Top Ten Books Of 2010

It won't take more then a cursory glance at this list to convince the reader it's not meant to be anything kind of definitive. I've not even bothered to separate the fiction and non. All this is, is a list of the best reads I had from contemporary books in 2010. And I'll stand by each and everyone as a great read for just about anyone. Pop one of these in your bag while your traveling this holiday and I assure you the trip will seem a lot quicker.

Grand Jury Prize: Generation Why? By Zadie Smith: Not technically a book but the best thing I read this year was Zadie Smith's dissection of Facebook. If you spend time online (And guess what you're here. You do.) You owe it to yourself to read this.

Worst: Imperial Bedrooms: It’s tough to know which is sadder. Brett Easton Ellis trying and failing to regain his King Of Shock status. Or him running full bore from the artistic strides of Lunar Park. Either way the resulting book is worth no ones time, failing to rise even to the level of empty shock value. Limp and perversely unaffecting. Ellis once joked that Less Then Zero was, "About cock sucking, coke snorting zombies." Imperial Bedrooms feels like it was written by one.

The literary equivalent of that old Onion gag about Marylin Manson going door to door in his attempt to shock.

2nd Runner Up: Game Change: The literary equivalent of getting stoned and eating an entire bag of candy bars and a Big Mac while watching reruns of Good Times. It’s fun while you’re doing it. But it leaves you with nothing but a feeling of bloat and self loathing. And a deep inability to reconcile what you’ve just done with who you thought you were as a person.

Honorable Mention (Good List): The Devils In Exile: I’ve written some harsh things about Chuck Hogan on this blog. But I really did like his last turn at bat. It’s kind of insane and well worth picking up. Starting off as a realistic examination of post traumatic stress, the disaffection of returning vets and a gritty heist novel involving said same. Until morphing 2/3rds of the way through into a genuinely deranged piece of Heroic Bloodshed. If John Woo is ever stupid enough to come back to America, hope that someone hands him this.

Honorable Mention 2nd Runner Up: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour: Ambitious and slightly manic, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour was somewhat inevitably not the finest hour of The Scott Pilgrim series. It was taken on it's own terms a fine, if rushed ending. Second chances are awarded to those who deserve them and just deserts to others. Everyone grows up a little and moves on. Just like in real life. Real life of course does not have O'Malley's keen visual imagination or quick sense of humor. Mores the pity for us. But perhaps the finest thing that can be said about Finest Hour is that it doesn't spoil the illusion that it might be. If only for a few blocks up in Canada. It is always a pleasure to share O'Malley's headspace.

10: Zero History: Cagy and paranoid, with a deep and unexpected humanity. Zero History is the best book William Gibson has ever written, and one of the most complete portrayals of what living in the information age is like. A time period when either everything is a conspiracy or nothing is. And one can scarcely say which answer is more frightening.

9. Destroy All Movies: A labor of love. Simply put the most beautiful book I’ve held in my hands this year. A wonder to look at and sharply researched and written. Though the book’s prose is occasionally snide, it’s all a front. The love of cinema this thing embodies seeps in through your pores. The world’s ultimate Zine.

8. Freedom: Well holy shit the big important book that everyone was supposed to read was actually pretty damn good. More humane then The Corrections, but no less sharply observed, Freedom’s secret weapon is that it reads less like A Big Important Statement On The Way We Live Today and more like a vivid character study. Which is exactly what it is. The satire is rooted not in The Social Aspects Of The Way We Live Today, but in the subtle vagaries of human nature.

Like The Corrections, Freedom reads like an epitaph, but one which reads “Everyone tried their best.”

7. Full Dark No Stars: The best pulp fiction writer of the last half century at his very best. Nuff said.

6. Horns: And the heir to the throne proving himself more then worthy. A novel filled with horrific concepts, imagery and imagination. The most horrific of all being the manner with which Hill looks at the worst humanity has to offer and laughs his ass off. Not perfect, Horns nevertheless cements Hill’s reputation as someone who will absolutely go there. And get us eager to follow along. With a head for horror, and a surprisingly tender heart, Horns makes me excited to follow Hill for years to come.

5. Moonlight Mile: Lehane ends his Private Eye saga, the best since Chandler, in true style. Lehane does not end with the Peckinpah style blood and fire one might expect from Lehane, but with a simple and irrefutable rejection of the darkness that has tainted the lives of his two central characters. It’s that odd piece of Pulp Fiction that yearns for maturity without contradicting itself. The “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” of Crime Fiction.

Through Kenzie and Gennaro Lehane has dealt with the idea of Evil as a disease. Something communicable, possibly even sapient. And in Moonlight Lehane finally comes up with his answer to it. Bury it. Drown it in the Charlestown.

Some might find the ending cynically pat, but they don’t know Lehane. Make no mistake, his characters have earned the ending they’re given. And so has he.

4. The Big Short: If this book doesn’t make you insanely angry its because you haven’t read it, having A) been reduced to living in a cardboard box, or B) having burnt it for warmth. Michael Lewis renders in painstaking detail the rank, nigh unbelievable levels of stupidity, delusion and willful ignorance that went into making the world economy the clusterfuck it is today.

Like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Except the car is your country and the collateral damage is your future. This is the type of book that’ll make you go out and buy a gun, and then wonder if you should turn it on yourself or the subject matter.

3. The Passage: A great epic that takes a look at the world’s death rattle and comes away with hope in its heart. Epic storytelling at its finest, that like The Stand a generation before renders our slow motion demise with sickening plausibility, and then creates a world in our aftermath that kindles the imagination.

It’d be unfair to give away a single one of the books surprises suffice to say if you’re depriving yourself of The Passage, and you care at all about Sci Fi, Horror, and Fantasy, you are hurting only yourself.

2. 1000 Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet: A lovely and strange book. In which by refusing to pull a single one, David Mitchell perhaps performed his ultimate prank. Proving he never needed a single one.

1. Christianity: An essential book for both Believers and Non. A work of Scholarship so extensive that it’s practically mind numbing. Reaching for the origins of Christian thought not merely in Judiasm but in Ancient Greek tradition, and then chronicling with painstaking detail all the ways that thought has changed and mutated and sprung up over the ensuing three millennia. You don’t have to be a believer to be fascinated by what McDiarmid has done here, you just have to have some level of curiosity about the thought that has, for better or worse shaped the course of human history.

This is not merely a great work of history. This is a definitive work of history.

The 25: Part 20 & 21: Sherlock Jr. and Shoot The Piano Player

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider the best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)

Chaplin or Keaton. Truffaut or Godard. These are of course not merely questions for cinephiles but the questions. Like The Beatles V. Rolling Stones or Frank Miller Vs. Alan Moore, they don’t merely tell you about your tastes, they tell you about yourself.

The strange thing about my set of answers is that they contradict each other. Only a true cynic is supposed to choose Keaton over Chaplin and only a sloppy sentimentalist could prefer Truffaut to Godard. So I contradict myself. It won’t be the first time or the last.

In both cases it comes down to a pure gut level reactions. I enjoy and respect Chaplin’s films. I’m in awe of Keaton’s. It’s not as if I don’t like Chaplin. It’s that I can comprehend him. He’s a genius pure and simple. But his are the films of an extraordinary man visiting the ordinary. While Keaton’s are the films of ordinary man making himself extraordinary. Chaplin’s films coast along buoyed by the zephyrs of genius, Keaton’s on the other hand always seem earth bound. The result not of divine inspiration but of craftsmanship so fine and single minded that it borders on obsession.

Virtually every scene in Sherlock Jr. has a precision to it that frankly makes my head hurt. At a scant forty five minutes Sherlock Jr. packs in enough great scenes for an entire career. It serves as a perfect distillation of what makes Keaton great… And hell with it, why don’t you just go ahead and watch this one along with me.

The film starts off with a slow burn. The kind of humor, like the gag of Keaton continually finding the dollars in the rubbish before being forced to give them back are the types of routines that he would have no doubt perfected in his days on the vaudeville circuit. They could easily be performed on the stage. It’s not always wise to read to much into a director’s supposed motivations. Particularly one who played things as notoriously close to the chest as Keaton did. And yet, it is so easy to believe this intentional, a taste of the old to contrast the new. Of all of Keaton’s films Sherlock Jr. is the most cinematic. It positively bursts with the possibility of what a sharp mind and a camera can accomplish.

Normally it’s Chaplin whose considered the great master of the close up. But here too I think that Keaton is the superior. If only by virtue of his generosity. Take the above shot of the Shop Girl, after she has just turned down Keaton's attempt to buy the most expensive box of candy at a discount. The shot has little to no bearing on the plot. The character aside from a quick moment with Keaton’s rival is never seen again. But that moment adds so much, that look equal parts affection, solidarity, and amusement create a character were Chaplin would have only had an impediment.

Minute Fourteen launches the film into its first real virtuosic sequence. Keaton’s deadpan referred not only to his face but the way he presented his set pieces.

A sequence like that looks almost comically simple, until you stop and think about the precision and practice it must have taken. Yet it all looks so effortless. And it’s only about the sixth most complicated sequence in the film.

The theater sequence is of course the most complex scene in the film. And the most justly famous. If watching this sequence doesn’t give you something akin to the screaming mimi’s I can only conclude you know very little about film production. Creating a sequence like this now would cause someone to break out in cold sweats. Creating it then places Keaton somewhere far beyond the level of virtuoso. Word’s can’t do it justice. Just watch.

The film ends with one of the most breathlessly executed stunt scenes ever recorded. A ten minute compendium of the impossible that just keeps escalating.

But it’s not just awe that draws me back to Keaton. And it’s not just the fact that his films are fall down hilarious (Did I mention that?) His films were just as ahead of their time thematically as they were in technique. Look at the end scene, with Keaton literally taking his cues about what to do in real life from the film he’s watching. That sequence is so far ahead of its time that it laps its contemporaries. While his contemporaries were content to treat it like a toy, Keaton, like Munrau knew exactly what the cinema was. And he would never quite get the credit he deserved for it.

A lot of the credit for the introduction of self consciousness to cinema ended up going to the French New Wave boys and the two kings at the movement’s center. While in the case of Keaton Versus Chaplin I retain a large amount of affection and respect for the opposite number, in the case of Truffaut and Godard my feelings are completely binary.

Simply put I don’t respond to Godard films. At all. There’s something on what feels like a chemical level that keeps me from responding to his work. Truffaut’s early death and Godard’s Highlander like life span have long been proof to me that the good die young and the bastards live forever.

My love for Truffaut was equally immediate and complete as my disdain for Godard. The delicacy of his films, that mixture between their passion and innate shyness, the complex emotional state of his characters and Truffaut’s engrained humanism and compassion for them. And above all the love of cinema expressed not through mere regurgitation but in exhilaration at the act of creation itself.

I know that it is 400 Blows and Jules And Jim that are the canonical classics. But so help me I prefer Shoot The Piano Player to the both of them. Shoot The Piano Player, is based off of David Goodis’s pulp novel. A story of a mild mannered cabaret piano player who is dragged by fate and familial ties back into the life of criminality he’s worked so hard to sever himself from. Dire consequences result.

While both The 400 Blows and Jules And Jim are the more openly emotional films, Shoot The Piano Player is paradoxically, his deepest felt. Like its hero the film is steely and taciturn on the outside, a raw nerve within.

And yet for all the pain in the film, Shoot The Piano Player never feels dreary. On the contrary it is among the most light on its feet films of The French New Wave. A cinematic movement renowned for its nimbleness. The film seems positively giddy at what it can do. When a cabaret singer performs a song (in its entirety) the lyrics bounce jauntily across the bottom of the screen as if inviting the audience to sing along. When one of the criminals makes an oath to his young kidnap victim on the health of his mother, we’re treated to an insert shot of the old lady keeling over in a silent film style gag. Or take the film’s central knife fight which swings from violence to pathos, to humor, to violence again in a scene that shifts tone approximately a dozen times in a single scene. In each instance one can almost feel Truffaut’s nervous style. “Can I do that?” one hears him ask, “Well I guess I can.” Is more often then not the answer.

But when the film intends to bruise and it does, the film has no trouble shedding its stylistic innovation. The reason is simple. While Godard would use such tricks to tell you that you are above the narrative, Truffaut uses them to tell you that you are never above the narrative. It is the narrative that brought you here in the first place.

Shoot The Piano Player is the film that best articulates the differences between Godard and Truffaut. Goddard dissected the B Movies of his past so he could have an intellectual response that was above them. He manufactured cinematic valentines to his own cleverness and chic politics. Truffaut dissected them to discover what it was that made him so deeply feel them in the first place. As a result Godard’s cinema is ultimately one of detachment while Truffaut’s is one of furious attachment.

Like Keaton at the end of Sherlock searching for clues Truffaut is all to aware that the movies matter. They may be illusions. But nothing is an illusion inside our heads.

Clearing The Docket

Time for a bit of housekeeping. I’ve built up a bit of a backlog over the last few weeks and thought I’d go ahead and clear it.



Doghouse is another attempt to recapture The Splatterpunk style of Jackson/Raimi/O’Bannon/Gordon/Corscorelli dominated eighties, and like other recent forays, Dead Snow, Undead and Black Sheep it only ends in tears.

Oddly on the surface it doesn’t seem like it’s a tough aesthetic to reproduce. Get a good natured screenplay. Populate it with a game cast. And get your buddies to help you out with some over the top gore effects. So why is it that every time I come across a film that promises to reawaken the elicit thrills of my favorite sub genre they so manifestly fail to do so.

It’s actually pretty easy to pinpoint what goes wrong in Doghouse because there’s just so much of it. The film follows a group of friends out for a boys weekend in order to cheer up a friend who just went through a nasty divorce. First the cast is overstuffed, nearly a dozen folks line up for the weekend, so its difficult to get attached to any one of them. The one name in the bunch, usual live wire/favorite character actor (I still can’t believe he’s “Not Jason Statham” in Snatch) is woefully miscast as the sad sack of the bunch. The effects quality is WILDLY erratic, ranging from decent gore gags to what literally looks like a mannequin head slathered in blood. There’s a larger conspiracy subplot that absolutely nothing is done with and sucks up an ungodly amount of runtime. But most problematic is the film can’t decide whether its message is that the crew are a bunch of Pussy Whipped sad sacks who need to get their mojo back by killing a lot of women, or misogynists getting their just deserts at the hands of a bunch of vicious man killers. Both of these messages are problematic but a little consistency would have gone a long way to making it more paltable. Hedging it’s bets is just cowardly, especially when the movie keeps proudly mentioning just how “Un PC” it is at every opportunity.

So basically you have a movie that is intrinsacly flawed on a narrative, character, tonal visual and thematic level.

Other then that its pretty good though and truth in criticism I did laugh at the line, “If she wanted a pet she should have bought a Labrador.”

Doghouse is just another disappointment in a long line of them. One day I will see a movie that earns the right to mimic the gleeful anarchic feel of the glory days of Splatterpunk.

That day is not today.




Predators is one of those frustrating movies that works great on paper and not at all on screen.

It’s tough to pinpoint exactly where it all breaks down. It has a concept (Intentionally bringing dangerous people to be hunted by The Predators rather then a bunch of randoms) that I still think is pretty killer, assembles a good and game cast for the proceedings, gets some smart people behind the camera and then just kind of sits there.

Predators is so completely unengaging as a movie that it crosses the line into simply being depressing to talk about.

Note to Universal, the horse is fucking dead. You killed it. Now please stop beating it.



I don’t know why I suddenly got the urge to watch the original Halloween 2 again. Yet despite the fact that I knew I hated it, I somehow had convinced myself that if I saw the film again, I would somehow find it a misunderstood bit of wonderful.

Instead, the reaction I had was once again “Oh wait, I remember why I hate Halloween 2. Because it’s an awful fucking movie.” With its TV movie palate, dreadful pacing, graceless filmmaking and off kilter performances from the original cast, there’s not an element in Halloween 2 that doesn’t scream “Train Wreck”

Carpenter wondered what all this mother fuckery was, and Rosenthal was infamously kicked off the film. No one really knows just how much of the film Carpenter reshot, though its safe to say any moment that conveys any kind of atmosphere (The long tracking shot of Meyer’s walking unnoticed through crowded downtown Haddonfield) is probably his.

Rosenthal left the franchise in shame, until in one of the great ironies of horror film history he was welcomed back with open arms to accomplish what he could not quite do the first time out. Namely make one of the most phenomenally shitty horror films not merely in the franchise's history, but in the history of franchises.



Hard Times is a bare knuckle boxing film which costars Charles Bronsan and James Coburn. Bronsan is at his coolest and most charismatic. Seventies Bronsan is my favorite, he hadn’t yet morphed into the clipped caricature he would play through the eighties and nineties (“Now I’m going to Emmet’s Fix It Shop to fix Emmet”), yet had a real sense of his persona and his own brand of cool. This is the Bronson who gave us The Mechanic and Mr. Majestyk. The avuncular Coburn makes a great foil for the taciturn Bronsan. The two complement each other so well it’s a shame they didn’t make a habit of staring in films together (Obvious exception notwithstanding of course).

The film takes place in New Orleans of the twenties and has atmosphere to spare. The film is directed by Walter Hill in his prime. He has a sure hand with both the actors and the aesthetics. His trademark energy, skill, bravado and great eye and ear all firmly in place.

The film is basically The Sting with some of the most high impact boxing scenes that I know of. Basically it’s a great compact little movie, well written, well directed and highly entertaining with two of cinema’s greatest tough guys at the center. The very definition of a good time at the movies. It’s well worth your time to seek out.

But skip the DVD. Which as almost as bad as the infamous Charley Varrick. Fool screen and lazy to the point of insult.

The film plays on TCM all the time. So it shouldn’t be too hard for an interested party to find a copy that doesn’t serve as an insult to interested parties.



Labels are often a hindrance as much as a help. I like everyone got a little oversaturated with J-Horror when it was presented for the first half of the decade as the only flavor of horror in existence. So when my friend/successful person Kyle Geradi recommended that I check out Cure I dragged my feet a bit.

Which was a stupid thing to do. Because Cure shares almost nothing with the tropes of J Horror, save that persistent tone of a dreadful thing only partially articulated. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a great admirer of Val Lewton. And his film shares that same oppressive dread as Lewton’s films. Cure plays a bit like a Japanese Seven. With a rash of murders sweeping the country, committed by a random assortment of people who when questioned are unable to articulate why they have done what they’ve done.

Soon enough this is all traced back to a sort of Patient Zero a dead eyed Grad Student, who can shed no more light on what he does then his poor victims. Imagine a John Doe who offers no answers and you’re halfway there.

Cure is an effortlessly chilling movie. Most of the killings are shot in dispassionate long shot. Its an incredibly unnerving effect. I’m reminded of Stephen King’s comment that Joe Spinelli’s Maniac didn’t even have the decency to leer at its murders. Offering absolutely no distance for the viewers. Cure is the same way; it is so resolutely unlurid that there is no space for the mind to go.

The film does share with its subgenre, if not its tropes, then a certain disregard for the regular rules of narrative clarity. I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly what happens in the last fifteen minutes of the film. Only that its damningly affective.



I liked Youth In Revolt so much that I distrusted my reaction. I watched it again and there’s no mistaking it. I really did like it that much.

A hilarious portrait of a certain type of hyper literate personality. Youth In Revolt assembles a game comic cast, including ringers like Ray Liotta (at his freakiest) Steve Buscemi and Justin Long in full reptilian mode.

It’s far too arch to get the real wince enduing stuff like Rushmore and misses out on a fair amount of emotional resonance as a result. Comedy is the genre I write least about on Things That Don’t Suck. Mostly because I find it the one genre that is damn near impossible to quantify. Youth In Revolt is no exception. I cannot tell you if you’ll find it funny, I can only say that I helplessly did.

Mini Holiday Gift Guide For Film Geeks

I ended up writing The Holiday Gift Guide for one of the weeklies I freelance for. But as it had to be a general guide I had to cut some stuff out of my movie section. Rather then waste it I figured I'd post here.

After all Us movie geeks can be a fickle crowd to shop for. Our poor family and friends usually can’t remember what we own versus what we disdain. So in the interest of cutting back on the amount of gift cards and full screen DVD’s received this holiday season I thought I’d put together a list of five items that’ll make any cinephile who receives them outrageously happy.

If someone has earned the benefit of your Largesse:

This book is good for the soul.

As Richard Hell puts it in his introduction, “This is one of those gems of immaculate editorial conception, perfectly executed, that will probably not stay in print for long. Like Jesus, the world is not really worthy of this book and if you don’t buy it now, you will regret it later when it’s a lot more expensive.”

For Bibliophiles as well as cinephiles the book is a true delight. It's simply put one of the most beautiful books released this year. And further proof of why ebooks are a fucking double edged sword. No Ebook could reproduce the look and experience of Destroy All Movies. It's painstakingly rendered to look like it was printed on cheaply printed, pink tinge stock. Destroy All Movies is nothing less then the ultimate zine (and let’s savor the irony that it cost the makers of the book enough to charge thirty five dollars for an effect usually accomplished with a photocopier and a handful of quarters).

The book was published by Fantagraph, also responsible for last years must own movie geek book, Portable Grindhouse. Fantagraph is quickly becoming the place for must own books about the fetishes of cinema, and Destroy All Movies furthers the reputation.

The film is coauthored by Bryan Connely and Zack Carlson, the latter one of the programmers extraordinaire at The Alamo Drafthouse (A quick note to Carlson, this is nice, but if you guys don’t get cracking on Vol. 6 of 42nd Street Forever soon I’m going to start to cry. And is it too much to hope that it’ll include the trailer for The Raaaaaaaaaappppppppeeeeee Killer?) as well as a group of freelancer. Carlson and Connolly are both dryly hilarious. Is there a soul so dead that they can't find just a little love for a book that solemnly dead pans that the moment in Back To The Beach, when Pee Wee Herman sings Surfing Bird and then flies away on a magic surfboard while glowing electric blue is "The third most important moment in cinematic history."

Truth in advertising time. There are a few dud reviews here 90% of which are the po-faced criticism provided by Simon Czerwinskyi (Who are you and why are you trying so hard?) Oh how I grew to dread the little SC down at the bottom of the reviews. There are some odd cred based choices too. Glam based spectacles like The Apple count as punk but somehow Rocky Horror doesn’t?

Still despite conventional wisdom, one bad apple does not spoil the whole bunch. And the enthusiasm and wit that all the other reviewers display more then make up for some of the weaker entries. Destroy All Movies is simply put one of the books of the year. A more tactile thoroughly enjoyable experience is not to be found elsewhere on the shelves.

Don’t let the lackluster reviews fool you. Give this game to any horror film geek and I’ll guarentee they’ll spend the next ten hours or so playing with an expression of glazed blissed out happiness upon their face.

Reviving the disreputable Arcade series, Splatterhouse plays as a loving tribute to the splatterpunk era of filmmaking. With references thrown left and right to films like Evil Dead 2, The Reanimator, Dead Alive, The Wicker Man and Friday The 13th Part 2 (and that's just for starters) Splatterhouse is a loving tribute to the horror genre.

The game is bolstered by a simple but never boring combat system, and an excellent turn from Jim Cummings (Winnie The Pooh) as the terror mask, who delivers the exposition and the actually funny one liners with equal gusto (“Aztecs, Mayans, They all taste the same to me.”)

Splatterhouse is a game made by horror fans for horror fans. It may not be the deepest gaming experience of the year, but as a guilty pleasure it has no equal.

If you’re feeling Cheap:

(Full disclosure I did receive a sample of this product for review purposes. To borrow a phrase from Arbogast, "I can't be bought. But I can be clothed)

Buying clothing on the internet is a bit like walking into oncoming traffic with your eyes closed. It’s possible you’ll get what you pay for. It’s equally possible that you’ll receive a burlap sack with an iron on decal.

Crazy Dog T’s is one of the good ones though. I received and talked about a few horror shirts from them over 31 Days of Horror, and they’re quality pieces of work. Soft, well made and durable, with logos that hold up well (My Camp Crystal Lake Counselor one has taken quite a bit of abuse and still looks great).

Anyway, if you’re looking for a place where you can buy some cool shit without getting ripped off, and spend a mere 4.99 on a gift while making yourself look like you spent a lot more, Crazy Dog is one of the places where you can do it.

If you’re liked the look of Destroy All Movies but balk at the 35 Dollar Price Tag, allow me to recommend My Year Of Flops and Yippee KayYay Movie Goer. I’ve already talked about these two in greater detail. All I can add if you get these for a film geek and he’s not pleased as punch, don’t worry, that probably just means they weren't film fans in the first place.

The Unseen #54: The Black Belly Of The Tarantula

Why’d I Buy It?: Given to me during the great Insomniac close of Aught Eight.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: No real reason.

How Was It?: I’m beginning to think I don’t like Giallo very much.

Trust me this surprises me as much as anyone.

A few days ago I would have thought this absurd. The definition of a dead issue. After all, Italian Horror Seventies and Eighties is one of my favorite flavors of horror. And I love the subgenre’s three Master’s so much that I’m thinking of starting a holiday called Bavargentofulcimasgiving And while truth be told I, now that I think about it, prefer their supernaturally based horror in each case I’m also a big fan of films like, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, The Bird With Crystal Plumage, The Psychic, Twitch Of The Death Nerve and Deep Red. All stalwarts of The Giallo subgenre.

So I would have thought that I had already made my choice regarding Giallo. My ballot had been cast with my checkmark in the “pro” box. I had a bumper sticker that read “My Other Car Is Fueled By J&B Whiskey, Eurotrash Girls, And Highly Unlikely Plot Twists. And I Drive It Whilst Wearing Fetishic Gloves Made Of Leather And Latex.”

Yet it occurred to me as I watched The Black Belly Of The Tarantula just how few Gialli I’d seen outside of that core group of filmmaker’s work. Something significant since this is the second time in as many months that I've been left staring with befuddled disconnect at an avowed genre classic.

I was literally perplexed by just how little I cared for the film. After all, all the elements were there, a swinging Ennio Morricone score, sun dappled cinematography and violent set pieces and that impalpable blend of ennui and decadence that makes up Euro Sleaze.

The movie was certainly having a good time. I simply wasn’t.

Black Belly Of The Tarantula is about the pursuit of a murderer who paralyzes women with a rare poison which leaves them immobilized but with their nerves intact, so they can feel it when he stabs them in the uterus.

Given that Black Belly Of The Tarantula is a product of the mind of Paolo Cavara, that gentle soul who gave the world Mondo Cane, I suppose this is not the sickest shit he could have come up with. For which we can only be grateful.

Issues of taste aside, tacky as it may be Black Belly Of The Tarantula is hardly the worst thing I’ve seen. The film is powerfully unengaging. The movie does have its bright spots including Giancarlo Giannini’s (of Hannibal the closest an American film has come to Giallo. But more on that later...) able performance as the hard bitten, somewhat hangdog detective assigned to find the vagina stabber. Also the afore mentioned score by Ennio Morricone.

But the plot, though as arbitrary as most Giallo lacked that energy, as well as anything that might be classified a mood and since the murder scenes focused on victims who were for the most part immobile even they lack any sense of suspense. I wish I could say that I was angered, or even incensed by Black Belly’s casual sadism. But truth be told I was just sort of bored by it.

Let’s hope that The House With The Laughing Windows will break my Giallo classics losing streak.

The Unseen #53: The Good Guys And The Bad Guys

(Oh Christ if only...)

Why’d I Buy It?: Came In The Robert Mitchum Boxset I Purchased (Last One Of These)

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: I’ve always heard it was kind of a piece of shit.

How Was It?: Funnily enough it was kind of a piece of shit.

That being said I always find it tough to be hard on the shitty movies of days of yore. Even a movie like this which I got virtually no enjoyment out of, has a sort of base line to it absent in today’s abominably bad cinema. The Good Guys And The Bad Guys is a movie because someone had an idea, convinced other people to make the idea and then shot the film. Now why that idea doesn’t work can be chalked up to various factors. Factors like the fact that despite it bills itself as a comedy it is never really funny, or seems to be especially trying to be. Or the fact that it saddles itself with an overbearing and fucking terrible folk score that narrates the action as obtrusively as possible (Imagine that Altman had wished for The McCabe And Ms. Miller score on The Monkey’s Paw and you’re halfway there). But one of those factors wasn’t that the film was market tested and demographed to within an inch of its life. And thus even in its awfulness has a certain organicness to its nature that prevents it from passing the last event horizon into truly unredeemable dreadful.

The Good Guys and Bad Guys, stars Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy as the titular Guys. They both sleepwalk through the film. Relying so heavily on their schtick that it’s a genuine surprise it doesn’t crack under their weight. They’re old cowboys who done outlived their time and run smack into the modern age. Why Mitchum even has to run the whores out of town!

Mitchum can't get any of the townspeople to believe him, or get all that upset when he tells them that Kennedy his old nemesis is riding into town for a robbery. He's unceremoniously retired, but goes out to stop Kennedy on his own, only to find that Kennedy has been similarly ejected from his gang of young guns.

This might all seem very poignant until you realize, shit The Fucking Wild Bunch (official title) was released that same year. This is not how you tell this story. David Carradine brings some life to it as a character meant to represent a new vicious breed of outlaw. But even he seems just kind of put out more then anything.

The film was directed by Burt Kennedy, whose just one of those guys who always turning up. As a writer he’s responsible for some of the finest Westerns ever written, including most of Budd Boeticher’s. Stuff like Seven Men From Now, The Tall T and also Clint Eastwood’s underrated White Hunter Black Heart. His career as a director is a good deal spottier. He’s responsible for the not “good”, but kind of interesting Raquel Welch revenge flick Hannie Caulder, Support Your Local Sheriff and the woefully misbegotten initial adaptation of The Killer Inside Me. He’s also made the immortally titled Dirty Dingus McGee (Starring Frank Sinatra!)

What’s the point of this? Only that Kennedy had more interesting ways to spend his time and so do you. Not everyone of the above movies is great, or even good. But they all do more then just sit there. Which is all The Good Guys And The Bad Guys does.

Monsters

Welcome to what Independent film looks like now.

Made for the cost of a plane ticket to Mexico, a set of Adobe After Effects, and the change in his pocket Gareth Edward’s (remember the name because you’ll be hearing it for a long long time) Monsters is one of those films that doesn’t simply raise the bar. It becomes the bar.

The film carries with it, not a whisper of the digital sheen of cheapness. It’s a gorgeous film and more importantly a tactile one. I kept waiting for the façade to crack, for the world Edwards created to reveal itself as nothing but a guy with a camcorder and a few amateur actors. Aside from a few rubbery shots glanced on passing television screens it never did. Even in the strange, tentatively beautiful finale when we see the creatures in full for the first time, it holds up.

The film takes place a few years after an alien, well not invasion but migration, took half of Mexico as its territory. A freelance reporter and his boss's daughter are forced to travel through the infected zone. It's a place both decimated and eerily beautiful. A Place which resembles Earth less and less with each passing mile.

I’ve read reviews in which people complain about the film on a narrative level. Setting aside for a moment that Monsters true triumph is doing what all great Sci Fi does, not so much telling a story as creating a world. I actually quite liked the somewhat languid pace. More then anything it reminded me of another swamp bound, texture heavy creature feature, The Legend Of Boggy Creek (I mean that as a good thing.) It’s true those holding their breath for a big show stopping bit of Smash Tokyo will be disappointed. But I even found this criticism a little over emphasized. It’s not as if the Monsters spend the film picking flowers and holding hands. There are a few attacks, which are well staged, frightening and give a true feeling of the scale of the things and their unknowable nature. Monsters may be a film of grace notes not crescendos, but that doesn’t mean it won’t live up to the title.

After viewing Monsters it’ll be impossible to watch another ultra cheapo Paranormal Activity knockoff with anything but contempt. In his review of that film, The Outlaw Vern said, “This is a video I like films.” I’ve felt a similar antipathy for the mumblecore movement. The democratization of film production has led to many great things, but its also shredded aesthetics. It’s not like I’m some snobbish uber formalist. But making an independent movie used to be just that. You proving you could make a movie. Now it’s about proving that you can get a half dozen of your friends to stand in front of your camera and smoke whilst spouting nonsequiters. Why take the time to frame a shot like Sam Raimi, Jim Jaramusch or Richard Linklater? Making something that looks like a movie is no longer requisite for making a movie.

But not anymore.

It's official, you’re limited by nothing but the bonds of your talent and imagination. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet your new Gold Standard. This is as the kids say some next level shit. But it's also something rarer and more valuable. That oh so infrequent movie that leaves you both satisfied and wanting more.