Things That Don't Suck

There's A Doings Transpiring....

2012-01-21T12:50:00.000-08:00

(T-shirt available from the fine folks at T-shirt Bordello)

Over at Son Of Danse Macabre I finally finished the Modern American Horror Film: Subtext And Text chapter. Whoo Hoo! That means there's only two chapters left to go in Son Of Danse Macabre.... Two Chapters that come to think of it, will be just as long as that last monster.... woo hoo...

Well time to get cracking. We're halfway through the eighties at this point, with a twofer covering two of my absolute favorite ridiculous slasher films, The Burning and Friday The 13th Part 2. And if the posts get you in the mood remember that friends at T-Shirt Bordello have the best eighties horror gear around.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2012-01-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

I would be shocked if Gary Oldman speaks much over a hundredwords in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but every one of them counts. By the timethe film ends we- well I was going to say know him, but that’s not right, noone with the possible exception of his wife really knows George Smiley andgiven what she’s done to him with that knowledge perhaps we can understand whyno one else does. Only twice in the film do we see an emotion break throughSmiley’s carefully composed mask, once in pain and once in what is unmistakablysatisfaction, both reveal depths to the man that were heretofore unexpected.But we can follow him and his train of thought and to a man like George Smileythought is everything.

Indeed I don’t think I can remember the last film I’ve seento feature so many shots of people thinking and considering. Attempting to seeas far down the path of their minds eye as they can. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spytakes place during at the end of The Cold War in MI5, where the blown cover ofan agent and the ousting of the former head of intelligence have revealed thatthere is a high ranking Mole in British Intellegence. Smiley forced out afterthe botched operation that led to the exposure and death of said agent isbrought back to The Circus in order to expose who the traitor is.

Every once in a while a film comes along that feels like itfell through a time warp from 1976. These tend to be some of my favoritemovies. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a relentlessly mundane look at the ColdWar and Warriors. The men who wage it are in late middle aged, a collection ofthick eye glasses, balding pates, paunches hideous comb overs and baduncomfortable suits. The battlefield shabby bureaucratic offices with tracklighting and dirty carpet. The film is so relentlessly dreary that it takes onits own sort of bizarre antiglamor. Smiley is well kind of cool, in his ownway. Anyone smart enough tonavigate this bureaucratic nightmare and keep themselves and their integrityintact is a man worthy of admiration.

Credit Tomas Alfredson for crafting this level of oppressivegloom and handling the film’s sprawling cast. I admit as I prefer Matthew Reeve’s version of Let Me In,that I previously underestimated Alfredson. But watching the grace with whichhe handles himself here I am forced to reassess.

His cast is uniformly strong. Oldman is of course at thecenter and makes for a magnificent Smiley. We all love Oldman for histheatricality, but it’s nice to be reminded of the astonishing range that hehas. Smiley is an implosive character instead of an explosive one, but hecontains all the force that is Oldman’s hallmark. Toby Jones and Dave Dencikand Colin Firth are all effective as bureaucratic survivors, one of whom hasalmost certainly turned traitor. They are upstaged by Tom Hardy and BenedictCumberbatch (Oh he of the most British name of all time) as two men justbeginning on the path that has wrecked so many before them. By the end of thefilm both have been ruined to a various extent (Also note the all too briefappearance by Stephen Graham). It’s the price of the job. But the movie is damnnear stolen by Mark Strong as the broken end result of that price, giving a performance of more depth andcomplexity than I would have thought him capable.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is not interested in feeding you answers. It’s a film thatdemands your attention. Many have complained that the plot is unclear, andthough it is dense I’d argue that it’s never obtuse. At the end of the day itdoesn’t matter if you can follow every thread. How much you know about The ColdWar is irrelevant, how much the film knows about Human Nature is everything.

Capsules

2012-01-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

I got some minor surgery for Christmas. As a resultI spent a lot of time over the holidays convalescing at the various bigreleases. Which puts me in an odd position as I don’t feel necessarily able towrite about these films objectively but I still wish to talk about them. TrueI “enjoyed” The War Horse, but I most likely would have enjoyed it more had Inot been suffering from a migraine and intense nausea during the second half ofthe film when the Vicodin wore off. So I’ve decided to split the difference andtreat the following four films as capsule reviews. Consider yourselfdisclaimered!

Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows: (Spoilers) I ended up enjoying thisone quiet a bit more than most people did. The first half is a bit unfocused,but Downey and Law’s chemistry keeps it entertaining through out. Jared Harrisended up being superb casting as an understated Moriarty (and is this reallythe first time we’ve gotten a Big Screen version of this character who is not acartoon rat played by Vincent Price? Really? Wow!) Ritchie’s film is atmospheric, the action crisp, with asense of humor that serves well as the films secret weapon and it features afar better understanding of the source material than most give it credit for.On the whole it’s the rare sequel that manages to match the charm of theoriginal. Only the killing of Irene Adler, a rather cheap way to raise the stakes, felt off. It’s not going to change anyone’s life, but it’s more or less exactlywhat I’m looking for in a Saturday Matinee.

War Horse: And then one day Stephen Spielberg awoke andsaid, “Hey, what if Au Hasard Balthazar had been directed by John Ford as his follow up to The Quiet Man. Andwhat if it is also a War Movie!” Everybody thought he was joking until afterthe first day of filming was over.

Still I have to think that Pappy Ford would be proud of whatSpielberg has accomplished here (oh those horizons!) Sure The War Horse playsit about as broad and sentimental as humanly possible, but aside from a fewmoments near the beginning it works. And to write it off as simple histrionicsisn’t doing justice to some the true grace of some of Spielberg’s filmmaking.He’s one of the few directors who would have been just fine in the silent era,very few have his ability to communicate yards of narrative with a single shot.

WWI is as far as I’m concerned, one of the hardest subjectsto make a film about. Setting aside for a moment that the grim absurdity of theactual fighting of it made Vietnam and Iraqi look about as romantic as boy’sown adventures, anything you can salvage from it comes with the grim knowledgethat in twenty years everyone you see is going to be fucked all over again,most likely worse than before. It’s hard to consider something a satisfyingconclusion when the best you can hope for is, “Gee I hope their children aren’tkilled in the blitz.” But for all it’s flaws, it’s hard not to be moved bySpielberg’s story of hard won innocence. A bit broad at times sure, but it’s apoetic and moving vision all the same.

The Adventures Of Tintin: WHHHHEEEEEE!!!! This is Spielbergat his most playful. Whether recreating one of the most famous action beats ofhis career with a small white terrier, or displaying a giddy feeling of “Oh whythe fuck not.” With the eight minute unbroken chase sequence. This is whathappens when you take one of the most imaginative visual minds of the era andcompletely unfetter it. There’s not a heck of a lot more to it than that. Thefilm’s an intriguing blend of new (Tintin himself falls smack dab in the middleof the uncanny valley more often than not) and charmingly old fashioned, (“It’sfunny because he can’t stop drinking.”) All in all it’s pretty Teflon, anddoesn’t rank with Spielberg’s truly great adventures. But for what it is, anambitious experiment, it’s pretty damn fun.

Mission Impossible 4: I’m not going to lie I was prettyspaced for this one. But the impression that I got was that Brad Bird wins liveaction. Seriously the success of this film should surprise no one. Bird hasproven himself time and again to have one of the most audacious imaginations incommercial filmmaking. Mission Impossible 4 is what happens when you let anunabashed film fan make a film. It plays like someone’s dream of a spy movie.Only the disappointing lack of Ving Rhames (They at least fit him in for acameo at the end. But his absence was distracting particularly when Cruisespent a third of the film trying to get in touch with a mysterious contact Iwas sure was Rhames.) and a strangely bland villain (especially when comparedto Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s sociopath in Part 3). Still the set pieces hereare gold standard stuff, all big budget filmmaking should be so imaginative,Cruise regains some of his charisma (particularly in a an opening Prison Riotset piece which seemed designed to make the idea of Cruise as Jack Reacher notridiculous). Like Sherlock Holmes there’s nothing revolutionary here, but whatis done is done awfully well.

...

And over at Son Of Danse Macabre the hits just keep on coming. I just finished my chapter on The Horror Films Of the 90's with a take on The Blair Witch Project. It's my goal to have the whole first draft of this book finished by the end of March, which means the content is going to be flying thick and fast over there for the next two months. Hope you'll join us.

Top Ten Films Of 2011

2012-01-02T12:30:00.000-08:00

4^th Annual Southland Tales Award For Film I LikedFor No Damn Reason: Drive Angry: It’s a film that begins with Nicholas Cageshot gunning four people to death in broad daylight on a city street and endswith him riding into hell in souped up muscle car as Meatloaf croons in thebackground. Somewhere in betwixt there Tom Atkins summarily orders theirexecution and Cage drinks Beer from a skull. Not just any beer. Simpler Times.Fuck Yes.

If you didn’t have fun with this movie the problem is you.

Worst: Your Highness: It’s not a good sign that when a filmstartles an accidental laugh out of the audience, a feeling of appalled shameimmediately fills the theater. David Gordon Green is actively trying to murderRoger Ebert, it’s the only explination I can find for his last two films that makes sense.

Underrated: The Ward: Sure it falls apart mightily in theend, but John Carpenter’s return to the big screen was far more effective thanmost gave it credit for. With a script that’s careful not to cheat (listenclosely to Jared Harris’s dialogue) a dread soaked atmosphere and some veryeffective scare sequences. Next time you watch it, think of it as a siege film,I guarantee it’ll work better. Not perfect, but it’ll make a hell of a doublefeature with The Fog.

Overhated: Scream 4: Look I’m not exactly one to go out ofmy way to defend Wes Craven, but I was surprised by the way this effectivelittle Meat and Potatoes slasher film riled everyone up so much. It’s notgreat, but it’s not actively embarrassing in the way Scream 2 and 3 were (ifonly for the fact that the ghost of Sydney’s mother never points at the cameraand moans “You’re just like meeeee!!!” in order to subtly suggest that Sydneyis afraid of turning into her mother.) As Stephen King once said, “It’s awfulpedestrian but then again so is beer.”

Overrated: Hanna: I don’t get it. Rarely has a disconnectbetween myself and a movie been as thorough as this one. I quickly sunk into adeep stupor as this Bourne Identity by way of Rocky And Bullwinkle’sFractured Fairy Tales played out. The tone of the film is so inconsistent thatit feels like Joe Wright was actually angry with his audience when he made thefilm. But apparently not as angry as he was at Cate Blanchett who was apparently directed to do her bestimpersonation of Dianne Ladd in Wild At Heart. Eric Bana is the only one in thecast who seems to know what he’s doing. The action is lack luster and all the fairy tale motifs in the worldcan’t hide the fact that this has been done before. Though rarely so ineptly.

Most Pleasant Surprises: Kung Fu Panda 2: Dreamworks sequelsdo not exactly have a strong track record for creative integrity. So it’s apleasant surprise that Kung Fu Panda did not merely match the charms of itsoriginal (easily the best of the Dreamworks animated films) but surpassed it.Beautiful animation, innovated fight scenes, and centered on another great GaryOldman villain (not to mention Michelle Yeoh's best American role), Kung Fu Panda 2 is for my money the best Kung Fu film given wide theatrical release inUS theaters this side of Hero.

Most Disapointing: Rum Diary: Finding out that BruceRobinson was coming out of retirement and then seeing this was like finding out that Santa is real andthen watching him puke from Dope Sickness in the corner of your living room.Delight curdling into Horror with record speed. (Not to mention making this a three peat for Amber Heard. Did that girl wish to be a movie star on The Monkey's Paw or what?)

10. Sucker Punch: Oh no I dinnit. Oh yes I did. I’ve written twice about my reaction to Zack Snyder’s audacious experiment in biting as many of the hands that feed him as he can fit in his mouth at one time and I am unrepentant.It’s a big insane dare of a movie. Not quite successful, even on it’s own terms,but all failures should be this spectacular. The ultimate pastiche and a slightlyincoherent shout of J’Accuse to the entirety of geek culture. Say what you willabout Synder’s self immolating act of kamikaze auteurism, there’ll never beanother like it.

9. 13 Assassins: From a director who I admittedly have a bitof a soft spot for, to one I don’t much care for. I was as surprised as anybodyat how caught up I got in Miike’s Samurai epic. A pure, near perfect genrefilm. With a great slow burn set up and an utterly insanse meat grinder of a finale that getsextended beyond all reason, 13 Assassins is one of those films that doesn’tmerely capture everything you like about a genre, it reminds you why you lovedthe genre in the first place.

8. Bridesmaids: My favorite farce since Dirty RottenScoundrels. What strikes me, having watched the film probably about half a dozen times and thusly finely able to see it without water obscuring my eyes, is justhow directed Paul Feig’s film is. So much modern comedy direction is done inthe indifferent Dennis Dugan school and why not? It’s a pretty thankless job.If you do it right you’re not the one who’ll be getting the attention. But itmakes all the difference in the world. Look at the perfectly timed insert shotof stunned glee on the face of Helen’s step daughter during the big meltdownscene. Watch the perfect way that Feig frames Annie’s walk as she boards theairplane. Ceiling and walls all in claustrophobic view, her eye’s slowlywidening to Doe in the headlights proportions. It’s a comedy crafted with careon every aspect of it’s production and it’s fucking hysterical. And if youdisagree you’ll have to take that up with my Mexican Drinking Worm. It’s like aNative American symbol for getting fucked up.

7. Rango: Huh. A Children’s animated film the owes more toEl Topo than Fievel Goes West. Animated in an aggressively abrasive style thatexplicitly references Ralph Steadman and at one point features an army ofinbred mountain men sweeping down giant bat creatures as Ride Of The Valkeryiesarranged for the banjo plays in the background. Nope I can confidently say thatI didn’t expect to see any of that. But I’m awfully glad I did.

6. Melancholia: Von Trier’s staggering unblinking ode tooblivion was one of the most visceral experiences I had this film goingyear. More humane than it’scritics or supporters gave it credit for, it was like watching Ingmar Bergmanbecome completely unhinged.

I’ve written before about the intensely negative reactionI’ve had to some of Von Trier’s work and to be honest I would be hard pressedto say exactly what it was about Melancholia that felt so different. But justthis once it felt as though Von Trier was playing on the level.

5. The Innkeepers: If you didn’t like House Of The Devil,The Innkeepers probably isn't going to change your mind. Like it’s predecessor, a deliberate (note I didn’t say slowburning, as an exasperated West put it in Austin “People say my movies are slow but there arejokes and scares in every scene!") tense film, interested in earning your fear asopposed to playing cheap. West may be the horror fan’s horror director, butonly because he has takes such obvious care with the genre. With a wellconstructed script, elegant style and a preternatural skill at linking theanxiety of day to day living with a larger supernatural framework, TheInnkeepers is exactly the type of careful horror filmmaking that is often solacking in the genre. Ti West’s last film may have been a loving tribute to thepast, but The Innkeepers proves that he is one of the precious few director’sinterested in pushing the genre forward.

4. Midnight In Paris: Beautiful, effervescent and thefunniest thing that he’s done in years (at least fifteen of them by my count)Allen’s tribute to the art and illusions that sustain us, is by far the best ofhis European films and may just be one of his best period. Centered around OwenWilson, in a perfect bit of “whoddathunk?” casting, Paris is smart wistful andbeautiful. The fact that it contains the funniest Ernest Hemingway parody ofall time is just gravy.

3. Hugo: A real oddity, a nostalgia piece about endlesspossibilities of the future. As a film Hugo is as viscerally made and felt asany of Scorsese’s. As a tribute to the art form it inhabits it is superlative.A wonderful film in the true sense of the word.

2. Drive: If Jean Pierre Melville and Sam Fuller had a babyand that baby was raised by being left in a room with the better films of PeterYates, William Friedkin, Seijun Suzuki, Budd Boeticher, and Brian DePalma, and that baby was also raised to be an unabashed romantic. Then that baby wouldgrow up to give the world Drive. An example of the primal, lizard brainedpleasures of genre film that made me kind of giddy. Is there much more to themovie than the fact that it is about as stylish and cool as it is possible forfilms to be? Not really. But in this case I have to say that that is enough. It’sthe type of film that makes you buy the soundtrack, and makes you walk a littlestraighter when it turns up on your iPod. There was no more purely pleasurable filmgoing experience this year.

1. Tree Of Life: If Drive perfectly illustrated thepleasures of genre cinema, Tree Of Life can only be called the exemplifier ofthe pleasures of turning away from genre and pushing the limits of cinema as far as they can be. I haven’t written about Tree, becausethere’s no way for me to intellectualize it. I can only think of it in theterms of the visercial way I experienced it, which seems like a fairly uselessthing for someone who is not me, to read. The film stirred memories andsensations within me that I would have thought were dormant or dead. If I hadcared to think about them at all. Allwhile communicating things that ordinary films don’t even have the framework,much less the ambition to do.

There’s a moment in the film where a toddler looks at hisnew born brother for the first time. Seems to realize that he once was as thisbaby is, internalizes the implications of this and starts to cry- and holy crapdid Malick just capture a human being realizing for the first time that he’sgoing to die on film? It’s a film that feels like sifting through someone’smemories and it’s impossible not to consider ones own. The Tree Of Life is afilm where one feels the weight of life, and the sensation of it passingthrough. Less like seeing a film than meditating under the Bodhi Tree.

Best Books Of 2011

2011-12-28T22:36:00.000-08:00

Most Disapointing: Swamplandia: I’ve read worse books this year (see below) but none that were quite so dispiriting as watching this lively original novel sink in a mix of grad school clichés in the final third. Like watching one of Russell’s indomitable Bigtrees take a perfect swan dive off the highboard only to plunge directly into the gullet of a gator upon landing.

Worst: My Boyfriend Wrote A Book About Me: I know Sloane Croasley, and you ma’am are no Sloane Croasley.

10. The Wise Man’s Fear/ The Magician King:

There is true magic in both of these imperfect, wildly ambitious, wonderful sequels.

The Wise Man’s Fear takes The Name Of The Wind and turns it up to eleven. For all the good and bad that that implies. On one hand, no book that contains the line “Thank the moon for sending me this lusty young manling,” (a line that caused my sister to laugh from one end of a long car trip to the other) can be said to be perfect. Around Kvothe’s eighth sensual encounter with the sex ninjas, it takes a powerful reader not to wish that Rothfuss had perhaps chosen to limit himself to four. And like The Name Of The Wind, one reaches the end of the book with the dispiriting realization that not all that much has happened.

And it doesn’t matter.

The Kingkiller Chronicles are the rarest and most valuable of stories, those that are entirely in the telling and not the tale. Rothfuss is simply put a wonderful storyteller. As his smooth prose unfurls the reader is helplessly drawn deeper and deeper in. In his ambitious, deeply humanistic fantasy epic, Rothfuss is giving us the fantasy story of our age. And doing it with a skill that makes me frankly angry that when I turn to my bookshelf there are only two books that bear his name on their spine.

Believe me, there is no book I anticipate more than the final volume in this story. If Rothfuss is somehow able to pull off this absurd dare he has set for himself and get everything he has promised into the final volume it will be simply wonderful. Even if he doesn’t, one can’t help but be thankful for storytellers like him.

The Magician King is something altogether, and powered by a different sort of magic. In it, Grossman does nothing less than an act of transubstantiation. Turning the very ambitious dissertation that was The Magicians into a real life story. It’s thrilling, like watching The Blue Fairy turn Pinocchio into a real boy.

In a daring move that pays dividends Grossman splits the narrative between occasionally insufferable malcontent Magician, Quentin Coldwater’s reluctant stumbling progress towards actual heroism and his childhood friend Julia’s brutal quest for self knowledge. The most ill advised search for truth since Harry Angel made that trip to New Orleans. Equal parts The Chronicles Of Prydain and Darren Aronofsky. The Magician King climaxes with a vile parody of religious enlightenment and a galvanizing blast of what may be the real thing. For all the admiration that The Magicians got, there were those who insisted on writing off Grossman as a clever boy. This ought to shut them up nicely.

8. Fear And Loathing At Rolling Stone/ Pauline Kael The Age Of Movies:

Fitting tributes to two of the finest Raconteurs American letters have produced. Both of these volumes capture the authors in all of their complexity. Both their unassailable brilliance and their infuriating lapses.
Fear And Loathing At Rolling Stone chronicles Thompson’s dizzying rise, blazing a trail of scorched earth through a thicket of stupidity and hypocrisy. Inarguably climaxing in Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail, a work that is generously excerpted here in that will stand alongside a Modest Proposal as one of the greatest works of satire created. It also is merciless in its documentation of Thompson’s decline, while being careful to highlight the flashes of brilliance that could still spring from Thompson’s typewriter.

I do have some issues with the anthology, including the baffling decision to abridge some of the pieces. But as a whole the collection is a fitting tribute to the man and helped me finally come to peace with my all too human idol. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Kael I have a much less personal relationship. Her work has always been too dogmatic and vindictive for my tastes and she has done little to shape my preference or ideas about film. That said, you can’t ignore the elephant in the room and few have written so influentially about film and even less with such pure, splendid ferocity. For Kael the movies mattered in a way that little else did. Her only real requirement was that they matter to the people making them as well. If the filmmakers in question didn’t bring as much care and passion to their movies as she did, Be-fucking-ware. You can’t help but admire that and if nothing else the aspiring writer can take this worthy lesson from Kael. Be prepared to take it to the mat. Every. Time.

6. Outlaw Album: The man who I sometimes consider the greatest writer working in America today delivered this slim collection of stories, as stark, truthful and beautiful as anything in American fiction. Bone hard and lean the stories of Outlaw Album show an American Master at the top of his creative powers. The last true master of the American vernacular. Small but mighty.

5. Reamde: I’m not going to lie, the fact that both William Gibson AND Neil Stephenson now find the present to be an appropriate place to set their stories scares the shit out of me. But it’s hard to mind when the result is a novel as thrilling, vivid and funny as Reamde. A novel with the density that rivals that of dwarf stars, yet somehow manages to breeze by as quickly as any dimestore paper back.

Like a Tom Clancy book for smart people Reamde unfolds over a global panorama across which enough ammunition is spilled to fuel several Balkan conflicts and/or another Wackowski Brother’s SciFi trilogy. Reamde combines all the best of Stephenson’s attributes, deadpan sense of absurdist humor, vivid detailed prose and unstoppable narrative momentum with virtually none of his weaknesses. To call it a perfect starting point for Stephenson fans would be unfairly reductive. When what it is is simply one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read this year.

4. 11/22/63: … I say one of because Stephen King’s late period winning streak continues unabated. Holy Crap. This is great. Watching King take a premise that seems designed to sustain roughly three hundred pages or so and turning it into one of the most propulsive reads I’ve encountered, is like watching a man ride a high wire on a unicycle while juggling flaming torches.

But all the narrative tricks in the world wouldn’t matter a damn if King hadn’t of found such a brokenly human story through which to tell it. Couching the uncanny in the human has always been King’s gift, but over his post Cell work it has grown to define him. King just keeps getting better.

3. Habibi: Perhaps the most beautiful comic I have ever read. Craig Thompson is one of the few who actually earns the term Graphic Novelist. Every work he does stuns with the complexity of its beauty and the depth of its compassion. Lovely.

2. Leftovers: Tom Perrotta’s eerily haunting novel is the best of a notable career. Following America in the wake of either The Rapture, or an event so like it that it literally makes no difference, Perrotta sketches a moving portrait of ordinary people facing the unthinkable… and then quietly gathering themselves up and going on. Most of them anyway. Worthy of Vonnegut and the best of Updike, The Leftovers is not only the greatest American Novel of the year, but an early contender for best of the decade and as delicate and moving a depiction of the post 9/11 mindset as I have read. D

Absolutely unshakeable.

1. The Pale King: A five hundred page tombstone, the most talked about, dissected unfinished novel since Edwin Drood, an unfinished epitath that leaves with it always the haunting possibility that maybe it was always planned this way. So much has been said about it that it’s tough to even know what to write. So I will just bow my head in humble thanks for one last gift from a man who held on for as long as he could.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T17:32:00.001-08:00

Alamo Drafthouse Austin Montage for December 2011 from Alamo Drafthouse on Vimeo.

I'll be back to wrap up the year with its various lists shortly. Until then,With a little help from The Alamo Drafthouse, allow me to wish you and your's a very merry Christmas.

Out For Action Cast

2011-12-17T08:44:00.000-08:00

As readers may know I pal around a lot with the fellas over at the On The Stick collective.

Yesterday we released what may very well be my favorite thing that this collaboration has yielded. I'll be upfront, I have no idea what this is going to sound like to people who didn't actually take part in this conversation. My guess is something like the Space Madness episode in Ren And Stimpy turned up to eleven. There's a moment here where I just crack and start doing my best Mark Hamill impersonation and well you'll see...

If you only listen to one of these casts make it this one.

20

2011-12-15T10:52:00.000-08:00

Cameron Crowe makes big, emotionally generous, open heartedmovies. These are the qualities that endured him to a generation of film fansand are of course the very qualities that landed him in Director Jail for thepast half decade.

No matter I have faith in Cameron Crowe, indeed I have thekind of wide eyed faith in Cameron Crowe that Cameron Crowe characters have inthings. Almost Famous remains both a pleasurable ramshackled shaggy dog comedyand one of the most honest movies ever made about the relationship we have withthe art we latch onto, Vanilla Sky continues to be way ahead of its time. I highly anticipate his return tonarrative filmmaking this December with We Bought A Zoo and if Pearl Jam 20 is any indication, the time away has not overly bruisedCrowe. His approach to documentary work contains the same optimism and sweetnature that his narrative films do. While Pearl Jam 20 may not exactly be what anyone would call hardhitting, it’s a commissioned victory lap of a film, it is still an intimate,interesting look behind the persona of one of the biggest rock bands in theworld and the environment that spawned it.

It’s an interesting film to watch for me, if only becauseyou would be hard pressed to find a band I have less investment in than PearlJam. I don’t mean this as a snobbish thing. I’m not trying to claim thatthey’re hacks or bad musicians. It’s an almost chemical reaction for me. Theirmusic simply fails to elicit any kind of response from me. They’re doing theirthing, I’m doing mine and we seem to get along very well without one another.That said, even if 20 doesn’t exactlyinspire in me a love of Pearl Jam’s music, it couldn’t help but elicit respect.There’s footage here, particularly from their early live performances that is justincredible with Vedder climbing up scaffolding at shows like a howler monkeybefore leaping dozens of feet into waiting crowds. Looking less like a leaderof a rock band and even less like the mellow elder statesman so prevalent todaythan some sort of crazed messianic cult leader. All I can say is it made mefervently wish for access to a time machine so I could see one of those showsand as previously stated I don’t even like the band.

One interesting thing to note is that 20 is the first documentary about a band that grew upin the video era and if its any indication of where things are headed musicdocumentaries are about to get a lot more interesting. While there are stillplenty of talking heads, most of the story is told by the band itself in thepresent tense, through footage that they themselves shot over the years.There’s a staggering array of material here. One of Crowe’s strongestattributes as a filmmaker is the instinct he has towards the detritus thatmakes up pop culture. He tells his story with things like Operaman sketches,clips from Wheel Of Fortune and The Headbangers Ball, and even excerpts fromCrowe’s own Seattle opus Singles andit’s disastrous after party where the drunken band assaults a room full ofstudio and music executives. It’s storytelling through collage in a way thatmanages to really bring the feel of the era that spawned Pearl Jam and theother Seattle bands to life.

Crowe managesto keep 20 intimate and celebratory, but with just enough insight andjournalistic integrity to keep it from crossing over into fawning. At the coreof the movie is Crowe’s conviction that the thing that gives Pearl Jam so muchof its power is the fact that its nice to see someone lead by example for achange. It’s this insight that makes 20 the type of film that makes even a nonfan want to celebrate.

Hugo

2011-12-11T10:41:00.001-08:00

When I walked into the empty theater and took my seat forHugo I saw Scorsese staring down at me.

Father Martin looked a little disappointed in me and well heshould. Just look at the state of the place. Oh sure a lot of this neglect isdue to Son Of Danse Macabre and I’m sure once that particular project is doneI’ll have much more time for Things That Don’t Suck. But lets face facts someof it is very real burn out as well.

I used to have such a pure hunger for film. Relentlesslyseeking it out. New or old, indie or mainstream, good or bad, it didn’tmatter as long as I hadn’t seen them before. I wanted to watch everything.

I’m literally embarrassed by some of the stuff that I’vemissed seeing in the theater this year. Sure no one can see everything, butI’ve missed some truly basic stuff, stuff I’ve been excited about seeing for along long time. If you don’t see Tree Of Life on the biggest screen availableto you it means one thing, you don’t care enough. And if you don’t care enoughwell what business do you have writing a film blog?

The fact is a few moments of frisson aside; the narcoticjunkie’s quest for film and its cousin narcotic bliss have been absent from mylife this year, for the first time in memory. I had to make a decision yesterdayregarding film that made me sick, literally sick all day. It transformed meinto my most bearish and I really, truly pity anyone who had to encounter me.But the fact is, that five years ago, hell two, I would never have made thesame choice. Part of that is growing up, but some of it feels like giving up.

Because the idea of making my own films or hell working onanybody’s, looks more and more unlikely with each passing day. Some of this ismy fault, as time keeps on slipping I looked at my writing and my filmmakingand had to choose which to put my energy into. Paper is cheaper than pixels andI’m a more natural writer than I’m a filmmaker (no comments from the peanut gallery)and my chances of getting published are better than my chances of getting a productionoff the ground. But the sting of the dream abandoned, even temporarily, nevergoes away. If you’re not careful it’ll tarnish the very thing that made youdream in the first place.

It’ll make you bitter.

So as I sat there underneath the sounds of Scorsese’s APersonal Journey Through American Film. Hearing lines that I once watched somany times that I knew them by heart, the feeling of disappointment became alltoo keen. I once understood the lines that Scorsese spoke. Could I truthfullysay that I still did?

I should have known that Scorsese would have a homily ready.

Hugo is a wonderful film. I mean that in the true sense. Itreminds you that wonder itself is the primary force behind film. A film madeall the more warm and humane given it’s knowledge of cruelty. It issimultaneously like no film that Scorsese has ever made and entirely of apiece.

It’s not hard to read into the story of an older filmmakerwhose ability to produce art is stripped from him, Scorsese making an alternatehistory for himself. Today, even if Scorsese can’t make anything he wants (andif he never gets his chance to bring Silence to the screen, I will consider itperhaps, the greatest of unmade films) he is certainly in a better position,both creatively and financially, than the majority of his peers. Contemporaryor otherwise.

It’s easy to forget that Scorsese’s films didn’t really makemoney until The Aviator. It’s all too easy to imagine that if that film hadn’tbeen made, if Michael Mann had directed it as was originally intended, andScorsese’s lucrative partnership with DiCaprio hadn’t cemented. Had he insteadfollowed up Gangs Of New York with another costly underperformer, that thestate of his career would have much more in common with someone like DePalma,or Scorsese’s mentor Michael Powell at the end of their tenure, or yes likeGeorge Melies. Still dreaming, still scheming, working desperately to makefilms that no one wanted. It’s this quality that gives the film weight aknowledge of the road not taken.

If that gives it its weight, than it’s the gratitude in theroad that was taken that gives the film its delightful fleetness. There is afilmmaker’s film and one can feel Scorsese’s palatable glee as he attempts toone up the silent filmmakers he pays such righteous tribute too. Watching himrestage Harold Lloyd’s Clock scene is like watching one magician, make a pocketwatch disappear, than watching another bow to him and make a Grandfather Clockvanish. The highlight of the film is a blistering montage of silent cinema thatprobably made a bumper crop of young cinephiles in every theater in which itplayed. It’s followed immediately by a jaw dropping recreation of the silentera, showcasing Scorsese as one of the few filmmakers capable of simultaneouslypushing cinema forward with each film he makes, and revering its past.

There is to the film just the slightest whiff of Tati, asScorsese benevolently watches his “parts” play across the station Including thelikes of Richard Griffiths, Christopher Lee (in a role that made metremendously happy) Sacha Baron Cohen (less broad than the awful trailers wouldhave you believe) and the lovely Emily Mortimer. Whimsical is not exactly the word that one often uses whendescribing Scorsese and it’s not exactly overplayed here. But it fits.

But it is the central cast of Asa Butterfield, Chloe Morentzand Ben Kingsley who carry the film. Butterfield is great, tapping into somedeep wells of bitterness that feel real in a way that children performancesrarely do. Morentz, is an odd case, she feels mannered here, less natural thanshe felt in her archer roles in Kickass and Let Me In. Perhaps it’s simply thenovelty of having to perform sans body count. But it’s Kingsley who trulyimpresses. His resemblance to Melies in the film is truly uncanny, but that’sonly part of it. The performance it reminds me of the most is Martin Landau’sin Ed Wood. Both have that ineffable sense of what happens when someone who hasbeen stuck in dreck for far too long is suddenly given something fine to workwith. It’s a perfectly played part.

Of the much vaunted 3D I remain unconvinced. There is nodoubt that there are some isolated moments here (such as when Scorsese overlayshis great clock with the city of Paris, in a shot that would make Von Stroheimcry bitter tears of envy) where it is used to great effect and the uber depthof field he achieves is astonishing at times. But I face the same problem withit that I face with every 3D film that’s not using the Disney Digital system, there’sa lack of solidity to the image that irritates my eyes to no end (That’s Disneyshot in 3D, the trailer for the post conversion job done on Beauty and TheBeast horrified me, if it’s any indication of what the feature film will looklike than I am much afeared).

There are some other bumps to the film; it feels like amovie with scenes cut from it. Kingsley and Butterfield don’t spend as muchtime together in the film as you might think and I’d be willing to bet thatthere are scenes missing from the first third of the film that where sacrificedfor the sake of narrative momentum.

Still these are minor issues. I found in Hugo, just what Ineeded. A reminder of all I truly love in film, and more importantly a reminderthat the things we love may go dormant inside us but never truly die. My hungerwill return in full. As surely as a man’s appetite is aroused when he smellssomething delicious cooking on the air. It may take a few more months beforeTTDS is back to full speed, but it will be one day.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go watch some films.

Encounters At The End Of The World

2011-11-29T11:06:00.001-08:00

The key word in the title Encounters At The End Of TheWorld is Encounters. For any other filmmaker it would be a word strictlydefined to the encounters the film crew had with the landscape and found inAntartica, an almost incomprehensibly harsh and wild environment. And Herzoggets his fair share of that. But for Herzog, that also means encountering thepeople, he’s fascinated by the landscape but studying the personality thatbrings someone to the very ends of the Earth and pushes them to go even furtheris what really drives him, A Machinist who contends that he is descended fromthe Aztec royal family, a zoologist who has spent so much time with penguinsthat he is markedly uncomfortable with people; the film easily could have beentitled Some Strange People That Werner Herzog Met In Antarctica.

Because make no mistake, though this is a G-rated movie,mellow enough to show to Grandma and the kids, the personalities Herzog findsat the bottom of the world are every bit as intense as any who have populatedhis R-Rated Opuses (in one of the best running gags the joke “Everyone whoended up in Antarctica just fell off the real world and slid to the bottom” istold about a half dozen times by different people). The soft spoken, dedicatedscientists might not look like Klaus Kinski, but they speak in the same tone ofbarely suppressed fervor nd have the same farseeing glint in their eyes..

Life in the Antarctic takes on a surreal bent, both forhumans and animal. Base workers walk around with buckets strapped to theirheads during survival training, in order to simulate a white out. There’s thehulking square compound itself, looking vaguely like a Moon Base found onearth. There’s hallucinatory surroundings, shifting fields of ice. A womanblowing off steam at a bar on the compound fits herself into a suitcase.Underneath sheets of ice so thick that holes have to be dynamited for thediver’s encounters, luminescent beings live that look like illustrations. Noother filmmaker has Herzog’s gift for finding images that look as though theyshould not exist. He narrates themall in his unflappably calm, clipped Teutonic tones. Still marveling at thestrangest of nature with the wonder glazed intensity that he spoke of in TheBurden Of Dreams, his awe always tempered ever so slightly be amusement andhorror.

If the documentary feels a bit more mellow than Herzog’susual work, despite some doom saying near the end, it is only because thecontinent speaks so well for itself. Herzog seems comfortable here, even withinthe crater of a huge active Volcano, in a way he never did in the lush Rain Forrest of Burden of Dreams, and the other wildernesses he has visited. If it is truethat Antarctica attracts a certain type of intense personality, than it is nosurprise that Herzog eventually made his way to the ends of the Earth. All thatis surprising is that it took him so long to get there.

...

Hey guys I know it's been pretty quiet here this month, and er- it's probably going to be pretty quiet here next month too.

Mostly this is because every moment of spare time I have as a writer has been dedicated to Son Of Danse Macabre. I'm bearing down hard, we're in the home stretch here, I'm hoping to finish The Modern American Horror chapter by the end of the year. Which will leave only two (2) chapters to go. Check it out if you haven't yet had a chance lately.

I've also taken some time to do some much needed fiction work. Including a piece I'm in the middle of drafting for the ambitious Mr. Jose Cruz's Mad House. If you know Mr. Cruz you know he's one of the most enthusiastic horror bloggers out there, and his new project should be a fun one. So if you've got something creaking in your drawer why not join me in the first issue. Should be fun.

Ken Russell R.I.P.

2011-11-28T09:37:00.001-08:00

I won't lie and say he was a particular favorite of mine. But there's one less visionary in the world today and that's always a sad thing to consider. One things for sure, there will never be another like him. So long Ken.

The Rum Diary

2011-11-14T10:44:00.001-08:00

Bruce Robinson’s Withnail And I is one of my favorite films.Period. Maybe in my top five, certainly in my top ten. I’ve never really written about it on Things That Don’t Suck, mostlybecause its just a tough film to get a handle on. It’s a raucous comedy thatfor long tracks of its run time isn’t remotely concerned with being funny. It’s the filmabout the death of an era that doesn’t try and make any grand statementsregarding said era. It’s two principles are blitzed for 95% of the run time,but I wouldn’t really call it a drug movie the way say The Big Lebowski or FearAnd Loathing In Las Vegas. Occasionally lyrical, sad, the best film ever made about male friendship and yes hysterically funny(Withnail’s desperate whinge when he realizes that they’ve come to the countrysans Asprins never fails to draw a huge belly laugh from me) Withnail And I isone of the very few films that can genuinely said to be it’s own thing.

Likewise the career of Bruce Robinson has always been one ofcinema’s great what ifs for me. After Withnail, Robinson made How To Get AheadIn Advertising, a fairly vicious satire on European Corporate culture and thencame to America to direct the dismal serial killer film Jennifer 8. Theexperience infamously broke any desire Robinson had to make not only filmswithin the Hollywood system, but films in any system. Over night he packed uphis game, emerging over the next two decades to occasionally have his scriptsruined by others.

Until now… His return to directing was without exaggeration my most anticipated cinematic event of 2011. Just what the hell would he make? Well if we are to use The Rum Diary to judge thetype of films that Robinson might have made in those two lost decades (aproblematic proposition I acknowledge) then perhaps we can rest a little easierknowing that we lost out of two decades of How To Get Ahead In Advertisingsrather than two decades of Withnails. The Rum Diary is a messy, entertainingfilm that has some real moments but it can’t help but feel like less than whatit could have been.

The Rum Diary follows Hunter Thompson stand in Paul Kemp as helands in Puerto Rico takes up with a paper on its last legs and for the firsttime finds his way to the dark nexus of power, hubris and insanity thatThompson would make his home for the rest of his career. Depp is uncannily goodas Thompson, all the more impressive for convincingly managing to play thecharacter younger than he did in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, despite thenear fifteen year break in between the two films.

There are scenes and images here that work incredibly well,Kemp’s eerie discussion with a lobster, a cameo by a certain runny food itemthat’ll make Withnail fans laugh, a night race through the Puerto Rico backcountry. They work so well in fact that I didn’t realize how conflicted I feltabout the movie until I started writing about it. Despite all the fine moments,there is simply no getting around the fact that The Rum Diary is a movie witha broken spine.

The film almost plays as a super hero origin, with Thompsongaining bits of his persona from each character he interacts with. His harddrugs here, his love of cars there, his rage at societal injustice over there.And there in lies the problem, the film watches Thompson do these things withan awe usually reserved for watching Arthur receive Excalibur from the Lady InThe Lake. The film is a hagiography of Thompson (and say what you will aboutGilliam’s film but it was never that). All the rough edges smoothed away, thewriter presented in The Rum Diary probably wouldn’t have written anythingworth reading, let alone make a movie about. On the way home I rented Gonzo,which I had previously dismissed as empty surface hero worship and I feel likeI owe the director of that documentary an apology, because compared to The RumDiary, Gonzo is Raging Bull.

The flat feeling extends in all directions Robinson hasassembled a good cast here and they’re all playing broad. Amber Heard, atalented actress with rotten luck (I mean God now she’s in the first JohnnyDepp movie to flop in forever) never gets beyond “the girl”. Giovanni Ribsi isa sight gag the entire film (a good one) worst of all is Aaron Eckhart, who iscapable of playing this character in a much more interesting way but insteadwalks around with “THE BAD GUY” Inked on his forehead.

Any hope ofredemption falls apart when the film follows its ambigious ending with a titlecard so unthinkingly celebratory I had to suppress my gag reflex. Yes Thompson was a greatauthor who wrote some great things. But his life was not an unqualifiedtriumph, just the opposite. If you wanted to give The Rum Diary an honestending perhaps you should have gone for, “The beauty of the world, paragon ofanimals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dusk. Man delights not me,no, nor women neither, nor women neither." 

A Quick Message

2011-11-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

Faithful readers might know that I love Cleveland. The mistake by the lake is where my family is from, it's my adopted home town, where I've spent some of my best times and where a lot of the people I care about most live. It is also the reason while I will curse a blue streak at the TV every Autumn Sunday until I die. But that is another story.

So it's only fitting that when his estate tried to get together money for a statue of the second greatest writer Cleveland ever produced (Chester Himes is number one with a bullet... or several) That I could only respond with a Hell Yeah. I mean I just love the idea of a statue of Harvey Pekar. Who wouldn't?

Anyway, I've donated, and if you've got any love in your heart for this working class hero and the city he portrayed so well, maybe you can too.

Drive

2011-11-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

Drive is the sort of film that taps directly into myparticular set of cinematic pleasure receptors. All the more satisfyingbecause I had no idea that it would. Up until the moments the opening creditsrolled I had no idea that I craved an elliptical, Euro crime thriller, starringRyan Gosling, with a mile wide romantic streak, and a discordant electro scorethat sounds like it’d be more comfortable in a David Lynch movie, but voila,apparently I did. Drive is a work of masculine art cinema on par with LeSamourai and Pat Garret And Billy The Kid.

Drive the story of a getaway driver who finds himselfbetrayed by the people he works for, is of course a story you’ve seen before.Hell, lets face it; you’ve already seen the existential art film approach to thisstory as well. This is a film that wears its Le Samourai hero worship proudly.All Gosling’s spartan apartment lacks is a grey bird and I’m sure that was just anoversight.

Drive is one of those films where every element works, nomatter how unlikely. Ryan Gosling with a mumble that would make James Deanenvious and a smile that would melt butter. He has the amazing ability to lookequally convincing shyly holding a girl’s hand and crushing a skull. AlbertBrooks chilling banality of evil performance all the more effective for the waythat it seems barely removed from his usual persona. Carey Mulligan reveals the uncanny ability tomake herself look five years older and wearier at will and Bryan Cranston doeshis Bryan Cranston thing. Perhaps only Ron Perlman is not used to full potentialhere, but then again Things That Don’t Suck has always held firm to theposition that it is difficult to get too much Ron Perlman.

Nicholas Refn shoots Los Angeles the way that Michael Mannused to. Turning it into a doomed megapolis of light and vice. Shooting theground level unglamorious neighborhoods of The Valley and Echo Park as well asI’ve seen them represented. There is that sense of dislocation to the film thatyou sometimes get when a European director makes his first film in America. LikeWim Wenders Paris Texas, another film that Drive shares a fair amount of DNAwith, Drive takes in its setting and action with a kind of bewilderedwonder. There’s a presence to thefilm, aided by Cliff Martinez’s hypnotic score a low key dread that is notquite like anything I’ve seen in a crime film before. A mixture of fatalism,icy Euro remove and iconic cinematic badassery.

Simply put Drive is a magnetic film, it keeps drawing youback into itself. It’s the little moments that I keep returning to. The wayRefn keeps the camera centered on Gosling, so when he reacts to something youhave no idea just what he’s reacting to. Or touches like the opening scenewhere you think you’re getting a humanizing detail about The Driver (Lakersfan) until it is revealed, nope also part of the plan.

Drive is the type of film that energizes me as a cinephile.The sort of film where you see a set of aims accomplished perfectly, with theflair, confidence and rock solid landing of a professional gymnast.

November Sucks

2011-11-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Blah.

Another October come and gone and I have the sads (sads may or may not be directly related to Hangover I was forced to battle yesterday, which can only be described as Amisian proportions).

But before we get back to our regularly scheduled Not Sucking, here's one last taste of Halloween magic courtesy of our friends at On The Stick. Enjoy

31 Days Of Horror: Day 29: Nosferatu

2011-10-31T14:40:00.000-07:00

Nosferatu is very high up in my personal canon. It would be in any top ten list of my favorite films ever made. Most likely in the top five. There is something enchanting about Nosferatu on a literal level. It works on the mind in a very primal way. Seeing it with a live score was something incredible. Watching the film galvanize the musicians and then their score flowing out into the crowd of people watching the film. Watching the effect spiral out, it’s almost like magic. The best moments of Nosferatu have the purity of a child’s nightmare. The sequence where “Hutter” (perhaps the most ineffectual cinematic lead in horror history) opens the door to reveal the count at the end of the hall, only to have him draw closer and closer expertly sums up the feeling of dread that one had as a child. The sense of some lurking horror under the bed, in the closet, just out of sight in the dark. All Hutter can do is hide under the sheets and pray that it’ll go away. That the dark shape in the corner will turn out to be a benign pile of laundry. Only this time it’s not this time it’s exactly bad as you fear it is. And there’s nothing to do but wait as it draws closer. To have just one sequence capable of such elemental power would have made the movie a classic. But Nosferatu is made up of nothing but those scenes. The streets of the buolic little town flooded with undertakers and coffins. Nosferatu standing tall against the horizon before the bound ship’s captain, the flood of rats emerging from the grave dirt of the spilled coffin, Nosferatu himself rising from the coffin, straight backed and horrifying. The look of Shrek is still just terrifying, shrunken and decrept but with that gleam of cunning and malevolence glistening in his eye. He’s one of cinema’s most convincing images of evil and decay. It is a film that communicates through pure image, is it any wonder that the film is so admired by Herzog. Munrau’s film has been deconstructed and reconstructed in all possible ways. Including a proto Nazi parable (and it is chilling to reflect that the faces of the innocent children we see would grow up just in time to make up the prime of Hitler’s war machine) but the film is far deeper than mere allegory. Nosferatu at its best bypasses the forebrain and hits us deep in the place where we are weak. Where we remember the dark things that hunt us and haunt us and how little we are able to do about them. It is a movie that not only reminds us what we are afraid of but why we are afraid in the first place. And with that I’ll wish you a happy and safe Halloween. Missed the 31 Days by two this year. Which sucks but considering the work load of writing I’ve been under as well as various guests posts isn’t too bad. Until next year, enjoy The Pumpkin Beer while it still flows freely.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 28: The Burning

2011-10-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite generic Slasher flicks of all time. So generic that it ends up becoming The Uber Slasher that Nietzche prophesied. Listen as I defend it against the crew of Ubercynics (and Joe) who make up The Action Cast.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 27: Dawn Of The Dead

2011-10-31T12:46:00.000-07:00

I was there, it was amazing. I don't know what else to say.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 26: The Devil's Rejects

2011-10-31T12:44:00.000-07:00

The first fifteen minutes of The Devil’s Rejects is asstrong as any I’ve seen in modern horror. It’s hard not to feel that anyonecriticizing Rob Zombie for doing the same old shit is doing so out of habit inthis film. As focused and singular as House Of 1000 Corpses is scattershot, TheDevil’s Rejects also benefits from the sense that Rob Zombie thought this mightbe the last film he ever got a chance to make. However the results of thisimpulse are totally different. Instead of the trying to stuff everything heever might want to see in a film, it feels like Zombie took a deep breath,focused up and legitimately tried to make the best film he was capable of.

But those first fifteen minutes, man. The assault on thehouse, the crude homemade armor that the Fireflies don for the counter attack.The race through their underground dungeon where a few lucky survivors arestill imprisoned, finally breaking out onto the rode to ambush some poorwaitress while The Allman brothers croon. Damn that’s good stuff.

The Devil’s Rejects unfolds like a prolonged disturbednightmare. Those who accuse Zombie of merely supporting psychopaths are lookingat the film the wrong way. It’s true that Zombie certainly has a grimfascination with monsters, but in the long nightmarish hotel scene he makes nobones about whose side he’s really on. That’s us right there, Banjo andSullivan and their wives aren’t some dumb squares who get what’s coming tothem. They’re what happens when anybody crosses the Firefly’s path. And while muchhas been made of Zombie’s portrayal of Sheriff Wydell, (William Forsythe givingthe best performance ever given in a Rob Zombie film) and the supposedequivancy it draws between their actions, I wonder if people aren’t quitecopping to the amount of satisfaction they may feel in the final reel.Personally speaking it felt awful good watching the Rejects get paid in fullfor two films worth of cruelty, I’m not proud of that but I’m not going to lie.

The film plays like a walking tour of hell. Zombie’s infamousMileu has rarely been put to better use. Every environment in the Devil’sRejects looks like its been caked by a life time of filth and degradation.Zombie is one of the few of the neo-grindhouse filmmakers to copy the films ofthe seventies in philosophy as well as aesthetics. So much of modern horrorattempts to get down right chummy with the audience. The Devil’s Rejects putsthem under assault.

A Couple Of Things

2011-10-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I dropped my last article for On The Stick's (Which just hit a landmark fifty podcasts. Congrats!) 31 Days Of Horror Games. If you haven't been reading it there's been some great stuff written there over the past month and now you have a nice juicy archive to blow through.

Inspeaking of Old Friends, Crazy Dog is offering Things That Don't Suck readers a five dollar discount on whatever purchase they might choose. Just type SCAREME5 at the checkout stand and you'll get five dollars off your purchase.

We'll be back later to close the gap in 31 Days Of Horror a little further. Got some good stuff coming up.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 25: House Of 1000 Corpses

2011-10-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

As someone who has written an awful lot in defense of RobZombie it recently struck me as odd that the only films of his that I haven’tcovered are the only two that people actually seem to like. What was I afraidit wouldn’t be enough of a challenge otherwise?

House Of 1000 Corpses is an awfully strange film, argument.It looks like exactly what it is, a movie made by a life long horror fan whowas unsure if he’d ever get a chance to make another movie. And as a resultthrew more or less anything and everything he’d always wanted to see in ahorror movie into one 90 minute long pot. As a result it rarely feels like twoadjoining scenes are from the same movie. The film’s approach is summed up whenit cuts directly from a cheesy horror host doing his best Ghoulardi in blackand white directly to what appears to be real autopsy footage. The highartifice of Captain Spaulding’s Murder Ride clash roughly with the snuff film8mm asethic of others, both of which look odd next to the comic book over thetopness of the ten foot tall robot zombie who chases the heroine around with abattle axe, which when placed next to the natural lit sadism of- well you getthe picture.

This gumbo school of filmmaking pervades across the wholemovie, Sid Haig (Got to give Zombie credit for getting their first), fuck yeah.Bill Mosely, well yeah you gotta get him in here. Saw Karen Black begging forchange by the side of the road? Sure why the hell not it’s a party. Michael J.Pollard? Holy fuck he’s alive? And is that Shane from The Shield about to gethis head blown off? And Dwight from The Office? It surely is. To a certainextent Zombie is not directing a movie here, he is giving us a tour through aliving wax museum that he has decorated as garishly as possible.

And I can understand why some people don’t enjoy theexpirience. House Of 1000 Corpses is a mess to be sure, but I contend that itremains kind of an intriguing mess. Call me forgiving but I find it almostimpossible to dislike any film made with this much passion.

Besides it’s not all amateur hour (although like I said thesheer unpolished enthusiam is a lot of what I like about the film). You cannottell me that anybody who can drum up a sequence as tense and just plain oddlooking as The Scarecrow set piece is without some serious fucking chops. Thereare enough genuine scares, creepy moments and unique style to prove that Zombieis not a slave to pastiche. His films just feel enormously tactile in a way Irespond to, people always complain about the grime of his films but I like it,his environments don’t just look lived in, they look positively burrowed in.The House at the center of the film does look like something you’d get if youhad a family of lunatics nest in a place for a good couple of decades and thengave another lunatic a camera and a major studio budget to make a movie there.I mean that as a compliment.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 24: Dog Soldiers

2011-10-29T15:13:00.000-07:00

Neil Marshall is one of those guys who I just find to becompletely on my wavelength. I don’t know if I could go so far as to say thathe’s like Rian Johnson in that he’s specifically making movies for me, but whenI see something like the Cannibal free for all in Doomsday or any randomfifteen minutes of The Descent, or the Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid Reduxin Centurion, it’s tough for me to come to any other conclusion. What can I say, the man knows what Ilike and makes movies the way I like movies to be made.

Dog Soldiers is Marshall’s first film, and if it doesn’tquite hit my cinematic sweet spots with the eerie precision of Marshall’s otherfilms, there is still much to enjoy and admire here, particularly forMarshall’s fans.

Dog Soldiers follows a group of British Soldiers sent onwhat they think is a training exercise in The Scottish Highlands. In realitythey’re being used as bait so a group of Black Ops can suss out a werewolf.Unfortunately for the unlucky soldiers it turns out that they’re not huntingone werewolf, but a pack of them and unlike most of the civilized world thewerewolves are more than happy to dine on British food.

The surviving soldiers make their way to an isolated farmhouse, where with the help of a friendly neighborhood zoologist they attempt tosurvive the werewolf siege.

Dog Soldiers is a good deal rougher than Marshall’s otherfilms. Thanks to a late stage twist there’ a plot hole you could drive a plotthrough. The tone is a bit odd as well, though it’s nominally a horror comedy,Dog Soldiers plays it straight for the most part. As a result, when something goofydoes come out of the woodwork it’s really distracting. Ther is a fisticuff’sversus werewolf scene that is just plain silly and the single most out of placeMatrix reference I’ve ever seen. The effects are what they are, but at the veryleast get points for being practical. More problematic is that Marshall had yetto learn to ask himself, “Would these people be making puns at this juncture?”

But as I said there’s much to appreciate here. Includingmany of The Marshall trademarks, his innate skill at framing, likablecharacters, tense set pieces and his ability to make his beloved Scottishwilderness look like one of the most foreboding places on Earth (indeed thefilm loses much when it switches locations from the woods to the farmhouse). Thereare some nice touches throughout Dog Soldiers, including a well played fairytale subtext. It’s the work of a naturally talented filmmaker making much outof limited means, and if it left room for improvement? Well that is how itshould be.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 23: Night Of The Demons 2

2011-10-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Night Of The Demons 2 was the belated follow up to youguessed it, Night Of The Demons. The key difference is that this time the ongoings are directed by Brian Trenchard Smith. Brian Trentchard Smith has ofcourse given the world much by proving that the mentally insane can direct films too.

If you’re not familiar with Brian Trenchard Smith you reallyshould be. He’s the man responsible for roughly half of the great clips in NotQuite Hollywood. Including Stunt Rock the only stunt and wizard theme Rock Operayet made, Dead End Drive In and the immortal BMX Bandits.

The nineties proved a much leaner time for Smith, but hestill managed to deliver this bizarre little number, which might have been madein the nineties but has eighties stink floating off of it like a fine layer ofmusk. Never have I seen a movie that rushed to fulfill the requirements of goreand T&A as quickly and thoroughly as it could.

Six years after Night Of The Demons Hull House and the stuffthat has happened there have become the stuff of urban legend. Angela is stillhanging around snacking on any Jehovah’s Witnesses unlucky enough to cross herthreshold but is understandably getting a little bored.

Angela’s mousy little sister, named er- mouse, becausethat’s the type of movie this is, is now living at a Catholic boarding schoolafter the Angela related suicide of her parents. This being a horror film, allthe girls hate her and Mouse soon finds herself on the receiving end of themost intricately hateful and unmotivated prank this side of Trick R’ Treat.These kind of pranks always crack me up, kids are hateful and terrible to eachother but they’re hateful to each other in terrible little mundane ways. Ifyour prank involves blue prints and a time table it is most likely not going toring true.

Unfortunately for these students their lucky stars are inretrograde. Some of them end up possessed and make it back to the CatholicSchool to cause some havoc. Faster than you can say “I kick ass for the lord.”The clergy and students retaliate, leading to one final battle at Hull House,where shit as they say, gets real.

Like I said, Night Of The Demons 2 may have been made in thenineties, but it has a definite 80’s vibe to it. There’s plenty of practicalgore, wild monster design, thin characters and other assorted genre goodies,all delivered with that trademark unhinged BTS touch. Don’t let me oversell,this isn’t some kind of lost classic or anything, but for a belated sequel tosomething that wasn’t all that good in the first place Night Of The Demons 2 isa surprising amount of fun. The sort of movie you watch fourth in a horror moviemarathon and perk up during because you’re not sure if what you’re seeing isreal or the result of the dreaded Pumpkin Beer Delirium.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 22: Last House On The Left

2011-10-27T19:12:00.001-07:00

My position on Horror remakes has been fairly wellestablished at this point. As a general rule the most I hope for is forindifference, at worst I break out into hives.

But The Last House On The Left was singled out by StephenKing as one of the best horror films of the last decade and though King’sopinions do occasionally lead me to believe he is from Rand McNally (wherepeople wear shoes on their head and hamburgers eat people) he has steered metowards more good films than bad. Here’s what he wrote about Last House On TheLeft,

“(The film) fills us with rage and sorrow, and if there’s anemotion more foreign to a Friday The 13^th movie than sorrow, I don’tknow what is. Our identification is all with the victim. The villains are badpeople, they deserve what’s coming to them. What they do not deserve is asequel they come back as our buddies.

Roger that in a big fucking way. There is another element atplay here, being that the original Last House On The Left is a film that I carefor not at all. I’ll let King take this one again…

The original Last House On The Left is so bad it rises tothe level of absurdity- call it Abbot And Costello Meet The Rapists.

Too. Fucking. Right.

Unlike most of the other remakes it’s not exactly like thisone could be worse.

In the final analysis, if The Last House On The Left is notas good of a film as King says it is, it at least tries to be as good of amovie as King said it is. The key phrase here is Victim identification. Ihaven’t seen a movie so unabashedly take the side of the victim in a long time.

Even in the original Last House On The Left there was thenasty subtext that by leaving the safety of home and going to the big bad cityin search of drugs and rock n’ roll, that the girls got what they paid for,however inadvertently. Here they didn’t sign up for this, by any stretch of theimagination. The girls don’t go “looking for trouble” even the girl who dragsalong her friend in search of weed is just being irresponsible rather than selfdestructive. Hell if you look at it closely, trouble wasn’t even really lookingfor them. They weren’t being set up, it was just bad timing. A ghastlyconsequences of a terrible series of coincidences.

There is another crucial shift in the film’s narrative thathas been more controversial. In this version of the story the girl survives theattack. Changing the situation from the parents merely getting gruesome revengeto the parents attempting to protect their wounded daughter (the fact that theyhave already lost a son in unrelated circumstances also a smart choice, makingtheir resolve all the stronger and making the lengths they are willing to go tomore understandable). As a narrative decision it’s gangbusters, adding a wholeother of tension to the story.

Many have argued that by having the girl be alive the filmhas wussed out by giving the parents a much clearer moral imperative than theydid in the original film. But let’s call a spade a spade here, if you’rewatching a film primarily because you’re interested in the moral quandaries itposes, then you’re not watching The Last House On The Left 1972, unless it’s bysome grievous error. You’re watching The Virgin Spring.

Director Iliadas directs with more flair and tension thanWes Craven has displayed in his entire career, comparing it to the pornproduction values of the first doesn’t even seem fair. The Cathedral woods aremenacing, and the way he slowly but thoroughly desecrates the house ischillingly effective. If there’s a complaint to be had it’s the fact that youcan see the Rob Zombie influence stamped clearly across the film (why weargrotesque art directed masks, if you’re going to A) Take them off after a fewmoments B) Kill all witnesses.) Particularly in the bizarre final fifteenseconds of the film which literally look as though they were tacked on fromanother film.

On the whole though, The Last House On The Left is a film ofambition and intense suspense. It might not be a great horror movie, but damnedif it only misses that distinction by inches.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 21: Locke And Key

2011-10-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

I think it’s safe to say at this point in time that LockeAnd Key is one of my favorite things ever. Note I didn’t say favorite comicsever, or even horror stories. Just things. The story of the Lockes is one thatI’ve become deeply invested in over the years and the idea of seeing it turnedinto a TV Show was as intriguing as it was worrying.

So you can imagine my reaction The Locke And Key pilot in amysterious Lynchian package in the mail. If you can’t lets just say that itinvolved yelling “SQQUUUUUEEEE” for several minutes before going behind TheWinky’s to thank the man who lives beside the dumpster (not a bad chap that).

As a work in and of itself Locke And Key isn’t exactlyflawless, but taken as a pilot it showcases a lot of potential. Make no mistakeif a certain network (coughMTVhack) was smart enough to pick up this show (andreally in the wake of Walking Dead why wouldn’t you?) this really does feellike the right cast and creative team to bring Locke and Key to life. Anintriguing mixture of old and new mysteries that suggests that the creativeteam could simultaneously be faithful to the source material and spin it offinto bold new directions.

The Pilot Episode of Locke And Key condenses the whole ofthe first arc of the comics into just under an hour. The basic story is thesame; a family tragedy drives the Locke family back to their ancestral homewhere they end up dead in the sights of a dark supernatural force and inposition of a certain collection of reality warping keys. The abridgement workssurprisingly well, no Nightmare “Readers Digest Condensed” version here. Reallyonly the nightmarish attack on The Locke family that kicks things off, and SamLesser’s journey across America feel like they actually suffer from theirabbreviations. But considering that this was first being developed for NetworkTV the impulse to tone down those two rather disturbing segments isunderstandable.

Other than that, it’s all good. Keyhouse and Lovecraft bothfeel just right, a ton of atmosphere and history. Though I have to admit I wasexpecting something a bit, well showier given that Mark Romenak was directing.Most of the actors do feel slightly broad in their roles, but that’s just parfor the course with pilots and I’m sure by a few episodes in things would havebeen much smoother. Nick Stahl as the wounded Duncan Locke and Ksenia Solo asthe androgynous, creepy as all fucking hell Dodge were already spot on.

Locke And Key promised(s?) to be a great adaptation and agreater variation (just where were they planning to go with their suggestionsabout Duncan?) Let’s just say that should it be picked up, I would be confidentthat one of my favorite pieces of comics material was in the right hands.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 20: Trollhunter

2011-10-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

Now this is a strange one.

Trollhunter is the Norweigan not quite horror comedy. Donein found footage style the film follows a group of students who think they’remaking a documentary about poaching, until they discover that their would bepoacher is actually a government agent whose job it is to hunt and exterminateNorway’s troublesome troll population.

These trolls are giant ill tempered beasts who rampagethrough the countryside, searching for the blood of Christians (which in one ofthe film’s funniest moments rather abruptly necessitates the hiring of a MuslimCamerawoman). Hans, our mysterious hunter, is on a more less single handedmission to put them down (see it pays to specialize) in a very of matter offact fashion.

The film straddles a lot of different lines, it’s a horrorcomedy but it’s not done as over the top as the premise might lead you tobelieve. Everyone plays things more or less straight. Hans, the troll hunter,is a blue collar guy, who treats Troll’s with the same amount of exoticism as aplumber treats a clogged toilet, when he dons his absurd Troll protection armoror his blasts away with his giant UV cannon its just another tool, likewatching someone put on a hard had. He uses the opportunity of having a cameratrained on him to bitch about the troll hunter bureaucracy and his lack ofbenefits and overtime pay.

The matter of factness and restraint make things funnier butit’s a double edged sword. Those expecting a fast, crazy horror film in theRaimi/Jackson vein should prepare themselves. The first half hour is a slowburn, and not in a good way either. The film takes a lot of time to set upthings that don’t particularly feel like they need setting up. It’s the type ofmovie where it feels like a given thirty minute stretch could be reduced tofive without particularly missing anything.

Yet once again this kind of attention to detail occasionallypays dividends. The TSS (Troll Security Service) keeps disguising the trollattacks and bear attacks. Where do they get the dead bears? At one point a vanadvertising a Polish Redecorating service drives up and drops off a bear corpsefor the TSS. The driver speaking in broken enthusiastic Norweigen is happyabout the whole thing, apparently he gets an order from these guys a coupletimes a month. When the kids quiz him about whether or not he’s curious whatthese people want all these bear corpses for, he smiles and shakes his head,“Why ask question when you just know it be problem?”

Why indeed.

On the whole Trollhunter is such an unexpected movie that Ican’t help but kind of like and recommend it. With the major caveat that it isprobably best that you make sure you’re in the right mood for it before youwatch it. If you’re expecting a fast gory piece of splatterpunk you’ll bedisappointed. But if you’re receptive to the art of the Shaggy dog story youjust might have a good time.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 19: Stakeland

2011-10-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

Stake Land is the kind of film that I feel bad bitchingabout. It’s a movie with some real ambition, one that makes a lot out ofobviously limited means. A film whose spirit and ambition I really admire. Butthere’s no getting around the fact that it just doesn’t quite have the meansto accomplish what it sets out to.As a book or a comic one could imagine Stake Land being a really affectingpiece of work. As is I ended up too distracted by the zippers running downeveryone’s back.

Like I said, this is the kind of thing I absolutely hatecomplaining about, particularly on an independent film, but if something tookme out of the movie I have to be honest about it.

Stake Land wants to play it big. It takes place in anAmerica decimated by a Vampire apocalypse, where small townships face againstthe growing encroachment of bloodsuckers and doomsday cultists who are oftentimes even more dangerous. The film follows Martin, a young teen whose familyis killed in a vampire attack. He’s saved by and apprenticed to The Mister,last of the vampire hunters and winner of this year’s Mickey Rourke look alikecontest. The Mister takes Martin under his wing, trains him in the way ofVampire killing and guides him through post apocalyptic America. They form up aragtag family with some other survivors which includes the ever appealingDanielle Harris.

Like I said, you really have to admire the film’s ambition,what it goes for would be tough to pull off for a film with ten times itsbudget and for the most part it does it reasonably well. The characters arelikable of well drawn and I like its take on Vampires, transforming them intobestial, barely sapient creatures driven by unthinking hunger and not muchelse. Director Jim Mickle, has a real knack for atmosphere and action. Thoughnot always convincing there is a real sense of place in Stake Land, the feelingthat Mickle has lived here in his head for quite a while.

On the downside the film is choppy. It feels like a filmmade from a script that was chopped down to save on budget and time. Charactersdisappear and reappear with no explanation. At one point the group stumblesupon the corpse of one of their members, who I didn’t even realize was missingat that point. It also leans alittle too heavily on Malickian ellipses, if I had to see one more magic hourshot of stake practice it might have driven me around the bend.

Yet despite it’s flaws its hard not to like Stake Land and Iwould certainly recommend it to anyone who has a real interest in the horrorgenre. Sure Stake Land’s reach may exceed its grasp, but it is still refreshingto see a horror film reach that far. Would only that, “too much ambition” was aproblem that more horror films had.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 18: Tucker And Dale Versus Evil

2011-10-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

Horror comedy is one of the toughest subgenres to do right. AsI’ve written before part of my fascination with both genres is how involuntarythey are. How they completely bypass most of the usual criteria that we use tojudge films and live or die by the gut instinctual reaction that they cause inthe viewer. That’s a tough thing to do when you’re just going for one reaction,but when you’re going for two gut reactions that run directly counter to oneanother, well then you’re spinning plates while riding a unicycle.

I can say without hesitation that Tucker And Dale VersusEvil is the most successful horror comedy since Shaun Of The Dead. If it missesthat movie’s heights well that’s because most things do.

Tucker And Dale follows two good hearted, slightly dimwitted Good Ole Boys, who plan to spend the weekend fixing up the old shackthey’ve bought deep in the heart of Appalachia. Unfortunately their tripcoincides with a group of college kids led by the loathsome Chad, who quicklyconvinces the others in the group that they are about to star in anunauthorized remake of Just Before Dawn. After their rescue of the kids is misinterpreted as a kidnapping attempt, Tucker and Dale findthemselves under siege. And before you can say “Mass Epidemic of Suicides” theyfind themselves dealing with quite a body count.

The strength of Tucker And Dale is the effortless way itswings between goofy splat stick and comedy of errors material (such as anearly encounter which has Dale holding a scythe, giggling menacingly and asking“Y’all going camping.” But builds to it in a way that feels totally natural)and some genuinely witty material. Somehow the film manages to become more thana one joke movie.

It’s a genre lover’s treat of course, with a flashback to“The Memorial Day Massacre” proving that Eli Craig has just as good of a feelof/affection for the subgenre of the slasher film as Edgar Wright has for thezombie movie. The atmosphere is creepier and more consistent than most straighthorror films released these days and needless to say the gore gags, includingthe already classic “head long dive into the woodchipper” bit are pretty great.

If the film has one flaw, which I will admit is kind of anitpick to the point where I was genuinely trying to figure out whether tobring it up, it’s that the balance of the characters is a bit off. If you thinkback to Shaun Of The Dead (and yeah I know I’m bringing this up a lot but it’sthe gold standard) the balance between Shaun, Ed and Liz is just perfect, witheach character getting equal weight. With Tucker and Dale I feel like thebalance is just a little off. The film does a great job establishing therelationship between the two, but after the first third it takes kindof a back seat to the budding romance between Dale and one of the “collegekids”. With Tucker popping up mostly to deliver a few of the gags, and then actas a hostage. He becomes more of a supporting character than a co lead and Ithink the movie suffers for it.

This could just be me. Or the simple fact that I preferTudyk to Labine (who I was actually a fan of from way back on Reaper, a show Iwish had gotten more of a chance, but who has played out his persona todiminishing returns ever since). He plays a hell of a straight man to the chaoshere and the understated way he delivers lines like “That Chad kid has got someissues” raised some of the biggest laughs in the theater I was in.

But like Isaid, that’s just me. On the whole Tucker and Dale is a blast, a nostalgiapiece that doesn’t rely on it and a horror comedy that delivers the goods onboth fronts.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 17: The Dark Half

2011-10-19T23:10:00.000-07:00

The Dark Half has never exactly had the greatest ofreputations. On the scale of George Romero films that no one really gives afuck about it ranks well above Bruiser but below Survival Of The Dead.

After watching The Dark Half I can’t help but feel that thisis at least just a bit unfair. I wouldn’t go so far as to call The Dark Half alost gem or anything. It certainly is a flawed film. But it is not withoutmerit and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be dismissed as completely as it has.

Of course The Dark Half has never exactly been what youwould call a beloved Stephen King novel. Not bad certainly, but not great. It’sthe kind of book you shelve next to The Tommyknockers and oh I don’t know-Insomnia. Not bad not great, just one of the books that King puts out so he canbe sure he has a book out every year. The kind you devour and then struggle toremember any specific detail about when you pick up the next one a year later.The Dark Half is notable for it’s unusually dark ending and not much else.

Not that it doesn’t have a good hook though, Thad Beaumontis an unsuccessful literary writer who happens to run a cottage industrypublishing hardcore pulp novel’s written by “George Stark”. Thad Beaumont alsohad an ingrown twin removed from his skull when he was ten. I leave it to youto piece together whether those two events are connected.

When a fan finds out what Beaumont is up to and tries toblackmail him, Beaumont decides to “kill” the pseudonym rather than pay up. Youget three guesses to figure out how well that goes and the first two don’tcount.

For the most part this is pretty effective. Hitchcock’sWrong Man syndrome is always going to be effective on a very primal levelunless the filmmaker is incredibly incompetent, which Romero is not. The filmactually has more in common with the likes of Season Of The Witch and Martinthan it does the Romero’s Dead gorefests. Most of the violence is offscreen,and what does end up happening on screen is heavily implied more often than itis explicitly shown. It’s a smart approach in many ways running counter to theultra violent novel that King wrote, with winning results. Romero builds anunseemly amount of tension in the film.

That said, the movie is not without its flaws, TimothyHutton (or Princess Timothy as I have it on authority that he is known) is fineas the beleagured yuppie who finds his security threatened, but is a lot harderto swallow as a stone cold sadistic badass who will strike the fear of God intoyou with a single look. The film ends abruptly and tones down the darkness ofKing’s novel just a touch too much. All leading to a muddled home stretch.

Yet as a whole the film works surprisingly well. It mightnot be Dawn Of The Dead, but Romero fans who have had much to shake their headsat post Land Of The Dead would do well to check it out.

Just A Couple Of Things

2011-10-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, Today's 31 Days will be up later tonight, should be a good one.

In the meantime here's a look I took with inReads at The House On Haunted Hill.

And in speaking of horror literature...

I guess I'm a published fiction writer now, which is kind of weird. A story of mine was accepted in the anthology State Of Horror: California. Kindle users can pick it here those of you who want the book (or perhaps if you're The Last Lovecraft want a book to burn) can order that here.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 16: The Thing

2011-10-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

It is always interesting to me just how many characters in ahorror movie act as though they know they’re in a horror movie. Whether it’sthe dopey teens lining up to be next years urban legends, or the scowlingscholars looking up various portents everyone seems to more or less know whatis coming.

Of course the horror films that tend to really hit hard arethe ones that buck this trend. Films like The Strangers, The Texas ChainsawMassacre, the original Halloween, films about ordinary folks who too a wrongstep and wound up in hell. It’s all about taking away a degree of remove. Thinkthis won’t happen to you? Think again.

Watching the original The Thing for the first time sincechildhood that’s what really struck me. These people have no idea what’s coming.They are, like all the characters in Howard Hawk’s films professionals. They’reout there to do a job, even the scientist who ends up on the wrong end of TheThing’s wrath is just trying to do his damn job. When said job goes from “transporting personal” tosaving the human race from extinction at the hands of a hostile life form, theboys roll with it with a certain blue collar matter of factness. It’s justanother damn thing they’ve got to deal with. The cast of dependable B Moviefaces may not have the charisma of the Dean Martins and Cary Grants that Hawksnormally dealt with, but they’re cut from the same cloth.

Of course how much of The Thing Hawks actually directed issomething we’ll never really know for sure. Though the lowball figures tend tobe “some of” while the high end estimate is “most of”.

In either case it bears so many of his fingerprints it’stough to see how much of a difference it would make. It’s all here theoverlapping dialogue, tarted tongued dames (Even in the Artic Circle you can’tescape them in a Hawkes film), aforementioned obsession with competence andprofessionalism, the sense of male camaraderie, unshowy long medium shots, thebonding over small items like cigarettes. If sheriff John Chance was caughtbattling aliens its tough to see how the outcome would be much different.

Hawks (or whoever) creates a surprising amount of tensionfor someone who never tried his hand at the horror genre before or since.Though the artic base is a good deal brighter, efficient, cozier and much moreobviously a set than Carpenter’s grimly functional installment, it retains itssense of isolation. The imagery holds up surprisingly well for what is essentiallya low rent monster movie from the fifties as well. Though when seen in full thelarge domed James Arness can’t help but look a little silly, when seen from faroff and obscured, as when the men watch him rampage through the dog pen, or insilhoutte as he often appears, or best of all when he’s lit on fire by thesoldiers and runs through the pitch black artic night like a living torch heremains suitably creepy.

Yep The Thing sure is a great film. Strange that it inspiredjust the John Carpenter remake and nothing else.

And. Nothing. Else.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 15: The Final Destination

2011-10-17T00:48:00.000-07:00

Whelp here weall are for one ~~final~~ time. Intially supposed to end the series with a bang, a3D!!!! bang (Seriously you haven’t seen this much stuff fly at a movie screenin a horror film since Friday The 13^th Part 3), The Final Destitionbrought back David Ellis to take things out with a bang, and a kapow… and abrain hemorrhage (Too bad that James Wong didn’t direct Part 5 in order to keepthe symmetry going).

I have to say I do like the Ellis installments significantlymore than the Wong ones. Ellis ups the ante, knows how to build tension andmost importantly seems to have an innate skill at misdirection that makes someof the modes of shuffling off the ole mortal coil genuinely surprising. As wellas pretty funny.

You know how it goes by now, premonition, disaster; alldeaths will be answered in the order that they were received.

This time the twist is that the lead continues to receivepremonitions as events continue, because death wasn’t being enough of an asshatI guess. And also that most of the people saved were fairly reprehensible.

Yep The Final Destination ditches the whole likable cast andclever plot thing from Part 2 and instead focuses on running through as manykills as possible. The characters are transparently meat puppets filled withblood, even by the somewhat lenient standards of character depth in the fourthinstallment of a horror film. The film barely limps past the 80 minute mark andthat’s with significant padding. Also problematic is a depressingly predictableover reliance on CGI. I doubt that so much as an ounce of Karo or latex wasused in the film and it’s so distracting that originally I wondered if the filmwas going for a PG-13 before realizing, “No they’re just really bad at this”. Needless to say the film plays faintlyridiculous in 2D with CGI models of hooks and nails and shit occasionallyflying at the screen inbetween scenes for no other reason than Holy Shit 3D.

And yet I have to admit I had more fun during thisinstallment then I had during either one or three. Look no ones going tomistake this for a great horror film- ever. I know it’s derivitive, I know it’sa cash grab I know it’s kind of dumb. But it’s also the only installment thatmanages to have an ending as deranged and chaos filled as its opening, has atleast one sequence (The salon) that legitimately had me on the edge of my seat.

Not bad for the fourth installment of something I wasn’tthat crazy about in the first place.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 14: Final Destination 3

2011-10-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

Well one step forward two steps back.

Death got bored again and unable to think of any clever plotcontrivance ala Part 2, he decided,“Maybe that cute girl from Scott Pilgrim and Death Proof will notice me if Isend her psychic visions.” So like a nervous schoolboy leaving a note on herdesk, Death sends a fiery vision of death via rollercoaster, and then after shesaves the lives of yadayadayda instead decides that he’s better off justkilling everyone again. (If these movies have an inherent flaw its that they’refront loaded. Without exception the most impressive scene has been the openingone.)

The film brings back original writing team of Glen Morganand James Wong, Wong returns to the director’s seat as well. Unfortunately itkind of shows. I may have had my issues with the first Final Destination, butone thing you can say for it is that it played things straight. Final Destination 3 tries to blend theapproaches of Part 1 and 2. Going for over the top kills during the death scenes and solemn gravitas inbetween. It’s classic have your cake and eatit too and the mix just doesn’t work.

The fact is that it’s pretty clear that Wong and Morgandon’t have a whole lot of ideas this time out. I mean there’s no way you cantell me that they wrote the original Final Destination with the word Franchisein mind. They don’t feel all that invested in the characters, every one isstock and not particularly well written stock (Wait why is the Goth Kid even atthe popular girl’s funeral, let alone making a scene “defending” her there.)Even as an intensely likeable and crush worthy actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead,can only do so much with her unlikable, flat character. It feels like Wong’smost frequent direction to her must have been, “Furrow your brow.” The most they can come up with to shakeup the formula this time out is to make all the main characters atheists thistime out. Er- edgy?

As for the death scenes, they’re fun, if not as much fun asthe one’s in the last installment. They’re pretty far over the top (like thetanning bed fry up) and go for short punchy shocks over complex Rube Goldbergmachinations. This actually isn’t that bad of a trade off. What the film losesin momentum thanks to this it gains in shock. The weight lifting death ispossibly my favorite in the series.

Out of the three Final Destination films I’ve seen so farthis is probably my least favorite. It’s still not bad, but it feels just sortof there. Without part one’s earnestness or part two’s gleeful over the topsavagery. And the absence of Tony Todd knocks things down at least one fullnotch for me. In short, if you’re a fan of the franchise this deliver’s thegoods, albeit not as well as the others. If you’re a doubter stick to Two.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 13: Final Destination 2

2011-10-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Whelp, ask you shall receive.

Most of the time when I describe a sequel as “The same thingbut moreso,” I mean it as a criticism. But with Final Destination 2 that turnedout to be just the right approach. Final Destination 2 is just what a horrorsequel of this kind should be, bigger, bloodier and actually a good deal moreclever than it has to be.

As in the first Final Destination a young woman receives apremonition of a disaster and her actions then prevent several people fromdying. Death slaps his bony hand against his forehead and gets to workbalancing his ledgers in a manner suggesting that Death has a lot of time onhis hands and is awful bored. Probably lonely to, I imagine after flawlesslyexecuting (hur hur) one of his Rube Goldberg Body Counts he turns around togive someone a high five, only to slump his shoulders in the realization thatno one is there. Poor little fella.

Ali Larter returns from the last round, having shed theblack locks after producers realized that she made the least convincing Goth inthe entire world in the first movie. Here she looks ready to bash death overthe head with a field hockey stick. Also returning, the man with the voice toturn your bowels to water, the man with a voice so deep it made Keith Davidsay, “Damn.” The one the only Tony Todd returns to bring a Tony Todd shaped rayof sunshine to the proceedings. Then once again leaves after one scene to thecrushing disappointment of all.

Still his absence doesn’t hurt this time, simply becausethere’s a lot more going on. Director David Ellis, stepping in for the team ofMorgan and Wan, has a long history as a stunt coordinator in Hollywood and heputs it to damn good use. The deaths here have a visceral feel that was absentto the first one. Again looking at the opening scene, semi trucks and sedansget smashed up all over the place in your average Hollywood film, but if thisone doesn’t make you flinch you’re one cold fish.

The death scenes are cleverer too. Playing off yourexpectations in unexpected ways. In one scene a seemingly doomed charactermakes his ways through dozens of death traps only to be killed by a left overplate of spaghetti. So in the next scene when it looks as though the characterin question is about to snuff it thanks to something ridiculously mundane webuy it. Only to have his death come in the most over the top manner in thefilm. The movie manages to keep you off guard. No mean feat for a franchisewhose entire gimmick is based off of the fact that you know these people aregoing to die.

The same kind of care is taken with the plot. Instead ofjust rehashing the events of the first film, Final Destination 2 actually comesup with a plausible (well you know what I mean, interesting anyway) reason fordeath to stalk these individuals. Final Destination 2 beats it’s predecessor incare, creativity and energy. It’s a whole lot better than it has to be.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 12: Final Destination

2011-10-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

So I’ve never seen one of these.

Now hold on just a second. When Final Destination first came out there was noreal reason to. It didn’t look special, it was that dumb looking movie withthat puffy faced Devon Sawa kid and Stifler. I was too young to know who TonyTodd was.

Just when did these movies get respectable anyway? Iremember when the last one came out people were still referring to the serieswith out and out disdain. Yet when I mentioned to a few horror fan friends thatI’d never seen a Final Destination flick, they acted as if I had just said “Youknow I’ve never gotten around to watching Night Of The Living Dead. Halloweenneither.”

I figured I might as well check one of The Final Destinationfilms for 31 Days Of Horror. But which one? Well probably best to start at the beginning right? Thenagain I have heard that Part 2 really is the one to see. But Part 3 stars MaryElizabeth Winstead, and she’s ahem- er… Well best to just watch them all then.So for the next four days (The fifth Final Destination just left the damndollar theater) It’s Final Destination Fest here at 31 Days Of Horror. We willfind out just how many ways you can skin a teen.

Things get off to a relatively low key start with FinalDestination. Upon boarding the plane our hero receives a vision of the planegoing up in a giant fireball (Truth in criticism this is a pretty darnimpressive sequence). Understandably freaked out by this, he panics and getshimself and a random selection of students kicked off the plane. Which thenexplodes. Dun dun dun.

39 Days later after the memorial service and the unveilingof a statue dedicated to the victims, the random selection of students begin todie off. Why, Death decided to wait until after the memorial service to beginoffing the principles is a little sketchy. I guess he just wanted to giveeveryone some time to pay their respects. Death may not be proud but you cannotsay that he isn’t polite.

I’ll admit I’m still not entirely sold on this one. I meanit’s fine, but there’s nothing to really differentiate it from the host of WBhorror that was being released around that time, save Tony Todd’s great onescene appearance. The whole mechanic it devises for “Death passing people over”is pretty sketchily drawn. And it even does that annoying thing that horrorfilms were doing at the time of naming all their characters after famous horrorfigures (Valerie Lewton? Ker-rist).

The death’s are all pretty low key, without any of themreaching the Rube Goldberg craziness I’m told the series reaches earlier. Onlyone, involving a cracked mug, a bottle of Vodka, a house fire, some kitchenknives and a spice rack really hits any entertainingly ludicrous heights. LikeI said there’s nothing really wrong with the film, it just feels sort of workmanlike.

Then again I have always been told that Part 2 is where shitgets real. So we shall see.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 11: Phenomenon

2011-10-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

Phenomenon has always been to a certain extent, been the oddman out of the Dario Argento films (you know before the coconut accident). Abig American star, a PG rating. A plot about a girl who psychicly controls bugsand uses them to solve a murder that even by Argento standards is “fairlynutty.”

Yet despite all of the above being entirely accurate I wassurprised by just how well Phenomenon fit into his oeuvre. Like Suspiria beforeit, Phenomenon is essentially a fairy tale (I mean it begins with a young girlentering a black forest woods and approaching a house that may as well be madeof ginger bread). Despite the fact that it heavily features a chimpanzee with adistended ass that refuses to get any less distracting no matter how many timesyou see it (said Chimpanzee may or may not have bit off Jennifer Connelly’sfinger during filming).

Phenomenon stars Jennifer Connelly as the daughter of amovie star sent to a European boarding school. She is also asleepwalker/psychic/bug wrangler. Because you know, Argento. Unfortunately,said boarding school is the site of several gruesome murders (~~How this moviegot a PG is beyond me. The woman next to me spent the film actually moaning inrevulsion.~~ Ah by cutting thirty minutes out of its initial US release nevermind) and Connelly is compelled to solve them, with the help of her insectfriends. Although her fellow students are so bitchy one has to wonder why shebothers. She’s joined in her hunt by Donald Pleasance, a kindly old paralyzedetymologist, who cheerfully sends Connelly off on her own to go hunt a serialkiller in what is perhaps not the most believeable moment in cinema history.But then again when seen through the prism of fairy tale logic it works muchbetter.

This leads to several trademark awesome Argento, “BrianDePalma off his meds” set pieces and imagery. Still in command of his talentsthey are masterpieces of suspense and style. You can start to see the cracksaround the edges that would widen into chasms in his post Opera career. WhileArgento is able to sell most of his truly lunatic concepts, there are a fewthat slip through the cracks, culminating with a shot of a Chimpanzee with adistended ass, wielding a straight razor walking into the woods, seekingrevenge. This is not an image the movies have given to us prior to Phenomenon.

The film also features Argento’s trademark- er let’s justsay lax, dubbed dialogue (sample: “He just stays up in his room alone with hiscrazy thoughts”) and Goblin music score. Actually Goblin shares scoring dutywith the likes of Iron Maiden and Motorhead, which would normally be prettygreat, but in this case just illustrates how much Argento’s films lost whenthey ceased to be scored by Goblin. The disjointed score kind of sums upPhenomenon on the whole. Fascinating but disjointed. Sadly one must face thefact that this is the film where Argento’s grip first began to slip. Herecovers and sticks the ending with a last fifteen minutes as crazy andwonderful as anything in the oeuvre. But that can’t change the fact that atleast for awhile it looked as if Argento had no clue what he was doing.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 10: Curse Of Frankenstein

2011-10-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

You know how there are certain movies where you hear abouthow great they are so you kind of accept it and figure “I’ll get around to iteventually.” And when you finally do see it, you go “Wow that was reallygreat.” As if everybody hadn’t been telling you this for the past couple ofyears.

Yeah Curse Of Frankenstein is one of those. It’s reallygreat. I know I’m only like sixty years behind the curve on this one. Seriouslythough, despite it’s status as a genre classic I was more than a little bit unprepared for this one. Imean as much as I love The Hammer Dracula films, I think that Curse OfFrankenstein is superior to all of them (with the exception of Brides OfDracula which is my favorite Hammer movie period. Though I suppose there cansome debate on whether or not that is a Dracula movie), pretty much across theboard.

The story like the Universal one is a pretty looseadaptation of the story. Baron Frankenstein gets bored, decides to create life,marries his cousin resurrects ghoul. What makes it special is Cushing’sapproach.

Peter Cushing plays Victor Frankenstein as a magnificentbastard. I know that, you know that but it’s another thing to see it. There’s aselfishness to Frankenstein, a veneer of aristocratic entitlement that hebrings to every action he performs, whether it’s boffing the help in the backpassage or trespassing in God’s domain (I read an interesting interview withChristopher Lee the other day where he said that it was this entitlement thathe really thought he brought to Dracula, as opposed to sexuality. That goesdouble for Frankenstein.) Cushing plays it to a hilt. You buy every aspect ofhis character, his ruthlessness, his curiosity, this is a man who was bornfeeling like he deserves everything. I must admit after watching Tales From The Crypt and Curse OfFrankenstein back to back I have a new found appreciation for Cushing. The manhad range.

He’s helped by the character Paul, who goes fromFrankenstein’s tutor, to partner, to enemy. There usually is a character tospar with Frankenstein and appeal to his conscience in these films, but he’salso usually dead by the second reel. The elevation of Paul makes a bigdifference, not to mention the fact that he really manages to create a sense ofintimacy with Cushing. He’s the only one who really knows who he is and can seewhat he’s doing in every scene. There’s one great moment where he walks into aroom, and immediately shoots Frankenstein a look that says “I can’t believe it,you’re about to murder this fucking old guy aren’t you.” It’s not easy gettingthat sort of communication to seem authentic.

Of course, Cushing is only the half of it. Christopher Leeplays the creature in a performance that manages to feel completely differentfrom The famous Karloff take on the character, yet completely valid. No easyfeat especially considering the relatively small amount of screentime he has.His take on The Monster is less cognizant then Karloff’s. Even further from theeloquent creature of Shelley’s novel. There’s no soul behind the monster’seyes. He’s all reaction to outside stimuli. In what is perhaps the film’s bestscene (seriously it deserves to be up there with the “flower girl” sequence interms of importance to the mythos) the monster murders an old blind man, andsomehow manages to look as confused during the entire ordeal as his poor victim.

Terrence Fischer directs the film with his usual flair. Makingthe most out of an obvious limited budget (I’d be shocked if the movie has morethan five sets). The film moves at clip and Fischer makes the intimacy work for him. Though he certainlydoesn’t skimp when it comes time to bring the horror on.

But at the center of it all is Cushing darkly driven by his monstrousambitions. Not merely unremorseful, but unaware that anybody would evenconsider remorse possible.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 9: Tales From The Crypt

2011-10-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again I have areal soft spot for the horror anthologies that Amicus put out in the sixtiesand seventies. To me they hit a real sweet spot when it comes to the idea of“fun horror”. They manage to be gruesome without being ghoulish, dark withoutbeing bleak and contain some real moments of sick humor without beinggratuitous. They tell fast paced punchy stories that usually manage to have apunch line worth sitting through and if they come off as a bit campy, wellthat’s all part of the fun isn’t it. Besides it’s always a good time watchingold British character actors looking appalled.

Many consider Tales From The Crypt to be the best of theAmicus films, I still have to give the nod to the fairly loopy Asylum, but itcertainly stays in the running. The film was directed by Freddie Francis (Theman behind the immortal Trog). Unlikeother directors always seemed comfortable in the anthology format. In a lot ofways he was the Terrence Fischer of Amicus. It certainly is the funniest of TheAmicus films I’ve seen. “All Through The House” in which a treacheroushousewife (are their any other kind in the EC universe) attempts to cover up amurder on Christmas Eve, takes the well worn cliché of the killer Santa to newheights. While “Wish You Were Here” an incredibly over the top take on TheMonkey’s Paw plays like a Monty Python skit of itself. Complete with a middleaged stammering witness to the mayhem so ineffectual he might as well be playedby Graham Chapman.

The highlight, for me anyway, is Poetic Justice, in which areal estate developer dedicates himself to ruining the life of Peter Cushing’skindly old pensioner, only to face some unexpected consequences. Alright notthat unexpected it is Peter Cushing he is harassing after all. This is a storyyou have seen before, hell let’s face it almost by definition every single oneof these Amicus segments are stories you’ve seen before. But the sheer amountand unmitigated force of the EVIL Real Estate agent’s unmotivated dickery istruly impressive.

Blind Alley, in which the residents of a refuge for theblind get rather baroque revenge on the stingy head of the institute is goodfun as well. Bonus points for such great use of a hallway lined with razorblades. Really only" Reflection Of Death" can be said to be a dud. It’s fine, butit’s the very definition of a one joke premise. You know the punch line farahead of time and just patiently wait for the film to catch up.

Still four out of five isn’t bad for any horror anthology,and for an Amicus one that’s a batting average to rival Ty Cobb. Tales From TheCrypt might not be my personal favorite of The Amicus anthologies. But I’d behard pressed to think of a better place to start.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 8: Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

2011-10-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

After a fair amount of pre release excitement Don’t BeAfraid Of The Dark came and went with a bit of a shrug. Sometimes the reactionsthat films get baffles me. Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark may not reinvent thewheel, but it is a creepy little sleeper that generates a good amount of uneaseand at a time when horror becomes more and more generic it has a voice of itsown.

That voice is of course Guillmero Del Toro’s, though he only co-wrote and producedthe film it contains all his hallmarks. The collision between folklore andmodern life, the bonds between children and surrogate parents and theinstability of and inherent pleasures and miseries of childhood. Really what itmaintains from Del Toro’s work is its philosophy. Most filmmakers approach thesupernatural with fear, Del Toro approaches it with a kind of awe a distinctionthat gives even his lesser films a very real power.

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark follows a little girl who movesinto the house her father and his new fiancé are renovating. As shown in aprologue the house can be a bad place for children and after a sealed offchamber is discovered, things begin to contact the little girl. It’s classichorror as metaphor stuff, with the anxieties of new family life neatlydovetailing with the anxieties of discovering that a race of creaturesforgotten by time and the good people of the earth are now living in a burrowunder your house. But the ingenious thing about Del Toro’s script is the way hetaps into the richer vein of folklore beneath the metaphor. If you follow anysubtext long enough, eventually it just becomes text again.

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark first gained notoriety when theMPAA refused to give the film a PG-13 and then explicitly requested that DelToro not recut in an attempt to get the rating. Frankly it’s a little tough tounderstand what all the fuss is about. This is after all a film which, past itsprolouge cannot even be said to have a body count. There’s only one shot in themovie that screams “R” (a nasty leg break) and it’s seems as if it could havebeen omitted easily enough with a judicious leg break. Don’t get me wrong,there are some nasty implications in the film, the prologue in particularcontains a truly stomach churning moment and the scene where the handy man isattacked is probably the most intense I’ve sat through in a horror film thisyear. But it’s all implications, editing, and some extremely well done sounddesign. There’s a very nasty edge to the mayhem present in Don’t Be Afraid OfThe Dark. Like the eldritch creatures who populate it, its not afraid tobite.

All in all I’d say that Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark is thebest horror film released by a major studio this year (which might not besaying much but is saying something)

Please Stand By

2011-10-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, sorry to miss yesterday's post, my computer suffered ~~an utterly terrifying~~ a fairly serious crash. It looks like I've been able to fix it for the most part, but as a result I have to play catch up with some other stuff before returning to 31 Days Of Horror. There will be a new post up by tonight, and rest assured you can call it Upgraydd because it will most certainly feature a double dose of pimping.

Come On A My (Splatter) House

2011-10-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

As you well know I'm not the only 31 Day game in town. One of the best is being run over at my On The Stick, the home of my internet homeboys. Like The Wu Tang Clan, they ain't nothing to fuck with.

Just like last year when they did The Twilight Zone I'll be guesting a few times over there. My first a look at Splatterhouse 3 went up today.

Check it out.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 7: Innocent Blood

2011-10-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the mere fact that you haven’t heard about a movieis enough to make you nervous about it. Take Innocent Blood made by JohnLandis, who is at the very least semi beloved by the horror community. Why according to Showtime he’s aMaster Of Horror. I mean this guy made American Werewolf In London and TheTwil- well American Werewolf In London was pretty great anyway. So why have Inever really heard of his only other straight horror film?

Turns out that Innocent Blood is unfairly, well not maligned,but ignored. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a lost classic but there isplenty of fun to be had for the genre fan looking for a film this Halloweenthat they haven’t watched a billion times before.

The film follows Marie (Anna Parillaud fresh from La FemmeNikita) a vampire who doesn’t prey on “innocent blood.” This sounds good intheory but in practice she ends up giving a vicious mobster played by RobertLoggia a bad case of vampirism. This goes about as well as you might expect.

One of the main hang ups that people seem to have about thefilm is why combine The Gangster film and The Vampire film. Frankly the answeris probably because no one had made a Vampire film set in gangland before. Thetwist on the genre gives a way for the film’s other lead, Anthoney La Palgia asan undercover cop, to get into the film and doesn’t add much else. It’s not asif Loggia does anything all that special that any other Vampire bad guywouldn’t do. Well aside from run to his lawyers house first thing anyway.

The film is more character than plot driven anyway. Marie isan intriguing mix between the soulful romantic vampires who so dominate thearchetype today and the feral blood feasting predators of yore. Call her themaniac pixie nosferatu.

If we follow the three great scenes, no bad scenes law ofwhat makes a great movie, Innocent Blood is one of those movies that gets abouthalf way there. It does have at least three great scenes; one in which Loggiaruns out of the morgue and into a press conference that’s pure Landis anarchy,a sex scene with enough genuine heat that I’m kind of shocked it made it pastthe American studio system and the MPAA and the film’s greatest creepy momentand gore shot, both which takes Don Rickles as their unlikely subject. If you haveever wanted to see Don Rickles explode like John Cassevettes at the end of TheFury look no further. But it also does have a lot of filler, an intrusive voice over, the cops subplotdoes slow things up, and there are some strange details (bullets work prettywell against Vampires for some reason).

But while it’s undoubtedly imperfect Innocent Blood is alsoa lot of fun for any horror or Landis fans. It Includes plenty of Landis’ssignature vehicular destruction, old monster movies (one of the films best running gags isshots of minor characters becoming inappropriately enraptured by old horrorfilms) and cameos (This time including Forrest J. Ackerman, Tom Savini, Dario Argento, theubiquitous Frank Oz and Sam “The Man” Raimi). Like I said, Innocent Blood won’tchange anybody's life. Bu the dedicated genre fan could do worse than to checkout this neat little sleeper, despite the fool screen only DVD release (for shame Warner Brothers).

31 Days Of Horror: Day 6: Beyond The Reanimator

2011-10-06T19:20:00.000-07:00

Don’t ask me why I was surprised. Actually strike that,surprised is too strong a word. Don’t ask me why I was mildly perturbed thatBeyond The Reanimator kind of sucked. It is after all a decades late sequel tothe cult hit (Even if you factor in Bride Of The Reanimator this baby is stillcoming down the pike thirteen years after the fact) that didn’t much demand asequel in the first place, let alone two. Chalk up the absence of Stuart Gordonand we are pretty far into “Have no one to blame but myself” territory.

I guess I just didn’t expect a Reanimator movie to be sodreary, so lifeless (Rimshot). Directed by Brian “Overrated” Yunza (Have youever actually SEEN Society? It’s fucking boring. The very definition of a one scene wonder.) with production values thatscream “European tax shelter.” BeyondThe Reanimator is a plain dispirited movie. Like going to see a legendary rockband at the midstate fair, only now the bassist has an artificial leg, thedrummer is drunk, and the lead Singer is a replacement from a cover band afterthe real guy hung himself in his garage seven years ago.

Beyond The Reanimator starts in suburbia where some HerbertWest instigated mayhem goes down. A child survives the attacks and becomesobsessed with West, who he saw reanimate the dead. West is arrested and sent toprison. The child grows up, goes to med school and then gets a job at theprison, in order to help West continue his research. Things go about as well asyou would expect.

If there’s one bright spot in the whole mess its JefferyCombs, who is clearly relishing the chance to play his signature characteragain. He plays West, as older, wiser, and if no less single minded than atleast a great deal more mellow. It’s a progression of the character and aninteresting one. Unfortunately Combs is just about the only one who did put anythought into it and he can’t save the movie because he’s kept off screen formost of it, shunted aside for the bland younger cast.

Mayhem does eventually break out at the prison, as thetension between West, The Young Doctor, and a sadistic prison warden (are thereany other sort in movies?) heats up. But it feels strangely perfunctory. WhenStuart Gordon made a severed head perform a terrible pun it felt like a work oftransgressive, lunatic imagination. When Brian Yunza shows a close up of asevered penis, it looks like well a severed penis. Which can only hold so muchinterest (the fact that said penis is reanimated and fights a rat in theclosing credits does not help as much as you think it might). It’s not that thenovelty wears off, there’s just no novelty in the first place.

So yeah, don’t waste your time with Beyond The Reanimator,even if you’re just DVRing it off IFC wondering “What have I got to lose?” Agood non refundable hour and a half of your time is the answer. You can findsomething better to do with it. Trust me it shan’t be hard.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 5: Melancholia

2011-10-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Despite the richness of its possibilities horror alwaysseems to have such a narrow perception of itself. Most people wouldn’t considerMelancholia a horror film, even though horror is its sole subject matter.

We all deal with horror every day. Most of us have justgotten awful good at distracting ourselves from that fact. Able to look theother way from the giant planet that will obliterate everything in time. Whatis depression then but the inability to look away? To be transfixed by horrorto the point that it blocks everything else out, becomes the world Not anundercurrent of life but its overriding theme.

Von Trier has made two horror films before, The Kingdom andAnti Christ, and neither were like this.Both of those films were out and outassaults on the viewer. Full fledged attacks on the viewer’s thresholds of onscreen violence and any kind of narrative sense. Melancholia isn’t like that.After the strangely beautiful and horrifying opening, which features imagerythat looks like it was pulled directly from Von Trier’s night terrors, awful inthe true sense of the word, the film hardly shows anything terrible at all. Thefilm takes on a hushed, almost funeral tone, as is appropriate.

The film is divided into two parts the first set during awedding reception for Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, held at the manor ofher very rich sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsborough. At first Dunstis bubbly, luminescent, but it quickly becomes apparent that she is a womanwith some very real problems. It’sa much subtler performance than you would expect from Dunst, at the beginningof the film her mask is so firmly set that you can’t help but mistake it forthe real thing. Then it starts to crack, slowly at first and then withincreasing inertia. It becomes clear through the interactions with her familythat this is a group of people who have done some real damage to each otherover the years (This is to be expected as after all they are characters in aLars Von Trier film).

The second part of the film has Justine returning to hersister’s home after her depression returns full force. This happens to coincidewith the news that a new planet has been discovered, followed by the somewhatbelated news that said new planet is going to crash into the Earth and destroyit utterly. For the rest of the film it hangs heavily on the horizen (“It looks…friendly” Claire marvels at one moment). This makes little difference toJustine, to truly live with depression is to live every moment waiting for aplanet to come out of the sky and crush all live on Earth out of existence.

I’ve never been all that much of a Von Trier fan. All hismovies to one degree to another are pranks. While I can’t say that Melancholiais all that different in that regard, there has been a perceptible shift in VonTrier’s point of view. One could hardly call him humanist (though he does drawsome remarkably good performances out of the cast. Including Kiefer Sutherland)but it is as though he is genuinely sorry to see the things that his charactersare doing to themselves and others this time around. But maybe that is to beexpected. In the face of obliteration empathy is all we have.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 4: Fright Night Part II

2011-10-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

Seeing the original Fright Night at The Aero’s horrorthonlast year was one of the most pleasant surprises I had at a movie last year. Iwas somehow all but virtually ignorant of the horror classic in all but the broadest strokes. This despite the film being so far downmy alley that it was practically breaking into my house to steal shit.

Yet I was still skeptical about seeking out the sequel. Thisafter all was not just any sequel but an Eighties Sequel. And it’s a generalrule of them that an eighties sequel is going to be beat for beat like theoriginal, expect a lot less enjoyable. I mean we are talking about a subclassification of film that requires the line of dialogue “I can’t believe thisis happening… AGAIN!!!” to appear in nearly every single one of its entries.

But the lure of 35 mm and The Alamo Drafthouse proved toostraong, and I ended up seeing Fright Night Part II with a crowd better andmore primed for the film than the ones who sat through the film in 1988.

I wasn’t exactly wrong about what Fright Night Part II wouldbe, but there was a surprising amount of fun to be had to it. Once expectationshad been suitably lowered. Fright Night Part 2 takes place three years laterwith Charlie Brewster just getting out of a stay at a mental institute and intocollege. In this time period he’s been convinced that vampires don’t exist(This is more than a little hard to swallow, but it’s another staple ofeighties sequels. If you’re going to repeat everything again you have to reduceeverything back to square one). This gets tricky when wouldn’t you know it, abunch of Vampires move into Charlie’s neighborhood and start stalking him andPeter Vincent.

This time it’s a posse of Vampires, (They’ve also broughtalong a ghoul and a werewolf played by ultimate 80’s genre character actor JonGries) and unlike the suave, urbane, Chris Sarandon they are totally 80’s. Youhave no idea how unintimidating a vampire on rollerblades is until you actuallysee it.

But it is fun to watch William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowelldeal with it again, their chemistry intact (The film does suffer from theabsence of Amanda Bearse whose quintessential girl next door performance addeda lot to the film. Though her replacement is appealing as well.) McDowell in particular gets oneextremely fine moment where he gets to articulate his reason for being to theincredulous patrons of a dingy bar. It may not justify the movie in and ofitself, but it goes a long way towards doing so.

The film also carries over the top notch practical gore andmonster effects from its predecessors. There’s no getting around the fact thatFright Night Part II is just a fun movie to look at on a very basic level.

Watching Fright Night II is like clammering onto a carnivalspookhouse at the midstate fair for the second time. It’s predictable, morethan a little cheesy and you know every beat before it arrives. But there’sstill some fun to be had. Albeit not nearly as much as you did the first time around.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 3: The Roost

2011-10-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

It’s always a tricky business to go back and what the earlyfilms of a director you admire. On one hand you have to be careful not tosimply give the movie a pass because of your foreknowledge of what thefilmmaker would accomplish, on the other hand its not exactly fair to expectthe work of prodigy on a low budget, “We have one take for most of this” Film.You have to try to watch the film with the question “Would this have impressedme if I didn’t know who made it.” Firmly in mind.

Honestly, I don’t know if I would have been all thatimpressed with The Roost had I walked into it blind. But in the context of TiWest’s career it’s an interesting watch. Displaying lots of raw talent andpersonality in what is a fairly haphazard film.

From the beginning, The Roost shows West as a directordeeply attuned to horror’s past. He frames The Roost as part of an introductoryhorror show called “Frightmare” with Tom Noonan playing the horror host in awrap around that telegraphs “My cut of the movie did not make my contractuallyobligated eighty minutes.” While its always fun to see this stuff, and it drawsa connection with his later work the Frightmare material is problematic. On onehand Tom Noonan, which is never a bad thing. On the other hand, it just is so damnunmotivated, not to mention the fact that it allows for a moment that justscreams “I’ve just seen Funny Games” and not in a good way and then let’s Westend his movie with the exact same jump scare twice in a row.

The rest of the movie follows a car full of twentysomethings on their way to a wedding. They end up stuck on an abandoned countryroad where they are attacked by bats with a virulent strain of rabies (orsomething damn close) that ends up infecting them. Hijinks ensue. The concept speaks well of West and his ambition, there are enough challenges fora young filmmaker to deal with without having to wrangle a horde of real,puppet and CGI bats. The fact that

The Roost is surprisingly effective in some places,surprisingly clumsy in other. There are several great moments of tension, a fewgreat shots (including one of an old man walking up to a barn that could comeright from the pages of EC) and a couple of great Ti West patented “We knowsomething the characters don’t” beats. But like I said, this is obviously thework of a growing filmmaker. Though West showcases his austere patient style insome places in others he relies on the type of shakycam antics that would neverreally be seen in one of his films again. He overplays his hand in a couple of corny moments to (At one point the moon turns red! Blood Red I Tells Ya!) In one hilarious moment whenswitching locations West cuts to a black screen with a giant red NEARBY writtenon it, for no other reason then the fact that he apparently believes that basicfilm grammar is beyond our ken.

So perhaps it would be to much to say that The Roost is anauspicious beginning, but it is a beginning with potential. That in itselfdoesn’t mean much, there are few commodities cheaper than potential. But Westcapitalized on his, and if The Roost is nothing else than the film that got theball rolling then it’s well worth a place in any horror fan’s heart.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 2: Livid

2011-10-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Let us pretend that one fortuitous day Dario Argento woke up andwas hit on the head with a coconut. This coconut hit had the happy effect ofreversing an early hit to the head with a coconut that occurred some yearsearlier right after post production on Opera and thus Gilligan’s Island styleArgento reverted back to his old self and remembered how to make a fuckingfilm. It is not unfeasible that he would go on to make something very likeLivid.

Livid was by far the film with the most mixed reaction atFantastic Fest. The people who loved it fell head over heels with it, thepeople who hated it didn’t just hate it, they wanted you to know that they hated it. Unmotivated exclamations of “Boydid I hate Livid!!” could be heard far and wide throughout The DrafthouseLobby.

By all rights I should have been one of them. I don’t thinkmuch of the so called French New Wave of horror, including the directorsprevious film Inside (Livid itself takes a very funny and effective swipe atthe “killer kids” films that have popped up in the movement like weeds in the wake of Them.) ButLivid is something truly different. You can count me on the loved it (or atleast liked it a whole lot) side of the equation. Though I have to admit thatthe extreme polarization on this film is confusing to me. Walking into the filmafter hearing the advanced word I was expecting some sort of activelyaggressive anti-narrative to rival The Holy Mountain.

Instead Livid seems to be deliberately simple. Some thingshappen in it that “don’t make sense” to be sure, but they don’t make sense (orperhaps a better way to phrase it is they make deeper sense) in the way afairytale or a dream does. Last Year At Marienbad this is not.

Livid follows a young girl who is spending two weeksvolunteering as a nurse. She is taken to the home of an elderly woman in acoma. There is something of an urban legend about the woman, who was once afamous dancer, a rumor that she hid a great treasure in her home. When shementions this to her doofus working class boyfriend he of course gets veryexcited and plans to rob the house along with his equally doofus friend. Thoughthe girl first resists, she’s dealing with pressures of her own and decides togo along with the break in.

So far so simple, but once our trio makes it into the housethings become a little less so. It quickly becomes apparent that things in thehouse play by different rules, and as they venture deeper and deeper into itsdark heart the consequences grow more and more exacting. It’s a great hauntedhouse movie Livid builds an atmosphere of decay, dread and unease that is all its own,with twisted imagery and horrific implications. It builds a feeling of suchoriginality in fact that it is disappointing when in its final bend, to see itsell itself short both in concept (“We don’t know just what these people arethat’s unsettling… Oh wait no turns out they’re vampires.”) and imagery(including those damn killer kids that the movie so effectively satirized early).These and a few other flaws (there’s an early encounter in the house that I’mpretty sure would make any sentient individual shit their britches that thekids just brush off) knock Livid down from great to pretty darn good.

Oh well, C’est La Vi, as the countrymen say. Livid might notbe perfect but it’s awful damn good, which sets it far above the majority ofits competition. It’ll stay with you.

31 Days Of Horror: Day 1: The Innkeepers

2011-10-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

It’s a bit of a tradition for me to kick off 31 Days OfHorror with a personal favorite. A film that sums up what I find soinvigorating about the horror genre as a whole. I am pleased to be able tocontinue this tradition with the fourth (yikes!) year of 31 Days Of Horror,albeit with a film that has not yet seen its official release.

Rest assured, I’m not worried that I’m being prematureadmitting The Innkeepers into my own personal canon so early. So much of whatTi West does can be seen as a direct reaction against what the rest of horroris doing and God bless him for it. He’s coming up in a generation of horrorfilmmakers for who story, character, actual investment are all tertiaryconcerns. West realizes that they are all that matter. It’s no hyperbole to saythat with The Innkeepers Ti West has made a film that is exactly what I want ina horror movie.

The Innkeepers follows two employees of a run down hotelwhich is soon to face demolition. The hotel is supposedly haunted and the twohave been playing at ghost hunting as a hobby to pass the time for a while. Butnow with the place shutting its doors permanently and taking advantage of anearly empty house, they decide to pull out all the stops.

The first third of the movie is relaxed, funny. Like West’sother films it’s a definite slow burn and once again the chorus of Mountain Dewaddled attention spans will probably dislike the film. Fuck ‘em. It’s all to apiece, The Innkeepers is intensely character driven horror, West allows us togrow as comfortable with the characters as they are with each other. He is, ofcourse, aided by the performers Sara Paxton, who is as cute as two buttons, andPat Healy who’s sardonic and bitterly funny without feeling stock. The two havea report that doesn’t for a moment feel forced.

The Innkeepers is a deceptively organic movie. It only feelsconversational; in reality West has made an artfully constructed movie, slowlybuilding his tension, only seeming to disperse it with a few big laughs. Hecreates an atmosphere of day lit horror, casting everything under sicklyfluorescents, though he is more than able at opening up a carnivorous pit ofLewtonesque shadow.

Narratively West is in complete control adding just theperfect touch of ambiguity to the proceedings. He gives you the answer to everyquestion, but he does not answer every question for you. A crucial distinction.West has the rare ability for a horror filmmaker to use fear as metaphorwithout overplaying his hand. Without giving too much away, he plays veryknowingly with the idea of “service industry hell.” Of the frustration at beingstuck in a dead end job “forever” of never being able to “move on.” An anxietyI find all too relatable. But it’s not overpowering, it never calls attentionto itself. West puts it on the table and leaves it there for you to take orleave. It’s a grace note among many, uninsistant.

There are a few minor issues with the film. As affective asHouse Of The Devil was, it’s easy to forget that it didn’t really show all thatmuch that was supernatural (Aside from “Grandma” and that’s arguable). In theInnkeepers he does and one gets the feeling that West is not yet a hundredpercent comfortable doing so. Don’t get me wrong there’s some horrific imageryhere (which I am not going to spoil) but the most effective supernaturalimagery is the imagery that looks the least supernatural. It’s certainly not abig deal; it just makes West the latest director to fall victim to hundred FootBug Syndrome. No matter how terrible the hundred foot tall bug is at least hewasn’t a thousand foot bug. Stillit speaks well of West that though his imagery is merely scary, hisimplications are horrifying.

Another problem is that West got a steadicam this time outand you can see he’s really excited about it. There are about half a dozensweeping, unmotivated shots, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if they didn’tstick out so noticeably with West’s austere, classical style. Imagine TheHaunting with a day of second unit done by Sam Raimi. Similarly problematic isthe subplot involving a psychic staying at the hotel. Kelly McGillis does agreat job in the role and she is necessary for the delivery of a pretty crucialpiece of exposition. But at the Q&A after the film West mentioned that hewanted to make a horror film in which the characters were “unequipped” to be ina horror film and McGillis breaks that tone.

These are really just quibbles though. They do nothing todiminish the film as a whole.

Like House Of The Devil, scratch that more so than House OfThe Devil, the pleasures of the film are modest ones. I don’t mean that as acriticism, far from it. If you come into The Innkeepers expecting big specialeffects, and moments of ultra violence you will be disappointed. If all horroris to you is a lightshow with prosthetics and stage blood you will bedisappointed.

But if you are like me. If you see horror as an expressionof something deep and pure. If you appreciate a film that gnaws on you ratherthan revealing all its secrets at once, than I believe that you will love TheInnkeepers as much as I do.

....

So that's the kick off for 31 Days Of Horror I think it's going to be a great year.

Please be sure to check out my friends at On The Stick who are running a 31 Days Of Videogame Horror over on their website. I'll be guesting there myself a few times this month, I'll be sure to provide some links.

Also I did another guest podcast with my buddy Jose Cruz over at his great new blog Mephisto's Castle, we talk about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 a film that as you know I have a good amount of affection for. Hope you enjoy.

Last but not least, I've updated Son Of Danse Macabre with two articles since we've parted one on Horror In Videogames, the other on Horror In Comics. Be sure to tell me what I've missed so I can catch it in the second draft..

There's going to be lots of great stuff this October, I'm turning over my inReads articles to the forces of darkness too. So for the month of October expect an embarrassment of riches. Let's just hope I can survive it.

My Reaction To The Cleveland Game

2011-09-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

That was the greatest terrible game I've ever watched.

I shouldn't be this elated over such an ugly win and such a terrible game but I can't help it.

Colt McCoy showed he's a true Browns QB by only realizing that there was a game going on in the last fourth quarter. I mean this as a complement somehow. Seriously, it was like watching Kosar play.

Pulling a win without Hillis was a big big deal for us, no matter how ugly.

I was in a Texas bar with about a hundred ex patriot Browns fans, I've never been in a sports situation so intense. That whole last five minutes of the game, that last drive was just an adrenaline high, and then when it looked like we might lose anyway... Jesus.. Group hugs cheering the whole ten yards I love Cleveland fans.

For the first time in five years I have hope.

...

It's going to be a bit quiet here until 31 Days Of Horror starts. There might be one more pre October treat, but I've got Fantastic Fest down here in Austin, and I think I'm going to take the oppurtunity to get a few reviews in the reserve.

Until then here's a piece I did for SODM on Horror In Videogames. There might be one more pre October Treat, but just in case I'll see you guys on the first.

Super

2011-09-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Super is the sort of film where you spend a good chunk ofthe runtime starring at the screen aghast at what you are seeing. How much youwill enjoy the film is directly related to how much you enjoy said experienceof gaping in horror.

This is something that audiences have had a chance to do atthe theater a lot lately. While it’s easy to be numbed by such calculated taboopushing, it would be a mistake to lump Super in with its inferior brethren.Troma trained James Gunn is genuinely sick and I hope he never gets well.Unlike say Machete, Kick Ass or Hobo With A Shotgun, whose over the top mayhemand self aware style gave audiences an easy out, Super has the balls toactually play its concept straight. It does not even have the decency to leerat the horrible things that it puts on screen. Instead presenting them with amatter of factness that is almost unbearable. The film never winks, even whenits hero is being mind raped by God (You read that correctly). This is not afilm that is interested in letting you off the hook.

The film follows Rainn Wilson as a loser whose life of“humiliation and disgrace” has been marked by “two perfect moments.” The firstwhen he married his wife, the second when he pointed a cop in the right directionof a fleeing criminal. When drug dealer Kevin Bacon (Who I have to admit I findkind of irresistible now that he has embraced his inner sleazebag) steals hiswife away Wilson snaps. After what he believes to be a rather forceful momentof divine inspiration he decides to follow his true calling. Smashing people inthe skull with a pipe wrench for offenses which range from Child Molestation tocutting in line. Each offense receives the same amount of pipe wrench.

All credit has to go to Wilson for finding the movie’stricky tone. There is something about Wilson’s dead eyed bewildered stare thatis genuinely unsettling. He elevates Super above the one note joke it couldhave been and gives it its own sort of queasy power. When asked by one criminalif he thinks “Stabbing me to death is going to change the world?” he responds,“I won’t know unless I try.” And that sort of sums up the whole film.

Gunn brings the same zealous conviction to every frame ofthe movie. If there’s one thing that Gunn has taken from Troma it’s the abilityto make you legitimately unsure how far he is going to take things, there’ssomething legitimately filthy, deranged and dangerous to Super that makes otherfilms of its ilk look sanitized. Helped immensely by his game cast. Whichincludes the aforementioned Kevin Bacon and old hand Michael Rooker. Ellen Page makes the most out of herrole as Wilson’s sociopathic sidekick and it is perhaps the film’s ultimateaccomplishment that it makes sex with Ellen Page look like a legitimatelyterrifying experience.

This is not a film for everybody and I have a feeling thatmany of the people who the film is forwill walk away from it actually angry. I think that’s a great thing. You watchas someone falls to the ground and starts having a seizure thanks to a pipewrench related skull fracture. Your shocked laugh catches in your throat andyou’re unable to look away.

Just A Fond Farewell To A Friend...

2011-09-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

I didn’t want to write about this but I have accepted thateverything else I try to write will be crap until I do. We all have our ownways of drawing the poison.

A good friend of mine committed suicide on Sunday. I foundout about it Wednesday morning.

It was unexpected. Which is a dumb thing to write. Of courseit was. But if I had to make a list of people I knew who would be liable topunch their own ticket, he would have been way down near the bottom.

Andy had a big personality. That’s vague but it’s the onlyway I could put it. You know how you know how someone has a big personality?When conversations are defined by their absence. Andy had more conversations take place about him when he was“off screen” than Harry Lime. Put two people who knew Andy into a room togetherand eventually their conversation would turn to Andy it was inevitable. He hadan ability to manufacture adventure, as well as chaos, a sharp sense of humorand a huge heart. Stand him in front of any vertical surface and he would scaleit with his freakish simian feet. He posted numbers that would make WiltChamberlin envious. Taught me how to smoke. Once stole a life sizedadvertisement of the movie Barbershop and stashed it in a horse stable for aspace of two years. Introduced me to The Beach, Youth In Revolt, Pulp Fiction,Jurassic 5, The Vandals and a bunch of incredibly shitty jam bands. In short hewas a good friend. At a time when I needed one very, very badly.

Eventually we drifted apart. It would be a comforting lie tosay that distance was responsible for it, we didn’t live anywhere near eachother for most of the year, but it wasn’t. We had a few arguments in the lastyear of our friendship. Nothing serious enough to end it, but serious enough tomake a dent. We parted at the end of that summer on friendly terms, but termsmarkedly cooler then we had before nonetheless. After that, a few phone calls,a couple of letters, when talking to someone we both knew I’d ask after him, (likeI said it was inevitable that at some point the conversation would turn his way)and that was that for five years.

And then this summer something funny happened. I had not onebut two fairly random encounters with the man, once in person and once on thephone. Neither were long, I’d be surprised if either topped fifteen minutes, soit would be an exaggeration to say that we fully reconnected, but both weregood. Catching up, talking about old times, trying out a few of the old in jokesand being delighted to find that they still worked. Both times I walked awaystruck by the fact that it was still just damn good to see him.

I didn’t get any hint of what was coming. I don’t know if Ishould have. Both of the conversations were fairly superficial, perhaps if wehad had a chance to talk longer I would have picked up on something. Probablynot though. It wasn’t as if he was closed off, but you saw what Andy wanted youto see, and unless you knew him very well he did not let you past the surface.I had heard from some mutual friends that he was having some problems, butnothing specific.

I have had many emotions since his death. Grief as well as afair amount of anger. But now I feel just burned out with a hollow sort ofacceptance. I wish that I hadn’t lost touch with him so completely in thoselast five years. I wish that I had picked up on what he was going through. Iwish I had just randomly invited him down here to Austin for a week of eatingand drinking. I wish he had not done it. I wish a lot of things. But I’m leftwith what is. Speaking from personal experience suicide isn’t something thatanyone can talk you out of but yourself. Andy didn’t.

So I’m left here, a couple thousand miles and a plane ofreality away. With a blog post in the place of a funeral I will be unable toattend to provide what little closure it can. I love and miss you my oldfriend. The world is a poorer, less interesting place with you gone from it.

But I am not without hope, that some good will come fromthis, even if I cannot yet understand what that might be. Certainly more goodhas come into my life through knowing you than any bad (Though the cancersticks were a bitch to quit). I end with the last line of my favorite poem,

“I say this not out of sorrow, but in wonder.”

Forbidden Planet

2011-09-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

Forbidden Planet, was the noble attempt to legitimize Sci Fi in the fifties. At the time Sci-Fi was strictly the stuff of B-Movies. Films made on the cheap with cardboard sets, and cardboard actors. Black and White filler made to put something on the screen while the kids necked at the drive in. The idea of Forbidden Planet was to do the sci-fi film as an A-picture. A Big Budget!!! A story (loosely) based on Shakespeare!!! Cutting edge special effects!!! This thing would have class coming out the wazoo!!!

Of course now Forbidden Planet looks if anything like more of an artifact than the Drive In Fodder it was supposed to outclass. This is mainly due to the fact that the producer’s definition of an “A-Picture” was clearly a B-Picture with a lot more money thrown at it. Narratively the film remains strictly in the realm of the unremarkable, (Compare it to the still powerful The Day The Earth Stood Still to see what I’m talking about here.) centered around a deadpan performance from Leslie Nielsen indistinguishable from his later work as Frank Drebbin. In short they may have lost the cardboard sets, but kept its use in other places.

The film follows a crew of astronauts, that lands on a planet deep in space, searching for the remnants of a crew of scientists that had been sent their earlier. To their surprise they find a survivor, Dr. Morpheus, who with his daughter is living among the ruins of a the civilization of an extinct race of aliens called The Krell, who were far beyond humans in their technological advancement. Morpheus has dedicated his life to studying the Krell and does not take kindly to the threat to his control that their presence represents. He warns the crew that the threat doesn’t come from him, but a monster who lurks on the surface of the planet.

The film was directed by Fred Wilcox, one of those directors who made their career in the studio system making any damn film the studio gave them. To give you an idea of his passion for Sci-fi it’s worth noting that the film he directed directly after Forbidden Planet was I Passed For White and his debut features were two of the Lassie Films.

The true people behind the film were Irving Block and Allen Adler. Who developed and pitched the film as a chance to show what the cutting edge special effects work they were capable of doing, but were unable to because of Sci Fi’s B-Budget. The efforts paid off, Forbidden Planet’s visual effects were above and beyond anything that had been seen at the time, though they appear charmingly retro to our post 2001: A Space Odyssey eyes. The film shows every sign of being one conceived of by special effects artists. At one point Dr. Morpheus turns to the spaceship crew and basically says “Would you all like to take a tour of our very expensive sets?” to which Nielson and Co, reply “Yes, yes we would like to take a tour of your very expensive sets.” They then spend the next thirty minutes walking from room to room, gazing in slack jawed wonder at what a couple of million dollars could buy in 1956.

And yet as improbable as it may seem these sequences actually offer the most haunting moments of Forbidden Planet. Sure large chunks of the film come off as corny, and the effects seem more like kitsch today. But not all of it, when the film shuts up, pulls back, and observes, it regains some of its haunting power that it must have had upon its first release. As we watch the human cast, dwarfed to the size of pinpoints by the enormity of the sets, crawling across the surface of great mechanisms of a past civilization, as ignorant and insignificant as insects, it is impossible not to feel, if only for a moment, that eerie awe that the genre is capable of producing at its best.

Escape From New York/LA/The Action Cast!

2011-09-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

I join my friends on The Action Cast to discuss Escape From New York and LA, as well as every other John Carpenter film we can fit in.

I take Snake's above example when my Pod mates express their opinions on Escape From LA.

500 Or Bust

2011-09-10T20:56:00.001-07:00

Edit: I am a sad sad man today.

The Unholy Three

2011-09-08T13:19:00.000-07:00

Readers, I know I’ve said this before- but this is a weirdone. The thirties were an awfully strange time for genre cinema. Pre and postcode pressures alike make it about as diverse a period as has ever been, interms of content and tone. Meanwhile the strictures of the genres themselveswere still pretty loose, and the assembly line style of studio filmmaking wasreally starting to gear up, meaning the law of averages guarantees that everyonce in a while an absolute mutant of a movie like The Unholy Three got made.

But enough beating around the bush, just how strange is TheUnholy Three? Well it’s a movie that features the sight of Lon Chaney in drag,threatening a strong man with a caged ape. Said caged ape actually being a manin a suit whose costume makes vigorous claim to “Least convincing man dressedin ape suit of all time.” Which is saying something as “quality of ape costumesin old fashioned films”, is a particularly low set bar if there ever wasone. This scene is, by the by,directly preceded by one in which a midget straight up kicks a toddler in theface. Readers, this is a weird one.

Not quite a horror film or a crime film (the type of genrebleed over that was common in the thirties) The Unholy Three follows the titular trio, a gang of former freakshowworkers, who turn to crime when their carnival is shut down (a result of theaforementioned toddler face kicking. That’s the sort of thing that will justruin the reputation of a family entertainment establishment, believe you me).Led by Professor Echo (Lon Chaney in his only sound film and last role. He diedof throat cancer a mere two months after the films release. All the saddergiven that his comfort in the role suggests that he would have made the leap tosound stardom with an ease that few of his contemporaries could match.) TheUnholy Three hide in plain sight with Echo taking on the role of “Grandma O’Grady” and the midget acting like an infant child, in between their robberiesand murders. Things only get stranger from here.

The film is aremake of one of Chaney’s earlier hits, and it misses the atmospheric directionof original helmer Tod Browning (who was busy making Dracula at the time). Butwhat it lacks in style it makes up for in its pervasive strangeness. Much moreof the film’s runtime is given over to the star crossed lovers of the plot,Professor Echo’s former squeeze,and the dopey shop clerk (perhaps the squarest hero I’ve ever seen in a film)who is set up to take the fall for The Unholy Three’s crimes.

The incongruity between the standard thirties romance, andthe bizarre doings of the circus freaks just highlights how odd the ongoingsare. It’s as if a standard thirties melodrama has gone stark raving mad.Novelty is tough but I can personally guarantee that The Unholy Three is unlikeany film you’ve ever seen.

Hail To The King Baby

2011-09-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

Son Of Danse Macabre, lurches back to life with an article about the King of horror. September should hopefully be a pretty busy month over there. After all I have to get as much in as I can before October. When it becomes an absurdly busy month over here....

Attack The Block

2011-09-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

Hype’s a funny thing isn’t it?

I saw Attack The Block about two weeks ago and just have not built up the steam to write about it. Granted part of the reason for this is the week long road trip I took. But equally troubling is the fact that I haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts on the film in a way that doesn’t make it sound like my soul is of the consistency of sour Owl Poop.

Because like I said, Hype is one hell of a double edged sword. Hype is what allows a foreign genre film like Attack The Block to play in US Theaters. Hype allows said film to break out of the “foreign film ghetto” and get a crack at a larger audience. And hype is exactly what had me walking out of Attack The Block with a big ole case of the “mehs”.

Attack The Block is the Edgar Wright produced, Joe Cornish directed sci fi film. That finds out what happens when an alien invasion lands in the slums of London. It’s Guy Fawkes Day (I think?) so thanks to the chaos, and downgraded location of the attack the authorities don’t cotton to what’s going on until a few of their own get splattered. By that time it’s far too late, and in the best Amblin fashion all that stands between London and certain destruction is a group of young outcast teens (albeit cut from a rougher cloth than most of the Amblin leads).

The bitch of it is that I know had I caught Attack The Block at one of its earlier screenings, my focus would be completely different. Had I it snuck up on me as an unassuming programmer among many, I like its early champions would most likely have praised the film for its character driven story (a rarity among genre films of any stripe), admirable social conscience, charismatic lead performance, innovative moments and several tense set pieces. However, thanks to seeing it after it was ordained as a modern genre film classic, my thoughts instead tended to be more along the lines of “Well someone has been watching his Joe Dante”, “Well that was a bit heavy handed”, and “I fervently wish that these alien creatures reminded me more of HR Giger, and less of the things in Critters”.

Now exactly none of this is the movies fault. It just comes from me seeing the film on the opposite end of its prerelease hype. Like I said, hypes a necessary evil but it is in fact an evil. When one allows their expectations to be raised from “modest” to “high” there are certain consequences. In that way Attack The Block is perhaps the anti-Ward.

So take this review as my gift to you. Definitely see Attack The Block. Particularly if you have a chance to do so in the theaters. It’s important to support this sort of original genre cinema if nothing else. Just do yourself a favor and cycle down your expectations a little. There are many fine things in Attack The Block. Don’t allow them to be overshadowed by the fine things that are not there as I did.

PS. Dear English readers, Are you guys just cloning Emily Mortimer now? Not that I'm complaining but jeez that was downright disconcerting.

Lawrence Of Arabia

2011-08-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

The central image of Lawrence Of Arabia is of great crowds of people looking at Lawrence. Sometimes they look in awe, sometimes in fear, sometimes in admiration, sometimes in out and out hostility. But never once does anyone look at him with comprehension. David Lean usually considered the most square and establishment of filmmakers turned in a remarkably subversive film. It is an easy thing and not an altogether remarkable thing to make your hero a charmless thug and crow about your revisionism. It is quite another to make a heroic epic that manages to call the entire concept of heroism into question.

Yes amazingly up until now I had never seen Lawrence Of Arabia. It was just one of those holes, every movie geek has a couple, that I never managed to fill. It wasn’t anything malicious, and I always figured I’d get to it one day. It’s just that Lean wasn’t terribly in vogue when I was cutting my teeth as a cinephile. There wasn’t any urgency. What can I say that wouldn’t be the first dumb mistake I’ve made.

This really should be the worst possible time to watch Lawrence Of Arabia anyway. It is after all at its core a story of Western intervention in the Middle East. Made at a time when most westerners fervently wish that the concept of intervening in The Middle East was still entirely foreign to them (When Rains says the line “On the whole I wish I’d stayed in Wales.” the laugh he got had the distinct ring of commiseration). But like all great cinema Lawrence Of Arabia stands out of time. Perhaps that is the test of truly great film. From the opening images on it’s impossible to judge Lawrence by any standards but its own. Art forces you to accept things on arts terms.

It helps that Lean presents Arabia in a way that goes beyond mere exoticism. Arabia ceases to be foreign and becomes down right alien. The ceaseless bleached white vistas, the rocks that dwarf the human characters, the ever shifting sands and winds.. Everything, from the crazy grace of the camels, to the clothes to the architecture takes on a new aura and significance. Blown to eye shattering proportions on an immaculate 70 mm print it becomes in its own strange the world’s most photorealistic sci fi film.

There are of course all the things that usually get talked about that make the film remarkable. It’s incredible scope, the sheer beauty of Lean’s cinematography, the cast which includes such pleasurable ringers as Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn and Claude Rains, as well as the debut of the unbelievably charismatic Omar Sharif.

Just as alien is the figure at the center. Of course some of this “strangeness” is a bit easier to parse now than it was fifty years ago. I’ve often heard about the “ambiguity” of O’Toole’s sexuality in the film. Let me tell you there’s nothing ambiguous about it. Short of indulging in a cabaret number it’s tough to tell what more Lean and O’Toole could have done to telegraph that Lawrence is flagrantly DC. And yet the crucial thing, the thing that makes the film not just ahead of its time but in many respects ahead of ours, is the way that the film instinctively understands that this explains nothing at all. Lawrence’s sexuality is only one aspect of the character. It adds to his outsider status but it doesn’t define it. To say “Well that explains the enigma, he’s gay.” Is no more helpful than to say “Well that explains him, he’s straight.”

From frame one the film is dedicated to you not knowing Lawrence. He's obscured first in an overhead shot, then through a pair of insectile road goggles. When we finally do meet him face to face it’s after the man is already dead and buried. In the rest of the film he’s mercurial, messianic, fey (at one point actually skipping across a courtyard) and barbarous, in equal measure. In one of the film’s most famous shots upon reaching The Suez Canal (providing a shot of Steamship traveling across the desert that I can’t help but wonder got Herzog’s wheels turning) a British officer on the other side bellows out “Who Are You?” to a dazed Lawrence. A look of horror quickly spreads across Lawrence’s face. At first glance this would seem to be an example of being a bit on the nose. But that’s only if you consider the question from one angle.

You see, I think the horror is not a result of Lawrence realizing he doesn’t know who he is. I think he is horrified by the fact that he knows exactly who he is. He is a man who marched into the desert and found himself waiting for him. “Nothing is written.” He says in one of the movies most awe inspiring moments. Nothing. Except perhaps character. The one thing we can’t escape.

Who is Lawrence? Who’s to say? All we see is the poetic image of the shadow dancing across the sand.

(Postscript: To the three to four douchebags who sat behind me at The Paramount and snickered like Jr. High School Girls for three hours before I finally snapped. Congratulations, you are officially above the movie or something, and the entire back half of the Paramount Theater got to see evidence of that fact.

Next time you want to prove you're too cool for a movie rent it, and then make snarky comments about it when you return it to the video clerk. Don't spoil a 70mm revival screening with your rudeness. If it's too much to ask that you have a little taste, at least have a little respect. The cinema is a church.)

Summer Of Samurai: Ghost Dog The Way Of The Samurai

2011-08-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

It helps to understand that the hero of "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" is crazy. Well, of course he is. He lives in a shack on a rooftop with his pigeons. He dresses like a homeless man. The whole story is so strange, indeed, that I've read some of the other reviews in disbelief. Are movie critics so hammered by absurd plots that they can't see how truly, profoundly weird "Ghost Dog" is? The reviews treat it matter of factly: Yeah, here's this hit man, he lives like a samurai, he gets his instructions by pigeon, blah . . . blah . . . and then they start talking about the performances and how the director, Jim Jarmusch, is paying homage to Kurosawa and "High Noon." But the man is insane!

-Roger Ebert-

Understanding this seemingly self evident fact is the key to understanding Ghost Dog. Paradoxically this becomes tougher the more of Jim Jarmusch’s films you have seen. Usually seeing a body of a filmmaker’s work clues you into their method, but indeed in Ghost Dog it just obscures it. After all, all of Jarmusch’s characters tend to live in their own pocket universe. Their actions, dress and manner dictated by inscrutable personal style that might as well be Byzantine codes of honor. So Forrest Whittaker plays a hitman who lives by the code of the samurai, how is that any odder than Johnny Depp’s Cowboy/Accountant/Possible Reincarnation of William Blake in Dead Man? Or Winnoa Ryder’s precocious grease monkey in Night On Earth? Or Tom Waits in day to day life?

Yet there is no getting around the fact that Ghost Dog is out of step with his would be siblings. If for no other reason than the film is so aware that the world is refusing to play long with his persona. Ghost Dog as a whole is a good deal less arch than the average Jarmusch work (Though there certainly is an element of that, mostly from the trio of gangster chieftans who end up hunting him. You have not lived until you’ve heard Henry Silva impersonate an Elk’s death rattle). He’s been accused of making all of his films with one eyebrow arched. But here it drops down at least a little bit. Once again the best way to figure out what Ghost Dog is is to compare it to what it’s not. Jarmusch would make another film about a taciturn, inscrutable Black hitman The Limits Of Control, a film that was perhaps doomed by its title. Compare it also to the other irreverent genre deconstruction, his weird western Dead Man. Perhaps the closest of Jarmusch’s films in tone to Ghost Dog, but still much more aloof.

Indeed the genre deconstruction is perhaps best viewed as another feint. Not that it isn’t a valid take on its genre, just that most people choose to view it through the prism of the wrong genre. The film was released in 1999, at the height of the HK film boom and the heroic bloodshed genre. A hitman meant Chow Yun Fat with two pistols gripped in his fists and two more on his feet just in case. But Jarmusch was harkening back to an earlier era (and different country) of genre filmmaking. Pulling cues from the surrealist gangster films of Seijun Suzuki, rather than the then current trends in Asian cinema.

Thanks to its inimitable concept, powerful performance by Whittaker, cult of personality from Jarmusch, and hypnotic awesome score by The RZA Ghost Dog was always guaranteed a place in cult film history. But despite all the praise that gets thrown its way, I have the sneaking suspicion it is still underrated. Go back to it, watch it with fresh eyes. It’ll be there, like its hero, quietly confounding all who approach it.

All The Little Kids Growing Up On The Skids Are Saying...

2011-08-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

After a two day marathon road trip I'm happily ensconced in my adopted home town. Should I manage not be blown up by Joss Whedon, I'll be back sometime next week.

A Brief Message From Our Sponser

2011-08-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

I don't usually do swag posts on TTDS. But as the immortal Arbogast once noted, "I cannot be bought but I can be clothed." So I tend to make an exception for the guys at Crazy Dog T-shirts.

The reason is simple, they make a quality product. And with so many fly by night clothing companies on the internet I don't mind pointing readers to one that is dependable. Their shirts are soft and durable. The logos actually remain after washing. Trust me on this one. I'm almost embarrassed by how much use I get out of my Camp Crystal Lake Counselor shirt. Which has become my mid twenties equivalent of Calvin's lucky rocket ship underpants. I put it on I know I've got a good day coming up.

Said shirt by the way, is currently retailing for 6.99. And if you type in the promo code that marks you as a TTDS reader (ICEPOP) you get five bucks off. That's a measly 1.99 to mark yourself as the survivor of one of the greatest massacres in cinematic history. What's not to like?

The Man From Nowhere

2011-08-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

There are things inherently pleasurable to watch in movies, no matter how many countless times you see them. The story of a lone underestimated underdog working his way through a sizable portion of the criminal population is one of those things. The latest film to follow this ever dependable formula is the Korean movie The Man From Nowhere, a hard edged lean thriller that’s probably my favorite film to come out of the Korean since A Bittersweet Life.

While The Man From Nowhere doesn’t quite reach the crazed melodramatic heights of suffering and madness that one associates with The Korean New Wave (Seriously Euripedes saw Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and was like “Damn man lighten up.” Thank you five people who got that joke.) Though it is perhaps telling about the movement that a film that features organ harvested from people while they were still alive can qualify as “low key”. Instead it operates on a much more Western friendly level of intensity.

Indeed The Man From Nowhere resembles nothing so much as a Korean Man On Fire. A quiet loner with a dark secret in his past runs a pawn shop and forms a reluctant attachment with an adorable moppet. After said moppet’s mother runs afoul of heroin dealing, organ selling, puppy eating Gangsters (Puppy eating not confirmed) they kidnap the moppet for collateral. The heretofore mild mannered pawn shop owner rouses himself, comes to terms with his dark past (Spoiler Alert: It involves killing a lot of people. Also tragedy. It’s Korea.) in order to cut a bloody swatch through nearly every low life in Korea. Leaving them to bleed out from their severed wrists as they rethink the recent actions of their soon to be over lives.

These types of films work with the merciless efficiency of pistons. First by setting up the seemingly invulnerable, incalculably evil villains and then watching said villains pale before the hero’s righteous fury. As the hero’s righteous rampage begins and they realize they have fucked with the one person they should never under any circumstances have fucked with. As said it has been done about a billion times before. But like The Goldberg Variations the point is not the music but how the music is played. With its simultaneously gritty and stylized atmosphere, kinetic plotting, genuine emotional involvement of its cast, not to mention some brutal but badass fight scenes, The Man From Nowhere might tread familiar ground, but it does so with confidence.

The film was overshadowed on its initial release by the fully demented I Saw The Devil. But it’s worth seeking out. What it lacks in novelty it more than makes up for in satisfaction.

Dispatches From The Man From Another Place

2011-08-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy week even if hasn't strictly been here. But in the Red Room man things have been swinging.

First off, longtime friend of the site Neil Fulwood contributed an absolute cracking piece to Son Of Danse Macabre. This despite the fact that he's been busy with his awesome Summer Of Satan as well as large portions of his country being on fire. Inspeaking of the latter. Neil wrote what is probably the best piece I've read on the recent riots. You would do well to read it.

Secondly I once again guested on The Action Cast, this time talking about Hobo With A Shotgun. Which if you will remember I liked a whole lot. In typical Action Cast fashion it we manage to talk about every movie but Hobo With A Shotgun before getting to our duties. But that means if you've ever wanted to hear me do an incredibly awkward Paul Verhoven impersonation today is your lucky day.

Finally I've been hard at work at inReads where The New Column has kept me hard at work. Writing here has been an incredibly rewarding expirience, and anyone who joins the site so it can continue to be has my gratitude. There's going to be a lot of good stuff coming in the next couple of days. So keep your eye out.

The Chase

2011-08-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Chase is one of those movies that people always seem to ruefully shake their heads after referencing. A big bloated misfire of a movie, the type of Studebaker that they just don’t make any more. With a reputation like that how can you not want to see it?

The Chase tells the story of Bubba, a convict (played by an impossibly young Robert Redford) who breaks hisself out of jail and goes for the home place. His partner kills a man, steals his car, and leaves Redford framed for the job. This is a real problem, since the son of the local rich man has been having an affair with Redford’s wife and now the good townsfolk think he’s coming back for some southern fried vengeance. As things tend to do in bored southern small towns in films of the sixties, the townsfolk form together to get a bit of preemptive justice in the mix. Only Marlon Brando as the town’s outmatched sheriff stands between Redford and an untimely end.

While this could be the stuff of a fairly crackling eighty minute film by the likes of Sam Fuller, at a bloated runtime of near two and a half hours, The Chase has to be one of the most inert films I have ever seen. Ponderous and slow it’s one of those unfortunate movies wherein you are fairly sure you have seen an allegory, but damned if you know for what.

The cast is game enough, Marlon Brando is in full mumblecore mode, and strain as Penn’s camera does it cannot quite hide the fact that he has had plenty of access to pies lately. But he does not radiate out and out disdain for the project the way he would later in life. The film also features Angie Dickinson and there’s never anything wrong with that. Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall and Robert Redford round out the “Oh they’re in this?” contingent. All do fine work, particularly Duvall as an emasculated husband who looks like he wandered out of an Edward Albee play, though if ever there has been an actor who looked less like a “Bubba” than Robert Redford I have not seen them.

Penn gives the film a great deal of atmosphere. From the sunbaked sweaty streets of the small town, to the nearly expressionistic sets of Bubba’s hiding spot, to the provincial opulence of the manor. But the film simply goes on for far too long bogged down in too many subplots.

The real problem with the film, like all of Arthur Penn’s films of the period is that they’re films out of time. There’s plenty of Penn’s New Wave tendancies and ambitions on display here, if not so nakedly as in Mickey One (though certain parts, I’m thinking specifically of the massive junkyard set, and the riot that breaks out there would look right at home in that odd duck of a film). Penn simply had the misfortune to make a movie that straddles the line dividing Home From The Hill and A Band Apart and is extremely unlikely to satisfy fans of either school of filmmaking.

The Vault Of Horror

2011-08-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

I have a soft spot in my heart (and possibly my head) for Amicus. The other two syllable British Horror company that operated from the fifties through the seventies. Their brand of horror could basically be summed up as Hammer, but less classy. While Hammer’s gothic retellings of the old horror stories all had a kind of opulence to them, the Amicus films were endearingly ratty around the edges.

Amicus’s specialty was the horror anthology film. Five creaky horror tales for the price of one. The Horror Anthology is one of the most notoriously tough to do subgenres, given that even if you get one segment right you still get four chances to get it wrong, and the law of averages says at least one of the entries should end up a dud. Amicus was pretty good at them though. Sure the segments are not often scary, but they are at least usually entertaining.

Vault Of Horror was one of the two films that Amicus did with stories licensed from the old EC Comics line. It faithfully follows the EC formula of following rotten people doing rotten things before coming to rotten ends. The first story follows a brother who decides to murder his sister in order to receive his father’s inheritance and runs into some complications thanks to her neighbors. The second follows the most British man ever filmed (Seriously he looks like an out take from Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit Of The Year” competition) as he has some trouble settling into his new marriage. The third follows a magician husband and wife team who travel India and go to unwise lengths to procure a new magic trick. The fourth a dud about a poorly thought out insurance scheme. The final follows an Artist (Dr. Who!) who gets revenge against those who wronged him with the power of voodoo. As you might have guessed things backfire quite spectacularly in all five cases.

It’s doubtful that all but the faintest of hearts will get any real fright from the segments contained within. The Amicus films rarely were scary (the lone exception being Asylum, probably the best of the Amicus anthologies, which had at least one genuinely spooky segment, involving brown butcher’s paper). But there is something here for the genre fan, the pleasures involved in a genuine B-movie. They may not scare in and of themselves, but like the horror comics that they’re based off of; they manage to capture quite well the pleasure of the horror story.

Doug TenNapel: Interview

2011-08-01T11:06:00.000-07:00

So Doug Tennapel is one of my favorite authors. He has a new book out called Bad Island, which is pretty amazing. He was kind enough to grant me an interview, which you can read here.

I can honestly say this is one of the coolest things that has come out of blogging for me.

Captain America

2011-07-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a fairly dreary summer Captain America emerges as an unlikely hero. This summer has seemingly had the goal of redefining empty spectacle and while one could hardly accuse Captain America of modest introspective filmmaking, it does at least want you to care about the people who are caught up in all of the CGI-splosions and tell a complete story about them. It’s almost a little sad how gratifying that is.

Like Joe Johnson’s earlier film The Rocketeer, Captain America manages to capture the fun, and dare I say innocence of the pulp era, with its straightforward heroes, hissable villains and retro future designs. Though it may lack The Rocketeer’s aesthetics purity it remains a welcome reminder that the sight of a Nazi taking a hard left hook to the puss will never lose any of its inherent charm.

Chris Evans, continuing his trend of being unexpectantly talented (he was always better than the movies he was in, watch Push sometime). He manages to play both Steve Rogers and Captain America convinincingly. Showing how the latter grows from the former. He’s easily the most human superhero we’ve seen since Tobey Maguire put on the red and blue. His opposite Hugo Weaving gets to Hugo Weaving it up, which is never a bad thing. His Red Skull is the ultimate pulp villain, marshalling armies of black clad soldiers and masses of infernal devices. Here is a man who knows the value of an ominous insectile war ship that he can stand in front of and cackle while it hovers ominously in the background. Stanley Tucci also makes a nice addition and Tommy Lee Jones also stars in the Tommy Lee Jones role. Delivering what I can only describe as The Platonic Ideal of “Old Crusty Tommy Lee Jones” performances.

Joe Johnston builds a unique look for the film (real visual imagination being another rarity this summer). Unadorned period piece for most of the America set segments, a look of sinister retro evil for the more fantastic sequences. Also welcome is his sense of lucid action. It’s amazing how much better spectacle works when you can see it.

I don’t want to oversell things here. It’s not a perfect movie, somewhat over long, with a climax that comes about fifteen minutes too late, and features one battle aboard a sinister hovercraft too many. Though it says something that it may leave the viewer hungrier for some more period action than The Avenger’s movie it sets up. Still in a summer, neigh a movie year as dire as this one has been it is rewarding to see something that comes in and does its job with such straightforward determination. Like its hero Captain America is old fashioned, which is by no means a bad thing.

Jackass 3/2.5

2011-07-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

Jackass 3 reaches a kind of frenzied gloried. Though I enjoyed (I suppose that is the word) the other two Jackass films to one degree or another, they have now been made completely redundant. One cannot imagine where they can go from here. Or perhaps one simply does not want to. There’s something hypnotic about watching Jackass 3. It is like watching civilization end. Hunter Thompson once marveled that Circus Circus was what we would be doing every Saturday Night if the Nazi’s won the war. Jackass 3 is how we would spend our evenings if the bomb went off and nobody bothered to rebuild.

It’s hard to pinpoint just what makes the experience of watching the crew (including Chris Pontius the pride of my hometown) do horrifying things to one another so different this time out. I mean sure the depravity and brutality have been turned up a few notches, with even relatively innocent sketches like Knoxville trying to disprove Roger Miller’s Thesis about Roller Skating in a Buffalo herd drawing winces. But there’s something else going on here, When one of the film’s running gags is that the veteran camera man keeps throwing up, you know things have taken a turn.

Part of it is that they are no longer kids. It’s one thing to do this to yourself wired on testosterone and a headful of drugs, but as one reaches middle age and (supposed) sobriety the prospect must become less appealing. Before one particularly brutal stunt Steve-O moans “Why do I have to be Steve-O” with what sounds suspiciously like existential despair.

My thirst for things that make me despair for the future of the human race not yet slated I also watched Jackass 2.5. The .5 series is if anything worse than the main one. As it consists entirely of stunts that the crew believes that they did not pull off. The main difference is that while the stunts in the main film usually end with the ensemble chortling like a pack of hyenas over a kill the .5 series are more apt to end with them staring at the spectacle they just caused with horrible numb introspection. What could cause such horror and remorse in a group as hardened as the Jackass crew I shall leave to your imagination.

It’s hard to believe; even setting aside the death of cast member Ryan Dunn that there could be a follow up at this point. There’s nowhere else to go. Unless they’re willing to have Jackass 4 end with the cast participating in a literal reenactment of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. With the chorus of hooting and chattering as they use rocks to smash one of their fellow’s skull to bits. It is perhaps the logical endpoint of the series.

Still Alive

2011-07-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

So these guys over here are paying me to write about books. You guys should go check them out so they can keep doing that.

As a result it’s time for a little pow wow. Things That Don’t Suck is going to be changing a bit in the coming weeks. Not too much. But the fact is I’m now writing on a regular basis as freelance for two publications and am quite frankly looking for more. Between that, my two blogs, not to mention my own writing, somethings got to give, and unfortunately what’s going to give is Things That Don’t Suck.

Now don’t send the flowers yet. I’m not going anywhere. There’s a great community of readers here and over the years I think the site has developed a real voice, something I’m really proud of. I’m not going to abandon that. Nor is this going to be just some sad appendix that provides links to my free lance work (I hate it when that happens). Things That Don’t Suck will keep it’s own identity.

Honestly, I’m not sure what the new schedule for Things That Don’t Suck will be. It might be every other day, it might be bi-weekly, I don’t know we’ll see.

I started the daily posting schedule for two reasons. The first to teach myself discipline as a writer, has been achieved. The second, to compete in the brutal battle for traffic was rapidly beginning to not make blogging fun for me anymore. Basically what I’m planning to do is cut the filler posts. Write about what makes me passionate again, instead of trying to drag 500 words out of the corpse of Season Of The Witch. Like the man said “All Killer, No Filler.” It might be that this shift in priorities is the best thing to happen to Things That Don’t Suck.

I can promise you this though, as long as you’re interested in reading Things That Don’t Suck it’ll be here for you.

See you tomorrow.

Summer Of Samurai: Lone Wolf And Cub: Baby Cart In Peril

2011-07-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

Lone Wolf And Cub Baby Cart In Peril is the fourth installment in The Lone Wolf And Cub Series, which remains for my money the greatest of the samurai series.

Noted badass Ogami Itto continues his trek across Japan leaving a venerable trail of corpses in his wake. You would think that people would eventually learn that the lifespan for someone sent to kill Ogami Itto is usually roughly the same as “Henchman for the Joker.” But Motherfuckers keep making the same mistake and Itto keeps cleaning them up.

This was the first of the Baby Cart films not be directed by Kenji Musumi and it shows. Unlike the previous three entries which went for epic storytelling Baby Cart In Peril is lower key and more atmosphere heavy than other entries. Instead of a master plot it’s almost a series of vignettes. The action is also downscaled with the epic storytelling (until the last scene). But what the fight sequences lack in scale they make up for with innovation and superb choreography, and feature some of the best in the series, including a truly creepy fight sequence against some “living Buddha’s” that gets even the usually unflappable Ogami Itto a little freaked out.

The film follows Itto as he goes to kill a female assassin who is killing members of a samurai family in her own quest for revenge. The assassin has gruesome tattoos over her body and fights topless because hey this is exploitation cinema in the seventies that’s why. But the film isn’t as plot driven as the others, Itto doesn’t so much relentlessly track her as remember two thirds of the way through the film “Oh yeah I have that thing I gotta do.” In the meantime he kills some of the monumentally foolish people sent to assassinate him, gets briefly separated from his child Daigoro and gets a rather unnecessary retcon to his back story.

This retcon introduces Gunbei the only man to ever defeat Ogami Itto in a duel, and one of the douchiest characters I’ve ever seen in a samurai film. How Douche? Upon meeting Daigoro in a temple he realizes that the child is not afraid of swords. His natural response? To take the child and leave him in a burning field, and then murder a Buddhist Priest who tries to protect. Once again this is done with absolutely no motivation. He’s just kind of pissed that the child isn’t scared of him.

This entry does have a couple of issues; there are a few sequences that have an unnecessary and cumbersome narrator. The retcon also is a bit strange, reducing Itto’s quest for vengeance from a battle against a mad system to the machinations of a single family for the humiliation of a single fighter and to top it all off the series continues its tradition of having the most rape happy villains this side of Dr. Light.

But setting all that aside, The Baby Cart series remains one of the toughest, coolest, and yes best Samuari series ever made. And thanks to its brisk pace, atmospheric style, and hardcore action Baby Cart In Peril remains one of its best entries.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

2011-07-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

Transferring a beloved TV show to the big screen is a tricky business. Particularly when one is translating the actual show, as opposed to some vague reimaging that trades on name recognition. Transferring a show that had one of the most distinctive yet mercurial identities of any television show in ever made is significantly trickier. Transferring a show that had just ended in spectacular, not to mention rather definitive fashion, well that’s just plain asking for it.

Yet somehow Cowboy Bebop The Movie ends up being the rarity of rarities. A film that not only manages to keep the tone of the series undiluted, but delivers an experience that was on par with the best of the television episodes.

For those unfamiliar with the series Cowboy Bebop follows a group of bounty hunters vagabonding through the galaxy, not so much working together but with parallel contempt. The series was remarkable for its groundbreaking style, slick animation, nearly fetishtic level of affection for and understanding of genre filmmaking (all of them. The greatest part of the show was week in week out you had no idea if you were getting hong kong action, spaghetti western, blacksploitation, space opera, kung fu, or even out and out horror) and for the way it neatly eschewed all the usual beats of the team based storytelling. You really have to witness the form of dysfunctional functionality that the core team possessed. Against all odds they didn’t grow into a working family unit, but manifested any affection for one another as extreme passive aggression at best.

Cowboy Bebop The Movie ups the stakes, putting the fate of an entire planet at stake, but otherwise makes no concessions to the theoretically larger audience, both the crew and style against all odds remain resolutely themselves.

The film takes place in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. What first appears to be a biological attack is revealed to be something entirely more sinister. The crew pursues the person behind the attack, complications ensue. This might sound like a fairly standard action plot but the way its handled makes it superior.

Like many of its episodes Knocking On Heaven’s Door is about a buried secret of the old world (IE our world) coming to get revenge on the new. It’s a device that’s been done before, both with in the series and without. But rarely so well. Vincent is a hollow monster. Following the last impulse he has as his own.

It’s a textbook example of great Bebop plotting, done with just enough depth to give it real poignancy, and leaving enough questions unanswered to leave a real sense of mystery to the proceedings. Coupled with a great sense of atmosphere (the world of Bebop is a kind of multi cultural mélange, this time pulling on Moroccan architecture and culture) and some of the best choreographed fight scenes you’ll see in animation or Live Action, Cowboy Bebop The Movie lives up to the standard of quality set by the series.

Supernatural Season 1

2011-07-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

I rarely watch TV shows. It’s not a snobbery or a stuck up thing, it’s just that like everyone else I have limited time and as a TV show represents potentially hundreds of hours of investment I had better be damn sure I’m going to like it, before investing that sort of mental real estate. But I was somewhat curious about Supernatural, the long running horror/cute but non threatening lead delivery system, series system that has been running for the past several years.

Turns out it wasn’t bad. True the show rarely delivers any actual scares and at times seems far more concerned with showcasing the abs of its leads than any of the ghosts or demons they’re happening to fight. But it’s a light well made series, that manages to be a fair amount of fun. It’s like watching two not unlikable guys fight their way through a forty five minute Roger Corman film every week.

The show follows two monster killing brothers who are on the trail of their missing father (Badass in retrospect Jeffery Dean Morgan). Along the way they stop in various small towns across the US and battle a varied assortment of ghosts, demons, pagan gods and other supernatural beings and get in the occasional bits of surprisingly chaste romance (One of the interesting subtle ways in which the show is female centric is just how seldom these one episode romances get beyond a peck on the cheek. The days when Tom Selleck or James Garner could leave behind a trail of illegitimate children in their wake are long gone.) Though the show does spend an awful lot of time on a subplot involving the younger sibling’s resentment at being pulled back into the world of monster hunting after an extended hiatus, it’s just the kind of thing that is more noticeable with episodes watched back to back rather then spaced out over the course of a television season.

As said the show is usually too art directed to be scary. But it is at least creative. Switching between old standards (Indian Burial Ground) and original monsters. The effects themselves are pretty decent (We’ve come a long way since the days of Buffy’s first season) and manage a couple of creepy moments.

It doesn’t break any new ground in the genre. But it’s obviously made by people with a real affection for the horror genre, if not understanding of it. Really the show is for the most part content to just be a fun run through monster of the week. The perfect thing to watch over some Chinese left overs coming home beat from work.

Shame On A Blogger

2011-07-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the soft weekend. I've been trying to wrap my head around the prospect of an Evil Dead remake.

It hasn't gone well...

Also part of the blame has to go to this, which is just hypnotic. I mean pairing something incongruously cute with something incongruously crude is the oldest trick in the internet books. But the lip sync here is incredible. You haven't heard the Old Dirty Bastard's flow until you've seen it come out of the mouth of a pink pony.

NSFW

Riot On The Sunset Strip

2011-07-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

Riot On The Sunset Strip is a particularly baffling youthsploitation film from the good folks at AIP. The film features the great Aldo Ray, his salad days drawing to a rapid close, as the new Lieutenant of the Hollywood division. The Establishment types on the strip don’t take kindly to the hippies who have ensconced themselves on The Strip and turn to Ray in the hopes that he will beat the ever living tar out of some long hairs. But low and behold Ray is the reasonable type who seeks to understand the kids these days, causing no end of ill will between he and the rest of the establishment. In a parallel story the film also follows Ray’s wayward daughter as she hangs out with hippies, takes acid, gets raped and faces the assorted other things that happened to wayward daughters in 60’s cautionary tales (And really this has to be one of the greatest LSD freakout scenes of all time. I mean the dance she does it’s just… just…like wow man…)

The two story lines mesh into what can only be described as an extremely low rent precursor to Hardcore and things come to a head with the titular Riot On The Sunset Strip, though given that the title is in keeping with AIP’s hyperbolic marketing, perhaps A Mildly Rowdy Disturbance On The Sunset Strip would have been a more honest title.

The thing that keeps Riot On The Sunset Strip from being just the usual youthsploitation movie and launches it into the realm of the mystifying is the producer, writer and director responsible had all been making films since the 20’s, and their idea of Youth Culture was arrested sometime in nineteen thirty. It’s as if someone has vaguely described these “hippies” to them and didn’t do a very good job of it. As a result until the LSD rape the youth in Riot On The Sunset Strip have more in common with the opening scenes of Wild Boys Of The Road than say Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. They hop in jalopies, talk about chow, and despite dressing like rejects from Andy Warhol’s factory always seem on the verge of going to the sock hop. Watching one anachronistic group of idioms play ventriloquism with another anachronistic groups of idioms is strangely disconcerting. Like watching Mickey Rooney fire up a joint.

Youth run wild movies tend to blend together. Particularly those made in the sixties. But if you do have a hankering for a good old fashioned battle between the freaks and the squares you could do a lot worse than Riot On The Sunset Strip. It features Mick Jagger’s non union Mexican equivalent (fronting a band called Chocolate Watchband) a few truly great slices of kitsch (including the best/worst portrait of alcoholism I’ve ever seen) and at 86 minutes manages to leave before it outstays its welcome. Bad movies are a dime a dozen, but films so completely off as Riot On The Sunset Strip are rare. It’s like the time your father got drunk and decided that he didn’t need the damn directions to assemble your new bicycle.

Summer Of Samurai: Samuari Champloo

2011-07-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Two men kneel in a courtyard, hands bound, executioner raising an axe behind them. A laughing official in front of them asks if they want this last chance to beg for mercy. One of the men makes it to his feet and tells him to go to hell in spectacular fashion. The official snarls the ax comes down…

…

A laborer kneels in the road, begging an official not to take him off of a job, or his family will starve. The official sneers down at him and motions for a bribe. The humbled man moves forward digs into his pocket and pulls out the few coins he has. The Official takes them and scornfully throws them into the dust, humiliating the man and ordering him beaten. Just as his guards crowd around a stranger steps from the crowd, stands before the helpless laborer and draws his sword.

…

A Waitress serves a gang of rowdy men in the inn where she works. The men are rich and drunk, and as they get drunker they get rowdier and wilder, threatening the patrons and the staff. A vagrant slips in and offers to kill the men for the price of a meal. The waitress blows him off only to slip and spill hot tea all over the ringleader. The men grab her and the ringleader raises his sword and prepares to take her hand for the offensive, in a last moment of desperation she cries out “One hundred dumplings.” The vagrant smiles, unsheathes his sword, and the blood begins to fly.

You may wonder why I’m going to such care to describe a few seemingly random scenes. Are they the climaxes of three separate samurai films? Maybe the big set pieces in one. Or given that it’s a TV perhaps they’re just the ending of three particularly good episodes.

My friends all three scenes I’ve just described take place in the first five minutes of the first episode of Samurai Champloo; a show which feels more like the freebasing of a dozen Samurai films at once than the watching of one.

The show is directed by Shinchiro Watanabe, most famous for being the mastermind between the seminal anime series Cowboy Bebop. This show shares that one’s fluid animation, innovative action and dysfunctional secret filled cast, but does suffer from comparison to Cowboy Bebop, mostly because just about everything does. I mean you can’t make a superlative show that takes the best of thirty years of genre filmmaking, blends it with style that was truly next level yet boostered by retro iconicism that simultaneously defines the medium while transcending it, every time you make a series. You just plain have to hit a solid base hit every once in awhile.

If you can keep its over achieving elder sibling out of your mind while watching it, Samurai Champloo can be a lot of fun. As established it’s crammed full of samurai goodness without being exhausting, it’s stylish without merely devolving into exercise, and it’s action packed without being dramatically weak. It’s undoubtedly pastiche but it’s damn good pastiche. And if it’s not quite as soulful, exciting or special as its predecessor? Well see the above paragraph.

* This show features a character named Manzo The Saw. Hopefully I don't need to tell you why that is completely fucking awesome.

Things From Other Places

2011-07-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

So against all better judgement I got together with my buddies from the On The Stick empire for another round of the Action Cast. Where we talk about various terrible licensed video games from old blockbusters, and also muse about the various topics such as just what is the matter with Pierce Bronsan James Bond, Lego Al Leong films and poor John Woo in America. You can check out the dulcet tones of my voice and witness my science here.

In other news Son Of Danse Macabre has a new entry, concluding my massive HP Lovecraft essay. So get called by Cthulhu and check it out here.

Summer Of Samurai: 13 Assassins

2011-07-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

(Welcome to the inaugural entry in Summer Of Samurai. AKA the best idea that I seem bound and determined to mishandle. In its first year I tried to devote the month of August to Samurai, which was a very bad idea. This year determined to spread it out over the summer I announced the revival of the series at the beginning of June and now present the first entry midway through July… Well better late then never, and I can’t think of a better film to start out on.)

Takashi Miike is a hero to most/ But he never meant shit to me. If there’s one cult filmmaker whose bandwagon I’ve never been on its Miike. Maybe its because I’ve always liked Japanese Cinema enough that Miike simply wasn’t the only game in town when it came to extreme Asian cinema. Maybe its because you can only see so many people boiled alive in feces before the bloom comes off that particular rose. But mostly it’s because that Miike’s films just feel sort of empty, take away the transgression and there’s nothing there. Even the films that succeed purely by pounding one into submission, like his gleefully grotesque musical Happiness Of The Katakuri’s, do so by bludgeoning you with novelty.

This is all to establish that I am just as surprised as you are when I say that 13 Assassins is one of the finest examples of its genre that I know of. And could very well be one of the greatest action films I’ve ever seen.

Ironically the first thing that lets us know that it is a different Takashi Miike that we’re dealing with is Hari-Kari. In the opening shots of the film a Samurai lord commits seppuku, as a protest against the Shogun’s evil half brother. It’s easy enough to imagine how Miike would usually film that scene, with gore and gristle splattering all over the staid period settings. Instead Miike keeps the shot on the lord’s face throughout the action, emphasizing the time it takes, the emotions and pain that play out on his face. The amount of will it takes to do as he does. There’s more depth in that shot then there is in the rest of Miike’s films put together (It’s worth noting that when the one moment of traditional Miike transgressive perversity does come into play its meant to evoke sorrow, an emotion heretofore foreign to Miike's Oeuvre).

Spurred on by the act of the lord the high justice of the land commissions a faithful Samurai to assassinate The Shogun’s brother and his private army. The Samurai gathers together twelve other men for the task. It’s thirteen men against seventy, but then… Well that would be telling.

What follows is the kind of film that makes you a genre fan for life, and keeps you one when the love begins to wane. It’s classic man on a mission filmmaking, a slow burn that takes careful time with its characters, atmosphere and story that builds to an apocalyptic ending that just keeps going and going. It’s genuinely epic filmmaking and I feel sorry for the action fans who are getting suckered on Bay-splosions who for five dollars more could own this masterpiece. It’s one of the best of it’s kind and I know I’m sounding like a broken record here but I cannot freaking believe that Takashi Miike made this thing.

I envy the kids who get this as their gateway film.

Cars 2

2011-07-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

Whelp as you all know the Pixar streak, one of the finest unbroken stretches of quality in American film history, just got broken. But I come here not bury Pixar (as if) but to praise it. I’m fully confident that Pixar will make great films again (if only because holy shit did you see the trailer for The Brave) and thus it’s worthwhile to take a look at just why and where Cars 2 goes off the rails.

Here’s the thing Cars 2 does look for all the world like a Pierce Bronsan era James Bond movie, enacted totally by anthropomorphic Cars. Though the question of why anyone would want to see that is still assumedly locked somewhere in the depths of John Lassetter’s psyche. After the low key original, this has got to be one of the strangest changes in direction that a sequel has ever taken. It’s as if they made a sequel to Beethtoven and called it Cujo.

The frustrating thing about Cars 2 is the fact that its easy to see the entertaining, if undoutbably strange, film that it easily could have been. No film featuring Michael Caine at his most effortlessly charming, Bruce Campbell, Eddie Izzard, and John Turturro basically giving his G-rated take on The Jesus, is going to be wholly without entertainment value. Cars has some fantastic moments. Take the Japanese montage set to a song choice as obvious as it is perfect, which manages to craft in more ideas, more images, more wit, and more breathtaking design then most animated features cram into their entire runtime.

Yet there is the inescapable fact that when you are watching Cars 2 you are watching a Larry The Cable Guy vehicle. Let me repeat when you are watching Cars 2 you are watching a movie that has been lovingly crafted to give as much exposure to Larry The Cable Guy as humanly possible. Every minute of it precisely calibrated to give you as much Larry The Cable Guy as you could handle. Any time your mind lulls you into believing otherwise and you begin to enjoy the other elements of the film, the bright, lively animation the game supporting cast, the film comes in and reminds you that this the cable guy’s show and recenters everything around him, so he better scream catchphrases at the captive audience. The horrifying fact of Cars 2 is though you could shelve it next to your Pixar films, you could also put it next to your copies of Delta Farce and Witless Protection and you wouldn’t be wrong (also if you somehow owned both Delta Farce and Witless Protection may God have mercy on your soul).

Fair or not this is simply a film you have to look at differently for Pixar having produced it. In another family animated film an annoying side character voiced by an annoying celebrity, being put through the paces of a borderline nonsensical plot could be taken as a given, and allow the audience to focus on the other elements of the film. But this is a Pixar film. By definition they are supposed to be better than that. There is no way around the fact that Cars 2 is a sub-par film.

The Ward

2011-07-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got to do something that I have never done in all of my years as a filmgoer. I got to buy a ticket to a new John Carpenter film. I was too young when Vampires came out and Ghosts On Mars was gone from theaters before I could get a chance. Given the manhandled release that The Ward is getting it was one I wasn’t sure I would get to have this time around either. I felt positively giddy doing it. I’ve loved Carpenter for as long as I’ve loved movies and getting to sit in a seat watch the lights go down and not know what was coming next was a thrill I doubt will be equaled this movie going year.

As for the film itself, for all of its flaws, Carpenter’s last film is no longer Ghosts On Mars. And that in and of itself is worth the price of admission. Like I said, The Ward is a flawed film and unfortunately the nature of its flaws are pretty tough to get over. But it’s also, for the majority of its runtime a great little programmer. With its ineffective moments balanced by some awfully effective ones. Easily his best film since They Live, which true might be damning it with faint praise, but still has to count for something. If we take his two Master’s Of Horror episodes to represent the parameters of what to expect from this new phase of Carpenter’s career, with Cigarette Burns as the high point and Pro Life as the tone deaf low, The Ward falls almost exactly in the middle. What can be said of The Ward except that it works until it doesn’t. Hamstrung by an ending that can only be described as “unfortunate” and “Shyamalanesque.”

The Ward follows Amber Heard once again proving herself an effective lead in a film that few will see. She arrives at the sinister mental institution, under the command of Jared Harris who keeps us guessing whether or not we can trust his all too reasonable Doctor for much longer then seems logically possible. There she finds that the girls on The Ward tend to disappear, with everyone seemingly afraid to talk about them after they go. Is it a sinister conspiracy? Or something else? This of course brings to mind Sucker Punch and Shutter Island, and surprisingly there are elements of both in The Ward. Though not in the way one might expect.

The Ward is decidedly low key for the most part, subsisting on an understated hum of paranoia and tension, though there are a few moments where Carpenter cuts loose and shows that he still has some wild images and great set pieces in him.

There are a few other problems the sadly anonymous score (strange that it couldn’t get the full Carpenter treatment given how influential Carpenter’s work has been in the last couple of years). But towering over them all is that ending. In all fairness it is decidedly not tacked on, pay careful attention to Jared Harris’s dialogue. And when one thinks about it, SPOILERS, it plays as a clever twist on Carpenter’s classic “siege” story, telling the story of a personality under siege instead of a community.

But the fact remains that it just doesn’t work on a gut level, no matter how much you rationalize it. Still, all in all The Ward is a fun film and a worthy effort.

Now how about another Carpenter?

Hobo With A Shotgun

2011-07-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while something lives up to the hype. It’s easy to get jaded as a movie fan. After all we see so many good concepts come down the pike that we know, just know can’t live up to the potential of their trailers, posters, and concepts. Then every once in a while something does. Filthier than Machete, bloodier than your average Rob Zombie film, and more fucked up than the collected works of Frank Henenlotter Hobo With A Shotgun is the real deal.

It’s as if every disreputable low rent eighties action movie went to an orgy hosted by Frank Miller and Hobo With A Shotgun is the product of their hate fucking. John Carpenter took the child home to raise it. And the little bastard child grew up mean.

Hobo With A Shotgun follows the titular Hobo played by Rutger Hauer. He comes to Scum Town, a pre apocalyptic (Think Mad Max not The Road Warrior) Canadian city run by Drake a powerful crime lord/sociopath and his sons who offer not one but two devastatingly ruthless Tom Cruise impersonations.. (One of the most unexpectedly upsetting elements of the film is its Canadianess. I mean it’s a foregone conclusion that America will one day slide into a apocalyptic hell on Earth. But we kind of figured that you guys had it together.) After spending a few days in Drake’s hell hole of a city and befriending a teenage prostitute The Hobo decides he has had enough. He gets himself a shotgun and starts blowing holes in the city’s lowlifes, of which there are plenty to choose from.

Rutger Hauer stars as the Hobo. Hauer even after his brief revival via Sin City and Batman Begins remains a sadly underutilized actor. He gets to show his skills here, playing the role in a way that gives it a surprising amount of depth. Though the Hobo is the hero there’s no getting around the fact that he’s genuinely unhinged. There’s a moment where the Hobo’s teenage protégé allows him to sleep in her bed, and as he nods off he starts on this long rambling monologue about bears and how they can tear off peoples faces. Even though we know The Hobo is a good guy that’s still a half crazed homeless person lying in your bed talking about ripping off people’s faces. That’s going to be an uncomfortable moment no matter how you try and shake it. The fact that the movie doesn’t shy away from that, and the fact that Hauer is able to add such a great deal of sadness to what is essentially a gore cartoon, is what keeps the movie from being a one trick pony.

Not that that one trick is any small thing. Director Jason Eisener orchestrates non stop mayhem from the open frame to the closing one. The film is obviously one of limited means, but there’s a genuine demented creativity here that makes up for the lack of budget. Watch The Plague rampage and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s a tough time for independent filmmakers right now. Even if you do somehow will your film into existence that’s no guarantee you’ll get a second one off the ground. Just ask the guys who made Behind The Mask, or The Signal. I hope Eisener bucks that trend. His is a vision too demented to lose.

The film does have a few flaws. Some of the digital cinematography is sub par, with blown out backgrounds and over lit exteriors. Here’s hoping that next time out Eisener can afford a cinematographer with decent command of the F-Stop. The structure of the script is also set up so that The Hobo spends a bit too much of the end of the film sidelined. It’s cool in a sort of V For Vendetta way, but still you can’t help but wish that Hauer got to participate in a bit more of the anarchy that he unleashed.

Still these are really minor problems when compared to the whole. Hobo With A Shotgun exists and the world of exploitation cinema is all the better for it

Avenging Disco Godfather

2011-07-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

There are movies that have to be seen to be believed. Then there is Avenging Disco Godfather, which requires further independent varification. It could be that I sat down and watched this movie last night. It could also be that I just hallucinated the whole thing on a cloud of PCP smoke. Or as Rudy Ray Moore would have it, “P…C…P AKA ANGel Dust AKA Wack!”

Avenging Disco Godfather stars Rudy Ray Moore, the greatest enunciator who ever lived and the master of alliteration. If you don’t know who Rudy Ray Moore is well then you really should be making better use of your time. Avenging Disco Godfather comes late in The Rudy Ray Moore cycle, when the technical aspects of his filmmaking verged ever closer to competence, and the plotlines of his films verged closer and closer to out and out surrealism (This climaxed in Petey Wheatstraw The Devil’s Son In Law which plays like a ghetto Luis Bunuel film).

After his nephew (not God son…) a promising young basketball player falls victim to the dread P…C…P… (Call the AMB-YOO-LANCE, and tell them what he has HAY-AD!)

Rudy Ray Moore swears to "to personally come down on the suckers that's producing this shit!" and we all know that Rudy Ray Moore isn’t one for idle threats. He goes out on the streets and attacks the wack, with his own brand of Rudy Ray Moore Fu which can charitably be described as “slow” and “uncoordinated” and substantially less lethal then a group of eight year olds in a YMCA white belt class. Some how he manages to use said Moore-Fu to cut a wide swatch through the cities assorted drug dealers, pimps and fodder. Including one gentlemen who I must conclude is the worst hit man of all time. He dresses as a cowboy, uses an antiquated six shooter, and in one particularly logic defying moment (not that there’s not a lot of logic defying moments to choose from in any given Rudy Ray Moore film) puts down his gun when he has the drop on Moore so he can attempt to kill him with the much less efficient bull whip. I’ve seen hitmen who are bad at their jobs before, but never with this same kind of gleeful determination.

In between his time attacking the wack, Moore runs his Disco where he repeatedly gives his patrons the baffling command “Keep your weight on it!!!”

It’s difficult to describe a Rudy Ray Moore film if you haven’t seen one, as they’re less like traditional movies (even traditional movies in a genre with the lax narrative standards of Blaxploitation) and more like deranged carnival rides, in which sex, violence, stand up, kung fu and anything else that’s cheap to film is put in front of the cameras with little to no provocation. It might not make a great deal of sense but it does make for a great time.

It goes without saying that Avenging Disco Godfather is a pretty awesome movie, and I love it regardless of whether or not it actually exists.

Sucker Punch Directors Cut

2011-07-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

(Courtesy Kate Beaton)

Now I like Zack Snyder just as much as the next guy… Actually given all available evidence I like Zack Snyder a great deal more then the next guy.

But I was still somewhat nervous about The Sucker Punch Directors Cut. See Zack Snyder has this thing about directors cuts where he’s not very good at them. The Dawn Of The Dead one was pretty inoffensive, but the Watchmen Directors Cut is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s baffling, aside from the addition of the Hollis Mason death scene (which given the character’s scaled back presence in the film is no longer such a big deal) all of the additional material dilutes the movie. It’s all filler, awkwardly added in action sequences, and additions that in a few cases actually botch perfectly translated moments. It's such a strange cut that it almost feels like the directors cut was the studio cut and vica versa.

So despite the fact that I was one of the film’s few apologists I couldn’t help but wonder if going back to the cut was against Snyder’s better instincts. Sure enough The Sucker Punch Directors Cut takes a problematic film and makes it more problematic. It’s not as bad as the Watchmen cut, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it botched. But it's uncanny the way this cut of the film manages to take what annoyed people about the theatrical cut of the film and amplify it. Thought that Snyder’s sexual objectification bordered on serial killer level deranged? Well wait until you his “Love Is A Drug” sequence which plays like the ultimate nineties Madonna Video, conceived of and shot while on PCP. Thought that the film’s message and sexual politics were naive at best, incomprehensible at worst? Well then wait until you see Jon Hamm’s big scene which turns the heroine’s final actions from “Heroic Sacrifice made on her own terms.” To "Talked into it by a fine pair of bedroom eyes."

Still the lunatic vision of Snyder’s dare of a film still manages to shine through. Despite all these new flaws, which have been added to a film that was admittedly already flawed just plenty the stubborn fact is that I still like Sucker Punch a whole lot. I like the total commitment that Snyder has to his go for baroque vision. I like the fact that the question “Will people want to see this?” Never once seemed to enter his head. I like the look of the film, and I like the feel of it. I like its strange assaultive imagery and most of all I like the fact that Snyder took the darkest film a mainstream studio has had to offer in sometime and wrapped it away in this candy colored shell, with all the warning of a razor blade tucked in a Snickers bar. What can I say, I love filmmaking that is genuinely off the rez.

"Well, there's something you don't see everyday, Chauncey." "What's that, Edgar?" "An art deco bullet train traveling towards the rings of Saturn populated by faceless robots." "Oh, I don't know, Edgar; mass transit has taken some amazing strides."

(Courtesy of The Projector Has Been Drinking)

Which is a place that Snyder may never go again. He must be thanking his lucky stars that he had Superman lined up before this, or else it could have been a potential career ender. The Snyder we will see post Superman will most likely be a more cautious filmmaker, which will frankly probably result in some much better films. Still I can’t help but find it endearing that he had it in him to go by this crazy.

Like Southland Tales a similar case of auteurist mania, Sucker Punch may not qualify as a good film but it is a mesmerizing one. Sucker Punch may not be a good movie by any conventional objective standard but I maintain that it is sort of a magnificent one.

Celebrate The 4th Of July With Brad Neely

2011-07-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

The way our Founders intended.