Wills and Fates

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run" -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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There's a philosophical problem buried in the second half of Terminator: Dark Fate (2019, directed by Tim Miller) that's new to the series. The Terminator films have always dealt in metaphysics, questioning whether the universe is deterministic or whether it can be affected by free will. This is the dichotomy between the first film in the series and the second. The films since then have mostly tried to have it both ways because if the end of Terminator 2 holds sway, there can't be any more Terminator films going forward. There's too much money at stake for that to derail future films, so these questions mostly get addressed in ways that permit the new films to take place at all, without too much thought about the original dialectic. The new film is mostly unnecessary, as all of the subsequent Terminator films have been unnecessary, except for a brief moment when it veers away from the series' metaphysical dilemma into the realm of epistemology. It asks: "What is the purpose of a killing machine once it has fulfilled its mission?" Then it asks a similar question. "What is the purpose of a mother of the future when that future no longer exists?" It also touches briefly on what it means to be a human being once a trans-human singularity drastically changes the physical bounds of what human beings actually are. It even interrogates, however briefly, the function and moral worth of work in a world where humans are not actually needed to perform that work. All of these questions have been lurking in the underlying structures of the Terminator movies, but this one brings all of them to the surface. It does not, however, dwell too long on them because there's stuff it needs to blow up real good.

Post Mortem

...But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all...

--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

In Supernatural Horror in Literature, his landmark essay on the subject of fear in horror fiction, H. P. Lovecraft opined: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." I think this says more about Lovecraft than it does about the nature of fear in horror fiction, though. Lovecraft was scared of his own shadow, after all. My own feeling is that the root of fear in almost all things--especially in the horror story--is ultimately a fear of death. That undiscovered country of Shakespeare and the neurotic obsession of the Gothic romantics. Lovecraft is right in one respect, though: death is a great unknown, and not just because no one yet has returned from its Plutonian shore to offer a report on the lay of the land. The rituals of death are often a mystery, too, hidden away from most people in the Western tradition. As a people, we have become disconnected from death and death rituals to a point where the cerements of the grave provide the horror story and the horror film with their most constant companion. There are also taboos about the dignity of death. One of the most persistent themes in horror is the "bad death," in which the body is violated by death and its aftermath, whether it's from being mangled in a threshing machine or mutating into a fly creature. The integrity of the body is the fundamental state of an untroubled universe; its violation is an affront to the human sense of order in the world. Maybe this is why there is a persistent sub-genre of horror stories about autopsies and morticians.* All of these things percolate through André Øvredal's second film, The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), which is among the most effective horror movies of the current period.

Escapist Entertainment

Note: I wrote most of this in January of 2019 and neglected to publish it. I rewatched Escape Room for the October Challenge and remembered that this was waiting in my drafts.

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A snowstorm was barreling into my part of the Midwest last Friday and my employer sent everyone home at 1 pm to avoid the inevitable disasters on the roads. Unfortunately, my partner wasn't so lucky and I wound up with four hours to kill before I could drive the 25 miles to home. I didn't want to make the drive twice, so I went to a movie instead. I felt bad about the theater employees, who were equally at risk, but the theater was open and the most convenient showtime wasn't for a tentpole movie or an award bait prestige film, but was rather for Escape Room (2019, directed by Adam Robitel) one of those horror movies studios like to dump into theaters every year during the cinematic wastelands at the beginning of January. It's like they're the unofficial start of a new movie year. Perhaps they are the exhalation of a whoopie cushion acting as a starting gun announcing, "And they're off." This tradition dates back at least as far as the early 2000s. Maybe farther. I haven't bothered to research it.

In any event, I went to see Escape Room for no other reason than it had a convenient showtime. It was a pleasant surprise. While it wasn't a world-beater, and has the grave misfortune of coming on the heels of one of the better years for horror movies in recent memory, it's not a film that insults my intelligence, nor is it one that's egregiously incompetent. That's faint praise, alas. What it is is a tense exercise in suspense filmmaking that managed to keep my mind engaged during its entire running time. It's not even particularly frivolous. Within the confines of its PG-13-rated thrills, it's a perfectly fine film that stays within the bounds of its ambitions. If it's not particularly original--and it's not--it at least executes its genre elements with something like elan.

Unmask, Unmask...

The Masque of the Red Death (1964, directed by Roger Corman) was originally planned to be the second of Corman's Poe films for American International Picture, following the unexpectedly large success of House of Usher. Corman had a screenplay in hand, but he eventually decided that the subject matter was too similar to Bergman's The Seventh Seal, which was then making its way through the American marketplace. Corman, reluctantly, turned to the more gruesome The Pit and the Pendulum. He wouldn't come back to The Masque of the Red Death for several years. By that time, he had started to use the Poe films as experimental films. Corman, in spite of the cash register in his heart, was a man of taste and discernment. When he returned to The Masque of the Red Death in 1964, he did not care that the screenplay he had in hand was too similar to Bergman. He was fine with that.

If That Nightingale Won't Sing

The Nightingale (2018) shares some elements with director Jennifer Kent's debut film, The Babadook. Both films are about motherhood. Both films are about women driven to extremes. Otherwise, the resemblance is slight. Where The Babadook was an intimate, almost private film, The Nightingale is altogether more ambitious. It takes its specific story and projects from it a more global portrait of a world that is sick at heart. It's also a good deal more violent. There were walk-outs at the showing I attended, something I can probably chalk up to an arthouse audience unaccustomed to a rape/revenge film that doesn't pull any of its punches. Even accounting for that, it's a rough film to watch. It's not an exploitation movie, not really, but it has the visceral impact of one.

Hell On Wheels

Such was Stephen King's popularity in 1983, that work on the film version of his novel, Christine, began while the book was still being edited. 1983 offered a bumper crop of films based on the writer's work, including Cujo, The Dead Zone, and Christine. The later two were directed by two of the masters of late 70s/early 80s horror movies, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. Carpenter, for his part, was coming off the failure of The Thing, a financial disaster that saw him removed from the director's chair of another King project, Firestarter,* and desperate for a hit. Christine was fast-tracked and appeared in December of 1983, a mere eight months after the novel's publication.

Double Your Pleasure

By 1971, Hammer Films were grasping at straws, trying desperately to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. There was a sea change coming in the wake of Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. Their competitors for the British horror market were producing the likes of The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Raw Meat, Don't Look Now, and Frenzy while Hammer tried to milk the last ounce of blood from their Dracula and Frankenstein franchises. Hammer's usual Gothics seemed quaint in comparison, no matter how much bright red blood they spilled or how many nubile young women they undressed. There's a cautionary tale in this if the makers of the current crop of blockbusters want to take it. In any event, Hammer's biggest success of the era was an adaptation of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla", filmed in 1970 as The Vampire Lovers. That film added a dash of transgression to the Hammer formula, given the overt lesbianism that drives its plot. They tried it again with that film's sequel, Lust for a Vampire (1971), with diminishing returns. With the third film in the Karnstein sequence, 1971's Twins of Evil (directed by John Hough), it was back to business as usual. The lesbianism was mostly gone except for one minor nod in that direction, as was everything else that made The Vampire Lovers work. In spite of that, it's not without interest.

Sleeping Like the Dead

Welcome to another installment of the annual October Horror Movie Challenge. The goal, as always, is to watch 31 horror movies before the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. At least half of those movies have to be films I haven't seen before.

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Film history hasn't been kind to Riccardo Freda. Arguably the father of Italian horror, his star has been eclipsed by his great contemporary, Mario Bava. It was Freda, not Bava, who directed the first Italian horror movie of the sound era, and only the second horror movie ever made in Italy. Bava, a cinematographer at the time, was Freda's main collaborator, and their first film, I Vampiri, was a failure in 1957. The stage had not yet been set for the revival of the Gothic horror film. They were a year too early, a year before Hammer films in England paved the way with the massive success of their Frankenstein and Dracula revivals. When Bava went back to the well with Black Sunday, it was a huge hit. Its time had come. Freda, who had lobbied hard to get a horror movie off the ground, was left behind. His next horror movie wouldn't appear until 1962, and it wouldn't make it abroad until two years later. That film was The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, starring Barbara Steele. Steele is also associated with Bava, but she only made one film for him. She was Freda's favorite collaborator, however, and it was Freda more than Bava who shaped her into a horror icon. In spite of all this, Freda is largely forgotten while the cult of Bava (justifiably) grows apace.

The Family That Plays Together...

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Ready or Not (2019, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) hit theaters a mere week after the similarly themed Blumhouse/Universal film, The Hunt, was pulled from release after whining from conservatives about "coastal elites" hunting red-state salt of the earth for sport*. Ready or Not punks this in hilarious ways. Mind you, I haven't seen The Hunt, but from the trailer, I get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, there's a certain amount of misinterpretation going on here. The trope of the rich hunting the poor for sport is not new. There are plenty of pulp novels that use this plot and there are rip-offs of The Most Dangerous Game without number. Hell, one of the films that came out at the start of 2019, Escape Room, used this trope, too. Moreover, the dichotomy between hunter and hunted has never been about liberal versus conservative, so much as it has been haves versus have nots. There's a core of Marxist critique of a murderous, decadent aristocracy in this trope that cannot be erased no matter how much you try, and it's amplified by appearing in an era of unrestrained billionaire plutocrats. There's a line in John Woo's Hard Target that makes all of this explicit when Lance Henricksen's hunting guide explains to a client that "It has always been the privilege of the few to hunt the many." Ready or Not is very much coded along these lines. It's lucky in its timing because it fills a void that might otherwise not have existed.

Two for the Road

I knew I was going to owe my brain an apology when I sat down to watch The Fast and the Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019, directed by David Leitch), so I'm mildly surprised that it wasn't quite as dumb as I was expecting. What I got was a ridiculous action movie starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, and it delivers the action thrills promised by the trailers. It's been a weird evolution for this film's overall franchise from street racing b-movie to sci fi espionage epic. The only franchise I can think of to undergo an even more drastic evolution is Don Mancini's Chucky movies. But that's a different matter. This is as deep a movie as a slick of rain on concrete, but I did notice odd flourishes seeping in from the ambient culture.

Keeping the Gators Fed

Crawl (2019, directed by Alexandre Aja) isn't nearly as much fun as Piranha, the director's last foray into the revolt of nature film, but it offers uncomplicated horror movie thrills and plenty of red meat in spite of that. I mean, sure. Horror fans are still waiting for Aja to replicate the intensity and what-the-fuck-ery of his debut film, High Tension, but it seems increasingly likely that he never will. If that means lean commercial horror movies like Crawl, well, there are worse ways a career can go. Crawl, for its part, is pretty entertaining in its own right.

Adding Color to the Sky

"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky."--Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

There is a gloomy sense of millennial unease threaded through Fast Color (2018, directed by Julia Hart), a sense of a world on the downward side, worn out, done. In spite of its fantasy plot, this is very much a film about climate change and the looming extinctions--possibly including our own--that the century ahead holds in store. Contrary to its title, it's a monochrome film, shot mostly in de-saturated colors across desolate landscapes. Like many genre films that don't want to be thought of as genre films, it's a dour, unhappy experience.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

"The devil is not as black as he is painted." -- Dante, The Inferno

I have to admit, I was looking forward to the new Hellboy movie in spite of the wave of negative reviews that hit the week before it opened. I mean, sure, it was never going to be Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy, and it would take a bit of getting used to someone beside Ron Perlman in the role, but things move on with these sorts of franchise movies. If anything, I thought David Harbour was pretty good casting and I've liked Neil Marshall's work in the past (even the critically derided Doomsday). And Mike Mignola's comics provide a wealth of material. Too much so, as it turns out. Marshall's Hellboy (2019) reminds me a bit of Doomsday, in so far as it's a mishmash of various sources. It plays a bit like an anthology film, with the film's main plot acting as a framing sequence. This does the film no favors though.

Last Exit to Nowhere

My friend, Willow Catelyn, has written an excellent essay about Detour in her ongoing posts about the Criterion Channel's movies of the week. You should all read that.

Meanwhile, I wrote about Detour a lonnnnggggg time ago in what seems like another lifetime. I looked at that brief review this morning and it holds up nicely. This is it:

Detour, 1948. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Edmund MacDonald, Claudia Drake.

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At first glance, this poverty row quickie seems like any other Z-grade thriller that studios like PRC and Republic cranked out during the thirties and forties. It is certainly cheap, made for $10,000 with only six interior sets and a cast so small that it seems to take place in some hermetically sealed pocket universe. But there is a weird alchemy at work in this movie the likes of which occurs very rarely (other films in which this alchemy occurs include White Zombie and Night of the Living Dead). There is a spark of otherness that transcends its cheapness and turns that very cheapness into an asset. That hermetically sealed universe is a microcosm where doom stalks every character. It is a disjointed movie, filled with non-sequiturs and broadly pitched performances that take the movie out of the realm of the here and now and into the land dreams and hallucinations. The film follows good-natured loser Tom Neal cross-country to meet his fiance. Along the way, he gets detoured by the death of the man who gives him a ride. Panicking, he hides the body and continues on, only to meet fatal femme Ann Savage, who knows all about it. She blackmails him and seals his doom as well as her own. The movie is straightforward enough in telling us all this, but it is riddled with those non-sequiturs I mentioned, those strangely out of place coincidences. After careful examination of the film, one begins to suspect that the narrator is lying to us and those strange lapses in the flow of events are covering things up. Even on first viewing, the hints of things behind the curtain of the reality presented to us carry a hell of a punch, which is why Detour remains in the mind longer than any movie that cheap and that calculated as exploitation has any right to. This has a curious side effect: Detour may well be the only film in history that improves in inverse proportion to the quality of the print. The more battered and grainy the film, the better the movie. This functions as an amplification of the squallor on the screen and further removes the film from the shackles of verisimilitude.

By the time Detour came out, the great cycle of horror movies of the thirties had run its course. After the war, film noir took its place, feeding on a disillusionment and an anomie that is quite different from the desperation of the depression. The war showed that there were far worse things than "hard times" and the American consciousness was never the same. As a result, films like Detour presented far more virulent nightmares than the fur and fang epics of the heyday of the Universal monsters. And like all of the best film noir and hard-boiled fiction, Detour maneuvers itself into a state of existential nothingness worthy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Detour is film noir's blackest Bete Noir.

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True/False 2019: Scenes from the Resistance

There are always countervailing narratives at True/False (and, I imagine, at other documentary festivals). For every apocalyptic cautionary tale, there is an account of people resisting the horrors of their times. This year was no different. These kinds of films provide an uplift if you've just seen some of the dystopian nightmares presented in other films. Usually. Sometimes they're ambivalent.

True/False 2019: A Boot to the Face Forever

George Orwell, ever the optimist, once suggested that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." This undercurrent of despair underlines several of this year's documentaries, which chronicle the future of labor, the future of governments, the pre-apocalyptic mood of generations waiting for climate change to get worse, and the underlying sickness afflicting everything.

True/False 2019: The Queen of Soul and the Queen of the Bronx

Amazing Grace (2018, directed by Sydney Pollack and completed by Alan Elliot) chronicles the recording of the album of the same name by Aretha Franklin. The album remains the biggest-selling Gospel album ever recorded; the film has sat unreleased for nearly fifty years, beset by technical problem that have only been correctable with the advances of filmmaking technology of the present era, and by Franklin's own dissatisfaction with the film. I think I "get" why Franklin might have had qualms. As presented in what is basically a church service, she sublimates her own personality to the decorum of religion, something of which the Rev. James Cleveland reminds the audience at the outset. There is certainly a patriarchy at work in the musical and religious traditions from which this is drawn (Ray Charles, for example, famously appropriated the call and response dynamic of a male preacher revving up a choir). Aretha doesn't really talk much in the film--she's there to sing after all--but Cleveland and Aretha's father sure do. There's also a curious merging of the religious and the secular, which is pronounced even if it is at the heart of soul music in the first place.

True/False 2019 Day One: Moonshots and Provocations

I thought last year's True/False Film Festival was an off year, in spite of crowd-pleasers like Three Identical Strangers and Won't You Be My Neighbor in the line-up. I mean, I had a good time and I saw some really good films, but I've gotten jaded in the last few years. I've been expecting something to knock me on my ass the way something like The Look of Silence or Stories We Tell did, and it hasn't been happening. Those kinds of films are once in a generation films, I suppose. It's entirely possible that I just hit the lows last year and the other films were amazing, but you never know. The first two films I saw at this year's festival are reason enough to think this year will be better. In fact, it's probably already better.