So–as the month proceeds, I’m committed to seeing some horror films. The following three sort of fit the generic bill, but alas while most clearly intra-genre two of the films also failed to bring the noise.
1408 is well-shot and lovingly attuned to genre tradition. It’s also about as much fun as staying in a hotel room. A jaded hack writer kicking out quasi-travelogues of the supernatural (John Cusack, using his sad and grim faces mostly, instead of his other two options–the blank or the smiley) goes into one “evil fucking room” and haunting ensues. In the story by Stephen King, it’s pretty stripped down; I don’t recall a backstory which gives a rationale (sort of) for the writer’s jadedness (this is NOT a spoiler–the requisite dead kid) which did give the film its small bit of emotional juice but also drained out what remained of my pleasure in the film. Why didn’t this work? Again, I liked the turn to the traditional–no torture scenes, just ghosts and evil spaces. But I was never spooked in the least, and mostly I was bored. I kind of blame Cusack… and maybe it’s unfair, but damn he seemed more impassive than jaded. Everything seemed tamped down, controlled.
Black Sheep wants to be uncontrolled, the opposite of tamped down–revved up, Peter-Jackson-crazed with gore and the slapstick potential of extreme horror. But the film suffers from a very similar ailment as the above: while utterly loony in its premise (genetic sheep turned killer, also somehow able to transfer sheep-ness into humans bitten so that we get a few transformations), and in love with endless shots of sheep munching happily on piles of innards or grabbing and stretching bits of rubbery flesh farther than you ever thought biologically possible, the film was also boring. It was so utterly conventional in its enactment of its strange premise that the helium seeped out and instead we get a pretty tedious straightforward horror film, saved only slightly by a relative competence in its execution, a lack of pretension, and some decent enough acting. I enjoyed the trailer more than the film, though.
Black Book probably deserves another thread. I thought about sticking it under our thread on Soderbergh’s Good German, because this film seems a far more effective embodiment of classic war-time Hollywood narrative married to a bleaker, more cynical critique of those films’ romanticism. I watched, and quite enjoyed–Paul Verhoeven updates this WWII melodrama, infusing it with a vicious sense of human nature (and occasional flashes of ironic situational humor) and an intriguing willingness to play the horrors of that war (somewhat explicitly addressed) as fodder for thrilling suspense. I was very taken by the lead Carice van Houten, who is fearless and enthralling in her performance–capturing exactly that sense of the ’40s heroine in her semi-hardboiled yet earnest attitude. Sebastian Koch (from Lives of Others) is also quite good. I guess what drew me in, besides the strong acting and excellent pacing and suspenseful story, is that I kept thinking that it seemed a rather glib way to tell the story, and the film seemed self-conscious of its own glib repression or exploitation. . . and yet it’s not ironic or winking in form (which we might say of Soderbergh’s film). Not really horror, but occasionally horrifying, and–like many reviewers I cautiously toss this word out–entertaining.
I plan to watch William Friedkin’s Bug this month sometime. It got bad reviews, but whatever. Got to be better than the laughable sounding 1408. I”m also tempted to watch a Saw movie, but torture as a film topic doesn’t really interest me, though I do admire the Rob Zombie movies. Apparently his new Halloween had some good stuff in it…
based on an enthusiastic recommendation from mike, i watched a piece of crap called phantoms a couple of nights ago. actually, it wasn’t that bad, but i don’t really get what mike meant when he told me on the phone that this was “obviously a continuation of the so-called 70s aesthetic that jerkwad frisoli goes on about”. indeed i thought it quite inappropriate when he began squealing, “oooh look at me! i’m from the 70s! we’re so special! our films were so great!” and had to hang up on him.
“jerkwad” is just the kind of middle school epithet I’d expect from Reynolds. When will he grow up? I just outright call him a motherfucker. ooooh, now is so great, look we have Tyler Perry and The Game Plan! Please, let us all just hang up.
Jerkwad!
Murder Party never got a release, I’d heard nothing ’til it popped up on the dvd schedule, it’s a low-budget “horror/comedy” (uh oh) making fun of the NYC artist scene (uh oh).
And it’s a fucking blast. The film opens with a sly parody of John Carpenter films, crappy spooky synth music over a montage of Brooklyn Halloween scenes. It gets going slowly, following a loser (with a cat named “Sir Lancelot”) who finds an invitation to a “Murder Party” and crafts himself a knight’s suit out of cardboard and duct tape and attends. The party is actually an art collective, a bunch of dipshit hipsters looking to impress a potential mentor by staging a killing. That’s all the summary you need.
The film is excessive and goofy and lowbrow and (in the end) ridiculously gory even as it’s also very well-shot and -acted for its tiny tiny budget, as often subtle as it is broad in its digs at aesthetics and its echoes of various films. At 80 minutes it zips along, and … well, I just dug the hell out of it. I am admittedly the sole horror aficionado on site here, yet I think this might–*might*–have a broader appeal. Way better than I expected, or could have expected. It recalled my serious pleasure in the very smart Behind the Mask which I posted on some time ago.
Fido‘s a kick. A pastiche of zombie tropes, ‘fifties satire, and family-film parody, with a lovely production design, many small laughs, and a fine central performance–in grunts, sighs, stares, and roars–by Billy Connolly. Henry Czerny and Tim Blake Nelson have some nice moments as (respectively) a former-war-hero-cum-Zombie-Containment-corporate bigwig and a Hef-like neighbor with a zombie girlfriend. Relatively muted in terms of gore and scares, and not too uproarious. (I think one joke, a carefully-executed Lassie set-up, made me laugh out loud.) But amiable and clever.
I have yet to watch anything Halloween themed this year.
Except the news. I think if you live in LA right now, the news counts.
eli roth programs a 24 hour horror fest over at the onion’s av club. no cronenberg?
Yes, I’ve yet to be impressed by this low-rent wannabe as I think Roth imagines himself to be the Tarantino of horror. Still, The Vanishing is a fucking creepy film. I’ve seen it a few times and it continually scares the shit out of me. Surprisingly, I saw the Spanish horror flick Who Can Kill a Child? a few weeks ago, but I thought it was lame. I might actually pay to see Roth remake that film . . . but we shall see. Isn’t LA always burning, metaphorically speaking? You fuck with mother nature and you will get burned. Real estate developers should be on the front lines of that sad, horror show but alas . . .
How is Jerry Van Dyke doing, Mark?
For those wondering which torture film to watch this Halloween, I offer up a general dismissal of Hostel, part II, despite some real interest I have in what Eli Roth seems to be doing or trying to do. The plot? More pretty young ugly Americans snatched into the bowels of a bid-for-kill industry in Eastern Europe.
The film is irritatingly accomplished in its craft. Roth can shape, edit, frame a suspense narrative along the most efficiently conventional lines–the action slowly building, each piece put into place and amplifying the film’s sense of potential energy. And yet the film is equally at home with its far-from-the-mainstream influences, holding for far too long on the contusion, the vicious head wound, the cut throat. That kind of z-grade sleaze was generally stunningly digressive, poorly-edited, without a glimmer of forward motion. These two styles work in a weird kind of dialectic in Roth; he is equally likely to show us 30 seconds of his Fangoria-wet-dream of a leg stripped of skin as he is to playfully block our view of surveillance footage at the moment of the cut with the blocky dumb head of a guard. I find that interesting: he makes mainstream versions of despicably nasty pieces of shit. Or vice versa. On the one hand, the gore-hound is teased with more Hitchockian sleight-of-camera than usually desired, while on the other the refined fan of suspense gets 3 full minutes of a woman bathing in blood from the woman hanging above her.
Oops. Spoiler!
But that glimmer of intrigue in the collision/collusion of style and method turns over the film’s long haul into glassy stare. Unfortunately, I find both the mainstream set-up and the gory pay-off pretty damn tedious; like the first Hostel and even the goofier Cabin Fever, the first hour of a brisk 90-minute film is played too straight for parody and has too much ironic clarity in its aesthetic to be taken seriously. And I’ve never much cared for the precision and craft of gore or sleaze–its ridiculous artifice has often been exactly its interest to me. I like the glorious goofy exploding heads of Scanners and the body-fluids-from-a-hose of the Evil Dead films and the cow’s-tongue-woefully-disguised-as-human in Blood Feast. It isn’t the pain or the bodies exposed–it’s the sense of “body” as an excessive grotesque playground for film. Realism is exactly NOT the point.
And yet Roth’s not really realistic, either–he’s too sly, and he assumes his viewers are too sly. These films are not sleaze, they’re “sleaze.” However, unlike the revamped sleaze of Tarantino, or Rob Zombie, I always see the quotation marks around the film, and what’s quoted is never given new voice. Roth is making the films he loves, rather than making films. That distinction make much sense? It’s lacking any of the excessive pleasure that Rodriguez takes in recreating grindhouse films, and Roth but rarely comes within a country mile of catching some of the pleasure of excess that Tarantino or Zombie reveal in their reconceptions of such films. Those guys do covers. Roth is singing karaoke.
I did kind of like many of the sick jokes in the last 10 minutes, and poor Roger Bart who can be so damn good in small roles here and there struggles through mightily to imbue his nasty-but-maybe-redeemable businessman with a sense of soul.