The Unseen #24: Rock N' Rule

Why’d I Buy It?: I haven’t written about it before on this site, but one of my favorite movies is Walter Hill’s Streets Of Fire (Not joking). It’s a movie I love dearly because its so batshit crazy that I have to constantly remind myself that its something that actually exists, rather then something my subconscience dreamed up while having a fever dream under the influence of Cough Syrup. “Oh Streets Of Fire, isn’t that that one movie where Willem Dafoe, dressed in rubber overalls, kidnaps Diane Lane and has to fight Michael Pere, Ed Harris’s wife and Rick Moranis as a tough guy? And the whole movie takes place in this weird retro future Studebaker based fifties dreamland that looks like what Meat Loaf sees when he sniffs airplane glue while reading SE Hinton and then drives around Cleveland for an hour and a half? Isn’t it a rock opera? And hasn’t the ultimate form of music been discovered to be a blend of Motown Doo Wop, 50’s rockabilly and 80’s synths. And isn't a lot of the movie, including the incredibly overblown concert scenes, shot in ways that are unironically innovative and genuinely stylistically exciting, thus elevating the movie above simple kitsch and thus confusing your poor brain? And isn’t there a scene where Willem Dafoe walks out of a burning building, then turns around and walks back in? Holy fuck this thing actually exists?”



I feel that its important at this time to point out at this point that the film's title is not a metaphor. Yes. There are literally Streets Of Fire in Streets Of Fire.

Oh wait... I'm not actually writing an article on Streets Of Fire.

I’d only heard one movie with a premise as remotely insane as Streets. Rumors of an animated Rock Opera that made Heavy Metal look like a Merchant Ivory production. The plot goes a little something like this. “So it’s hundreds of years in the future and mankind’s dead. But Dog’s Cats and Mice have evolved to replace them, and they’ve become supertechnologically advanced. Everyone walks around like nightmares from a furry's tortured sub conscience. So there’s this struggling bar band of rock n’ roll playing dogs, and their lead singer is picked to summon a demon, by Lou Reed whose basically playing Swan in Phantom Of The Paradise except now he's a rock and roll space wizard and he wants to end the world, which he will do by summoning a Lovecraftian Space Demon played by Iggy Pop to destroy the entirety of existence with the power of Rock. It’s a cartoon. Its Canadian. Earth Wind And Fire contributes some songs. Oh and the singer whose going to do all? Debbie fucking Harry.” No I did not just make this shit up.

Fuck. Yeah.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: I had a bitch of a time finding this movie, I luckily came across it in the great Hollywood Video Closing that just happened recently (expect to see that sentence pop up a bunch of times in the next dozen or so columns I picked up some kick ass stuff) Basically I put it on as soon as I could.

How Was It?: In away films like Rock N’ Rule are tough to review, because no matter what problems you may have with it they’re inconsequential to the fact that it features Lou Reed as an evil Space Rock Star who summons a demon played by Iggy Pop to destroy the world with the power of his rocking.

Main character an underwritten douche? Space Demon.


Way too much time spent on sub Borscht Belt gags? Canadian Mutated Dogs traveling to a place called “Nuke York” featuring half the cast of SCTV. Nothing in this movie makes a lick of sense? Earth Wind and Mutherfucking Fire.

The film’s animation is impressive in a pre computer animated, Don Bluthy sort of way (that’s good eighties Secrets Of Nimh, Land Before Time, American Tail Don Bluth not Pebble And The Pengu- OHJESUSCHRISTMYEYESHAVEBEGUNTOBLEED Don Bluth).

But overall it must be admitted that the movie never rises above kitsch. True rising above Camp is a lot to ask for a Canadian cartoon about Rock N’ Roll Mutant Dogs, but there it is. I always hate it when critics say “You already know whether or not this movie is for you.” But in this case its true, your either excited out of your mind for this oddball mutant bastard of a movie, or you couldn’t give less of a fuck.

It’s less a movie then an artifact. A gloriously tacky artifact. Where synthpop both destroys and saves the world.

Wallace Beery. Wrestling Pictures.

Top Ten Films Of The Decade: Number 9: Ratatouille

If someone where ever God Forbid to make a Bergman style movie about me, involving the fractured pieces of my personality turned into living embodiments, it might look a whole hell of a lot like Ratatouille.

Trust me I know that’s a pretty ridiculous statement, but work with me for a minute here. I also know that this is a pretty personal reason for naming a film one of the best movies of the decade. But as time goes on I find I have less and less use for objective film criticism, and if ever there was a stage for the personal it’s the blog. And that’s the thing about Ratatouille I take it so ridiculously personal.

But lets take a moment and look at the larger picture Pixar is as far as I’m concerned the only true constant working in film today, and Brad Bird’s their best filmmaker. Sure Stanton’s the poet, and Doctor is the storyteller, Lassester is the craftsman that makes it all work, but Bird? Prickly, self certain, fearlessly auteuristic Bird? He’s the total package, if there was any fairness in the world of American Animation (Hint there’s not) Bird would have already helmed a Miyaziki level of films by now. His is one of the most fully formed voices in American cinema period. Even when he’s making something from the shambles of someone else’s product, he cannot help but make something that is glorioulsly himself. It’s a voice that bugs a lot of people. Fucking Good. Objectivism is about as far as you can get from my own personal philosophy without actually being Scientology. But having a personality, one strong enough to annoy people in a medium that’s as purposefully antiseptic as American Animation is a feat.

But Bird isn’t some mere demagogue he’s also a true artist with a poet’s eye. There where sequence’s in The Incredibles particularly near the beginning that where worthy of Tati. Iron Giant’s lovingly 2D animation was a complete labor of love. But Ratatouille out does both of them, with its warm tones and free camera scurrying through the streets of a romantic’s dream of Paris, making food made entirely out of ones and zeroes look mouthwatering.

It’s a film of comic wit, witness Ego’s exquisitely designed study, and the way after checking the vintage he declines the spit take, or the perfect timing on the near domestic murder that Remy witnesses on his trek across Paris, or the simple comic perfection of a raised thumb. Like Day For Night, my other favorite valentine to France and Art, it delivers its message not in ennui filled monologues about the struggles of creation, but with a simple comic grace.

But really it’s the… well heart sounds too cheesy, but emotion of Bird’s piece that makes it fly. Anchored by Patton Oswalt’s lovely bristly performance, perfectly matched by O’Toole’s droll dogmatist (The film on the whole has one of Pixar’s great supporting casts, the names aren’t really big, but Brad Garrett, Brian Dennehy, Jeneane Garofolo, Will Arnett, and Ian Holm all do note perfect unshowy work) , Ratatouille is my favorite movie about art, about that simple wonderful act of creation that I’ve ever seen.

Like I said, as crazy and borderline soliphistic as it sound I see pieces of myself in all the central Ratatouille characters, The finicky difficult creator, the unsure and uneasy kid, and the demanding exacting connoisseur. All so disparate but all united by the common theme that what they do, despite all evidence to the contrary somehow matters.

Why write an indepth essay for a blog, which I’m happy neigh estactic for when it gets forty hits a day. Why write weekly for a column that I’m halfway sure that literally no one reads. Why toil away on screenplays and manuscripts and film that will probably never come to fruition even if I am able to drag them kicking and screaming into “Complete” (Whatever that means) status. Why can’t I learn from Sissyphus and when the boulder rolls over me for the forty thousandth time just go “Fuck this.” Or on the other end of the brow spectrum get it through my head that The Acme Catalogue is never going to be all its cracked out to be. Why the utter masochism of hard work for little recognition or satisfaction?

Because I can’t even begin to imagine doing anything else.

As Ego says in his noble final speech the new does indeed need friends. Whether its my destiny to actually ever create something new, or just spend my life as an ardent appreciator of it (and its friend the old, often equally endangered by the ever present foe the banal) I do not know. But I accept either.

And that’s what Ratatouille captures, that bit of benevolent mania that is at the core of anyone narcissistic enough to consider themselves creators. Success or fail “It is wonderful to create.” As Akira Kurosawa put it. It might be nigh impossible to please people, and even harder to please yourself, but those moments when it does come together, and that plate of Ratatouille takes someone back to the base component of what they love, or leaves them stumbling out into the Jacaranda haze after the main credits roll, it’s a special kind of bliss. Just like this movie.

The Messiah Of Evil: Holy Shit!

Sometimes you get lucky and a movie completely blindsides you. Sends you sprawling ass over teakettle wondering “What the fuck was that?” This happens less and less often every day, as the studio hype machines seem determined you know every detail of a film before you see it, and our own beloved blogosphere has more or less guaranteed that every film has been extensively catalogued and categorized. The chances these days of walking into a movie knowing something about it are virtually non existent. But that rare treat is just what I got. I saw The Messiah Of Evil as a tag along to a presentation of a new print of Day Of The Triffads at an academy screening that I somehow got invited to (On a sidenote should you ever get a chance to see the Mary Pickford Theater do so. The posters in the lobby are worth more then my car, probably my house as well).

To say my expectations were low would be an understatement. “A horror movie directed by the team responsible for Howard The Duck…? Well it’d be rude of me to leave early.”

Stephen King compared the horror fan who ventures outside the safe waters of canon to a gold miner. Most of the time you get nothing. Sometimes you find Gold Dust, nothing to write home about but enough to keep you going, keep you hopeful. But Every once in awhile, with no warning, you pull a fucking nugget out of the river. Well fellas I found a nugget and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

Messiah Of Evil is like no other horror film I’ve ever seen. It’s got plenty of grindhouse trappings, right down to the oxidized print, libertine characters and later day appearance by Elisha Cooke Jr. And as it the film started, with it’s grisly opening and somewhat over wrought voice over I leaned back and expected a kitschy good time. Then an odd thing happened and the movie started to scare the shit out of me. Make no mistake this isn’t a film to be laughed at. The only thing I’ve ever seen remotely like it is Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, with it’s seventies trappings, whiffs of mental illness, and mysterious zombie like townsfolk. However, unlike that film whose working title I still half expect was, “Let’s bore Bryce To Death.” Messiah Of Evil is kind of amazing.

After a grizzly prologue that I will not spoil The film starts with a young woman, Arletty, driving to a small California Beach town, attempting to find her missing father. Things get off to a suitably freaky start when she stops at a gas station, finds the attendant randomly shooting into the woods. It’s a great opening playing with your expectations, years of Texas Chainsaw rip offs have trained you to know that Gas Station Attendants are bad news and this guy seems to fit the bill.

Then suddenly a Seven foot tall black albino (I'm sure there's a more PC term then that but nothing springs to mind), pulls into the station and demands two dollars worth of gas. The Attendant sneaks a look into the bed of his truck and sees A few dead bodies and does his best to ignore it. It's a great "Wait what the fuck is going on?" moment a bizarre disconcerting opening and it just gets stranger from there.



Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent so much of my time in little dusty stucco beach towns like one portrayed here. But Messiah Of Evil immediately made me nervous. It’s easy to make the wide open plains of Texas, or the deep south, or some chilly Lovecraftian town creepy. But to do it to sunny, sane old Southern California? That takes some doing. Here is a movie that understands the stark existential terror of an open 24 hours Ralphs.

Arletty arrives in the town, and after some Twin Peaks like touches, particularly an encounter with a blind art gallery attendant, she makes it to her Father’s house. And that’s when the movie really tips it’s hand to being great. The walls of the House are covered with floor to ceiling paints. Filling the frame with orphan vanishing points and shadowy figures which you can never quite be sure are two dimensional. It’s a great trick as disconcerting as anything in a prime piece of Italian Horror.

After awhile she decerns that the citizens of the small beach town are, to borrow a phrase from Stacie Ponder, “Cuckoo Nutsos”. She stumbles across the only people who aren’t crazy and finds them to be merely deeply unpleasant. A millionaire American born Portuguese count (No really) who travels from town to town doing his best impersonation of Christopher Walken as “The Continental” and his two groupies.

The improtu group quickly falls apart, and the town takes advantage of this by taking them down one by one in some ridiculously dread inducing scenes. This movie is simply put really fucking scary, and I’m not someone who really gets scared at horror movies despite my affection for them. There’s one scene at a movie theater that I won’t spoil (though given the films rarity I’ve provided the clip down below), except to say that it literally had me squirming in my seat, and I can only hope that Brian DePalma saw it and turned blue with rage at the fact that he didn’t come up with it first.
Here it is.




The film does lose a bit of it’s magic in the closing ten minutes, where it for some unfathomable reason decides to explain what’s going on (This is one place where the much maligned Let’s Scare Jessica is actually superior). The long winded explanation threatens to rob the movie of it’s eerie power. And a very cheap shot of someone stumbling out of the sea nearly succeeds. Proving that old adage about leaving stuff up to the imagination is occasionally right.

Still despite the bungled ending, The Messiah Of Evil has quickly become one of my personal favorite Horror movies of all time. It’s a truly haunting movie.

THE RETURN OF 31 DAYS OF HORROR: #12 Friday The 13th Part 3

Ah Friday The 13th Part 3, my second favorite of the series. While it’s not quite pure blast of liquidy slasher goodness that is Friday The 13th Part 2. It’s an easy going, fun, slasher flick which goes slips on as easily as a comfy pair of slippers, bolstered by it’s 3-D effects (best watched in 2D, for maximum awesome), great cast of stock characters, awesome gore effects, some truly effective scare scenes and it’s ungodly great theme song.



God I love that thing.

The film opens, after a reusing the climax of Part 2, with Jason polishing off a white trash couple, Shrewish Mc Harpy and her mate Drunken The Doormat. It might be the first time that a Jason slashing could be qualified as a mercy killing. This couple is so horrifying that they seem to have emerged living and breathing from Patton Oswalts Stella Dorra Breakfast treats routine.



We’re introduced to the newest bunch of fodder to join the Crystal Lake Club. The characters show the biggest drop of quality for the series. While the previous movies showcased charismatic and likable, if none too deep, characters, the writing and acting has gotten a lot lazier. The characters are generic even for a Slasher movie, there’s The Horny Ones, A Couple Of Dirty Hippies, The Nerd, The Final Girl, and The Final Girl’s soon to be dead boyfriend. Oh and there’s some bikers, got to give them that, you don’t see those in every horror movie. Truth to tell the series never really recovered. Oh sure they brought out some weirdos for The Final Chapter, but from here on out, it’s all about the kills. Who survives is completely arbitrary. There’s nothing really special about the Final Girl, aside from an unnecessarily convoluted background. She survives by default. And as the ending suggests she’s gone crazy, Its tough to be surprised. She’s got nothing on Amy Steel.

They’re headed up by the infamous Shelly. The cackling annoying bridge troll who accidentally made Jason one of the most iconic boogeymen in cinema history. Shelly is of course, is one of the most annoying characters ever to appear in a horror movie. He’s neck in neck with even the dreaded Franklin. Though he does come down ultimately on the side of merely annoying rather then actively repulsive. So Franklin wins in the end. FRANKLIN ALWAYS WINS!

RESPECT

Anyway Shelly’s the one who ends up giving Jason the hockey mask, which coincides with him not being remotely scary anymore. So we’ve got that to hold against him to. Thanks a lot Franklin. Not only are you a painful to watch asshole who gives horror fans a bad name, but you ruined a great horror icon. I wish something bad would happen to you.



Ah there we go.

Anyway our merry crew make their way to a cabin on Crystal Lake, where they have a nice weekend, forge unbreakable bonds, and all learn a little something about themselves. Naw I’m just fucking with you, they end up getting butchered like swine. LIKE SWINE I TELL YOU!!! Ignoring a hobo wielding a severed eyeball (Not a typo) they go to the cabin, where drugs, alchol, sex, and murder are all done with abandon.

I feel like I’m coming down to hard on this movie, which I really do have a great deal of affection for. Like Part 2, it’s just such a pure slasher experience you can’t help but have fun. The atmosphere at the cabin is suitably eerie, and Director Miner was a cut above most of the other helmers, and manages to pull off some decent scare sequences, beyond the usual jump scares. Even the double fake out that ends the film is suitably creepy.

In a lot of ways I feel like this is the last great Friday The 13th. I know The Final Chapter is a fan favorite but it’s never done that much for me beyond Savini’s effects and Glover’s dance. The rest of the series is just to gimmicky for my tastes. I’ll have a good time while watching them (per my “Greater Friday The 13th Theorem elaborated on in my Nu Friday The 13th review) but I’ll often hate myself in the morning. Part 3 was the last to claim that special fear that comes from being in the woods and not being sure you’re alone.