Playing the Mind Guerrilla

How degenerate has the movie industry become that John Carpenter--John mother fucking Carpenter!--has to have the backing of b-movie actress Amber Heard to get a job directing a movie? Is this a reflection of how low Carpenter's own career has sunk or a reflection of the movies generally? Or both? I don't know. I DO know that I'm mad as hell that I never got to see his new film, The Ward (2010), in a theater. I mean, Carpenter's name alone would have guaranteed a decent release even a decade ago, but this film, like a LOT of independent films these days, is in the twilight zone between limited festival release and video on demand. It doesn't deserve it, either, because I think this would have played fine at the multiplex.

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Down in the Trenches

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

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I have an acquaintance from my days in the gun industry whose favorite movie is Apocalypse Now. I got into a discussion with him once about why he liked the film and his response was that it was "badass." He was particularly fond of Robert Duvall's character, but I think he also grooved on all the severed heads at the end of the movie. This underlines the essential risk of making war films, even war films that are ostensibly anti-war. Some audiences are going to groove on them for all the wrong reasons.

Apocalypse Now has the right idea. It deals with war as an abstraction, as an allegory. More importantly, it approaches warfare in its second half not as an action film or as a document, but as a horror movie, which may very well be the only idiom for dealing with the concept of war with anything approaching honesty. Unfortunately, it spends so much of its running time depicting the Vietnam War realistically before it makes this tonal shift that it doesn't quite turn the trick of turning off viewers like my friend. It horrifies, but it also thrills. I can't exactly fault the film for this--big budget films are entertainments, after all--but it does suggest to me that whatever its other merits, for some viewers, it goes awry.

But I don't want to write about Apocalypse Now, per se. The movie I want to talk about is a modest low budget horror film from 2002 called Deathwatch, directed by M. J. Bassett, set in that most horrifying of wars, The Great War to End All Wars.

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Into the Wood

Note to self: if I ever find myself in a position to take advantage of some supernatural boon, I plan to follow the conditions of that boon to the letter. Because, really, if you break the rules when, say, bringing your dead daughter back to life, things will ONLY end badly. This is the lesson of Wake Wood (2011, directed by David Keating), an unassuming little Irish horror movie released as part of Hammer Studio's recent revival.

In tone and spirit, it's closer to Hammer's aesthetic than either Let Me In or The Resident, vampires and Christopher Lee not withstanding. But it's still not quite there yet. It reminds me more of an Amicus production, or better still, a Tigon film, one of those films from the baby Hammers in which Pagan cults still haunt the British countryside. But the resemblance is only superficial. There are four decades between those old films and this one, and even though the formula is the same, the conventions of the horror film are dramatically different. Horror movies--even at budgets as low as the one for Wake Wood--show a level of craft these days that would have beggared Hammer or Amicus or Tigon. Visually, it's very much of its time.

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Suffering for Art

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

--David Cronenberg

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I've been kind of stumped when it comes to Darren Aronofky's Black Swan (2010).

On the one hand, it seems like it's cobbled together from a bunch of other movies. On its surface, it's a quasi-remake of The Red Shoes crossed with Repulsion, Carrie, and The Fly. It's an exploitation film masquerading as an art film, right down to the Oscar-winning performance of its lead actress, who exploits and is exploited by the film. None of this is a criticism, by the way. Merely a description. Darren Aronofsky tends to make exploitation films dressed up as art films. You cannot tell me that Requiem for A Dream isn't pushed hard over the line into exploitation by the scene where Jennifer Connelly ends up impaled on a dildo the size of my forearm, and you can't tell me that Black Swan doesn't do the same thing when it shows Mila Kunis going down on Natalie Portman. That Aronofsky is able to convince A-list actresses to perform in these kinds of scenes speaks to a director of considerable persuasive skills. These kinds of scenes do tend to undercut the high-mindedness of the director's films, though.

...And on the other hand, this is a film that puts its index finger on the psychological pressure points of my own household. There's nothing in horror movies more apt to leave bruises than the shock of recognition. I'm actually reluctant to describe exactly why the film hits home for me so precisely because it's intensely personal.

So I'm stumped.

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The New Flesh, Revisited

Don't Look Back (2009, directed by Marina de Van) takes on the shifting identities of an unstable woman and literalizes them on screen on the bodies of the actresses. This is a very Cronenbergian idea, and this film plays the same kinds of games with shifting realities as one finds in movies like Videodrome and Naked Lunch. Like those films, this is a visceral "body horror" movie, though one with a sheen of a high gloss A-list European film. If you're going to make a body horror movie, I suppose it doesn't hurt to have the bodies of Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci on which too enact your psychodrama. That its lead actresses are among the most beautiful people on the Earth makes the mutability of their flesh all the more creepy to watch. That they turn into each other over the course of the movie, is perverse enough, but the special effects that accompany the transformation are singularly disturbing.



The film follows Jeanne, a travel writer who is bored with her work and wants, instead, to write a novel. The novel has an ulterior motive, though, because Jeanne doesn't remember anything that happened to her before the age of eight and she hopes the novel will unlock those memories. Unfortunately, as she begins to write the book, things around her begin to...change. Her husband, her children, her mother, they all seem like they're becoming stranger to her. Worse, she's becoming a stranger to herself, and soon she actually finds herself changing into another woman. That other woman has no more anchor to her reality than she does, and she pursues the clues she finds in photographs toward her identity. Unfortunately, she begins to change back...

It's difficult to know what's real and what's imagined in the first act of Don't Look Back. The movie makes so many subtle changes in its early going that it never gives the viewer a steady place from which get her bearings. When the movie finally divulges its secrets, it seems a lot less subversive than one would hope from its Cronenbergian beginnings. The end of the movie turns into a standard Gothic "return of the repressed" narrative built around a childhood trauma. Unfortunately, the movie has torpedoed this with an early narrative that doesn't play fair with the audience. The end of the film seems entirely too benign after the horrors of its first half, and its transformation into a bittersweet quasi-ghost story seems unearned to me. Your mileage may vary.

Still, that early going carries a jolt. There's a period during this part of the movie where our two lead actresses inhabit the same body, and this is one of the creepiest special effects I've ever seen. The movie is a showcase, too, for its lead actresses, and regardless of my disappointment with the soft landing at the end of the movie, this is well acted by two genuine by-golly movie stars, and part of the joy of watching movies is watching actors, to say nothing of astonishingly beautiful women. The willingness of the filmmakers to deform the flesh of its leads is gravy. The movie itself is good looking, too. Marina de Van gives the film a high gloss polish. It's a film where all the rough edges come from the story itself rather than the way its presented. It goes down easy and never drags. In spite of its influences, this is neither an art film, nor a genre film (strictly speaking), so much as it is a commercial film. The surface polish is part and parcel of this. What cognitive dissonance and psychological discomfort the movie manages to inflict on a viewer is all smuggled under the surface. Its central horror--the dislocation of one's very identity--is one that easily exists in this context. And if, ultimately, it doesn't have an instinct for the jugular, well, that's okay, because it still goes down smooth.

Current tally: 14 films

First time viewings: 14

My internet has been unreliable today, so a light round-up of links:

The Vicar of VHS returns with his take on [•REC]2.

Meanwhile, Tim over at The Other Side gives Let Me In a chance.

Bob over at The Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind has another challenge diary, including thoughts on Mad Love, The Man in the Attic, The Amityville Horror, and Martyrs.

Horror is Hard, Dying is Easy

I wonder how people in film towns keep a straight face when watching movies. All through A Horrible Way To Die (2010, directed by Adam Wingard), I was distracted by the fact that it was shot in my home town of Columbia, Missouri, and parts of the film became for me an exercise in spotting the locations ("Hey! That's the Broadway Diner! And that's the wine shop!"). There are one or two crew members from the film that I've met, too. Does all of this constitute a conflict of interest? Maybe.

This movie represents something kind of interesting. On its most basic level, this is a low-budget, low-key relationship drama, made on a tiny budget and featuring seemingly improvised dialogue. It's one of the spiritual children of the films John Cassavettes used to make. But this film slightly changes the conditions of the idiom by introducing genre elements. One of the corners of the film's relationship triangle is a serial killer, and the movie spends some of its time documenting his rampage as he works his way back to the wife he left behind when he was sent to prison. Like last year's Cold Weather, this is a film that finds mumblecore expanding its field of view.

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More Scenes from the Apocalypse

'Tis the season for economic horror movies, I guess. Stake Land (2010, directed by Jim Mickle) is another snapshot of the zeitgeist, in which the survivors of the apocalypse wander through the wreckage of America. The thing is, though, that the wreckage of America wasn't purpose-built for the movie. It was already out there waiting for the filmmakers to shoot it. This is the horror movie as looking glass, and what you see on screen is as through a glass, darkly.

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Growing Pains

The New Daughter (2009, directed by Luiso Berdejo) is one of those orphaned movies that distributors like to stuff in a sack and throw off a bridge. It barely crept into theaters before being unceremoniously dumped on home video. It stars Kevin Costner, who doesn't really do horror movies, and with good reason. It's surprising to find him in this movie, actually. I guess his career has seen its best days. Still, it's not the debacle you would expect.

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In Every Dream Home, a Heartache

Dream Home (2010, directed by Ho-Cheung Pang) is an artifact of the zeitgeist. The global housing bubble hit Hong Kong, too, and, as it did everywhere else, it popped in 2008. But in the run-up, people did a lot of foolish things. At the beginning of Dream Home, there's an onscreen credit that claims that it's based on a true story, though I haven't verified that. If it is, well, real life is more like a horror movie than we normally think. A pretty outrageous horror movie, at that.

The story here follows Cheng Lai-Sheung (Josie Ho), a telemarketer for a bank who dreams of owning her own flat. The one she's got in mind has a view of the harbor, but such properties are expensive and she has plenty of competition. When the deal she has lined up falls through, she takes drastic action to change the rules of the game to her advantage. This involves brutally murdering eleven people. Real estate can be pretty cutthroat. Literally, in this case.

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Sticks and Stones

At some point, Spanish director Jaume Balagueró needs to start entering the discussion as one of the premier horror filmmakers of the last decade. Film after film finds the director expanding his own idiom and finding more and more acute pressure points with which to scare audiences. Unfortunately, all of his films have had difficulties in the American market through no fault of his own, whether it's suffering at the hands of the Weinsteins or having the misfortune of having his signature film scooped up for an American remake (and held off the American market). The guy can't catch a break. It's no surprise that his 2005 film, Fragile, has been similarly ill-starred. It was finally picked up for video distribution by Fangoria. It deserves better.

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Buyer's Remorse

I think the mistake I'm making with the October Challenge this year is that I'm not peppering my month with legitimately good movies. I haven't watched anything this month to alleviate the feeling that this year's challenge is a chore rather than an adventure. Things did not improve with The Resident (2011, directed by Antti Jokinen), a film that has an excellent cast and style to burn, but squanders both. I mean, it's watchable. It's even heartwarming to see the venerable Christopher Lee in another movie bearing the Hammer Studios imprimatur. But "watchable" isn't the same as "good."

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Gone to Ground

The Burrowers (2008, directed by J. T. Petty) isn't the first genre film to channel The Searchers. I mean, you can see hints of The Searchers in movies from Star Wars to Taken. It's one of the most influential movies ever made, after all, so it's not a surprise to see it resurface in a horror movie even at this late date. I was thinking about this last night as the credits rolled at the end of the movie, because it seems perverse and funny to me that the two most influential narrative types in the horror movies of the last half century are Westerns (the other is Rio Bravo, by the way, which is the template upon which Night of the Living Dead and its imitators are built). I smiled a bit that I was finding an Nth generation version of this in a horror movie set in the American West, in which the central themes of racism and obsession are reenacted. Hell, it even has something of the same feel for landscapes.

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No Good Deed...

The most disappointing thing about Case 39 (2009, directed by Christian Alvart) isn't that it's ridiculous. That's a given in any movie about evil children and if you're in for horror movies about evil children, you had better be willing to ride that roller coaster off the rails. No, that's not it. The most disappointing thing about it is how unimaginative its monster turns out to be. I don't mean in the literal sense of its conception, though that's kind of disappointing, too. I mean in terms of its visual design. This is kind of a crisis in horror movies right now, because too many effects houses are concepting the same damned monsters. I'm giving away the plot, but screw it: there's a demon in Case 39, and it's a demon that looks EXACTLY like the creepy old woman that goes berserk at the beginning of Legion and the vampires in I Am Legend and any number of other human-ish monsters of recent vintage. From my perspective, horror filmmakers tasked with creating monsters have the best fucking job in the world and it's unconscionable to me that most of them don't give it their all and rely, instead, on boring designs already out in the world. It's lazy. Say what you like about Guillermo Del Toro or Peter Jackson, they at least take the job of creating monsters seriously.

Anyway, as I say, Case 39 is ridiculous.

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The Ghost in the Machine

It's all that I can do to keep from counting Tron: Legacy (2010, directed Joseph Kosinski) as a horror movie. I mean, yeah. I get it. It doesn't feel like a horror movie, with its sleek, glazed surfaces and its visionary digital landscapes and its weird, quasi-fetish wardrobes. But the fact that Tron: Legacy is Frankenstein is completely inescapable to my way of thinking. That it doubles down on its roots in horror by casting its monster as a doppelganger only deepens its shadows. It's a horror movie in the sense that Metropolis is a horror movie. It's a Gothic set in an autoclave. Science fiction, it should be noted, has been a Halloween-y genre for a long time, from the publication of Frankenstein to that long-ago Halloween in 1938 when Orson Welles terrified the nation and beyond. Science fiction and horror both occupy le fantastique, after all, like two peas in a pod.

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Blues for a Red Planet

Here's the first coherent opinion I formed while watching The Angry Red Planet (1958, directed by Ib Melchior): "Holy crap! Look at all that stock footage!" I didn't go through and count the minutes, but the percentage of the film that's constructed from other people's footage is dramatically high. The footage actually shot for the film jumps off the screen. That's never good. This is another sci fi film I managed to avoid when I was younger, and I can't say that I would have liked it even then, because this one kind of sucks. I'm four for four for the challenge this year, and I'm desperate for a film that I can write about without the urge to jump up and down screaming: "This sucks, this sucks, this sucks!" But that's what I'm stuck with, I guess.

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Blood Will Tell

If ever there were any doubt that some actors have an indefinable suitability for horror movies, I give you Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961, directed by Sidney J. Furie), a film undone in its entirety by a lead actor who has no business whatsoever playing the lead in a horror movie, let alone a mad scientist. I've never seen a movie so completely bushwhacked by its choice of a leading man. It's not that Kieron Moore is attractive in a leading-man sort of way, which isn't necessarily poison to a career in horror. Hell, Christopher Lee was attractive. So was John Barrymore. It's just that there's something undeniably "wrong" with Moore relative to the genre, something that marks him as a fish out of water. He confirms the existence of "it" by the complete void left in "it's" absence. It's all in the negative space, I suppose.

The movie is a b-picture programmer about the title character, Dr. Peter Blood, who is expelled from his research program in Vienna for experimenting on humans. He returns home to England, where someone is kidnapping the locals and swiping medical supplies from the local doctor. When he joins the hunt, it becomes clear that Dr. Peter Blood is up to some serious hanky panky. Indeed, his experiments are designed to bring the dead back to life!

"Wait!" you might be saying. "Isn't this the plot of Re-Animator?" Well, yes. It is. It's also the plot of Frankenstein, I guess, but, man, this seems like a low-grade first draft of Stuart Gordon's film, minus the gore and Barbara Crampton's creamy flesh and Jeffrey Combs's "it" factor. In exchange, Doctor Blood's Coffin gives us Hazel Court (which is a good thing) and the Cornwall coastline (which is also a good thing) and a young Nicolas Roeg on camera (another good thing). Hell, it even has a sense of willful perversity as our deranged hero attempts to court Nurse Parker (Court) by raising her dead husband from the dead. I'm a little uncomfortable with the speechifying about god and the nature of the soul, but that's the grumpy atheist in me, so pay it no mind. But this film also has Moore, who sucks it all into himself like an errant black hole. Seriously, this should work, but it doesn't. It sits there lifeless on the screen.

Current tally: 3 films

First time viewings: 3

Around the web:

Insanislupus at 1001 things takes on Pinocchio's Revenge. He's braver than I am.

Andreas at Pussy Goes Grrr takes on It (the miniseries based on Stephen King's novel) and finds it wanting.

Hitching a Ride

Are great movies always sui generis? Are they always innovative? Not at all. I mean, when you have a movie based on a samurai version of a Dashiell Hammett novel and recast as a western, you're not dealing with originality but the result is A Fistful of Dollars. Digging back through the detritus of genre will unearth a lot of cases like this. Influences are like rocks thrown into placid water, with the ripples creating interference patterns and waves. I couldn't help think about that while I was watching It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958, directed by Edward L. Cahn), which is such a primary influence on Alien that I can't believe that there were no lawsuits. (There was a lawsuit from A. E. Van Vogt over Alien's similarities to his story, "Black Destroyer"). Alien is a legitimately great movie, though, and It! is not.

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Challenge Links, Day 2

Around the web:

Eric at Expelled Grey Matter is inaugurating his blog with 30 Days of Night. Welcome to the blogosphere!

Pussy Goes Grrr is still stretching before the marathon. Andreas gives their readers an overview of their last year in horror movies.

Darius over at Adventures in Nerdliness is off to a flying start with The Devil Within Her and Sea of Dust. He even took time out for a kung fu movie on the side.

From Heck

Pia Zadora once claimed that Peter Sasdy, the director who guided her to a Golden Raspberry award for her infamous performance in The Lonely Lady, was the worst director in the history of directors. I think that might be giving the man too much credit. When you get down to it, spectacularly bad directors have a kind of charm, which is why the work of such cinematic criminals as Ron Ormond or Al Adamson persist in the outer twilight zone of the pop culture imagination. To say nothing of Ed Wood. Sasdy just isn't in that league. His films are generally anonymous, often indistinguishable from workmanlike television productions of the period. They are vapid and unimaginative. A case in point is The Hands of the Ripper (1971), a film I've had in my Netflix queue for quite some time. I it dumped there with a bunch of other nondescript Hammer films last year and never did get around to it until now. It's pretty bad.

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The Riddle of Steel

The summer of 1982 was the first season my movie habit really took off. It was the first time I had money and mobility enough to go to the theater on a regular basis and I abused it like you wouldn't believe. I was still too young to get into R-rated movies, but that didn't stop me. I was adept at sneaking into these by paying for PG movies and sneaking into the others. It was also really the first year that genre pictures--particularly fantasies--began to dominate the market. What a summer that was! You had Poltergeist, E. T., Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing, Cat People, The Dark Crystal, The Beastmaster, Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D, Quest for Fire, The Secret of N.I.H.M., and Tron. Some of these remain favorites. The movie I remember looking forward to the most in the spring of 1982 was Conan the Barbarian (directed by John Milius). It was rated R, too, but I didn't have to sneak into it. My dad took my brothers and I to a Saturday evening showing. It was a "dad" kind of movie.

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The October Challenge is Nigh!

The Seventh Annual October Horror Movie Challenge begins next week. This year, I'll be doing something a bit differently. I'm going to run it like a blogathon. So, in addition to making (theoretically) daily posts about my own horror movie viewings, I'll be posting links to other bloggers who have taken up the challenge. If you want to participate, let me know in the comments or email me at archaeopteryx_wtw at yahoo dot com and I'll add you to my spreadsheet and RSS reader.

Some history: The October Challenge started on the IMDB's horror message board. The rules are simple: Watch 31 horror movies over the 31 days of October. At least 16 of these movies must be movies you've never seen before. You are, of course welcome to watch as many horror movies as you like beyond the basics, so don't let me stop you. Within the basic challenge, many participants undertake additional challenges. For instance: last year, I challenged myself to watch 31 movies that I hadn't seen before allowing myself to watch any old favorites. Some other suggestions: 31 Asian horror movies, 31 horror movie sequels, 31 European horror movies, 31 horror movies from a specific decade, etc. These obviously require some planning and certainly added spice. You can watch them all in any configuration you like. All in one go or rationed out over the month. The only thing that matters at the end is the final number, not how you got there.

Finally: last year, I undertook the October Challenge for charity. Last year, my charity was the National MS Society. I pledged fifty cents for every movie I watched and at the end of the challenge cut them a check for $20. This year, I plan to do the same and invite others to pledge against my viewings as well (or to pledge against their own viewings). I also pledged some amount on my friend, Aaron Christensen's challenge. Aaron was my editor for Horror 101 and he is an all-around fantastic guy. His charity last year was an AIDS charity in Chicago. This year, he's supporting AmeriCares disaster relief. He has the same deal. Pledge x-amount per movie--last year he only asked for a dime or a quarter--and settle up in November. He raised over a thousand bucks last year.

Finally, here are some banners you can use (Herbert West is new for 2011):

The Root of All Evil

Before last Thursday evening, I had never seen a movie from the Congo. Oh, I had seen movies that were set there--When We Were Kings is a good example--but never a feature film produced and financed by the Congolese. There's a good reason for this, actually. There hasn't been a feature film from the Congo in a quarter of a century. Viva Riva! (2010, directed by Djo Munga) breaks this silence, while demonstrating the structural barriers to a national Conglolese cinema at the same time. It's also a brutal exploitation thriller. If you're going to found a national cinema, there are worse ways to go about it.

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Flashion Statements

This is my entry into the Fashion in Film blogathon over at The Hollywood Revue. This is actually something I wrote quite some time ago, reworked a bit for the blogathon. Enjoy.

My long-suffering girlfriend is convinced that I’ve lost my mind. First, there was the Robby the Robot incident, in which I hurried her to the computer to show her a web site (http://www.the-robotman.com/) that sells seven foot-tall FUNCTIONING replicas of Robby and implored her to consider getting me one next Christmas (in truth, I would prefer to have either Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still or Maria from Metropolis, but this guy doesn’t sell those.

Then there was the Elvis lunacy. I was watching the end of a movie on the Fox Movie Channel (which mysteriously became available to us recently in spite of us making no effort to acquire the channel through our cable company). The movie was Battle for the Planet of the Apes, a palpably awful movie for which I never the less have a great deal of affection. Immediately following the final roll of the credits, this....advertisement...for something called “King-tinued” comes on, featuring a credible Elvis impersonator draped in an American flag singing Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. “Today’s hits, sung Elvis-style!” the announcer blared, and sure enough, some the worst pap of AOR pop music, including BOTH versions of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” the aforementioned “Tears in Heaven,” et al. scrolled up the screen. But WAIT! There’s MORE! You ALSO get “King-Country!” As if the other disc WASN’T enough, you can ALSO hear the King singing the latest country hits (and some not so latest ones, like “The Gambler”). What music collection is complete without The King of Rock and Roll doing HIS take on Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA?” After my brain recovered from this, I was gripped by a divine madness: I WANTED this disc. Bad. It would go into my music collection alongside “The Ethel Merman Disco Album.“

My girlfriend wouldn’t permit it, bless her heart. That mania passed eventually, but sometimes, I still feel it seething just under my conscious thoughts.

Which brings me to the last bit of mania: There is no earthly reason I should derive as much enjoyment out of Mike Hodges’s update of Flash Gordon as I do, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t grin all the way through it the last time I saw it. The film is a travesty: it has a thinly disguised contempt for its source material and the audience for the source material, much as the Batman TV show had contempt for its source--interesting that both flow from the pen of one Lorenzo Semple, eh? It has a producer in Dino De Laurentiis who seems intent on duplicating his early Barbarella with the primary source instead of at second hand. And it has a lead couple in Sam Jones and Melody Anderson who deliver two of the worst performances in big budget film (and that’s saying something). The sneering attitude the film takes to sex and innuendo seems drawn more from Flesh Gordon than the comics or old movie serials

But....man, the production design of this film is really cool: a loving recreation of the day-glo look of the comics combined with William Cameron-Menzies-style grandiosity. The skies of Mongo, a multi-colored profusion of elaborate cloud-tank special effects are like no other science-fiction setting in film. The costumes are agreeably ornate and unbelievably tacky as only disco-era costumes can be. Max Von Sydow has taken a lot of heat for the roles he was taking during this period (many for De Laurentiis), but I can’t imagine a better actor as Ming the Merciless. You can see a barely controlled glee beneath the surface of his performance. Bergman never permitted him anything this broadly outlandish. The Queen soundtrack has kept this movie in the circle of "cult" movies for quite some time now.

I could just leave the justifications at that, but that doesn’t really explain the mania that gripped me during this film. The elements that really seal the deal are of a more personal nature.

When I first saw this film in 1980, the adolescent me developed an unhealthy obsession with Ornela Muti as Princess Aura. This wasn’t an innocent adolescent crush, but a full blown fetish. Her Princess Aura--a better predatory sex kitten pulp sci-fi has never seen--featured prominently in many a nocturnal fantasy. It was never Muti herself, mind you. I’ve seen her in a number of other films and her presence in these never really fired such a glandular reaction. It was Muti as Aura, the nymphomaniac daughter of Ming the Merciless, a character who promises unspeakable pleasures and torments....The only thing in movies, for me anyway, that rivals Princess Aura is Jane Greer in the first scenes of Out of the Past.

The other personal appeal is also probably fetishistic. The drag queen in me has been fixated for a long time on the gown Dale Arden wears for her wedding to Ming in this film. As I said, all of the costumes are ornate and unbelievably tacky, whether it's Princess Aura's skin-tight spandex or General Kala's dominatrix drag by way of Christopher Strong. And so it is for this gown, a creation in beaded black scales that flow like liquid over the curves of Melody Anderson’s body, with threatening winged epaulets and matching headdress. I mean, just LOOK at this thing:

This sucker is the soul of a drag gown. Truth to tell, like Robby the Robot and “King-tinued,” I want one. Bad.

And so I watched Flash Gordon unfold with mounting anticipation, occasionally diverted by the performances (Brian Blessed’s performance as Prince Vultan is particularly ripe), until the segments with Princess Aura would have my unwavering attention and until the film culminates with that glorious gown. Somehow, I doubt that this is a healthy approach to movies...

Heart of Cinema

This is part of the Guy Maddin blogathon over at Fandor's Keyframe blog. Thanks to Kevin Lee for inviting me to participate.

Back when I was in the video business, we got a steady stream of requests for Guy Maddin movies. I think we eventually got Tales of the Gimli Hospital and The Twilight of the Ice Nymphs before we closed up shop. There was a constant and surprising demand for these movies, given that this was the pre-Internet era and given that we were not doing business in a major city. I have to admit that I didn't "get" either of those movies when I initially saw them. Which is to say, I understood what Maddin was up to, but they seemed like intellectual exercises to me. They didn't grab me by the short hairs and drag me into their delirium. I didn't come around to Maddin until sometime later.

"The Heart of the World," Maddin's 2000 short film for the Toronto Film Festival, turned out to be the Rosetta stone for me regarding Maddin's aesthetic.

"The Heart of the World," like most of Maddin's films, looks back at disused cinematic traditions that the director rescues from the dustbin of history. It's mainly inspired by Russian silent films, with an emphasis on rapid montage. It's what you might get if Eisenstein had got it on with Vertov and been unleashed on the scene dock at UFA. A staccato score that emphasizes its forward motion accompanies the rapid flow of images. The score sends an affectionate elbow into the ribs of contemporary scores for silent movies.

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Magic and Loss

Lee Chang-dong's new film, Poetry (2010), is the kind of film I would have squirmed my way through had I been forced to watch it when I was younger. It's a slow film, filled with quotidian details that summarize the life of a 66 year old woman in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Its main plotline, summarized in its title, follows her changing perceptions once she starts taking a class in writing poetry at her local community center. The movie is a good deal darker than that might suggest, because in learning to see with language--particularly with language that she's losing--she begins to see some very dark things around her. I'll come back to that in a bit, though. First, I need to point out that my younger self was an idiot. She wouldn't have responded to the gentle, but implacable insistence of this movie because she was impatient. She wanted things to happen in a hurry. It would have been her loss. As with the protagonist of Poetry, spending a lifetime with movies eventually does teach one to see, if you're up to it.

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Bad Netflix Tonight!

Tonight is another round of Bad Netflix. Follow me on Twitter, or follow the hashtag #badnetflix. This round is being wrangled by Guts and Grog Reviews. Tonight's crimes against humanity include Asylum's Sherlock Holmes rip-off, a mathom from the late eighties called "Ninja Vengeance," and a recent offering called Dance of the Dead. Join in and follow along, if you like! We'll be starting at 8:30e/7:30c/6:30m/5:30p

Once Too Often to the Weller

This is my entry into the Juxtaposition Blogathon. The folks over at Pussy Goes Grrr are running this show. It's their first blogathon.

I got it into my head this week to watch RoboCop 3 (1993, directed by Fred Dekker), a film I barely remember seeing when it first came out. To say that it was a troubled production is putting it mildly. Peter Weller, iconic as the title character, refused to reprise the role. Nancy Allen only agreed to do it if her character were killed off. And to top it all off, Orion Pictures went bankrupt at the time of its production, causing it to sit on a shelf for two years. The movie isn't well liked by audiences, either, perhaps because of the casting, but also, perhaps, because it tones down the violence of the previous entries to gain that PG-13 rating that many genre fans hate. The film currently rates a 3.5 out of ten among the users of the IMDB. I feel kind of bad for Fred Dekker, a director I'm fond of. A lot of this was out of his control.

But the film itself? Y'know, it's not bad. It's like reading one of screenwriter Frank Miller's comics from the same period. Certainly, the film reflects Miller's preoccupation with all things Japanese, while indulging in the dystopia of The Dark Knight Returns and Give Me Liberty. It even has a character named Bertha Washington (very close to Give Me Liberty's Martha Washington). And for all the changes that occurred during its production, it feels like a RoboCop movie. The importance of Phil Tippett, Rob Bottin, and Basil Poledouris to the feel of these films shouldn't be understated, and all three of them return for this installment. Hell, Poledouris's score for RoboCop is almost as iconic as his score for Conan. Also, the movie retains the comedy value of the ED-209 robots, which I love.

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Time Out of Mind

I started reading science fiction just as the New Wave of the sixties and seventies was beginning to ebb and just before the cyberpunks showed up to trash the joint. The hot name in the genre at the time was John Varley, who was being hailed as the second coming of Robert Heinlein. It's easy to see why. Varley wrote a so-called future history, in which many of his short stories were interrelated, and he had a similar penchant for alternate sexual configurations (particularly the routine availability of sex changes). He had Heinlein's gift for extrapolating minutiae, too. And then something curious happened to him. Hollywood came a-calling and it broke him.

Varley's short story, "Air Raid," is a clever piece of time travel fiction, in which a future society of time travelers plucks the victims of airplane crashes out of their planes right before they crash in order to repopulate the world. The world of the time travelers is pretty dire, so polluted that every member of the dwindling human race is a mass of cancers and deformities. The snatch teams are the least mutated and they get the best medical care. Unfortunately for time travelers, if you're not careful with your gear, you can cause paradoxes. It's a nimble short story. It was optioned for films almost immediately. According to the author, this is what happened next:

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What Rough Beast?

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)

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I think John Carpenter may have been broken on the wheel during his sojourn through studio filmmaking. Certainly, he was never the same filmmaker after the major studios spit him out at the end of the 1980s. Too much of a maverick, I presume. He couldn't help but chafe at the bit. And it's a shame, too, because early Carpenter was one of the most exciting filmmakers of the 1970s. In any event, after about 1986, Carpenter ceased being an interesting filmmaker. But the decline was slow.

I thought about all of this as I watched Prince of Darkness (1987) the director's first indie film following the financial debacle of Big Trouble in Little China. It's a strange film. On the face of it, it's not really very good. It cobbles together a bunch of sci fi horror ideas that are each suggestive in themselves, then resolutely fails to examine them. Instead, the film devolves into another variation on Night of the Living Dead, by way of Carpenter's own Assault on Precinct 13. It's an exercise in confinement and zombies. Most great films that utilize the ideas of confinement use their settings as a microcosm that lays bare the characters trapped within it. Prince of Darkness barely registers as having characters at all. It has types to feed to the meat grinder.

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Learning Experiences

Well, my fundraiser ended yesterday. The good news? I raised $105. That's fabulous given the circumstances. The bad news? It's not enough by a long shot. So I'm calling it. No Fantastic Fest for Krell Labs this year. I've learned a few things from the experience, though.

First and foremost: timing is everything. The next time I run a fundraiser, I need to plan it for a time period when I don't have multiple deadlines looming for various freelance jobs. I should also avoid scheduling it for periods when I'm sick, but there's no avoiding that. I haven't been able to promote it the way I would have liked. But there's no guarantee that I would have promoted it anyway because...

Second: fund raising is not for the shy. I'm a lousy self-promoter because, well, I'm pretty shy. I don't want to be intrusive. I don't really want to bother people, and, frankly, that's poison for this kind of enterprise. I needed to be hitting this a couple of times a day every day.

Third: I need to use social media better. At least one of my real world friends told me last night that he had no idea that I was running a fundraiser, even though he'd seen me posting the sketch cards as I finished them on my Facebook account. On the other hand, Facebook doesn't allow me to post 70 point headlines, so be that as it may...

So here's what's going to happen. The folks who donated below the threshold to get a sketch or DVD-R are going to get a refund. I don't feel comfortable taking it if I'm not using it. Everyone else will get their sketch 0r DVD as promised.

The long term fallout of this project is a little bit less grim. First, I've actually managed to sell art over the internet. This is something I've never done before, and it suggests to me that I might be able to make a business of it. I'll probably be opening an Etsy shop in the very near future. More than that, though, people have wanted my art. As someone who has suffered from crippling self-doubt about my art, this is enormously gratifying. Thank you to everyone who asked for a sketch. It means so much.

With all that out of the way, the next installment of Bad Netflix is coming up in a couple of weeks. If you want to join in the fun, it'll take place on September 17. Guts and Grog Reviews has the details. I'll also be participating in the Juxtaposition Blogathon being run by Pussy Goes Grrr, and the Fashion in Film Blogathon being run by Hollywood Revue.