Dance mash-up delight!

From the Dangerous Minds blog, Marc Campbell has created a fantastic mash-up: footage of dancing kids from 1956 accompanied by a great selection of later, alternative, more punkish tracks such as The Velvet Underground's "Run Run Run" and The Buzzcock's "Why Can't I Touch It?", not to mention Outkast and The Normal! This is what the internets was made for.

Frightfest the 13th Day 3

OUTPOST II: BLACK SUN

Sequel to rather good stripped-down Nazi-Zombie film. With the sequel inflated to try to accommodate the scale of the original concept – Nazis have built amazing-machine to create an indestructible supernatural zombie/phantom army – it implodes and ends up with lightning-from-fingers to resolve he undead problem. A certain earnestness keeps things a little grim and eerie. Best of all is the cinematography and lightning where the shadows are the same grey as the zombie skin.

PAURA 3-D

Italian giallo homage – in 3D! (which improves nothing) – where three guys break into luxury villa to party away, but there’s something in the basement. Enjoyable thriller hinging upon the degradation and torture of a beautiful woman: half of the films I will see will feature this in some way. The guys aren’t total jerks so the dilemma is to do the right thing and save their own skins too. Slick direction, some crowd-pleasing nastiness and a little pathos help keep this stylish and memorable.

Under the Bed

Despite its moody greys and blues, ‘Under The Bed’ barely knows what to do with itself. Under the kid’s bed is a festering monster of all the household’s males, threatening to tear them all apart. It’s a “Goosebumps” episode with added Fulci-gore at the end. Bad acting and baffling narrative make this unintentionally humour: the Frightfest audience was having a great time chuckling away through the last act when the fact that the moodiness really couldn’t disguise the weakness of the whole enterprise. At one point, the parents wake up their sleep-deprived boys who are sleeping on the sofa in order to make them go to a sleepover... it really doesn’t make much sense. Hilarious answer to the monster problem – throw mum’s ashes at it!! – really tops off the whole shruggable affair. Too gory to be a Dante-like kids’ horror; too underwhelming for anyone else.

Remnants

Post-Holocaust flick: a small rabble of survivors hide away in a cellar and slowly die. The lead hero is a sanctimonious asshole – he is meant to be heroic, but he needs a good kicking – and Edward Furlong just looks ill and uncomfortable. The actors wear their burns, but they don’t look like they hurt. The tone goes for sentiment rather than the horror and it’s all very TV drama until the final showdown with marauders, and then it’s a bit nasty – just a bit. No matter the worthiness of the message, it’s all rather dull.

Maniac

When I heard that Elijah Wood was going to be in a remake of that infamous 70s scuzzfest ‘Maniac’, I was greatly intrigued: who would ever have predicted such a thing would come to pass? At its Cannes Festival screening, there were walkouts after the first five minutes. Well, the first five-ten minutes set the tone and that first kill and scalping is built up to and executed brilliantly. With the soft voice of Woods’ derangement, a fantastic post-‘Drive’ retro-electro score and riveting and upsetting kill scenes – not to mention very believable and lovely women – this was the very first triumph of Frightfest that I saw. A great re-make that I will be returning to again. Not for the squeamish, though.

Buck Theorem at Frightfest the 13th: day 1 & 2

I am at Frightfest the 13^th, Empire Leicester Square 2012. This involves limited time for writing and sleeping and adding nice pics to this post, so I'm just going to plough in and hope for the best and add more decoration later.

Day 1: Thursday 23rd Aug.

The Seasoning House:

Stylishly made; goes for hideous beauty. Highly problematic in both its use of brutalized female bodies and its vision of men purely as rapists, especially those that already like their women bloodsoaked. Frightfest programme booklet bandies about comparisons to Hitchcock and Polanski: no and no (a suspenseful film is not instantaneously Hitchockian). Eli Roth and extreme French cinema are better references: indeed, director Paul Hyett describes ‘The Seasoning House’ (all films are discussed as mash-ups of other films) as ‘Martyrs’, ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and ‘Die Hard’. Del Toro? Hmm, no. ‘Die Hard’? Well yes, when our diminutive orphaned girl “Angel” (!) starts fighting back and crawling through crawlspaces, one can see comparisons there. Mute and kidnapped for a Balkan brothel where she dopes up and cleans up other brutalized girls, Angel ends up being nothing more than a pixie-sized revenge fantasy against violent masculinity. Brilliantly played by Rosie Day, the film’s weaknesses and problems become more evident as it passes the halfway mark: for example, such hideous masculinity becomes the realm of English actors putting on ‘foreign’ accents thick enough to sit on, putting the male characters in a cultural no-man’s land and at arm’s length. The use of imagery of tortured and gore-soaked women leaves this tale highly distasteful when it is only in the service of another escape/revenge fantasy and not – like the superior ‘Martyrs’ – to reach a genuine polemic and discourse on such imagery. In this way it is far more exploitation cinema than its careful conception and ugly-pretty aesthetic would have the viewer believe.

Bonus: a brilliantly nasty knife fight when Angel first starts fighting back. My first understanding, also, that a huge horror audience will laugh at extreme violence regardless of the seriousness or ugliness of the text as a whole. They laugh because the effects are brilliant; they laugh because they are relieved that the bad guys are getting some just desserts; they laugh because all extreme special effects are funny?

First memorable Frightfest imagery: knife-in-the-mouth moment.

Cockneys vs Zombies

If you find Cockneys inherently funny, then this is probably for you. Lots of gusto, some good lines and gags – mostly to do with Richard Bryars – but really never more than an amusing title with some kind of East End splatter attached. Old People’s home versus zombies is the best side of the film, including Honor Blackman gleefully hammering away at zombie heads. Very broad. Nothing interesting done with zombies at all: as with ‘Zombieland’, zombies are just a pretext for some jokes and a wallowing in guilt-free spree killing (although "Zombieland" did have some interesting undead designs). Comparisons with “Shaun of the Dead” leave the cockneys wanting. Regardless of this, director Matthias Hoene comes across as really winning and interesting (friends of mine, manning the festival's cameras, interviewed him and said so) and plenty of others are going to enjoy this on its own terms. That’s condescending, but there you go. I don’t find gangster-posturing cockneys inherently funny, so not quite for me.

Grabbers

This is more my thing. Humour based upon characters and context rather than gags and excess. Director Jon Wright says he wanted to make a homage to those ‘80s monster movies such as “Gremlins” and “Critters”, et al, and he succeeds. Nice central performances and gorgeous Irish tourist-board cinematography of the little island town suddenly besieged by both small and giant aliens. Despite the fact that the whole things sounds like a bad gag – aliens allergic to alcohol attack Irishmen – it’s all played straight enough that the concept works and doesn’t drown the fun in blarney. First full win of the festival.

Second memorable Frightfest imagery: unforgettable vision of a giant ball of tentacles rolling across the countryside.

And then time to run off to get the night bus home. There’ll be some sleep, but not too much, then back for Day 2’s marathon session.

 

Day 2: Friday 24^th

Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut

Even when it was released in 1990, I was aware of the legend that this Clive Barker film was cut to ribbons by the studio. The original version was deemed to be lost until an old VHS copy turned up on Barker’s shelf and other footage turned up in Italy, etc. ‘The Cabal Cut’ is two and a half hours long but there was also a three hour version cut and other footage still thought to be pending. The cut is based upon original drafts of Barker’s scripts. 'The Cabal Cut' is mostly comprised of murky VHS prints apparently filtered through static.

I always thought ‘Nightbreed’ was a diverting monster movie, although not especially good it was enjoyably odd, and that David Cronenberg as a hooded serial killer stole the show. ‘The Cabal Cut’, as is and apparently truer to Barker's original vision, reveals a very, very confused film with a lot of stuff happening, and then more happening, but very little cohering or making sense. Stuff happens because it does. For example, why is the underground world of Median meant to be so secret and safe when people just seem to walk in and out of it at leisure throughout the film? All the stuff about who are the real monsters? and the monsters as angst-ridden outcasts feels like the rantings of a juvenile X-Men fan. Also, it becomes seriously camper and camper as it goes on, reaching its nadir when a policeman tongues a garrote lovingly. It’s a total mess and increasingly dull and painful to watch. It becomes apparent that the studio probably saw it and thought what the hell do we do with this? And their decision for cutting becomes quite understandable. What a shame.

But Cronenberg and his buttons-and-zip hood are still totally terrifying and still steal the show.

Elevator

Eight characters trapped in an elevator with a bomb. For the most part nicely written and compelling due to sturdy performances and decent dialogue, but it still feels like a television movie with added gore. The analogies to a post-9/11 world and financial crises are obvious enough to make one sigh without being too hammered home. Well made and diverting but probably nothing more.

V/H/S

I have far too much to write on this to put here, but essentially it’s a found footage anthology by a bunch of directors and, although truly overlong, it is mostly a great success, containing much unease, several surprises and ... well, it is scary. Although my Frightfest pal David found the final segment "hokey", I found myself whooping with delight once I realised what was going on and things really got crazy. The ‘found-footage’ subjectivity seemed to me to open up quite a different and thrilling vibe to the otherwise well-worn genre tales. It has to be said that the handheld and VHS tape aesthetic is probably overdone and likely to induce vertigo and nausea; it would seem that there were no tripods or putting the camera down in the days of VHS.

Again, however, is the problem and myth that no one can pick up a camera without wanting to make a porno and/or snuff film. Again, the male characters are mostly all problematic, bullying and coercing the women to varying degrees, and if not they seem just like tedious juvenile pranksters.

Rec3

The original ‘Rec’ is pretty much a horror masterpiece: one of the best point-of-view films ever made. ‘Rec2’ is a lesser beast, perhaps inevitably, but this third installment throws down the hand-held aesthetic after a fairly bravura opening and gets down to some post-"Evil Dead" kick-ass splatter. This all leaves the intimacy and terror of its predecessors very far behind. Well, maybe that was played out by this point, but what we are left with is a very different beast, much more interested in pleasing its audience with brides-and-chainsaws and comedy costumes and never troubling itself about the full ramifications of a huge wedding party where family and guests slaughter one another because they are infected or in self-defence. There are some nice gags earlier on regarding the characters but it’s hard to reconcile the glee with which the Frightfest audience greeted the chainsaw-on-zombie carnage with the moment where a bus full of children trying to escape is chillingly overrun with the infected.
 

 

The day also featured a rather unexpected and fun run-in with writer and Frightfest organiser Alan Jones. My Frightfest pal Paul and I had decided to forego the Dario Argento Q&A in order to get some food (you have to grab free moments where you can as there isn't much space between screenings). We came back and wandered into the theatre to see if we wanted to listen to Argento, but we did not and decided we wanted coffee instead, so we left. In the lobby Mr Jones seemed to bound across and said to us, "Oh, is he that boring?" Chatting away, I asked if they were going to an Argento film, which they weren't after all and we ended up chatting about how the renowned giallo director doesn't own the rights to any of his films other than "Opera", and how there is only one copy of "Suspiria" for digital projection and that one is booked for the next two years. Mr Jones keeps telling Mr Argento to get a digital copy of "Opera" to carry around with him, but he hasn't. "Oh, when will Argento listen to you?" I lamented on Mr Jones' behalf. Mr Jones threw up his hands and agreed.

I also confessed that although I love "Suspiria", I don't have so much time for Argento's other work (and his new "Dracula" is meant to be crap). I kinda regretted this as I recalled later that Jones is a big fan of Argento's earlier work, but never mind.  
 

Bumping into Alan Jones has been a mini-highlight for sure.

 

Pictures from Mars! (really)

It's Mars!!!

Fantastic.

Links & Stuff

Good stuff...
"Mark Twain Looking Pretty Cool in a Silent Film From 1909"

...and bad stuff...
"A guide to mass shootings in America" with map.

...and Victorian stuff...
"Baby's first butcher's shoop, circa 1900"

... and Maniacal Wood stuff...
I will be at FrightFest this year - this time for the whole event - and this one is intriguing me. A remake of grungy 80s horror "Maniac" with Elijah Wood... that isn't anything I ever would have predicted happening in the world. But I am a fan of Elijah and I am looking forward to seeing if this works. I mean, we don't need any more remakes, re-imaginings and re-boots, but I am curious nonetheless.

... and Soothing Sylvian stuff.

"Wicked Game": David Lynch's Chris Isaak video

It starts with fire and panning up Chris Isaak's fabulous suit and guitar to his quiff and that gorgeous opening line. One of the most dreamy and achey songs ever, and one of my alltime favourites. That guitar twang encompasses all the lovelorn songs in the world. "Wicked Game" is a song so full of atmosphere and romanticised heartbreak that it just about stops the world in its tracks as soon as that unforgettable opening swoons in.

Lynch's video is a tie in with "Wild at Heart" when he was at his peak on the reputations of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks". The Lynchian world kicked up many an artist's career and reputation (Jack Nance, Julee Cruise, Dennis Hopper, etc, etc) and Isaak was one of benefit greatly too. Isaak and Lynch proved to be as complimentary and brilliant an association as Lynch and Badalamenti. Just as there was often the hint of absurd melodrama in the Lynch/Badalamenti collaborations, there was always something playful and not too earnest about Isaak - and Lynch - which made the sudden turns to dark seriousness and unironic heartbreak that often cropped up in Isaak's work all the more upsetting ("Funeral in the Rain", for example). "Nobody loves no one," Isaak concludes on "Wicked Game", and despite the overheated noir-ish drama of the song, I always felt unsettled by the directness of that coda. Isaak was always as offbeat and dark as his snappy manner and sharp suits and, as he seemed to be roaming the streets of Orbisonville, U.S.A. (a place out of time), perfectly apt for Lynch's surreal and nightmarish Americana (a place out of its mind).

David Cameron: Vampire Hunter

DAVID CAMERON: VAMPIRE HUNTER

A sharp-toothed slice of satire from Philip Challinor, The Curmudgeon.

Prometheus - a prequel, a sequel, a strange disappointment

PROMETHEUS
Ridley Scott, USA, 2012

Notes before a film: indecipherable trailers & inappropriate audience members

It’s always a good thing to wander into the cinema after the adverts. It leaves your tarnished soul a little more complete if you miss the commercials, leaving it all more ready to welcome in the film you have paid to see. You still have the trailers, though. Incomprehensible trailers, edited as if by a chef super-slicing and dicing, ones that show you everything and nothing. What the fuck is happening? you wonder. Explosions? More explosions? Action? Vehicular action? Was that some kind of joke or punch-line? Who is that? Token romantic element? A bad guy? Wasn’t this a show ... is this a remake of something? Wait, that look likes something from that other one... What the fuck is happening x²?

For my trip to see “Prometheus”, I didn’t miss the wretched Orange “joke” skit or the pitiful M&M puff-piece (are these meant to contribute to our film-watching experience?), but I did see the trailers for “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “The Amazing Spider-man”. Contemporary trailers do that thing of fading to black every second, even before you’ve registered what you’re actually seeing, and this is inevitably complimented by a big bass rumble like the sound of a small cosmos, far far away, being tossed on its rear. If a trailer is not changing every micro-second like someone simply fast-forwarding through the film you are meant to be enticed to see, they are fading to back. “Boom!” – to black, it goes again and again, apparently to denote tension and impending doom. I don’t know. Trailers don’t actually seem to want you to detect any story or to decipher what you are watching. It’s just a couple of seconds from here and a second or so from them, held together by action shots and explosions. Signifiers of drama, humour, action, and so on; just mostly signifiers rather than tantalising clues. It is trying to create sensation as if that is all we need to be seduced. This punch means you will get some violence thrills. This kiss means you will get some faux-sexual tension. This scream into the camera is... well... this monster face is...

Abraham Lincoln is fighting vampires with tedious 3-D enhancement, doing gravity-defying jumps and spins in slow-motion, pointing guns at the screen, waving an axe around and threatening some undead. Not sure there is any story at all but it looks to be, in the action-fantasy canon, a bit like that terrible “Van Helsing” more than anything else. I am sure that’s not what they intend. Wrong signifiers, pointing at tedious overwrought elements and at previous bad films and genre tropes. With nothing to entice other than action clips, why would I bother? The novelty premise alone isn’t enough. What are they telling me with it?

“The AmazingSpiderman” trailer is odd [can't seem to find the extended trailer I'm about to describe]. Actions bits, fade-to-black booms; then the trailer stops to show an entire scene where Peter Parker tries to get over his embarrassment to chat up a girl in the school corridor. The scene goes on long enough to show that it’s awkwardly written and fails to be cute by not rooting down the conversation and relying upon they’re not saying much and it’s cute that they can’t actually agree to a date, but it just kind of implodes, really. Then the trailer skips back to action shots; indeed, too many action shots. I feel like I am seeing too much of what ought to hinted at, even if I am only seeing micro-slices. A trailer ought to promise something tangible and the film ought to deliver; trailer’s shouldn’t give away too much, but how they do, even though they are showing only a second of something here and another there. And you end up saying what? But not in a good way.

Two favourite trailers: “Europa” and “Blue Velvet”.

Anyway, there’s also a trailer for “Ted” which features a fellatio joke, and I wonder if that really is age-appropriate to go with “Prometheus”: I am wondering this because I did not really note that “Prometheus” is rated “15”, and there are two boys aged between 5-7 sitting with their dad a few rows down from me. Then the film proper starts and I see that indeed it is a “15” certificate. Wow. What on earth are these kids doing here and what the hell are they going to make of Ridley Scott’s prequel to one of the greatest sci-fi horror monster films ever made? Well, I’ll never know, but I would sure be curious to find out, and to wonder why their dad brought them there (I heard them call him dad, so that’s verified). Maybe they felt it was inferior to “Alien”.

An "Engineer" and Howard David Johnson's 1978 sketch  "Promethues Unbound"

A sequel-prequel; “Prometheus”

Well, what to make of “Prometheus” anyhow?

My first inkling that all may not be overwhelming with "Prometheus" was when I was in the toilets at the local popcorn palace (to see "The Raid") and I overheard somebody, whilst peeing, saying that "it" was everything he hated about science-fiction. I thought, Surely he can't mean "Prometheus"? But there was, however, no other science-fiction to be seen.

It sure looks good, that’s for sure. Huge. Vast. Expensive, pretty, beautifully filmed and all that, as we have come to expect from Ridley Scott. It doesn’t lack for ambition. It starts slow and it has one of the oldest and one of my favourite premises: people go to a mystery place and the mystery place holds things untold, wonder, horror, etc. Let’s investigate! It might be a horror house; it might be the deepest depths of the Amazon; it might be a deserted town or an alien planet. What happened here? What is lurking in the shadows? What is that? Uh-oh! – and so on. “Alien” was fantastic at this.

“Prometheus” follows almost step-to-step in the “Alien” plot, but then it’s an old and reliable template and, as I say, one of my favourites. But what comes out of the mystery is what really counts. What kinds of answers we get or don’t get is what elevates and differentiates one story using the template from another. Perhaps the problem and disappointment with “Prometheus” is that it is answering questions that didn’t necessarily need answering: when the crew of the “Nostromo” in the original “Alien” lands and discovers an extraterrestrial ship full of strange extraterrestrial corpses and artefacts, and once we have seen the eponymous alien in action, we can pretty much fill in the backstory ourselves. Did we need to have that backstory filled in with a tale of faith and the origins of man and some weak, vain clinging to crosses? That isn’t what we were really thinking of needing answering in the original film: the original was an exercise in being reminded that no matter how equally narcissistic, brutal and advanced we are, we are still terrified that something else is higher up on the food chain, just waiting to wipe us out. A quintessential monster film enhanced by simply asking H.R. Giger to design the extraterrestrial stuff. Boy, wasn’t that a smart move? One of the greatest man-in-a-suit nightmares was thus launched into popular culture. All vagina dentata, mouth rape and things bursting out of your stomach – take that male viewers! The sequels expanded on the alien life-cycle and broadened the premise, but really the simplicity of the original was beautiful and almost primal: there’s a monster and it’s going to get you and chances are that you can’t stop it. No need to know why. The sequel “Aliens” shifted gear and became a highpoint of sci-fi action cinema, and action cinema itself; it gave a little more about the alien, and more of them, plus an alien mother, but that’s fine: mystery enough still surrounded them. By the time we get to the “Alien vs Predator” fanboy series, we’re pretty far from the wonder of the original, and the thrills of the immediate sequel.

That is to say, the problem with “Prometheus” isn’t so much that it wants to fill in the backstory, but that what it fills in isn’t actually that interesting, and it’s not-interesting with pretensions. Perhaps we never needed these answers, but then again why not take the series in a different direction – “Prometheus”, after all, looks likely to be the start of a new trilogy and Scott has decided to go for a more “2010: A Space Odyssey” and “Quatermass and the Pit” approach, concerning the origins of man and the search for God and facing death and so on. We know this because the characters don’t leave it to the visuals and talk about all this. The characters are not particularly good, so this does the film’s themes no good.

 It also feels compromised. It says “caesarean” when it means “abortion”. It has concrete-looking cylinders rather than the icky, gooey, sex-organ-like alien eggs/pods of the original (although, ok, the eggs surely come later and these are forerunners). It has Giger-lite murals. It has mouth-rape and phallic-snake aliens that can break your arm – perhaps the film’s best moment? – but the squid-foetus and the mini-Cthulhu vagina-dentata behemoth it eventually turns into just can’t compare to those original man-in-suit Giger-designs.

Worse, this is another case of an apparent group of specialists going on a special, one-of-a-kind mission and acting: juvenile, incompetent, argumentative, unprofessional, untrained, etc. Smoking in their space-suits; argumentatively splitting up from the rest of the group on an alien planet, for example. The black captain is too busy being nonchalant and sexually available, as well as playing his accordion; so busy being inept on an alien planet, in fact, that he doesn’t seem to be paying attention to evidence of a potential threat, even though, you know, he is on a space mission to find alien life. Is there no round-the-clock monitoring of the nifty gadgets that are flying around the alien craft and mapping it out? Why do they seem to get a briefing of the mission only once they have woken from a two year cryogenic sleep? Didn’t they know what they were getting into? In the future, do apparent specialists just leap into cryogenic sleep and hope for the best mission when they are woken? And if the ‘robot’ is meant to not understand or experience many human emotions, why does he keep smiling to himself with satisfaction and awe when discovering the secrets of the alien race? Science-fiction always has a problem with emotionless characters because, well, melodrama has a hard time accepting the truly ‘other’ and letting it be itself. What’s the point of Charlize Theron pulling her boardroom-career-bitch act? Where does that get them? And this all hinges upon the protagonist’s crisis of faith and the fact that she lost her dad? Hey, there’s no God and it’s pretty much meat and murder, although there is the fascinating conflict of our inherent animal natures and our highly developed technology (the spaceships look great) and confused emotional states. She’s gone in search of God? Hell, “Star Trek” did that most weeks.

Unleash the aliens. That’s all we ask.

There’s eeriness and dazzling sci-fi spectacle, but any answers are mundane, and I’ve a sneaky feeling that they feel redundant; the characters are nonentities, the squid-impregnation-abortion seems faintly distasteful and stupid and her physical recovery and persistence afterwards unlikely. The revelation that the aliens are some biological warfare (I think) is ok, but I preferred the idea that they were simply a development of their own, travelling across space and wiping out whomever they met far more resonant. That the alien “engineers” simply turn out to be bad guys also feels dissatisfying. And when they are woken, they get right back at continuing their mission, even though, well, was this the only ship meant to be targeting the Earth?

Not that Scott ought to have simply thrown up another “monster house in space” scenario, although that would have been fine, but “Prometheus” seems to be a victim of its own mythos, forgetting the thrills and simplicity of its original premise and relying too much on silly and uninteresting characterisation to carry the weight of the drama. “The Thing” re-make/prequel was arguably narratively better simply for being more modest in its intent. Well, “The Thing” is probably more redundant that “Prometheus”, but no one expected much from “The Thing” and it mostly delivered more than expected. “Prometheus” is a whole other weirdness and clash of sequel redundancy and state-of-the-art cinema.

Awe-inspiring for the eye; underwhelming in other details. It will likely attract those who love to rush off and write essays on the religious symbolism and themes, which are inevitably masquerade as profundity rather than the human narcissism they are, throwing the far more interesting themes of survival and the expanse and alienness of outer space. I don’t really feel inclined to be thoroughly dismissive or unkind to “Prometheus”, but neither did I feel invigorated by it. A kind of apathy is surely not the intended response, and there are those that seem to loathe it, but it’s really just an expensively dressed average science-fiction thriller. So - Question: one of the most disappointing and eagerly-awaited franchise entries in a long time? Answer: probably.

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind": the wonder of a man-child.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

Steven Spielberg, 1977, USA

I remember going caravan camping with my father when I was 12 and finding inside, on a shelf, a book called “Alien Encounter” by Flanna Devin. I remember most clearly deciding that it was about time that I started to read adult book, to abandon the kid stuff and start seeing what big books dense with prose were like. Also, I was besotted with the alien encounter idea. The cover had a spaceship flying through the great void, but that had nothing to do with the story within, a tale of an encounter that changes a small American town. It was one of those books you would always find in the bargain bins, along with a lot of crap horror, but which often bore great cover art. Anyhow, extraterrestrials making creepy visits occupied much of the same fear-space in my head as cemetery ghosts and attic monsters. I recall that UFOs were big in the Seventies, and that carried over in my thoughts when I was an adolescent in the eighties. Much of my sense of what alien visitations would be like was rendered in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. It certainly felt like the culmination of many anxieties and expectations of the UFO generation.

Having produced one of the greatest suspense-horror-adventure films of all time in “Jaws”... well, let’s add “Duel” in there and make it two ... Steven Spielberg turned his attention to science fiction with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. He imagined alien encounters as a series of dazzling light shows and a touch of meeting the angels. For the most part, “Close Encounters” provides a wonderful realisation of the UFO enthusiast’s dream, delivering a number of set-pieces that reach a sense of the genuinely awe-inspiring. It’s uneven, but it’s pace is deliberate, delivering encounters early but still holding back until the first act transcends itself with the abduction of a small boy: his house seems to be under siege by lights, bringing his toys alive, seemingly taking the house apart by its screws to get to him. It is certainly one of greatest cinematic alien abductions in cinema, effortlessly combining childish wonder and audience terror. Indeed “wonder” itself seems to be the very subject matter and certainly one of Spielberg’s abiding themes (and somewhat tediously too).

The curious thing about Close Encounters it that its protagonist, Rob Neary, is one of those All-American All-Annoying Man-Child characters, part clown, part asshole, selfish, tediously goofball, and Dreyfuss also plays him like a Robin Williams knock-off. That is probably not the intention, but Neary is a bad, self-centred and immature father from the start when he can’t be bothered to stop tinkering with his train set to help his eldest child with his homework. Spielberg says:

I think in casting “Close Encounters”, what I was really looking for were actors who were still closer to their own memories of their own childhoods. Richard Dreyfuss was a bigger kid than the children he was raising in his suburban house.

Spielberg is probably thinking that a child’s-eye is the eye of wonder, which probably makes him the perfect Hollywood wunderkind, but the net effect is imagining American Suburban families as immature and easily distracted by shiny objects. This just does not cohere with the moment where all the scientists and specialists and whomever, when faced with the mothership, simply stop what they are doing, barely remember to do their jobs and simply stand in true awe, and the audience does much the same: what we are doing is connecting with our adult sense of wonder. That is: we are not being infantalised; awe is not solely the domain of the child. When anointed with the vision of Devil’s Tower, Neary-Dreyfuss – the kind of whacky guy who drives against the traffic with maps in front of the windscreen, because, you know, he's obsessed! – character flaws go into overdrive, reaching its nadir in the embarrassing comedy sequence where he starts throwing plants and bricks through his kitchen window and fighting the trashman for trash bins. He drives his family away and has no attachment to them to make him think twice about, in the end, joining the aliens.

He’s lost his job, alienated his wife, and spooked his kids, yet he can’t bring himself to care about any of it – not since the universe slipped in through the car window. [1]

says Eric Hynes. But actually he is a one-note character that just gets worse. Since he starts out with little interest in paying attention to family matters and, it seems, adult concerns, the summons and pilgrimage to the mothership looks like a calling for all emotionally stunted adults, especially the man-child characters that dominate the American mainstream and sit-coms, to leave those responsibilities aside and join child-like aliens to head to the stars. The adults are left behind to clean up the mess and go back to work. However, Neary’s cracking-up does provide one splendid moment of domestic breakdown which feels quintessentially Spielberg, a scene that momentarily matches all the special effects around it: Neary is at the dinner table making his mashed/creamed potato into the likeness of “Devil’s Tower” and the family just look back of him and start crying with a kind of abstract despair and a realisation, surely, that he has deserted them in some way. It is the one moment of true emotional effect before Neary’s behaviour becomes a dumping ground for slapstick and man-child narcissism.

The Special Edition of “Close Encounters” – one of at least three varying versions –provides the film with one of those Spielberg sentimental touches that ruins almost all his films, making them one half brilliant and one half ridiculous. In this revised edition, Dreyfus walks into the spaceship and both the light show and orchestra goes into overdrive. Spielberg later realised that we should never really see inside the ship, as that ought to be all up to the audience imagination: something eerie still remains by not seeing, not only promises of unknowable wonder. But worse, as John Williams whips his string section into ecstasy, he also drops in a motif from “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Indeed, the way to imagine a fantastic and benign alien contact is to throw in a tribute to Disney. Such crassness breaks the spell.

But let’s leave the Special Edition aside.

The final thirty minutes is a fantastic prolonged set-piece of wonder and revelation on top of more wonder and light-shows. It is quite a feat, leaving narrative to one side to show what the visual medium can do. The other remarkable achievement of Spielberg’s film is in “producing a seventies-set drama so devoid of cynicism.” [2] Indeed. However unrealistically the scenario may play out, it probably is a splendid indulgence to see an alien encounter rendered so benignly without the military rushing in to shoot up anything vaguely un-American; or, indeed, to rush forward and immediately throw the people who come out of the mothership into horrifying decontamination process and post-abduction tests (or maybe they do, but in the film’s world it seems unlikely). Considering that a key part of the authorities cover-up strategy is to use ideas such as contaminated air, the ignoring of the possibility of alien viruses is somewhat disingenuous,  (indeed, what should we make of the toddler that was abducted simply being taken out from under the noses of the scientists to simply pop back home?).

But no matter: the "Close Encounters"  opening visions are unnerving and thrilling and the prolonged finale is jaw-dropping, so side-stepping concerns about aggressive aliens and the fall-out from the encounter is part of the delight of this encounter. And, seemingly despite itself, its sense of wonder is not really so juvenile. It's looking upwards and being amazed and scared and back again, and that is not totally the domain of the child.

---

[1] http://www.reverseshot.com/article/close_encounters_third_kind

[2] http://www.reverseshot.com/article/close_encounters_third_kind

Nightmares of "This Island Earth"

"This Island Earth"
Joseph M Newman, 1955, USA

One of my fondest film-watching memories is when I was about eleven and living at my grandparent’s house after my parents split and getting to watch the b-movie season playing over months and months on television. I was about eleven or twelve and I loved getting into my pyjamas and watching these films on a Sunday evening before bed. I saw so many of the black-and-white creature features this way; my private education to the drive-in horror and science-fiction era, as if I had been born decades earlier. I know for sure that I saw “The Beast from 50,000 Fathoms” and “King Kong” and “It Came From Outer Space” that way, as well as “It! The Terror Beyond Space”, “Earth versus the Flying Saucers” and “This Island Earth”.

“This Island Earth” is kind of an honorary classic: it’s not a classic due to story and execution, but the whole is definitely greater than the parts. It looks and sounds like a tacky Fifties sci-fi, but it is much more if you play into it. It has decent and decidedly adult characters; it has a nice air of menace and mystery and a fascinatingly ambiguous relationship with its aliens. The aliens are the kind you are likely to meet in “Star Trek” – intelligent and humanoid with over-sized foreheads, but can seemingly pass for human. They are a threat in that they are a civilisation – from Metaluna –  on the brink of being wiped out by their enemies and both need Earth’s help and intend on moving their population to Earth too. The film’s classic status is surely down to the fact that it is quintessential Fifties-era pulp sci-fi, and that’s a lot of fun and no bad thing. It also has a slow build-up that is rewarded with a fantastic if brief visit to Metaluna itself, a gorgeous cosmic vision with comic-book colours and mutants, one which rivals anything from “Forbidden Planet”.

“This Island Earth” is full of green rays, flying saucers, manipulative but super-smart aliens, unlikely square-jawed scientists (Rex Reason) and equally unlikely science. It looks and acts like something out of “Astounding Science Fiction” magazine, and that is no bad thing. The worries about other cultures being smarter, manipulative and colonialist, but trusts its square-jaws and female vulnerability to get an Earthman through an extraterrestrial encounter. It is dated, but that doesn’t seem to do it any harm. It gets better and balmier as it goes on and has the good sense to throw in some alien mutants too to spice up things.

Yes: the mutants. These insectoid aliens gave me a nightmare that I never quite forgot. They were lumbering, soundless and – well, you can’t get much more alien than insects. I dreamt that I was on the spaceship standing inside the giant transparent tubes it had to condition people to different environments; my dream was paraphrasing the spaceship and a scene from the film. One of the mutants was going crazy on the flight deck, just as in the film, and I was stuck in the tube. The difference was that there was a gap at the bottom of the tubes so that feet, ankles and lower shins were horrible exposed. The alien came attacking the tubes and I was trapped inside and, eventually, it started to attack my feet at the gap at the base of the tube. I suspect I woke up during the attack. Oh yes, it was quite a nightmare and I’ve never forgotten it. For this reason, I have quite a soft spot for “This Island Earth”.

It remains a delightful slice of pulp hokum with an odd charm all its own. It doesn’t have the resonance and deep chills of, say, “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers”, but it is old school fun and possessed of enough intelligence and gorgeous alien scenery to more than hold its own.

Walt Disney's "Taxi Driver"

The Cabin in the Woods

Drew Goddard, USA, 2012
The CABIN IN THE WOODS

(This review is completely full of spoilers)

Count me in the minority of dissenters. When I read a little about ‘Cabin in the Woods’ I was told that it would not be what I expected, so I stopped reading, thinking there would be cool twists and surprises. Well, any horror and science-fiction aficionado can hazard a guess where it’s going from the first five or ten minutes, so there are no twists or real surprises, just a pop-culture frown at horror and a bit of showboating.

As a supposed meta-horror about the genre, ‘Cabin in the Woods’ really isn’t very smart, and therein lays its offensiveness. Perhaps its hypocrisy starts with our first view of our main protagonist in her underwear. Drew Goddard’s camera maintains a sleazy eye in order to both capture the sexuality of our tediously hot young cast – except for the stoner token, of course – and to titillate the easily titillated in the audience: it seems confused where the line between those two poles are. Later, our “puppeteers” will urge on one of the characters to show her breasts, apparently to appease both them and the greater forces they are trying to appease, who apparently – apparently like the rest of us – want to see her goodies. In the reality of the film, this greater force is meant to be The Old Gods. Perhaps it is this that truly defines the film’s deep-rooted silliness. There’s a cabin in the woods which is a stunning bit of science-fiction-cum-supernatural construct where a super-secret government organisation has to send young Americans (and others from all over the world, it seems) so that they can unwittingly choose from a selection of horror scenarios and die by that choice. This is done to appease Old Gods, whom apparently want a reality TV horror show and who will otherwise destroy the world. Old Gods? Really? To my mind, it is only HP Lovecraft that can pull off The Old Gods scenario. Of course, the Old Gods are an allegory for the horror audiences’ appetites for blood, human sacrifice and, apparently, titties and derivative genre fare: it is to this that we must sacrifice young hot things to nasty horror genre deaths.

“You think you know the story,” challenges the tagline. Well, any alert sci-fi or horror will work it out early. The problem is that fanboy favourite Joss Whedon (scripting) and Drew Goddard (directing and co-scripting) are writing about, and perhaps unintentionally for, a perceived lowest common denominator horror fan and failing to capture the complex and sophisticated relationship that horror fans often have with the genre, one which they are able to engage with various levels of self-awareness. Worse, the scenarios meant to sate the Old Gods seem to be based upon a post-‘Scream’ American horror template, the kind where posters and covers for horrors simply have a line-up of young interchangeable, bland hotties. It is hard to take it as fun and perceptive, or seriously, when the breadth of its knowledge and feeling of the genre seems to be based upon television horror, franchise sequels and a story by HP Lovecraft it once heard about. So we get characters proposed somewhat un-ironically as ‘the virgin’, ‘the whore’, ‘the athlete’, etc. Anything ironic or tongue-in-cheek about this dissipates when the most sexually active of the victims truly is considered ‘a whore’, and the idea that, despite a little tweak here and there, young people really do like to fall into and act out their stereotypes. Adam Naman writes at Reverseshot:

In Drew Goddard’s new and extravagantly lauded Cabin in the Woods, a group of sharp, likeable protagonists are forcibly reduced to generic stereotypes within the film’s storyline to prove some larger point about pandering to audience expectations.

But that’s not exactly so: the characters start out as annoying types and then are reduced to cliches. Okay, so the ‘jock’ is also a successful academic, and for the most part it is “the puppeteers” trying to shoehorn their characters into stereotypes too, but our young victims really aren’t made that complicated; they are still as initially brattish as any other tediously teen-horror. And then, there is the fact that the sexually active woman (who is capable of giving tongue-sex to a mounted wolf-head) really is considered a “whore” in the apparent scheme of things, and the film does not seem to realise how offensive this may be and how it is playing into awful and ancient patriarchal prejudices and stereotypes. After all, it’s otherwise not clear why the “virgin” – which she isn’t – doesn’t qualify for “whore” status too. Is it because she’s less “slutty”?

There is the whiff of contempt for the audience about all this: despite the amusing asides to Asian Horror - which is ‘Cabin in the Woods’ best gag - and ‘The Shining’ and – most embarrassingly – ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Cabin in the Woods’ presents the most formulaic and worst of the American slashers as the go-to sub-genre to epitomise horror, and casts its “puppeteers” as slightly-bumbling and frequently obnoxious bunch who gamble on the lives of their victims, egg on the girl to take off her top just before she is murdered and treat all of this as a game. Oh, they protest that the gambling is just letting off steam, that it is a hard job etc, which is meant to explain their obnoxiousness, but that’s just waffle. Having a Token Black Character of Conscience doesn’t help either. Perhaps making horror films under Dimension Films and the Weinsteins – who always actively demand their quota of tits – creates the feeling that American horror film makers are just stupid manipulators playing to the Old Gods of the lowest common denominator, but it is presenting a woefully reductive vision of the genre, if not the studio process, and no amount of name-checking other work will elevate this true meta-horror. It maybe satirising the commercial end of horror, but it’s not quite doing anyone any favours either. A larger point being made? Well, It’s all bread-and-circuses is not an especially revelatory footnote. Like Michael Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’, ‘Cabin in the Woods’ represents horror and condemns its practitioners and product without understanding that they might understand what they are watching. The Weinsteins’ own ‘Scream’ revealed how horror satire can be both serious, respectful, nodding and amusing (although according to Peter Biskind’s book ‘Down and Dirty Picture’, they didn’t understand it one jot and almost tried to sabotage Wes Craven’s production at first). “Cabin in the Woods” references “The Shining” and “Hellraiser” without seemingly realising that those benchmark films were already deconstructing, reconstructing and setting horror precedents. A fan can look to a film like Norway's 'Fritt Vilt' to show how the genre can still provide solid genre characters and mayhem without resorting to apathy or crassness.

It is hard to truly treat ‘Cabin in the Woods’ as fun or think it has true respect for the audience when it wheels out the Sigourney Weaver of Exposition at the end to tell us what we already know. And is it even worth mentioning how stupid the big-red-button-that-unleashes-alll-the-beasties is? Maybe TV horror can get away with such shorthand, barely, but in true cinema, greatness is in the details and credibility. When you have to start making major allowances for such flaws, there is the hint that all may not as be as good as it looks. And to be tutted at by Whedon who gave soft horror one its most famous fan-boy, pop-culture wet dreams: a hot girl who fights vampires? One must look to films such as ‘Martyrs’ and ‘Let The Right One In’ and ‘Attack the Block’ to witness true engagement and dialogue with the horror genre. Or perhaps ‘The Monster Squad’ and anything by Joe Dante are better suggestions if you’re looking for the knowing but softer satirical stuff. Whedon has provided much better fun. Where is the love in ‘Cabin in the Woods’? Raiding the horror cabinet and tutting a bit isn’t good enough. ‘Cabin in the Woods’ is meta-horror for ‘Scooby-Doo’ fans. Surely the Old Gods themselves require better feeding than this?

The BBFC and "Eraserhead"

Question: Is the BBFC a condescending entity?

Exhibit A:
BBFC Eraserhead report - 15th July 1979
Bonus question: Is there any evidence of sexism in the BBFC opinions?*

Report summary:
"Well, it's certainly different and well enough made to merit some consideration. Fortunately the only criterion for this report is category and we all settled for the 'X' chiefly because of the truly obnoxious foetus. 14- and15-year old girls ought to be spared that, indeed all pregnant women should be advised of the film's content."

* Please note I used the term 'opinions' rather than, say 'conclusions' or 'verdict'.

Video and Violence: a vendor's tale

The following piece is taken from a work in progress, my pending book "The Gory Id: Killers in Film", and features as a foreward to a chapter discussing "Henry: portrait of a serial killer". I was lucky enough to find a journal entry written around 1992, when I worked in a video store, in which I documented a minor arugument I had had with a customer over the film and whether it was violent or not.
__

Video and Violence:
a vender’s tale

During the 1990s, I was fortunate to work in what used to be called a “video store”, a phenomenon to be fondly remembered that came and burnt out over about a twenty-year period, more-or-less. Or rather, I worked in a newsagent where one corner opposite the greeting cards and chocolates was devoted to a wall of VHS covers. When VHS came, the impact on film watching was incredible: it is simply impossible to convey to any youngster what it meant when video tapes were invented and, after a while, became widely available affordable to any old household. Or the fact that you could rent videos overnight from your local store: amazing! Before the VHS revolution, if you had loved a film seen at the cinema, you would wait a year or more before it turned up on television; and if you wanted to see it a third time, you would have to wait another year for the repeat, of you were lucky, not forgetting that you would have to make sure you were actually home to catch it. I myself had many nights when I was meant to be asleep for school illicitly watching films and television with my face pressed against the black-and-white screen in my bedroom with the volume as low as possible so that I wouldn’t get caught. Film-watching required a patience and dedication that would seem intolerable in the digital age. And then there was the Video Nasty period, which made VHS dangerous too (David Cronenberg knew!). And then people were recording favourite films and television shows, and so sometimes you had to make sophisticated arrangements and networks of friends of friends to acquire that one that you missed on TV last week. And I have very fond memories – during the nineteen-nineties – of heading across town to the local film fair in order to buy the films banned by the BBFC: oh yes, I was very excited to have ‘A Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974), even in its second or third-generation quality. ‘Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom’ (1975)? ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ (1980)? ‘Evil Dead’ (1980)? Yep, those too and all the joys of acquiring forbidden fruit.

I recall that the very first VHS tapes in my collection were ‘An American Werewolf in London’ (1981), ‘The Amityville Horror’ (1979) and ‘Eraserhead’ (1976). I was still in my mid-teens when I got these and since they were all 18 certificates, I have no proper recollection of how I got them, although I do recall waving ‘Eraserhead’ at my mother to buy for me. That was a film that had stunned me upon stumbling upon a late night broadcast when I was thirteen, and to think I was to actually own it was mind-blowing. Video renting was also a delightful ritual: my local newsagent was also a video store and even though I did not know that I was to eventually end up working there in my twenties, in my late teens it was a treasure trove. Any horror fan of the era will tell you about the joys of browsing those big boxes with the outrageous and nasty covers. You were going to end up with the cut versions, probably, but those covers triggered the lurid and fevered imaginations of millions of young horror fans, creating imaginary horror films that were hardly ever to be matched by the actual film on the chunky cassette.

And then, with the advent of video cameras being made affordable and available to the general public, we started to make our own films too. But more on that later.

So I came to work at this video palace, and I grew to know its particular selection of hundreds of films intimately. There was the excitement of the days when my boss would bring back new titles from the supplier, or those that were delivered. What new films would I get to see? And then there was the disappointment of those he hadn’t ordered that I wanted to see. It was amazing, for example, when he brought back ‘Henry: portrait of a serial killer’ (1986), which I had seen in one of its rare, rare cinematic screenings at the Everyman Cinema, when it had quite traumatised me. And then I rented it out. There were times I would take home a film every night, from junk horror to Hollywood Top Titles. Then other people rented it out, much to my amusement, for I was certain that for the most part that it was not what they expected.

One day, a man slapped the cassette of ‘Henry’ on the counter, returning it, and he said, “It’s supposed to be violent, but I’ve seen more violent ‘15’s.” So I asked him, with quite some tactlessness: didn’t he find seeing a kid’s head being whacked against the floor and having its neck twisted violent? He sniffed the answer away. I wondered if he would feel different if someone broke into his house and murdered his kids (he had three). He still wasn’t convinced. He had obviously watched ‘Henry’ for the violence and had been disappointed. Perhaps the BBFC’s cut had been successful in taking out all the extremities after all? Perhaps his view of screen violence was different to mine? Oh, I am sure.

But more than that: that very day, two ten year-old boys from Merseyside had been in court for murdering a two-year old boy the week before. Their names were Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. This was the famous Jamie Bulger Case and the media and the entirety of British society was consumed with it. When the police tried to smuggle the two boys out of court, the crowd of adults outside attacked the vans, throwing bricks, threats and expletives after the van and the kids (and the police?). Soon, the prosecution in the case and the media would claim that a typical little b-movie horror called ‘Child’s Play 3’ (1991) was inspiration for the boys to kill, bringing about a second wave of “Video Nasty” hysteria. The after-effects of the first “Video Nasty” wave still had not passed, and wouldn’t until the invention and whirlwind effect of DVD. Indeed, ‘Henry’ itself had been in certificate and censorship limbo for around eight years before I got to see it, uncut, at the Everyman Cinema. But with the Bulger Case consuming all, violence and children and parenting and screen violence was very much enflaming the majority of media and national conversation. Quentin Tarantino’s debut ‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1992), for example, was a cause célèbre for the pro-censorship and anti-screen violence voices and kept the topic at the forefront of media outrages (although all Tarantino had actually done was leave in all the blood that film noir had previously had to keep out).

 

And within this climate where sensitivity to screen violence was high, this man that I was debating with, having rented and dismissed ‘Henry’, asked me if I had been to the Gallarea yet: The Gallarea being one of the brand new shiny multiplex cinemas that were suddenly popping up and sweeping the country, killing off all the local and small cinemas in their wake. I said that I hadn’t been to The Gallarea – yet – because it wasn’t really showing the films I liked, and I tended to go to The Everyman in Hampstead instead. To which the customer pushed up the tip of his nose and he said, “Snob!” Evidently we were never going to agree on representations of violence on screen.

Myself, I was becoming increasingly interested in the subject of screen violence and its relationship to society around that time. I was convinced that verisimilitude in screen violence was crucial to a moral representation: the more realistic and graphic, the more honest and truthful. I had foolishly been turned off by the hysterical super-violence of ‘Total Recall’ (1990), for example (later I would come back to it, wiser, less pious, and relish its absurdity and outrageousness), even though it was a film I should have otherwise lapped up for its outrageousness (which I did later). I, you see, was busy watching shockers such as ‘Henry’ and ‘Man Bites Dog’ and the ridiculous and stupid violence of contemporary action films did not convince me. I felt that they were trivialising a very serious subject. This, after all, was the glory days of super-violent actioners in the style of Schwarzenegger, Van Damme and ‘Rambo’ hits. Their lack of realism and awareness was an insult, I felt as I missed the greater complexities and representations of screen violence.

And so it was indeed the verisimilitude of John McNaughton’s ‘Henry’ that met my criteria of the time. And this, indeed, was to me real horror and real violence on video. And that was before the character of Henry himself video-taped his killing.

(To be continued in "The Gory Id: Killers in Film")