APPALOOSA (2008)

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. 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)

I have a buddy. He loves movies. He's not as picky as I, though, about what he chooses to love. As he hasn't family locally at hand, I have, for some years now, had him spend the various holidays 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 bloody, 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 over 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

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 it was even better the second 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, consumed by 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 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 an 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."

That's what I called it. The "m" word is overused by people who write about movies, but it's 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 overall 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 much 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 sometimes 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, disingenuously profess 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 not only unavoidable, it's delivered with all the subtlety of a jack-hammer to the face. The real measure of a proffered interpretation usually isn't the stated intent of the filmmaker (and V admittedly isn't the best example to make this point); it's whether or not that interpretation is supported by the film itself.

Reading a lot of film criticism, as I do, one inevitably comes across the occasional instance wherein 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."

...none of which is true. 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 conclusion as to who got it closer to right.

--j.

Much Ado About Roger Corman's Oscar

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. Corman's particular breed of low-budget, action-oriented, socially conscious exploitation fare has, for over 50 years, 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 slight 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 as worthless such a perspective 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 with, in general, 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 difficult for anyone with any knowledge of Corman's work and its impact on cinema to argue against 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 initial Uwe Boll comparison "might have been an exaggeration" (wording that suggests allowances that Snider may have any insight into the subject might have been exaggerated). 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 exhibited in the likes of 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 (THE ENGLISH PATIENT, anyone? Anyone?).[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. Admittedly, plenty of them were 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 Corman fan. 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, well, what it is.

[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

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 movie 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 became a bit of an evangelist for them. 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

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, however, be judged as quite negative. The movie spawned the mostly unfortunate slasher cycle, 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 almost 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--too much so, really--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 continued degeneracy 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 in offering a body-count of extraneous characters who are, as usual, written as little more than one-dimensional targets and, as usual, 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 certainly isn't great--that would be far too much to expect for such a project--but it's light-years ahead of its immediate predecessor in nearly every respect. And it bombed, and is, to this day, still frequently reviled as a notorious 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. And it is, after all, just a slasher sequel.

One of the key elements of the effectiveness of the first film is the effort expended to make its scenario plausible. Viewers could directly relate to the film because it stripped away 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 some mythical 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 at the time of the film was becoming 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 a pistol and apparently blasts the killer 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 comes 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-Mikey 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 he's being driven to do by that evil something in his mind, which is a particularly nice touch--the thought that something like a human being is trapped somewhere in this automaton makes the character much more interesting, his plight horrifying. 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 H4 territory 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.

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[*] 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 is different, 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, collectively, 3 minutes of screen-time). 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. Making Myers an actual character with some humanity instead of just an empty, murderous automaton gets a lot of abuse.

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

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 at the moment. 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.