A World of Hurt

According to the director herself, Kathryn Bigelow was given one day to prove herself on the set of Near Dark before the producers replaced her with another (presumably male) director. She used that day to maximum advantage, using it to orchestrate the motel shootout in which our band of white trash vampires find themselves dodging bullets and sunbeams. If you know the movie, you haven't forgotten that scene, and Bigelow kept on directing. At this writing, she's favored to become the first female winner of the Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker (2009), having already become the first female winner of the DGA award. I've already seen speculations that, if she should win, it's because she "makes films like a man." Bigelow's movies occupy a "male" space only if you believe demographic research that states that women don't like action movies ("'Action' is a label for video store owners," she has said in the past) or only like romantic comedies. What bullshit.

What strikes me hardest about The Hurt Locker, an account of a bomb disposal tech in the Iraqi theater who gets off on the adrenalin rush from his very dangerous occupation, is not that it has the point of view of a female director, but that it has the point of view of a director who has always explored the obsessional appeal of violence. She often eroticizes it (the movie The Hurt Locker most reminds me of is the director's own Blue Steel, in which Jamie Lee Curtis answers the question of why she became a cop with "because I get to shoot people"). And here, Bigelow's background in another genre--the horror movie--bleeds into The Hurt Locker. There are two specific sequences in the film that could not have been made by a director who wasn't in touch with the sensibilities of the horror film: first, the sequence where our squad of heroes explores a captured bomb-making facility only to discover the makings of a "human bomb." In the second, our protagonists are touring the aftermath of a nighttime suicide bombing and take off into the darkness in pursuit of the enemy. Neither of these sequences reads as "action." Both of these sequences are palpably horrific.

Another element of the movie that sticks out like a sore thumb: although Bigelow is using the "run and gun" style of shooting, presumably to give the proceedings a documentary feel, she never does so in a way that obscures the geography of the scene. You always know precisely where everything is in space. In this regard, Bigelow kicks the holy crap out of directors like Paul Greengrass at their own game.

Finally, The Hurt Locker is an interesting exercise in subtextual political critique. The film goes out of its way not to point fingers about the Iraq war, or, really, to pretend that it's about anything other than its very particular characters doing their very particular jobs. Some critics have taken this to mean that it's apolitical. I don't believe that. Its acquaintance with horror is one giveaway, which kills any kind of jingoist thrill that might transform the film into war porn. Another is the jump cut at the end of the tour that places Jeremy Renner's character in a supermarket, confronted with an oppressive consumer culture. "Is THIS why we're going to war?" is the unspoken question. This is a political film, all right, but Bigelow has used the time honored technique of "smuggling" the politics into the movie in the subtext. Sometimes, movies are stronger for the elements that the director hides. This is such a movie.

Gender Fixations

I don't remember who pointed me at Princesa (2001, directed by Henrique Goldman)--it was probably one of my friends on the IMDB, but I'm not sure--but I hope they aren't offended if I stop taking recommendations for transgender-themed movies from my cisgender friends. The movies themselves keep pissing me off. This is yet another dire examination of the life of a transsexual prostitute. What is it about European films about transsexuals? Do European transsexuals not pursue other professions? Surely they must. Anyway, Fernanda, the title character is from Brazil, but works the streets in Milan in order to save money for her operation. She initially lives with fellow trans prostitute Charlo (who is not transsexual, per se), and works for transsexual madame, Karin, who fancies her. For the most part, Fernanda treats the people around her pretty poorly, especially Karin, but none of these people is exactly sympathetic. One of her Johns, Gianni, is so smitten with her that he offers to leave his wife, take her in, and pay for her operation. She treats Gianni pretty poorly, too. The poor guy doesn't have any idea of why Fernanda does anything that she does. I doubt that a non-trans audience would understand why she would object to a partner who is a bottom and the movie doesn't explain it. When she's confronted by Gianni's pregnant ex-wife, she leaves him and heads back to Karin to reclaim her spot on the street.

So, given the opportunity to escape life on the street, she finds that living as a "normal" housewife is a suffocating set of gender roles and then goes back to the streets where "she feels like she belongs." What a load of happy horseshit. I mean, I "get" the point. The life of a housewife is oppressive, the film seems to opine, blah, blah, blah. It further opines that the life of a pregnant cisgender woman is more valuable than the life of a transgender woman (and has that transgender woman acquiesce to this notion). And it offers the noxious idea that trans women would choose sex work over another kind of life. Clearly, the filmmakers don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Oh, they throw Charlo at the audience, who develops AIDS and heads back home to her parents, but that's not really held as criticism. This is a film that really is slotting a life of desperate exploitation as superior for our heroine to a life of bourgeoisie comfort. Really? Give me a break.

In any event, it's all deeply offensive.

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There's something chilly and clinical about the early going in XXY (2007, directed by Lucía Puenzo), the first film I think I've ever seen about an intersex person. The characters--at least initially--seem like specimens under the microscope of the filmmakers. This isn't helped by the austere backdrop of coastal Uruguay, filmed by director Lucía Puenzo in a cold, blue light. The story in this film concerns Alex, who was born with both male and female sex organs but lives as a girl, and her parents, who are at a loss as to how to help her through puberty and the awakening of her sexuality. This material has the potential to be exploitation or to be the equivalent of an after-school special (which is another kind of exploitation). The filmmakers feel the tug, I'm sure, but for the most part avoid this trap.

As far as the plot goes, Suli, Alex's mother, has brought a renowned plastic surgeon and his family to visit in the hopes that they will push Alex one way or another. Their son, Alvaro, has his own struggles with sexuality and with a father who is indifferent to him. It's a nice contrast that speaks to the notion that everyone has issues with their parents and their sexuality, not just gender variant children. Alvaro and Alex are drawn to each other, and each exacerbates the other's loneliness.

The film thaws considerably in its last third, as Alex's marine biologist father looks into options for Alex on his own. This leads him to meet another intersexed man who was assigned a female identity at birth, but disagreed and changed it, and their conversation injects an unexpected warmth into the film. There's also a cautionary tale embedded here, as Alex is assaulted by a group of boys on a beach who want to "see it." She is, after all, a freak in their eyes and they feel an entitlement to gaze upon the freak regardless of her own desires even though they will never really understand her. The end of the movie pulls a neat trick: it's the "normal" Alvaro whose relationship with his parents is destructive rather than Alex. In one of the film's last images, Alex puts her father's arm over her shoulder as they walk. I almost wish the entire movie was as warm as this image, but nothing makes a thing stand out like its opposite, I guess.

In any event, as a statement of self-determination in matters of gender identity, XXY is pretty enlightened. It's certainly light-years beyond other transgender movies that still fall into the stereotypes of gender variance as defined by a cissexual (cissexist) dominant culture.

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In keeping with the theme of this post, one of the major villains of Chocolate (2008, directed by Prachya Pinkaew) is a transgender gangster who keeps among her henchmen a group of transgender thugs. Far-fetched, I know, but considerably less offensive than the crap in Princesa. Beyond that, though, this is an old fashioned martial arts movie, in so far as the plot and characters don't really matter. All that matters is jaw-dropping action, and, as in director Prachya Pinkaew's collaborations with Tony Jaa, this delivers on that count in spades. The story, such as it is, follows Zen, an autistic girl who is also a kind of savant when it comes to martial arts. When she sees martial arts--on television or in real life--she can duplicate it. A useful thing when your mother used to be a gangster's girlfriend who is owed a lot of money by mobsters, especially when said mother develops cancer and needs someone to collect those debts. This film has been described as Rain Man meets Iron Monkey, and I don't disagree with that. JeeJa Yanin, who plays our heroine, has awesome martial arts moves, and the copious ass-kicking lets her show it all off in increasingly complex fight choreographies, culminating in a 20 minute blaze of glory at the end of the film. This is one of those movies like the early 1980s Jackie Chan movies in which the viewer watches the insane stunts and thinks: "Oooh! That HAD to hurt." Like those films, there are copious outtakes at the end, showing that, yes indeed, it DID hurt. These people are crazy. In any event, this is a gas.

Hair of the Dog

I was mildly surprised to find myself enjoying the heck out of the remake of The Wolfman (2010, directed by Joe Johnston), given that everything about this film, from the change of directors midstream to the changing release dates, screamed "disaster." For all of that, it's a pretty good fusion of classic horror and the more sanguinary contemporary horror movie, one that respects its sources and doesn't feel the need to trample all over an icon in the name of becoming relevant to a contemporary audience. The basic story still works. So this film doesn't really go off after its own imp of the perverse or take any real swings at the fence, per se, but, y'know, the original item didn't do that either. It's ENORMOUSLY better than any of Universal's previous attempts to jump-start their monster franchises.

Boy, howdy! is this a good-looking movie in a gloomy/gothic sort of way. The production design is primarily done in grays and blacks and reds; it reminds me of Edward Gorey's set designs for the 1970s stage revival of Dracula. The actors are all very good, with Benicio Del Toro doing an uncanny impersonation of the Chaneys (he actually looks more like Lon senior than junior), and Anthony Hopkins doing a variation of eccentric that should be a dead giveaway as to the plot turns later in the movie. Emily Blunt is fine in the thankless role of love interest--more than fine, actually; she manages to erase any fond memories I might harbor of Evelyn Ankers. Some of that might be the work of her wardrobe, which is elegant and gothy without being stereotypical.

The set pieces are engaging and well staged. Joe Johnston is a fairly classical director who doesn't go in for the run and gun style, so the audience is clued in to what's actually happening on-screen most of the time. The filmmakers have resisted the urge to tone down the violence for the PG-13 audience, but the various dismemberments don't overwhelm things. The best scene in the movie is the asylum scene, where poor, doomed Larry Talbot is trotted out for the assembled psychiatrists to demonstrate how baseless his delusions are. I wish it had a better instinct for the jugular, but it's a fun scene. And the end of the movie is like the end of the best Paul Naschy werewolf movie ever made.

All told, a pleasant surprise.

Embracing Pedro

I've been mulling over Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces (2009) for about a week now. It's a film drunk on movies. It's as constructed of other movies as any Tarantino film, and like Tarantino--hell, MORE than Tarantino--Almodovar has internalized his sources and spit them out as his own inspiration. This movie is his 8-1/2 and his Peeping Tom all rolled into one and filtered through Bad Education. It has four basic narratives, including a film within a film remake of one of his own movies, all of them centered around a director whose memories of a life in film haunt him after his blindness. More to the point, though, it provides Penelope Cruz a role that embodies everything the director loves about actresses. She's his Audrey Hepburn, Claudia Cardinale, and Marilyn Monroe all rolled into one in this movie. The opening shot during the credits tells you everything: it watches Cruz as she prepares for a take. Like the Nouvelle Vague directors, Almodovar understands that movies were invented for gazing at beautiful women.

It's in its particulars, however, that the movie sings. There are two sex scenes that give lie to the notion that there are no new ways to film sex scenes. There is a shot of Lluís Homar and Cruz together on a beach that looks like an alien landscape that says almost everything about love and the photographic image, and there is a shot in which the fictional blind director frames his last kiss with his lover between his hands as it plays on a grainy video that might be my favorite shot in all of Almodovar's films. And the climax isn't a big reveal that ties up the film's mysteries--it leaves some danging loose ends, thankfully--but is rather the restoration of a murdered movie.

All of this is filtered through a kind of formal classicism that Almodovar has been drifting towards for a little more than a decade, though, like everything else, he's internalized it and converted it into his own cinematic anima. This film is a masterpiece when viewed through that lens: beautiful, enigmatic, complex, everything anyone could want from a movie. What I mostly take away from this movie is a desire to watch more movies. In this regard, it's a gift to me at a time when my need to watch movies has been at an ebb.

Housing Crisis

At the end of Ti West's House of the Devil (2009), I had two thoughts. First, that it was the kind of movie Lucio Fulci spent the early eighties making (including Fulci's eyeball violence!). My companion for this film corrected me by noting that Fulci never directed anything as coherent as this film. She has a point. Second, this was a far better genre reconstruction than either half of the Grindhouse double feature. Those films were far too knowing. This film is deadly serious. Its jokes are almost entirely found in the formal elements rather than in the text or the subtext. For that matter, it makes far better use of familiar genre actors like Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace by virtue of giving them actual parts rather than giving them walk-on cameos as post-modern winks at the audience.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. This movie is a loving reconstruction of the sort of horror movies that were made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In terms of tone, pacing, story construction, and payoff, this is a film that would be comfortable on a double bill at a declining drive-in or on HBO at about 2:30 a.m., back when HBO was still desperate for content and showed all kinds of movies. It has a wintery existential look that suggests a film made in Canada as a tax break, if you know what I mean (it was, in fact, made in Connecticut).

The plot isolates a college student (Jocelin Donahue) looking to make money for a new apartment by accepting an unusual and unusually lucrative babysitting offer on the night of a full lunar eclipse. Her employers (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) are the kind of creepy senior citizens that befriended Rosemary Woodhouse back in 1967, which should tell you all you need to know about the plot. Tom Noonan needs to be in more movies, by the way. So does Mary Woronov.

For the most part, Jocelin Donahue does a fine job as Samantha, our heroine. It doesn't hurt that her character is wholly believable. She doesn't do anything obviously stupid, and her motivations for what might arguably be her stupidest act--when she ultimately takes the job offer--are completely justified. You can see her longing to be out on her own in the first shot to show her face (a characteristically long take comes up on her from behind as landlady Dee Wallace extols the apartment she's trying to sell her). This is set up really well. The cruel fate of Samantha's friend, Meghan (Greta Gerwig) also defies horror movie conventions, in so far as the movie doesn't seem to hold any kind of moral judgment towards her (nor should it). But then, this film has a different genealogy than that. It's not descended from the slasher movie, in spite of its "babysitter on her own" set-up.

As a formal exercise, this is a pretty tightly controlled movie. Director West, who also wrote and edited the film, shows a talent for squeezing every ounce of dread out of his long takes, and sets things up so that when the first real shock of the film happens, it's as abrupt and brutal as a bullet into your temple. More than that, though, the film has a weirdly depopulated feeling that is as isolating to the audience as it is to its central character. For the most part, the suspense the movie builds makes a promise to the audience that the payoff can't possibly keep, but it tries gamely enough with what it has. You could even argue that the end of the movie is a feminist rebuff to the normal ending of devil movies, in which the heroine takes the responsibility for her body into her own hands, though that might be stretching things a bit. In any event, if you're a long-time fan of the horror movie, the journey is pleasurable enough as it is, and, hell, those films from the eighties did the same things with their endings most of the time. And this one has a better soundtrack.

Kinda Blue

At this point, I wonder if there's even a point to writing about Avatar (2009, directed by James Cameron). I mean, I'm late to the party anyway (even though I saw it a couple of weeks ago), and what I have to say about the film has already been said. It's a technological wonder, no doubt. It's the Birth of a Nation for the new century. The 2001, even. Yada yada yada.

My own knee jerk reaction is this: there's a disconnect between the ideas expressed in the visuals and the ideas expressed in the plot. If one approaches the film only as a sensory experience--as, apparently, a majority of film-goers do--then Avatar is a wonder, and not just as a panoply of pretty colors and awesome special effects. The visuals represent world-building SF, which is a kind of SF that really hasn't appeared on movie screens before (in part because of the technological limits that Avatar makes a point of expanding). In building his world, Cameron has obviously put a lot of thought behind the science involved. Take this film's Maguffin: Unobtainium. Cameron didn't invent this name, he merely used it for his fictional stable, naturally occurring superconductor. Cameron places the properties of this in the background. The piece that Giovanni Riblisi is using as a desk ornament floats on a magnetic field. Now, I doubt seriously that Cameron started with an explanation of his floating mountains--he surely borrowed the concept from other sources, most probably Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky--but he has worked out how such a thing might actually exist, and he's really subtle about the visual explanation. The center of the mountains is a Na'vi holy place where the tree of souls resides (more on this in a moment). Here's what it looks like:

Notice a pattern? The rocks are aligned along the lines of magnetic force. The floating mountains are obviously laced with unobtanium, and they're floating on the planet's magnetic field. Similar explanations for, say, the bioluminescence of Pandora's ecology can also be seen in the background (Pandora orbits a gas giant in a double star system, so there will be periods of long night). There are countless other details that have obviously been worked out in detail. The most important of these to the movie's plot is the "connectedness" of Pandora's ecology. This might seem like a deus ex machina or a bunch of hippy-dippy bullshit, but the movie is careful about setting things up. It's established fairly early on that the life on Pandora functions as a global neural network. It's not too far to stretch this concept to assigning the ecology an intelligence, or at the very least a self-awareness, that will almost certainly defend itself. The tree of souls seems as if it functions as a kind of brain stem or, possibly, a corpus colossum for that intelligence, or, at the very least, an interface.

On a completely meta-level, the film's conceit of placing its characters in Avatars to explore this world functions nicely as a metaphor for the method of the film's own making. The Na'vi, after all, are performance capture avatars of the actors who perform them. You can extend this to the battle mechs at the end of the movie, which are also avatars of a kind. I find this neat.

In any event, this is all characteristic of world-building SF, and it has echoes of all kinds of sources. It reminds me most of Ursula Le Guin's "The Word for World is Forest," but you can see Dune here, too. And for cinematic sources, it strikes me as a kind of conflation of Terrence Malick's last two movies, The New World (which should be obvious) and The Thin Red Line (in which the filmmaker postulates that war is an affront to nature).

Unfortunately, Avatar also shares the common flaw of world-building SF: it's not really about people. The characters in Avatar are generally types, not people. It compounds this flaw by providing them with a fairly repugnant narrative. I was complaining about the "White Savior" archetype in District 9 a few weeks ago, and here it is again. What you have here is a narrative that wants to expiate the sins of colonialism after the fact. In this regard, the narrative is kind of reprehensible, and it certainly sours the experience of watching it once the thrill of the visuals and the adrenalin rush from the action wear off, which is unfortunate.

The exception to this is Sigourney Weaver's character, who manages a certain amount of humanity due to the actress's force of will, more than anything. Her Grace Augustine (a name loaded with Significance with a capital S, methinks) is a rare thing in movies: a scientist who actually behaves like a scientist! Weaver plays her as a more stable version of Diane Fossey, and gives her a credible world-weariness, even in the face of wonders undreamed of. Weaver provides me with my favorite moment in the movie, even amid the big special effects and blood and thunder. As she's dying and being brought to the tree of souls, she looks up at it and says "I should take some samples." It's a small moment, but it says everything about who she is. No one else in the movie manages that.

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A word about 3-D. Cameron deploys his 3-D in an intelligent manner--no poking things at the eye of the audience--and at times, the effect does add to the vertiginous effect the movie is going for. Cameron even blocks his actors to take advantage (he has obviously studied the way Jack Arnold blocked his actors in 3-D for The Creature from the Black Lagoon). He also gives the audience time to get used to the effect in the early going before pulling out all the stops in the last seventy minutes or so. But on the whole, I'm not sold on 3-D. The glasses are still an annoyance. I'm more impressed with the way Cameron and Weta Digital manage to create photoreal CGI characters without straying into the valley of the uncanny. Good for them.

Decade: Gangs of New York

"Some of it I half remember. And the rest? The rest I took from dreams."

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At one point, Martin Scorsese called Gangs of New York (2002) "a spaghetti western set on Mars." It's a deliriously strange movie, that shouldn't be seen as a descendant of any of Scorsese's other "gangster" pictures. This has virtually nothing in common with Mean Streets, Goodfellas, or Casino, except, of course, that the streets are mean. Of the films Scorsese made in the first decade of the 21st century, it's the one I like the best. It's the one where the experience of watching it in the theater for the first time on opening night remains indelibly etched in my brain.

I've had a lot of conversations about this movie over the years, mostly with people who don't care for it. One of my movie correspondents told me once that this was the first of a string of movies (culminating in The Departed) in which Scorsese was shamelessly playing to Academy voters. Certainly, Daniel Day Lewis's performance is so out-sized that even the meanest Academy voter can appreciate it, the argument sometimes goes. It's a pity that Leonardo Di Caprio vanishes in Lewis's shadow in this movie, leaving a hole at its center. For the most part, these conversations have convinced me, over time, that many of my movie friends don't have the barest inkling of what they are talking about with this movie. Oscar bait? Really? This movie has a character in it named Hellcat Maggie, who has filed her teeth to points, takes the ears of her enemies as trophies, and keeps them pickled in a jar at the end of a bar. If this is "Oscar bait," then give me more.

I think the key to Gangs of New York is found in that opening line of narration. This is a dream of New York, a half-remembered legend from a period and place that most people know nothing about. The mythological nature of the movie is important, just as Di Caprio's subordination to that legend is important. This is not a modern or post-modern narrative. It sprawls. It is a picaresque. Amsterdam Vallon, Di Caprio's character, is Ishmael to Lewis's Ahab, or Cormac McCarthy's nameless kid in Blood Meridian to Lewis's Judge Holden. Vallon is a viewpoint, not a character, and is intended as such. Also like those two narratives, this is about violence as a historical imperative in the formation of the American identity, and I think that this is something that the movie does brilliantly. It puts its finger on the central fissure in the American identity: the conflict between nativists and know-nothings, and the immigrants and ethnic "others," and it presses down hard. I don't agree with the critics who claim that the film is unfocused. I think it builds deliberately to a climax in which the main antagonists, nativist and immigrant, wind up indistinguishable from one another in the ruins of a New York leveled by the draft riots of the Civil War.

Apart from all of that, though, Gangs of New York is a film into which Scorsese poured every ounce of his considerable knowledge about filmmaking. This film contains what is probably my favorite single shot of the decade, in which the camera follows Irish immigrants off the boat to where they're being processed into citizenship and into the Union Army, then over to where the coffins are being loaded back onto the boats. This is all in one unbroken take. This is the cinematic equivalent to those murals that tell every part of a story in one image. It's a tour de force. And at the very end of the movie is a cut that shows Scorsese not as a Catholic filmmaker, but as a Buddhist (the director who made Kundun rather than the one who made The Last Temptation of Christ), when everything is swept away by the passage of time. That the final image of this cut is the World Trade towers is an accidental exclamation point.

Some of Scorsese's signature gifts are present in this film in singularly weird incarnations. His use of "needle drop" soundtracks, for instance, winds up mutated into a percussive mixture of fife and drum music interspersed with folk songs from the period. Present, too, is the director's obsessive attention to details, which in this film results in a riot of colorful, unfamiliar, and outre historical items, from the role of fire brigades in antebellum New York to the varieties of prostitutes and thieves to the various entertainments people used to escape their lives. This isn't a dry, period piece. At times it seems like a post-apocalyptic movie--especially at the beginning--and at others it seems like a collection of tall tales or cartoons. This last is appropriate, given that what remains in the popular imagination about this period is informed by the great cartoonist, Thomas Nast, who brought down Boss Tweed. This film provides a vivid interpretation of Tweed by Jim Broadbent. In some ways, Gangs of New York is the antithesis of Scorsese's other historical New York film, The Age of Innocence: Where that film was all tightly controlled gentility, this one is savage and sprawling; they're two sides of the same coin, one Apollonian order, the other Dionysian chaos.

In any event, the experience of watching it for the first time, as I say, is branded on my memory. It was thrilling, compulsive, and, in some ways overwhelming. There came a time near the end of the film when I realized that I was holding my breath for short periods, almost suffocated by what I was watching. It was an experience the likes of which I've never had at the movies, before or since.

Last Call for 2009

The year is winding down. Here are the last stragglers for the Christmas week. I don't know what I'll get to this week. Something, I hope.

I was really irritated with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009, directed by David Yates) the first time through. I don't know if it's the fault of the filmmakers or the DVD transfer, but the damned thing was so dark that there were long stretches where I couldn't actually tell what was going on on the screen. Annoying. The second time through, I adjusted the brightness and contrast on my tv to compensate. I don't know that it was much of an improvement, but it did save on the eyestrain. The Potter movies continue to get metaphorically darker, too, which they take from the books. This is adapted from the darkest at heart of the books, but like the last film in the sequence, it seems like it rushes from set-piece to set-piece in order to get everything in. It's all plot at the expense of character. Still, it's not all bad. Daniel Radcliffe has grown into a pretty good actor, and Emma Watson finally gives a performance that's not all twitches with eyebrows and her mouth. I'll be interested to see how they do in the final story, now that they've been stripped of mentors and allies.

I think I was sitting too close to the screen for Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes (2009), because the visual image was really soft. Checking the technical specs of the film, I find that it was filmed with both a 35mm camera and a HDTV camera, which explains, perhaps, why the image is softer at some points than others. In any event, the film is visual mud. I liked Downey and Law as Holmes and Watson, but I think turning Holmes into a kind of super action hero was a bad idea (I should note, however, that there is some justification for it in Doyle). I liked the presence of Professor Moriarty. I hated the way the movie uses him as a franchise builder. For the most part, this is a film for which I should have waited until it came out on home video.

Don't ask me what I was doing watching Punisher: War Zone (Lexi Alexander, 2008). I mean, this is a character who hasn't exactly had the best cinematic track record. I will say that I was curious to see Ray Stevenson in the part, having really enjoyed watching him in Rome. I was also curious to see another action film directed by a woman (and to see if Lexi Alexander is a patch on Kathryn Bigelow--she's not). Actually, the action sequences aren't bad. The glue that holds them all together, on the other hand, is awful. Every time a character opens his or her mouth to speak, you have to cover your ears. Stevenson comes off the best, mainly by virtue of having so few lines. I will also admit to laughing out loud at one scene where a petty crook is handcuffed to a chair as the FBI agent on the case negotiates with him, only to have the Punisher walk in and blow his head off. I guess you had to be there. Otherwise, this pretty much sucked.

I also watched District 9 (2009, directed by Neil Blomkamp) again because my partner hadn't seen it. It doesn't hold up well to multiple viewings, in part because I really hate everyone in the movie and I hate that it uses the "white savior" archetype. Odious.

Decade: The Horror Movies

The "'aughts" have been a pretty good decade for horror movies. For the last several years, I've been saying that this has been one of the genre's periodic golden ages. Unlike previous golden ages, you would never know it from the marquee at your local multiplexes. Most of the real action in the genre has been pretty sub rosa. While Hollywood studios have been recycling the genre's past successes with ever-diminishing returns, seriously great horror movies have been creating waves just below the surface. Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order. Keep in mind that I have some idiosyncratic ideas about what constitutes a horror movie, so if you think one or another of my selections don't actually qualify, feel free (but I don't really want to hear about it). Anyway...links are to old reviews of these movies both here and on my old stand-alone web site.

A Tale of Two Sisters--A puzzle movie and a ghost movie and a showcase for the craft of film making (as many Korean films these days are), this takes the tropes of this decade's Asian horror movies and applies them as an elaborate ruse as we plunge into traumatic memories in a fractured narrative.

Frailty--A religious horror movie that manages the tricky feat of disturbing the viewer regardless of his or her stance on matters of faith. From my perspective, it's a harrowing portrait of the way fundamentalism distorts families, but it pulls the rug out from underneath that quite nicely. Terrific performances, particularly from director Bill Paxton.

May--A film that drinks deep the wine of loneliness. Angela Bettis is superb as a downtrodden outsider, and the ending of this film is kind of magical even while it is deeply horrifying.

Let the Right One In--My favorite queer horror film of the decade, and also a chilly examination of the horrors of childhood.

The Devil's Backbone--I think this movie really kicks into high gear when the ghost of the murdered boy, Santi, walks away from his place of haunting and pursues our young hero through the halls of his boarding school. All bets are off at this point, and when the movie lets the horrors of war intrude at the end, it goes for the throat. A piece of work, this film.

The Host--The monster movie as family farce, this throws the script for the monster movie out the window and marches to its own drummer. It contains, possibly, THE best scene of gigantic monster mayhem ever put on film, and it puts it right up front.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer--The return of the Gothic, this is a twisted examination of obsession, shot through with fairy tale elements from the darkest of European folklore. But where it really excels is in finding a cinematic equivalent of smell. It doesn't even need to rely on smell-o-rama cards.

Inside--Probably the most relentless horror movie of the decade, this pursues its grinding horror with single-minded brutality. That it's even watchable is some kind of miracle, but it pulls this trick by mating its instinct for visceral horror with a surprisingly deft command of suspense film making. Bracing.

Pan's Labyrinth--One of the GREAT fantasy films, this is a companion piece to The Devil's Backbone. Like that film, it throws children into the horrors of war. But it also provides a dream life of children that is, in some ways, just as horrifying.

Spider Forest--The horror movie as epistemological mind fuck, or perhaps it's a cubist horror movie. Whatever it is, it's another fractured narrative from Asia that arrives in the territory of the Gothic novel and its descendants.

For the most part, though, this has been such a rich decade that ten films are just too few to really give a coherent snapshot of the state of the art. I could easily have gone in other directions. Some other suggestions:

The Others
Dagon
Drag Me to Hell
[•REC]
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
Dawn of the Dead
The Descent
Below
Seance (Kurosawa's remake of Seance on a Wet Afternoon)
Kairo
Thirst
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Slither
The Ruins
Rogue
...and any number of other films.

Those people who complain that horror is dead are morons, by the way. There has been quality filmmaking in every sector of horror filmmaking: in the mainstream, in the indie sector, on every continent, and in a broader range of sub-genres than has held sway in a very long time. It's good to be a horror fan right now.

Snowbound

So I went to see Dead Snow (2009, directed by Tommy Wirkola) last night and I think it's a movie that's going to suck on home video unless you can find a way to make it into a party.

Mind you, I had a great time at this movie, in part because I went to see it with a relatively large audience (that skewed surprisingly female) with my friend, Anna. We went to a microbrewery beforehand for dinner, so we were in a good mood. A good mood is paramount for this film, because if you're not in one, you'll get pissed off by it. The set-up is familiar, of course: vacationing young people in a remote cabin with no cell phone signal, beset on all sides by zombies (Nazi zombies, no less). It knows its cinematic roots (it explicitly name checks Peter Jackson's Braindead and The Evil Dead Movies), even if it was made in Norway, and, further, it hits the notes by rote. The role of each character is pretty much obvious from the get go, and they make their respective gore-strewn exits in more or less the order you think.



There are a lot of things to like. This film makes creative use of intestines, including one image that might elicit a spit-take if you're drinking at the time, and another in which a character witnesses their own disembowelment in a POV shot. It has an arresting visual design, too, which, much like the wood chipper scene in Fargo, uses the white landscape to spray oodles of blood in high contrast. It's a design that mirrors the colors of the Nazi uniforms worn by the zombies. But, frankly, I've seen this film before, and so have you. Lots of times. I didn't resent it, really--I don't insist on the thrill of the new--but it was disappointing.

That said, the experience of watching it made it fun. Find your best girlfriend and see it with an audience. That makes it a fun, communal experience, even if you have seen it all before. Movies can be a terrific social activity, after all. I like it a lot better than going to church or bowling, frankly.

Still and all, I can't really hate a movie that ends with the line "Oh, fuck."

Wayward Impulses

I had a brief exchange with my friend, Kevin Lee a couple of days ago, in which he was composing his "best of the decade" list and I casually mentioned that I hadn't seen any films by Ming-liang Tsai, one of his favorite filmmakers. Most of these blind spots are reserved for filmmakers of recent vintage and are the result of spotty distribution of recent foreign films in North America, and some of them are deliberate. After my experience with Abbas Kairostami, another of Kevin's favorites, I've been, well, kind of avoiding Tsai. Not necessarily because I'm using Kevin as a barometer, mind you--I've greatly enjoyed the Hsiao-hsien Hou films I've seen at his recommendation--but mostly because descriptions of his work tend to mix the words "minimalist" and "transgressive" a little too liberally. Anyway, Kevin's surprise at my admission kinda sorta impelled me to seek out something by Tsai, and the most immediately available film for me was The Wayward Cloud from 2005.

Which was probably not the best place to start.

Anyway, the first shot in the film is long, characteristic of a minimalist director. The second shot, however, is something else entirely. Here are a couple of screen caps from this shot (well, actually, I think it's from the third shot, but they're similar enough):

To which, my brain started going: "What the fuck am I watching?"

The story here involves two people who are drawn to each other during an acute water shortage in Taipei, with the male half of the couple concealing his career as a porn star. The long-take, minimalist idiom at work here, combined with the text of the movie, is fairly alienating, but unlike some alienating movies, this film is ultimately about connections. That the connection involved involves fairly explicit sex is almost beside the point, until the end of the movie, in which the connection becomes literalized with an on-screen oral copulation. I never thought I'd see a blow job that could be considered "touching" in a movie, but this comes close. It is placed, however, on the other side of a sequence of profound nastiness. Our hero's Japanese co-star finds herself unconscious for the last quarter of the movie, but that doesn't stop the filmmakers from using her to complete their porn film. The sight of a man fucking an unconscious woman, whoever she is, is so troubling that it kind of makes the ultimate end of the movie ring a bit hollow, if not a more than a bit misogynistic. Maybe that's the point.

Oh, and this is a musical. Really.

The rhythms of this films are such that the musical numbers are particularly jarring, though not necessarily out of place. Some of the imagery in these sequences is striking, and for the most part they got me wondering whether a movie that cries out for some variety of gonzo film making really benefits from a minimal approach. I'm not really sure. In fact I'm not really sure about what I think of this movie generally. It certainly makes an impression, but I'm not sure it says anything that I can hold on to. I do know that the film has terrific moments that I can hold on to, like a scene in which several live crabs escape into a kitchen, and a foot fetish scene that would make Tarantino weep. Is this the point? To take the moments when they come? Maybe.

I dunno: whenever the art house and exploitation intersect like this all bets are off.

The Light Fantastic

So, a couple of days ago, I saw a preview of something called Leap Year, due out in early 2010, starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode. As I watched the preview, all I could think was: "Hey! That's I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)." And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a LOT of romantic comedies are I Know Where I'm Going. As much as I love this movie, you'd think I would have noticed that, say, Pixar's Cars is an Nth generation descendant. In my defense, I've only seen I Know Where I'm Going! twice, a decade and a half apart. I notice on the IMDB's trivia page for this film that Paramount used this film as a guide for screenwriters in the years after it was released. I'm not surprised.

Anyway, the preview for Leap Year also reminded me that my local art house, the excellent Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, Missouri, was showing I Know Where I'm Going! this week as part of their ongoing Ragtag 101 series. This was my second viewing. I've never seen I Know Where I'm Going! on a television screen and I'll probably keep it that way*, because, like many of The Archers' movies, this one is what movie screens were made for. It's the light fantastic, conjured by those two sorcerers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Oddly enough, it doesn't start that way. It starts out as a screwball comedy. We find our heroine bullying her way through life and dreaming of a life of luxury and money (the dream sequence in this film is one of its best magic tricks). Then we come to the stark beauty of the Hebrides and mournful shots like the one at the head of this post, and the tone of the movie shifts so dramatically that it's hardly the same movie. It shifts again, later. The structure of the film is one in which Wendy Hiller's character is constantly walking through doors into other worlds, each wilder and more primal than the last.

Along the way, the filmmakers puncture the social structures that still held sway as WWII came to an end, particularly the lordship of the aristocracy. Hiller's foil, played by Roger Livesey with restrained grace, is aristocracy that has already had his place in the world transposed. He's come to terms with a world that doesn't conform to his expectations. And here, the film shifts again, because Hiller can't come to grips with this and follows her determination into the maelstrom. The Archers weren't shy about turning their movies into horror stories, though this one is milder than the end of, say, Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes, but you can see Poe all over this one, though in the end it's far more humane a film to descend fully into the abyss.

One of the things that I noticed during the film was how much the thick Scots accents reminded me of Scandanavian accents, and the occasional Gaelic dialog increased that impression. The association came mostly from the light, though. This film has Bergman's light, and the compositions from the middle of the film onward are occasionally as tenebrist as anything in Bergman. Cinematographer Edwin Hiller famously shot this film without a light meter, relying instead on a painter's feel for light and darkness. It's a tour de force, one that imbues what might ordinarily be a run of the mill romantic comedy with a whiff of other worlds, and turns the whole movie into a waking dream. The interesting thing about this is how concrete the film is while it turns this trick. Take, for instance, the sequence in which Livesey goes about fixing the engine of the boat while they're being sucked into the whirlpool. Another film would show the actor mucking about in the engine without bothering with the details, but here, we see each meticulous step of the way. This has a dual purpose in the film: first, it ratchets up the suspense during this sequence; second, it grounds the film in reality as a means of counterbalancing the mythological elements (Herman Melville would have envied this).

---

*actually, I'll probably relent on this. I mean, this is a film that rewards careful viewing, and I'm told that the Criterion edition is lovely.

October Wrap-Up pt. 2

Okay. This is waaaay late. I'll get back on track this weekend. Promise. Anyway, wrapping up the October horror-palooza:

October 26:

Altered (2006, directed by Eduardo Sanchez) is a less gimicky sci-fi horror film from one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project. He knows his way around a camera when directing a conventional film. The movie, on the other hand, is pretty bad. It concerns a group of former abductees who capture an alien in the woods. While this might sound fun, the filmmakers have given the proceedings characters by giving us human characters who are a bunch of foul-mouthed rednecks. I had more than enough of THAT particular screenwriting convention half-way through The House of A 1,000 Corpses, thank you very much. Some interesting gore effects, but the story is an ungodly mess that pushes credibility way past the point of snapping.

The Blame (2006, directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador) finds an abortionist developing an unhealthy obsession with her nurse and her nurse's daughter after taking them into her home as live-in help. Serrador is the ring-leader of the Six Films to Keep You Awake series and is currently the grand old man of Spanish horror (having a career that stretches back to the 1970s). He knows how to turn the screws, and, as he did in Who Can Kill a Child?, knows that pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting are a minefield of raw nerves to be mercilessly exploited. He's good. I wish more of his stuff was available.

October 28:

Bob Burns Hollywood Halloween (directed by Lindsey Keith Jackson) is a kind of love-letter to the Monster Kids of the 60s and 70s, focusing on superfan/pop-culture collector Bob Burns and his famed Halloween haunted house shows. These shows were a proving ground for up-and-coming talent that would soon become big players in Hollywood, including special effects guys like Rick Baker, Dennis Muren, Greg Nicotero, and William Malone, as well as genre stalwarts like Dorothy Fontana and Walter Koenig. I watched this with a fair degree of envy. These shows looked like a gas to produce (and they've given me ideas for next Halloween). Perhaps the best part of the documentary, though, is the rescue of George Pal's Time Machine from prop museum hell, much to the delight of George Pal himself. A portrait of the fun that creature features used to engender in the young and young at heart.

Red Eye (2005, directed by Dong-bin Kim, a Korean film not to be confused with the Wes Craven film of the same name), is another Asian film in which the ghost is in the machine. In this case, it takes place on a late-night train between Seoul and Pusan which has cars from a train that had been involved in a horrific wreck. Of course, the souls of the dead rest uneasily. The first two thirds of the film are a standard slow burn, but the end explodes with violence. This has a lot of ideas, but it doesn't connect the dots very well. It's a disjointed effort, though not without pleasures.

October 29

MOH: The Black Cat (2006, directed by Stuart Gordon) casts Jeffrey Combs as Edgar Allan Poe, drinking his life away as his tubercular wife spirals downward. In his need, he falls into a delirium in which the events of his short story, "The Black Cat," enact themselves in his marriage. Combs is a surprisingly good Poe, and Gordon seems on top of his game with this. Of the big name "masters" assembled by this series, Gordon is the one whose work is most typical of the films that made his name, and reuniting with Combs gives this an added kick.

October 30:

A Real Friend (2006, directed by Enrique Urbizu) finds lonely Estrella living in a world populated by imaginary friends. Estrella loves horror movies, and her friends derive from the movies she watches when her mom isn't home. This installment of the Six Films to Keep You Awake series isn't wholly successful--in fact, I would call this the weakest of the lot--but it has several unforgettable images, including the unexpected and touching sight of Leatherface giving comfort to a lonely little girl. Whatever the merits of the film itself, this image is going to stay with me for a long, long time. Call it a personal quirk.

October 31:

The Spectre (2006, directed by Mateo Gil) is a character piece, concerning a man who recently lost his wife and who is haunted by the affair he had with a woman who might have been a witch when he was 16. This film is probably my second favorite of the Six films to Keep You Awake, but it's a hard film to talk about without dismantling the surprise of a first viewing. I will say that it's beautifully filmed and beautifully performed and adds a touch of bittersweet to the horror. Take it as a recommendation and be surprised if you like.

A Christmas Tale (2006, directed by Paco Plaza) closes out the Six Films to Keep You Awake series for me, and in many ways, it saves the best for last. It's the least cinematically subdued entry, and it's certainly the most playful. The story here involves a group of kids--reminiscent of The Goonies and Stand By Me--who stumble upon a woman in a sinkhole who has stolen a huge amount of money. Rather than turn her in, they extort the woman for the money and torture her when she doesn't comply. Unfortunately, she escapes. This set-up plays like A Simple Plan crossed with The Lord of the Flies, and I can't recall any American film that has as clear an eye when it comes to he cruelty of children. What's really interesting about this point of view is how it contrasts it with a name-dropping cultural milieu intent on evoking nostalgia for the 1980s. It's a heady mixture.

The finale of this film is an addition to the cinema of killer Santas, deliberately recalling Tales from the Crypt's ax-wielding Santa and placing her in the funhouse. And after that's all said and done, the movie turns a neat trick as it slips its reality sideways. It's totally earned by the film from the first frame, but it's unexpected. This is very much my favorite of these films, and it makes me even more anxious than ever to track down a copy of director Paco Plaza's other films (particular Second Name).

The Ring Virus (1999, directed by Dong-bin Kim) closed out my October. It's the Korean remake of that constant font of Asian horror, The Ring, and, like the American remake, it alters some things in subtle and not so subtle ways, returning to Koji Suzuki's book rather than the film for many of its alterations. The biggest difference between this film and its source is that it replaces Hideo Nakata's deadpan dread with oodles of atmosphere. Like most Korean movies of any pith or moment, this is a showcase for the craft of filmmaking, though also like many Korean films, it is a failure at the craft of screenwriting. This gives its characters short shrift, for the most part, and without an investment in the characters--something that both Nakata and Gore Verbinski got right--I was adrift, because, when it comes right down to it, The Ring is a ridiculous story, and if you don't buy into it, it comes crashing down. Bae Doo-na is in this, so it has some interest for me, but I was more than a little irritated at the way she was wasted. Ah, well.

And another October Challenge ends.

October Wrap-Up pt. 1.

For various reasons, I've been unable to keep up with blogging the October Challenge. I got hung up about two thirds of the way through. Here's an effort to get caught up.

The total number of horror movies I saw this year was 32. Of those, 29 of them were movies I had never seen before. Here's the list of what I saw (I've listed first-time viewings in red):

October 2:

[•REC]
The Baby's Room

Comments here:
http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2009/10/pain-in-spain.html

October 3:

To Let
The Curse of Frankenstein

Comments: http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2009/10/no-exit.html

October 5:

Quarantine
Splinter

Comments: http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2009/10/deja-vu-all-over-again.html

October 7:

What Have They Done to Solange?

October 8:

Who Can Kill a Child?

October 11:

The Vault of Horror
Tales from the Crypt
Zombieland

Comments: http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2009/10/scenes-from-apocalypse.html

October 12:

MOH: Deer Woman

October 13:

Shiver

October 14:

MOH: Valerie on the Stairs

October 15:

Underworld: The Rise of the Lycans
The Uninvited (2003)

October 17:

Evil Dead Trap
The Beyond

Comments: http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/2009/10/fiznit.html

October 19:

Hatchet

October 20:

MOH: Sounds Like

October 21:

Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.

October 23:

Thirst (2009)

October 24:

Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)

October 26:

Altered
The Blame

October 28:

Bob Burns Hollywood Halloween
Red Eye (2005, Korean film not to be confused with the Wes Craven film of the same name)

October 29

MOH: The Black Cat

October 30:

A Real Friend

October 31:

A Christmas Tale
The Spectre
The Ring Virus

Here are some general comments about the films from the second half of the month (I'll be splitting this in two to accommodate the tags):

Hatchet (2006, directed by Adam Green). This kind of sucked. A lot. I knew this was going to be one of THOSE movies when Robert Englund gets killed off in the first five minutes. Tony Todd is in it too. But the filmmakers obviously didn't want to pay for any extended work from either of them. Oh, and Kane Hodder is here, too, but since I don't like the Friday the 13th movies in the first place, I didn't really give a flying fuck.

October 20:

MOH: Sounds Like (2006, directed by Brad Anderson). Very much a variant on X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, and pretty much assembled from stock horror elements, but the addition of a director who hasn't used television as an excuse to leave behind his own cinematic intelligence makes this into one the series best episodes.

October 21:

Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003, directed by Masaaki Tezuka) was a surprise, because, for the most part, the Millennium series Godzilla movies have kind of sucked. This one was really fun, though. The initial sequence, with some fighter planes encountering Mothra, was really cool, and the monster mayhem in the back half is really satisfying.

October 23:

Thirst (2009, directed by Chan-wook Park) is a box full of wonders, but it's all over the place in terms of tone. This isn't a criticism, per se, so much as it's a description, because this film is endlessly fascinating. This is a weird conflation of the vampire film with film noir--it's what you'd get if you crossed Dracula with The Postman Always Rings Twice--but that's a really facile description. This is one of those horror movies where the tropes of the horror film aren't necessarily used to scare the audience--though this has some amazingly horrifying scenes--so much as they're used to dissect the film's characters. Kang-ho Song is now officially my favorite actor in the world right now, and he's wonderful in this, but he's arguably upstaged by Ok-vin Kim's femme fatale, who could give Barbara Stanwyck some pointers. The final ten minutes of the film are existential comedy at its finest, and it's last shot is a magnificent visual pun.

I'll have a LOT more to say about this one once I get my hands on the DVD. Thirst hits DVD on November 17th.


October 24:

Blood: The Last Vampire (2009, Chris Nahon) remakes a well-known anime, and you can see the influence all over this thing. The story follows a vampire working for a shadow agency, tasked with exterminating demons, all the while looking for the arch-demon who killed her father and mentor. The film contrives to dress its heroine in a schoolgirl outfit, in spite of there being no dress code at the high school where it sends her undercover. For the most part, this is pretty much crap, with lots of motion (the fights were choreographed by Hong Kong director Corey Yuen), and no suspense or any kind of investment in characters. The performances are uniformly awful.

Dubious Masters

So far, I've been keeping up with the October Challenge fairly well, though I've been lagging when it comes to blogging about it. I'm not doing poorly, really, but if I let myself fall behind, I'm pretty much screwed. So far, that hasn't happened. That's the good news. The bad news is that I'm not really pulling ahead, either. Part of this is the limited supply of movies I haven't seen before. Part of this is real-world demands on my time. Damn that pesky job and mortgage. Ah, well. Anyway, here's a recap of where I am since I left off.

*****

I suppose that, since it was his idea in the first place, Mick Garris had a right to direct an installment of the Masters of Horror. His long association with Stephen King does not grant him the status of "master" merely by association, and I don't think he's ever really knocked anything out of the park. His second season entry, Valerie on the Stairs (2006), sidesteps this complaint fairly neatly by adapting a story by Clive Barker, who has a much more legitimate claim to the title of "master of horror." Unfortunately, this isn't one of the better outings for either Garris or Barker. The story revolves around a writer who is accepted into an apartment building for unpublished (ie: "failed") writers. The complex is haunted by a beautiful woman and some kind of demon, which it becomes obvious are the fevered inventions of the other writers in the building. This is a hard one because Barker doesn't really translate to the screen particularly well. His prose emphasizes visionary scenes over storytelling, and unless the director is some kind of visionary himself, this is bound to strain the audience's credulity to the breaking point. Garris is NOT a visionary, and this is filmed in a flat, television style that torpedoes any kind of mood. The result is fairly ridiculous.

John Landis might have a better claim than Garris on the title "master of horror", but it's debatable. His two major horror films aren't anything like his best films, the horror community's fondness for An American Werewolf in London not withstanding. When he's on his game, Landis IS a pretty good filmmaker, though, and a lot of the beats of comedy filmmaking translate to horror. Especially if the production in question is conceived as a horror comedy to start with. Deer Woman (2005) is just such an animal. This installment finds Detective Brian Benben on the trail of some kind of Native American deer spirit who manifests as a beautiful woman in order to seduce men and trample them to death. The filmmakers are perfectly aware of how ridiculous their own premise is, and they incorporate this into a scene in which the nature of the deer woman is explained by a worker in a reservation casino. On the whole, it's intermittently funny, but rarely scary. Cinthia Moura, who plays the title role, is smoking, though.

I picked up the DVD double of Amicus's Tales from the Crypt (1972) and Vault of Horror (1973, directed by Roy Ward Baker) from a bargain bin a couple of weeks ago, I've written at length about Tales from the Crypt in the past, so if you want my thoughts on that film, you can see it here. I'd never seen Vault of Horror before, though I knew it by reputation. For the most part, it's more of the same, though it's more of the same if you discard the first film's rising quality. The stories in this film are all more or less on the level of the first couple of stories in Tales from the Crypt. In other words, the weaker stories. These are all variants of the "heel gets his come-uppence," and they're directed with indifference by Roy Ward Baker. There are some interesting performances--particularly Glynis Johns's put-upon housewife in the second segment--and there's some interesting casting--real life brother and sister Daniel and Anna Massey in the first segment--but beyond the cast, there's not much to recommend, and worse, the film itself has been neutered to the point of mutilation. The censor's scissors are blatantly obvious in the first segment, where a shot of Daniel Massey with a tap in his neck for the benefit of a town full of vampires has been removed, with a freeze-frame of the shot with a blacked out area over the tap substituted. Given that this film could have used the nastiness to punch things up, this has to count as a murdered movie.

*****

I didn't have a lot of interest in Underworld: The Rise of the Lycans (2009, directed by Patrick Tatopoulos). I didn't like the first film at all, and I skipped the second film, given that it was from more or less the same cast and crew. Further, the first film is one of the films that suggests the Kate Beckinsale rule, which states that if Kate Beckinsale appears in your movie in a leather corset, your movie probably sucks. Beckinsale is absent for the prequel save for a shot at the end, and in her place we have Rhona Mitra, an actress who has already proven adept at holding the screen in B-movie genre fare. She certainly has more screen presence than her predecessor. This film is pretty much a wank fest for goths and LARPers, telling the origin of the war between vampires and werewolves. It turns the tables on the first film by painting the Lycans as the oppressed heroes and the vampires as the villains, and in doing so, it improves things immensely. Vampires SHOULD be the bad guys.

I should note that I LOVE werewolves, but I'm almost always disappointed by them. A movie that gets the werewolves right can get away with a lot of sins. This movie has pretty cool werewolves. While they won't displace the werewolves in The Howling in my affections (because Rob Bottin's transformation effects are still better than any CGI I've ever seen), these come pretty close to matching the werewolves of my imagination. For this alone, Underworld 3 is surprisingly not bad.

*****

1988's Evil Dead Trap (directed by Toshiharu Ikeda) predates the Japanese horror boom of the late 1990s by about ten years, but it has certain elements in common with it. Principally, it's in touch with the unease generated by technology. It's among the first Japanese films to put the ghost in the machine. But from there, the similarities become few and far between. This film is not a slow-burn horror movie; it's a gore-fest. It's first hour is a fairly merciless slasher movie, while its second jumps the rails with a grisly, bio-horror finale. I have to admit that the structure of the film gave me pause. After the first hour, our killer has knocked off everyone but our final girl, causing me to speculate on the wisdom of leaving her to her own devices for another forty minutes, but the movie itself is bifurcated, like two separate movies in one.

In any event, the story such as it is follows the crew of a late-night TV news program following the breadcrumbs of a video that appears to be a snuff film. Whoever made the video went to great pains to demonstrate how to find the scene of the crime, which should have been a warning to our heroes, but plausibility isn't one of this film's strong points. Once on site, the mostly female crew is killed off in sundry creative ways. The final murder in the first half of the film is a baroque trap that foreshadows the Saw movies. The second half of the movie is as aggressive as the first, but considerably more ridiculous, and slightly less cruel. And the very ending is vivid, but utterly laughable.

Director Ikeda isn't afraid of showing his influences. He steals the maggot scene from Suspiria outright, for one example, and the Goblin-ish score further tips his hand. There are also echoes of Cronenberg in the movie's videodromic dread, as well as hints of Larry Cohen and Frank Hellenlotter, of all people. It's fun picking out the influences, but when all is said and done, there's no new ground broken in this film. As film, though, Evil Dead Trap has some of the feel of the Hong Kong films from the same period. It's energetic and outrageous, which means it IS entertaining. I just don't know if it's all that good.

Current tally:

14 Films

11 First-time viewings.