The Dead Zone by Claire Donner, Party of One

"Daddy, Save Me!"

2006-05-28T10:41:00.000-04:00

Korea continues its monstrous rampage to dominate genre cinema.

After drawing such prodigious crowds that an extra screening was needed for its international premier at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight sidebar, the Korean monster movie THE HOST can look forward to attracting even greater attention world-wide. Its tremendous reception so impressed a certain Eamonn Bowles that his Magnolia Pictures has bought multi-territory rights to the film, which some call the hit of the festival. THE HOST’s sales agent Cineclick Asia had originally intended to sell rights only on a territory-by-territory basis, but Magnolia’s offer was so generous as to win the rights for the UK, US, and Australia.

Bowles gushed that director Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature "has the potential to become a classic of the genre…it is the most impressive and imaginative monster I've seen in a long time." The greater public will have to wait and see whereof Bowles speaks, since Joon-ho has obstinately revealed as little as possible about his film, whose ominous tagline exclaims, “Daddy, save me!” “'A family desperately struggling with the haunting presence of a creature infesting the seedy waters of the Han River’ is all I'll say about this film,” the tight-lipped director told Korean press. “No spoilers, no more talking about the film's plot until it comes out in theaters.”

Within the last few years, Joon-ho made warm little waves at festivals with a peculiar little black comedy called BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE (2000), and the grisly police procedural MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003). The latter is a retelling of real-life rural serial rape-murder, and the former is a bizarre black comedy about a man who becomes a killer of canines in his apartment complex; but however incongruous his move into monster movie territory may seem, THE HOST has been gestating in the filmmaker’s mind all along. “Even 18 years ago, when I was in school, I was preparing for this project,” he said. The chance to realize this relatively large-scale project finally came “because of [MEMORIES] and its success…I (wasn’t) waiting for the technology to catch up with my vision - I just was dying to make it."

But despite the years of mental preparation, bridging the gap between his experience with comparatively intimate horror and his ambitions of GODZILLA-like terror was no easy task. "At first I thought it would be easy,” Joon-ho confessed. “But at the end I was almost on my knees pretending to pray. (Building) a mechanical thing and designing a living, breathing creature are two different things. (How) it would eat, sleep, purge itself, and lose blood were choices we had to make, and just that ultimately took a year to (do)."

However, it still sounds like the new film won’t wander too far from the atmosphere of his previous efforts. Amid poetic musings on THE HOST’s cinematography, which seems to make Seoul’s Han River into the main character, Joon-ho affirmed that "the creature is not the be-all end-all of this film,” adding curiously, “but it's certainly protagonist of…the climax.” But despite the brevity of its screen presence, the monster is the partial responsibility of Australia’s Creature Workshop, who brought to life the hyper-slick hordes from PITCH BLACK, so FX enthusiasts can expect a fair showing of amphibious flesh by the end.

For more quotes from Bong Joon-ho and his human lead, go to:
http://www.movie-page.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=188&sid=f78211c4375a1f5a49091d4de4b746e3

For further reportage from the Cannes front:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/film/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002574743

And to see the trailer:
http://www.twitchfilm.net/monster.wmv

Spike Lee Takes On Family Matters

2006-05-28T10:31:00.000-04:00

Supernatural thriller attracts socially-critical cineastes.

Apparently Spike Lee so enjoyed the directorial experience of making a dog deliver death sentences in his horrific SUMMER OF SAM that he’s signed on to script a supernatural thriller for 20th Century Fox. The project, SELLING TIME, concerns a man who exchanges years of his own life to extend the life of his tragically murdered daughter. Since it is being touted as a “thriller”, one can imagine that things go gruesomely awry. Although the gimmicky premise might feel a little “done” at this post-Tarantino, post-MEMENTO point in the history of linear narrative, it must reek of relevance to a certain kind of socially-conscious craftsman. The picture has been passed between several pairs of unlikely hands since bit-acting brothers Derek and Steven Martini penned the first version in 2002; long before Mr. Lee signed on for a rewrite, Forest Whitaker had announced his intentions of directing the project.

At the time in 2002, when he was hosting UPN’s Twilight Zone update, Whitaker explained to the press as much about the mysterious movie as anyone has since: "It's about a man who is on top of the world. He’s meeting with the president of the United States. He's a media rep. One day, he doesn't pick up his daughter at school because he's been held up by the president. His daughter is abducted at school and she's killed…then his boss offers him the opportunity to meet this woman who says if he'll give her seven years of his life, she'll give him back seven years of his daughter's life. He agrees and the next morning the daughter is fine. And it proceeds from there. It's a supernatural thriller, but it's really about prioritizing your time and figuring out what's important."

Apparently, had Whitaker followed through with this dark affair instead of deciding that what was really important was his cutie-pie Katie Holmes vehicle FIRST DAUGHTER, he might have had Will Smith for his male lead. It remains to be seen whether Spike’s protagonist will be played by a more pensive performer. The film, which Lee has also expressed tenuous interest in directing, has been given a 2007 release date.

For more on Spike Lee’s dubious intentions, read on at: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944011?categoryid=13&cs=1

For an illustration of some of the project’s previous incarnations, go to:
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue285/news.html

And for a timeline on this weird undertaking:
http://www.upcominghorrormovies.com/movies/sellingtime.php

David Seltzer, You Were Adopted

2006-05-28T10:13:00.000-04:00

OMEN remake so faithful that only original's writer is credited.

Recent ink on the upcoming remake of THE OMEN has revealed that the retread is so thin that David Seltzer, scribe of Richard Donner’s original film, has received the sole writing credit on John Moore’s update – despite the fact that Seltzer and the new director have never even met. However, Irish-born Moore has bigger problems than an all-too-common lack of originality. The filmmaker may have damned himself and his movie by including footage of, among other contemporary tragedies, the devastation of September 11th, 2001, in order to imbue the fantasy with the sense that the End Times are upon us.

A May 16th press screening of his OMEN-remake played to a less than impressed audience. "During the introduction to the Q&A, a gentlemen purported to have a question, which really turned out to be a statement,” Moore recounted to Sci-Fi Wire. “He asked if I was from New York, and I said no. Then he said, 'How dare you use an image of 9/11, and your movie's a piece of sh--t.' And then he stormed off."

Like the 1976 original, the remake concerns Damien Thorn (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), the young son of a diplomat father (Liev Schreiber), and his devoted wife, Katherine (Julia Stiles). Sinister events surrounding the boy’s sixth birthday reveal to the Thorns that their son is the Antichrist. Lovers of the first OMEN will find that the greater body of the first film has been imported – in some cases word for word and shot for shot – into the present project. Moore excuses the absence of the remake’s proper screenwriter from the credits thusly: "Dan McDermott was a credited writer, but due to the machinations of the [Writer's Guild of America], he lost his credit." The specifics of that remain unexplained, but as to the text of his remake, Moore admits: "We did use Mr. Seltzer's script extensively."

Has Moore put any of his own touches on the material? "I think I did, by default," he said, in a moment of either pathological honesty or outright shame. "It's a different cast; it's a different movie; it's a different experience. The story is the same. I don't mean this in a flattering way to myself; I mean it in a flattering way to the text. It's a bit like a Shakespeare play. You very much want people to enjoy the experience of the play, but the text is so good, and the story tracks so well, that you feel inclined to stick with that.”

Knowing what one does about the director’s additions to the story, one may decide he was right to be so hands-off. But unlike the poor Thorn parents, Moore had been warned about what he was conceiving. "I did stay up late at night wondering whether or not to use [9/11 imagery] in the movie,” he confessed. “Other people said, 'For God's sake, use Rwanda' or something like that. Which in and of itself is interesting. But you'd have to be churlish to not understand that this is America. If you're using images of pain that happened in America, and you're showing it to Americans, you can expect there to be an emotional reaction." Evidently he hadn’t thought far enough ahead to discern just what kind of emotional reaction it would garner.

Moore’s last baffling words on the subject are as follows: "Believe me, I looked into a lot of cases of pure evil, and it's undeniable that looking at the last few years you can't walk away thinking that's not one of the most significant events. That's why it's used. I tried to use it in an analytical context. I didn't use it to get people upset."

Finally, the director claimed that he screened the end product for Richard Donner himself, and that the elder director was “happy with it”. If you’re not busy throwing rice at the wedding of Anton Lavey’s grandson in Las Vegas, you can see The Omen in theaters on 6/6/06 and form your own opinions.

To read more of John Moore in his own words, follow the links: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=36281
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=36234

For a selection of clips from his remake, go to:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/theomen.html

And for a brief history of the whole dubious enterprise:
http://www.upcominghorrormovies.com/movies/omen666.php

A PUERTO RICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON

2006-03-17T10:44:00.000-05:00

Del Toro eats villagers, Walker mutilates story.

Lupine leading man Benicio Del Toro is slated to star in a Universal remake of the studio’s 1941 classic THE WOLF MAN. For the suave and swarthy actor, playing the eponymous lycanthrope will be a childhood dream come true, as Del Toro whiled away his younger years in the forests and caves of rural Puerto Rico, alone with fantasies of famous monsters. The grownup Benicio is an avid collector of Wolf Man memorabilia.

However, one wonders what will remain of the nostalgic romance usually ascribed to the Universal monster movie canon, since the project is being penned by SE7EN scribe Andrew Kevin Walker. Variety warns that the writer will add several new characters and gruesome plot points that will best lend themselves to “cutting-edge visual effects technology.” Considering the feeble results of the AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON update, one wonders just how much more visual stimulation today’s CG-reliant FX studios have to offer.

Narratively, the remake will not wander too far from the beaten path - it will be a Victorian period piece, at least. Our hero will be an American is bitten by a bipedal canine whilst visiting his ancestral English homeland, and subsequently finds himself switching species to take moonlight strolls and feast on human flesh. Del Toro will make the transformation in early 2007, after wrapping Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara biopic GUERRILLA, and THE WOLF MAN will hit theaters in summer 2008.

For further production details, read on at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117939760?categoryid=13&cs=1

Those wondering what qualifies Del Toro to succeed Lon Chaney Jr. may peruse his bio at:
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/biographies/benicio_del_toro_biog.html

And to review Mr. Walker’s rap sheet (credited and otherwise):
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1195151

BACK TO THE GRIND

2006-03-17T10:37:00.000-05:00

Tarantino-Rodriguez trip down memory lane delayed.

Fanboys awaiting Robert Rodriguez’s return from his foray into family film territory will have to wait a little longer; the genre favorite’s latest adult-oriented project, GRINDHOUSE, has been pushed back from its September 22 release date to December 1 of this year. Like the Romero-Argento diptych TWO EVIL EYES (1990), GRINDHOUSE will be composed of two 75-minute segments – one directed by Rodriquez, and the other by SIN CITY-collaborator Quentin Tarantino.

No sooner are rumors of Michael Keaton’s involvement in the film debunked, than there is news of a role for rabid attention whore Tom Savini. The FX guru-cum-cameo machine first stepped in front of Rodriguez’s camera (alongside costar Tarantino) for the genre-bending sex-gore extravaganza FROM DUSK TILL DAWN in 1996. Apparently Savini’s performance as the aptly-named Sex Machine so pleased Rodriguez as to warrant a comeback, and so the gore effects godfather joins Danny Trejo, John Jarrett, and Alicia Rachel Marek in the GRINDHOUSE cast list.

It’s no surprise that Savini should be part of the package, considering that Rodriguez and Tarantino are both professional genre geeks; the project itself is designed to simulate the experience of a pre-Giuliani Times Square double feature, with a splattery zombie flick (Rodriguez’s “Project Terror”) and a slasher movie (Tarantino’s “Death Proof”) sandwiching a mock-trailer reel of fictitious exploitation features. TheWeinsteinCo. production, which the directors hope may be the first of a series, is currently filming in Austin, Texas.

For the first-hand Savini report, go to:
http://www.houseofhorrors.com/crypt/pages/recent_news/article_629.shtml

Those peeing their pants about the delay should keep an eye on:
http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/index.php?Show=5980&Template=newsfull

And for a thorough roundup of all known GRINDHOUSE facts and rumors to date:
http://www.joblo.com/upcomingmovies/movies.php?id=607

BLACK HOLE

2006-03-17T10:32:00.000-05:00

Charles Burns masterpiece to be filmed by Alexandre Aja.

Visionary graphic novelist Charles Burns, indispensable contributor to pioneering publication Raw magazine and one of the most talented writer-artists in the history of the comic book industry, has finally earned the privilege of having his greatest labor of love adapted for the big screen. That’s right, Black Hole is now the property of Hollywood.

Pop-noir screenwriter Roger Avary (TRUE ROMANCE, RULES OF ATTRACTION, the upcoming SILENT HILL) and traitorous comic book hack Neil Gaiman (Sandman, MIRRORMASK) are teaming to translate Burn’s beloved masterpiece of doomed romance and human frailty into a screenplay to be directed by Alexandre Aja, the young French slasher filmmaker who recently made-over Wes Craven’s classic THE HILLS HAVE EYES. If it’s hard to imagine hardboiled Avary working with fruity fantasist Gaiman, it may be even harder for those who have seen Aja’s vicious hyperkinetic HIGH TENSION, or his relentlessly unpleasant Craven-produced HILLS, to imagine the director’s live action interpretation of Burn’s black and white, quietly disturbing suburban psychodrama.

Black Hole, a novel-length narrative that took Burns ten years to complete, is a Twin Peaks-esque tale of naïve Northwestern high school kids who fall victim to the “teen plague” – a protean STD that transforms the bodies of its hosts into terrifying new forms. The thinly-veiled AIDS allegory is by turns blackly comic, devastatingly tragic, and generally resembles an intimate retelling of a beautiful dream. It remains to be seen whether the writing duo also responsible for Robert Zemeckis’s forthcoming tech monstrosity BEOWULF, and the director who specializes in flesh-rending mayhem will be capable of channeling any of the myriad virtues of Charles Burn’s Black Hole in their film.

First word came from:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com

For a Burns bio and reviews of his most revered work, read on at:
http://www.artbomb.net/profile.jsp?idx=1&cid=103

For an interview with Avary on his previous collaboration with Gaiman, follow the link:
http://www.fangoria.com/news_article.php?id=3743

CRONENBERG AT THE WALTER READ, PT. 2

2005-12-16T10:24:00.000-05:00

After a wonderful evening spent in the company of the cast and composer of his recent success A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, director David Cronenberg returned alone to spend a more intimate moment with the patrons of New York City's Walter Reade Theater on the night of November 29. The graceful, imperiously intelligent filmmaker arrived in yet another gray-velvet-dominated ensemble, prepared to answer any remaining questions about HISTORY or anything else in his oeuvre with his trademark velour intonations and wintery countenance. Even old flesh is erotic flesh.
The Toronto-dwelling director's return to Manhattan so soon after his last visit was certainly called for; it seems that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE has proven itself to be a film that requires repeat examination from multiple angles. Apparently after having viewed HISTORY with a lethally somber American audience, Village Voice critic and Midnight Movies author J. Hoberman felt that a Canadian screening was essential – and true to his intuition, his northern journey found him with an audience that frequently roared with laughter. Unsurprised by this information, Cronenberg contributed, "The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May, and there was a famous incident which involved an Austrian critic (at a press screening)…I think it actually was New York Times critics who were chuckling (and) laughing it up, and this (Austrian) critic stood up and said 'Shut up you fucking piece of shit critics, don't you know that this is not funny, it's serious!'" The Times critics' blogs reflect that the Austrian was certainly an intelligent and talented critic, but "they felt that they had a better handle, and I think they were right, on what was going on in the film than he did, because (HISTORY) does ask the audience to twist and turn in terms of tone. It's funny, and (then) it's immediately shocking, and then it's immediately scary, and then it's immediately funny again, and then it's sad and emotional. It does all that, and it is a dangerous thing to do because you're walking a tight rope and it can backfire on you." The director, known for his perhaps willful urge to upset and even repel his audience, often with the use of unfamiliar and otherworldly elements, said of the relatively earthy, naturalistic HISTORY, "What I really wanted to do was replicate the kind of emotional rollercoaster that you could have over the course of a normal day. You read something tragic and you're upset, then something funny happens in your office, then someone phones you and is in a panic. All of these things happen (in life), why can't a movie have that many moods within it? But I think the template for movies today is very clunky… Hollywood movies and movies that follow that pattern tend to be 'Now it's sad and the music is sad and the lighting is said SAD and you know it's sad, and then you can move on to something that's funny.' There's never any mixing of tones and moods. And people can get confused…they think they're supposed to be somber because it's the new Cronenberg movie, and if they think that that's a serious thing then it must be approached seriously. But I've never made a movie that's not funny. They're all funny." Well…a beat passes. Facial muscles contract. A moment of doubt comes and goes. Then, "Maybe THE BROOD wasn't very funny." He smirks, referring to a film he made in direct response to the event of his then-wife joining a cult and attempting to induct their child and escape from him altogether. "I was in a really bad mood when I made that movie. But that's about the only one that doesn't have genuine laughs in it."

Despite the multifaceted emotional responses of various audiences, Cronenberg can happily say that HISTORY has yielded "one of the best critical responses I've ever had." For the so-called Dave "Deprave", positive critical reaction is an occurrence worth remarking upon. He first made a name for himself in 1975 by scandalizing the Canadian government when he exploited its tax shelter structure to finance the wantonly grotesque and erotic SHIVERS (which, despite public outcry, is the only film made with Canadian tax money to have actually made money back), and within the past decade his NC-17-ratedCRASH was verboten in parts of the UK. Critic Chris Tookey's call for the ban was taken seriously in the cultural center of Westminster, reflecting agreement with limey critic Alex Walker's assessment that the fetishy J.G. Ballard adaptation was indeed "beyond the bounds of depravity." "I thought that was pretty good territory to be in," chuckled Cronenberg, before concluding calmly, "but, um, he's dead." In response to the house's astonished laughter, the director added with a wry smile, "I do not forgive."

Certainly this director, one of the few with dual citizenship in the art house community and the mainstream, has run up against a relatively high degree of antagonism from censors and critics over the course of his career, and sees that continuing to happen even in this more enlightened era. "It's very hard to get a difficult film made now…it's very difficult to get an independent film made that's edgy," he said, allowing for difficulty on both sides of the indie/mainstream fence. "It's something that people have talked about vis-à-vis Sundance…(we) are starting to see films that are obviously rehearsals for studio films…it's just the tenor of the times," he shrugged. So at this relatively permissive point in time, what is it that makes a film "difficult"? "Violence is not edgy," Cronenberg elaborated. "In terms of movies, violence is just bread and butter…sex and violence are the basics. 'Conflict is the essence of drama,' said George Bernard Shaw, and violence is of course the most basic kind of conflict. So I don't think violence (gives) you edge; what you see in a lot of movies is not even real violence, it's attitude. Attitude is anti-art because it's a pretense, it's a façade, it's a defensive mechanism. It means that you're really not digging deep, you're not going into something real, where something makes you vulnerable. If what you express is attitude, then it's all defensive, and you can't be defensive if you're going to be an artist." So despite what might be perceived as a sadistic bent in his movies, Cronenberg's real priority is the preservation of a certain kind of vulnerability, particularly within himself. This should not surprise anyone who is aware of Cronenberg's roots in the cinema underground of which Jonas Mekas was part – but by the way, what became of his relationships with the subterranean community now that he's ascended to mainstream status? "I try to crush all other filmmakers," was Cronenberg's deadpan assertion, much to the delight of the house. "It's important to be honest about that."

Despite his art world roots, on the director's previous visit to the Walter Reade he made several in-no-uncertain-terms statements regarding his constitutional rejection of a postmodern approach to his subject matter, espousing instead a kind of single-minded, in-the-moment earnestness about the depiction of his characters and their generally science-fictitious predicaments. On this his second visit, the audience again confronted the director with what some believed was a po-mo meditation on (for instance) the mass media that stretched between VIDEODROME and eXistenZ – and this time, some even suggested that Cronenberg's sci-fi speculations could be prophetic. The director explained away the Blake-ian notion of the artist-cum-prophet, and his apparent precognitive powers regarding the metastasis of mass media, as such: "As an artist you allow your antennae to go right out as far as they can and to be as sensitive as possible. It makes you very vulnerable to pain and to all kinds of other things, but you have to lower your own defenses and to allow all these things to pour in and to allow yourself to see things and to be in touch with things within yourself and in society in general that other people are hedged against…because they're afraid of it or because they need to repress certain things in order to function. If you do that, if you allow those antennae to pick up stuff that around, then I think that you would inevitably end up predicting things just by accident." Taking as an example his early sci-fi/horror hybrid about a woman who becomes a kind of vampire after the implantation of undifferentiated tissue, he further explained, "For example, in RABID I actually invented stem cell research. I should get the Nobel Prize, but somehow I don't think I will. I went to Stockholm recently to get a lifetime achievement award from the Stockholm Film Festival, and that was ONLY because it was as close to the Nobel Prize as I was going to get."

Additionally, it came out that Cronenberg had refused to do any research on dementia when directing SPIDER in order to avoid the perils of properly presenting schizophrenia in a clinically and politically correct light. So with the implication that scientific accuracy is almost an accident of intuition, he was asked, did he research any of his other films? Did he research flies before making THE FLY? "Well, I knew all about flies before I made THE FLY," he shrugged, almost perplexed by the question. Then, seemingly to himself, "Everybody knows about flies."

That mention of Cronenberg's most visceral work brought forth a question that has bothered devout gore hounds and strict genre buffs since his recent turn to drier, more literary, less literal horror films. Will the director ever make another true horror film? Cronenberg's broad brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed in thought as a long thin stream of Poland Spring water escaped his lips and dribbled onto his chest. Silence in the house. "Well, I just drooled on myself, so I guess that would be your answer," the filmmaker laughed. Responding directly to a specific question regarding Cronenbergian horror, he made a surprising claim: "I was never obsessed with 'the horror within'…but for me, philosophically, the first fact of human existence is the human body, and I think that that is the beginning and end of us…and therefore it requires serious discussion in films, and examination, and I suppose that's why my movies are in one way or another very body-oriented, and I would include for example SPIDER." He defended that relatively quiet English melodrama about one man's insanity as quite at home within his viscerally horrific oeuvre, "You can smell Spider in that movie. And HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is (viscerally horrific) in its own way as well. So although these are not sci-fi movies, they are still, I feel, thematically, viscerally and tactilely connected with (my) earlier films, which are a little more fantastic about it. But I wouldn't hesitate to do another horror film. I've been through this before when I did THE DEAD ZONE. A lot of people were saying, 'He's moving into the mainstream, that movie's not very gory, it's more psychological,' and this and that, and then the next movie I made was THE FLY, which was very gory and very definitely a horror film…I wouldn't turn my back on genre filmmaking. I don't think I ever have, actually."

So considering that, can the world expect to see another literal horror film from Cronenberg in the near future? According to the director, the scripts he is offered are more often than not unrelated to his interests. "They often make a mistake, a very critical one, because they send me stuff that has to do with the devil and supernatural stuff and things with demons and ghosts and stuff, and I don't do those…that's because of my own aetheistic, existentialist, humanist leanings. I don't really think about afterlife, and I don't particularly want to promote that idea either…I just don't have that empathy for it. I certainly understand ghosts in the psychological sense, certainly my parents are both dead, they've been dead for a long time, and I can hear their voices, I can feel them, touch them, so I'm haunted in that sense, but I don't for one second think that they're floating around somewhere watching me. So I could do a sort of a psychological discussion of ghostness, let's say, but I wouldn't ever want to propose it as a literal fact…so I often get scripts like that. People seem to just think 'If it's a horror film, it's a horror film'…(but) I couldn't have done THE EXORCIST. I mean, I can watch it and enjoy it, and I could actually plug into it for (a) moment for its sort of medieval catholic frisson…but I could never have done that, because I couldn't have taken it seriously."

So is there anything on the menu that is more in line with the director's personal inclinations? One question from the audience referred to rumors of a new car movie to follow CRASH (and FAST COMPANY and THE ITALIAN MACHINE, for the aficionado). "That script was called RED CARS, and it was about Formula One racing, which is something I am very passionate about, and I have raced cars and motorcycles in the past…It's about American Phil Hill winning the world championship in 1961…I have not been able to get that made. However, some crazy Italians who were beautiful book publishers at a company called Volumina approached me and said, 'Do you have anything?' and I said, 'Well, I have a script'…They got very excited…and they have published this book that's absolutely gorgeous, and it comes with a model of the Ferrari that Phil Hill drove," the director enthused, his auto-fetish showing. "They went to the Ferrari archives and got photos from them, but they have also treated them in the most artfully beautiful way, and the book is the script plus photos…almost stills from the movie that didn't get made. And you can go to www.redcars.it , and you can order one of these books. It's very cathartic (for me) because I think that's as far as (RED CARS) is ever going to go; it just seems to be a movie that must be too expensive for the audience that can be expected…but that is a fantastic book. 130 euros, you can't go wrong!"
Also circulating in the rumor mill, alongside entirely erroneous ideas about the director acting in an Italian production called I KILL and his directing a version of Frankenstein, is talk of a miniseries based on DEAD RINGERS. "Worse than a miniseries," Cronenberg corrected his interlocutor wryly, "it's supposed to be a series – it could run for years! It's something that has been suggested to me by Carol Baum (an original DEAD RINGERS producer)…I think it was the success of Nip/Tuck that generated this idea, and they came to me with it and said that HBO would be interested in it, and so it turned out to be. The pilot is being written at this moment by a young writer named Wesley Strick, who pitched a very interesting version of it to me, which was very faithful to the tone of the movie. I wouldn't have done it if I thought it was going to be really tacky and exploitive." After a pause he admitted, laughing, "Exploitive is obviously a relative term when you talk about television…but it was very touching and very emotional and very true, and his understanding of where it could go after that was also pretty interesting, so based on that I became an executive producer, (and) I will have the option to direct the pilot if I want." One can only hope the director will take that option to set the tone himself; it is worth mentioning that perennial stuffed turtleneck Leonard Maltin called the original film "fascinating, but unpleasant". "(As) most unpleasant things are," rejoined Cronenberg.
Last question about future projects: what about LONDON FIELDS, which good old IMDb.com lists as having a 2006 release date? "LONDON FIELDS is a possibility," Cronenberg allowed. "That's a Martin Amos ISN'T THIS AMIS? novel, and I'm a big Martin Amos fan. There is a script that he co-wrote that's very good, (but) it's an independent film, and that means that there's a lot of people attached to it that I don't know, and that's tricky. So I actually at the moment don't know what my next film will be, I have no idea."

So with all his promises that he will not abandon the genre community, is there anything that he won't do? The question boils down to, What freaks out David Cronenberg? The answer is that "freaked out" and "wouldn't do" are virtually mutually exclusive ideas. "If something freaked me out it wouldn't mean that I'd be less likely to do it, but (that) I'd be more likely to do it, because I think that's really what the artistic compulsion is…that you don't accept reality as it is presented to you, neither socially (nor) even physically. You're always wanting to know what's really going on, you're going into the ceilings, you're going into the walls, you're digging under the floor, because you want to know what's really going on and you (feel) that you missed the real version of life on earth and the human condition as it's officially presented, let's say by society or high art, so you're constantly looking for that stuff." And he adds that, as a filmmaker, "you're a dramatist as well…so you are looking for those moments where things go wrong. Usually where things go wrong, you see how they're put together. I mean, you don't bother about the engine in your car until it starts to go wrong and then you want to know 'what is a cam shaft and why is mine not working properly'; so, not to be too mechanistic about it, but that's the (artistic) impulse…and if you're talking about censorship, I have said and I meant it, that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever. On the contrary, you have to have sort of a willing amnesia, you have to forget for the moment (in which) you're being an artist what the effect of what you're doing might be or what the revelations that you come up with might suggest, or what the implications of that are…it's so easy to destroy yourself by being responsible as an artist, (by worrying) about being politically correct is dead as an artist, immediately." Although it seems as if the filmmaker is advocating an entirely solipsistic approach to the creative process, it turns out that his suggestions have quite far-reaching political implications. "In terms of censorship, the ultimate triumph of the totalitarian state has always been to create the internalization of censorship so that the state doesn't even have to worry about it, citizens are so self-censored that they automatically reduce themselves to impotence. And it's very easy to do that even in a place (with) gentle, even right-minded political movements. You could make a case for political correctness as having (a) certain validity, but if you incorporate that into your nervous system and that is there when you're trying to create art, then you're finished. You're absolutely finished."

CRONENBERG AT THE WALTER READE, PT. 1

2005-11-23T15:25:00.000-05:00

David Cronenberg is joined by his cast and composer at the Walter Reade for an investigation of his HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

As we all know by now, David Cronenberg's in-name-only adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel A History of Violence has far outshone its source material. (The director referred his initial ignorance of his supposed source material, "I've accused [screenwriter Josh Olsen] of suppressing the book, but he swears it was an accident,") Cronenberg's HISTORY is a grim, intimate portrayal of a devoted family man with a grisly criminal past, and his inability to hide it from his loved ones forever. In the director's oeuvre, which is populated largely by loquacious weirdos, familiar-unfamiliar urban locals, and pseudoscientific redefinitions of humanity, HISTORY sticks out like a sore thumb. Questions about its tone and texture were bound to arise, and the director was on hand at the Walter Reade theater in New York City with three of his stars, Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, and William Hurt, as well as his composer Howard Shore to field those inquiries.

"Well, I certainly didn't want this to be a movie about movies," Cronenberg began, accounting for the unusual guilelessness of his new film. "This is a modernist movie. There's no irony, there's no cynicism, there are no quotation marks around everything. But at the same time it's a movie that's more about America's mythology of itself than it is about America as you might see it walking into a small town with a video camera; so there's a kind of remove there, a kind of disconnect, a kind of unreality."

But of course, it would be impossible, and perhaps inadvisable, for an artist as high-minded as Cronenberg to simply eschew his awareness of the time-honored iconic Americana that is a key ingredient in HISTORY: "We did talk about American Western movies, and about John Ford, and Howard Hawks, and all that, (because) you can feel that there's an Aaron Copelandy thing, there's a real American landscape…although once again, I say somewhat mythological, but still believed and felt."

That "felt"ness is a crucial part of the dark but deeply sincere film of which he spoke, and it is what made Cronenberg's standby composer Howard Shore such an integral part of its creation. Shore, a strangely vulnerable bespectacled straight-shooter, gave such naked explanations of his spiritual creative process and heeding his inner voice, that it prompted such questions as whether he culled artistic inspiration from his dreams. The composer laughed, "Napping is a good part of it…music is very ephemeral and abstract in a lot of ways and it's because what it really is, is a feeling that you're trying to capture. There is a technical part of it…but you have to feel something to write music. I find that films are a bit of a dream state, and I like to put myself in that dream state even when I'm away from the film."

David the science major grounded the discussion, "Sometimes when Howard and I are taking naps together, we talk about what music can do for a scene and a movie. There's an obvious thing…which is to support what's going on in a scene; when it's a funny scene you get funny music, when it's scary you get scary music, if there's crying in a scene you get sad music, but with Howard…there are many levels that get expressed with his music. Sometimes the music isn't actually talking about the scene that you're watching, it's about another scene and very often the tone of it (is) contrapuntal. It's not just sort of trying to emphasize what you've already seen, it can actually add a whole other layer of meaning to the movie. I think that's what Howard is so great at, and it's not that common actually."

True to his stated ambitions, the director continuously hits a very precise note regarding the difference between genuine mystery and post-modern double meaning over the course of his misty rural fable, which requires a careful balance between psychoanalytic intelligence and a pure-hearted determination to maintain the plausible plain folk-ness of his characters. This, of course, requires a rather profound sensitivity to the needs of actors., "I didn't want (the actors) to play that…these characters don't know they're in a movie…and that's where you get that interesting tension between the reality and the unreality."

Whatever he did to keep a performer as startlingly bright as Viggo Mortensen's po-mo faculties at bay, it seems to have worked, and Cronenberg's effusively affectionate actors love him for it. Mortensen responded to his director's waxing Americana, "I thought we were making a Canadian movie!" But he proceeds reverently: "When I read it, I thought it would be an interesting story, but that it would most likely turn out to be an exploitation movie, something a lot more superficial than it turned out to be…but I didn't know that David Cronenberg was going to be the director, and when I found out that he was going to direct and he was interested in me as a possible candidate for the part I played, I thought, 'Oh that's interesting, I wonder why he wants to make this movie.' But the moment that we sat down, any questions that I had and any doubts I had about possible traps that would almost force you to make a bad movie, or a not very original movie, he seemed to have already been working on the same questions and many more,…and I felt very comfortable right away; so the short answer is, I wanted to do this movie because David Cronenberg was directing it."

Maria Bello, a woman of fewer words than her leading man, cut right to the chase: "I have to say it was about David as well. I didn't even read the script. I've been a huge fan of (his)…I've never walked away from one of (his) films…without questioning something I hadn't questioned before. So I met David as a fan, and I thought 'I would do ANYTHING that this man wanted me to do,' and then the script came to me and I didn't even have to read it to say yes, I want to be with you and work with you."

Her somewhat alarming outburst obligated Viggo to joke, "You should have seen what he made her do that's not in the movie."

Cronenberg calmly assured his audience, "It will be on the DVD."

(Here it may be necessary to mention that this evening's audience failed to test the wit and witticism of William Hurt, who answered shortly and sharply questions like "Have you ever played a gang leader before?" with replies like "No, just window dressing." Oh well.)

HISTORY is clearly a film that demands more of its actors than any other craftsperson that moviemaking requires. It is apparent that Cronenberg's careful guidance yielded much in terms of deepening his charges' understanding of their tricky, multivalent roles. Asked about the plausible persistence of the personality of gangster Joey Cusack in his new life as family man Tom Stall, Viggo responded, "I never saw (Tom and Joey) as two people…I think that we all have maybe limitless sides…even little kids can imagine all kinds of good things and all kinds of bad things, and if you can imagine it you can do it. Society works more OR of less because we censor ourselves."
Just as many viewers were interested in Tom's wife Edie's ability to cope with the revelation of the gruesome past of the father of her children. Maria Bello fielded such inquiries thoughtfully: "Some people say, 'Ok, so what are you going to do now? Are you going to accept him?' And what I realized it wasn't about him at all, at that point…he had been a mirror for me to uncover my own shadow, and here I am looking at myself in a new way and discovering parts of myself I hadn't even acknowledged, and now I have to say, 'Who am I now? And where do I fit into all of this, and what do I want?'…Yes, it's about Tom (and) Joey, but it's about (the whole family) now as individuals and how do we proceed in our lives."

But how did Cronenberg exercise his masterful guidance of the actors? Well, he told us what he didn't do. "To me, rehearsal (isn't) valuable…because (on set) everything changed for me, it was a very sculptural, tactile experience. I want to touch the actors and move them around and see what they have to bring, but it has to be on the set, otherwise you're just kidding yourself, because if you can't be in the actual space you're shooting in, you're not really making a movie yet. I remember on CRASH, Holly Hunter said, 'We really want to rehearse,' and I said, 'Oh, I don't rehearse.' And she said, 'David, we really need to rehearse,' and I said, 'Holly, I Don't…" And then SHE said, 'Look, David, we all fuck each other in this movie, and we don't know each other, so we need to rehearse.' And I said, 'Oh, you want to "get to know each other", that's not the same as rehearsing, I'll do that!'"

And of course, this reminder of David's own pervy filmmaking past begs certain questions…what was that thing I read on the internet? Cronenberg's placid countenance contorts. Facial muscles tick, mouth opens and closes, legs cross and recross. Finally, directly to Viggo: "DON'T YOU DARE." This incited hysteria in the house and on the stage, and when it finally died down, we got the real story: contrary to the popular understanding, David Cronenberg did not, in fact, have violent repeated public intercourse with his wife on set for the edification of his romantic leads.

"Just don't believe anything (Viggo) says," the director laughs. "Well…so the story goes like this. This is what we said at the Toronto film festival, and then Viggo went on Letterman and said this too, so it's become fact. Talk about mythology…it's only good for my rep, I suppose…these actors had no idea what to do with that scene, so I said, 'Well, it's something that my wife and I do every night, so why don't I bring her to the set and just show you.' And then Viggo and Maria picked it up…and then after 10 times they said, 'Ok, WE GET IT…' anyway, this is the story.

"NOT TRUE.

"But it has become true. And we're building new stairs. No carpeting."

He proceeded with more shop talk: "Even though a sex scene of that kind is difficult, because the actors are obviously vulnerable in ways that in a normal scene, perhaps (they would) not be…it's not that different from a dialogue scene, and (with the) violent scenes as well, it wasn't a big deal…different scenes scare different people. And sometimes you're surprised at which ones. Sometimes it can be a very simple dialogue scene that the actors are worried about…it's not always the most obvious. So for me it was just business as usual. Let's block the scene and see what happens. You know, call the wife…"

Inevitably, the big question of his treatment of the idea of human violence arose. Cronenberg took it from the beginning: "I don't come to a scene or a movie with a preconceived idea or an abstract concept let's say about where violence should be going in cinema or what has been done or the way it has been portrayed…I want the movie to tell me what it needs. It's like a child…it's your child, but it's not the child that you maybe thought you were going to have, and yet it's still very demanding…and you have to decide, 'I must give this child what it needs so that it can resolve itself, realize itself.' …I don't try to impose anything from the outside. So I ask myself in this movie, 'Where does the violence come from?' The answer was, 'certain people'. What does violence mean to them, and where did they learn their violence?…They learned it in the streets of Philly, and that's sort of what Joey says, he says 'I thought business would come first.'…Violence for them is business; it's not martial arts, it's not aesthetics, it's not even sadistic, it's just business…so that gives me the key to what the violence should feel like…it would be very brutal and short and quick, and it would be very real time. No double cutting, no slow motion…it was meant to be as realistic in that way as possible, and you would also see the consequences of the violence because otherwise it still becomes action movie violence that is there for the exhilaration…so that's why those shots are there that show what the result is."

Finally, when asked whether he thought virtual violence in the media affected actual violence in the world at large, the director did not ask his interlocutor why he would attend a film called A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE if he thought his question had the slightest real social import. Instead, he kept it simple: "Certainly I've never believed that it's a simple copy cat kind of thing. I mean, I must have seen eight million people killed on screen since I was a kid, and I have not killed anybody as yet. So I'm proof that one does not do what one sees."

Cronenberg will continue his latter day literary bent with a screen version of the novel London Fields, adapted by its author Martin Amis. But before that film's 2006 release date, Cronenberg will be on view again at the Walter Reade on November 29, this time in company of SPIDER's lead, Ralph Fiennes.

COSCARELLI DRILLS HEADS, LIBERATES WOMEN...PHANTASM

2005-10-28T19:59:00.000-04:00

Director Don Coscarelli continues to terrify, but with a new female perspective, when premiering Masters of Horror episode at NYCHFF.

"I'd like to thank you all for coming out here to watch a TV episode," Don Coscarelli quipped demurely before unveiling his latest work at the New York City Horror Film Festival on Friday, October 15, a week before it was to appear on the small screen. The creator of the PHANTASM and BEASTMASTER franchises had the honor of directing the premier episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror miniseries. "I don't necessarily consider myself in that category," said the charmingly frank Coscarelli of the grandiose title, which is also meant to refer to twelve other directors who were tapped for the task: Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Larry Cohen, Joe Dante, Mick Garris, Stuart Gordon, Tobe Hooper, John Landis, William Malone, Lucky McKee, John McNaughton, and Takashi Miike.

How did Coscarelli, who admittedly has a narrower resume than most of the other Masters, get involved? It began with a dinner invitation from writer-director-producer Mick Garris, whose numerous TV credits include Tales from the Crypt and a number of other horror-oriented programs. For one night the PHANTASM director had the privilege of dining alongside Argento, Hooper, Cohen, Carpenter, and even Guillermo del Toro (though the later did not end up on Masters' roster). Coscarelli recalls the evening as a beautiful meeting of the minds; this did not elude Garris, who "decided to monetize the whole thing" and create MoH, complete with introductory footage of himself, Gordon, Dante and Landis sharing a meal. Sticking to what he knows, Coscarelli decided to adapt another story by Joe "Bubba Ho-tep" Lansdale, and derived his episode from the author's short story "Incident On and Off a Country Road".

"Incident" introduces us to weepy young Ellen (Bree Turner), who is on the run from romantic disappointment. We know that she's probably recently lost her husband because she's listening to syrupy country and western music whilst wending her way down a rural road in blackest night. But this being a horror story, her journey is cut short by a car wreck caused by your usual forest-dwelling albino gargantua with metal teeth. It is at this point that Ellen's memories of the ex (Ethan Embry) serve her well – turns out the ex in question was a nutjob weekend warrior who spent the duration of their relationship trying to imbue his waify wife with Survival Skills. Although those required courses lead to his eventual ex'ing, they come in handy now as a series of flashbacks to his tough-love life lessons teaches her how to turn the contents of her purse into a bunch of lethal weapons. However, her best efforts are not enough to fend off the 6'10" mutant (played by the hulking John de Santis, whose cargo pants and jungle boots indicate that he was probably also a survivalist before ratcheting it up a notch to serial murderer), who drags her back to his cabin and gives her a demo of what he does to the eyeballs of his victims before making crucified lawn ornaments out of their remains.

About the latter issue, the director told his festival audience that since Lansdale had neglected to include any explanation of how his mutant manhunter gets those nice clean holes through the crania of his victims, the director decided to take a little artistic liberty. Apparently he was experiencing a little performance anxiety from having shooting his episode after maestro Argento had already shot his own, "Jennifer", which prominently features a shocking scene in which the eponymous woman (Coscarelli stammered, evidently still disturbed) "literally eats a man". The result of Coscarelli's efforts is…interesting. Suffice it to say that fans of the bizarro blue collar arsenal employed in PHANTASM II will be just as baffled by Coscarelli's latest misuse of power tools as the rest of us. Incidentally, this is not the only addition to the text – to make room for bosom buddy the Tall Man, Don generated a whole new character. Kindly old man Angus Scrimm (who accompanied his director to the NYCHFF screening) plays Buddy, a psychotic singing septuagenarian who lives in the killer's industrialized basement and whose nonsensical ramblings elliptically guide the heroine to safety. When Coscarelli asked Scrimm to recall Lansdale's response to the Buddy, the actor quoted exuberantly, "I thought he stood out like a hard-on at a wedding party!"

The author's objections notwithstanding, "Incidents" is a curiosity in the context of the director's male-centric oeuvre. Virtually all of Coscarelli's films can be described as boys' coming of age tales, or conversely, stories that focus on men who are visibly past their prime finding a (generally supernatural) reason to prove their vitality and continue to self-actualize into advancing age. When I asked Don about the sex change, he replied, "I grew up in a house full of real liberated women, and so I sort of had that drilled into my head, and then when I read this I thought 'What a great opportunity to do that'…it's really a story about a woman who marries wrong, and has to deal with that." Also interesting about the episode is that it does away entirely with any evidence of the male nobility we've come to expect from the director; his heroine has to learn to access her personal power via the teachings of one of the worst specimens of masculinity, the racist paranoid weapons fetishist, in order to defeat an even uglier version of man, the murderous misogynist.

But of course, Coscarelli's cinematic speculations on male experience do not his films inaccessible to the fair sex. I couldn't help noting that I found the most compelling part of BUBBA HO-TEP (about a geriatric Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy fighting an evil mummy in their nursing home) to be the sincere and substantial manifestation of male bonding between his stars, the venerable (late) Ossie Davis and genre superstar Bruce Campbell. Pleased but eternally humble, Coscarelli explained, "I wish I could take credit for that, but it was all Bruce and Ossie…Ossie had no idea who Bruce was (or) that he's a god among men…but Bruce has these working class Midwestern roots and he made Ossie laugh, and the two of them became kind of an item on the set."

Not wishing to stray to far from the previous talk of drilling heads and boys' coming of age, I had to ask a question about PHANTASM that none of my research yielded Coscarelli's answer to: what about that scene that you quoted directly from DUNE? PHANTASM predates David Lynch's screen adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic by about five years, but any modern genre buff should recognize the near-plagiarism in the former film when an old witch demands that young Michael "put his hand in the box" to teach him that "fear is the killer". Coscarelli laughed, "People do ask me about that sometimes, but I guess Frank Herbert fans are not the same people as DUNE fans! But you know what the real influence was that people never ask me about is 'Something Wicked This Way Comes'." While Coscarelli was directing his first film, the straight boys' coming of age tale KENNY AND COMPANY, his star Reggie Banister suggested that he take the gang from that film and scratch his itch to adapt the aforementioned Ray Bradbury classic. Three years later when that adaptation emerged as PHANTASM (or THE NEVER DEAD in Australia), Angus Scrimm called Coscarelli one night to tell him "I'm at a screening in L.A., and Ray Bradbury is here!" Despite Coscarelli's cowing terror, he was told that the scribe emerged from the theater raving, "It was great! I loved it!"

After Masters of Horror's October 28 premier, Coscarelli will go to work on his prequel to BUBBA HO-TEP, entitled BUBBA NOSFERATU, which finds Bruce Campbell's Elvis having trouble with female vampires on a Louisiana film shoot. While looking forward to that, horror fans can keep occupied with the thirteen-episode run of Masters, which continues next week with Stuart Gordon's "Dreams of the Witch House" on Friday, November 4.

ROGER CORMAN RECEIVES NYCHFF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

2005-10-16T19:58:00.000-04:00

Festival honors beloved B-movie mogul for fifty years of innovation and commitment to genre cinema.

In the four years since its inception, the New York City Horror Film Festival has had the honor of welcoming such genre luminaries as George Romero, Tom Savini, and Tobe Hooper to receive the fest's Lifetime Achievement Award for their continued willingness to push the envelope for horrific subject matter and the graphic realization thereof. Although the work of these three men is a relatively recent memory for the modern genre fan, each of them owes a debt to this year's award recipient - Roger Corman. On the penultimate evening of the NYCHFF, the innovative filmmaker treated the festival audience to a Q&A following a screening of his MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964) and the subsequent award ceremony.

As the modern horror aficionado may warmly expect, Corman's vintage Poe adaptation looks a little cheesy and nakedly cheap; however, as the silent adulation of the Tribeca Cinema audience attests, MASQUE's lurid color, seamy perversity and mirthful displays of sadism have stood the test of time. The tall slender director-cum-producer himself has aged with a similar peculiar grace, and offered inspiring and occasionally off-beat answers to the questions of his largely young interlocutors. It was particularly kind of Corman to spend his time thusly, considering the substantial body of writing that has been produced by, for, and about him since the beginning of his filmmaking career some fifty years ago. Plausibly there is no question that has gone unanswered by this juncture, but perhaps some things bear repeating.

Of MASQUE's seedy surrealism, the director offered the equally curious interpretation that "Poe is writing against the unconscious, and I should say, away from reality." When one hears such a thing, it may be helpful to recall that Corman himself is no stranger to altered states, confessing to have prepared for the making of his drug induced fantasy THE TRIP (1967) by "taking the lead of Timothy Leary" and heading out to Big Sur to experience his own Lovely Sort of Death. Although he claimed elusively that this was "an act of conscientious objection", this undertaking presented a different sort of trouble than he'd imagined: "My only problem was that I had a wonderful trip," he laughed. He had to consult with the film's screenwriter Jack Nicholson and costars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, among others, who had actually experienced bad trips, in order to "put all those trips together to make the film."

That in mind, it may be easier to get past the Corman's engineering education and his calculating manner of stretching money and material as far as possible, and imagine that even today he claims to remain most interested in the artistic end of production. When the director (who named THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN as his all-time favorite film) was asked to identify his favorite part of the movie making process, he instantly replied that it is "the conceptual process, working with the art director...the shooting is very difficult, whereas the thinking I find very pleasant."

Proceeding along those lines, the venerable movie mogul validated what many of us in the much maligned genre-loving community have always held true: "The genre of horror is one of the most creative ways of working in film. (You can use) comedy, pure horror, philosophy, straight slasher; it's very much underestimated."

At the end of his visit, Corman continued to espouse a primary love for artistry and auteurship in the horror demimonde, particularly from the underdog. Although it could be argued that the high cost of filmmaking separates the truly passionate from the dabblers, Roger supported the evolution of the video medium, particularly HD, as the answer to the independent movie maker's prayers. Since it more or less frees the artist from a mass of financial worries, it allows the prospective director to operate primarily "based more on his or her own creativity."

Although Corman himself last took up the mantle of direction in 1990 and has produced upward of 360 films as opposed to his 55 directorial efforts, it is his pioneering spirit and fundamental love for the perseverance of the artistic expression that grants him his high post in the hearts and minds of even the youngest generations of filmmakers. Roger's latest prospect is an update of one of his older productions, Paul Bartel's 1975 cult favorite DEATHRACE 2000. The new picture (entitled DEATHRACE 3000, of course) was announced in the spring of this year, and is set to be directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, of ALIEN VS. PREDATOR fame.

For further details on the history of the NYCHFF, proceed to: http://www.nychorrorfest.com/

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Rape Me, Nunsploit Me

2005-10-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

Ok, I confess. I couldn’t do it. No part of this passing year and its needless number of repeat viewings brought with it the artistic inspiration or the verbal aptitude necessary to describe to you that which is KILLER NUN (1978). Neither drink nor smoke, nor fast nor abstinence, nor prayer nor lucid dream nor days and nights of wakefulness have granted me the vision and skill needed to convey the true nature of this cinematic experience to my readership. So, mea culpa, everybody. I suck. I’m going to have to resort to the time-honored tradition of simply cataloguing the myriad dubious pleasures Giulio Berruti’s film provides. Just try to imagine that you’re standing in front of the world’s longest series of lobby cards and, I defy you, visualize what their attached graphics might be...

THRILL to the sight of frog-faced cheesecake Anita “The Iceberg” Ekberg (42-27-38 at age 46) as Sister Gertrude, cruel mistress of the psych ward of a general hospital.
ENTER the big titty nun dorm, where Anita and Paola Morra (Italian Playmate of the Month Sept ’78, previously nunsploited in SEX LIFE IN A CONVENT) sleep naked in four-poster beds three feet apart, separated only by flowing chiffon drapery.
HEAR Sister Gertrude tell her PhD colleague that she needs more mooooorphiiiiiine. Apparently that’s what brain tumor removal does to a gal.
LISTEN the singing saw a whole bunch.
FREAK OUT with Gertrude as she stamps an ill-behaved old lady’s dentures into unrecognizable mush at the dinner table.
WITNESS Gertrude being totally unhelpful to a patient dying of a heart attack so she can steal and pawn the deceased biddy’s jewelry.
ROCK OUT to the sounds of the crappiest fusion jazz of all time. Yes, that’s quite a distinction.
OGLE the Iceberg as she dons the biggest hardest cocktail gown in the world so she can go out and pawn hot jewelry in order to score drugs, try to bang a guy with a deceased gerbil clinging tenuously to his eggplant-like chin, and finally engage in the Worst Sex Scene Ever Shot by a Human Being.
GET ALL PISSED OFF with Mother Superior Alida Valli, who couldn’t understand why her disciplinarian character had to spend screen time eating bon bons in bed.
BOGGLE at the half-dream/half-flashback in which an old lady makes out with a rotten basketball as it receives brain surgery. I think the ball is supposed to be Anita.
SHOCK at the suspicious defenestration “suicide” of a patient; was it Gertrude’s doing, even though she was too busy dreaming of porking corpses at the time?
TANGO IN THE RAIN with some nuns for some reason.
BAFFLE at the murder of a paraplegic who, after a dark and stormy night of getting his knob polished by some other nutcase, is punished for his sin by having his mouth crammed full of a lethal quantity of fluffy pillow stuffing.
PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME what the fuck is going on in that one scene where after a lady is killed by having pins stuck all over her face, Gertrude discovers the body levitating (I think) in an elevator shaft (or laundry shoot or something). Then it just, like, falls down.
WONDER what the hell is going on as Anita rewards Paola’s crush on her by forcing her to put on silk stockings and forcing her to say “I am the worst kind of prostitute.” Also WONDER about the strenuous regimen of arms-only jumping jacks Anita forces on her patients when she realizes they’re starting to cotton to what a freakazoid she is.
BEHOLD Dr. Joe Dallesandro having no goddamn idea what’s going on, but for once you don’t blame him. (In part because there is a nun licking his wool pants.)
…and finally, after about 85 minutes of seeing how Anita Ekberg has totally flipped her shit…
MARVEL at the startling left-field conclusion that Paola Morra was the culprit all along, because when she was little her grandfather performed acts with her, condemning her to a lifetime of lezzing out and killing people. That’s right, rape-revenge! Or…whatever.

So there you have it. As the passage of time has proven, I have nothing more to say about this matter. All hail Blue Underground. I’m gonna go watch FLAVIA THE HERETIC and try to feel better about myself. In the meantime, dear reader, please try to come up with more things to make me feel better about myself after I attend a screening of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST at Landmark’s Sunshine this weekend…

P.S. The current working title for our ever-evolving prenatal channel is Horrornet. I'll change the blog name when it seems like we're in a less mercurial state, but meanwhile, go have a look at the equally protean www.horrornet.tv , where I'm neglecting the news, too!

BEOWULF TO GET VIRTUAL MAKEOVER

2005-08-18T19:55:00.000-04:00

Zemeckis digitally renders Glover and Jolie, narratively dismembers ancient text

Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures will jointly handle distribution (domestic and international, respectively) for Robert Zemeckis' big-screen adaptation of the epic poem "Beowulf". To realize the 1300-year-old tale of the eponymous Scandinavian hero who rescues the Danes from the vicious monster Grendel, FX junkie Zemeckis will likely put much of the film's preliminary $70 million budget toward motion-capture technology. This digital animation process (first seen in the director's peculiarly dark holiday release, 2004's THE POLAR EXPRESS) uses computerized cameras to capture an actor's performance, which provides a concrete blueprint for a virtual character. The performances in question will be created by Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich, Alison Lohman and Brendan Gleeson, among others.

Those who are untroubled by the progressive domination of the FX universe by inorganic media may take issue instead with Zemeckis' impositions upon the time-honored literature. The story will be adapted for the screen by the unlikely duo of former Tarantino collaborator Rogery Avary (see also his Bret Easton Ellis adaptations, RULES OF ATTRACTION and the upcoming GLAMORAMA) and faery-loving graphic novelist Neil Gaiman (of DC Comics' "Sandman" fame) according to the whims of the director, who apparently wants to make a variety of changes to the narrative.

Anyone who finds it difficult to synthesize an Avary-Gaiman co-creation in his or her imagination may find further clues on-line. When 45-year-old goth idol Gaiman isn't busy oiling his motorcycle jacket, teasing up his mullet, or sipping tea with Tori Amos, he's updating his blog like any other with-it creature of the night. Gaiman excuses alterations to the ancient tale thusly: "When Bob Zemeckis bought the script and assumed the director's mantle, he wanted some small changes from the narrative of the poem and one big change, which, because we understood why he wanted them made, we were willing to make."

The scribe further "explains": "Books aren't films, and poems aren't films even more than books aren't films...When Roger Avary and I wrote it originally, we decided that anything that was actually reported as happening in the original poem happened like that, but that anything where we only have someone in the story's word for it what happened might - or might not - have happened like that. But we still didn't try to put everything in the poem onto the screen." Artistic liberties notwithstanding, he assures the hardcore anglophiles among us that "yes, there is still some Old English in it."

Amateur boxer-turned-actor Ray Winstone (SEXY BEAST, Tim Roth's THE WAR ZONE, Gary Oldman's NIL BY MOUTH) will adopt the titular role. Professional weirdo Crispin Glover will portray the monster, and fish-lipped homewrecker Angelina Jolie will play his temptress mother. Whether or not Jolie will spike Glover's hair into a blue mohawk and force him to pose at her bosom for People Magazine like a certain adopted Cambodian tot who is too young to know what punk rock or Mohicans are remains to be seen.

"Beowulf" is currently in pre-production, and is slated for a 2007 release.

For further production details, see: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/film/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001017413

To keep up with the slightest tremor in Gaiman's inner world, go to: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp And to gain a further understanding of what exactly "digitally rendered live action" means, proceed to: http://www.skwigly.co.uk/magazine/news/article.asp?articleid=346&zoneid=3

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST BATTLING CENSORS?!

2005-08-17T19:54:00.000-04:00

Snuff film rumors of a savage cinema classic still eat at modern audiences

No sooner has Grindhouse Releasing set the October 25 street date for its 25th Anniversary Collector's Edition CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST DVD, then they find themselves faced with possible delays due to the unwillingness of printers to handle the project. The trouble arises not from the content of the widely banned film, which will appear uncut on the disc, but from the "graphic and offensive" packaging.

Ruggero Deodato's notorious 1979 endurance test concerns the disappearance of a documentary film crew who venture into South American jungles to document the habits of an anthropophagous tree-dwelling tribe. When an anthropology professor retraces their steps to investigate their disappearance, he discovers not only their skeletonized remains, but the footage they shot -- which, of course, comprises the bulk of Deodato's film. For 98 minutes (or 86 minutes, if you're in the UK) one is treated to the splattery spectacle of the savage rituals of the "primitive" people being documented, and the even more savage techniques used by the amoral white filmmakers who want to spice up their doc. "Who are the REAL cannibals?" the professor ponders in the end as his colleagues move to broadcast the disturbing footage to a voyeuristic television audience. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST may be fairly accused of pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and above all unacceptable levels of violence even within the infamously sadistic subgenre to which it belongs. However, the ruefully unforgettable film has proven itself to be more than just another Italian animal torture extravaganza; it has influenced countless other films from Umberto Lenzi's comparatively gentle clone CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) to the American family favorite THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999), its capacity to shock and appall has endured the test of time, its director has been taken to task by the court system and the mass media alike (Deodato had to bring members of his cast to the set of an Italian TV program to prove that they hadn't been eaten), and apparently the pall of its suspected snuff film status still persists.

Trouble first reared its head earlier this month, when a printer decided not to handle any artwork associated with the release. Although it was true that this (unspecified) printer had handled substantially more disturbing art for other DVDs, no explanation was provided for the refusal. The art was rushed to a second printer, where the management reviewed and declined to print the CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST art unless Grindhouse revised the graphic design. Although these complaints were no more specific than that, it seems that the printers' objections are not related to the content of the DVD, nor its outer sleeve art, which is an image of a face screaming into a camera lens specifically selected to spare innocent bystanders the sight of what's inside. It is, in fact, the cover of the Deluxe Signature Case under the sleeve that has caused the latest controversy. This cover features the film's most famous still - that of a nude female impaled on a wooden stake. Though this distressingly convincing vision caused many to suspect they were seeing an actual corpse, Deodato claimed that he'd simply had a native girl with an "unusually calm temprament" to sit on a bicycle seat attached to the stake and hold a piece of balsa wood in her mouth to complete the effect.

Grindhouse has been doggedly working on the CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST DVD for over five years, and has already endured more daunting difficulty in the form of proliferating bootlegs to the threatened seizure of a 35mm film print by the local law in Lexington, Kentucky. The company has issued statements to the effect of their staunch refusal to compromise the integrity of their project, even if it means missing their planned Halloween release.

Grindhouse's Sage Stallone and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST stars Robert Kerman (who recently took a more wholesome turn as the tugboat captain in SPIDER-MAN, which Murawski co-edited) and Gabriel Yorke (tentative) will discuss all this and more at the next FANGORIA Weekend of Horrors, to be held September 24-25 in Secaucus, New Jersey. However, the latest North American tour of the film will begin earlier than that on September 17 and continue travelling until the end of November, ensuring that the film will be seen regardless of resistance facing the DVD release.

For further elucidation from the mouths of Grindhouse reps, read on at: http://fangoria.com/news_article.php?id=4536

For the film's official (startlingly comprehensive) website, at which you can find out where CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST will be playing in your area, follow the link: http://cannibalholocaust.net/

For a roundup of all the hearsay that has gathered around the film in the last twentyfive years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibal_Holocaust

And for information about the aforementioned Fango event: http://www.creationent.com

THEY'LL GET YOU WHEN YOU SLEEP, JOHN WATERS.

2005-07-30T19:52:00.000-04:00

German director snatches Kidman's body, takes it to Orioles game?

The upcoming big budget remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS will be blessed by the wet-lipped, dewy-eyed presence of Nicole Kidman. The Aussie actress will put her constant quivering and quailing to use as the woman who first notices that the people of her town are uniting in a sinister hive-mind, and who bands together with the few unaffected citizens to try to combat the extraterrestrial epidemic at fault.

German director Oliver Hirschbiegel will be the fourth filmmaker to retell Jack Finney’s original story, which has proven itself a fertile field of multifaceted allegorical material. Don Siegel’s 1956 INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS located the tale in the sort of tiny suburb that was a familiar breeding ground for the virulent conformity and commie paranoia that dominated its contemporary culture. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS took place in San Francisco, which was once the counter-cultural capital of the country, but by the late ‘70s was just as affected as any other city by the horrors of Vietnam, endless embarrassing political scandals and assassinations. Professional wino Abel Ferrara’s 1993 take, simply entitled BODY SNATCHERS, transpired on a military base where the soldiers were pod people, and found release when the Gulf War and its attendant syndrome were still a fresh wound for many. What purpose can this overripe social allegory serve today’s times? Well, let’s have a look at where shooting will begin in October: Baltimore. That’s right, the crime-ridden white trash capital of the country will host the alien spores as waspy porcelain doll Kidman races around trying to stem the spreading plague.

Kidman will be joining Hirschbiegel in Maryland after Wong-Kar Wai finishes with the leading lady in his remake of LADY FROM SHANGHAI, which will begin shooting in St. Petersburg “sometime soon”, according to Production Weekly.

For that and other titillating vagueries, go to: http://www.productionweekly.com/site.html

For a roundup of all the scant details on the coming INVASION: http://www.upcominghorrormovies.com/movies/bodysnatchers.php

And for the curious, creepy celeb worship and details on Wong-Kar Wai’s latest attempt to rejuvenate the noir genre can be found here: http://nicolekidmanunited.com/NicoleKidmanFilmography/TheLadyFromShanghai/

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Rape Me, Revenge Me Part II

2004-12-07T01:14:00.000-05:00

Let’s get it out of the way right now: Kill Bill would have little to take to the bank without the 1973 advent of Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood. (Incidentally, Ms. Hannah would be plus an eye in that two-part film if it weren’t for Thriller) Everyone who’s seen it knows it, everyone who will see it will find out, and I’d prefer not to reduce public curiosity about the film to its impact on Mr. Tarantino’s epic genre-spanning homage. I love you, Quentin, really I do, but I’d like to get Oyuki alone for the moment…

The apparently revenge-obsessed manga master Kazuo Koike contributed more to the film world than just the glorious Lone Wolf and Cub opus. Lady Snowblood is another Koike-derived chambara [sword-centric action film, usually a period piece as in this case] about a blade-wielding wanderer who is less a person than a walking act of vengeance. The eponymous Shurayuki was born in a women’s prison – not unfamiliar territory for leading lady Meiko Kaji, scintillating star of the early Female Convict Scorpion entries – to an inmate who threw herself at every man in her path in order to produce a child who would live as the embodiment of her mother’s wrath and murder the criminals who murdered their family.

Shurayuki, which seems to break down roughly to “snow from hell”, (call her “snowblood”, “child of the netherworlds”, or whatever affectionate soubriquet one might choose from the film) was born and so named as her mother Sayo dies during one winter night of the life sentence she serves for taking the life of one of her assailants. She claims to remember everything from the moment she arrived in the world, and those memories include the words carried on Sayo’s dying breath: “…child of vengeance…” Her childhood is spent in brutal training under a stony priest who understands the nature of her evil but unavoidable mission, and in her twentieth year, Yuki goes into the world to carry out her late mother’s undying will. A beautiful woman armed with a lethal sword hidden in the handle of her parasol, she seeks and systematically destroys the gangsters responsible for the decimation of her family.

Unlike the cold quite Cruel Picture, Snowblood is a red hot action flick accented by cool jazz-inspired music (notably the flute-garnished “Shura No Hana”, or “Flower of Carnage”, sung by double threat Kaji and resurrected in Kill Bill) and a vivid color palate that occasionally metamorphoses into a startling multimedia extravaganza. To lay down the foundations of the story, director Fujita crafts dense layers of flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, employing historical still photos in black white and sepia, semitransparent streams of calligraphy, black white and red all over manga (borrowed from Koike and Kazuo Kamimura’s original books), and even a little bit of animation. One standout sequence goes from black and white stills of old Japan to sepia stills of Yuki’s mother seducing one guilty party to a facsimile of stop motion shuffling rapidly through stills depicting Sayo raising her blade then downshifting to streaming full color action of the murder, blazing red arterial spray and all. Mmmm. Arterial spray. “Eye candy” doesn’t begin to cover it. Opening with Sayo’s cellmates in their crimson uniforms helping deliver Yuki within moss-colored prison walls (reminding anyone who’s anyone of Dead Ringers) barely sheltering them from a suddenly sanguine snowstorm and closing with Meiko’s anguished visage drowned in a pool of red ink, Snowblood is a constant joy to look at. The frighteningly beautiful Kaji is perhaps the most compelling spectacle in her occasionally Tim Burtony kimonos, her reptilian gaze turned back on the audience with such intensity that one can scarcely believe she’s an actress playing a role.

However, for all its formal beauty and timeless coolness, Snowblood never settles for making Yuki’s lot in life simply an opportunity to demonstrate her unrivalled badassedness. Her fate is an undeniably horrifying one – she lives only to kill in the name of a family she never knew – but at the same time that her predicament is mindbendingly piteous, one cannot shake the feeling that she is simply not human. According to the story, she is less a person than a fleshly incarnation of a dead woman’s final sentiment, only the continued action of the departed Sayo’s rage at the world. Yuki’s path is a difficult one, fraught with obstacles (will a smitten journalist’s published tribute help her cause or hinder it?) and doubt (are all of her targets even still alive, and if not, how can she justify her continued existence?) heavy enough to extract sympathy from the most callous of witnesses; and yet Kaji’s raw intensity reminds you that her origins make her an organism that is well beyond the average human’s capacity for empathy. (Elite corps centipede, perhaps?) As Christina Lindberg’s beguiling innocence does for Thriller, Meiko Kaji’s preternatural severity forms the real backbone of Lady Snowblood.

I’m sure at this point I hardly need to provide more incentive for the burgeoning genre enthusiast to put Shurayukihime on his or her Christmas list, but who knows…maybe I’ll feel the need to continue singing its inexhaustible volume of praises tomorrow…maybe I’ll feel guilty for not having gone on at greater length about its florid beauty or its bizarre morality…or maybe I’ll relent and start talking about the unseemly Killer Nun instead. We shall see.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Rape Me, Revenge Me

2004-12-05T15:03:00.000-05:00

Synapse Films, those delightful slime who have lovingly repackaged such highfalutin jerk-off material as Radley Metzger’s L’Image and nunsploitation extravaganza Flavia the Heretic for our digital indulgence, recently brought 1974’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture back into the public eye (those who’ve seen it…pardon the pun, if you please). Directed by former Bergman AD Bo Arne Vibenius, the film is a heretofore forgotten classic of the rape-revenge subgenre, non-exploitative in the way that the brutally honest I Spit On Your Grave is and more formally artful than that reigning champion. The banned-in-Sweden (“the first film ever” claims its erroneous tagline) Thriller is a longer cut than the previously available They Called Her One-Eye, including 42 more minutes of hardcore sex, graphic violence, and typical Nordic lingering over one detail after another.

Thriller makes a terrifyingly patient slowburn through the tragic life of angelic Madeleine, beginning with the childhood defloration by a deranged old man in a sunlit park which renders her forever mute, extending through her career as the unwilling property of a pimp who disfigures her (hence the American AKA), hooks her on heroin, and sells her to a multitude of perverts, and concluding with her training for and execution of a gruesome revenge on all those who progressively pecked away at her purity. Despite a few camp flourishes – Madeleine’s lavender and scarlet designer eye patches, the relative absurdity of her secret martial arts training with a military outfit of some sort, her shooting up right in the middle of a lesson at a karate dojo – the film is a harrowing and lethally serious tour of the possibilities for human awfulness, its (strangely Leonesque) conclusion presenting less a triumphant catharsis than a sour admission that in such a world as this one can only fight evil with evil.

While praise for its boldness and tone is due (though perhaps not for its intentions, re: Vibenius’ desire to hide his identity to make "a commercial-as-hell crap-film" to cover the losses from his first bomb), one should be warned that the film is a little one-note. OK, more than a little; it suffers from a decidedly limited expressive vocabulary, which rarely goes beyond the extended use of slow motion, a small assortment of aural drones and whines, and a palate rich in yellows from jaundice to Phantasm sangue. These few things are worked into a successful rhythm, but much of the impact of what genre historian-cum-director Quentin Tarantino has called “the roughest revenge movie ever made” should be credited to the mute, unaffected presence of its leading lady Christina Lindberg.

Ms. Lindberg, who has starred in such films as Love in 3-D and What Are You Doing After the Orgy?, looks to be about 17 of her 24 years, and presents a startlingly convincing semblance of innocence. Just as the scene of her deocculation is so realistic as to have spawned rumors of the use of an actual corpse (a rumor even IMDb repeats this bit of “trivia” as fact), the viewer may find it not improbable that the young actress might simply have been found on the street, tossed into a gunnysack, and hurled into this staged scenario unwittingly. The intercourse is clinical in-your-face real (and admirably lacking in erotic impact), and there is something more than a little unsettling – and for that, undeniably powerful – about watching a porn starlet star in porn and at once “act” like she’s acquiescing but certainly not having a good time. [Note to Reader: see also Rocco Siffredi’s affecting art house turn in Catherine Breillat’s graphic Anatomy of Hell] This considered, her vengeful turn in the final act is all the more compelling.

In conclusion, kick the kids at Synapse some of your hard-earned cash and find out with the Swedes didn’t want you to see. I return shortly for the second installment in my brief survey of new-old rape-revenge thrills, coming back at you with the chamabara shocker Lady Snowblood and, um, Killer Nun. It will all make sense, I swear to god.

Donner Party of One, SOtDing Off

2004-09-23T23:07:00.000-04:00

So, y’all gonna go see Shaun of the Dead tomorrow night? Yeah, I know you are. I don’t know why I asked. I hardly need to convince you, but it is my duty to drop my dime on this shiznite, so…
Since at least 1969, such diverse personages as Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon and uberhipster Danny Boyle have employed the Plague O’ Zombies subgenre to address such vital issues of the day as class struggle, racial tension, the ever-escalating environmental crisis, fear of a shadow government, and American consumerism. Finally, a couple of little English TV writers, writer-director Edgar Wright and writer Simon Pegg, have put zombification to work in analyzing the problem of being a lazy unhygienic mama’s boy whose college years are well behind him but he still can’t get his ass off the couch and stop playing video games and drinking beer long enough to keep his girlfriend and get a proper job. Why hasn’t anybody else thought of this? As the reader may or may not already know, Shaun of the Dead is a tiny little UK flick about meek boring Shaun (Pegg) who gets a wakeup call from his somnambulant journey through life by the transformation of London citizenry into cannibalistic corpses. Suddenly, he and his boorish childhood chum Ed have the ability to rise above their lives of refrigerator sales and playing Timesplitters 2 and slugging back pints at the Winchester Pub when it becomes clear that their lifetime of gaming and escapism has rendered them best equipped to save their loved ones from the all-consuming hordes.

Shaun is good. It’s hip but refreshingly free of hipsters, full of ORGANIC special effects (versus, say, the recent memory of Zatoichi’s excess of CG blood) and…bizarrely heavy and emotional in the third act (oh…you’ll see). SotD’s observations of its eponymous hero’s oblivious manchild existence are often quite funny, its splatter sensibility will be a breath of fresh air for everybody who feels unfulfilled by the masses of blurry pixelated predators from the recent barrage of goth-industrial wankfests that have been flooding the megaplexes over the last couple of years. But actually, about the gore…let it be said that Shaun is funny and modest and almost morbidly earnest. But all of this produces a decidedly injurious form of self-deprecation that leads the filmmakers to try to distract the viewer with other films. Witness its punny title. Alright, so it’s a catchy ploy, but if only the joke had stopped there and not spread itself to paper-thinness over gags about Shaun working at Foree Electronics alongside coworker Ash and having to save his mother (“We’re coming to get you”) Barbara…then finally, and most unfortunately, the movie’s climax is catalyzed by a graphic evisceration scene directly quoted from the infamous Hell’s Angels massacre made famous in, um, Dawn of the Dead. Excuse me, Mr. Director Sir? The people who like Night of the Living Dead and Evil Dead like them because when they saw those films, they were FRESH and NEW and, yknow, not inclined to degrade the viewing experience in progress with reminders of exactly how much better a movie can be than ANYTHING YOU MIGHT SEE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. This faux film literacy thing is a real goddamn downer. Out with injokes. Assume that I’m well-rounded enough not to need reminding that The Evil Dead is a perfect film that has had an indelible impact on virtually every subgenre effort made since.

Or don’t. There’s my useless optimistic streak again, rearing its naïve little head when I’m trying to immerse myself in the horror demimonde. This is a film that, though born from the hearts and loins of card-carrying fanboys, has achieved international recognition on the Hollywood-dominated multiplex level. Thus, just as I was drifting away from the demurring Shaun and into fond reverie of the gut-munching bombast of Dawn, I was brought back to the screening at hand by the ear-splitting keening wrenched from the throats of the unwitting mainstream audience who had never ever seen anything like the anthropophagic vision being burned into their retinas without the slightest awareness that it was nothing more than a cheeky little injoke. So…more power to you, messirs.

And speaking of things that one wouldn’t ordinarily expect to see in mainstream theaters, all you degenerates can get out your raincoats and go see John Waters’ new sleaze opus A Dirty Shame just about anywhere you want tomorrow. I must admit to harboring some doubts about this flick because Waters is not at his best when he is without his old cast of real live freaks and geeks, but for eff’s sake, when’s the last time an NC17-rated flick went to first-run mainstream theaters? And really, I shouldn’t be so hard on John for his choice of established Hollywood performers. After all, Selma Blair is in it. and Selma Blair is totally rad. Selma blair. Her legacy of cheesy teen sexploitation notwithstanding, Selma Blair is fucking rad. How do I know that? because I saw her at a panel on Hellboy at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors last January in New Jersey. Selma was there, and MY BOYFRIEND Ron Perlman was there, and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola was there, though sadly Guillermo couldn’t be there because he’d just gotten out of surgery, but he sent along a very cute video expressing his regrets. Now, Selma didn’t seem a whole lot smarter than Cruel Intentions might suggest to you; witness “They let me pick the color of my flame, and I chose blue because it was really spiritual,” (um…of course) and to support whatever suspicions that might inspire, she revealed that Mr. Del Toro called her “monkeybrain” virtually every day of shooting. But all of this is easily forgiven in the face of her blazing frankness and wit. When some timid hopeful mole person asked if she had a favorite comic book or horror movie, she unhesitatingly replied, “I’ve never even been to one of these things before – I mean, you guys are not my people.” Not with any cruelty, mind you; just without the slightest hint of that little white “I have so much respect for the genre” lie that certain other unnamed starlets might produce. Later on, as the Q&A was coming to a close, some snide little fanboy stood up and cutely inquired, “We’re very happy to have you here, Ms. Blair, and since this is the first event of its kind that you’ve attended, I’d like to ask: what do you think of the smell?” All the trolls giggled, but Selma replied with a straight face:

“Smell? What smell? I didn’t notice any smell…now you’re making me nervous. I probably smell worse than all y’all…But really, wait, there’s supposed to be a smell? Well what’s it supposed to smell like in here, like…BLOOD? Or like…BALLS or something?”

It brought the house down. Uproarious laughter from all corners, palpable degree of actual hysteria. Corey Sullivan, my companion for the day, leaned over and said, “I don’t think this woman knows what she’s doing by talking about testicles in front of these people.” And god bless her for it.

So: even if you’re dubious of recent vintage Waters, support Selma, support the appearance of NC17 certificate cinema in mainstraim theaters, and go see A Dirty Shame.

New Place to Geek Out

2004-09-21T08:31:00.000-04:00

Otaku and uber-hipsters, attend me: Now there’s a charming little two-screen theater on 59th between 2nd and 3rd called Imaginasian. It’s an offshoot of a prenatal cable station that will broadcast signals from contemporary Asian popular culture into the living rooms of Asian Americans who wonder now and again what’s going on in their parent countries. Anyway, you can go in there to see first-run eastern cinema, and the unbearably cute young panasian staff will serve you shrimp crackers and bubble tea, and if the disturbingly attractive pubescent Tadanobu Asano look-alike smiles apologetically and says they don’t have bubble tea today, you can instead have a Korean drink called Bon Bon which is a can of grape juice with GRAPE SAC in it (8%, claims the can). Then you can go in and watch the new retina-searing anime opus that is Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence, if you are me yesterday.

The long-awaited sequel is a decidedly gothic affair, an aggressively baroque and moody and haughtily literate reverse-Jack the Ripper yarn with gynoids (an ingenious name for female robots, frequently sex dolls) vivisecting their masters. Batou must take a little time away from mourning the disappearance of the only woman who was ever fit to serve beside him, Major Kusanagi, in order to lead his still-wet-behind-the-ears partner Togusa through crumbling urban yakuza turf and ornate walled cities and a variety of hallucinations to the conclusion of the mystery. In the process a startling amount of blood is spilled, but that quantity doesn’t begin to near the intimidating bulk of literary citations exchanged between virtually every combination of characters. If you were to remove all of the quotations from Confucius and Descartes and Milton and the effing bible and everything else in it, there would probably be about four lines of dialogue in the entirety of the film. Though under those conditions, you probably won’t understand much more about what’s going on than you do with the inclusion of the literary citations. But don’t worry about that; as with its groundbreaking predecessor, the actual political details are not the point. The point is pithy musings about the nature of sentient experience. The point is wondering at what point does one stop being definably Human in the evolution from organically human, to artificially augmented human, to classifiable cyborg, to a human mind transplanted to an entirely artificial body, to a “dub” of a human mind infused in a vast number of artificial bodies. And, moreover, wondering what is the true character of the impulse to reproduce by one’s own means that which one encounters in nature. Innocence goes balls-out on the matter, slyly accusing natural mothers and even their doll-toting daughters of acting purely on the impulse of a god complex.

But whether or not you have any investment in that kind of condemning psychosocial speculation, the question invites a rather curious consideration of the film itself. The original Ghost in the Shell of a decade past has continued to astonish otaku and cineastes alike not only with its philosophical probings but with its emotional depth and its raw visual beauty. Even if you’ve no connection to the narrative content or the pathos therein, there remains the fact that the spectacle of Ghost is…arresting in its most casual moments. To be frank, the film makes me cry like a child, and not just because of its sensitivity about The Human Condition, but because when I see it I simply cannot believe that it was delivered by way of human hands. The film is fundamentally about the child surpassing the father, and as that story is being told, the artifice itself becomes greater than the flow of organic life from whence it came. Even the opening title sequence is a document of human-born superpower.

Almost ten years later, Innocence arrives. The technology of animation has changed dramatically, enhancing the capacity to animate hand drawings, to make a drawing move by way of computer, to animating photographic imagery by way of computer, to animating raw CG imagery…Innocence seems to employ all of this, and in the process, deals a deathblow to the continuity of its artificial reality. Some of it bears that conspicuous dopey weightless textureless look of CGI, yes, but then…some of it simply looks far too much like live action. Masamune Shiro’s original manga design for angsty stone-faced Batou looks increasingly hokey and awkward as it moves through progressively more organic-looking urban environments and seedy yakuza dens and even his own hermetic bachelor pad. Straight-up cartoon abuts near-photorealistic images of puppies in dog food ads abuts implausibly seamless CGI, and the result is often jarring. Too often. The source of the problem? The artists’ obsessive pursuit of direct translation of external reality by their own hands. The familiar visages of Batou and Togusa are off-limits for update, but outside of that, there seems to be a god complex running rampant in the art department, frequently to the detriment of the stability of Innocence’s Japan. In the end, the film’s formal execution actually becomes an object lesson in the philosophical quandary proposed by the narrative.

Dear Guy Who Sat In Front of Me at THE BROWN BUNNY,

2004-09-19T01:42:00.000-04:00

You, a gnomish white collar specter in thick spectacles, wandered into this film and sat in front of me about five minutes after the action had commenced, and considering the multitude of attempts you made to forge a personal bond with me, I am concerned that you may have missed a few crucial moments in this lovely and largely unsung work of art. Since we are so dearly intimate that I could set my watch by the frequency with which you turned to gaze directly into my face during runtime of Vincent Gallo’s ostensible death rattle, I thought I would use this my personal PA system to make sure that you are fully aware of the brilliance of this film despite the time you and I spent enriching our wordless relationship.

While you were munching so loudly on the papery contents of your box of popcorn, producer/writer/director/editor/cinematographer/star Vincent Gallo was employing motorcycle race footage and an audio track that vacillated between Doppler Effected mechanical drones and snowy silence to introduce us to struggling bike racer Bud Clay. Bud is struggling less with his dimming racing prowess than he is with the recent memory of an exquisitely painful breakup with a girl named Daisy, which you would know if you hadn’t regularly turned to beam light from the projection booth off of your spectacles and directly into my dilated pupils.

If that scintillating look that would have blinded me had I not lined up my cupped palm with my face like a Shetland pony’s blinder hadn’t lingered so long, Guy Who Sat In Front of Me, you would have witnessed Bud interact with a variety of equally alienated girls with botanical monikers as he makes his way across the country in his filthy van. Why does he do this?, you may ask me, since you spent much of the film in your own state of love-struck myopia. He is haunted by the mysterious loss of paramour Daisy (Chloe Sevigny), and accordingly he haunts a string of roadside urchins and lonelyhearts and hookers for fleeting moments as he searches for reflections of his extant potency and powers of attraction and emotional functionality in the eyes of these unfortunate throwaways. After a long journey through a series of anonymous crumbling samples of America (including a permanently arresting image of superhero Gallo doing his own riding off into the brilliant white expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats), Bud arrives at his LA hotel to rendezvous with his lost love.

Bud and Daisy reconnect in his hotel room and extend tenuous tendrils toward one another with more tremulous hesitation than you reached out for me with the adulatory stare you directed up my kilt as I unwisely uncrossed my legs. But lucky you, you turned around and directed your rapt attention to the screen just in time to witness the commencement of the now-infamous hard-X girl-on-boy oral sex scene. Daisy attempts to convince Bud of her persisting love for him, and finally, as if a trial, he allows her to fellate him. I had my doubts as to whether or not anybody – the abundantly talented Gallo included – could infuse an activity of such primal appeal with more than two levels of pathos. Well, I assume that you were appreciating the multiple strata of human emotion emanating from both performers in this surprisingly complex cinematic moment, since you finally turned your greedy eyes away from me for the full duration of a scene.

But perhaps the depth and scope of this interaction somehow disappointed you, Guy Who Sat. It seems that as soon as it became clear that no further cocksucking would ensue, you were compelled to vacate the premises. Why would this be? Could it have something to do with the crisp vivid silhouette of an upthrust erection to which I was treated as you stood and turned perpendicular to the screen? Now if you had not been urged out of the theater by the decidedly short attention span of the organ that was pointed insistently at your face, you’d have been treated to a fairly unfortunate turn of events. His Eminence genre critic Travis Crawford, who also liked this broadly-panned picture, had warned me, "It has a twist ending that would make M. Night Shyamalan blush". And so it is. Of course, I cannot reveal to you what happens at the close of this hypnotic road opus. What if you had the urge to return to the Landmark and reminisce about our chance meeting? I’d hate to ruin it for you.

If the epic romance of said chance meeting has stayed with you in such a way as to enamor you of the disturbingly perfect male specimen that is Vincent Gallo, perhaps you may wish to pursue him to the next Ferrara picture. Erstwhile porno director (aren’t they all?) and Driller Killer director/star Abel “THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD” Ferrara will be directing a film called Mary in the near future, in which director/star Vincenzo will enact Mr. Ferrara’s “search for the heart of (his) religious upbringing” [Variety] in two roles – one of which will be the director/star of a controversial film about the life of Christ.

But perhaps the actual appreciation of fine cinema was never the point for you, Guy Who Sat In Front of Me. Perhaps The Brown Bunny only amounted to a prolonged view of a weepy-looking, vaguely jailbaity young thing sitting directly behind and above you in the Landmark’s stadium seating. Ah well. There’s no accounting for taste.

Sincerely,
Claire Donner, Party of One

Rumor Mill: Kidnapped Movie

2004-09-13T21:13:00.001-04:00

So my little foray into the past at the close of my RE:A coverage put me in a nostalgic mood, and while I’m waiting with bated breath on this week’s release of Ghost in the Shell 2, I’ll continue down memory lane. Who among you has heard anything about a picture called Kidnapped Coed? Kidnapped Lover? The Kidnapper? Date With a Kidnapper? House of Terror? Unless you’re a rabid consumer of everything Something Weird has to offer (which, of course, you should be), this stream of genero AKA’s probably means next to nothing, as you are probably not aware of the stunted auteurship of one Frederick R. Friedel.

The anonymous grindhouse title Kidnapped Coed does precious little to evoke the rare viewing experience that awaits the audience, but once you’ve seen it you may ask, what brief combination of words could really do the trick? Sandra Morley is the innocent young daughter of a famous millionaire, which turns out to be more of a bane than a boon when she is absconded with by a tough-as-nails extortionist Eddie Mattlock. The kidnapper drives the schoolgirl deep into the North Carolina countryside where they encounter the strangest cross-section of their fellow man, dodge psychotic hillbillies and highway robbers, and eventually learn to love one another. Each moment of its 88 minute runtime is, if not constantly exactly action-packed, gorgeous to look at, transforming naugahyde upholstery into mother of pearl and jarred preserves into polished jewels. Even the seediest hotel room and the most derelict country lane are imbued with a spectral glow in Friedel’s vision. When the audience is not rapt to this scintillating spectacle, it will be taken aback by the blackly comic dialogue (“When it is my time to die I will most certainly be dead”) and the abrupt interludes of grisly violence. What else could you want, right?

Well, if you actually thought of anything, you probably won’t get it anyway. Coed was followed closely by a grimmer, dirtier, less patient genre effort called Axe. Axe concerns a trio of two-bit crooks who, after dousing a storekeep in Coca Cola and enacting a William Tell routine with her produce, descend upon a rural farmhouse inhabited only by a comatose old man and his teenage daughter Lisa. The unsuspecting crooks decide to make themselves at home, never realizing that their pubescent hostess is more than their equal in terms of efficient dispatch of human life. Lisa has spent her days in total isolation, slaughtering chickens and feeding their raw eggs to her vacant grandfather, and now that the stasis has been broken, she finds herself receiving Repulsion-like visions of what is to come, and she goes about the business of restoring the peace with a straight razor and the titular weapon.

Axe is not nearly so lovingly crafted as its older sister, and Friedel’s decreasing patience and sympathy are apparent. It does seem to have made a couple of video nasty lists, and the director’s distinctive sense of humor is still in effect, but his frustration remains to this day due to the fact that the blazing Harry Novak emblem on the front of Friedel’s films has outshined the director’s own name, and thus the films were seen not as products of a burgeoning auteur but as droplets in an ocean of generally dismissible sleaze. So: a little bird told me, not so long ago, that Friedel has been cooking up a plan to cut the two films together and release the hybrid to have it seen in the appropriate light.

Such recognition is richly deserved. Though Axe has its share of flaws, Coed vacillates between jarring violence and unadulterated sweetness with remarkable grace. Comparisons to David Lynch are unavoidable, and this is one of the only cases in which the parallel is truly apt. More than a few amateur critics will bandy about the term “Lynchian” as a cheap faux-literate way of saying “weird”, as if Lynch’s strangeness were arbitrary and indistinct. But Friedel’s brand of strange can only be described to the uninitiated as Lynchian, favoring old hat noir situations descending into unplumbed depths of weirdness, particularly vis-à-vis his cast of humanity oddities – the ominous elderly folk, seedy sadists, and genuine eccentrics who form the gauntlet through which his protagonists must pass. What really justifies this parallel to Lynch, however, is Friedel’s pervasive sense of tenderness; his ability to make even the most tacky and blasé Americana appear lush and luminous, his Leonean consideration of human facial expressions, his revelation of naïveté surviving under even the most squalid conditions, all point to a persisting romance that distinguishes the director from other hacks and pornographers operating under the auspices of Harry Novak. And let it not escape observation that Coed predates Blue Velvet by a decade. Who knows how it might have reflected upon Friedel if the aficionados of art house and grindhouse fare who embraced Blue Velvet had the recent memory of Kidnapped Coed in mind? It would be justice served if Friedel garnered greater visibility for his early accomplishments. But how plausible is his proposal for achieving this?

The dichotomy of Sandra’s coming of age and Lisa’s descent into psychosis might make for interesting storytelling, to say nothing of the curious pair of leading ladies the film would have in Coed’s snow white copperheaded peculiarity Leslie Ann Rivers (whose voice seems to be a full quarter century ahead of her body) and Axe’s somnambulant nymphet Leslie Lee. The trouble would lie in reconciling the two faces of Jack Canon. Superfox Jack is the male lead of both films, devil in the latter and angel in disguise in the former. Mr. Canon, who is something like a lanky laconic lovechild of Clint Eastwood and Harry Dean Stanton, is an out-and-out thrill-seeking sadist in Axe, but only toys with ersatz hardboiledness in order to send money to his ailing mama in the deeply romantic Coed. One could easily be presented as the past of the other, but will not Axe’s pervasive angst strike a dissonant note with Coed’s compassion? And how well will the filth Friedel allowed to filter into Axe sit next to Coed’s relative radiance? With any luck Friedel will show us all how it’s done. If anybody knows the guy, say something encouraging to him. And re: his thankyou's from Coed, get him to tell me who Adolph is.

It's Exactly What You Think It Is

2004-09-11T20:59:00.000-04:00

So…Resident Evil: Apocalypse. For those of you were not among the hordes of frothing red-eyed infected who converged upon the megaplexes yesterday, allow me to introduce you. Thriving metropolis Raccoon City is beset by a zombie plague, the product of the tech monolith Umbrella Corporation. Trapped within the city limits are a small band of paramilitary agents who, if they wish to escape, must find and rescue perennial Creepy Little British Girl Angela, the daughter of the distraught scientist who is responsible for the outbreak to begin with. Our heroes wind up fighting for their lives against the teeming hordes in a church stronghold (which is, shall we say, eerily familiar, but I’ll be kind), and all seems lost, until…Enter bitchy, twitchy Milla Jovovich on a flying motorcycle in a scene that confirms that what you are seeing is not actually a fleeting reminiscence of 28 Days Later, but rather a little homage to Demons, sans katana blade. Milla, as most of you well know, is an ethereal creature resting somewhere between Bjork Gudmundsdottir and a boys’ JV basketball player, and you can expect to spend most of this movie watching her sprint along the sides of skyscrapers, kick the heads off of zombies, and charm the pants off of everyone with her strangely appealing chainsmoking schoolgirl’s rasp. Moreover, after her recent internment at an Umbrella Corp medical facility, she is infected with a new strain of the virus that is making her faster, stronger, and generally more like the most recent incarnation of a better-known uber-frau in a better-loved cyberpunk horror franchise…

But enough with the nostalgia. Let’s be in the moment. Hold on to your face, because this movie is loud. The audio output is so intense that at a certain point I’m pretty sure I began to hear Inner Ear Tones. This in combination with it polyrhythmic pacing and cinematography so dizzyingly kinetic that one can never be sure where one character’s body ends and another begins, RE:A is more like a glorified drum machine than a film. The movie careens from the fetish chamber that is Milla’s Umbrella Corp hospital room to the military citadel walls erected against the infected to a church to a cemetery where – do you wanna party? ‘Cos it’s party time – the earth erupts with undead and so then it’s on to the local catholic junior high where a decidedly less polite version of Losey’s These Are the Damned is underway…the pervasively pixilated imagery of the walking dead and the karate-aided dispatch thereof is so sketchy, and the camera work so violently ADD that you might not remember much other than the lovely Ms. Jovovich’s bare Frank Milleresque glass-cutting nipples. But hey, that’s probably reason enough for many.

That having been said, the flick is, unsurprisingly, an action movie. Very few will be taken aback by that realization, but let me say, Apocalypse manifests a level of technophilia that would make Kenneth Anger blush. The film’s industrial chic aspirations don’t stop at the overabundance of firepower that would make Sigmund Freud blush, but press on to a realm where the technology is so ubiquitous that every angle of every street corner is attended by a level of surveillance that would make Brian De Palma’s head explode. But this is where the brilliant language of the video game comes into play; just as you’re thinking “This is the most absurd tech solution since that thing in the library in Pretty In Pink,” you remember, “Oh, right. It’s the UMBRELLA CORPORATION.” If I’ve ever heard another name that more immediatley evoked Unstoppable Leviathan…I just can’t remember what it could be.

And speaking of ludicrous visions of the future, all y’all who made all those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle jokes about Jason X should have held their breath for the Nemesis Project. So probably everybody remembers Eric Mabius getting infected with something or t’other that caused spiny little thingies to protrude from all open wounds in the previous effort…well, apparently that was just phase one of turning into a giant pile of corrugated flesh poured into PVC Lip Service pants and held together with bondage straps and for some reason, despite the omnipotent technological presence in effect, needing to have half of its face stapled together. This thing will spend most of the movie loping around glumly and turning everything in its path into sand with the aid of a set of automatic weapons that I don’t even want to bother describing until it gets to have its ultimate dream date with Milla in the last act, which mostly looks like a cardio kickboxing class.

Now, therein lies my biggest complaint about the picture. I can handle the fact that the editing is often too fast for the naked eye, and that the film seems to suffer from some embarrassment regarding the current debate over whether or not zombies should have lightning reflexes, and maybe I can even come to a grim acceptance of the strange snickering apology for Night of the Living Dead wherein a boozing cowboy-hat sporting cop snipes a zombie off the back of a black man who is begging not to be shot …but for eff’s sake, if you’re going to make the coy insinuation of monster-girlmonster romance at the big climax, just get it out and get it on. Between all the sweaty kung fu foreplay and the gazing into one another’s tear-filled eyes at the moment of recognition, I believe it’s safe to admit what everyone knows is going on. Can’t we get a little sugar, after all we’ve been through? Just something for the ladies.

But outside of my paean for more girl-on-monster romance in today’s horror cinema (the first of many, one can be sure; Freddy Krueger, why hast thou forsaken me?), there’s very little I can really offer anyone regarding the expanding Resident Evil legacy. It’s safe to assume that most have seen it, and most of those who haven’t know what they’re going to get, and I ought to leave the rest of you gentle creatures in the capable hands of my more caustic companion. I’d do much better to move on to another cinematic citizen of the zombie demimonde, the criminally underexposed, exquisitely beautiful Messiah of Evil.

Messiah of Evil (1973) is a rarely-seen wonder written and directed by American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom scribe Willard Hyuck, and his Graffiti cowriter Gloria Katz. Beautiful young Arletty treks out to the remote coastal village of Point Dune in search of her dear father, whose latest missives became stranger and stranger until they stopped entirely. Once she has arrived in the apparently quiet and unremarkable settlement, she comes upon a trio of decadent drifters who have arrived in Point Dune to acquire her father’s paintings. Unfortunately the man is no where to be found, and the only help any of them can find among the town’s unnervingly icy citizenry is from Elisha Cook, Jr. in a role he was born to play. The vacant, haunted derelict Charlie relates to the interlopers the legend of the Blood Moon, in which a Dark Stranger arrived at Point Dune and men began to behave as animals, eating raw meat and weeping blood under a scarlet full moon. Before Charlie leaves the disturbed foursome, he abruptly admonishes Arletty: “If you love your daddy, you will kill him – put fire to his body.”

Arletty returns to her father’s empty home, a massive studio so full of the man’s paintings that the rooms hardly have their own identities, and begins to examine his diary. Therein she discovers more of the deranged notions that his letters only hinted at, implications that he has fallen prey to a monstrous disease that is affecting all of Point Dune. As well, the pages reveal that the centennial of the Dark Stranger’s arrival is upon them, and the painter’s mental deterioration is only part of the problem. “I think I’m going mad now…but worse, I think the hideous things I’m seeing are not imaginary.”

One night, Arletty awakens to find the art collectors within the walls of her father’s home, having been turned out of all the inns after Charlie was found dead. (“…it must have been dogs.”) Now the velour dandy Thom and his two ladyfriends, languid ice queen Laura, and petulant nymphet Toni have installed themselves, and their agitated boredom with one another becomes increasingly evident as Thom sets his sights on Arletty. As the four try to separate themselves from one another, the drifters run afoul of the evil that is metastasizing in Point Dune, and soon Arletty finds her present synching up with her father’s past as her eyes fill with blood, her mouth fills with insects, and the moon gathers a crimson corona.

The film is beautiful to behold from beginning to end, drenched in searing sanguine reds so rich they look wet, saved from conflagration only by the intrusion of supercooled funerary blues. Aside from its malarial visual climate and the brilliant engineering of Point Dune’s dreary Americana, Messiah features some of the most startlingly effective scenes of zombie horror of any entry in the subgenre, canonized classics included. Dull-looking citizens who appear as if they might as easily be attending a PTA meeting or a bingo game gather under the cold fluorescent lights of supermarkets to feast on raw meat until a beautiful young woman arrives, who will die with the strains of Muzac ringing in her ears, or they gather in a theater to quietly weep bloody tears as a bizarre mélange of ultraviolent and pornographic spaghetti westerns plays over jangling honky tonk and sardonically discordant disco, awaiting innocent moviegoers. Victims try to make their escapes quietly, awkwardly, as if in embarrassed politeness, unable to admit to themselves the insanity of what is taking place until it’s far too late.

Where can you find this elusive beauty, you may ask? Not many places, is the sad answer. Brentwood Entertainment distributed it a few years ago in an arbitrarily assembled four-disc set that includes Ruggero Deodato’s quiet masterpiece of misanthropy House on the Edge of the Park, the bizarro seasonal horror offering Christmas Evil, and the ninety-minute American edit of Deep Red for some ungodly reason. Those desperate enough to give in to such a dubious offer rather than hold out for a kinder treatment (my sad self included) will find themselves in possession of a grainy, washed out little with the DVD company logo burned into the image about four fifths of the way in. Other than that, a peculiar-looking Greek bootleg has been floating around for some time now, and it’s fairly accessible to the devoted hunter, but for now, we’ve nothing more. Unless you will be anywhere in proximity of Pitman, New Jersey around the eight of next month. Pitman is a little hermetically sealed suburb with a lot of doll shops and storefronts filled with wedding dresses, and a little red trolley called “Honey” to cart you around. In the middle of town is the glorious old Broadway Theater, a recently renovated, rotten red velvet-draped affair garnished with opera boxes that is set upon once or twice a month by a little punk revival outfit called Exhumed Films(.com). On the evening of October 8th, the boys at Exhumed will treat their audiences to a zombified triple feature of Day of the Dead, The Fog, and at the top of the bill, Messiah of Evil. That’s right. Figure it out.

Bit By Bit, They Carved a Nightmare...

2004-09-09T01:46:00.000-04:00

Everybody tell Lion’s Gate exactly how much you want to see Tobe Hooper’s remake of The Toolbox Murders in theaters. They’re keeping me up at night with this prickteasing little insinuation that they’re considering a midnight circuit run to accompany the DVD release in fall of 2005, and I and many others would rest easier if those coy little so-and-so’s would just call it a night and commit.

Has everybody seen this thing? I know Mr. Hooper has been taking it around to festivals all year, and it seems like the general reaction has been favorable. Last I heard it played to an enthused crowd at the Egyptian this passing August, and we all should hope that it continues to flit about as long as possible between now and the time we’re allowed to take it home. It’s dirty and unpleasant and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but doesn’t that describe a good number of canonized genre offerings? Not that I’d necessarily go so far as to canonize it, but my memory of it from the genrefied Danger After Dark program for the Philadelphia Film Festival this passing spring is a pleasant one. After a relative ebb in the flow of visceral shocks and atmospheric fright from the man who inflicted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre upon the world, Tobe Hooper has suddenly cultivated a full-blooming flower of evil from the barest seed of an idea born in another movie about power tool mayhem, made not long after his own initial triumph in that field. Tobe’s Toolbox Murders (perpetrated, by the by, with the aid of Tobe’s actual toolbox) is a grim, filthy, and almost needlessly jarring extrapolation on Dennis Donnelly’s original bare-bones suggestion about a maniac doing a little nail gun-enabled spring cleaning of the immoral inhabitants of his apartment complex. As Hooper readily admits, his Toolbox is a remake in name only, so be warned: not even its notoriously severe predecessor will prepare the audience for the trauma incurred by viewing its descendent.

Ectomorphic May antiheroine Angela Bettis has just moved into a labyrinthine, claustrophobic, never more than half-lit apartment building where she finds herself regularly disturbed by constant electrical disruption, noise produced by her criminally weird neighbors, and inevitably, the violent dispatch thereof. The play by play is unimportant, as the meandering narrative culminates in a murky, Freemasony mystery that’s nearly impossible to pick apart. But don’t let that distress you. Instead, allow yourself to be distressed by the almost surreal levels of sturm und drang permeating LA’s infamous Ambassador Hotel in which the film (and Robert Kennedy, famously) was shot by May cinematographer Steve Yedlin; or, by the disfigured homicidal handyman whose visage and modus operandi actually live up to the gold standard achieved by Chainsaw’s Leatherface; or, if none of that does it for you, than by one of the single most gruesome murders this reviewer has ever witnessed in her life-long study of the spectacle of simulated violence. The victim actually begs for death. You might, too.

Despite the high level of aggression born by Hooper’s new project, and that of the exponentially more brutal classic which he bestowed upon us thirty years ago, make no mistake -- Tobe is a sensitive artist. I have this on good authority from Danger After Dark programmer Travis Crawford. Mr. Crawford was responsible for Tobe’s entertainment during the day of his visit to the Philly Fest, and the first order of business was to take Mr. Hooper where all DAD guests are taken – the Mutter Museum. For the uninitiated, this is an institution of medical history that caters to the local med student populace, but which appears more like a turn of the century odditorium. It’s filled with malformed homunculi in jars of formaldehyde, plastic renderings of ocular injuries, and it houses the world’s largest colon. A string of other genre luminaries have made that journey under the festival’s auspices, ranging from Alex De La Iglesias (Common Wealth) to newcomer Jorge Olguin (Sangre Eterna, the Chilean mall-goth thrill machine that is a thousand-fold better than Underworld), and all of them came away with photos, teeshirts, and a general feeling of childlike glee. However, in an unforeseen twist, the man whose trademark work of art was banned in Britain for something like “psychological torment” all but swooned like a neurasthenic Victorian housewife at the sights he was shown. After manifesting an entirely tragified reaction to an umpteenth exhibit, the venerable director was asked whether he wasn’t sorry he’d come. Responding to his host’s blushing apology, Tobe “Chainsaw” Hooper intoned with solemn resignation (I paraphrase), “No, no…I suppose this is just one of those things you have to see in your lifetime.”

I take this to mean that Hooper has a heart of gold, and that he crafted Chainsaw, if not other films, with the extreme sensitivity to the potential hell of embodiment that enables his best work to drive the present author to tears. That in mind, I’d like to pick his brain someday regarding his reaction to the original Toolbox Murders. I recall my initial viewing experience with that dubious classic, sitting in a rotten red velvet-garnished theater in Pitman, New Jersey at a screening hosted by a little revival outfit called Exhumed Films. Despite snickering fanboy references I’d heard to the film as a campy balls-out slasher artifact, I found Dennis Donnelly’s Toolbox to be one of the most grim, unapologetic, and peculiarly disaffected films of its type that I’d ever seen. The disconnect between the film’s somnambulant cinematography and sleepily sentimental Top 40 country soundtrack, and its unremittingly cruel homicides drove me into a state of near-catatonic disquiet. Though I’d never in a million years side with such a faction, I almost felt a pang of sympathy with the feminist factions that called upon this specific film as an example of why this strain of moviemaking should not be allowed to persist. Coincidentally, I was in the company of the aforementioned Mr. Crawford during this particular screening. I should note that this fellow is responsible for my awareness of such video uber-nasty as Don’t Go In the House and In a Glass Cage before I repeat what he said about a particular scene wherein one victim is brutally slain, apparently in direct punitive response to her pleasuring herself: “Feminist critics at the time said that this film is ‘Dangerous and should not be seen’…and I’m inclined to agree.”

All you sleaze cineastes out there know that the original version of this film got the Blue Underground royal treatment in the recent past, so I say to everyone: see them both, it matters not in which order, and push for the theatrical release of the latter. You’ll be glad you did.

Tokyo Shock is Alive and Well and Living in Flushing

2004-09-07T19:03:00.000-04:00

So, by now everyone who is so inclined has exposed themselves to the latest Far Eastern genre import, the nerve-rending tale of supernatural terror that is Ju-On: The Grudge. Recapping: Ju-On is a punchy, episodic tale of terror flashing back and forward with giddy (and perhaps arbitrary) abandon, lurching from today to yesterday to tomorrow to track the rapid destruction of two living families by the undead fury of a roving mother-son/croaking-meowing/succubus-incubus thingy. Creepy crabwalking Kayoko and her bug-eyed little tyke Toshio steal the souls and possess the bodies of the still-living nuclear clans, reducing their victims to a Karloffian stagger and a Presleyan facial tick, in attempt to sate the enduring rage generated by their own murder at the hands of the patriarch of their family. Relentless, hysterical, and driven more by its series of abrasive windup-and-punchline scares than by anything like a linear narrative, the rising and expanding success of Ju-On is a matter of some curiosity. Is it a potent expression of a distinctly Japanese brand of righteous indignation whose raw emotional intensity generates a tableau of intuitive hallucinatory horrors, a feat that allows the film to transcend cultural borders and linear narrative structures? Or is it merely ninety minutes of desperate cinematic milking of Hideo Nakata’s powerful pendant works of supernatural horror in hopes of wringing out even a teaspoonful of the potency that demanded of Ringu and asan American remake apiece?

Well, whatever the nature of the beast, it seems to be serving 32-year old director Takashi Shimizu well. One Mr. Samuel Raimi has made Shimizu an offer he can’t refuse, commissioning the production of a Hollywood remake of the first of the Japanese director’s projected trilogy, even as he is still heavy with sequel. But with the blushing specter of the ostensible American fear of subtitles (um….Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anyone?) hanging overhead, and a little pillow talk, Shimizu hopped in the sack with Ghost House Pictures and conceived again. Shimizu, blushing schoolboy that he is reputed to be, admitted to Sci Fi Wire, “These producers, including Sam Raimi, they really wanted me to do it again, because the taste I have has never been done in America as a horror movie, and they really wanted to introduce my taste to America. I thought that was nice, and I decided to do it."
Has he really been convinced that he’ll be taking America’s Japanese horror cherry? Methinks Takashi Shimizu is being a little faux-naïf. I sympathize with his apparent bewilderment at His Eminence Mr. Raimi’s request for a remake of Ju-On almost before the projected trilogy has finished gestating, but the suggestion of surprise in many of his comments vis-à-vis the capacity for Ju-On’s Japanese fear factor to scan well with American audiences seems a little absurd at this point. His coy murmuring about an altered ending for The Grudge is a bit suspect. Not only has the phenomenally successful Ringu remake beaten a smooth path for his tender young feet to tread, but the benevolent presence of the pre-natal American Dark Water hovers auspiciously on the January 2005 horizon, virtually walking Ju-On down the aisle. (Thanks a load, Jennifer Connelly. We worship you, et al) And of course, both of those originals are readily available at just about any old mom and pop rental outfit on any old American corner now. Moreover, even Sion Sono’s Suicide Club experienced sweeping festival success and remarkable breadth of distribution Stateside earlier this year despite its decidedly art house approach to a uniquely Japanese social scourge. It’s next to impossible that this evolving cultural climate has escaped Mr. Shimizu’s notice, and it would be stranger still if he were unaware of the eye-popping relationship (sorry, Everyone) between Ringu's now-classic promotional image of Sadako's demonic orb peering out from behind a curtain of matted hair, and The Grudge's promotional image of Kayoko's, um, demonic orb peering out from behind a curtain of matted hair. This use of the resonant Japanese image to pander to the future American audience, in combination with the queasy similarity between Ju-On’s central scare tactic and a certain recently exhumed, widely visible outtake from the first part of a currently expanding American horror franchise – that’s right, Reagan’s much-maligned spider walk from the “Version You’ve Never Seen” of The Exorcist. Now, I’d never have the gall to pretend that I’m the first or only to notice this. I bring it up by way of suggesting that Shimizu’s dewy-eyed babe in the woods reaction to Raimi’s courtship and the supposed American innocence of his particular horrific stylings is a pretty weird put-on, all things considered.

But maybe I’m being too quick to judge. Maybe a cultural exchange between two such alien nations will always feel like the very first time. Nervous comments made by Georgia peach Kadee Strickland suggest that maybe the problem of translation is not to be taken for granted. She told the aforementioned Wire, "I play a businesswoman who has lived in Japan, and her family's coming over. So I am sort of the seasoned, cultured girl over in Japan. She's a businesswoman gal, and it's just so funny, because I'd never said a lick of Japanese in my life before, and I'm not Southern in the picture, so that was also going to be fun, to have to speak Japanese and not have a Southern accent. There were all kinds of twists and turns in that job for me.”
So maybe I’m being too blasé about the imminent danger of delivering his intrinsically Japanese message to a Western audience. She could be right. If I hear Miss Strickland’s syrupy-sweet southern drawl gently warping what I’m sure will be her gaijin character’s otherwise flawless Japanese in the midst of this dialogue-heavy, intensely character-driven psychosocial opus, I might have a brain aneurism and die. Twists and turns abound. Good luck, Kadee. So perhaps I’ll recant and doff my cap to all the brave little thespians who are undertaking the formidable task of helping Americans understand what’s scary about being haunted from beyond the grave by an unspeakable soul-eating evil.
So what is this “taste that has never been done before” to which Shimizu might allude? Even cinematic progenitor Nakata seems to be repeating the same grim, condescending presumption about the translation process. “The American audience needs more jolts or stimulation, whereas the Asian audience can be a little more patient,” he said to MTV regarding the reconception of The Ring 2. Is anybody really satisfied with this excuse? After poring over page after page of vagaries about Japanese pacing and power of suggestion expressed by Raimi and Shimizu and their ilk, I found a much more helpful observation made by cameo superstar Ted Raimi regarding Japanese and American ghost storytelling:
“Everybody suffers in a Japanese horror film. In American horror films, in Halloween, for example, there's that morality system where P.J. Soles sleeps with her boyfriend and then Michael Myers comes and kills her. In this film, the innocent and the guilty suffer. There is no distinction.”
Ah, now that’s the ticket. It’s not that critique about Japanese pacing and coyness, which flagrantly ignores the country’s historic fascination with violence and biological decay in evidence at least as early as its relatively eager acceptance of blood-drenched Christian literature and iconography, and still apparent in a substantial body of internationally successful gore-soaked cinema (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the bizarrely visceral Uzumaki, any of the most popular Miike selections…), but also overlooks the fact that Ju-On is, while bloodless, nothing but a series of jarring scare shots from beginning to end. The junior Raimi notices that neither Ringu or Dark Water or any of their ocean-crossing peers settle for moralizing about mortality. And THAT’S why they’re so exceptionally frightening to the primally puritanical American sensibility. Thanks, Ted. Loved you in Skinner. Truly.

So the question remains, will the Raimi-Shimizu lovechild adopt the piety of American slasher films in the translation process? We’ll just have to bite our nails until October 22 to find out.

...And Baby Makes Three

2004-09-06T19:30:00.000-04:00

AVS’s fascinating socio-scientific analysis of AVP inspired me to make even more charts. I took up her lead, straight from the sexology angle, and drew my own conclusions about the film’s base elements…

ALIEN
Has a pistoning, penetrating auxiliary mandible
Has acid for blood
Belongs to a mysterious ancient species that seems to exist everywhere in time and space

PREDATOR
Um…has been called “pussyface”
Has Koolaid EctoCooler for blood
Belongs to the Parliament Funkadelic

…am I wrong? Of course not. Admit it, you’ve been marveling at the Predator’s natty dreads for some time now. That countercultural fashion statement has allowed you to forgive the fact that, as far as being the ultimate hunter goes, he doesn’t seem to see very well (everything reads as blobs that only differentiate what’s dead from what’s not) or hear very well (re: that looping tinny echo effect that makes everything sound the way it must to James Hetfield), and caused you to continue to deem him Totally Rad through three movies. You overlooked the erotic undertone of the sweating straining Tom of Finland cartoon that was his film debut, in which the Predator struts around in his little mesh shirt looking like he’s waiting for his chaps to come back from the drycleaners so he and Arnie can go cruising, because those dreadlocks are so epically awesome. You sat through a second movie of this overgrown double-Y club kid loping around LA like Boba Fett’s special little brother pursuing Danny Glover’s bubbalicious butt because you were wondering how to groom your own goth-industrial chic tresses into the cyberpunk wet dream that is the Predator’s famous coif. Or maybe you just think the Predator movies are really good. In any case, you’ve been wondering about those dreadlocks. For me, this psychological journey ended after the climax of AVP, when the mothership lands and P-Funk is born away by his family of grunting, natty-haired, decadently-ornamented space aliens into a dense bank of whirling twisting psychedelically-lit smoke. Then the old shriveled-up granddaddy comes out, who is unmistakably George Clinton, and all but hands our heroine the bop gun. Oh. Thanks for clearing that up.

But before we veer too far from the previous discussion of reproductive organs, I’d like to pull on your coat about the actual viewing experience of the aforementioned Godzillian clash. When the Amy of Darkness and I attended a late nite screening of AVP at our local megaplex, we began to notice a peculiar sound back and to the left of us as the end credits crawled away. “Is that a wounded animal?” Ms. Of Darkness inquired. No, of course not. Silly. That’s a mewling infant. I mean, what better date for the 10 O’clock show of an inner ear-rupturingly loud display of hottt monster-on-monster action than a barely-formed homunculus? He’s sweet, he’s sensitive, he’s clearly not afraid to cry at the movies, and you can almost guarantee yourself no cheeky popcorn box antics.
Apparently, such was the mindset of the impressive quantity of broodmares who took not one but, I don’t know, a hundred of their toddling byproducts to the midnight show of Exorcist: The Beginning. Some of you may have wondered, “Who is the target demographic of Exorcist: The Beginning?” I got your answer. Wee little babies. Or, better yet, post-babies who are just capable of comprehending something about the Devil, something about the Holocaust, and something about the fact that this whole movie is about dead children. It’s just like showing them The Miracle of Birth, only, you know, kind of the opposite. You probably know by now that the bulk of this prequel’s fright arsenal is composed of images of a prepubescent urchin being torn to tiny pieces by CGI hyenas, a maggot-infested stillborn, and of course, endless slo-mo footage of fat-faced cherubs having their brains blown out. Now, if I might get a little bit personal with all y’all, I remember catching The Omen II on television when I was something like a fat-faced cherub myself, and I vividly recall being tucked in to bed that night and asking before the lights went out, “Mommy…is there really an Antichrist?” Har de har har. Kids say the darndest things. Now, I count myself very lucky that I was in the presence of a sympathetic and articulate parent in the privacy of our home when the question that would eat away at my psyche for the rest of my natural life arose. Unfortunately, such was not the case for the little man who audibly burst into tears when a young boy not unlike himself was dragged off in tatters by a gaggle of satanically-possessed desert varmints on screen, nor many others who had similar reactions to the sight of the pink, pouty little putti whose brains are used to paint the town red by a roving squadron of SS. Over and over again. In slow motion. Good times. Well, maybe I’m in no position to question, I’m not a parent. Maybe it’s good for the little troops. Builds character. Maybe I should feel inspired by this brave and honest move to subject young’uns to all worldly possibilities for horror as early as possible. It’s sweeping the nation. Perhaps we’ll get a new book that helps parents be frank with their children, a companion piece to the internationally successful Japanese offering Everybody Poops. It could be called Everybody Dies Horribly. Or everybody could just keep bringing their wimpy babies to witching hour screenings of gruesome horror sequels and totally wreck my shot at ever having a nice evening at the theater again without the aid of cheeky popcorn box antics.

AVS VS AVP

2004-08-26T16:32:00.000-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, submitted for your approval:

PREDATOR

Has a sort of vaginal opening for a mouth (at least once you get beyond the dentate portion…).
Has a nurturing, maternal instinct toward women, children, and the infirm (as witnessed in both PREDATOR 2 and ALIEN VS PREDATOR).

ALIEN

Has a phallic protuberance within its mouth.
Something of an absentee father, it uses its face-huggers to impregnate its victims (yes, I realize that there’s a "queen" that lays eggs and is expressly female – don’t interrupt me with facts while I’m trying to make a point!).

I posit that, due to the human reproductive organs we’ve assigned to these alien beings, subconsciously we don’t want to see them fight, we want to see them…well…another verb that starts with "f."

Anyway, now that their obligatory action match-up is in the can, it’s time to forge ahead with next summer’s romantic comedy blockbuster, WHEN ALIEN MET PREDATOR! And given Alien’s tendency to love and leave, I’m sure plenty of hilarious sparks will fly.

Don’t lie to yourself, you’ve all been thinking it… - AVS

CREATURE COMFORTS – or – HA! I saw a free preview of ANACONDAS!

2004-08-26T12:27:00.000-04:00

I have a special place reserved deep down in the darkest recesses of my black little heart for unpretentious, formulaic creature features like ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID. Although I suppose it’s not really their intended purpose, I find myself calmed and charmed by them. For me, they provide a cinematic experience akin to listening to white noise or eating a bowl full of well-blended mashed potatoes – not particularly interesting, but soothing nonetheless. The characters in these films are like old friends: the wacky, frightened sidekick, the strong, willful female, the hardened, experienced leader, the tragically flawed zealot, etc.; we know what to expect from them (and we know the ones we like are likely to survive). Also, the message of such films is never too harsh or preachy. Typically the audience is warned against the dangers of excess – science, technology and ambition can be good things but only in moderation – and since no one is going to waste their breath contesting that, we remain unchallenged. Most importantly, perhaps, is that one never expects too much of films like these, and because of this, one is rarely disappointed.

It’s hard to stay mad at unambitious eye-candy like ANACONDAS. So if you, like me, occasionally enjoy putting your mind on autopilot, then take a trip down Formula Lane and indulge yourself with ANACONDAS – there’s a monkey in it!

PS - I especially recommend seeing it for free! -AVS