Chaplin
Scarface - Howard Hawks
Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio de Sica
Napoléon - Abel Gance

I tend to see such lists as a waste of time. The reason I've never been fond of them is that they can never work--the cinema is simply too vast a realm to be done justice by such an instrument. No matter how good any such list is, it still has more holes than a Swiss cheese, and it's just as easy to effectively pick apart. This one is no different. To wit:

Sergio Leone gets the nod for ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, but not for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, which is a better movie. OAUTIA is also great, to be sure, and probably belongs on this list, as well, but if one is going to pick only one Leone, it has to be WEST.

I've never seen EL, so I don't know where I'd put it myself, but that's the only Luis Bunuel film on the list, which seems very wrong. I'd certainly place him among the best the medium has ever produced, and would rate several of his films higher than any number that appear on the list. My personal favorite is also one of his most obscure: SIMON OF THE DESERT.

Like Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa is also criminally underrepresented here--only SEVEN SAMURAI. It certainly belongs there, but Kurosawa is arguably the greatest overall filmmaker who ever lived. There are more than half a dozen of his features that should be there. It's particularly surprising that RASHOMON is absent. It usually scores even better than SEVEN SAMURAI in these lists.

Ingmar Bergman has only FANNY & ALEXANDER, which isn't even his best work. That honor goes to THE SEVENTH SEAL, and it's rather remarkable to me that it's a film that doesn't even rate. For whatever reason, Bergman--once considered a god among filmmakers--was downgraded in critical opinion in the last few decades. I'm not sure why; he's still one of the best. Personally, I'd have also put HOUR OF THE WOLF and maybe even THE VIRGIN SPRING ahead of F&A.

Dreyer gets two nods, including one for THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC--probably his best film--but his DAY OF WRATH doesn't make the cut. Surprising, considering many of the films that do.

Hitchcock has the opposite problem; as usual, he's overrepresented. VERTIGO belongs on the list. The other two are gratuitous.

Stanley Kubrick is misrepresented, here; BARRY LYNDON and 2001. DR. STRANGELOVE is easily his best film, but doesn't even rate, and any number of his other movies belong ahead of BARRY LYNDON.

John Huston rates only with THE DEAD. No TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. No MISFITS. No ASPHALT JUNGLE. THE MALTESE FALCON isn't there, either, but, as great as it is, I've never thought of it as top 100 material.

Speaking of asphalt jungles, noir in general is grossly underrepresented, here. Robert Aldrich's KISS ME DEADLY rates, and, in fact, always ranks high in these sorts of projects, but it has never been worthy of its reputation. Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL is the only other noir picture of the classical era included on the list, and the only one that actually deserves to be there. In film noir, Orson Welles, alone, made MR. ARKADIN, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, and starred in THE THIRD MAN, all of which leave KISS ME DEADLY in the dust. Nick Ray, who only gets the nod for JOHNNY GUITAR, made, within noir alone, THEY LIVE BY NIGHT,ON DANGEROUS GROUND, and, in particular, IN A LONELY PLACE. Jacques Tourneur gets no notice for any of his films, which is, in itself, a crime, but it's a particularly aggravated crime for the exclusion of OUT OF THE PAST, one of the absolute best noir pictures. Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD is nowhere to be seen. Robert Wise gets no notice for THE SET-UP. Kubrick's THE KILLING is AWOL. I could list these all day long. Noir was an astonishing genre. It produced a string of genuine classics, and KISS ME DEADLY wouldn't even rank in the top 20. Maybe not the top 50. Frenchies named film noir; come on, fellas--get with it!

There are several other glaring omissions. There isn't a single Martin Scorsese film. Not one. CASABLANCA (the absolute apex of the assembly-line Hollywood studio system, and one of the finest films ever made) doesn't rate. Werner Herzog is entirely unrepresented (No AGUIRRE, no FITZCARRALDO). Hawks gets the nod for RIO BRAVO (a programmer Western), but not for THE BIG SLEEP.

This being a product of the French, Charlie Chaplin has to be insanely overrepresented, but five films--more than any other director--is taking the absurd to new levels (for my part, I probably wouldn't include any Chaplin).

Then, there are those selections that just leave me scratching my head in befuddlement. FREAKS? THE DEER HUNTER? THE SEARCHERS? What the hell...? THE SEARCHERS always polls above its merits (Hawks' RED RIVER does, as well), so maybe that isn't such a surprise, but I keep expecting history to finally catch up with it. Looks like history hasn't done it yet. That doesn't make THE SEARCHERS any better, though. FREAKS is essentially a novelty film by a minor director that someone in France must have overhyped to an insane degree--it certainly doesn't belong anywhere near any such list of this sort (particularly when not a one of the genuinely excellent horror films of its era are included). Neither does Truffaut's THE 400 BLOWS, which seems forever held in a high esteem it does practically nothing to earn.

Even a genuinely great movie like NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is greately overrated by appearing here, particularly as high on the list as it appears. I say this as a sincere, committed fan of that film for much of my life. I love it. The movie is just incredible for most of its running time, but unfortunately, when it gets to the final act, it progressively disintegrates. The crash is hard, and it is jarring, a brutal shift in tone that takes us to a trite ending that looks and feels like nothing so much as one of those inane studio imposition on an already-finished picture we've seen so often over the years (shades of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS). That's enough of a flaw to drop its ranking well out of a top 100.

There are some pleasant surprises, as well. KING KONG and APOCALYPSE NOW certainly belong in that category, and it's good to see David Lynch and Pedro Almodovar get a little respect. Far more of the picks, however, are befuddling. A stray misfire or two would be somewhat forgivable, but, in this case, there are a lot of them, and their presence requires totally excluding too many obvious, deserving picks.

But, as I said before, any list like this can be torn to pieces with a little thought. It's why I don't like 'em. If I made a list of my own 100 personal favorites, I could then rip it to shreds in exactly the same way I've been ripping up this one. Pitting against one another films as different as CHILDREN OF PARADISE, SOME LIKE IT HOT, and APOCALYPSE NOW doesn't serve any useful end. The cinema is vast and has something for everyone. It should be enjoyed, not listed.

--j.

POSSESSION (1981)

2008-12-15T03:30:00.000-05:00

This remarkable film has been allowed to remain out-of-print for quite some time, now. Only a few weeks ago, Blue Underground was scheduled to re-release it, as they do with so many old Anchor Bay titles, but this has either been delayed or canceled entirely, which is very unfortunate. Here's my review of it, written back in the spring:

Fri., 11 April, 2008

Back in 1980, Polish director Andrej Zulawski had an idea for a movie. Trying to sum it up, he inevitably made it sound overly "arty" and convoluted, so he decided to simplify his pitch--he told an American distributor it was "about a beautiful girl who gets fucked by an octopus." What's even more astonishing about that tale is that the distributor bought it, and ponied up part of the money Zulawski needed to make the picture. The result was POSSESSION, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill.My cinematic studies were rather extensive last year--probably a few hundred movies, in all--but POSSESSION was one of the absolute best I saw all year, and one of the most intense movies I've ever seen. I felt utterly drained after watching it. It's exhausting, to be sure, but in a good way.

The aforementioned "octopus" wasn't really an octopus, but it was a monster with a lot of arms, and it did fuck Isabelle Adjani. The movie isn't "about" that, though. It's actually a very intense, visceral study of the disintegration of a once-functional marriage. Art reflected life--POSSESSION was made right after the traumatic collapse of Zulawski's own marriage. His film offers an excruciatingly detailed and unflinching map of the emotional landscape of two people whose relationship has disintegrated and left them in absolute agony, their lives in pieces, and the two of them trapped in a sort of emotional limbo. They can't stand to be together. They can't stand to be apart. Isabelle Adjani, lost in her pain and seemingly verging on madness, gives birth to a monster, a literal physical representation of her emotional state. At first, it's in a constant state of evolution. She sequesters it away, cares for it, nurtures it, and yes, is fucked by it, until it finishes its last transformation. That transformation is a major plot twist. It's the sort of thing I should have seen coming, but totally missed until the big reveal at the end. It is said that "a picture speaks a thousand words." The reveal near the end of this ups the word-count substantially.

And that isn't even the end, yet. Zulawski sees the end of this relationship as something akin to the end of the world. And, in the movie, this is literally the case.

(How's that for a hook?)

Zulawski shot and edited the film in a raw, frenetic style. The camera, as agitated and unstable as the characters, is forever moving, moving, moving, covering most of the interaction between the two leads in tight, claustrophobic shots that bore in so closely we can almost count the pores in their faces. Adjani, in particular, has a remarkable face for film, and Zulawski makes perhaps the best use of it of any of her directors over the years. For their part, Neill and Adjani are just excellent, and in a pair of extraordinarily demanding parts that could have been disastrous in lesser hands (and, one suspects, would have sent most thespians running home, crying for momma). Adjani was unnerved, even horrified, by the intensity of the film, dubbing it "emotional pornography." The Cannes Film Festival awarded her Best Actress for her work on it.

POSSESSION is rather long, just over two hours. Back in the mid-'80s, it was released on video in the U.S. in a substantially butchered version--the distributors apparently tried to re-edit it into something like an exploitation film. Needless to say, it quickly died (I can't even imagine who would have come up with such a project, or how they'd have gone about it). Luckily, at the dawn of DVD, good ol' Anchor Bay--back before they'd become a recurring joke/tragedy themselves--came along and saved it, releasing it in its complete form in the U.S. for the first time, accompanied by a very good Zulawski commentary track. I bought this one virtually blind last year, having read a single laudatory review that told almost nothing of the plot. I'm very glad I did.

In a sign of how badly Anchor Bay has stumbled since selling out to Starz, POSSESSION has been allowed to go out of print and stay that way for quite some time. But they do offer us ROSEANNE: THE COMPLETE 5th SEASON! A real monster, to be sure, but one that fucks us, instead of Isabelle Adjani.

--j.

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE in glorious black-and-white!

2008-11-27T03:43:00.000-05:00

I discovered Robert Siodmak's THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1946) a little more than a year ago on Turner Classic Movies. I was deathly ill one night, and got up at some ungodly hour to violently unburden my poor roiling tummy. I sat on the couch afterwards, turned on the tv, and caught the first 15-or-so minutes of it. It blew me away, in the way only a great, well-constructed specimen of cinema can blow away a devout lover of cinema. I was hopelessly hooked, but hopelessly ill, and, furiously, had to cut it off and return to my bed--one of those moments when one really despises one's mortal weaknesses--but I got up the next morning and immediately sought out the DVD release for purchase.

When it arrived, I hungrily devoured it, and was so impressed, I then sat through it again. The movie ticks like a clock--I think it's one of the fifty-or-so best horror pictures ever made. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of it. I'm sure I'd read of it over the years, but I had no memory of ever having done so. It just came out of nowhere for me, and I was genuinely astonished that something so good could have escaped my notice for so long.

The black-and-white photography is thematic. There's a mystery afoot in THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, a mystery involving family secrets, hidden history, a creepy old house, and a killer on the loose. We're all lost in the dark with our heroine until the final reel. Then, as the mystery unravels, things get really dark!

The movie is a showcase for the use of black-and-white photography for effect. The film was made right at the height of the film noir era and reflects those influences in every frame, but while noir can have a strong horror element, THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE is the full treatment. A b&w film of this sort is a circus of light and shadows, with the director as the ringmaster, deftly stage-managing what he allows us to see and leaving us to guess about what we may not. Used successfully, this taps into basic primordial fears of the dark. Skillfully manipulated, darkness is made the living, moving embodiment of those fears of the unknown. We aren't merely afraid of it, though. We're of two minds about it, because we're taught, from childhood, that our fears of it are silly and irrational, and most of the time, that's proven correct. Most of the time, there's nothing in that darkness except an empty room. But sometimes, there are very bad things in it, indeed; things that lurk there with fell intent, things that can reach out and lay hands upon you before you even know anything is there. If we allow ourselves to give in to it, the conflict between our instincts and our experience creates an anxiety that makes a movie like this very effective. Even if we maintain some distance between ourselves and the film, though, we can appreciate the artistry of it.

I was really impressed with just about everything in the movie. It was quite ahead of its time. Oddly enough, it's what an Italian giallo should theoretically be (but never is), and it was made 20 years before Bava invented cinematic gialli. Siodmak's direction, which is what initially hooked me on the picture, is wildly inventive--crazy angles, creepy images, an atmosphere of stifling dread. I love it, and study it often.

It's a movie that had to be made in b&w--it wouldn't have worked in color. I've always hated hearing b&w called "monochrome." Actually, "black-and-white" itself is a misnomer. It isn't just black and white--it really is another sort of color palette. When it comes to making a film, the choice of color or b&w isn't neutral. A director and cinematographer design the look of a film around whatever palette they're going to be using. As John Huston put it, "I shot in black and white the same way a sculptor chooses between clay, bronze or marble." It's confounding that so many people--including nearly all of the misguided souls who agitate for "colorization" of old b&w films--should be so apparently oblivious to so obvious a thing. I've long held that a skilled director and cinematographer can get as much "color" out of the format as they can from outright color stock. THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE is a prime example of this.

An unfortunate phenomenon of recent years is a growing lack of appreciation for b&w cinema, particularly among young people (and I say that as if I'm some white-haired old duffer myself--I'm definitely not). I worked in video rentals for a number of years, before the vampire chain-stores entirely sucked the blood out of the trade, and I often ran across this peculiar malady. My early impression was pure old-fogey-ism; this distaste for b&w wasn't directed at b&w photography itself, but at the implications of a film being done in b&w. It suggests something older, something more dialogue-driven, something bereft of today's rapid-fire editing and computer animation, and something without an explosion or fight every two minutes, and thus overly challenging to those without attention spans. Old-fogey-ist sentiment though this may be, I still suspect it accounts for most of the aversion I've observed.

Not all of it, though. I'm not so much the old fogey that I confuse a comfort with the familiar (contemporary films) with the idiocy of the terminally unwise (in which the past is held in contempt). Not everyone afflicted with B&W Aversion Syndrome is hopeless. I have, in fact, personally managed the recoveries of more than a few of its victims.

Think of what those victims miss out on. An affliction of this sort effectively cuts one off from a large portion of the history of cinema, including many of the greatest films ever made. No CASABLANCA. No CITIZEN KANE. No SEVEN SAMURAI. And no SPIRAL STAIRCASE. I was recently watching the new 75th anniversary DVD re-release of Karl Freund's THE MUMMY (1932), which is definitely one of my favorite movies, and some remarks on the new commentary track about the failure of younger viewers to appreciate films of that sort made me want to write something that would express my own profound, sincere love of same, and maybe even do it with sufficient flair to convince those afflicted with this malady--those who aren't terminal, that is--to give their condition a second thought or two. Perhaps that will become a recurring theme here. Perhaps these comments on THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE are the first step toward a cure.

--j.

FLAVIA THE HERETIC (1974)

2008-11-20T01:04:00.000-05:00

My take on an interesting Italian feature that is far too often carelessly filed in the "nun-sploitation" folder:

Sat., 19 April, 2008

I'd read about Gianfranco Mingozzi's FLAVIA THE HERETIC (1974) for many years, but I only got to see it early last year, when I went on an insane movie-buying binge, and, for whatever reason, it has been on my mind lately, though it's been some months since I watched it.

It's a striking film, set in Italy somewhere around the 15th century. Definitely Medieval-era (though I don't think any specific year is ever given). This being the time of Christian ascendancy, the age is a time of utter madness, and the movie captures this very well.

Flavia, our protagonist (Florinda Bolkan), is a young lady who encounters a fallen Muslim on a battlefield. He seems a warm and intriguing fellow, and she's immediately taken with him. Her father, a soldier of a a family of some standing, comes along, almost immediately, and murders the wounded man right before her eyes. But she'll continue to see him in her dreams.

Her father ships her off to a convent that seems more like an open-air insane asylum--the residents, so harshly repressed by unyielding Medieval Christianity, slowly go mad. Flavia comes under the influence of one of the nuttier nuns. But in a mad world, only the sane are truly mad, and this sociopathic sister clearly recognizes the insanity around her. Her take on the times in which they live strikes a chord with Flavia, who, being young and apparently sheltered, is beginning to question everything about this world in which she finds herself trapped.

The movie is unflinching in its portrayal of that world, showcasing a lot of unpleasantness. We see a horse gelded, a lord rape a peasant woman in a pig-sty, the pious torture of a young nun. Through it all, Flavia observes and questions, rejecting, eventually, the Christian dogma that creates such a parade of horrors in terms that would gain the movie some criticism over the years for seeming anachronistic. I disagree with that criticism. Flavia's views, though sometimes expressed in ways that vaguely mirror, for example, then-contemporary feminist commentary (the movie was made in 1974), revolve around what are really pretty obvious questions. It is, perhaps, difficult to believe she could be so much of a fish out of water in her own time, but that's the sort of minor point it doesn't do to belabor. Flavia is written in such a way to allow those of our era, or of any era, to empathize with her plight. As well as it works, getting bogged down on such a matter would be missing the forest for the trees.

Flavia is heartened when the Muslims arrive, invading the countryside by sea, and she finds, in their leader, a new version of the handsome Islamist who still visits her dreams. Smitten with her almost immediately, he allows her to virtually lead his army, and Flavia becomes a Joan of Arc figure in full battle-gear, directing the invaders to pull down Christian society and wreak vengeance upon all those she's seen commit evil.

Is she the herald of a new and better world? She may think so, but Muslims of that era weren't big on feminism, either, as she soon learns the hard way. As they say, meet the new boss...

This is really just a thumbnail of some of the things that happen in FLAVIA THE HERETIC. The movie is quite grim, and with a very downbeat, direly depressing ending. Not a mass-audience movie at all, to be sure. It's quite good, though, for all its ugliness, and doesn't belong on the "nunsploitation" pile on which it is often carelessly thrown.

--j.

BCI's Spanish Horror: An Evaluation

2008-11-19T01:57:00.000-05:00

The last of my vintage pieces on the Spanish horror line from BCI/Deimos:

Mon., 7 July, 2008

It looks like BCI/Deimos is closing the tomb on its Spanish horror line. That's too bad, because it's been a hell of a run. Their most recent pair of films were, admittedly, botched--CURSE OF THE DEVIL (1973) has an horrendous authoring error that renders it unwatchable, while WEREWOLF SHADOW (1971) lacks the advertised American version (including, instead, some butchered monstrosity no one recognizes). One suspects these, issued after it was apparent the line was ending, may have fallen victim to a shove-it-out-the-door-before-the-house-burns-down attitude, with accompanying minimal quality control. Aside from these, all of the releases in this line have been first-rate discs, indeed, even when the movies themselves were less than stellar (EXORCISM and VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES, I'm callin' you out). Beautiful transfers, and frequently solid extras.

I made some real discoveries through those releases. HUMAN BEASTS (1980), a Paul Naschy flick that seems to have been almost entirely overlooked by everyone, turned out to be a very solid discovery. Ditto with Amando de Ossorio's LORELEY'S GRASP (1974), a very ambitious monster movie that, in spite of budgetary shortcomings, mostly succeeds. Another discovery: Ossorio's NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS (1974), much heralded in some quarters but difficult to find for many years, turned out to be a ludicrously overhyped turd, a film whose good reputation over the years seemed to be entirely based on youthful--and, one suspects, quite foggy--half-memories of old cable airings. Still another: Leon Klimovsky's DRACULA SAGA (1972)--not very well known--was a good, crazy little movie.

My pick of the litter, though, was Paul Naschy's NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF (1981), a movie that showcased exactly why Naschy has such a devoted cult following. Plotwise, the movie is a virtual remake of WEREWOLF SHADOW. Naschy is, once again, Waldemar Daninsky, the Polish nobleman afflicted with lycanthropy, battling a resurrected vampiress who once claimed him as a slave. In addition to starring in the film, Naschy took up directing chores on this one, and, in a time in which slasher films virtually consumed the horror market, the movie was full-blown, unapologetic old-school gothic horror--forboding castles, dark, cobweb-bedecked tombs, ancient curses. This was Naschy peaking, hitting his prime, and the result is the film all those earlier Naschy werewolf sagas were trying to become. It runs a little too long for its own good, but that's a very minor quibble.

The series also gave us a pair of commentaries by Naschy and Carlos Aured on HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB (their best collaboration, and a fantastic piece of inspired madness) and BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL (not a great movie, but worth a look, if one is in the mood). Aured died very soon after those commentaries were recorded, making them much more significant--a pioneer of Spanish dark fantasy offering the final recorded comments on his own career.

As wonderful as they are as a group, I have been critical of some of BCI's decisions with regard to these releases. They have to run their business as they see fit, of course, but as a consumer, one who belongs firmly within the target audience of such movies, a lot of things they did didn't make a great deal of sense to me, and these decisions, I suspect, did some of the harm that led to their eventual decision to abandon the line. The very fact that COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE (1972), one of the most anticipated Naschy releases by fans, is now going to be released as part of some other BCI line, having been left gathering dust since BCI acquired the rights to it and all of these other films as a group, seems rather astonishing. I also suspect BCI's decision to release in Blu-ray proved, as I anticipated, a costly misfire (while Blu-ray is a marginal format, at best, Sony demands enormous fees for releasing anything on it). Still another: Both of the two most recent films they released--the botched ones--were merely retreads of relatively recent, readily available, and already-acceptable releases. And instead of being broken up or just put on the back burner for a while, they went out together (to be fair, though, even these included the superior Spanish language tracks absent from those earlier Anchor Bay versions). And so on.

Still, I suppose what's done is done, and maybe the folks at BCI/Deimos had what they thought were good reasons for all of those things. They still managed a solid series of releases, and I raise a glass to their efforts. I wish they were going to continue.

--j.

BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL (1973)

2008-11-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

Continuing my vintage reviews of Spanish horror releases via BCI/Deimos:

Mon., 21 April, 2008

I'm just not much of a giallo fan. As a sub-genre, it's wonderful in theory, and usually godawful in execution. I was somewhat hesitant about picking up the new BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL disc, because, as its title suggests, it's an intentional effort to ape the Italian gialli, this one brought to us by the Spanish. It stars the most excellent Paul Naschy, Spain's Lon Chaney, and was directed, in 1973, by Carlos Aured, a fellow pioneer of Spanish dark fantasy who has recently died. Those two facts helped prompt me to pick up the movie, but the two real selling-points for me were that I also wanted to help feed BCI/Deimos, who have done a fantastic job on their series of Spanish horror films, and I wanted the Aured/Naschy commentary, recorded not long before Aured's death, and probably his last public words on his career. That, in particular, made it a must-have item. Still, I didn't have very high hopes for the movie itself.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a pretty solid film. Our man Naschy is a drifter who breezes into a town in the north of France and goes to work for three odd sisters, living a reclusive life in a big, old house. Almost immediately after he arrives (and starts getting very friendly with two of the sisters), blue-eyed ladies start turning up dead around town, each one having their eyes stolen by their killer. Naschy's drifter, it turns out, has a past from which he's on the run, and when it emerges, all suspicion turns no him.

But there's more to this mystery than meets the blue eyes.

The movie, though certainly worth a look, is far from perfect, and it would probably be fairly ranked as a relatively minor Naschy outing. It suffers from some of the shortcomings that so violently sink most gialli, but, unlike so many of the Italian films, it isn't sunk by them. The police procedural elements are fairly minimal. The "big reveal" at the end is, as in practically every giallo, utterly ludicrous, but the final sequence is so odd and so well played that viewers will tend to forgive the film for failing to solve a critical piece of the mystery (a major character is stabbed, but it's never revealed who did it), and for building up a minor one, then leaving it completely unexplained (the matter of the accident that resulted in the injuries to the two sisters). We're given at least one red herring that is never explained--one of the sisters spies Naschy's boots covered in mud, which was potentially very important, but no explanation for their being muddy is ever given. As a mystery, it has far too much of the giallo in it to be very good. As a movie, though, it's pretty consistently entertaining, with plenty of nifty directorial flourishes and a really good score.

I may be going easy on it because I was so surprised it wasn't a complete waste of space. Still, all the caveats I've offered in mind, I'd give it a marginal recommendation.

(As a footnote, one of the film's retitlings over the years was HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN, which has always seemed to me a much better title. Interestingly enough, Aured mentions this on the commentary, and seems to like it better, as well).

--j.

HUMAN BEASTS (1980)

2008-11-15T01:58:00.001-05:00

Another vintage review of one of the excellent Spanish horror releases from BCI/Deimos:

Mon., 7 April, 2008

HUMAN BEASTS (1980) is the newest vintage Paul Naschy release from BCI/Deimos. Just saw it this morning, and I liked it a lot. While I thought it a relatively minor film, at first, it has grown on me as the day wore on, and as I've given it further thought. I like that a lot.

(There will probably be some spoilers, here, for those who haven't seen the film).

Naschy is a mercenary, roped into stage-managing a robbery by his girlfriend and her brother. He gets greedy, makes off with the booty, and bumps off the brother in the process. Wounded and pursued by his spurned and revenge-minded paramour, Naschy finds refuge in an old dark house populated by a cast of oddballs with more dark secrets than you can shake a stick at.

HUMAN BEASTS takes a lot of turns. It begins as a crime thriller about a diamond heist, then about a diamond heist gone wrong, then becomes a horror piece, with a voyeuristic killer, seemingly spectral appearances by a mysterious dead woman, a house full of rich wierdos, and the Man, Naschy himself, as a nightmare-plagued anti-hero thrust into the middle of it all. The odd fusion works very well, for the most part. Everyone in the film is, as the English-language title suggests, a human beast--they put up a "normal" front to those around them but, inside, they're thinking only of themselves and ruthlessly feeding on their fellow man in various ways. Naschy's Bruno comes out looking the best, but only because he at least feels remorse for the lousy things he's done. Not that this will necessarily save him in the end...

This is another great release from BCI/Deimos, who have been doing Spanish horror fans proud (and, hopefully, making some more of them, too). The plot of HUMAN BEASTS sounds awful similar to the simultaneously released BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL, which I haven't yet seen, but that film is said to be essentially a Spanish version of a giallo, and, as that particular sub-genre produced virtually nothing noteworthy except mass, I suspect I'm going to prefer HUMAN BEASTS. I'll know soon enough!

As a footnote, I still seriously question the release schedule of these discs. If the two films are as similar as they sound, why not release them at least a few months apart? And the next two simultaneous releases--WEREWOLF SHADOW and CURSE OF THE DEVIL--are both re-releases of already-available movies. Wouldn't it make more sense to mix those up, too? Ultimately, I don't suppose it really matters, but I really like these movies, and I'd like to see them do as well as possible, niche items though they are, and their release schedules, with a few exceptions, have just seemed, from the beginning, like one unnecessarily bad decision after another.

--j.

THE LORELEY'S GRASP & NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS

2008-11-14T01:28:00.000-05:00

Another vintage review of a pair of Spanish horror films from the good folks at BCI/Deimos:

Fri., 16 Nov., 2007

A double-shot of Amando de Ossorio from the Spanish horror line of BCI/Deimos. Watched them both for the first time, and back-to-back last night, and it made for quite a contrast.

I'd heard some pretty terrible things about THe LORELEY'S GRASP (1974), but it turned out to be very good, almost excellent, for what it is. It's set in a small town by the Rhine where young women are being horribly killed by some sort of creature, their hearts torn from their chests. A girl's school hires a professional hunter to protect the students and bring in the beast, which turns out to be the Loreley of Germanic legend, taking hearts to prolong its life. Ossorio takes what could have been a standard-issue monster movie and ambitiously infuses it with a mythical element that is surprisingly effective.

LORELEY is certainly hampered by budgetary considerations, but not cripplingly so. I could have done without the radioactive recreation of Siegfried's blade--why not just stick with the mythical elements of the film and write it so the Doc had found what he believed to be the real one? Loreley's business face was a rubber-suited atrocity, but good ol' Amando realized it from the beginning, and, having thankfully never been corrupted by the Lucio Fulci School of Talentless Hackwork with regard to lousy effects, never allowed us to get much of a look at it. At the same time, her public relations face was that of Helga Line, and we get to see plenty of it, which is just dandy. Great locations, too. Amando is almost Franco-like in making solid use of interesting surroundings. He manages, at times, to imbue the movie with an otherworldly feel, as though it's a fairy tale; something that isn't necessarily taking place in a fixed time in the real world. Our heroes' stripey pants do unfortunately date the film. Put him in some khakis, and we'd be talking Timeless.

Overall, a very solid effort--a movie I'm glad I bought.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS (1974). Like LORELEY, I'd heard it was rancid butter, but it also had a reputation, in some corners of genre-dom, as a most worthwhile effort, and I prayed the hype was to prove more accurate than the hooey. Unlike LORELEY, though, the dire estimations of the films' merits were not only correct but actually understated. It just stinks. Worse than limburger. Worse than the stinkiest of stinky feet. Worse than George Bush Jr. Well, maybe not that badly--no film is really that bad. But it's still pretty awful. So awful there isn't much point in listing its deficiencies. There are some beautiful ladies on display, and that's the only thing good one can say about it. Oh, and it ends.

Even though NIGHT sucks like a black hole, both of these discs are first-rate. Beautiful prints. Not much in the way of extras (in spite of the "Special Edition" tag on the label), but the folks at BCI/Deimos deserve nothing but praise for the loving attention they display on every one of these releases. Even releasing such obscure niche-market titles deserves a round of applause. That they do it so very well is just gravy.

I would, however, question the wisdom of releasing NIGHT before LORELEY. It's impossible to imagine anyone who watched, as their first Amando de Ossorio film, NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS ever being compelled to watch another. Active avoidance will be the most likely reaction every time. Its release, when LORELEY is in the wings, is like the situation, on the Naschy films, where the putrid EXORCISM was chosen to precede HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB. The recently announced plan to release NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF and VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES on Blu-Ray sound pretty dubious to me, as well. I want these films to succeed. I'd guess that Blu-Ray release will be a rather pricey venture, and I'd just as soon the company didn't put too many of its eggs into what is, honestly, a fringe format that shows little sign of ever rising above the niche occupied by laserdiscs in the '80s, and is just as likely to die off entirely in the near future.

But these are really seperate matters. These two were my first non-Blind Dead Ossorio ventures, and even handicapping for SORCERERS, his work is looking pretty damned good to me.

--j.

HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB (1973)

2008-11-12T23:59:00.000-05:00

While it was ongoing, I wrote several reviews of films in the excellent line of Spanish horror films released by BCI/Deimos. I'm going to be putting them here in the coming days. First up...

Fri., 16 Nov., 2007

Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) ran into some problems with the law a few centuries ago; it seems the authorities of his day didn't appreciate his murderous habits. What's an evil warlock to do? If you're Alaric and it's 15th century France, looks like the next item on the agenda is getting one's head chopped off. Alaric doesn't appreciate his executioners' poor sense of humor about the whole business, and, before getting his lid bobbed, he puts a curse on their descendants. Five-hundred years pass, then HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB!

Finally saw this one two days ago, and what a whacked-out movie! A stubby weightlifter-looking warlock/werewolf (or at least one who howls and is accused of werewolfism) who spends half his screentime in the movie as a severed head, his most excellent vampire girlfriend, mind-control mayhem, more than the mandatory-minimum of nudity, a beating heart being torn out of a chest, fantastic use of a great location in winter, vampire fu, some first-rate backwoods justice, the Hammer of Thor as a talisman against evil, lots of evil to wield it against, the best Naschy visual character design EVER, AND the living dead, AND a score drawn straight from 1940s radio dramas.

Anyone who doesn't love this movie just sucks.

On the other hand, it's not a movie to approach rationally--nothing in it makes one lick of sense, and one could write a long and mean review cataloguing its many idiocies. It was obviously an impoverished production, and could have used something more closely resembling a budget here and there. It's very poorly edited, at times--director Carlos Aured was a first-timer behind the camera, and it shows. Some truly terrible transitions, among other problems.

These things were noticeable, sometimes nagging, but none of them even came close to robbing me of the very real fun I had with the movie. Look at all the wonders encompassed in the running time of HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB! No one is going to go into it expecting CITIZEN KANE--to be put off by its shortcomings to any real extent would be far more lamebrained than the lamest of the many plot elements with which the viewer is beseiged. This one is a definite keeper.

BCI/Deimos also gets a thumbs up for yet another first-rate DVD release in their Spanish horror line. Unlike many of their others, this one actually lives up to the "Special Edition" label on the cover, and sports many worthy extras. There's even a commentary by Naschy and Aured. A minor quibble about that, though--the commentary is recorded in what sounds like a large room with the mic too far away from the participants. They speak in Spanish and subtitles are provided, so the translation can be read by those who don't speak the language as it goes along, but I'd also like to have heard it, and the relatively poor recording makes it difficult, at times, because the film's sound, kept at too high a level beneath the commentary, often all but drowns it out. As I said, though, a relatively minor quibble. Shouldn't detract too much from the hearty praise those at BCI have earned for this release.

--j.

Early Impressions of Jesús Franco

2008-11-11T22:36:00.000-05:00

Beloved by some, hated by many, Jesús Franco has become one of my cinematic heroes. This is an appreciation of his work I wrote a few years ago, when I was still relatively new to it:

Thurs., 14 Sept., 2006 [1]

Back in the mid-'80s, my uncle gave me Phil Hardy's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HORROR MOVIES as a Christmas gift. The book was the first--and, so far as I know, only--attempt at a comprehensive worldwide survey of "horror movies" (Hardy's definition was often rather rubbery), from the birth of cinema in the 1890s to the then-present. It was a remarkably ambitious work, filled with interesting descriptions of little-known and long-forgotten cinematic gems. I had already been an enthusiast of cinematic ecclectica, but the book, by giving me a glimpse of how truly vast a landscape there was to explore, opened a whole new world for me.

In its pages, I first discovered Spanish madman Jesús Franco, one of the most prolific filmmakers the medium has ever seen. Hardy's descriptions (even when disapproving) made his work sound utterly fascinating, but it was virtually unknown in the U.S. A few years later, Tim Lucas wrote a groundbreaking survey of Franco's films in FANGORIA. A few more years go by, and Franco was the subject of a chapter of IMMORAL TALES, an excellent book on European sex-and-horror films authored by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs (the latter later a founder of the most excellent Mondo Macabro DVD label). Still, it wasn't until the advent of DVD that his films began to circulate like mad in the U.S., and I began to get my first look at it.

I took the plunge with TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS, which turned out not to be the best film in which to plunge! It isn't bad, I suppose; just mostly a silly diversion. From what I'd absorbed from the literature, Franco is noted for intense, claustrophobic sagas of sex and seediness, told through free-form dreamlike narratives, recorded with crazily experimental camera work. ANGELS was basically a light comedy. It has a pulp aesthetic I could appreciate, but it wasn't the full-strength Franco treatment for which I was looking.

I carried on.

My next outting was VAMPYROS LESBOS (1970), and, if I'd had any doubts, this one turned out to be a film that safely guaranteed there would be a third, fourth, and 50th Franco film in my future. It's very rare to come across something so utterly bizarre and unorthodox in every particular but to "get" it instantly. That's what VAMPYROS LESBOS was like for me. I'd read about Franco for years, but nothing I'd read did justice to the reality. Bela Lugosi's DRACULA has been sequelized, remade, rehashed, and referenced more times than can be easily counted, but, as far as I know, this is the only time anyone set out to produce a "remake" that consciously reversed everything in the movie. Franco's film is like a negative image of the original. Night becomes day, cold Carpathian environs fall to warm Meditteranea, hetero Count becomes lesbian Countess, Puritanical vampire hunter becomes a degenerate obsessed with becoming a vampire himself. The perversity of it all--particularly that last touch--is delightful. Soledad Miranda, as the vampire Countess Carody, dominates the film with her remarkable presence. Bela never drank... wine, but, when Franco zoomed into Soledad's exquisite face as she tells us "I love this wine," I may not have danced a jig in joy, but the impulse were certainly present.

Next came SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY (1970), a positively hypnotic film, also starring Miranda. In this one, a naively idealistic scientist engaged in fetal research he hopes will offer tremendous benefits for mankind instead finds himself scandalized, his work condemned as ethically abominable. How's that for a timely premise? Distraught, he eventually kills himself, and his horrified lover (Miranda), psychologically broken by it all, sets out for revenge against his persecutors--one by one, she hunts them down, seduces them, and kills them.

The film's most astonishing sequence features beautiful Soledad consumed by grief to the point of insanity--as she confronts the horror of it all, Franco zooms into her face and seems to zoom into her soul. We see her thoughts and memories of her previously happy life, and their violent collision with the realization of what's become of it. She struggles to maintain some grasp on her sanity. She's lost to it. We witness the point at which the madness finally consumes her--we almost experience it ourselves. A breathtaking sequence that leaves the viewer gasping for breath. And that's far from the film's only moment of brilliance.

Like all Francos, the movie is, unfortunately, plagued by obvious budgetary shortcomings--the final suicidal plunge, in a car, off a cliff was reduced to a rough drive down a somewhat steep embankment. In such cases, the viewer just has to let his imagination more properly fill in the details.

Both VAMPYROS LESBOS and ...ECSTASY feature another Franco hallmark, an inventive, jazzy score. The work of composers Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab, the music is an often bizarre melding of jazz, progressive, and pop--the combination is unlike anything I'd heard, and sets the perfect tone for the films, while further solidifying them as utterly unique works.

It's impressive work, indeed, that can successfully live up to--and, in most cases, surpass--two decades of anticipation, and how sweet it is for the seasoned film connoisseur when it happens. That's how it was for me with Franco. Apparently, I'm not alone. DVD has made him a full-fledged cult legend.

I've seen something less than two dozen of his films, so far. Maybe a little more. Nearly all of them are plagued by a lack of budget--Franco has maintained his creative freedom over the years by working with microscopic budgets. He films on the fly, the finished products often have a careless look, are crudely assembled, and, as overall films, they're often as bad as Franco's critics claim. Very few of them, however, are without some redeeming merit, some flash of the remarkable genius that hooked me on his work in the first place. It is difficult to describe exactly what it is he has that makes his films so special. Perhaps that's why so little that is written about his work does it justice. It has to be experienced to be appreciated. Media often don't translate well into one another. With Franco, cinema is his language; anything that's written about it is just an adaptation.

--j

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[1] This date is what I had in my notes. I've been with Franco much longer than this, and wrote this piece much earlier. I'm guessing, for lack of any other explanation, that's the date I did a polish of it.

Thoughts on THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004)

2008-11-10T23:26:00.000-05:00

Mel Gibson's Jesus epic stirred a whirlwind of controversy then rode the self-invented storm into a big pile of money. It wasn't any good, though, and its success bothered me. I saw it just after its video release. These were my thoughts, at that time:

Written very early in the morning, on Saturday, Sept. 4, 2004:

I just watched Mel Gibson's much-talked-about opus and find that I'm unable to sleep without at least trying to put some of my thoughts on it into writing.

First, the more mundane comments:

This is a bad movie. Not just run-of-the-mill bad, either--we're talking suck-fest of epic proportions. Whatever else one wants to say about it, it just doesn't work as a movie at all.

The performances are almost universally awful, and not at all disguised by the director's insistence on using archaic period languages. Star Jim Caviezel is particularly bad, playing Jesus as a near-comatose idiot who refuses to say much of anything in his own defense through nearly the entirety of the film. The recurring comments, in critical reviews, about the "superb" quality of the acting are... amusing.

The movie really is, as several reviewers complained on its initial release, plotless. We're merely invited to sit and gawk at a man being tortured and murdered in drawn-out fashion. In a sense, "The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" moniker hung on the film by one of its more irreverent critics was entirely appropriate. The much-touted violence is there, but it's so over-the-top that it becomes cartoonish. The scourging of Jesus is a violent scene, but as we're seing flesh being ripped from his body, it begins to take on that edge of the absurd. The beating goes off camera and gets really ridiculous, going on and on, enough to have killed anyone dozens of times over. When we cut back to the beating, Jesus isn't even remotely injured as badly as such a beating would have left him. Movies abuse our willingness to suspend disbelief all the time, to be sure, and this would have been a relatively small thing if the movie had anything else going on, but it doesn't. The rest is just more of the same, and I'd already gone past my tolerance point by the beating. As Jesus is made to haul his cross through town, Gibson throws in a scene of Jesus, weakened and being driven by the lash, collapsing into the dirt, shot in slow motion so as to make it more dramatic, or, more precisely, to make it what hack directors think of as "more dramatic" (and what conscientious film fans will tend to see as cliche'd crap). Then, it happens again. Then it happens again, and by the third time, I was laughing at the idiocy of it. By the, yes, fourth reoccurance, I was beginning to get hysterical, and it wasn't even close to over--we get a variation on the same scene no less than 8 times, by my count (with "the Black Knight always triumphs" echoing in my ears). And they haven't even nailed him up yet.

One of the things that genuinely surprised me about the movie--and that was no laughing matter--was that the anti-Semitism it was said to contain was far, far worse than even the harshest critics had alleged. The Jews in this movie are portrayed as nothing more than mindless sadists thirsting for blood, led by Caiphas, who is Evil Incarnate; a guy who makes Darth Vader look like a pussy. Pilate, bizarrely enough, is the hero of the film, if it can be said to have one. He comes to Jesus' defense over and over again, and only consents to allow him to be killed after exhausting every other means at his disposal to placate the Jews, and, more importantly, after being threatened with an open rebellion. A pair of Roman soldiers charged with roughing up Jesus are shown as ruthless sadists, in what looks like an amateurish bid to provide some sense of "balance," but the movie makes clear their actions are frowned upon by their superiors, which sort of defeats that point. Pilate's lieutenant is shown as sympathetic to Jesus throughout--he yells at his sadistic underlings over the beating they deliver, and, later, seeing Jesus exhausted during one of those "falling down in slow motion" scenes, orders them to help him along. His frequent looks of disgust are quite a contrast with Caiphas' smug sadism, taunting Jesus even as he's nailed up. Overall, I think the anti-Semitism angle was actually grossly underplayed by the film's critics.

(This strong anti-Semitic angle comes from the text from which the film is actually adapted, which isn't any biblical text but, instead, an 1833 book called "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." Gibson has tried to downplay this fact, and for good reason: the book catalogs the delirious ravings--or, if one prefers, "visions"--of an insane 19th century nun named Anne Catherine Emmerich. Gibson is much enamored of it, and reportedly carries around in his wallet what is purported to be a piece of Emmerich's habit.)

Last, I come to the heavier remarks, the ones I've so far been putting off by writing about other things at such length:

I'm disturbed by this film. Not by the movie itself, which, as I've said, is a ridiculous cartoon. What bothers me is the reaction to the movie by a not inconsequential contingent of my fellow man.

A few remarks by way of set-up: I don't often write about religion in public forums, and only discuss it very rarely in private with close friends. I've always felt it was a profoundly individual personal matter, and I know many people would be offended and perhaps hurt if I was to vent my true feelings. I don't go out seeking to antagonize anyone over such a personal matter, so I usually don't touch the subject. I'm going to touch it a bit, here, though, because it's the real reason I started writing about this movie at 5 a.m. this morning, no matter how much I beat around the bush to avoid getting to that point.

After my laughing spell while watching "The Passion," I started turning over, in my head, the reception the movie has had. A huge money-maker. A cadre of devoted fans. A friend told me, yesterday, that it sold by the truckload when it hit the video market Tuesday. What are these people seeing when they watch the movie?

I'm a pretty radical fellow from a small town in the south. My regular thoughts, feelings, views tend, shall we say, to alienate me from those around me. It's been a good, long while, though, since I had thoughts that made me feel this distant. I sometimes entertain the idea of Christianity as a death-cult. It's a thought that can't help but occur from time to time to ancient world buffs like myself--early Christianity clearly was a death-cult. Throughout history, hardcore Christians have always been nasty, brutish people who go around trying to spread their doctrines with a fist in the face, and proactively take to barbecuing their fellow man for (mostly imagined) heresies. The real sequel to "The Passion" wasn't a bright, shiny day where the world is redeemed and everyone goes skipping through the tulips singing "Kumbaya." The real sequel is the Dark Ages, where the newly redeemed death-cult very nearly destroyed civilization, bringing human development to a screeching halt for centuries. It was only when their influence began to wane that we sort of got back on track. These are some of the thoughts that run through my mind at times, and, boy, did "The Passion" ever revive 'em with, well, a passion.

Those sorts of ruminations are all good and fine as historical analysis, but I almost never see those around me--by which I mean friends, family, acquaintances, etc.--through that prism. Those days are over, and the world has moved on, right? I know these people and know they aren't really like that, right? Except maybe, in some way, they are. There's virtually nothing in the movie of any of the philosophy of Jesus which Christians insist, when trying to recruit, is so wonderful. It's just a lengthy torture/murder staged as a spectacle. I know contemplating that is the point of any passion play, but that, alone says something. What have people seen in this movie that makes them so devoted to it? I find myself thinking very bleak thoughts about what must be going on in their minds. I feel as though I'm seeing a manifestation of some ugly little corner of their soul, one I've never noticed, and one of which I don't like the looks.

--j

The Good Works of MONDO MACABRO

2008-11-10T01:49:00.000-05:00

Here's a piece I wrote this past spring about one of the best DVD labels for which any lover of weird and wonderful cinema from around the world could ask:

Tues., 15 April, 2008

For the serious cinematic archaeologist, DVD has been a gift from the gods, even more so than the early days of VHS. The birth of DVD brought about a Golden Age for lovers of weird and wonderful cinema. I fear it's running down, now, exactly as happened with VHS when it became overly mainstream. There are still dozens of small companies out there turning out celluloid oddities from around the world. The writing, unfortunately, seems to be on the wall for a lot of them, of late, but what a run they've had! I've seen dozens and perhaps hundreds of movies as a consequence of their efforts that I probably never would have seen otherwise.

Last week, I was watching DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL, a French drama that was inspired by the same bizarre New Zealand murder case as "Heavenly Creatures." In spite of its awful title (a good name for an exploitation film--not so good for this), it's quite good, and became notorious in its day for running afoul of even lax French censorship. Specifically, it was attacked for being blasphemous. And it is. And it's very good, a story of two teenage girls in a repressive, devoutly religious upper-middle-class environment who live in a sort of self-contained fantasy of their own making, rarely allowing the real world to touch them. When it does, it's usually with devastating results. They fancy themselves disciples of Satan, and stage ceremonies mocking those of the Catholicism they find so stifling. The movie features a lot of noteworthy imagery and ideas, and builds to a shocking finale. I'm glad I was able to see it.

DON'T DELIVER US... came to me via Mondo Macrabro, the DVD label of Andy Starke and Pete Tombs, the latter of whom authored and co-authored a pair of excellent books on the sorts of cinematic oddities the company now distributes. IMMORAL TALES, co-written, by Tombs, with Cathal Tohill, explored the lesser known corners of the world of European cinematic fantastique. MONDO MACABRO, by Tombs alone, extended the focus to the rest of the world, covering films from Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Phillipines, Brazil, Japan, India, etc. Now, Tombs distributes the movies about which he wrote, and he's come up with one gem after another--his label, also called Mondo Macrabro, is the only company from which I will blind-buy anything simply because it's released via that label. I don't have MM's entire catalog, or anything near it, and I'm sure there are probably some clunkers, but, of what I've bought, I've only been let down once (by THE DEVIL'S SWORD, a pretty wretched Barry Prima flick that attempted to ape Chinese wuxia, and did it very badly).

One Mondo Macabro release with which I had a lot of fun was their Turkish Pop Cinema Double Feature. Turkey (another country covered in the Mondo Macabro book) went through a period of very lax censorship in the '60s and '70s, before a military crackdown ended it forever. Television had virtually no penetration into the country at the time, and the locals went to the movies in droves, much as had happened in the U.S. during the Great Depression. The Turks were huge fans of American serials, Westerns, period spectacles, and they began producing their own versions in large numbers, often blatantly stealing music, FX shots, and other elements of the American imports. For a while, cinema was a booming industry.

MM's Turkish disc features a pair of movies from this period, and let me tell you, if you've never seen these movies, you've never seen anything like them. The disc starts with TARKAN & THE VIKINGS. Tarkan was one of the most popular Turkish celluloid heroes of those years. Because he was a blatant rip-off of both Tarzan and Conan, they simply combined the two names: Tarkan. A fierce barbarian warrior, raised by wolves, who now roams one of those Times That Never Was, seeking adventure and fortune. In this installment, his foes are, as the title suggests, Vikings, but these are not like any Vikings you've ever seen. "Vikings" with Wagnerian horned helmets, wearing, as one reviewer described it, pastel costumes made of what looks like those little throw-rugs one puts down in a bathroom. Tarkan travels with a couple of wolves, a father-and-son pair, who are, of course, his family (he was raised by wolves, recall). Early in the film, one of the wolves is killed in a Viking raid, and Tarkan, shedding tears of anguish at the fallen creatures' grave, swears revenge. The other wolf is also crying profusely over his fallen father! Bowed head, a thoroughly miserable look, and tears streaming down its face! All of this is done with an utterly serious tone, and as absurd as it sounds, my description can't even begin to match the experience of seeing in on the screen. Seeing it as I did, with nothing to prepare one for it, it's difficult to believe one's eyes. After I finished howling (not unlike a wolf, actually), I immediately fell in love with the movie. Edward Wood developed the following he has because his movies are full of his own sincerity and relentless enthusiasm for film. He clearly loved every minute of what he was doing, and his enthusiasm is infectious; it's just that he had no talent at all. That produces this weird dissonance--lots of enthusiasm plus utter ineptness producing laughs at a mile a minute. Imagine, if you will, a Wood production showing the same enthusiasm and that same lack of talent, but combined with a big budget (big for Wood, that is), and with a pace that produces astonished laughs by the second, instead of the minute. That's what TARKAN & THE VIKINGS is like.

The second part of the double bill, DEATHLESS DEVIL, is also a riot, a Turkish version of an American serial adventure, featuring a masked superhero, an over-the-top-of-the-top villain with one of the wildest moustache-eyebrow combinations you're ever likely to encounter, a purloined Henry Mancini soundtrack, and a "robot" so inept that it makes a lot of the robots in the serials of the '30s look competent by comparison. It's supposed to be terribly menacing. The film is a blast.

Putting such movies on the market isn't just a way to make money--it also helps preserve them. A large number of the movies released by Mondo Macabro are in danger of disappearing forever. After the military crackdown in Turkey, for example, large numbers of the movies released during the period of freedom have been lost or destroyed. MM's efforts ensure at least two will survive, and perhaps it can help revive sufficient interest in the films to save more of them. My latest MM disc is SILIP; THE DAUGHTERS OF EVE, an arty Fillipino drama from the '80s that critiques the destructive effects of foreign Christian-imposed notions of sexuality on the domestic culture. MM was able to acquire the original film elements for their tranfer, only to discover that those elements were beginning to deteriorate due to poor storage. The film had simply fallen through the cracks and been forgotten by all but a handful of serious cinephiles. MM's disc preserves the film, and does so in the best condition in which it's ever likely to be seen. Without MM, it would have probably been allowed to quietly disappear. Similarly, MM tracked down the ONLY known surviving elements of THE LIVING CORPSE, a Pakistani version of Dracula. It's the first Pakistani horror flick, and the first--and last--movie of any kind ever to be tagged with an adults-only certificate in that country. As a movie, it is, like so many found by MM, like nothing you've ever seen--basically a sort of remake of Hammer's first Dracula movie (complete with purloined music), rejiggered to suit local tastes. It has a Frankenstein/sci fi prologue about the foolishness of this man who challenged Allah--he ended up turning himself into a vampire by his forbidden experiments--and it features (no kidding) musical acts throughout the movie. The film is playing, we're getting a very tense horror movie, and right out of the blue, people suddenly break out in song and dance! The filmmakers didn't think this strange--all Pakistani movies had to feature this element. Local audiences demanded it. MM located, as I said, the only print of the film known to still exist, and released it, thus preserving it.

Here's to Mondo Macrabro. May they keep up the good work.

--j.