Top 9 Most Subversive Christmas Horror Movies

As a special treat this Christmas, I've prepared a video instead of an essay. Each film is introduced much more shallowly than I would allow in writing. The video is intended to be light and easy. Still, I hint at how each film can be understood in light of subverting Christmas themes. After all, subversion of the normal, transformation of dream into nightmare, a glimpse at what lies beneath the conscious, cuddly order--this is what horror is all about. Enjoy!

The Hole (2009) - 2.5/4

Horror as therapy: this is a remarkably consistent, usually implicit theme in horror cinema. One might say it's simply the nature of a strong narrative to have characters transform through their experiences; and when that narrative concerns horror, unsurprisingly the transformation is due to experience of horror. That is to some extent true. But one wouldn't refer to just any transformation as therapy. There's something peculiar about horror that is therapeautic. Horror is facing not just a fear, but an unpleasant truth about ourselves and suffering for it; it's simultaneously an indulgence and a punishment. In Robin Wood's account of Hitchcock, he suggests this therapy is for the protagonist first and for the audience identifying with the protagonist second. For both it is a nightmare come to life that must be encountered and understood if it is to be transformative.

There are many instances. Take a recent film like Vacancy (2007). A feuding couple, haunted by the accidental death of their son, are put through such a horrific ordeal that the guilt poisoning their relationship is entirely remedied. A similar dynamic is present in the classic Straw Dogs (1971), in which an easily-cowed intellectual kills a group of yokels who raped his emasculating wife and, as a consequence, is happier than he's ever been in his life. His marriage is ruined, clearly; but he's transcended his wife. He has become a strong male, capable of violence, through the ordeal: this is a good thing in Peckinpah's universe. Romero often uses the therapy structure as well. In Monkey Shines (1988), for instance, an alpha male is placed at the mercy of a female monkey; he only triumphs because he has learned, through his ordeal, to view a woman as an equal. In all films the horrific situations fix the protagonists of some imbalance, some psychological or social fault. This taps into the same well as a host of familiar platitudes: "Everything happens for a reason," "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," etc.. However, the therapy dynamic occurs on a subtler, less triumphant level as well. As Carol Clover argued, the Final Girl tradition in slasher films is really about fixing an excessively independent girl through horror. Her friends have already gone too far and perish; she alone has the option to turn back and be a Good Girl.

With that prologue in mind, let's dive into The Hole, directed by old master Joe Dante and written by the author of the aforementioned Vacancy, Mark L. Smith. A magic realist story, the film concerns a teen boy (Chris Massoglia) and his younger brother (Nathan Gamble) finding a bottomless pit--cleverly concealed with a trapdoor beneath a throw rug--in the basement of their new home. With nothing else to do in the small town, the brothers and their sexy*, teen neighbour begin probing the hole for answers, but find themselves the probed instead as the hole gazes into their deepest fears and confronts them with what it finds.

Each of the youths gets a fear to confront. The young boy must face clowns, the older boy his father, and the girl a tragedy from her past. They of course don't realize what the hole is doing until the contrived moment in the narrative where realization must dawn. Prior to that, it all seems to be random creepiness. Upon discovering the hole's sinister effects, they research the hole by consulting Creepy Carl (Bruce Dern), the previous tenant of the house and a character we've seen a hundred times before: the antisocial kook who provides a piece of key information. They implausibly get all the right information at just the right time in every instance and set about facing their fears one-by-one.

If the above plot description doesn't make it clear, the film's narrative is riddled with cliches. How the characters come to the conclusion the the hole makes them face their fears, how they realize simultaneously that one of the hole's manifestations is from the girl's past, and the relationship between the mom and her teen son is all the lazy and contrived sort of plotting and drama-building we've seen in countless other films. One might say the film is aimed at a younger audience, and indeed it is; but twelve-year-olds, already pretty media savvy, do not need such a primitive, dumbed-down structure. The film plays like an episode of Eerie, Indiana--Joe Dante's contribution to the world of television--extended by an unnatural forty-five minutes.

Not only the narrative is diluted. The film has a pretty heavy-handed moral I found displeasingly trite: All you have to do is face your fears, understand them, and they will have no power over you. To be fair to Dante and Smith, their definition of 'fears' is broad enough. The two teenagers seem to feel more guilt than fear. The boy feels guilt for the abuse he and his brother have suffered at the hands of his father; the girl for the event in her past. Although in what sense guilt and fear are related emotions is, of course, not explained, it's fairly obvious that these emotions feed one another in various ways.

The moral itself is arguably not that problematic. Psychoanalysis is all about understanding and facing our repressed fears, guilt, and desires. The way the film presents the moral is what's disappointing. First of all, understanding and facing fears is not a quick, simple process. One can't merely destroy a clown doll to overcome one's fear of clowns or throw a belt buckle at an abusive father to overcome the fear, guilt, and shame he's instilled in one's psyche. This is a ridiculous and cavalier treatment of the psychology of children. Compare to a film like Curse of the Cat People (1944), where the child's creative impulses and fantasy life are repressed until they bubble up in the form of an imaginary friend: her father's deceased first wife, the individualistic Irena of Cat People (1942). Curse of the Cat People takes child psychology seriously. The Hole does not.

Second, the hole itself is clearly some sort of mirror to the subconscious. The signifiers are all present: it's in the basement, bottomless, dark, refuses to be covered up once opened, and produces what the children don't want to face. Creepy Carl refers to the hole gazing into its victims and that's what it does: it looks into the mind and manifests what's negative, makes the children face it. This is a really clever device and mirrors what horror films generally do. As I claim above, horror films, like the hole, make us face our repressed anxieties and desires; we leave with them either freshly repressed or destroyed. (Increasingly, however, we leave the theater or turn off the DVD with the monster triumphant. Arguably this is better. But that's a discussion for another day.) In a sense, the hole is offering the the children the same therapy horror films offer us. We know the hole will never kill the children, so like a horror film, it's a non-threatening way of facing those repressed fears.

But this is the problem: repressed fears are never straight-forward. If the hole is mirroring the subconscious, one would expect it to be considerably more inventive. The subconscious is beyond logic, realism, order, language; a realm of nightmares, to push the spatial metaphor. The bottomless black pit that is the hole suggests Dante and Smith are aware of this--of course they are! Yet, all the hole manages is the most superficial horror: clowns, abusive dads, and a traumatic experience. As Bruce Kawin writes, "One goes to a horror film in order to have a nightmare...whose undercurrent of anxiety both presents and masks the desire to fulfill and be punished for certain conventionally unacceptable impulses."* Similarly, when Robin Wood writes of Hitchcock's therapeutic films (Rear Window, Marnie, Psycho), he notes the film follows indulgence in some deviance before the therapy. A fear of clowns is most likely a subconscious mechanism for evading a more pressing and disturbing repression, a fear of a part of oneself and the consequences of indulging it; that would have been much more fascinating to explore in a horror film. Instead, we get a creepy clown doll anyone would be frightened of. And a fear of an abusive father is hardly a deep-rooted, subconscious fear; it's a pretty reasonable thing to fear, in fact.

The basic idea of having children developing by facing their fears was done much more interestingly and with a more imaginative touch of surrealism in an episode of the '80s television series The Real Ghostbusters, entitled "The Boogieman Cometh." When a film compares unfavourably to episodes of syndicated television cartoons, even very good ones, there's a problem. Considering Smith could have had the hole do just about anything, it's so unfortunate it was limited by his imagination to the most banal ideas. We have no symbolism, no psychological depth, none of the rich imagery the history of horror films have yielded.

I brought up the therapeutic structure found in horror films at the beginning of this review because The Hole employs it quite explicitly. The hole only loses its power when the fears it presents are faced. Creepy Carl, who padlocks the hole and leaves the house is merely repressing his fears, not overcoming them. When the hole is re-opened, he pays for his repression. Undergoing horror therapy is the only solution. The problem with this film is that the fears are so shallow and their solutions so immediate and brute that if it's therapeutic for the characters, the audience does not share that therapy at all. And since we can't share the therapy, the climactic confrontations with the hole really lost my involvement. Not because I was thinking of therapy, Bruce Kawin, and Robin Wood while watching, but because it was all very unimaginative.

Even Joe Dante's visuals, one of the pleasures of the film, could have used more imagination. He gets what milage he can out of the Screenwriting 101 screenplay, treating us to some fun expressionism where he's able. (In one of the film's many sight gags, there's even a reference to the German expressionist classic, Orlac's Hande.) The climactic decent into the hole yields some pretty impressive visual ideas in a Dali-esque deterioration of childhood memory. Also particularly enjoyable is the stop-motion animation of the various creatures from the hole. Before one thinks this is a remake of The Gate (1987), the creatures from the hole are mostly human. Yet they move like puppets. There's something alarmingly uncanny in that, not unlike the unsettling denizens of a Svankmajer film.



My concerns suggest the film is lacking in ambition, a little too complacent and lazy. But that needn't stop a film from being fun, right? Indeed, The Hole is still an enjoyable experience. From my own memories of watching Eerie, Indiana as a child, I suspect children of twelve and under will find it very enjoyable. The relationship between the brothers is playful, the girl next door charming in a Lolita sort of way, and their investigation into the nature of the hole had the natural pull that any investigation into a mystery will have. Moments of seriousness, such as the obligatory Chat with Mom scene in which she asks her teenage son to help her make things work, are thankfully few and far between, so we can continue to watch Joe Dante play with toys. Why else does one watch a Joe Dante film if not to see him playing with toys? Still, this is a far cry from the brilliance of The 'burbs (1989) and Matinee (1993).

*1 - If you feel guilty for finding the young lady in The Hole sexy, I'm pleased to inform you that Haley Bennett was in her twenties when the film was made.


































*2 - from Kawin's classic essay, "The Mummy's Pool."

Short Reviews for Dec. 6, 2010: French and Cheese

La Rose de Fer (1973) - 3/4

Iron, fog, and stone
Are met with perky nipples
Amidst skulls and bone.

Ils (2006) - 2.5/4

A film so economical couldn't begin in kindergarten for nothing.
So I guessed correctly.
Still, the suspense of the picture is undeniable.
I had to suspend my belief three, four, five times!
Still, the terror of the picture is undeniable.
How Strangers took a page or two from this book!
Oh, but found a prettier deathtrap.
Tis only in Romania floors and walls are the same colour.

I could watch her in her panties all day.

House of Wax (2005) - 3/4

Remake: Firstly, to call House of Wax a remake is tantamount to libel. Against whom, the original House of Wax (1953) or the present House of Wax, I couldn't say. The only thread they share in common is a murderous wax artist. Where The Thing (1982) and Thing from Another World (1951) share the arctic setting as well as the alien invader, House of Wax has nothing but the wax museum in common with its predecessors House of Wax (1953) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

Ambition: Both Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax were technologically ambitious films. Mystery of the Wax Museum is perhaps the earliest feature-length colour horror film. And House of Wax was famous for its 3D. (The paddle-ball guy is infamous.) There is no technological innovation in House of Wax (2005). But the art direction is surprisingly ambitious and fulfills those ambitions handily. The film is arguably even more ambitious than its predecessor, insofar as it makes not just people out of wax but entire buildings. It really is impressive.



Narrative: The narrative is needless to say a Dead Youngster Movie. A group of young people are offed by the maniacs for no good reason other than "They're maniacs!" By making the youngsters slightly older, around 25, the film has a certain emotional maturity not too often found in such films. Moreover, the body count isn't high. Still, despite the paucity of characters, several are sidelined and entirely undeveloped.

Subtexts: Unlike many films of this sort, the girl and her boyfriend aren't the protagonists, but a girl and her brother. This is predictable to some extent, as the film's major inter-character conflict is between them. Any horror film that tries to give itself a little depth a la Screenwriting 101 does this: a personal conflict amongst the characters to parallel the more pressing conflict with the villains. You see it used clumsily in Vacancy (2007), The Strangers (2008), and many, many other run-of-the-mill screenplays. And this is indeed a run-of-the-mill screenplay. For some reason the serial killers are separated siamese twins. An homage to de Palma? I'm not sure what's going on there. Blood is thicker than goopy, hot wax? I dunno.

Scares: Scares come from vulnerability. If a character stands in front of a dark window, we automatically grow tense, because she's vulnerable. The tension reaches its peak and simultaneously dies--like a supernova--when the attack is launched. Jump scares are consequently the weakest of scares because they begin, peak, and die all in one fell swoop. House of Wax uses NO jumpscares. Instead they use this other trick: You think a protagonist is hiding somewhere, the maniac goes to check that spot, and while the POV is with the maniac, the protagonist has slipped away out of frame. So we expect to see her get caught, the tension mounts, mounts, mounts and BOOM--she's not there! Tension is relieved without peaking, but it's still effective.

So that's House of Wax (2005). It's entertaining, inventive, and capable enough to never become annoying.

Unrated: The Movie (2009) - 1.5/4

There are these bimbo actress babes walkin' through the woods, right, and they're not wearing woods-walkin' clothes 'cause they're stupid bimbos. And there's this Eastern European-lookin' dude with a camcorder and he keeps sayin' "Action!" but there's no script--kinda like this movie--and he falls down a lot, which is funny, 'cause there's comedy sound effects like BOING.

And they get to the house and they're all like, "Sheeeat, this house stank," 'cause it's just a dirty cabin in the woods and the establishing shot was made in photoshop. So the bimbos are yellin' at the dude and then at each other, sayin' like, 'Old bitch!' and 'Piss bitch!'--taxing all their creativity. So one bimbo leaves. And the dude just whacks off to pictures of the director.

And sometimes they try to say stuff in like a conversation, but nobody knows how to make a conversation, so they're just kinda sayin' stuff in the general space of each other and nothing's really reachin' anyone and they keep repeating the same things over and over and it's really frustrating for everyone involved, including me.

Then SATAN shows up, and he's a chick with beams of light coming from her nose! Whoah! And she has this spider and a little screaming worm thing, but he feeds the worm to the spider 'cause, I dunno, the spider's gotta eat. Then BOOM! lightning dislodges a book. And they've never seen a book before, but they're thinkin' it's cool. But it's not. It's bad. And the chick who left suddenly appears in a reaction shot, which is also not cool. It's bad.

And the monsters start comin' out of the book. And there's like this melty latex guy and he's all like BLARGH! and this fat zombie guy and this other guy named Karl who sings a song in broken English about 'desaster' and this chick with huge, fake tits and she does a little dance on TV and never stops rubbing her funbags 'cause it's probably cold.

So they neuter the dude. And the chicks are all like, "This is too much, we don't even have our own trailers!" so they start kicking the monsters. And uh the monsters don't like that too much so they rip the bimbos up, even the old lesbian one. And the chick who was supposed to have left, well, she hasn't heard anything, 'cause she had water on her face. Then her face just melts, I dunno why.

But there's this other bimbo who has like some character development goin' on 'cause her parents were murdered and she even gets a dream sequence during the murders and doesn't wake up 'cause the 12-foot cabin is just so big who can keep track? Finally she gets up and the monsters are all there, but fortunately so are the machine guns that were never in the movie before and she's like shootin' them BANG BANG BANG and suddenly she's in a g-string and she keeps shootin' 'em and there's this song about rainbows and unicorns and then she machetes them and then she shoots them summore. THEN she calls them cocksuckers and that sends them to the pits of hell and stuff 'cause they're homophobes. Then she starts posin' for the camera with her machete and gun and g-string, which is kinda hot but kinda stupid--just like the rest of the movie. And then it ends, 'cause the experience taught her she doesn't have to feel guilty about her parents' deaths anymore.

This is a really stupid movie that's half-way Lucio Fulci film (audience-pleasing gore-fest) and half-way Chris Seaver film (a collection of in-jokes to amuse the filmmakers--and only the filmmakers). Sadly, the flavour of Seaver overwhelms the delicate Fulci undertones, making this a rather unappealing dish, despite the tasty garnish of tits and lesbians. I think all the dialogue that goes nowhere, token character development, and narrative chaos is intended as some sort of parody of bad horror filmmaking. And y'know, it kinda works. And just as a parody of film noir is itself a film noir, this is a pretty good instance of bad filmmaking. Unrated: The Movie is the cinematic equivalent of an idiot savant. Make of that what you will.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 3.5/4
Comedy sound effects: 18
Humour: 3.5/4

Short Reviews for Nov. 29, 2010: Wynorski and Misc.

Three Jim Wynorski Films
Sorority House Massacre II (1990) - 2.5/4

Jim Wynorski to the rescue. If you weren't already confused, in the stunning sequel, Wynorski gives you flashbacks to SLUMBER PARTY Massacre instead of SORORITY HOUSE Massacre, which this is supposed to be the sequel to. So even the director can't keep 'em straight. No matter, 'cause Wynorski takes all that was right about Slumber Party Massacre--great titties--and gives us more, more, more. Wynorski contrives every event and every angle to show us more T&A, bless 'im.

Five bodacious babes who wear only underwear. Greatest thighs in a motion picture, Robyn Harris. Stacia Zhivago, who looks like Laura Dern as a pin-up girl--later became a doctor. Melissa Moore, a bit of a butterface, but what an amazon. Michelle Verran, the sweetest rack in the film. Dana Bentley, a raven-haired cutey with big nostrils, now surgeried herself into Pete Burns territory. Low-angle panties. High-angle cleavage. On her knees. Out in the rain just to get wet. Orville Ketchum, the man who never dies. Bridget Carney as Candy, the stripper with a booty so fine you'll cry tears of semen. Random racism from Abdul and Schmabdul. Satana the remarkably unsatanic stripper. Jealous lady cop. Random showers. Ouija board seance. Drunk titties. Angry titties. Betrayed titties. Afraid titties. Squeakin' titties. "Let's work together" titties. And of course, ass-kicking titties. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 2/4
Tequila-swillin' sluts: 5
Humour: 3/4

Sorority House Massacre III (1990) - 3.5/4

AKA Hard to Die (a much more appropriate title)

Read my review of Sorority House Massacre II? Well this is the same film cranked up to 11. Really, some scenes are lifted almost exactly from SHM2. Except this one's set in a upscale lingerie shop and not a sorority house at all. The temps are in for inventory and what kinda temps do they hire? College kids? Mike and Joel? Nope, they hire lingerie models! who wear lingerie and high heels almost the whole movie--except for when they take turns having a shower scene.

But that's not the essence of the film. No, this is an epic battle between good and evil, the great demon-hunter Orville Ketchum versus the diabolical spirit of Hokstatter, brought to its final chapter. Both are HARD TO DIE--the question is, who is HARDEST? Me, after watching these sexy babes romping around in their upscale panties with big guns.

Babes in lingerie. Titties squeak when you wash 'em. Orville still eats raw meat. Scared tits. Bloody tits. Soapy tits. Possessed tits. Gun-wielding tits. Bouncing tits. Naked tits. Wet tits. A few dead tits. Stabbing, shooting, stapling, paper-pick stabbing, ball-kicking, head-pounding, and choking. Weirdest Chinese food delivery costume ever. Burning weirdest Chinese food delivery costume ever. Babes with guns. Babes running. Babes bouncing. Babes climbing stairs. Babes moving boxes. Babes moving filing cabinets. Gratuitous porn shoot. Several gratuitous showers. Gratuitous dirty feet. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 3/4
Gore: 1/4
Babes with guns: 3
Humour: 4/4

976-Evil II (1990) - 2/4

That wacky, Satanic calling service returns, this time without Sam Ritter (No? Google Image Search, safe search off, enjoy.), and unleashes more nonsensical terror. The film gives no further explanation, so why should I?

Hotline to Satan. Creepy old man. Evil creepy old man. Lecherous creepy old man. Waste of good POA. Bad Vincent Price impression. Good Vincent Price moustache. Great set piece: It's a Wonderful Life...with ZOMBIES! Death by television. Death by phantom car. Death by prop stalactite. Pizza attack. Oven attack. Daddy's little girl: nice tits and slutty, cut-off jeans. Half-wit cop. Exploding drunk. Tough guy on a bike--named Spike. Puttin' the move on Daddy's girl. Eatin' fries. Drinkin' beer. Ridin' the hog. Warnin' about the number. Breakin' n' enterin'. Scrutinizin' phone bills. Astral projectin'. Turnin' down Brigitte Nielsen circa 1990--he's gay. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 0/4 - Really? In a Wynorski flick?
Gore: 1/4
Times you think, "That's not what a phone sounds like": 14
Humour: 2/4

Bikini Girls on Ice (2009) - 1/4

Bikini car wash meets random killer at a rundown gas station--the title tells the rest.

Lots of girls in bikinis. Cinematographer couldn't light his way out of a paper bag. Smart girl with deep voice, reluctant to wear bikini: obviously the Final Girl. Her peppy, cute friend with a touch-o-the-slut: obviously destined to be killed in a harrowing moment. Car washing montage. Prostitution. Pointless sex scene with a bonus, "Don't touch me!" Slutty girls. Bitchy girls. Lezzy girls. Nerds with a bus. Old man with a warning. French tourists with a gas can. Killer can move faster the light--screw you, Einstein. Killer makes no sound--obviously a ninja. Obsession with ice baths--definitely a ninja. Girls keep wandering off alone--guess what happens? Dead dog. Dead slut. Dead tourists. Dead bitch. Absence of girls with their bikinis OFF. Absence of interesting kills--unless black-outs interest you. Absence of interesting gore. Stupid, stubborn victims. Stupid, unimpressive killer. Deus ex machina--we saw that coming. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 0/4!
Gore: 1/4
Times a victim asks the killer, "Why are you doing this?": 6
Humour: 1/4

As a Quebecer myself, I apologize for my fellow provincemen's lack of ambition and for such a disappointing waste of a good title and several good pieces of ass.

Hack-o-Lantern (1988) - 2/4

Produced and directed by Bollywood rejects Raj Mehrotra and Jag Mundhra respectively, Hack-o-Lantern is a preposterous satanic cult/slasher hybrid about a young man groomed by his grandpa to take over his cult.

Dad wants grandpa to leave the boy alone, so he's gonna head on out there. Turns out 'out there' is just next door, where a satanic cult is practicing a ritual no-one seemed to know about--just next door!

The boy grows into a moody, muscular loser who listens to metal and works out all day. One day he listens to metal and fantasizes a random '80s music video, in which a black girl struts down stairs, sticks out her tongue, and shoots '80s lasers at the band until only the boy is left.

Meanwhile, his sister is getting ready for a Halloween party and sets her best friend up with her normal brother. Normal enough. Then her brother screws her best friend in the cemetery on the first date. The best friend tells the sister about it and, rather than be disturbed, they go back to the cemetery together to look at the spot. Don't all sisters do that? Stare at their brothers' fresh hump-spots.

It's almost at the climactic showdown when a comedian (the great Bill Tucker, remember him? He's famous for being the comedian in Hack-o-Lantern!) steps out and begins doing a lengthy impression of a one-eyed turkey. What? I don't know.

Sexual harassment. Lecherous grandpa. Very campy grandpa. Incest. Truck full of pumpkins. Graveyard sex. Sex on top of a dead body. Satanic cult. Gee, grandpa's evil, whodathunkit? Random '80s metal video. Random awful comedian. Random snake lady. Geisha. Cowboy. Scary cult of... uh, about four people. '80s lazers. Satanist vs Satanist showdown, with pitchforks. Patricide. Matricide. Infanticide. Turkey impressions. Bald beaver. A few titties. Bad jokes. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 2/4
Gore: 2/4
Awful puns: 5
Humour: 3/4 - kinda in Troll 2 territory here

Short Reviews for Nov. 22, 2010: Yuzna and Russo

This is a new feature on Lair of the Boyg. Because my reviews are usually so long and in-depth, I find I don't get to write about even a tenth of the films I'd like to write about. With a Short Reviews feature, I can provide lighter, free-form, more playful reviews that cover films I either can't or don't feel inclined to write about in depth.

Three Brian Yuzna Films:

Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (1990) - 3.5/4

Sometimes you really do find a brilliant film buried in a sequel. Brian Yuzna's SNDN 4, for instance, subtitled 'The Initiation' is a Cronenbergian attempt to deal with the man-hating popular feminism of the '80s from a reasonable man's point of view. Borrowing ideas from the history of horror cinema, the film tells the story of an underappreciated but ambitious woman who takes a news story against her boss's wishes and finds herself sucked into the trap of a coven of witches. The film poses a lot of interesting questions about guilt, resentment, bigotry, religion, and oppression; and, gratefully, it doesn't really give answers.

Clint Howard. Inadequate, half-eaten hamburger. Giant, freaky centipede thing. Cockroaches everywhere. Abrasive, ambitious overachieving chick--everyone thinks she's a bitch and they're right. Her boyfriend thinks she's a fine piece of ass, and he's right. Giant cockroaches. Vomiting in the toilet. Spontaneous combustion. Lezzy, witchy bookstore owner--I've known a few of those. Rosemary's Baby-style coven. Fat naked guy with a nose-boner. Gratuitous violence to Clint Howard. Abdominal insect penetration. Insect-vomiting. Insect-crushing. Hideous adult birth scene. Resentful, man-hating women. Women who say, "But he's a man, what does his life matter?" Men who say, "Women belong in the kitchen!" Girls who say, "Get off of me! You're like a dog in heat!" Bad beer jokes. Lots of gooey stuff. Human sacrifice. The secretary from Moonlighting playing basically the same character. Body-morphing a la Videodrome. Flame-shooting arms. Combusting legs. Gratuitous violence to a bigot. They're burning Christmas. Judaism vs Christianity. Christianity vs Paganism. Apatheism wins. How quickly children forgive. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 1/4
Gore: 2/4
Icky, gooey stuff: 4/4
Humour: 2.5/4 - come on, it's got Clint Howard.

Rottweiler (2004) - 2.5/4

Yuzna's killer dog film about an American in a European country who escapes prison and is pursued by the prison's cyborg dog. Probably the most ambitious killer dog film ever made. Not that the competition is fierce.

- Hero and dog are linked on some level, destined to destroy one another.
- The loss of the hero's girl and the robotic mechanism of the dog occurred together.
- The hero hallucinates the dog, making it a spectral sort of conscience, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Jealousy, guilt, and guilt for jealousy.
- The chase itself is really just an excuse for a dark, even morbid picaresque romp involving thieves, drug dealers, whores, female rapists, flower-picking little girls, crazy industrialists, bounty hunters, and more.
- Symbolism of the fog as our fumbling toward a destiny we can't escape.
- Symbolism of the scorpion, the cruel sting of death we can't escape.
- Dystopian world with countries run by a crazy industrialist Paul Naschy.
- Privileged thrill-seekers trying to escape ennui by infiltrating forbidden nations, getting in over their heads. At least the ennui is gone.
- The game of infiltration: infiltrating the mind and soul.
- The progress of self-realization, as the hero flees the prison of ignorance and arrives on the open shores of understanding.
- The supernatural visions, omens, hallucinations that pervade the story like fog make the film more expressionistic than realistic.

Despite some of the silliness, cliche moments, stupid writing, and sometimes-CGI, sometimes-puppet, sometimes-real dog, Rottweiler is far better than any made-in-Spain evil-robot-dog-movie has any right to be.

Nekkid: 0/4 for dudes, 1.5/4 for the ladies
Gore: 2.5/4
People the dog kills for no good reason whatsoever: 8
Humour: 1.5/4

Beneath Still Waters (2005) - 2.5/4

Yuzna ever seems to be in Stuart Gordon's wake. First with the Re-Animator series, now with heading over to Spain and shooting a Lovecraftian evil town flick. Gordon made Dagon (2001) and Yuzna gives us Beneath Still Waters (2005). How does it stack up?

Screenwriting 101: deepen characters with tragic backstories; have the male and female confide their tragedies to one another in a moment that ends in a kiss; the tragic backstory must come back to haunt the hero in the climax. Monster left over from The Resurrected or Castle Freak. Very '90s feel here. Effeminate evil sorceror. Kid-killing. Kid-eating. Jaw-breaking. Tongue-eating (is that what he's doing?!). Evil book. Evil fire. Evil seaweed. Spooky flooded town. Chained up satanists. A-hole cop. Cute Spanish girl in bikini--is she legal or isn't she? is it right to wanna plough her or isn't it? Oh, her bimbo friend looks old enough, must be okay. But her mom is young and bangable too--what a conundrum. Botoxed-out reporter. Wet-suits a-plenty. Annoying kids a-plenty. Awkward melodramatic exits a-plenty. Awkward character exposition a-plenty. Frog. Two-headed deformity. Self-mutilation. Magic mutilation. Characters who sit around watching murders. Orgy time! Titties on cake! Cake on titties ("Frosted flakes")! Man-on-man dry humping! Spanking! Whipping! Attempted screwing! Riding! Stripping! Impromptu bondage! Pretty tame stuff from the guy who gave us Society. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 1/4
Gore: 2.5/4
Number of times Marcia is pronounced Mar-SEE-uh: 8
Humour: 0.5/4

Three John A. Russo films:

John A. Russo, the other Night of the Living Dead guy--kind of the 'loser brother' to George A. Romero--has had an interesting and uneven film career. Let's have a look.

Midnight (1982) - 3/4

A girl runs away from home, hitchhikes with some dudes in a van, and becomes the captive of some backwoods Satanists. Will daddy come to the rescue in time?

Religious fanaticism. Drunken stepfather. Rapey stepfather. Rendered unconscious stepfather. Takin' to the road, 1960s roughie style--with one bag n' a gee-tar. Random sexual proposition. Nice guys in a van. Sensible black guy. Fun with shoplifting. Rejected chips!!!! Preacher with a long, boring story and a cute daughter. Good samaritanism. Campin' under the stars. Random racism. "White boy!" galore--that's more racism, isn't it? Yes, black racist. Fat, cackling hick--didn't Russo steal that from Just Before Dawn? Guy with tight, stuffed pants. Gratuitous frisbee game. Satanic rituals. Talkin' to dead mother. Girls in little dog cages--is it wrong I was turned on? Head removin'. Hippie shootin'. Girl slicin'. Preacher killin'. Hick shootin'. Body disposin'. Grocery stealin'. Christian prayin'. Hick burnin'. Hick clobberin'. Blood drinkin'. And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Kind of a summary of 1970s exploitation genres: Summa Exploitica.

Nekkid: Nein!
Gore: 2.5/4
Racists: 9
Humour: 1/4

Dark Craving (1991) - 3/4

A soft-spoken physician is burned as a vampire/witch for his experiments in curing diseases, helping people, not sleeping with his brother's slutty wife and similarly sinister activities. Centuries later he emerges from a landfill alive, well, naked, and a vampire with venomous saliva. He finds friends, enemies, romance, and despair in our strange, modern world.

Accusations of sorcery, like puss-drinkin'. Genteel vampire. Evil antique dealer. Naked guy emerges from a landfill. Not only is he a vampire, he's a no-good dirty Tory! Chat with a priest about fluid exchanges. Tom Savini weightlifting. Tom Savini shooting things. 1980s American thrash soundtrack. One of the most interesting explanations for vampirism I've ever heard: superstition and the accusations themselves have transformed an innocent, victimized man into the feared monster. Antique dealin'. Museum visitin'. Accidental little girl killin'. Bikini girl assaultin'. Saliva secretin'. Street thug killin'. Catholic confessin'. Inept vampirin'. Girl stalkin'. Vampire macin'. Vampire shootin'. Priest killin'. Needless backstory for police officer. Moon Unit. And a lot of romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: Just that vampire guy's ass.
Gore: 3/4 - Tom Savini
Useless information about minor characters: Lots.
Humour: 0.5/4

Santa Claws (1996) - 0.5/4

A boy murders his mother and her santa-suit-wearing fat boyfriend. The detective calls this "piss-poor behaviour", but the boy is allowed to roam free to become an adult and die-hard fan of scream queen Debbie Rochon (playing Brinke Stevens, basically). But who's gonna die hard? The men who are using, abusing, and trying to take away the lovely scream queen.

Debbie Rochon's titties. Camcorder cinematography a-plenty. Lots of hot girls showing titties and pussywillow. Milf titties. Hairy, old fat guy gropin' milf. Crazy scream queen fan. Lengthy discussion about what pathetic losers scream queen fans are. The glamorous life of a tittie photographer. Creepy neighbour no-one seems able to notice is extremely sketchy. Murder with tiny gardening hook that could barely pierce a half-inch of flesh. There is a santa costume at some point. Bitchy mother-in-law. Bitchy sister-in-law. Did you contact the divorce lawyer yet? Scream queens just get no respect. Makin' out with a mannequin. Nerd dream sequence. How many times are they gonna say Scream Queens' Naked Christmas? And a little romance for the lady viewers.

Nekkid: 2.5/4
Gore: 0.5/4
Times you think, "Russo should have known better": at least 50.
Humour: 0.5/4

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) and the Sexual Mythology of the Slasher

The original Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was written by feminist and novelist Rita Mae Brown as a reflection on the genre's subtexts, a metafilm as it were: a juvenile fascination with nude women and sex, a nearly omnipotent and nearly motiveless killer, a phallic murder weapon, are all appropriated from the genre to point out the gender politics in the slasher film. Contrary to popular belief, Brown had not written a parody; the comedy was added in an extensive re-write by director Amy Holden Jones. Apparently not a feminist, Jones took the material and, to the best of her ability, played the subtextual structure as a tongue-in-cheek slasher. The result is an over-the-top instance of the slasher, the archetypal instance of the cheesy '80s slasher, not to be confused with moody '70s-style slashers like Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), and He Knows You're Alone (1980). The goggle-eyed killer earnestly drilling nubile young girls is too ridiculous to take entirely seriously and yet Brown's subtext shows through, or perhaps is helped by the comedy: this killer is a frighteningly aggressive male sexuality dead-set on drilling the nubile girls. The same goes for the gratuitous showering, girls who hide about as well as a four-year-old playing hide-and-go-seek with her grandparents in the nursing home, and dialogue gems like, "Hey, it's not the size of your mouth; it's what's in it that counts." All of it is a joke and simultaneously a statement on the psychosexual dynamics of the slasher film.

As the film is definitively neither thoughtful metafilm nor over-the-top cheese-fest, whether The Slumber Party Massacre is taken as one or the other is ultimately up to the viewer. Both possibilities resulted in sequels, curiously enough. Jim Wynorski's Sorority House Massacre II (1990) and Sorority House Massacre III (1990), confusingly sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre rather than Sorority House Massacre (1986), take the over-the-top qualities and push them into comically extreme territory. In the Sorority House Massacre sequels, the driller killer of The Slumber Party Massacre becomes a malevolent spirit capable of possession. He then terrorizes increasingly big-titted babes with decreasing skin-coverage. The comedy elements reach their peak when both the potential victims and the villain refuse to die, no matter how many bullets are sent into them. The Slumber Party Massacre sequels, on the other hand, written and directed by women, sided with Rita Mae Brown over Amy Holden Jones. Slumber Party Massacre III (1990) does so by making its killer a sexually impotent victim of childhood molestation. Slumber Party Massacre II is by far more interesting; the rest of this essay will be devoted to why.

The plot of Slumber Party Massacre II ostensibly picks up where The Slumber Party Massacre left off. In the aftermath of the tragic incident, one of the survivors is in a mental hospital and her sister, Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), is trying to hold her own life together. On top of her over-protective mother, she has to contend with a series of disturbing dreams partially remembrance of the harrowing ordeal and partially filled with gruesome imagery presided over by a leather-clad, rockabilly driller-killer. Once her mom allows her to attend a weekend in a friend's country home she begins to suspect the dreams are premonitions. Unfortunately--the plight of the seer--no-one heeds her concerns until it's too late. After a series of hallucinations that leave her friends thinking she's crazy, the rockabilly driller-killer emerges from her dreams and, all while rocking some killer tunes, slays her friends one-by-one with his guitar-drill.

What makes the film so interesting is Courtney's dreams. A throw-away line in the film explains that dreams are the subconscious mind's way of dealing with trauma. Dreams give the trauma some sort of order that makes sense in the pre-rational depths. For perhaps the first time in horror film history, we're treated to a sequel that seriously deals with the psychological aftermath of a trauma like seeing one's friends drilled to death by a maniac. The result is, then, a very peculiar slasher film that is itself entirely a damaged mind's way of dealing with the content of a previous slasher film: it's a meta-film, in short. This allows writer-director Deborah Brock to take her investigation of the gender politics and sexual dynamics in a slasher film much farther than Rita Mae Brown could.

Courtney's dreams take a dualistic form: although they're all sexual in nature, there are the positive sexual dreams and the negative sexual dreams. The positive, or good dreams are those centered on the sweet, handsome Matt, her desired boyfriend. He's always shirtless and engaging in some sport that emphasizes his muscularity, or smiling at her from a slight low angle--she's literally looking up to him, in both adoration and sexual submission. Whenever she dreams of getting closer to Matt, however, her dreams are invaded by the negative. The negative dreams are centered on the darkly handsome driller-killer, with his leather jacket, brylcreemed hair, and guitar with a drill in place of a fretbar. While he's killing her friends, most importantly Matt, he's pursuing her with misguidedly amorous intent, not unlike Pepe Le Pew. Where Matt represents a clean, pure female sexuality, fantasizing about the physical beauty of the sporty boy-next-door, the driller killer represents that darker female sexuality that is drawn to dangerous, sadomasochistic relationships. Matt's sexual aura is comprised of his physique, winning smile, and sports. The killer's sexual aura is comprised of rock n' roll, leather, sexual dancing, and violence.

There is clearly a relationship between Courtney's pure, one could say socially-sanctioned sexuality, and the violent sexuality that terrifies her. Whenever she begins to fantasize about Matt, the rocker intrudes. What this seems to suggest is that the ordeal she survived in the first Massacre has affected her ability to engage in a mutually satisfying sexual relationship; she instinctly transforms it into a sadomasochistic relationship. A slight twist on this point, she may just on some level perceive all male sexuality as destructive, all female sexuality as trapped in sadomasochism. In the first film, Courtney, still a young girl, witnessed a man sticking a phallic drill in nubile girls wearing skimpy clothes. This image seems to have impressed itself upon her as the only course sexuality can take. By the same token, she automatically punishes herself for her sexual desire. She seems unable to cope with a sexual desire that is as pleasurable for her as it is for the male.

At the level of fantasy, Courtney's negative dreams are much like bondage: an attempt to transfer what one fears into an environment one can control. While often viewed as a perversion, bondage is little different than a man with a fear of heights going skydiving. Courtney dreams of the rocker so she can, on a subconscious level, deal with her fear of her own sexuality impressed upon her from the first Massacre. As the fantasist of a rape fantasy doesn't really desire to be raped, Courtney doesn't really desire to be subject to the driller-killer's terrorism.

At the beginning of the film, Courtney is seemingly in control of these dreams. Like any dream, they run without explicit control. Yet she's cheerful and undisturbed as she eats her breakfast. Once she leaves home and sees a dead bird--just as in her dream--she begins to worry that she's lost control of her comforting fantasy. As the film goes on and sexuality begins to impinge upon her more and more, her hallucinations increase in frequency. After she overhears her friend having sex, she hallucinates her bathtub filled with blood and then her friend's head overtaken with a gushing zit. These are all revealed to be hallucinations, much to her relief and dismay.

(Note: Major Spoilers from here on.)
The turning point is when, finally, her dreamboy Matt takes her to bed. When her positive dream becomes a reality, so too does her negative dream. By allowing herself to engage in sexual pleasure, she releases the sadomasochistic fantasy into reality. The killer immediately drills through Matt, destroying Courtney's hope for a normal sexual relationship. He pursues Courtney through the house, singing his lines and performing sexualized rockabilly dances while terrorizing the girls. The editing becomes expressionistic, giving him little music videos. This shows he's in control; he's no longer a subconsciously contained fantasy, a safe exploration of danger and fear. Gradually he manages to drill through everyone until it's just he and Courtney.

For better or worse, Courtney is unable to embrace this aspect of her sexuality. The film doesn't make entirely clear where it stands on this subject and it is by no means self-evident. As noted, the sexuality Courtney has with Matt is a mutually satisfying one. One might therefore assume the film is against an abnormal and sadomasochistic sexuality. However, feminist filmmaking is characteristically against perceptions of what's normal or abnormal in sexuality. Matt is, after all, a very much socially sanctioned object of female desire. Perhaps the driller-killer represents a fear of her more adventurous sexual interests that ought to be embraced. At one point he states, "You and I are one until we go all the way." Courtney's sister (in her dreams), however, says, "Don't go all the way!" In the context of the genre, though, I would suggest that the film can be taken at face value. The driller-killer, in the lineage of slasher villains, is an essentially patriarchal force that exploits females and denies them the right to their own sexual pleasure. Feminist writers, like Carol Clover and Linda Williams, have made much of this, from the phallic choices of weapon (although, what weapon isn't phallic?) to the relentless pursuit of girls engaged in sexual behaviour and the ultimate survival of the virginal heroine. This was made more explicit in The Slumber Party Massacre than any prior slasher; and Slumber Party Massacre II makes it even more explicit, indeed, as I've been showing, the very central dynamic of the film.

The film's final shot, to some very disappointing but to us the most interesting of all, reveals the whole film to have been a dream. Valerie Bates is not the sister in the mental hospital, but rather Courtney herself. Suddenly that throw-away line about the mind dealing with trauma seems all the more relevant. Cowering in her hospital room, she imagines the driller killer piercing her room--a visual euphemism for penetrating her, of course--just as she's imagined all we've seen in the film. Had this not been the case, the fantasies of the ideal Matt could be chalked up to a reflection of reality. However, once we realize there is no Matt, we see he's a purely idealized vision of a young woman's sexual desires. He's infinitely attentive to her needs, impossibly handsome, and while talking on the phone wears nothing but cut-off jeans and poses like a poster boy. Brock, moreover, directs the film such that Matt is consistently represented in a dream-like manner, with strange, subjective shots of him looking into the camera.

The intrusions of the driller-killer are thus not just about sexuality. A normal sexuality is co-extensive with a normal life altogether, which the traumatic events of the first Massacre have prevented Courtney from enjoying. The sadomasochistic fantasy perverts not just her sexuality but her whole world. He destroys her friends, destroys her romantic dreams, destroys her boyfriend, till it's only him left in her world. Her final attempt to exorcise him from her dreams with fire is a failure. If the film represents her struggles at self-therapy, the therapy fails; she remains a frightened, broken girl in her hospital room.

Sexuality is central, however, because just as the events of the first film are contained within a highly sexualized slasher format, so Courtney's means of dealing with the events are themselves contained within a sexualized slasher--albeit from a notably more feminine point of view. Brock is able to engage, in this way, not only slasher genre tropes, but also criticisms of the genre. In her 1984 essay "When the Woman Looks," Linda Williams argued that any woman who dares to grant herself the privilege of desire in a horror film is punished with her own reflection in the monster, a creature of abnormal power, and simultaneously victimized by it. If this dynamic is what Courtney witnessed in The Slumber Party Massacre, she's now internalized the experience and is cursed to perpetually punish herself in her own dreams for exhibiting sexual desire. The first-person relishing of the beautiful Matt is an instance of female gaze, female desire enjoying the spectacle of a beautiful male. It's genuine and not salacious; it is, for once, female pleasure acknowledged in a slasher. For this Courtney punishes herself, having internalized the slasher dynamic.

Moreover, Carol J. Clover's 1987 essay, "Her Body, Himself," which Deborah Brock could conceivably have read prior to writing Slumber Party Massacre II, argues that the 'Final Girl' in the slasher film, the girl who survives the ordeal, is purged by her experience. The most self-denying of the female characters, virginal and serious, usually a tomboy, the Final Girl is stripped through the horrifying experience of any desire to seek out pleasure for herself. Courtney was already a Final Girl. In this film, she's dealing with the results of this purgation. As I've noted, Courtney punishes herself for fantasies of mutually satisfying relationships. These fantasies pervert themselves into sadomasochistic relationships with a primal male sexuality she can't control. In an instance of Freudian repetition, she's forever reenacting in her fantasies her own ordeal as a Final Girl, repeatedly purging herself of her healthy sexuality. But the purgation, in Brock's film, is itself extremely unhealthy and leaves the female with an unbalanced, pathological sexuality.

The film's message, if we may call it that, is not that women watching slashers will, like Courtney, internalize the sexual dynamic and become sexually unbalanced. Courtney witnessed the Massacre from inside, not safely projected on a screen or popped in a DVD player as we do. (Although the names of the characters--Bates, Voorhees, Krueger--suggests Courtney's watched her fair share of horror films.) But if slasher films are to some extent reflections of a social disorder, a disorder based upon repressing female sexual liberty, then Slumber Party Massacre II suggests the dangers of propagating such a disorder. Film is a very powerful medium and what viewers of that medium can and will assimilate would astound. Freedom of sexual desire is sexual health.

Wrong Turn (2003) - 2.5/4

Imagine you open your eyes and see before yourself a dog standing on a beach ball and being chased by a clown. Yes, you're at the circus; you'd just nodded off. Suddenly, in your drowse-inspired detachment, you're struck by the realization that the universe has been developing for billions of years according to unbending laws of physics so consistently, so unerring, so determinately that it could be said the entire universe has led up to this point: the clown and the dog on a ball. Granted countless other things are occurring in the universe simultaneously; but it did take billions of years for you to watch a dog on a ball. One can be extremely amused by the mock-epic implications; one can also be a little disappointed in the universe. It's such a trivial thing to spend billions of years working towards.

Fifteen minutes into Wrong Turn, I knew I'd feel a similar disappointment. The plot is simple: a doctor takes a shortcut through West Virginian woods to avoid a traffic jam, strikes an unexpectedly-placed SUV, and the whole group that goes looking for a phone is hunted by violent, inbred hillbilly cannibals. The moment I noticed three girls and two guys in the SUV group, I knew who would survive the film. But with that prediction (an accurate one) came this disappointment: that all the horror, violence, agony, death that occurs within the film does so just so the handsome, square-jawed man and the pretty, resourceful woman can 'get together.' This is the unspoken progression of the film. All the premises and how they work out leads to this conclusion: the handsome man and the pretty girl develop a romance.

I don't mean to imply Wrong Turn gives us pointless love scenes: it never does. But the film does conclude with the surviving pair together. It was predestined. The moment we spot Eliza Dushku, we realize she exists for the doctor and he for her. They're written that way. And everyone else, who should have a separate and meaningful-in-itself existence actually exists for these two to get together. The ordeal doesn't take on any symbolic implications for the implausibility of any two people coming together; it is concrete, particular, regarding these two people in this universe set up just for them. Because in the movies, pretty yuppies getting into a relationship is the most important thing in the universe. Hence my disappointment. Like the dog on the ball, to end the film on the predictable couple getting together and driving off into the sunset seems to trivialize all the came before; it trivializes the characters, the events, the horror all.

A more interesting though no less predictable film with a similar progression is House of Wax (2005). While that film also subordinates the existence of all other characters and all the events to the relationship of a brother and sister, it seems somehow more meaningful. Their relationship, for one, predates the events we witness and, while hardly well-developed, has a specificity to the characters. The relationship in Wrong Turn is entirely generic; it is, as I said, handsome man and pretty woman, but nothing more.

The said, the film offers some exciting chase action, including a siege on a fifty-feet-high watchtower and a battle in treetop branches. The success of these chase sequences depend very much on setting logic far aside. If Johnny is so inbred he can't learn spoken language, how likely is it he'll be a master archer or as nimble as Tarzan? These hillbillies should be club-footed special-care charges barely able to feed themselves. Yet, as is so often the case with the Hollywood depiction of hillbillies, the only parts damaged by inbreeding are the face and conscience. Amazingly proficient at anything physical, able to plan out sophisticated strategies, they are entirely incapable of moral reasoning. This is useful for creating a monster the yields thrilling suspense sequences, as when the protagonists hide in the monsters' lair, and chase sequences, as when the protagonists flee through the woods. But one wonders what else it's useful for. That is to say, what is accomplished on a social and psychological level by depicting hillbillies in this fashion?

The victims of hillbillies, from a genuine classic like Deliverance (1972) through cult classics like Just Before Dawn (1981) and Rituals (1977) on to Wrong Turn, are always middle- or upper-class and educated. In Rituals, they're all doctors. In Deliverance they're successful businessmen. In Wrong Turn one character is a doctor and the others all seem well-to-do. The hillbillies are, of course, living in poverty and without education. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that we, the predominantly middle-class and educated audience, are being confronted with two monsters of our world: the enormous failure our economical and educational systems to distribute goods justly over all; the possibility that education and success has made us weak and unable to fend for ourselves in situations of real danger. Hence the logic-defying physical capabilities of the hillbillies in Wrong Turn and trapping skills of the hillbillies in Rituals. When the hillbillies are finally beaten down by our cityfolk protagonists, we can return to the world at ease with our social and economic systems: the monster has been repressed again. If the extremity of the backwoods horror tropes in Wrong Turn are any indication, the repression has only exacerbated the situation. The hillbillies are Wrong Turn are more hideous, more heinous, more horrendous than in nearly any of its predecessors.

But I'm not here to preach social justice. Wrong Turn, for all its decadence, delivers on terror, even if it does show its hand a little too early and is, behind the gloss, a generic backwoods horror. Still, it would take a very uncooperative viewer not to cheer the film's final punchline, at least in his heart. If the universe has been following those unbending laws, maybe there is no such thing as a 'wrong turn.' This is how inbred hillbillies ought to be repressed.

The Family: Un jeu d'enfants (2001) and Promenons-nous dans les bois (2000)

(I wrote the following essay(s) in October 2010, but for one reason or another it was never completed to my satisfaction and thus never published. Reading it over, I think it is publishable; however, as my memory of the films, not to mention my own train of thought at the time, is too diminished to complete it, it remains in incomplete work. - JR, Sept. 28, 2011)

Un jeu d'enfants (2001) - 2.5/4
Promenon-nous dans les bois (2000) - 2.5/4

The horror film, for its ability to fly under the radar, to directly target the emotions, and to push against or beyond the limits, has often been considered as both the most subversive and, paradoxically, the most conservative genre. More paradoxical still is how subversion and conservation are achieved in the same stroke according to such critics as Robin Wood and Bruce Kawin: the monstrous and subversive force is allowed to roam free only to be destroyed at the end, leaving the audience to go home with their catharsis. Of course, horror films have never been so simple. The films of James Whale are intentionally more subversive than conservative. In Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, the Bride rejects the male for whom she was made, her expression of free will being the film's very climax. The slashers of the '80s, on the other hand, are considered by many feminist critics to be the height of ideologically conservative films.

Some filmmakers, moreover, strive to be subversive and unwittingly create a conservative film; sometimes the very converse happens. I have no knowledge of the filmmakers' intentions in Un jeu d'enfants and Promenon-nous dans les bois; but whatever their intentions, one has turned out a decided assault upon the traditional Western family form and the other a fierce protector of its sanctity.

(These reviews contain some spoilers.)

The Conservative: Promenons-nous dans les bois

Promenons-nous concerns a group of young actors who are invited to the mid-forest chateau of a rich eccentric in order to put on a panto performance of Little Red Riding Hood. The fun-loving, attractive youths find him an uptight, wheelchair bound homosexual living alone with his nearly-catatonic grandson and gamekeeper. After the performance of the play, the sun sets and the group is targeted by murderer in a wolf costume.

What the film emphasises, in the midst of the unremarkable slasher material that ensues, is two very different but equally non-productive coupling forms. The company of actors is promiscuous, their relationships ephemeral. For lack of a better term, they're 'fornicators,' without a family form. The group, in fact, contains only a single heterosexual couple. One male is single and potentially bisexual, one female lesbian, another bisexual. It is a voluntarily non-productive group that directs its actions to pleasuring itself. Taking the group as a unit, it is essentially masturbatory.

On the other hand, the situation into which the group enters is a family consisting entirely of men: the grandfather and the little boy. The gamekeeper has a sometimes-submissive and sometimes-dominant role in relationship to the grandfather that at times flickers wife-like. So this unit is similarly non-productive, albeit for different reasons. If the group of youths are non-productive from an excess of Eros, the chateau denizens have a deficiency of Eros and instead embody Thanatos. The grandfather, indeed, compulsively repeats Little Red Riding Hood tropes from his own youth, but curiously treats the wolf as the protagonist, Hood as an invader. (The repetition of the past is, in psychoanalytic theory, a function of the death-drive, Thanatos.) The gamekeeper has a taxidermy hobby and is a rapist. The chateau is thus committed to merely subsisting, consuming but producing nothing.

The climactic reveal of information is, significantly, pertaining to the family situation of the chateau. The grandfather's daughter, while pregnant with the boy, tried to escape the family and, mid-flight, was caught by the grandfather and the gamekeeper; they cut the child from her womb and left her to die. So not only is the situation deprived of female presence, it is openly hostile to the necessary female presence in sexual reproduction, to the family situation that is ordered around sexual reproduction. It is as though she were killed for her productivity.

I mentioned James Whale above. The film can be compared, in subtext, to Whale's far superior film The Old Dark House. In The Old Dark House, a group of youths (or what passed for youths in the '30s) enter a non-productive family of old eccentrics, the women masculine and the men feminine. The only vital presence in the household is Boris Karloff's butler character, whose energies are devoted to one of the effeminate men. Whale went so far as to cast a woman as the family patriarch.

In Whale's film, normality is represented by the young crowd who enter the house seeking shelter and who ultimately leave the house in flames, normality restored. Whale's sympathies, however, seemed to lie in the titular Old Dark House, not with the sentimental young couples. Promenons-nous doesn't divide its sympathies from its results, going a step further than Whale in both restoring normality and approving. In Promenons both the family and the youths are abnormal; their collision results in both groups being destroyed and the remnants assembling into a makeshift family. Of the chateau only the boy survives, of the group one male and one female: the makings of a nuclear family. The boy, nearly-catatonic throughout the film, for the first time smiles as he drives home with the surrogate mom and dad; and on that the film ends, with happiness gained by destroying promiscuous heterosexuality and essentially non-productive homosexuality. In short, finding happiness is co-extensive with maintaining the ideological order as it pertains to sexuality and family forms.

The Subversive: Un jeu d'enfants

Un jeu d'enfants begins with an ideologically perfect family: a work-at-home mom, an office-worker dad, a son and a daughter, both around seven years of age. With their financial security they take an enormous apartment which may turn out to be their undoing. An elderly brother and sister pair arrive at the door one day requesting a tour of the apartment in which they grew up. The mother obliges the decidedly creepy couple, briefly loses track of them, and escorts them out without incident. However, once the couple leaves, strange things begin happening and the mother is convinced the old couple had something to do with it.

Jeu is not exactly a haunted house film, but the concept of place is important all the same; nor is it a possession film, but the loss of identity is also important. Somehow merely inhabiting this apartment, where an earlier family ended in tragedy, begins to tear at the fabric of the well-ordered family. The essence of the patriarch is to earn the money, so naturally the father, when he begins attacking an imaginary offender at work, loses his job. The essence of the wife is her fertility and fidelity, so naturally the mother begins having random sexual encounters with servicemen. The children, however, are the most affected, seemingly taking on the characteristics of the elderly pair and thus becoming independent beyond their years.

The ways in which the apartment effects these changes in its occupants remains mysterious. In fact, Jeu is so committed to ambiguity there's not much one can be certain of. The elderly pair seem not to exist outside of the wife's mind; the adulterous liaisons the wife engages in may not have occurred at all, given the bizarre way the servicemen are represented. The repairman, for instance, screws her as methodically as he works on the washer, calmly walks away when she tells him he's done. One wonders if there isn't a psychedelic fungus in the apartment. But the film gives no basis for this in the narrative, so we're left with a family disintegrating in their new apartment for no other reason than that a previous tragedy occurred there and some occult forces have determined the next must follow suit.

Ultimately Jeu is a nightmare of the middle-to-upper class nuclear family, the tensions of which arise from individuals resisting the roles the structure thrusts them into. In Jeu, the home, the central place of family life, perverts each individual into the opposite of the role they are expected to occupy: the patriarch becomes impotent and dependent, the mother a whore, and the children begin to dominate the family. When the fate of the family situation is decided by the children, it is inevitable that it is consumed.

The Ghost Writer (2010): A Political Ghost Story

(This essay contains spoilers.)

"Unfinished Business
The primary reason for ghosts to be sticking around. They want revenge, their story to be told, or simply to be informed once and for all that they are, in fact, dead. To get rid of the ghosts, the hero or heroine will have to either do extensive research in old newspaper articles or communicate somehow with the ghosts. Once their business is finished, they vanish in a flash of light."(1)

But what if the ghost and the hero are unwittingly the same person? The first ten shots of The Ghost Writer show a vehicle deprived of a driver aboard a ferry, then a man's body, deprived of life, lying in the surf on a beach. Over the final shot in the series, a long shot of the body, Ewan McGregor's voice begins, "You realize I"--cut to him eating lunch with his agent--"know nothing about politics." By the eleventh shot Polanski has already let us know that this character (who never gets a name of his own) is the ghost of the body in the waves. He's not literally a ghost, of course; but in effect his raison d'etre in the film's world is to settle the unfinished business of that body and he will haunt all the places, from room to vehicle, that body has occupied during life until the business is finished.

The body on the beach is a long-time aide of former prime minister of the UK Adam Lang and ghost writer of his memoirs. McGregor's character, "The Ghost", a soft-spoken Englishman, is hired to ghost-write the memoirs into more marketable material than McAra had left them. He's taken to an island off the coast of New York where he has a month to get the book ready under the watch of Lang's wife, Ruth, and political aide and mistress Amelia Bly. As political controversy explodes around Lang when it's discovered he had authorized the torture of four terrorist suspects, all British citizens, McGregor begins finding traces of McAra's research that lead into a conspiracy way over McGregor's head and sends him running for refuge with the very man heading the investigation into Lang's war crimes. McGregor believes Lang had been recruited by the CIA, but his questioning is cut short when Lang is assassinated. During the opening gala for the memoirs McGregor has successfully ghost-written, he gets the last hint and discovers the wife, Ruth, is the CIA agent and Lang had been her puppet, and thus the puppet of the United States, all along. McGregor is then unceremoniously killed off-screen by a mysterious black car.


The reason McGregor can be killed so unceremoniously is that he's a ghost. Once he's discovered that Ruth is the CIA agent and informed her of his knowledge, he has finished the business for which he exists and ceases to be. Polanski prepares this progress carefully. When McGregor is first given the job as ghost writer, he's shown leaving the publishing house headquarters and hailing a taxi. When McGregor exposes Ruth (only to us, alas), he's shown, fittingly in the film's final shot, leaving the same building and hailing a taxi in the same spot; this time, however, the taxi ignores him and he exits the frame, where a car speeds after him and, well, into him. So, Polanski actually rhymes the moment the ghost is given his 'unfinished business' and the moment after he finishes it. By having the story come full circle to the publishing house a fatalistic sense is imparted, suggesting that the moment McGregor accepted the role of ghost he had signed his doom.

Between these moments a dialectic reminiscent of Polanski's The Tenant (1976) begins. The Tenant is about a man assuming the apartment of a woman who committed suicide and becoming increasingly paranoid that the other tenants are trying to transform him into the suicidal previous tenant. The Ghost Writer, similarly, has McGregor resisting assuming McAra's life, resisting, as it were, haunting. He refuses to use the BMW he's offered because the groundskeeper tells him McAra loved it. He resists taking over McAra's room on the island and, once in the room, is disgusted to find the man's clothing left behind. Upon removing the clothing, however, he uncovers McAra's secret research taped to the bottom of a drawer. This is the moment he assents to being McAra's ghost. He then sleeps with Lang's wife, as it's very possible McAra did, and finally takes the BMW. Furthering the ghost motif, he finds McAra's directions still programmed into the vehicle's GPS. He decides to follow them, further ghosting McAra, just as ghosts are said to perform functions and frequent places they used to do while alive. He then calls the telephone number on the back of a photograph in McAra's research and finds himself in contact with Lang's enemy Rycart, betraying Lang just as McAra had done.

Of course, McGregor is hired to be Lang's ghost, not McAra's. Where McGregor is a ghost who struggles unsuccessfully to have identity of his own--throughout the film he only introduces himself as a 'ghost' and we never learn his name--Lang's problem is that he's all identity without any real soul of his own. He has too many ghosts. Everything is decided for him. In one scene McGregor is asked to draft a statement to send to the press. In the following sequence McGregor returns to his hotel and sees a member of the press on television quoting his words as Lang's. Innocence is lost then; we realize a prime minister is not so much a person as a team, the minister himself or herself a silver-tongued figurehead at best. So Lang has been. The first paragraph of the manuscript McAra has written states that 'Lang' is from an Old English word meaning 'tool.' Lang has been a tool manipulated throughout his whole career. He himself is strangely empty, void of content. Rycart confesses not understanding the man after working with him for fifteen years. Just as a shot-by-shot analysis of Plan 9 from Outer Space would prove mystifying, Lang is mystifying if only because there's nothing to puzzle out. He was a skirt-chasing, handsome actor not the least bit interested in politics and in him the CIA found something malleable. He has been a face used by the United States, through his CIA agent wife.

That is rather abstract, however. Lang is, of course, a human being with as much a mind and personality as anyone else. It is as a political entity that he is empty. As a person, he is a fascinating character insofar as he may be the only entirely honest character in the film. When Lang tells McGregor that he entered politics because he fell in love with Ruth, Polanski gives us no reason to doubt him. He's wrong, but he seems to believe it. In some sense perhaps it is still true; we don't, after all, know the depth and extent of Ruth's manipulation: did she ever love him? When confronted by McGregor, Lang asserts that he has never taken orders once in his career. That's very likely as well; that is to say, it's likely he believes this.

What McGregor and Lang have in common is the way they are easily manipulated by others under the guise that they have free will. In a key sequence early in the film, McGregor's first conversation with Ruth, she states two important points: McGregor's presence is her idea and she doesn't like Adam being out of her presence because, she implies, he's incapable of thinking for himself. Both men are joined in how they fall under her will. McGregor, like Lang, is chosen for his position for how easily he can be controlled.

If Lang did indeed enter politics out of love for Ruth, one could easily wonder what happened. Throughout the film, Ruth is one of the most bitter, vindictive, acerbic characters in recent cinematic history. Scarcely a line she utters isn't barbed and venomous. What makes The Ghost Writer such a great film is how so little is given to us directly, yet all the information is there, much as the threatening information is indirectly present in McAra's manuscript. Ruth is clearly much more intelligent than her husband and had always been the more politically motivated of the two. Her faustian agreement with the CIA, represented by the Mephisto-esque Paul Emmett, has led her down a road of unfulfillment as merely a footnote in the political career of her inferior husband. When asked if she never wanted to be a politician in her own right, she snaps back to McGregor, "Didn't you want to be a proper writer?" Even her apology to him is dripping with vindictive sarcasm, "I've hurt your feelings." In her unfulfillment she's become increasingly bitter, leading her husband to stray to Amelia Bly (an older woman) and, as she confesses, to stop taking her (i.e. the CIA's) advice.



Throughout the film, Bly is associated with light and Ruth with rain and darkness. Lang even tells us that he first met Ruth in the rain. The obvious effect is to make us feel gloom and depression when she's in frame; Polanski lets her affect us much as she affects Lang. The presence of rain also tends to suggest the malign, conspiratorial influence. The first shots of the film, when the BMW is discovered empty, are in rain. The final shot of the film, when McGregor is killed, is in rain. When Ruth learns an old man knows McAra's body was planted on the beach, she suddenly rushes out into the rain. Amelia (a name meaning "better") offers Lang freedom and Ruth, as always, has been a manipulative presence. After arguing with Ruth, we see Lang against the window like a fly in a jar. He's attempting to have a will of his own. McGregor's death comes as a result of leaving Amelia to send a note to Ruth informing her what he knows. Ruth and the clandestine political machinations she stands for consistently brings misery and death.

Ultimately Lang's, and Ruth's, salvation is in assassination. Stripped of a physical existence, Lang becomes pure image, as he was always expected to be; he is now a total tool, and more powerful than he had ever been in life. During the gala, as McGregor discovers the truth about Ruth, Lang's face is everywhere, watching, from the covers of the book McGregor wrote, the "voice from beyond the grave." If Lang has become a sort of ghost himself, he casts off his treacherous ghost writer and gets his revenge. Lang's face, as you can see above, peers out from behind a building, presiding over the murder of McGregor. With both "the ghost" and McAra dead, his legacy is secure. Even Rycart has to bow to the power assassination grants and call the 'war criminal' a patriot. Thus ends the ghost story, a victory of a political ghost over an ethical ghost.

Politically the film's target is clearly America on the one hand, and a very uninformed populace on the other. Lang's assassin kills him because he holds Lang responsible for the death of his son in Iraq. Lang's responsibility for that death is negligible. Lang is not even responsible for the war crimes of which he's accused. Nor is his wife. The importance of a figurehead like Lang is to absorb the accusations, to be the figure of blame. When contemplating getting mugged for a decoy manuscript given him by Lang's lawyer, McGregor calls himself a 'tethered goat'; at the same time, a news flash is running about Lang's involvement in the torture of the four terrorism suspects, thus linking McGregor's incident as a decoy with Lang's investigation as a war criminal. Lang is, similarly, a tethered goat, then. If people knew that the political world is a world of ghosts, wills working without being seen, they'd know how ridiculous it is to hold Lang responsible for what a whole system--ultimately the national security agencies of the United States, the supreme ghost in the film--moves him to do. But as McGregor confesses in his first line, we "know nothing about politics."

America is, however, more of a symbol than a target. The film's real theme is the identities, emotions, and energies of individuals that get swallowed by a political machine beyond any individual's control. Ruth, for various reasons--being a woman and her admittedly poor public speaking skills--couldn't become the politician she desired to be, but accepted being relegated to a politician's wife. Lang, a real person who enjoyed acting, is transformed into a political figurehead, or, as McGregor puts it, 'a craze.' McGregor, the ghost, the common man, doesn't even have an identity in this system. The moment these people start asserting their own wills and emotional needs against the system, they are put in danger of being destroyed. In the cases of McAra, McGregor, and Lang, this danger is realized.







Another of the film's themes is the essentially dubious nature of second-, third-, fourth-, nth-hand information. The film's climax is a tracking shot of McGregor's note passing hand after hand on its way to Ruth. The information in the note has been encoded in the manuscript McAra wrote. But whence did McAra get this information? Research and Google, perhaps? Is it even correct? We don't know. The nature of a ghost-writer is to convey information as though written by someone else; it's an inherently deceptive role. The information McGregor finds himself given is itself sometimes deceptive, such as the dates Lang confuses. McGregor's own words are, as I noted, reported on television as Lang's. We live in a world where we're inundated with information--Google, books, television screens in bars, airports, hotels--but rarely have any idea where it really comes from. Some of it is trustworthy, based on painstaking research; some of it is mere surmise; some of it is mistaken; some of it outright deceit. McGregor's position in The Ghost Writer is attempting to sort out to which of these categories the information he's given belongs and we needn't believe his sorting is necessarily correct.

In many ways The Ghost Writer, though from source material not original to Polanski, is a summa of Polanski's film career. The island location reminds one of Cul-de-Sac. The investigation into overwhelming intrigue and the failure of the protagonist to be a hero recalls Chinatown. The political conspiracy recalls Frantic. The paranoia over loss of one's identity recalls The Tenant. McGregor's character also reminds one of a softened and British Dean Corso of The Ninth Gate, which also dealt with books. Lang and his relationship with his wife recalls, indeed, MacBeth.

So, as with many Polanski films, but perhaps with The Ghost Writer more than any other, what you see and think you know upon first viewing becomes questionable upon rewatching. So little is given to us as direct information, so much has to be surmised both by McGregor and by us viewing the events through McGregor's perspective, that our surmising could be completely mistaken. McAra's death could have just been an accident. According to Ruth, he did indeed like spirits. The vehicle's path to Paul Emmet's house could have been Ruth's, as Emmet was her tutor and thus an old friend. McAra's belief that Emmet recruited Ruth could be totally erroneous, a mistake grounded upon a google search. (Most of the information on conspiracy websites is rubbish.) Neither Rycart nor Lang had heard Emmet is with the CIA, even though it's the second or third result on a google search for his name. Are they stupid or do they just not believe every foolish conspiracy theory? Is Lang the puppet he seems to be? And finally, although I maintain the car's path seems too deliberate, it's been pointed out to me that McGregor could just have been hit by a car accidentally. He was, after all, standing in the road. What does remain is that in the order of the film's universe, the Ghost is discarded once the business is finished: both Lang's business and McAra's business, and perhaps the audience's business.

(1) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfinishedBusiness, 14/09/2010.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009)

Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) has murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) and barricaded himself inside her house with two hostages. The film's tagline tells us, "The Mystery Isn't Who. But Why." My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? "Inspired by a true story" of a man who killed his mother with a sword after over-identifying with a character he was playing in The Eumenides, Orestes, who also kills his mother. Herzog doesn't accept such a simple explanation as "over-identifying." The whole film is constructed around answering the 'Why?'. However, contrary to the tagline, understanding the 'Who?' is the key to understanding the 'Why?'. Most of the film is comprised of a series of flashbacks triggered by Detective Hank Havenhurst's (Willem Defoe) questioning of Brad's fiancee, Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny), the play director, Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) and the neighbours, Mrs. and Miss Roberts. The flashbacks reveal to us the strange life and behaviour of Brad in the time leading up to the murder. We learn there are two major events that precipated Brad's crime: he visited Peru for a rafting trip and came back hearing the voice of God; and he starred in The Eumenides. In other words, no explanation at all.

There are two very important shots that reveal more about Brad than Ingrid and Meyers do, each in one of the two flashbacks to Peru. In the first, we see Brad standing before the river, splitting the frame in half: one half is the green land, the other half is the white rapids. Gazing toward the river, Brad yells at his meditating companion that the river is reality. So in this shot, Brad is still facing reality. In the second flashback to Peru, the group has moved down river some. Now Brad is sitting on the rocks, facing the opposite direction of the river. One companion tells him he's behaving strangely and he says, "I'm just looking at the river," which is patently false. Brad is now no longer facing reality. Ingrid and Mrs. Roberts tell us Brad changed after his trip to Peru, but they can't explain why. Ingrid thinks it's the death of Brad's travelling companions, but the flashback clearly shows Brad's madness setting in prior to their deaths. Temporally, we can't see what happened in between the flashbacks to suddenly trigger his madness.

However, Herzog gives us one flashback--which occurs suddenly, without trigger, and is not told by or to anyone--between the two Peru flashbacks. It's a quiet shot of Brad's mother poking a piano key, then walking over (the camera follows her) to Brad, who sits at a drum set. She complains that Brad never plays his piano or his drums. We can also see a guitar at the bottom of the frame when she's at the piano. Brad tells her that she's the one who "tried to persuade" him to want the drums. We have no idea when exactly this moment occurred in Brad's life, but Herzog plants it between the two Peru flashbacks for a reason: in between facing reality and not facing reality is Brad's lack of direction in life, his inability to commit himself seriously to any vocation. As the film goes on we learn he used to play basketball, was into New Age thought (along with his fellow rafters), briefly got the notion to go whitewater rafting, decides to become a Muslim and ditches out of the rafting, decides to become a stage actor, and even, as he's being taken away by the cops, announces "I have taken a new vocation as a righteous merchant." He's a dilettante: he wants to do everything but will commit to nothing. He wants to continually remake himself according to each new fantasy and, in doing so, withdraws further from reality until fantasy and spontaneous self-reinvention takes over.

Brad is a model of this generation's malaise. We live in a wonderful time when so many options and opportunities are open to everyone. I decide I want to be a film critic, so I start this website. If I want to be a filmmaker, I can easily pick up a camera and put out a casting notice. So many options are open to us, as they are to Brad, that in this generation we have difficulty choosing just one or at least having the discipline to stick with one for a reasonable length of time. Brad's mother has made every opportunity available to him. He seems to have no job, yet he travels to Peru and Tijuana, owns a car, spends all day doing whatever he wants. He does nothing, ultimately. The answer to the titular question, "What have ye done?" could well be "Nothing." Brad is a disappointment.

So in the two shots that illustrate Brad's turn from reality, we can say that he has turned from reality because he doesn't have the ability to face it. To face reality would be to accept that he must commit himself to a vocation, a career, certain people in order to exist in the human world. One must limit oneself in order to be oneself. To be everything is just to be nothing. Brad isn't the only character unable to face reality. The companions with whom he goes rafting are equally unequipped to face reality. Brad correctly tells them the rapids are too dangerous during the rainy season, yet one continues meditating and the other only says, without much thought, that the challenge is why they've come. They know nothing about whitewater rafting, they're not athletic at all. When Brad later tells them he's not interested in their herbal teas and talking to 'Indians' in sweat lodges, we gather that they're New Agers. What could be a better summation of flakey dilettante lifestyle than New Agers, who grasp onto every new self-centered fad until the next one comes along? So they're pampered Californians with lots of time for flakey New Age thought thinking they can just master the rapids. They face the river, which, as Brad noted, is reality; and they die. They leap into a reality they're unequipped to face. Brad, at least, knows he's not equipped to face it and avoids it via retreat into fantasy.

One would think, given some of Brad's more erratic behaviour, that someone would have tried to get Brad help at some point. Yet none in his life are willing or able to face that reality. Brad's mother clearly lives for Brad. One particularly awkward scene shows her bringing drinks into Brad's room for he and Ingrid; she stands in the doorway for what feels like three minutes (it's around fifteen seconds, actually), until Ingrid at last thanks her. She lives to serve Brad and asks for gratitude only. She also still sees Brad as a child, to the point that of attempting to spoon-feed him. In that particular dinner scene, Herzog frames the shot so the window opens behind Brad and Ingrid, but the curtain covers the outside behind Brad's mother. If Brad has a whole world of opportunity for himself and is unable to commit, his mother has stripped herself of the world through her obsessive devotion to Brad. Their madnesses mutually feed off each other.

If Brad is a crude but accurate caricature of my generation, a generation of people unequipped to face reality, Brad's mother is equally a caricature of the problem, parents who live for their children and give them endless opportunities but no direction, no demands. (And those parents, in turn, are a product of a whole history of Western, materialist culture, which Lee Meyers might call our "Tantalate House.") Direction is what Brad lacks, his energies considerable but uncontrollable. Hence the importance Brad puts in the play The Eumenides. Lee Meyers, the play's director, is literally giving Brad direction. Meyers is the only character in Brad's life who has any sort of control over him. Meyers's relationship with Brad is vaguely fatherly as well: he's affectionate and spends more time with him than his job requires. Although Meyers actually kicks Brad out of the play for being disruptive, Brad calls only Meyers and Ingrid before committing the murder. Clearly they have mutual respect. Unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality now, the direction of the play becomes his direction in life. He has a sense of destiny, killing his mother an act of necessity and fate. After killing her, he casually tells a detective who is unaware he's the suspect, "Razzle them, dazzle them, razzle dazzle them." Life and performance, reality and fantasy, have been conflated. He claims to hear the voice of God, which warned him of the danger in Peru; but as soon as he's barricaded in his home, and immediately--in the film's time--before the key flashback, he tosses "God" (a container of Quaker oats) out of the house saying he no longer needs God. As soon as his 'performance' is over, he's again without direction.

The film concludes with the victory of reality. The first shot of the film is a train driving through a field, on its way to San Diego. The train's motion is rhymed with that of the river. The final shot is of San Diego traffic flowing by behind a basketball in a tree (so placed by Brad). The flowing traffic is like the flowing river and the flowing train: reality rushing on. Inability to face reality doesn't make it go away. The police surrounding Brad's house are a part of that reality, impinging upon Brad's existence in his mother's uterine, pink house whether he likes it or not. Brad has no choice but to eventually meet the reality they represent in some form.

Of course, the film shouldn't be over-intellectualized. Much of it is felt and not quite understandable, much as Brad is not quite understandable and the murder is not quite understandable. The inability to rationalize is a part of encountering the film. The music, for instance, is sombre, sorrowful, and seemingly out of place with the images, producing uncomfortable dissonance. Herzog's decision to make his actors sometimes freeze also produces discomfort as we wonder why they've stopped, yet are clearly blinking. Sometimes they even look directly into the camera. Much of the film's oddness seems present primarily to keep us in a state of confusion, Herzog's use of film form complementing the content so that the mystery of human behaviour and the problem of knowing becomes characterized in the very style. Herzog's camera movements are hypnotic, always moving slowly and gracefully in steadicam, reminding one of some shots in Touch of Evil (the detectives are named Vargas and Hank, coincidentally). So hypnotic are the movements, that I've become drowsy each time I've seen the film. These soporific qualities, the confusing weirdness, leave us as lost as Ingrid and Hank (who are not privy, as we've seen, to the film's key flashback) and all the more disarmed for the jarring moments when Brad explodes. This is only skimming the surface, a brief brainstorming session: Herzog's style in this film could and should be investigated in much more depth.

That Brad McCullum would be a monster for Herzog is no surprise. Considering Herzog's films are famed for their depictions of monomaniacal men, who are quasi-heroes of Herzog's films, a man unable to devote himself to anything as Brad McCullum is monstrous. Herzog focuses on one brief obsession in McCullum's existence, but its brevity and the ease with which it's forgotten make him a model of what Herzog doubtless despises. That Brad is a monster for us has more to do with his unpredictability. As there is no explanation, no good reason, for Brad's behaviour, predicting it is impossible. This keeps not just other characters like Ingrid and Lee on edge, but also the viewers. Though we already know his crime, Michael Shannon's intensity and conviction in every insane line and gesture makes McCullum frightening to behold. Shannon has shown himself to be one of the best actors in America with his performance in Bug, able to put total conviction in the silliest lines, deep menace in the most banal lines. In My Son, he is not nearly so histrionic, his performance more subtle, but the more frightening for it.

I've seen My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? four times now and it's only improved in my estimation each time. Yet, strangely, my perception of it changes with each viewing. The horror of the film struck me the first time. The second time, the comedy of it. Much of what happens in the film could just as easily be humourous as disturbing, or both at once. The last time I was struck with sadness, the film's title encapsulating it. The title is the final words Brad's mother utters when she's stabbed, words gently chastising, yet overwhelmingly sad: this woman who has lived her life for her son and is moved to tears by his gratitude has her life taken away for no good reason. The film's mysteries remain, perhaps magnified, and so does my obsession with it; I think I'll watch it another four times.