Gangs Of New York is my favorite movie. It’s a great American story. A story that encompasses almost everything I care about, History, Religion, the Irish American identity, and Politics all told in a sweeping operatic style. It’s the last true American Epic, told with tactile sets and huge crowds rather then CGI and greenscreen. And it most importantly it’s about America, being an American, what that means, what it’s meant and how our history is one written in blood by generations who have defined what that meant. Today is election day, and back from the polls I pace the length of my small apartment watching CNN and drinking an obscene amount of coffee as I try to tell myself that it’s only Ten AM damn it and the results won’t be in for a long long while. I think of Gangs, and what it represents to me, about how it shows where I came from, who my ancestors were and what they did so I can live my life now. I think about the last eight years of our countries history, and the level of outrage fatigue I’ve been suffering from for the last three or so. And I say a small prayer of thanks for the excitement I feel, an excitement that I worried was gone forever, drowned by cynicism. No matter what the outcome, this election has brought about a change in me for the better, and a line echoes through my mind bellowed by a character who would be disgusted by the election we’re having, “THIS IS A NIGHT FOR AMERICANS!!!” and for the first time in a long time, that line excites me. This is a night for Americans, a liminal moment in our history, and I feel privileged to be here and be a part of it.
Still to tired to be any more then semi coherent but suffice to say, the annual Aero horrorthon was far beyond badass.
Night Of The Creeps was great, seeing TCM 2 on the big screen with a big crowd was fun, Dead Alive was a fucking revalation. I always loved it, but kind of gave Bad Taste the edge. But seeing it on the big screen... the crowd went crazy, there was barely a shot that didn't get a roar of laughter, a mortified groan, cheers, or actual fucking applause. Great show.
Then things slowed down a bit, Let's Scare Jessica To Death was kind of a dud despite it's reputation, as was Demons, it's tough to put my finger on any reason why. I just wasn't feeling it. But things ended strong with the moody, creepy as fuck Deathdream, a movie that really needs a reevaluation.
It's metaphor isn't exactly subtle, but it doesn't really need to be, when our shambling Veteran Corpse of a hero beats a man to death while hissing "You OWE me SOMETHING." It's both scary and terribly sad since neither victim nor attacker seem to know what that something is.
5:36:I suck what can I say. I didn't even get half way there.
But as Ed Wood said, next time it'll be much better.
To make up somewhat I'm doing a liveblog of my Horror movie marathon tonight. Enjoy, or don't, I'm freaking to tired to care right now. I've been lugging groceries in full Joker Make up all day/
5:40 few bong rips later and things are looking up, now to make Tamales and start up Dance Of The Dead, my first film of the night.
6:01:
After some Tamale related delays the first film begins. Ghost House has been a huge disappointment to me. The idea of Sam Raimi owning his own horror company should fill me with fuzzy bunny feelings. But the fact is that almost everything (30 Days Of Night semi excepted) out of the company has sucked with vigor.
Still the whole pick up eleven indie films and actually show them to people boxset they released last week was pretty cool. Sam, Rob, annd Ted Giving them the same help that they themselves needed when they made Evil Dead. And I've heard good things about Dance Of The Dead, so I guess it all boils down to me hoping that I'll unequivocally like something from Ghost House for once.
6:05: Huh new Punisher Trailer looks decent, if not for the fact that Lexi Alexander was booted off the film would I have what you humans called hope? I'll admit the fact that my two favorite HBO characters ever are in the film in the two leads doesn't hurt.
6:24: So far so not terrible. I can see why Raimi chose this one, it bares a certain resemblance to his work. These guys tightrope the walk between homage and ripoff, with it's living dead hands and rapid quick cut intros to the characters.
But so far it's light tone, fucked up gore gags, and genuine affection for it's oddball characters is winning me over.
6:36: Excellent Gag 20 minutes in starting to dig this. It's nice to see Nerds who lok like real nerds, these dudes make Jonah Hill look like a freaking pinup model.
6:43: Movies the makers of Dance Of The Dead have seen other than Evil Dead and Cemetery Man: Return Of The Living Dead.
Date Rapists decapitated:1 Evil Science Teachers ended: 1 Various: A shitload Zombies: A whole nother shitload.
6:50: Film swings wildly between Amateurish and stylish. Kinda endearing at times, at others ,such as the swing the camera wildly from person to person as they talk to each other in a poorly lit night scene? Not so much.
6:55: "Did one of you joker's lace my joint with formaldehyde again?" I've been there buddy.
Seriously tho Guitar battling for your life against Zombie Hordes is genuinely classic scene could have used a bit more time though.
7:00: I love Kyle. The crazy as a shithouse rat, redneck, punk rock enforcer, is making this thing.
Oh also Return Of the Living Dead. AGAIN and AGAIN! As I type it.
7:04: OK so of course as soon as I type that he expires. Thanks.
7:04: The main kid does suck a little bit.
7:08: At the right angle the main nerd looks like Donald Sutherland's Mini Me.
7:09: "They got to one, and then the other, and well, ended up having to kill the whole block." Psycho Coach is pretty great and I love that he happens to have everything needed to stop a zombie uprising in his garage.
7:12"Lord we don't know why you've brought the dead back to life. But well you have."
ALSO RETURN TO THE ULTIMATE GUITAR BATTLE!
7:30: Points for the cannibal love scene.
7:35 You know I like this film, but it seems like the worst thing that could happen to it would be to get a major Dead Alive style cult following. Scrutiny is pretty unkind to this movie. But left on it's own it's a sweet, light, funny movie with a few great moments, a few funny bits, a handful of genuine scares, and some great gore effects what more do you want from a horror flick?
Next, I visit the Casablanca of my generation, The Nightmare Before Christmas
7:40; I'm only kinda kidding when I refer to Sally and Jack as THE ideal couple of thei- Dear sweet God I love this opening.
7:50: I marvel at what a model of narrative efficiency this movie is.
7:54 "What's This?"
8:26: Not much to say about this flick that hasn't been said. I love that Jack's idea of spreading joy IS spreading demonic crazy shit to every house personally. This film is probably my Gold standard for character animation as far as animation defining character goes.
God The Making Christmas sequence is cool.
8:35: Boogie's Maggots writhing into Santa's beard gets me every time.
9:49: Fuck it I'm watching The Strangers again. Love this movie.
10:02 Dear sweet God this movie scares the shit out of me.
10:20 Jesus the shot where Liv catches the first look at her visitor at the window is one of the best jump scares I've ever scene. Here it's the fourth time I've seen this thing I know exactly when and what the reveal is, but it's still caused me to physically jump every time I see it.
11:113 Onto some HG Lewis, then I thin I'm about run out. Not the biggest marathon I've ever done, but I've got to conserve myself for the marathon I'm going to tomorrow at my beloved Aero for the annual horrorfest, read this one and weep.
Night Of The Creeps TCM2 Demons Dead Alive Let's Scare Jessica To Death
There is probably no movie that I wanted to see so much, waited so long for, and was more disappointed by then Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Let me explain, as long as I can remember I’ve been a certified horror nut. And to say the the trailers/commercials/posters/town criers, brought in to convince people that Bram Stoker’s Dracula would be the greatest movie ever fucking made, certainly achieved their desired affect. Unfortunately as I was seven or eight and had two somewhat protective parents there wasn’t anyway in hell I was going to see that movie. So instead I let my imagination fueled by American Zoetrope’s marketing department build the best possible Dracula movie ever. Suffice to say when I saw the movie about five years later, the expectations where not met.
Still I don’t think that it can all be blamed on the build up, as I believe that my eight year old self also wouldn’t have known what to make of Dracula turning into some kind of ape creature and fucking the shit out of Sadie Frost. Coppola’s Dracula is a movie that seems determined to destroy itself. For every masterful scene, every stunning bit of design (and dear God there are plenty) Coppola balances it with one that has an equal but opposite reaction. It speeds between great and terrible with a nimbleness that’s mindblowing.
Lets start with the good. To call the film opulent is like calling Versailles a little gaudy. It just doesn’t quite convey the idea. The film is eye candy of the highest order. It’s long been my personal theory that to achieve the look Coppola locked his production and costume designers in Scrooge Mc Duck’s money been and told them to get spending before they drowned. Every shot, every set, every costume, is simply masterful, and it helps that Coppola’s cinematographer, the great Michael Ballhaus, shoots the living shit out of the movie. The movie is a very Catholic one, and it taps into “The Catholic Imagination” with great zeal, giving evil a truly epic quality that most horror films lack. When Dracula comes across a pack of vampire hunters, shifts into the form of demonic bat, forces a cross to burst into flames merely by lunging at it, moans “Look what you’re God has done to me!” and then desolves into a pack of ravenous rats, your watching the product of two thousand years of considering the worst case scenario.
The special effects are amazing as well, mostly done in camera it gives even the simplest of tricks, like the extending of the coachman’s arm, or the backwards contortion walk by one of Dracula’s brides have a great “How did they do that?” charge that’s all but lost in cinema today. CGI would have ruined this movie.
The problem with all this fantastic design is that there are people in them. Had Dracula been silent or acted out with hand puppets, it would probably be considered a flat out masterpiece. Instead it is a very flawed movie that simply looks very very good.
Coppola assembles one of the most random casts ever seen to make this movie, and almost all of them are terrible, and seem to think they’re acting in different movies. Only Oldman’s hype living up to Dracula, who invests his character with the perfect mix of pathos, operatic insanity, and straight up bloodlust and Tom Wait’s fantastic Renfield, played with just the right mix of tragedy, pitch black humor, and superb skin crawling creepiness, seem to know the movie they are in. Winnona Ryder is merely bland rather then a woman one would cross “Oceans of time” for, it hardly seems realistic that Dracula would ask her for a second date, Sadie Frost is vacant in a very special way. And one scene where she and Winnona play with a bit of Three Company style misunderstanding, involving a Texan’s knife and penis, pinpoints the exact place where “Comic Relief” becomes an actual punishment. Anthoney Hopkins is absolutely wretched, playing Van Helsing at a level I can only describe as ultra camp.
Ah but there’s someone I haven’t mentioned yet is there?
Now look I’m not a Keanu hater. I think he’s an underrated and undervalued actor. No seriously. Films like My Own Private Idaho and The River’s Edge prove it, I’ll always have a debt to him for nailing Bob Arctor in Scanner Darkly and I’m an unabashed Matrix apologist.
That says Keanu really does fuck this movie up quite badly.
It’s not all his fault, I mean the casting makes the choice of Sofia Coppala for Mary Corleone look like a masterstroke. Who better to play a young repressed law clerk from the Victorian era out to make his fortune then you know… Fucking Keanu Reeves.
The opening scenes between Keanu and The Count are pretty fucking hilarious. Similar to the Nicholson Duval face off in The Shining, Keanu seems so utterly outmatched that it’s comical. It would only take a short nudge of editing to turn their scene into a short about a salesman so determined to make a sale that he desperately attempts to ignore all the crazy shit his mark is doing.
Now I suppose that a meeting between a centuries old undead immortal, and a callow clerk should have the latter feeling outmatched. But this plays less like a young Harker being swallowed by the experienced decadent count, and more like Oldman’s style of acting seriously is seriously harshing Keanu’s mellow.
This is particularly evident in the scene where the grisly tableau of Dracula feeding an infant to his hellish brides, to a reaction shot which conveys that Keanu’s buzz has been seriously harshed by the fact that like dude they just totally ate that baby. Not cool.
Keanu actually becomes more useless as the movie goes on. By the end as he prances around wearing a white fright wig that makes him look like Andy Warhol, his performance has become complete camp. It doesn’t help that Keanu has a British Accent that makes Dick Van Dyke sound like Laurence Fucking Oliver.
Once the film gets to London it continues its mesmerizing dance between great and awful. Dracula sliding between the screens at an early cinema, paying to tribute to a knew form of immortality? Brilliant. Dracula turning into an ape creature to fuck Sadie Frost? Not Brilliant. The vampire hunter’s harrowing confrontation with Dracula in his decaying abbey? Brilliant. Dracula turning into mist so he can give Winnona Ryder some head? Not Brilliant. Dracula scuttling inhumanly down a sheer wall? Brilliant. The suggestion that Dracula is a compulsive masturbator… Well you get the picture.
Aside from a piece of eye candy Dracula is most interesting when looked at from an auterist perspective, as it’s most likely Coppala’s most personal film of that decade. Of course given that his other films of that decade were Godfather III, The Rainmaker, and Jack, the competition was not fierce.
At it’s core stripped of all it’s supernatural hugger mugger, Coppala’s Dracula is basically an old guy who gets mad at the Catholic church for along time and then comes back to it in a time of need. It’s about our duty to God and his to us, and the limits if there are any to his forgiveness. Sure as far as theological complexity goes it’s not The Virgin Spring, or The Last Temptation Of Christ, but it’s an interesting look at a director who never really seemed interested in testing such waters before, even you know when he was making a film about Shenanigans at The Vatican.
All in all Dracula is a mess. But it’s a glorious one.
Post Note: Truth in criticism, the recent DVD edition is pretty tremendous. From the art, to the docs, to the design, to the transfer, this is one of the coolest discs I’ve ever owned. If you have the original release this one is actually worth the double dip.
The Shining is not my favorite Stanley Kubrick film. Infact it’s probably my least favorite Stanley Kubrick film. The instance where his style and material simply didn’t mesh.
The reason’s pretty simple, I’ve just never been able to separate the film from book. I’m a big Stephen King fan. King is always going to have a special place in my heart, he was after all my first "favorite" author, the one who taught me to love and seek out an author's voice. Ever since I snuck into the adult section of the library on a fourth grade field trip and grabbed The Dead Zone, I've been a loyal fan. And The Shining is quiet possibly King’s best work.
The Shining as a novel is a terrifyingly human horror story. Jack Torrance is arguably King's greatest creation. In the novel Jack Torrance is a good man, but one who has been given a long hard look on multiple occasions of exactly what he's capable of. Yet somehow he’s managed to pick up the pieces, and life is just starting to reward him for it. His wife and child are starting to trust him again, his career might finally pick up...
And then he has to go to that fucking hotel.
The way it works the way every room, every task, ever whisper exploits the still fresh cracks in Jack until he just completely falls apart is terrifying and terrible to behold. You see a man who is desperately trying to hold it together, who knows what'll happen when he backslides. And then he does.
But even then Torrance is still in there, and what happens at the climax is haunting.
It's great, a fantastic piece of characterization and story telling. Like I said arguably King's best. A very human monster as terrifying as he is pitiful.
So of course the first thing Kubrick did was go "Naw fuck all that."
My problem with Kubrick’s Shining is that, there are plenty of scares in but no tragedy. Nicholson is just being "Wacky Jack" from there very beginning. There's no downfall, no good man destroyed. Just Nicholson going from "Raving Looney" to slightly crazier. There’s never a sense for one second that The Torrances have ever functioned as a loving family, so the destruction of the unit means nothing. While Danny in the book is a kid struggling with a power he doesn’t understand, and the revelation of who “Tony” is turns out to be quite poignant, in the movie he’s just a weird little kid who talks to his finger. And while Shelly Duvall does a fine job looking exhausted and terrified, she doesn’t bring a whole lot else to the table. In the book Wendy is an intelligent and strong woman every bit Jack’s equal. With the mousy Duvall in the lead there’s a real strange sense of “How the hell did these two get together?” It’s hard to imagine her and Jack having so much as conversation, let alone a marriage together. It doesn’t help that Nicholson looks about twice her age through the entire film.
There’s that same strange stiltedness to almost every conversation between the living in The Shining. It’s almost like one of Lynch’s REALLY weird movies like Lost Highway or Inland Empire. It’s almost like everyone is speaking in code. For example in the opening when Jack and and the hotel’s manager Ullman discuss the job at hand, Ullman tells Jack the store of Grady going crazy and killing his family. Jack’s response is to tell Ullman not to worry his wife love’s horror movies.
Wait…What the fuck?
Imagine that conversation in real life for a second.
“A madman murdered his wife and children!”
“Ooh Spooky!”
In terms of style it's magnificent. In terms of humanity There's simply nothing there. (And I know that's a charge often used against Kubrick, but I'd like to point out that this is the only movie where that accusation rings true as a detrement for me. While a certain detachment is needed to study the uppercrust of 18th century Europe in Barry Lyndon, the bizarre underground circles of Manhattan in Eyes Wide Shut, or the dystopian future of Clockwork Orange, the style doesn’t really work when it’s applied to a working class family in the eighties).
However, I decided that this time I really was going to give The Shining the benefit of the doubt. Put the book out of my mind, and see the movie with fresh eyes and to give the movie the benefit of the doubt I brought my good friend Herb McSmoky Weed along to the screening. Sadly the results where pretty much the same, if a little more so. I came away from the movie with more impressed by what Kubrick was going for, and yet more disenchanted then ever with how he did it. Still I saw enough interesting wrinkles this time to movie The Shining past Killer’s Kiss. Keep reaching for the stars.
Let’s start off with the good, The Shining’s style particularly when shooting the supernatural, is pretty freaking amazing. Kubrick shoots the various ghosts who show up, in away that is almost a hyper reality. Always shot in Kubrick’s trademark “frames within frames” (The two little girls first in a doorframe then in a hallway, Lloyd between the mirrors of the bar, The Old Lady in the bathtub, Grady between the urinals, the final shot of Jack in a literal frame within a frame, etc. etc. etc.) In scenes like the iconic “two little girls” shot, or the one where Wendy witnesses a man in a dogsuit giving a blow job, the feeling is that they are the intruders, the impermanent ones, after all as Grady puts it, they “have always been there.” It’s the Torrances who are where they don’t belong.
However, the best haunting scenes are the ones in Barroom’s Bathroom. While a bit less flashy then the film’s better known scares, the bathroom scene is the only one where the movie comes close to recreating the bone deep terror of the book. One of Kubrick’s little signatures, was to have some of the worst things happen in the bathroom, man at his most savage at the place where he is least dignified. And once you see the bathroom Kubrick is using…
… Damn you know some bad shit is about to happen in there. The scene that follows takes a lot of the stuff that Kubrick has been doing and really makes it work. The long takes and pauses in the conversation, the way the conversations seem to almost be in code and makes it all work for one chilling sequence. Bizarre N bomb dropping aside (come on Stanley did they have to be racist ghosts?)
The film technique keeps you on edge. It just keeps doing things that are a little off, from how they are normally done. It’s constant use of fades for example give it a strange sense of inevitability. A cut suggests a jump, two unrelated things that become related and associated. It’s more or less the building block of filmic language, and the missing space between the two cuts, suggest some amount of free will in how the characters got to that place. The fade doesn’t allow that luxury, one scene becomes the next which fades into the next and into the next, there is no possible scene except the one that follows it.
Another little thing that I found odd this time, though I’m willing to concede that it might be a simple trick of my DVD’s mix, or my speakers, is the fact that a lot of Kubrick’s orchestral score doesn’t seem to be score at all but source music. Particularly in some of the scenes with Nicholson, the music seems to be coming directly from the room. Though we’re never shown a record player or anything of the like. It’s just one of those things, that makes you go “Weird.” Like the idea that Torrance thought it’d be a good plan to bring a shitload of Bartok LPs to an isolated hotel where everyone would be on edge.
But then again that is the type of character that Nicholson is playing. What the man lacks in pathos and nuisance he makes up for in pure crazy. Of course that’s the whole problem, from scene one he’s just playing wacky jack. Even in his “normal” scenes he seems on edge, it would be a surprise if he DIDN’T end up killing his family.
Still this time out I did have more appreciation for Nicholson’s performance. It’s almost Kabuki. It’s a rare scene where he wears more then one expression, it’s like before every sequence he’s affixed a Jack Nicholson mask to face, and convey’s the character through motion alone.
Unfortunately if anything my antipathy for Duval and whoever the hell the little kid was only grew. Still even this adds some interesting shades to the story. Duval is so bowled under by Nicholson that the film almost becomes a feminist horror movie, where marriage=loss of identity=death.
The Shining also loses steam in it’s somehow acclaimed ending. After the famed “Here’s Johnny” scene the movie just kinda sorta falls apart. Jack chases after his son, though he never gets close enough to be a threat, yelling. While Wendy stumble around the hotel seeing things that really aren’t that scary. Eventually they leave. And then Kubrick shows a picture.
The End.
The Shining as an adaptation is terrible, as entertainment it’s flawed and as a work of art it’s frustrating. But damned if I won’t keep coming back to, Kubrick’s put too much into it to ever have it be dismissed.
(This review has been repurposed to make benefit of glorious Final Girl Film Club. All hail brutal head of state Stacie Ponder)
I'm not mad at Tobe Hooper just disapointed. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is possibly the scariest movie ever made. It’s almost a quantum leap beyond any other in the genre. It’s a singular and masterful experience and I can’t help but wish the director behind it wasn’t such a one hit wonder. Sure Poltergeist is great, but we all know that Hooper was just a front on that one, my affection for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre II is well documented (The Aero is playing for their all night horror film festival and I cannot wait), the only other Hooper film worth half a damn is Lifeforce, which coasts by with an ungodly amount of nudity and camp.
Not exactly the formula for a winning career.
But there was one other Hooper film I’ve always been interested in seeing, and after receiving and an email after my TCM2 review my interest was furthered. I mean come on, Creepy ass carnival? Albino serial killer who wears a Frankenstein mask? A whole bunch of animatronics? No way this thing wouldn’t at least be entertaining.
Unfortunately for me Hooper FOUND a way to make it unentertaining. Congrats buddy keep reaching for the stars.
The film gets off to a great start with a fantastic credits sequence that consists of disturbing animatronics acting out the same repetitive motions again and again. Unfortunately for me this wasn’t merely a disturbing motif, but the blueprint that Hooper built his movie on.
Things pretty much go to shit the moment the film starts. Opening with a bizarrely protracted Halloween like POV from a little boy as he selects a knife and mask. The scene dances over the lines separating Parody, Homage, and Ripoff pretty freely. But eventually the “killer” goes into the bathroom where he rips open the curtain on his naked sister and starts smacking her with a giant fake phallic knife, while he photographs it. Ho-Ho!
I mean come on we’ve all been there right? The weird thing is the film plays the scene like it’s just cute kid shit, instead of you know, seriously disturbed behavior. Eventually the sister manages to stop wondering what the fuck is wrong with her brother long enough to get dressed and meet her grease monkey boyfriend and his two fodder, I mean friends to go out for a fun night at The Carnival that has pulled into town, having been chased out of the last one for murdering a couple of children.
No I’m fucking serious, they keep talking about how all these kids bodies where found in the carnival in the last town it was in, and nobody gives a fuck. They’re so nonchalant about it that you think they where debating the quality of the fried dough.
Anyway the group walks around The Carnival for a long long time. No seriously, a really really really long long time. Causing me to adopt a Milhouse like whine and ask “When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?” The other thing is the carnival is just bad. Not like ooh scary Something Wicked This Way Comes bad, but bad bad. If you bought a ticket to this carnival you would demand my money back. And I swear to God by the end of the film it will feel like you have seen every damn inch of the place. Imagine how tedious something like Last House On The Left would be if it just followed a couple girls out to a rock concert, with no hint of the fact that some crazed hippies would eventually come and kill them.
Eventually the four decide they love the terrible carnival so much that they want to spend the night there, so they hide in the Funhouse. Deformed Albino comes as do some of the most telegraphed "scares" I have ever fucking seen. You know the rest of the story. But I swear to God by the time it happens you won’t care.
The movie basically boils down to a few unpleasant people and one seriously disturbing kid bumbling around a terrible Carnival for awhile. If that sounds like your cup of tea, enjoy.
A Demon To Some An Angel To Others. Critic/Filmmaker/Factotum dedicated to engaging art on its own terms. Occasionally cruel but never incurious or dismissive. And always enthusiastic
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