Non-horror non-review: Black Orpheus (1959)

Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello both passed away this year, which is too bad, but does provide an opening to bring up the one big film of their lives. ("Bring up," not "review," 'cause I spent two days not being able to find my copy in a garage full of boxes and being too cheap to rent something I already own; so I didn't get to rewatch it, but what the hell I love this movie anyway, and at least that means I'll keep this mercifully short.)

Black Orpheus is not horror, but it is a fable about our greatest fears (death and loss). And actually the film sort of divides neatly into two different horrorish films. The first features Death (in a fantastic skeleton/spiderweb/luchador costume) stalking Eurydice during Carnaval: Death is persistent and (despite costume-switching) not easy to fool; the scene where Death pursues Eurydice during the samba competition, and Orfeu chases both of them to the trolley station, is both suspenseful and garishly outsize, all Hitchcock pacing and Fellini visuals. The second, after Eurydice's death, is about the disorientation, the existential confusion of loss: Orfeu first attempts to find the dead Eurydice at the Bureau of Missing Persons; the Tiresias-like (he's blind, maybe? there's someone blind in this film...) janitor tells him where he can find his love--through a medium in a candomblé ceremony. 'Cause she's dead, right? From here, it's the great tragedy of the fable--Orfeu is not only unable to bring Eurydice back, he is even incapable of not causing her loss again.

The movement from natural suspense (someone stalking Eurydice) to supernatural terror (freakin' Death stalking Eurydice) to existential horror (you and everyone you have ever loved will die) is basically all the horror content Black Orpheus offers, but that's quite enough. Not to mention the wonderful songs, bold colors, classical allusions, and the most achingly sweet scene of children dancing that ever closed a movie.

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

"Why did someone make two movies, then make a movie sandwich?" -Kristin

We watched When a Stranger Calls last week. It starts Carol Kane (I had no idea when I rented it -- also, this movie was, in 1979, her fourteenth movie, says imdb. She was in Dog Day Afternoon? And Annie Hall? I guess I don't remember either of those movies as well as I think I do). Anyway, I liked When a Stranger Calls. It's always fun to see a familiar actress in a surprising role, and even without Carol Kane, it would have been an average tense scary movie.

Carol Kane is Jill, a young babysitter who receives harassing phone calls. She calls the police, who do not seem concerned and at any rate can do nothing unless she can keep the stranger on the phone while they trace the call. When they do trace the call, it is coming from...inside the house! Up to this point, the pace of the film has been slow, but now things happen fast: a shadowy figure at the top of the stairs, then the police are at the door, the children have been brutally slain in their beds, and the killer is arrested.

Years later, Jill is happily married with two adorable children of her own. Two way too adorable children, by the way: "Mommy, come closer. I have to tell you something." "What is it?" "I love you." We watch Jill act out domestic bliss, putting her children to bed, calling a babysitter for the evening. Meanwhile, the killer has escaped from a mental hospital, and he's up to his old tricks. Perhaps having lived through the trauma of finding you sat quietly downstairs while two children in your care were murdered in their beds would give you pause before leaving your own children with anyone, ever, but rational realistic behavior is not the point of a movie like When a Stranger Calls. The point of a movie like this one is to experiment with pacing and building tension. Well, that and laughing at this dude's hair. I'd say the movie is well worth seeing, except for that one thing...

Unfortunately, When a Stranger Calls is only about 4o minutes long. And in the middle of it, inexplicably, there is another, much more boring movie, comprising scene after scene of Colleen Dewhurst looking sort of washed up and slutty (yes, that Colleen Dewhurst) while walking fast down dark streets in heels. Charles Durning makes a valiant effort to weave the two stories together, but it is at best a tenuous connection.

p.s. Does anyone recognize the waiter at 0:22 - 0:26 in the clip above? Just curious.

Saw Marathon?

For those of us who still refuse to tolerate a Saw movie, Sam Adams at the Onion's AV club has done it for us and chronicled his reactions in real time. I, for one, am willing to overlook the sentence "I'm going to get that crocheted on something" in order to completely bypass this movie franchise and adopt his responses as my own.

What a productive day!

When a Stranger Calls (2006)

Horror movies are, in so many ways, exactly like children's literature. Full of monsters and fabulous imagery, most are didactic--they warn us of the dangers of premarital sex, drinking, and generally being out late at night. The babysitter narrative usually falls into this category: if you were paid to watch someone's children, for the love of god don't go out drinking. Some horror movies, however, fall into the category of wish fulfillment, and this remake of the standard teen-in-charge tale is one of them. Jill's parents, cruelly, have grounded her with no phone or car and have forced her to babysit for a wealthy couple that lives in a dangerously remote location. It would totally serve them right if she were butchered with no way to escape or call for help. Actually, even better, it would be great if she were *almost* butchered, the only brave soul left standing after an evening of bloodshed. Then they'd see not only their error, but how unbelievably mature she is, even if she went 800 minutes over on her cell phone. The movie tells us immediately that this is a survival narrative; the opening shot of the movie follows her diligent laps around the school's track. This girl is a runner. There's no way a wheezing yokel hunched over a phone is taking her down--if he were in shape he'd spend more time attacking and less time calling from one of the family's luxuriant couches. My only question is if she'll ever actually check the children. [Spoiler: She does. They're fine.] The movie is a pretty standard suspense job, very little slash. For the most part, the movie feels like a medium budget excuse for a really killer set. The mansion is huge and rambling, full of mysterious sounds caused by the usual: ice makers (ominous vapor), pets (a whole room of free range exotic birds...what?!*), shitty postmodern art, and maids (why the babysitter?). There's a great moment where she calls the police only to be told that most of their units are having fun at the party she was forbidden to attend: "sounds pretty wild!" "....yeah." Things go somewhat badly for a while, until Oh Snap! You can dial 911 on disabled cell phones! Take that parents, she's going to talk for like 3 hours. [Photo: she has, at this moment, like 5 phones at her disposal]
*Do not keep birds in your home. Only you can prevent bird mites.

The Outer Limits S1E2: The Hundred Days of the Dragon

Our impending election has, for a couple of weeks now, far out weighed murder, haunting, or monsters in its ability to keep me up at night with fear, so I thought I would return to reviewing with an episode of The Outer Limits whose subject is the political fears that drove us in the 1960s and that continue to drive us today. The Outer Limits is never really scary, but it's about things that are, and usually those things are far more mundane than the frights that stalk the protagonists of most of the movies I watch. I won't ever be drugged and paralyzed such that I retain consciousness while my girlfriend slowly pierces my eyes with acupuncture needles, or chops off my foot with wire sharpened to slice through bone. Those things exceed the horizons of my social life. I am, however, deeply afraid of who sits behind the desk in the oval office, and if the media is any indication, many many people are afraid that this person could soon be a terrorist. As the title of this episode so subtly indicates, "The Hundred Days of the Dragon" plays on our fears of a communist Asia, and the slow infiltration of communists into the jobs and even bodies inhabited by those we love. It's invasion of the body snatchers for the conservative fringe: if our enemies possess **science** how will we prevent them from injecting our leaders with a substance that turns their bodies into malleable plastic for a duration of exactly two minutes? The episode proceeds pretty much as you expect it to, except for two moments. Dictator Li Kwan surveys the white house, gloating that he will conquer the West (or at least the West Wing) without firing a shot. Later, in the film's triumphant conclusion, the new American president opts to prosecute those involved in the systematic infiltration of the US's highest political and economic positions, but to waive his right to go to war. The film concludes with a heavy handed meditation on the nobility of avoiding war, even in those situations in which we are baited beyond comprehension. No one in this episode, arch villain included, wants war. The Outer Limits didn't scare me, nor did it make me adjust my tv set, rather it made me NOSTALGIC FOR THE 1960s, which is so much worse.

Every year I gear up for Halloween by watching Holiday episodes of Buffy, Home Movies, etc. This year it's election tv, which basically keeps me sane while I frantically check the 538. I've stolen hours in Lydia's living room watching Tanner '88, and because she is awesome, she just linked me to an article that will keep me feeling warm and happy regardless of the ominous October weather. Go vote, and if you want to be terrified on Halloween, Fox News is the new Takashi Miike.

Rear Window (1954)

"We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known."

While this is probably the most technically beautiful movie I can remember seeing, to talk at length about Hitchcock’s camerawork would be like going to the Antarctic and reporting on how very, very cold it was. If you’ve been there you know and it can obscure its subtler features, like the native subcutaneous parasites. For the sake of everyone’s hypothalamus gland, this would be a mistake.
By confining us to Stewart’s perspective, Rear Window does not only implicate us in his voyeurism, it also invests us in its world. Loneliness and isolation are as major a part of the feel of the film as the guilty delight in watching, especially since its sounds are mostly ambient. It is not until the dog is killed that the leads act on the plot directly, meaning it is the killer who first breaks the neighborhood’s silent taboo. While the broach of privacy isn’t portrayed as less moral than the wife’s murder, it is the one that provokes an interaction. Compare the dog-owner’s denouncement of her neighbor’s indifference to Mrs. Thorwald’s scream the night of the murder. Every window turns to hear the dog-speech, but even our hero, who is watching the Thorwalds when the scream happens, responds by falling asleep.
Situated in this narrative world, Stewart and Kelly’s relationship is what I find most interesting. Even before anything is afoot, we witness Stewart’s neuroses over his “too perfect” relationship. The film’s discomfort with intimacy seems to stand in as their real problem, especially since Stewart’s version of the problem is inconsistent (he tells his nurse she’s too good while telling Kelly they’re too different). She’s a career-minded socialite; he’s a free-spirited adventurer who can’t be tied down; these would be the hallmarks of romance if they weren’t presented by complete absence. Unlike how a romantic comedy tends to show characters struggling to find a balance between their public and private lives, Rear Window ignores the public side and obsesses with the private while its lead characters begin the film by doing just the reverse. The mean, weird indifference of love is overcome by their engagement in the plot. If the two have nothing else in common they’ve found someone to share their perverse fascinations, which is, I think, as good a definition of happiness as any.
Stewart’s confrontation with Thorwald is remarkable, and Halloween-appropriate. While the film tends to confront the morality of voyeurism by having the characters flatly ask each other about it, this scene is probably the most useful to the discussion. It has signifiers of horror- the heavy steps up the stairs, Throwald’s now-obscured and surprisingly large figure looming in the doorway. While the terror of the scene is mostly based on our identification with Stewart’s character, Thorwald’s reaction is interesting. Upon entering to find a seated silhouette of a man Thorwald says, “Say something… anything,” before advancing. We are offered only the slightest glimpse of the murder’s terror: confronting a faceless man after days of being privately observed, to all appearances calm enough to stay in his chair when a murderer breaks into his door. A reversal made all the more chilling by its transience.

There's always room for giallo

The Psychic, 1977
(a.k.a. Sette Note in Nero, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes)
dir. Lucio Fulci


I am no expert on Italian horror. I really love Phenomenon and some other Dario Argento movies, and I’ve seen a few of Lucio Fulci’s movies (including Zombie at least three or four times). But I don’t really have a sense of what to expect from Fulci, except these things: terrible special effects, weird inappropriate sexual content, interesting new kinds of gore, and characters who behave in ways that make no sense at all (the classic example of this last being the delightful shit-I-forgot-to-shoot-fritz-in-the-head plot of Zombie). When I rented The Psychic, I thought I would enjoy it for occasional surprise kills and an entertaining absence of logic or plot, but apart from some decapitations or falls-from-a-great-height or maggot-infested corpses, I thought I would be…well, kinda bored. I did not think I would genuinely enjoy the visual aspects of the film. I was pleasantly surprised. The utterly unsubtle use of color, especially red (another alternate title could be The Red Lampshade) puts this movie in a category—with Suspiria—of just plain beautiful movies.

Lisa and the Devil, 1973
(a.k.a. La Casa dell'esorcismo, The House of Exorcism)
dir. Mario Bava
(n.b. I was confused by Lisa and the Devil, and I didn't follow every minute of the plot, but I'm pretty sure there is no exorcism in this movie.)

I have no idea what this movie is about.


The eyes, Leandro, what color are the eyes?
Changeable my lady. But by candlelight they are blue.

Lisa is an American tourist. She sees a weird fresco of the devil, carrying a body of some kind, and looking a lot like Kojak. Then she gets lost in the narrow streets and alleys of Some Foreign City, meets Telly Savalis, and gets creeped out. Somehow, she ends up staying in an ancient house where Telly Savalis is, um, what, the butler? I guess? I’ll admit I probably did not pay as much attention as this movie requires. It seemed like every time I looked away from the screen for a minute, then looked back, a pair of completely new characters are making out in a different location, then the camera focuses on a statue nearby. Eventually, the blind matriarch of the strange ancient house reveals what everyone (except the audience) has been thinking: Lisa is the reincarnation of the dead bride of the blind woman’s creepy son.* Therefore, the son must chloroform Lisa, and have sex with her in the bed where he still keeps the skeletal remains of Elena, his first bride. Obviously.

Lisa and the Devil is surreal and confusing, but in a good way. The cast, especially Telly Savalis (looks like the devil, is the devil, eats many lollipops, sings about flowers), give memorable performances, and I found the final scene genuinely creepy and interesting.

Let’s just say this: Lisa and the Devil is my favorite movie about necrophilia and lollipops.

*It might be overstating it to say that Psycho invented the modern horror movie, but seriously what percentage of the last half-century of scary movies have not been about nutty sons and their overbearing mothers? Ten percent? Twenty? (Alien, Friday the 13th, Dead Alive are the first three that spring to mind…)

well calculated to keep you in SUSPENSE

Yesterday at work I listened to an episode of the long-running CBS radio show Suspense: "Consequence" starring James Stewart. "Consequence" originally aired on September 13th, 1945. Nothing makes me feel comfortable and nostalgic and dreamy like Jimmy Stewart's voice on a scratchy record. (When I was young, I had a recording of him reading Winnie the Pooh stories, and he always inspires feelings of calm and nostalgia.) What "Consequence" reminded me of though is what a genuinely really strong actor he was. When he says, "Of course she killed her. We both killed her" he sounds broken and heartbreaking.

Why you should listen to Suspense:

1. Some of the movies we know and love either started there ("Sorry Wrong Number") or were remade there ("The Lodger"). The popular "Sorry, Wrong Number" is better as a radio story. Agnes Moorehead's portrayal of claustrophobia and desperate aloneness is so real when you only hear her voice, in a story of a bedridden woman desperately seeking help with only the telephone for contact with the outside world.

2. Suspense will inform your experience of more contemporary horror. What television and DVDs are to to us now, these stories were in the 40s.

3. TONS of awesome movie stars. Frank Sinatra's first dramatic role was on Suspense. Off the top of my head: Joseph Cotton, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles, James Steward, Agnes Moorehead.

Suspense ran on CBS radio for twenty years, starting in 1942. Episodes are available online several places now:

http://www.archive.org/details/SUSPENSE

http://www.otr.net/?p=susp

I listen to the "Suspense Replay" podcast:

http://suspense.podango.com/podcast/648/Suspense_Replay

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Depsite its reputation as notoriously dull, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) is a fascinating movie, with one of the most interesting leads ever seen shot on film. The lead, naturally, is the Japanese military, portrayed at the very height of its strength in 1941. The primary events in the story surround the attack on Pearl Harbor, and as such it is, I suppose, a historical movie. Indeed, it is obsessed with factual accuracy, and, by and large, achieves it. The narrative, however, is a classical tragedy, of which we see merely the climax. In T!T!T!, the protagonist (let’s call him J.M) is portrayed as powerful, agile, and youthful, full of energy and ambition. However, unsurprisingly, J.M. is also filled with a youthful arrogance and, if I may, hubris. Perhaps worse, J.M. combines this arrogance with a deep suspicion and fear of his social betters, which derives (though this outside the narrative scope of T!T!T!) from his childhood reputation as both stupid and weak. Bullied through his childhood, now that J.M. has come into his own, he fears a recurrence, and forms an extremely clever plan to stop it. However, due in part to unfortunate circumstance, but primarily to the fact that J.M.’s plan was too intricate to really work, J.M.’s plan misfires, and ends by instigating precisely the aggression that J.M. so feared. The final lines of the movie portray both its tone and institutional focus, when Admiral Yamamoto, the leader of the attack, says, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The actual statement on which this line is probably based is even more humanizing, attributing to the United States as a corporate entity actual emotions and actions: “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”

It is not easy to portray the intricacies of an institution personality in film, and we should not therefore be surprised that many people, mistaking the people in the film for the primary characters, find the action dull and the interactions unmoving. This is much like arguing that Macbeth is boring, because the relationship between his liver and his large intestine is never really explored. The real characters here are national institutions, and it is their characters, their strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and fears, and not those of any of the individuals that compose them, that matter in T!T!T!. Seen from this perspective, T!T!T! is a compelling and fascinating character drama, and the very climax of a tragedy. Although attempts to portray aggregate characters are quite rare, they had something of a golden age in the late sixties through early seventies. The Andromeda Strain (1971) is an excellent example, and Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001 (1968) both contain elements of the genre.

Monster Man

I don't want to talk about it.

Even for a film of a genre with an expectation of the unthinkable, Monster Man is quite shocking. Billed as a “horror-comedy by the writer-director of 100 Girls,” the film tells the story of a man driving to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding while his friend repeatedly calls him a wussy. Along the way the pair is beset by the typical horrors of rural America (roadkill in the bed, decapitated Winnebago driver, etc.) which are a welcome reprieve from Justin Ulrich’s incomprehensible single-entendres. Along the way the pair gropes, then picks up an allegedly stunning hitchhiker, and the three respond to these occult happenings the in the only sensible way: brutally insulting everyone they meet at gas stations. This contempt for Midwesterners even appears in the characters’ private moments: as Aimee Brooks retorts while splayed out in front of some Nascar in the motel, “These fucking rednecks must have IQs the same number as the size of my underwear to watch this!” Really, if you’re going to be pretentious about how much hotter you are than someone’s intellect, at least have some syntax about it. At some point they are pursued by a big truck and find some body parts in their food, but no visceral or automotive horror can approach the film’s real monster: the ten minutes of Yoda-themed sex that would have Kevin Smith saying, “These people overlook the subtly of my work.”

Not only do Monster Man’s jabs at edginess create a hostile circle of dislikable heroes, they detract from what should be its greatest strength. In putting on such a front of cool, the film denies itself the kind of camp that makes the worst horror so wonderfully indulgent. It is, at least, a unique kind of bad, to be watched only by the deeply masochistic. Really only two things can be said about this movie: it must be seen to be believed, and it must never be seen.

Young Frankenstein

Why is Young Frankenstein better than everything else Mel Brooks has ever done combined? Usually in cases like this (the case of the single exception) I might make an argument that the exception is nothing like the rule. But Young Frankenstein is absolutely a Mel Brooks movie: sexist, derivative, offensive, and full of scatological humor. Statistically, the cast might be slightly more talented overall, but plenty of solid comic actors have slummed in Brooks's bad movies. Hell, Madeline Kahn is hilarious, and she's in practically every one of his goddamn movies.

Young Frankenstein should not be funny to me. Take the whole Monster's Big Fat Dick plot. A story so bizarrely and willfully naive about female sexual desire should make me feel puzzled and not at all entertained. But when Madeline Kahn starts singing, I snort appreciatively. Gene Hackman's cameo is an even better example. It is the worst, cheapest kind of humor. There is nothing clever about the idea of a blind man who is incapable of telling the difference between ladling soup into a bowl and ladling it into your lap. And while this series of jokes doesn't make me laugh (nor even snort appreciatively), it doesn't quite piss me off enough to stop me smiling at "I was going to make espresso." Or marveling at what Peter Boyle does with his eyes.

Peter Boyle was a genius. Without a single line of real dialogue in the first 90% of the movie, Boyle is the funniest part of the movie. His first line ("mmmMMMMMM") might be the best scene. Actually, my favorite moment is when he's playing with a little girl, throwing flower petals in a well until all the petals are gone. "What can we throw now?" says the girl naively. And the monster just looks at us. (Interestingly, imdb confirms that Young Frankenstein is the only project on which Boyle and Brooks are credited together. Perhaps Peter Boyle is the key to Mel Brooks not sucking?)

Cloverfield

"Something else. Also terrible."

There is something odd about a monster movie that isn't about the monster. The brief but evocative hints at backstory indicate doom for our protagonists but ultimately a human victory, with an aftermath where survivors attempt to catalog and categorize the events*. Yet when we try to put it all together, these efforts don't quite obtain: how did a tape survive the carpetbombing of Manhattan? how does this victory jibe with the spooky backmasked "It's still alive"? "Cloverfield" makes little sense as the name of the monster itself (as the title card's "sightings of case designate" seems to indicate) or the name of the case file (to today's literal-minded military); as yet a third name for US-447/Central Park it is powerful and allusive, but chronologically impossible. We are successfully kept off-balance by these hints--we know far more than the characters but far less than the people preserving and presenting this record of events.

The movie famously opens with mundane recording of the lives of beautiful young people, mostly a going-away party featuring soapy recrimination and the cameraman's embarassing crush on Lizzy Caplan. Only after 20 minutes does an explosion remind us that a monster is coming to eat everyone. After a brief feint toward satire, as American voyeur society quickly realizes that a cell phone camera won't stop a Cthulhoid horror, the movie uses the simplest of plots (1. Find way off the island 2. Rescue pseudo-girlfriend) to set up some decent set pieces and action sequences and some good scenes of people freaking right the fuck out: a few scary bits (night-vision view in the subway tunnel), gory bits (Caplan EXPLODING, awesome), sudden surprises (monster got some Spud Webb vertical leap); standard stuff, serviceably executed.

The most terrifying part, though, is our heroes navigating the roof of a half-collapsed apartment building with no monster in sight. But Cloverfield doesn't feel like a monster movie with a motivated, personalized, allegorical** villain anyway; it's a disaster movie with an impersonal, implacable force of nature. Between the no-name cast and annoying camera work, I feared this would be a reworking of the worst parts of Blair Witch Project; I was pleasantly surprised.

*Abrams has also offloaded much of the narrative to a viral marketing campaign à la LOST. It expands the story into strange doings around the underwater-drilling, satellite-launching Japanese corporate concern Tagruato, involving their popular beverage Slusho! and its sea-mined secret ingredients (shades of Brawndo and Slurm). Yeah, I know; but at least he avoids smoke monsters, time travel, and jungle polar bears this time. So far.

**So, so relieved that the destruction of Lower Manhattan wasn't about terrorism like Godzilla was "about" nuclear blah blah blah. So relieved.

The Terror

"For a ghost she's a very active young woman."

With Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson (at a young 26 years old), Roger Corman directing, and Francis Coppola producing, The Terror looks extremely promising. It's rumored to have been filmed in the few spare days Corman had after his completion of The Raven, using the same cast and set, almost as an afterthought. Corman is known for this sort of no-seriously-we-can-fit-another-movie-in work, and as I haven't read his autobiography, I can't say if it's true or not. I can say that The Terror feels like the sort of thing your college film club might have put together before striking the set of a period drama done as a required final project for their theater class. The movie follows Jack Nicholson's character (a French soldier inexplicably wandering without his regiment and without much concern for his military responsibilities) as he searches for the identity of a ghostly young woman who appears seemingly to him alone. For no clear reason, he wears his full uniform through most of the movie, and it looks exceedingly uncomfortable. The pacing is sort of...aimless; there's never any real terror, mostly a lot of meandering boredom and the kind of empty space that allowed Chris the time to speculate on the influence of naumachia on Corman's use of special effects (there is one notably exceptional scene, in which a folksy old woman chants "TETRAGRAMMATON" over a hand-cranked rotating rainbow lamp, finally shouting the name ERIC to music so ominous it seems to have been excerpted from another film, or at least intended for another name). In lieu of real excitement there is some genuinely confusing revelations of identity, the sort of wacky mix ups that occur in the hustle and bustle of killing. Overall this is as mundane as infidelity, murder, the undead, and amnesia get.
[Photo: not so active after all]

Planet Earth: Jungles

Technically the seventh in a series, Planet Earth: Jungles begins in the tradition of its documentary-style predecessors. Thusly guised, it begins with a humble sample of the characters populating this world, and we the viewers are hard pressed not to identify with them: the spider monkey, engaged in the interminable rat-race for figs; the bird of paradise, for whom sexuality is an exhausting display. But even the most lighthearted moments are permeated by reminders that this is the world’s largest population and it is vulnerable. As David Attenborough narrates with an uneasy calm, the lower level of the forest is starved of sunlight. It is here, in the lightless gnarl, that we are given something to fear.

We are abruptly cut to a lamentable everyman: a red jungle ant in the final stages of a peculiar madness. Borne away from the colony by its former workmates (their faces tiny, humorless masks of grim resignation), the camera stays on the body through its death and the following weeks- it is here that we meet our monster. The cordyceps fungus buds gradually from the miserable once-ant, as though testing the air of this new reality. Not since the Alien series has the monstrous been so eerily merged with sexual imagery. The fungus is a quivering phallus, penetrating from its now-hollow host the world outside it. In the scenes that follow, the creature’s cousins demonstrate their horrible works: lush panoramas of shapeless colour, spilling from the shells of their insect bearers. It would be Lovecraftian if those abominations didn’t at least have the decency to bear orientable features like tentacles and wings. While I was too frightened to complete the film, it is natural to assume the parasite spreads across the planet and ultimately fills the Earth itself, coalescing through the surface to turn its filaments toward an unknowing universe. What makes the cordyceps especially frightening its incongruity with the logic of the world it inhabits; Planet Earth presents a nature where death and predation are the cornerstone of life itself and this kind of consuming, psychological death something wholly other. Thank god that horror’s cathartic fancy is just that.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

Well, in the last twenty four hours, I have watched these movies, and I have nothing interesting to say about any of them:
Prom Night (1980)
April Fool’s Day (2008)
The Omen (1976)
Shutter (2004)
When A Stranger Calls (2006)

Although Prom Night turns out not to be the original movie upon which Prom Night 2008 was based, I feel this list makes King Solomon’s argument that there is nothing new under the sun, at least if he was talking about American movies made in the first decade of the new millennium (which, okay, I guess he wasn’t).

April Fool’s Day does go ahead and give credit to the writers of the 1986 movie, although from what I remember of the previous version, it is an entirely different story.

I’ve never seen the original version of When A Stranger Calls. The scariest thing about the 2006 version was when she opened the fridge and there were all these cans of soda, which made me want a soda, badly enough that I decided to walk down the block to the machine. When I got back, the second lock on my door – which I never lock – was locked! Possibly there is a scary stranger in my house as I type this and I will be brutally murdered in front of the open window before morning! Aren’t you scared? Yeah, me neither.

Here is what I think about Shutter: Joshua Jackson is adorable and charming and sexy for no discernible reason. I have a Joshua Jackson problem. I can’t explain it. Nothing stands out about the movie except that I want to make out with his stupid scruffy face all the time, even when he plays some totally worthless schmuck, which is always. (Wait, Fletch? Really?)

Dead Alive

Oh how I love Dead Alive. It’s not for the spectacular gore that I love it, although I am a fan of gore, and I appreciate the possibly unprecedented levels this film achieves in sheer volume if not in art. The blood and violence are always played for laughs – I only feel genuinely moved by the gore once in the whole movie: the infamous custard scene (*shudder*). Knowing exactly nothing about film making, I feel a little arrogant (and a lot inarticulate) trying to talk about what I love about this movie, because I think what I love is sort of technical. I’ll comment anyway. I believe Dead Alive demonstrates a real artistry that is nearly unique among low-budget horror films. The playfulness of the camera work always seems to serve the story. Something about the intense color (saturated? is that what it is?) and uncomfortable angles makes every scene just overdone and chaotic and farcical enough to keep me entertained. I also think that the story is neatly constructed, again in a way that is very rare in low-budget horror movies. Finally, if you’re not convinced that Dead Alive is deeper than it looks, remember, an unattended baby carriage is always a reference to Eisenstein.

Cursed

My tolerance for pop slasher / monster movies is admittedly too high, and Cursed is on my list of guilty pleasures. Well, not exactly pleasures, but it's a movie I watch once or twice a year, so that says something. As a childhood fan I'm still a weird sucker for Christina Ricci and for some inexplicable reason Joshua Jackson charms me in almost every bullying cocky role I see him in. His characters shallowly insist they are burdened by good looks or intelligence and inevitably I sigh and knit happily through unbearable dialogue. It's nice. For the most part Cursed a just a fluffy thriller more intent on making you guess who the wolf is than actually scaring you, but there's one thing I can think of to recommend it: stars! The cast is happy list of surprises: Portia de Rossi, Judy Greer, Craig Kilborn, and Scott Baio (the last two cameo as themselves). It makes me want to eat popcorn. Cursed is exactly that movie you want to see when you want to rent a teen horror movie but can't bear to rent most of them. It won't really be good, but at those times you don't really feel committed to quality but still aren't in the mood for something that didn't have at least some sort of budget. That's Cursed. Plus, Judy Greer.
[Photo: Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg are intensely frightened, attractive]

Scream 3 (Lydia)

"I am not a Randy substitute. I'm a completely different character."
"Named Ricky, who works at the video store."
"...it's an homage."

On the whole, I am not really a fan of the Scream movies. They are often praised for their self-awareness, the fact that they take place in a world informed by horror movies and populated by people familiar with the rules of horror movies, but to me it was not until Scream 3 that Wes Craven's franchise really transitioned from slasher movie to parody of slasher movies. The story is like this: having defeated the killer in the first two movies, Sidney (Neve Campbell) is hiding from celebrity in the mountains; meanwhile back in Hollywood, filming is underway on Stab 3, the third in a series of movies based on Sidney's real life, when actors in the film begin to get murdered. The film opens with Liev Schreiber's cameo, much of which he spends complaining about the fact that he has only a brief cameo in Stab 3, and from that moment forward Scream 3 is constantly self-referential. Almost every character makes explicit through dialogue their relationship to the characters of the previous films and of the real life story on which the Stab films are based. In the scene that really won me over, Roger Corman plays a studio executive, who calmly explains to the director why violence in movies is a "big deal right now." The whole relationship between Gail Weathers (Courtney Cox) and the actress (Parker Posey) -- named Jennifer, who used to date Brad Pitt -- who plays her in the movie is always fun, and nobody acts like a bad actor like Parker Posey acts like a bad actor.

(Note: Inexplicably, Neve Campbell is in all my guilty pleasure movies.)

Scream 3 (Kristin's Review)

It's hard for me, when I've invested so much time in maintaining an amused distance from the horror movies I watch, to write about a movie I really really love. The Scream trilogy is thrice that movie, and as elaborately as the third movie mocks and comments not only on the first two, but on the lives of the actors, Scream 3 provides me with thrice the experience of unadulterated love in a single movie (which I guess technically makes the whole trilogy five times that movie, which means I should buy some sort of elaborate box set). Each progression in the trilogy is a stage more self-aware: the first had fun with horror in what seemed like a fairly predictable way, the second was a movie about a movie, and the third is so dizzyingly self-referential that most critics seem to have panned it as indulgent to the point of total collapse. As a fan, I can't bring myself to see the flaws. With Scream 3 I will always insist that everyone else's structural instability is my non-orientable form. The perfection of this always hits me as Sidney flees the killer onto a film set built in perfect recreation of her home from the first film. Running through the house she finds that all the old rules of survival still work: the halls turn in exactly the right place, the doors block one another at exactly the right time. It works, and a scene from the first movie is almost exactly replayed, but for Sydney's anxious awareness of the repetition, and for the final door that opens to the back of the set where the floor falls out from under her. In horror movies, everything works and the audience is effectively scared until the point at which they recognize the rules. Then the genre falls out from under us, and we become aware of ourselves as viewers. I watch Scream 3 as a fan not only of horror films, but of the process of re-watching to the point of indefensible excess. The movie seems to recognize that its core fans, those who will watch the movie more than once, are the same people who night after night are engaged in a ritual of repeated viewing that fundamentally redefines what movies are. The accessibility of media has transformed movies from a two-hour public spectacle that cannot be recaptured till the next showing that can be afforded into a product we can possess and explore at our own pace, at home, on the computer, on an airplane, anywhere and at our convenience. Movies don't just entertain us, the movies we really love we keep within our reach for an empty evening, as background when we do our work, as company on that really bad day. There's a fair number of us who don't just know the rules of horror films, we're embarrassed to admit there are movies we know inside and out, beyond the point of plot or personal continuity. Watching this trilogy once is, for me, like watching one movie three times, except for the first time the movie evolves as a piece just as I evolve as a viewer. Re-watching the trilogy is another experience entirely, or perhaps the same experience but exponentially fun. I love the first two, but the third is the best joke, both on itself and on me. As viewers we're laughing, but not so hard we forget that the best joke is almost always a love letter to its object.

Rosemary's Baby

"Oh no, don't change the program on my account."

Roman Polanski’s first US-made movie, Rosemary's Baby exhibits a lot of the traits that I identify with Polanski’s subsequent genius. Polanski has created some of the most memorable portrayals of female victimization and madness. From La Locataire (The Tenant) to Chinatown to Death and the Maiden, his movies give us women who are forced into strange small spaces, sexually victimized, then constantly questioned when they ask for help.

I have an inclination to claim that it would be easy to read Polanski’s work as misogynist. Some very rudimentary internet research seems to indicate that lots of people agree with me that it would be easy…and that it would be a mistake. That is, lots of people are talking about how everyone misinterprets his work, but I can’t seem to find a single article which actually calls his work sexist (the man himself, oh yes, but not the work). The explanation may lie in his personal life—he famously fled to France after pleading guilty to (and before being sentenced for) statutory rape and he is reportedly a real bastard to women on set.But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

I think this tension between misogyny and honesty exists in these films, even in the absence of any outside knowledge about the filmmaker. I think it’s hard to tell the truth about women without risking a hint of misogyny. The interesting thing about these women, and let’s return to talking about Rosemary Woodhouse now, is the way that they conform to the difficult standards set for women. They are not ugly or rebellious or man-hating. Rosemary is in every way the perfect twentieth century wife: she is bright and beautiful, educated, upbeat, sexually unrepressed, eager to be pregnant, and skilled with a wallpaper brush or a tray of hors d’oeuvre.

I can’t seem to find it right now, but I think it was in a review of The Evil Dead that Roger Ebert said something like [quote, I’m paraphrasing], This is not a violent movie, but a movie about violence. In a sense Rosemary’s Baby is a film about sexism, but like The Evil Dead in its relationship to violence, it is not quite a condemnation of sexism. It revels in sexism, and invites us to participate in that. And thus we are forced to examine our own relationship to the darkest sides of our own humanity.Rosemary consents to being raped by the devil.“Oh no, don’t change the program on my account,” she says. It is this internal tension, between naming her own desire and her need not to be a bother, that makes her so fascinating and so psychologically disturbing and ultimately so true.

Prom Night (2008)

I've never seen the original, so yes I guess I'm doing this backwards. I'm experimenting with a sort of extreme reader response criticism, by writing notes while I watch the movie (and, incidentally, eat the most amazing spicy chicken cacciatore I just made up).

Opening credits: not particularly interesting, so far, but this cover of "Time of the Season" is taking liberties with the lyrics, I swear. Isn't it time OF the season FOR loving? Isn't that REALLY different from "time FOR the season OF loving"?

Cast: Blondy girl, and her wholesome black friend girl.

They talk about the Back Story, letting us know that for Some Reason, blondy girl's mom doesn't think she should join the [I didn't catch what team].

Hm...in the picture on the mantle, blondy girl doesn't appear to have the visible scar she now has. I'm full of suspense about the back story!

Action starts fast. Where's Joey? What's this baseball bat doing here? Joey's dead, blondy hides under the bed and watches mom get brutally murdered by a dude with scraggly brown hair and ugly boots, then...

(OMG, you'd never guess...)

...then she wakes up! In the therapist's office, where she is undergoing Plot Exposition Therapy.

Cut to hair salon with black friend and slutty friend. I have something to say about how sex is treated in this movie - I'm interested in comparing it to the original (my guess is that the original is less preoccupied with sex but at the same time does not bother, as this movie does, to make the point that it's Okay not to Do It. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that contemporary movies are more and more likely to make some big political deal about how some character is Choosing To Wait). In this scene black friend asserts that she has sex with her boyfriend and redhead friend (who I called slutty friend before, and I guess I was wrong, so I'll switch to her actual name, Claire) says how he's not getting any tee hee hee.

Back at home, blondy is getting ready for prom, with the cheerleader's mom, who gives her a very meaningful taupe scarf of some sort. Her mom would have wanted her to wear it.

This girl is surprisingly ordinary looking. What's with white teeth? I mean, unnaturally white. I'm pretty sure the uncle just asked the date if they were going to Do It, and the date assured him that they are not. "No sir, you have nothing to worry about."

Cut to police station, where nerd/hipster white cop gives a fax of Charlie Manson to tough black detective, who rewards him with a lot of plot exposition. Turns out Charlie Manson was a teacher (how come this dude could get hired and I couldn't?) who became obsessed with blondy, then killed her mom so they could be together. The detective explains that they expected the death sentence but the jury came back with insanity (NB: I'm pretty sure that's not how the legal system works. Aren't you usually not competent to stand trial if you are Technically Crazy?) and he's been in a mental institution until he did some thing that involved a neat little splatter of blood and an air duct. The scene ends with "We should go tell the aunt and uncle. This is gonna rock their world." Which to me seems like an odd choice of words.

Back at prom, charlie manson has cleverly disguised himself with a baseball cap and will now check into the hotel. Hilariously, a lady teacher seems to have a crush on Lisa (black friend). Good thing lesbian teachers don't get all obsessed and cut up people's moms! Chrissy, the "rich-bitch" who planned the prom, is at least thirty. (note: actually, she's 26 .) Everyone dances ironically. Oh no, Lisa's boyfriend went to the desk to pick up keys to the room, and accidentally revealed to Manson which room they are staying in!

Our first non-flashback death is of the maid. Maria. Yeah.

I think I have a lot more to say, in addition to my thoughts about her unnatural teeth, about the beauty ideal this lady represents. It seems to me that she not so much is beautiful as signifies beauty through artificial means. Beautiful girls have blond hair - she has blond hair. Beautiful girls have blue eyes - she has freakishly blue eyes. She's wearing a pretty dress, but it fits very oddly.

Blondy goes to the room to get Midol for Claire (OMG cramps! period!) and they have an extraordinarily brief heart-to-heart (we don't have to see an actual conversation or evidence of intimacy, only the thing that signifies intimacy: Midol and Boyfriend Trouble). Blondy: "Do you want me to stay here until you feel like going down?" Claire: "No, thanks, I'll stay up here by myself and get murdered instead."

Detective Wynn is at the front desk. "Have you seen this guy?" "No," says the front desk clerk, "I've only seen a dude who looks exactly like that dude, but in a baseball cap." (He didn't actually say that.)

Claire's prick boyfriend says "Where is Claire?" and blondy is like "You gotta stop being a prick or you're gonna lose her" and prick boyfriend is like "yeah right, I doubt that." Irony! She's dead! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Joke's on him! During and after the ensuing death of prick boyfriend, there is some cool juxtaposition of corpse clean-up with dancing, to cheery dance music.

I swear horror movies used to bother to explain the preturnatural strength of their villains, when they were preturnaturally strong. They were imbued with supernatural abilities by some catastrophic event, or they are truly evil, or they are demons. It seems like anymore, bad dudes are just able to do whatever evil they want, by virtue of being bad dudes.

(Not to keep harping on this, but is this girl pretty? She doesn't seem pretty to me.)

(Whoa. Turns out the dykey teacher is the gym teacher!)

Lisa goes upstairs to make out with her boyfriend. She sees Manson in the hall, but can't place him. Making out with her boyfriend, she suddenly places him, and runs out of the room to get murdered. The murderer steps on her dress, and she runs away, leaving approximately two thirds of her dress behind. For some reason, portions of the hotel are under a sort of construction that involves lots of creepily floaty plastic tarp and many easily startled pigeons. Obvs, the black friend is toast. Trademark neat little splatter of blood.

Detective Winn pulls a fire alarm and the nerd/hipster cop tells everyone to leave. But blondy can't leave yet - she has to run upstairs and get her taupe scarf thing. While she is in the room alone, the Manson dude comes in, and he seems to have a special power of making lights flash in a weird way. It's as if a light bulb on a string is swinging back and forth (this happened in both Them and The Evil Dead, but in a supply room and a basement respectively, I think, not in a fancy hotel room) interrupted by random flashes of bright blueish light. She manages to shut him out of the room, then hides...under the bed! Which is where Manson stashed the body of Claire. Actually, I think it's sort of cute that she's under the bed again. But she gets away, goes home, lots of boring pursuit ensues. The cops find the body of the bell boy Manson killed. Back at Donna's house, she's in bed with Bobby, then wakes up and goes to the bathroom (never wise) where the killer appears in the mirror behind her! And then...she...wakes...up. Yeah.

I forgot to check the rating, but this movie seems extraordinarily tame for a slasher movie. It's a problem that the market for this sort of movie is young enough to require a PG-13 rating, but at the same time they are attracted to these movies by the very things that caused them to be rated R in the days before PG-13 ever existed.

I just figured out that it's not a remake of the Jamie Lee Curtis movie at all, but coincidentally has the same title. I still want to compare them.

Actual ages of the cast:
Ronnie: 21
Donna: 22
Claire: 22
Lisa: 24
Chrissy: 26
Bobby: 29

Carnival of Souls

Like so many low budget 60s horror movies, Carnival of Souls has become a cult classic. Some internet research shows it's regularly screened before large crowds at Halloween or other horror-themed film festivals, making the viewing of it often a social event. I found it in a greeting card store, a cheaply sleeved holiday theme dvd in a pile of Halloween merchandise, and brought it home to watch alone. It follows a young church organist, Mary, who is unwittingly caught in a drag race with a group of boys. She emerges from the wreckage eerily altered and with no ability to explain how she has survived at all. Mary is, of course, dead, and obliviously continues to go about her "life," increasingly torn between the world she identifies as her own, and the foreign world of the dead. Though her work keeps her within the safe confines of the church, she is never a believer ("it's just a job") and regularly seeks help in doctors instead of her ever-accessible priest. This isn't, however, a straightforward sin story. Mary doesn't drink, doesn't dance, and has no interest in men. The carnival is hell for the quiet reserved young woman with no interest in social gatherings. It is a sort of Jacob's Ladder for the irreligious but still uninteresting. The dead dance, stalk, swim (well, lurk creepily below water, but they certainly seem to enjoy it as much as the living love the pool), and generally seem to demand the frequent social interaction that Mary so firmly resists. My copy of the movie came bundled with White Zombie and an ancient episode of "Casper the Ghost," in which it is revealed that Casper, much like Mary, just can't get behind the seemingly endless social revelry of the undead: "Not Casper. He'd rather stay home, and not frighten people." Me too. I loved this movie for its visual aesthetic and for its use of the organ, but mostly because I found the premise really effectively scary. I don't like to go out, and if death means a heavily made up eternity of hanging out in a large uncomfortable crowed, then I'm cultivating a much more committed fear of death. I watched it alone, phone turned off, gripping my pillow with white knuckles, and anxiously browsing the website of Aubrey de Grey. [Photo: Mary attempts to take a solitary drive and is disrupted by eager friends demanding a ride]