The Human Centipede (2009) - 3/4

From the first moments of The Human Centipede, when the sinister Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) is looking at photos of his beloved Three-Dog--three rottweilers sewn together anus-to-mouth--and when some vapid, American club-girls are lost and arguing in the German woods, it's clear it is not a film about characters reconnecting with lost childhood or a subtle narrative that will ultimately leave one wondering "Who is the human centipede really?" Human Centipede is dedicated to its gimmick. It stands or falls on how effective, affective, and significantly that gimmick is used. As it happens, the gimmick is used quite well.

The gimmick is the creation of a totally human monstrosity, which is the human centipede, three humans sewn together anus-to-mouth. While the monstrosity is an abomination, a loathesome and aberrant thing to the sight, to the mind, due to its physical implications, it is a piteous creature for which we feel sympathy. The real monster of the film is the perverse urge to create the monstrosity--by the mad scientist and by the writer-director, Tom Six. It is a gimmick that resembles and derives some significance from Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), later mad scientist pictures like Les yeux sans visage (1960) and most recently The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008). In each of these films the urge to create using human flesh as one's medium, a creativity that uses science for macabre art rather than any practical function and doesn't ask permission for its creation, is the source of horror.

Science is collaborative and functions within an ethical context of response. One doesn't take, nor does one give, a body part without permission. Art, however, is totally autonomous. These mad scientists all present themselves, consciously or unconsciously, as artists rather than true scientists. They guard their creation until it can finally be revealed in its beauty. Frankenstein is horrified to find his monster wasn't beautiful. Dr. Genessier of Les yeux is horrified to find his daughter's new face rotting off. Dr. Heiter's position in this tradition is an interesting one. He isn't horrified by his monstrosity. He loves it. He sees it as a pet. When parts of it aren't quite working according to his satisfaction, his solution is simply to replace one part with another. Perhaps it's just that Heiter is madder than any other scientist in cinematic history. Frankenstein's experiments have a purpose. He wants to creative artificial life and in doing so can discover what the essence of life is. The medical benefits are innumerable. Dr. Genessier wants to restore his daughter's face. If he succeeds, however, his research could have great benefits for the world. He'd certainly deserve a Nobel prize. The mad scientist of The X-Files wants to give his lover a new body. There's really no good reason for Dr. Heiter's creation. It is pure, mad creativity. He seems to just find the idea amusing. It's something he wants to try. Perhaps he just wants to see what will happen. Perhaps he just wants it as a pet in a totally infantile way. Certainly the way the film explores Heiter's interaction with the monstrosity is one of master to disobedient pet.

Consequently, there is no way to forgive Dr. Heiter. There is forgiveness for Dr. Frankenstein. He's a good man and a good scientist who just went, not too far, but too far alone. He stood outside of the scientific and moral community to create his biological artwork. A scientist observes ethical concerns and works within a community. Had Dr. Frankenstein done so, the monster could have been in a controlled environment. That he repents his errors is key to his forgiveness. He is even the hero of the films. Dr. Genessier is forgiveable primarily because we can understand his love for his daughter, though his experiments are still ghastly transgressions. He doesn't wait for face-donors: he steals faces from beautiful girls. Dr. Heiter is also outside the moral and scientific community, he also steals, but there's no way to forgive him. Unlike the other scientists, he is not a good man. He is apparently a renowned surgeon, but somewhere along the way, he clearly lost his mind. Or perhaps he only became a surgeon as part of a plan to create a human centipede. We never find out because, as I say in the first paragraph, the film isn't interested in character study. What we do find out from Dr. Heiter is that he hates human beings. Converting them into an insect of sorts is only too appropriate for him. He's a total, malevolent sociopath. His closest parallel for pure madness is Malita in The Devil-Doll (1936), but he exceeds her in malice by far. Malita wants to shrink everyone as an inexplicable act of revenge for her husband's death. She doesn't particularly hate humans as Heiter does.

Like Frankenstein and Les yeux sans visage, Human Centipede is structured around its experiment. The first act is collecting the parts. In Frankenstein, this consisted in collecting bodies. In Les yeux, Alida Valli is sent out to lure and incapacitate young women. Heiter's version is shooting with tranquilizer darts anyone who stops along the highway to defecate. The second act is creating the monstrosity. Though not nearly as poetic, the creation scene of Centipede resembles Les yeux most of all. In Les yeux, Georges Franju quite controversially for 1960 (one critic called the film "the sickest film since I started film criticism") chose to show the face transplant operations as realistically as he could manage, the scalpel cutting delicately around the eyes, the face peeling off and revealing bloody muscular material beneath. Centipede does the same. Dr. Heiter is shown cutting flesh, the lipidous material hanging in flaps. The third act is observing the monstrosity and preparing for its revolt. The fourth act is the revolt and the struggle to either destroy or correct the monstrosity, while outside forces begin closing in: the villagers with torches, or, in the case of Centipede, the police.

The strength of Human Centipede is in the third act. The other acts have their degree of tedium. Since the gimmick of the centipede is the heart of the picture, seeing the centipede in action is where the picture is at its most powerful. Tom Six is willing to explore the centipede's sad existence farther than many filmmakers would, but he could have and probably should have gone farther still. He does explore how eating and defecation works; how they must cooperate merely to walk; what they are expected to do for the doctor, and so forth. However disturbing it is, there is a very dark comic edge to this act. One scene in particular, in which Dr. Heiter tries to train the centipede to bring him his daily newspaper like a dog, is particularly played for humour. I couldn't help but be amused by Heiter's reactions. He is so over-the-top and so naively evil in these scenes he is grimly and, for the audience uncomfortably, amusing. The successfully conflicting emotions of this very memorable section of the film owes quite a bit to the brilliantly dark performance of Dieter Laser is the doctor.

The misanthropy of Dr. Heiter sets the general theme and tone of the picture. From Heiter's collecting victims mid-defecation to his sewing them in such a way that their are defecating into one another's mouths to his decision to make them into the shape of a centipede, there is a clear disgust with human bodily existence on display. While we watch, we are not disembodied. The bodily plight of the monstrosity made me uncomfortable in a physical way. We feel a certain disgust with our bodily existence that unites us with the disturbing content of the film and makes us identify very uncomfortably with Heiter as much as with the centipede. Heiter's creation of an insect out of humans has Greek resonance. How many myths consist in Greek gods transforming humans to insects? The mad scientist as god theme compliments the misanthropy, viewing these average, normal humans as insects. The one man in the centipede, and very patriarchally the one person with a mouthpiece, eventually calls himself an insect for his misused life. The girls are certainly not model humans. They're not bad people. They're just normal. They like going to clubs, dancing, drinking. The majority of humans have such low demands for themselves. Since Heiter dominates the film, the tone that dominates the film is that these people's lives have been selfish and base. Perhaps the most poetic moment in the film is when we discover that, while the man is willing to defecate, the middle girl refuses. One needn't be selfish. In such a tightly-woven collective, one has to make sacrifices. In fact, insects are extremely cooperative, so the metaphor is rather awkward; but that's not very relevant. The film does attain a certain poetry when the centipede learns to cooperate, a sort of perverse, fleshy Argo.

I've probably made a stronger case for the themes of The Human Centipede than it actually deserves. Their appearance in the film is sporadic and somewhat confused. It's never clear whether Heiter's attitude is totally condemned, whether he has some moral value. For that matter, the inability to derive nutrition from fecal matter and the fact that all three parts of the 'centipede' retain their own brains, make the experiment itself somewhat confused. The real strengths of Human Centipede are the disturbing science, its gimmick, which is to say, its monstrous creation and of course its monstrous creator, easily one of the maddest of all cinematic mad scientists, Dr. Heiter. Heiter and his experiment certainly did disturb me and clearly intrigued me. A good gimmick explored thoroughly can indeed produce a good film. The Human Centipede a fascinating picture.

Evil Angel (2009) - 4/4

The opening credits roll over a beautiful, blond woman--whom we never see again--caressing herself and masturbating in a luxurious and artfully lit bed. We then plunge into action: a man runs frantically through the city, shrieking in terror at the sight of any woman--all of whom appear to him as growling, grey-faced demons--ultimately leaping to his death to avoid contact with the woman trying to rescue him; at the same time a child is born; the paramedics ushering the child into the world try to help a saintly woman who has been randomly stabbed, but fail; as she dies telling the paramedic she loves him, another woman in the hospital suddenly rises from her deathbed and, using a fire extinguisher, murders a couple mid-proposal; the paramedic returns home to find his wife in mid-coitus with another man. That's all in the first eighteen minutes of Evil Angel. Never has a film quite so strongly and cosmically immersed itself in its thematic core so immediately, except perhaps for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Evil Angel, the latest picture from ex-King of Mormon Cinema Richard Dutcher, is clearly about women. To be more exact, it's about how men relate to and perceive women, from a decidedly male and decidedly sexual point of view. As much as Feminists will insist that thousands of years of Patriarchal domination has allowed the male point of view limitless expression, that's not entirely true. If the Feminists are correct, they should be the first to realize that no gender can be accurately or authentically represented in such a system. The male point of view has never been allowed an expression of vulnerability and fear in the face of female sexuality. The way society has been constructed, a woman need only wink at another man to deeply wound her husband emotionally, psychologically, and socially. On equal grounds, where we can all tell the truth about ourselves, a male point of view is perhaps something quite new. Evil Angel stands in awed confusion and terror of female sexuality. But most importantly, it has a lot of fun doing it.

The story of Evil Angel is based on the Lilith legend of Jewish folklore. According to legend, Adam's first wife was not Eve but Lilith. Lilith demanded equality, symbolized by her refusal to take the bottom position in sex, and flew away dejected when Adam insisted he be on top. Adam then got his submissive Eve and Lilith committed herself to making miserable the children of Adam. So the themes of female-male relationships, particularly of equality and loyalty within those relationships, is built into the very legend from which Evil Angel is derived; Dutcher exploits that fully. It wouldn't be a stretch to say the whole film is a struggle to see who's on top, in this case emotionally and socially, but through sexual overpowering.

Lilith's mechanism is something like Azazel's in Fallen (1998); she's a spiritual being who can take over bodies. Azazel could take over any body, male or female, human or animal. Lilith only takes the bodies of sexy women and can only enter them when they're temporarily dead. After she commits a few murders, a private investigator (Ving Rhames) whose son has become one of her victims starts to put the pieces together. Meanwhile, Marcus (Kristopher Shepard), the paramedic, deals with his suicidal wife, Carla (Ava Gaudet), and his obsession with the saintly stab victim he tried to save. These two narrative strands lightly intersect when Carla's suicide attempts leaves her temporarily dead.

There are a few subplots running throughout. The plot is, in fact, a series of criss-crossing subplots. A major subplot is Marcus's research into the life of Emma, the saintly woman. The first time he sees her, gasping for life with multiple stab wounds, he feels connected to her. The more he looks into her life, reading her journals and talking to her priest, the more he discovers that she is indeed the perfect woman in his mind. His wife is emminently imperfect. He finds her with another man. It's important to note, as well, that she's on top. His best friend, a beautiful young paramedic, is in love with him, but he's not interested. He himself says the first time in his life he's really fallen in love is with a dead woman, Emma. Her journals reveal that she's conformed herself to a thoroughly Catholic mould of femininity, refusing her sexual urges until she finds the right man and living to serve others. To Marcus, she's the ideal wife. Carla is alive and so free to continually disappoint him; Emma can remain an ideal, untouched by the realities of human existence. Emma is easy to love because she's not real and never can be; she is, in short, his Eve. That makes his wife Carla his Lilith, the woman he rejects for her overstepping her sexual bounds and virtually diminishing his sexual potency. Carla is thus prime material to literally become Lilith, as she does.

Lilith's personality, if it can be called such, is wholly infantile, a "blind drive to annihilate those toward whom [she] feel[s] anger, to force satisfaction from those who stimulate [her], to wrench food for [herself] if only by devouring those who feed [her]."(1) With Lilith, the emphasis is certainly on the 'blind drive to annihilate' part. If she were purely and directedly misanthropic, she'd presumably just use a body to become a world leader and launch a nuclear war. She's neither disciplined nor interested enough to do that. As the legend stipulates, she is Resentment Incarnate. She feels anger toward men, toward happy couples, and toward any situation of women conforming to male standards. In one of her bodies, for instance, she works as a prostitute and purposely spreads HIV to her clients. Under the guise of wanting a starring role, she lures gonzo pornographers to a secluded place just to kill them. These are all instances where men, arguably, exploit women sexually; at least, as far as Lilith is concerned, women are too submissive in these contexts. There's something wrong, for her, with the very notion of giving men pleasure, unless it's to hurt them later.

One wonders if Dutcher had had a few arguments with militant Feminists before he wrote Evil Angel. It sometimes seems as though Lilith stands in for the whole of Feminism, which can be and has been (e.g. by Harold Bloom) seen as essentially resentful. But Lilith is not always so ideologically directed. She kills the mother of one of her previous bodies, as well as her boss from another body, for no other reason than bubbling hatred. Just as she enjoys the pleasures of life, like sex and drugs, manipulation and deception, she seems to enjoy destroying those toward whom she feels anger. There's not much else to her. As evil as she is, she's so inventively and relentlessly cruel that we almost grow to like her as we do a Freddy Krueger.

As with all true art, Evil Angel provides no answers, but only investigations. The attitudes toward women on display are not intellectual points that could have been written in an essay--not even this one, really--but a matter of the sentiments, constructed more emotionally than intellectually. Dutcher seems to be working out a lot of conflicting attitudes toward women and toward men's attitudes. On the one hand, he's dubious of traditional standards for submissive women. Marcus is clearly presented as naively, even ridiculously, traditional, not to mention necrophiliac, for his obsession with the dead saint. A position that villainizes women for not conforming to that standard is chastised by the film. Yet the film has an accusatory feeling, pointing a finger at female sexuality. Lilith is a succubus. She dominates through sex. She gets on top psychologically and socially by getting on top sexually. The men of the film are mostly kind, almost too kind. Marcus is a very sweet man who, throughout the film, has his whole life destroyed by his relationships with women he trusts. He is deceived and hurt every step of the way. Very little of it is his fault. Clara, albeit not an entirely unsympathetic character, is somewhat monstrous even before Lilith gets to her. Moreover, the private investigator, in another subplot, paternally tries to rescue a young woman (Jontille Gerard) from a life of prostitution. Both men are gentle and kind, certainly not deserving of Lilith. In some sense, the legendary Adam is an unmentioned character, symbolizing perhaps a whole history of patriarchy that created Lilith. So the essential confusion at the heart of the film is that female sexuality is an object of horror, because it makes men vulnerable and can hurt them, while at the same time viewing it as an object of horror is treated as, if prudent, also priggish, antiquated and part of the problem.

Also worthy of note is Dutcher's editing techniques. During the first half of the film all events seem to be linked in synchronicity. For instance, when Marcus reads one of Emma's journal entries about her father, Dutcher intercuts scenes of the private investigator dealing with the death of his son. There are several such cuts, often involving three lines of action. The action is unified only by ideas, commenting upon one another and revealing unspoken emotions, but never impacting one another directly. In fact, one of the most shocking aspects of Evil Angel is Dutcher's sleight-of-hand in offering what appear to be cliche narrative moves that turn out to be anything but cliche. Threads that appear certain to connect, to reach certain destined points, run off in new directions or are suddenly cut short in gleefully macabre ways, a sort of violence to the tropes as much as to the characters. As the film runs on, the synchronous editing style tapers off. I initially thought this was in service to the plot, much as Paul Leni's editing tricks in The Cat and the Canary taper off after the first twenty minutes. But it's possible Dutcher did this intentionally, giving the impression of narrative fraying, synchronicity coming apart, destiny denied.

This editing style leads into the strange nihilism in Evil Angel. The essential problem is articulated by one of the characters. If good souls go to enjoy a heaven and evil souls like Lilith can enter bodies instead of going to a hell, that is to say, if the good die young and the evil live on indefinitely, there seems to be a fundamental disorder in the world. The way obvious connections aren't met, the way cliches are intentionally denied to shock us, increases the nihilistic impression, the feel that the universe is a cruel universe where good things don't always work out, good intentions aren't always rewarded, and good people don't always get the happiest of endings. Nowhere is this nihilism so strongly realized as in the relationships between men and women. The one sign of hope is that perhaps, should Marcus survive, his encounter with Lilith may just have been what he needed; he would be freed of his Eve delusions and his depressing wife. And she may be what we the audience needed. Maybe she leaves us, men and women, a little wiser about ourselves and free to start anew. For men, perhaps it's cathartic to see an archetypally evil female the target of violence; for women, perhaps to see a dominant female sexuality render men nearly powerless.

Whatever nihilistic and anti-feminist worldview Dutcher may have been working out through his screenplay, his playfulness was certainly not affected. We're invited to laugh at and with this cruel world and its inventive monster. Dutcher clearly relishes the freedom to have as much perverse fun with his camera and narrative as he wishes. Apart from the clever editing, there's also some fun with mise-en-scene, as when ornamental swords are slyly removed and restored to a scene background, with grim jokes, and with camera angles and movements (which I sadly can't detail since the film is yet to be released on DVD). Often such a stylish picture has weak acting, but Dutcher's cast, most of whom have very few prior film credits, is excellent. Ava Gaudet is exceptional, adeptly portraying the depressive Carla half the film and the manic Lilith the other half. The real gem performance, however, is Jontille Gerard in her small supporting role as the young prostitute, exhibiting considerable emotional range. Stylishly shot, well-written, and original, Dutcher has made a horror film that's both very fun and thoughtful in Evil Angel.

1. Carol J. Clover. "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." 1987.

The New Daughter (2009) - 3/4

The old "Indian" sacred site is a familiar horror film trope. It is most memorably found in the Pet Sematary films and Poltergeist. Though The New Daughter sounds as though it would be another Evil Little Girl movie, it is in fact an Indian Burial Ground movie. The project of these movies is always to threaten an innocent, white, American family. The full wrath European conquerors have incurred by their disrespect for these children of the Earth and their sacred places is meted out to a single family and sometimes, as in Pet Sematary, that family is torn apart as a consequence. The psychological and moral implications are, of course, instances of "White guilt" and our own way of dealing with it. We give ourselves catharsis by making movies in which some wronged, technologically inferior but spiritually superior society exerts its spiritual force against a totally unprepared, materialistic family. Our sense of guilt is thus manifested, freed from subconscious repression. It's never defeated in these movies; it's rather just avoided. The Indian burial ground in Pet Sematary remains, though Creed may have survived. The sufferers learn new respect. We the audience learn new respect. And our guilt is excised. We've now been symbolically punished on the screen and, whether the evil force wins or loses, we leave with some sort of a catharsis. It's more comforting when the white American family gets a happy ending, of course. To see them actually torn apart places a burden upon the audience by refusing to once again repress the guilt. Of course, the idea that these sacred sites are festering centers of evil spiritual energy and channeled resentment are totally xenophobic notions. There's no room for reconciliation in these movies. There is only the dangerous ancient spirituality and the need to either destroy or get far away from that danger. The New Daughter displays this distrust at least as well as Pet Sematary.

The New Daughter concerns a writer and father, John James (Kevin Costner) who, since his wife has suddenly decided she wants nothing to do with her family, is left to take care of his pubescent daughter, Louisa (Ivana Baquero), and younger son, Sam (Gattlin Griffin). He buys an enormous house in a rural, New England area to be their new home. After discovering a peculiar mound on their property strange things happen and Louisa begins changing and exhibiting unhealthy interest in the mound. John's concern leads him to discover that the mound may be home to some ancient demonic entities.

What's interesting about The New Daughter is the way the influence of the burial ground coincides with budding female sexuality. There are sexual implications to the mound itself. Even the shape and name, of course, brings to mind female genitalia. But more than this, there has always been a curious relationship between female sexuality and the spirituality of Earth religions, an idea that female fertility has spiritual power. Nicolas Roeg's Puffball recently explored this theme in depth. In The New Daughter Louisa is just beginning puberty. At the same time, this mound begins changing her. As it happens, the two events are linked. The whole movie, in fact, is steeped in a mystified horror of female sexuality, not unlike what one finds in Zulawski's Possession, which is about a woman who abandons her family for an alien sexual partner. For one, the family is not just being torn apart by the influence of the burial ground (the mound), but also by the departure of the mother. It's this inexplicable event hanging outside the film's narrative: how could a woman just leave her family? The same question comes up in the previous film I reviewed, Salvage; but in Salvage there was a clear answer. There is no answer in The New Daughter. Without a mother, or 'queen', John's family seems to be falling apart despite his best efforts.

These links between the mound and female sexuality are made explicit. A very obvious metaphor involving an ant colony and its queen makes clear the sexual importance of the mound: Louisa's new sexuality makes her valuable to the mound, which, like the James family, lacks a queen. On first blush, The New Daughter might appear to be an allegory of the experience of female pubescence, like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders or Picnic at Hanging Rock. Louisa's own experience of this sexual attention and its defiling properties is hauntingly depicted when she huddles in the shower covered in mud. However, this film, as the title indicates, is primarily from a father's point of view. Costner brings a certain bewildered and beleaguered pathos to the film as the caring, self-sacrificing father, who clearly finds his new role as the lone parent overwhelming. His performance is quite enjoyable, making the most of a somewhat flat character. One does wonder why he never brings his daughter to a hospital, but this is presumably an oversight of the writers; he clearly loves his children, to the point of sometimes being unrealistically patient and sweet. He and his struggling relationship with his daughter is the heart of the film. How her sexuality affects him is the real horror. I've always wondered how it must feel for a father to see his daughter become sexually mature and with that the object of sexual interest to males. He, as a male, knows that men desire and will try to fulfill the desire to have sex with his 'little girl' for pleasure and for reproduction. That paternal horror is uniquely expressed in The New Daughter when John discovers just how important his daughter's sexuality is to the mound. This film is about a man losing his daughter. There are even two clever references to the drowning scene that opens Roeg's Don't Look Now. But in The New Daughter, his daughter remains physically present. It's her soul, as it were, that is lost to sexuality and the mound. In the mound-penetrating climax, we see a man trying to rescue his daughter from the creatures, yes, but from becoming a woman, indeed, from becoming her mom.

The relationship between the film's sexuality and the more political 'white guilt' is curiously xenophobic. Perhaps there's nothing to it; perhaps it just happened to make a good story. What we see, however, is a white girl targeted for sexual conversion and a sort of spiritual brainwashing by a race of humanoid creatures. As racism begins to fade and with it many sexual taboos, an interest in interracial experimentation has become popular amongst white women much more than it has amongst women of other races. There are those who claim this is a consequence of 'white guilt.' The father's horror at his girl being transformed through her sexual interest in the Other, a non-white and in this case non-human race, thus becomes strangely xenophobic. The film, perhaps, allows a predominantly white male audience to see their subconscious resentment at white women in interracial relationships become the object of revulsion and an object to be targeted with violent force within the film world.

Unfortunately, all of these ideas are never explored in sufficient depth. The New Daughter is certainly a film with ideas. Somewhere along the production the ideas were compromised to stick to formula. The presence of Kevin Costner, Samantha Mathis, and Ivana Baquero probably made the producers uneasy about veering from established thriller formula. Costner and Baquero have both shown themselves willing to take daring roles in thoughtful films, but they're doubtless expensive to get in one's film. Consequently, there are a lot of stock conflicts, such as the random bully at school, as well as moments obviously created for no other reason than to make the trailer. Moreover, John has to jump through the formula hoops: he contacts the previous owner of the house and initiates the 'raving warning from an old man' moment; he contacts an expert scholar who gives the end-of-the-third-act exposition of all that's been going on. These moments are ones we've seen many times before. They are unconvincing, despite director Luis Berdejo's efforts to elevate them with visual techniques; they slightly drag down what could have been a very provocative film.

As a thriller, however, The New Daughter is quite successful. Its closest kin is perhaps The Mothman Prophecies. It's not created with quite the mastery Pellington brings to The Mothman Prophecies, but it has a similarly subdued and subtle approach. Like The Mothman Prophecies, The New Daughter creates a chain of unsettling events, moments that breech the ordinariness and make the viewer uneasy. What could be a more unsettling breech of reality than to see one's own child suddenly seem something Other? As one witnesses Costner reacting to one eerie moment after another, particularly his daughter's alienation, one feels along with him increasingly disturbed rather than frightened. There aren't nearly enough quiet films these days, but The New Daughter is one. The ambient score rarely calls attention to itself, just gently pushing the quiet into unsettlingly quiet. We're allowed to rest in the isolated space of the characters, to be with them and drink in the performances. Berdejo, whose first feature this is, has a skillful and very elegant touch in crafting this gently building sense of disturbance. The final ten minutes, unfortunately, do not live up to his work during build-up, as the film suddenly becomes a high-adrenaline monster movie. The same problem afflicted another skillfully built-up film of 2009, House of the Devil. A transition from thick atmospherics to visceral action is very difficult to carry off and indeed it is not carried off in this film.

So The New Daughter is a fascinating film that should have been more fascinating. It teases with ideas, some of which it follows some way and some of which seem to be dissolved by the motion of the plot. At nearly two hours long, there was a clear effort to include a deeper exploration of its ideas. It's just unfortunate that the movement to fulfill certain formulaic requirements interfered with the delicate eerieness and themes developed in the freer parts of the film.

A Reading of Dungeons and Dragons (1983), Milestone of Television Animation

Dungeons and Dragons is the best and most important animated television series of the '80s. Yet, due to being made for television, indeed Saturday morning children's television, it has never been taken very seriously amongst critics. I believe it is worthy of being taken seriously and studied. I propose to examine it in a holistic way, looking at disparate elements such as its reflection of the cultural milieu in which it was created, ideas, themes, and the emotional effects achieved in viewers, and seeing how they complement, intersect and cohere with one another.

Part of the difficulty in analyzing a television series is that any series is usually the creation of several writers working together. There is a head writer or story editor to keep writers on track, but there is considerable leeway for writers to develop ideas in unique directions. Few series are developed with the level of planning and consistency of vision found in, say, Babylon 5. This lends any series, especially a series with multiple seasons, a sense of improvisation, each writer building off what the last contributed. Many writers do little more than create a self-contained episode with little to no impact on the larger scheme. However, some writers are more ambitious. In a series like Chris Carter's Millennium, though the first season has no definite story arc, the second season's new head writers, Glen Morgan and James Wong, find the seeds of a story arc within it and develop the material in ways Chris Carter hadn't anticipated. In fact, so little had he anticipated the development that he returned to a greater degree of control in the third season to reconcile the previous two seasons. This process of 'developing the seeds' is not unique to television in itself. Many of Shakespeare's plays are developed from the potential in other stories, for instance. Goethe's Faust and especially Faust II are developed from the potential in the Faust legend. The difference in television is that the original and the developed remain together as a single aesthetic object.

Dungeons and Dragons followed a similar path to Millennium. The first season was under the editorship of Steve Gerber and most of the episodes were written by Jeffrey Scott. These episodes are very self-contained. They allow the characters to become fully themselves and to reveal themselves in relationship to the world and each other. Each episode follows a formula. No greater pattern appears to be emerging. With the second season, Karl Geurs takes over as editor and Michael Reaves, one of the best of all writers for animated series, develops seeds of patterns from the first season into greater significance, into a full pattern leading to a final and meaningful point. It is particularly in light of Reaves's developments that Dungeons and Dragons has the value, power, and cohesion that it does. What I will be analyzing in this essay is not any particular episode, but the patterns that arise out of material in all the episodes, patterns that, while not attributable to any 'auteur,' were nevertheless recognized and developed by a few of the keener writers on the series.

Dungeons and Dragons concerns a group of six children of varying ages who have been transported through a wormhole to a planet in a distant solar system. This new world is full of magic and mythical creatures, evil and peril. An old sorceror named 'Dungeon Master' gives them each a unique magic weapon to defend themselves in 'the realm' and hopefully to find their way back home through one of the many magical portals. Each episode follows the same basic formula: The children are trying to merely get by in the realm by catching food or bathing and getting in mild danger for their troubles; dungeon Master appears out of thin air and provides gnomic advice on a new way to get home and the dangers involved; all of the characters are gung-ho, except one, Eric, who complains that Dungeon Master is needlessly unclear and sending them into danger; ultimately, they all follow Dungeon Master's directions; they do indeed encounter danger, usually in the form of archvillain Venger, an evil sorceror keen on getting their weapons; in the process of doing a good deed and fighting Venger, their way home ends up getting destroyed; Dungeon Master appears again, this time to console them or, in the third season, offer some insight in soliloquy for the benefit of the audience. Only a few episodes, written by Michael Reaves naturally, wander from this pattern and then only mildly.

Any narrative formula can be deceptively simple. Genres function upon the repetition of formulaic elements, the many possibilities within them, and the many possibilities for their subversion. The formula of a television series is no different. One of the cleverest moves from Geurs/Reaves is to provide overarching significance to the formula in a manner similar to that of The Prisoner. The formula of The Prisoner, the final episode reveals, represents the steps in a process of some elaborate psycho-social experiment. In Dungeons and Dragons, this significance hinges upon the character of Dungeon Master. As his near-omnscience gradually becomes clearer, his apparent pleasure with the disappointing results of each attempt to get home suggests the work of a cunning manipulator. However benevolent, Dungeon Master is a highly paternalistic manipulator of the first order, functioning without transparency and ostensibly permitting every negative event for some never explicitly stated greater good. While the children are under the impression that Dungeon Master genuinely intends to help them find their way home with each episode, the audience can see he is fully aware they cannot both succeed in reaching home and make morally right choices. Thus the formula each episode follows becomes a process of conditioning, so to speak, each episode representing a step in the fulfillment of Dungeon Master's plans. So what we now have to examine is what is the nature of Dungeon Master's intentions.

Roughly speaking, Dungeon Master's intentions are to transform. Firstly, the realm is beset by many injustices, is in many places bleak, fallen, and under totalitarian rule. Dungeon Master clearly has the power to right many wrongs should he so choose. Yet he chooses not to interfere. This totalitarian rule is a result of the evil tyrant, Venger. Venger is the second object Dungeon Master seeks to transform, describing Venger in "The Dragon's Graveyard" as his own mistake. His desire is to convert Venger back to good as is implicit throughout the second and third seasons and explicit in the unproduced final episode. Though Dungeon Master demonstrates in a few episodes that he is more powerful than Venger, he never takes any offensive position against him. Again, he chooses not to interfere. Thirdly, Dungeon Master seeks to transform the children. Since Dungeon Master refuses to directly interfere with either of these three objects, it's clear what he desires is not just transformation, but a sort of self-transformation. This self-transformation is centered upon and begins with the children.

The most important concept for the children is 'home'. In each episode they seek a way home. Home is the main motivation for any of the activities they perform in the realm. It's also the reward Dungeon Master holds out when he sends them on errands. He is not merely withholding from them his knowledge that they won't make it home, he's actively deceiving them for what he perceives as their greater good. At the end of both "The Dragon's Graveyard" and "Cave of the Fairie Dragons", Dungeon Master reveals, to the audience only, that his interpretation of the concept 'home' differs from the children's. The children, of course, have in mind the place they were raised and their family. Dungeon Master, however, has a more existential interpretation of 'home.' So where the children see themselves as failing to get home each episode, Dungeon Master begins, with "The Dragon's Graveyard," to reveal that he's leading them into a sort of spiritual home. In "The Dragon's Graveyard," Hank has the opportunity to kill Venger but spares his life. Dungeon Master claims, in soliloquy, that this is their "first step home." At the end of "Cave of the Fairie Dragons," the penultimate episode of the series, when Eric expresses satisfaction in sacrificing their way home to help the dragons, Dungeon Master, again in soliloquy, states that they are in fact closer to home than ever. Evidently Dungeon Master's equivocating. What does he mean by 'home'?

He seems to have in mind the realm itself. This is where the transformation of the realm, Venger, and the children converge. As the children show self-sacrifice and right injustices in their attempts to get home, they make the realm a better place. Moreover, by having Venger continually encounter the good young ones, Venger is being taken on a course towards becoming good. Dungeon Master's schemes are occasionally designed with the express intention of pairing Venger with the children. In "The Garden of Tardos," Dungeon Master's gnomic advice indicates they must work with Venger. In "The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn," Dungeon Master clearly relishes having Venger stand beside his pupils, directly beside Eric incidentally, to fight a greater enemy. In the unproduced finale, "Requiem," the children succeed in converting Venger to good. Since Venger is the source of most evil in the realm, his transformation and the transformation of the realm coincide.

Thus, the action of the children represents a fundamental aspect of humanity. Animals, through evolution, adapt to their environments. Humans, however, adapt their environments to themselves. We don't find homes; we make homes. All of us, in every day life, exert influence on the physical reality around us, including other people, to make it more hospitable to our needs and desires. In Dungeons and Dragons, a group of humans from our world is set into a hostile world and through their actions they transform it into a hospitable world, a world they can potentially call home. So the action of transforming Venger and of transforming the realm coincides, in Dungeon Master's view, with the discovery of home.

Of course, in the children's conception of home, it is not merely a physical place. Their families are also left behind. Dungeon Master's plan seems to include, as well, making them find a family in each other. Eric, it's revealed, has always been neglected by his wealthy family. Amongst his friends he's never neglected, no matter how irritating they find him. As the series runs on, they become increasingly tolerant toward him. In "Citadel of Shadows," for instance, Diana only says 'Eric's just having one of his days,' when he's quite unpleasant to Sheila. He, likewise, becomes increasingly loyal to them. In the same episode, he later risks himself to protect Sheila. In the second season episode "Day of the Dungeon Master," Eric was willing to remain behind in the realm in order to send them home. This is quite a change from the first season episode "Eye of the Beholder," where they expressed surprise that Eric was even willing to use his magic shield to save them. It's not clear if they were even friends before arriving in the realm, but the disparity of ages suggests that they were not. They have simply learned, as the series progressed, to accept one another despite or even because of their differences. This, too, seems to be an aspect of finding home.

There is, moreover, an aspect of social commentary to Dungeon Master's concept of home. The '80s was a time of economic prosperity, of capitalistic success. People were free to indulge in materialistic whims like never before--except perhaps in the '20s. The sexual revolution and the women's rights movement had just unleashed unprecedented freedoms and now, in the '80s, those freedoms could finally be enjoyed. New technologies, like VHS and video game consoles, brought whole new forms of entertainment into the home. It became a bright, flashy, highly materialistic, morally bankrupt free-for-all. This milieu was home for the children of Dungeons and Dragons as well as the series original audience. Eric, coming from inordinately wealthy parents, represents that milieu most of all. An issue never quite explored in the series, but I believe to be implied, is that Dungeon Master is responsible for the children's sudden transfer to the realm. He takes them out of the materialistic world of the '80s and sets them in a harsh, dangerous, primitive world, where they have to struggle just to catch their own food and where around every corner something seems to want to destroy them. By learning how to fight for life and transform their world around them, they are reconnecting with an aspect of what it means to be human that has been lost in modern society. They are also reconnecting with an altruistic, purer aspect of humanity buried under materialism. In the first season episode "In Search of the Dungeon Master," Eric actually splits off from the group rather than help them find Dungeon Master. In the the third season episode "Cave of the Fairie Dragons," he's pleased to sacrifice his way home to help others. In this interpretation, the home Dungeon Master teaches them to find is wherever they are, with whatever they have. He's teaching them to appreciate what they have, the simple delights of one another's company and the joys of a world unsullied by modern technology.

Perhaps an even more abstract and misty notion of home is involved here. In "Citadel of Shadow," Venger's sister Karena is freed from her evil nature and, when asked what she can do for the group in return, is told her friendship is sufficient. At this moment, Dungeon Master tells her, "Welcome home." Katherine Lawrence wrote the final three episodes of the series, excluding the unproduced finale from Michael Reaves. Her writing is almost as good as Reaves's. There is reason to suspect this "Welcome home" indicates Dungeon Master's conception of home. It appears to have to do with friendship and goodness, being able to love and be loved. So perhaps the freedom from materialism and the selfishness it engenders is intended to itself be some form of 'home.'

It's worth noting, as well, that Eric is the most important character in the series, forming a triad with Dungeon Master and Venger. He is in some sense the protagonist of a subconsciously-running bildungsroman plot. The five other children are flat, one-dimensional characters. Bobby is the hot-tempered young one. Sheila is the needy but supportive teen girl. Diana is the independent tomboy. Hank is the fearless leader. Presto, though slightly more developed and exhibiting greater variety in his personality, is mostly the clumsy nerd. Presto's magic hat is perhaps responsible for elevating him, as the hat seems to work on purely subconscious principles, bringing into being not what Presto consciously desires, but rather some solution from a standpoint of pure lateral thinking. At any rate, these five are all eager to do good and never exhibit any disrespect toward Dungeon Master. The only interior conflicts that affect them are those directly pertaining to their roles and a single associated character trait. For instance, Hank's only concern is with leadership and his only internal conflicts arise when he believes he's not succeeding as a leader. Eric alone is fully human, his conflicts more real. He continues to go along with the group, but is always raising questions about the validity of their missions, of Dungeon Master's advice, or regarding the choices taken. That's not to say he's a great human being. But he's a fully-fledged character and with being fully-fledged comes flaws. It's important that he's weak; that he's not a great person to begin with. It is in him that Dungeon Master's process of transformation primarily takes effect.

Eric's interactions with Dungeon Master and Venger are both telling. He often questions Dungeon Master's advice and motives in front of him, initially rejects the role of cavalier in which Dungeon Master casts him, and expresses plainly in the first season that he'd rather go home than help anyone. Much of Dungeon Master's advice is aimed particularly at Eric and indeed several missions, particularly "Day of the Dungeon Master," in which Eric is temporarily made dungeon master, seem designed to benefit Eric more than anyone else. The progress of the whole group is centered in Eric. It is consequently Eric more than anyone else who annoys Venger. His silliness and comical behaviour infuriates Venger. Where Eric likes to be respected, he's strangely resigned to humiliations and rebukes. Venger demands reverance and fear, loathes anyone who makes light of his presence, and any apparent show of impudence. Eric's goofiness and lack of restraint in speech thus make him the usual target for Venger's rages. Not coincidentally, it is Eric who is placed beside Venger to fight a mutual threat in "The Dungeon at the Heart of Dawn"; and it is Eric who restores Venger to good in "Requiem." The series is in some sense about Eric's progress into a better person, with a new family who accepts him, and a new home in his role of helping others in the realm.

Eric and Venger may be bound as well in a psychosexual rivalry for paternal affection. Venger is both an Oedipus and a Prodigal Son. On the one hand he is scheming to take over the realm from his own father, Dungeon Master. However, all of his plans obsessively involve taking the magic weapons from the children. On a purely narrative level, he justifies his pursuit as an integral step to taking full control of the realm. However, there is another sense in which he is striving to displace the new objects of his father's affection. Dungeon Master has essentially adopted these children. Eric has the position of the younger sibling to Venger. By taking the weapons from the children, he takes away the affection his father has shown them. The older sibling is motivated, in psychoanalysis, buy envy and anger, sometimes fantasizing the murder of the younger sibling. Since Karena is Venger's sister, she must also be Dungeon Master's daughter. When he tells her "Welcome home," it therefore has the very straightforward meaning of welcoming her back to his family. The children finding home and Venger finding home thus become co-extensive events. This interpretation makes home more personal to Dungeon Master: home is his family, both the children he has begotten and the children he has adopted. This does not discount the previous interpretations of 'home,' of course, since that conception of home does appear to be involved in being a child of Dungeon Master's.

Dungeon Master's approach to home is closely related to the emotional force of the series. Watching the series within a short period of time rather than over months or years strongly impressed upon me the sense of delight in the realm's simplicity and the closeness of the friends. The modern world is terribly complicated and the human spirit sometimes feels diluted in an ocean of excessive choice. In Dungeons and Dragons, these children, albeit very different people, stick together and learn to love one another. Despite difficult situations, they support one another. They really only have each other in that world and there's something beautiful in that, a simplicity we don't find in our own lives. We're too free in our modern world to throw aside someone who doesn't quite fit our tastes or standards, too free to select our friends to be just like us. How terribly boring; how terrible for one's character. Yet in a world like this, it is no easy task to socialize with those who are Other. They're not interested. They might be in a nightmarish world full of evil wizards and dragons, however. I must admit I've fallen a little in love with Eric.

Surrounding the pleasures of the comradery is the simplicity of that world. Though they are in profound danger much of the time, they have no real duties. Dungeon Master sends them on missions for the way home, but in between this there is no pressure on them except to keep finding food and shelter. They don't have to seek jobs, or write a thesis, or visit their parents, or accept facebook friend requests; they don't have to worry about reputations or rivalry or romance. They've been taken out of the web of duties and brought to a world of self-reliance. There they always know what they must do and, when they have nothing to do, they may do what they like. And, of course, they always have each other to do it with. The pleasures of our world are manifold, but as one watches Dungeons and Dragons, the alternative looks very sweet indeed. They have whole new horizons and perhaps endless time to do see strange sights, meet new people, and perform heroic deeds all the while. I couldn't help but desire to be there amongst the children, to have the freedom and the comradery.

So within the formulaic episodes of Dungeons and Dragons a process of transformation for the children, Venger, and the realm takes place according to Dungeon Master's plans. There is a certain moral ambiguity involved. Although the world of Dungeons and Dragons is ostensibly dualistic, by which I mean there is a clear distinction between good and evil, those who are good and those who are evil are never entirely and unwaveringly such. Venger can be transformed to good. Dungeon Master, although wholly benevolent, still allows the children to fall into life-threatening danger time and again for the sake of his project. If his project is to organize their actions to transform the realm into a just world, resembling the moral rectitude of democratic earth without the complications of political systems and technology, if, that is, he cares about the realm, why has he allowed it, over the course of a thousand years, to fall into such a beleaguered state? All those who suffer under Venger's hand could, apparently, be saved by Dungeon Master. Has he truly allowed the world to come to such a state just for the sake of the children and Venger? This perhaps reflects the theistic notion that god works in 'mysterious ways.' Along with that theistic notion is the notion that god does not interfere so much as inspires. Perhaps the realm of Dungeons and Dragons is a Judeo-Christian world where the son of its god chose evil over good. Venger is indeed Dungeon Master's son. But this is speculation, matters of interest that arise as one watches, questions for which there are no answers. Were there answers, it wouldn't be ambiguity, of course.

To sum up, what makes Dungeons and Dragons such a fascinating and important animated series is the way its writers were able to use its formula to develop a consistant critique of '80s materialistic culture and dualistic propaganda through one of the essential tools of that culture, the television. It does so not just through the thematic development of the notion of 'home,' but also through the complementary emotional texture created in the experience of the characters, the world they inhabit and their progress through it to a redefinition of 'home'. I would be remiss not to mention that this emotional texture is in part created through the visual construction of that world, the stunning work of the animators. Much talent was involved in the creation of Dungeons and Dragons; it is with folly that it is neglected as an object of aesthetic appreciation.

Salvage (2009) - 3.5/4

During and just after the Second World War we had nearly infinite confidence in our governments. Well, those who weren't living in Germany did, at any rate. Victory inspired optimism. That optimism quickly soured, however. In America HUAC, the Cold War, the assassination of Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and amongst other things, inspired a lack of confidence in their own government to administer justly. Conspiracy theories began to arise. Curiously, those elected to office began to decrease in quality, almost as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Programs like The X-Files and similarly-themed films were possible in an atmosphere of accepted distrust. It had become more acceptible to believe one's own government as the enemy, to believe it had nothing of its own people's interests in its agenda, but was operating on a purely exploitational schema; it had become obliviously conservative to genuinely believe one's government is honest and working for the greater good. Then 9/11 happened and President Obama was elected. America setting the lead, it has once again become acceptible to hold the view that the enemy is on the outside.

There are still many who don't subscribe to that discourse and Lawrence Gough, who wrote and directed Salvage, is apparently one of them. Salvage is not necessarily a political film; but it uses a horror structure that is essentially political. It's a hysteria-enforce movie. A dad drops off his reluctant teenage daughter at her estranged mother's home on Christmas Eve. Enraged by her finding her mother mid-coitus, she hides at the neighbour's home. Before her mother, Beth (Neve McIntosh), can do anything about it, soldiers swarm the neighbourhood, shoot a knife-wielding neighbour, and force everyone to stay in their homes. While the neighbourhood is being torn apart, Beth struggles against the military forces and the anomalous Threat to get to her daughter and protect her

The first glimpse of a hysteria-enforce movie is the finale of The Night of the Living Dead, when the zombie panic is settled by mindless enforcement, in the guise of militia, of the standard order. Warning Sign (1985), Rabid (1977), Shivers (1975), and The Happening (2008) are all roughly hysteria-enforce movies. And the recently remade Romero film The Crazies (1973) is perhaps the ultimate hysteria-enforce movie. The structure of the hysteria-enforce movie begins with mass-panic and violence. Some virus or supernatural force is making normal people in a normal community dangerous to one another. The military, or some form of official security force, storms in to take control and ends up doing more harm than good. Usually the point of view for the story is a few chosen protagonists who become victims of both the Threat and the enforcement. Hysteria-enforce movies rarely have happy endings. It's a structure that derives from and perverts that of '50s science fiction monster movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), where a monster causes terror and must be destroyed by the military. Of course, this structure goes back to King Kong (1933) and even the peasants-with-pitchforks trope found in Frankenstein (1931). In those '50s movies, the monster is from outside the (human) community and the military is always justified, if callous, in their actions. They're optimistic movies. Hysteria-enforce movies are not optimistic. They're profoundly cynical. The Threat is now not from outside the community, but from inside. We ourselves can become the Threat and by the same token the enforcers who were once our heroes become our enemies and thus also the Threat. These films thus naturally critique official operations, such as the military, law enforcement, and the political institutions that govern them. They are sceptical of both the competence and integrity of those who are supposed to protect and govern us.

Gough is clearly aware of the political implications in the structure of Salvage and uses them to great effect. The film plays with the expectations of the audience and the characters. The military presence in Salvage is without doubt a dubious one. They're there to protect in some sense, but somewhat as an afterthought; their real purpose is control, not just of the threat but of civilians as well. They are clearly very willing to kill civilians to maintain their control, making them as much if not more of a threat than the Threat. A neat microcosm of political distrust occurs when a soldier tries to convince the hysterical civilians that he's protecting them from Al Qaeda. The use of a moment of hysteria to misrepresent one's intentions positively is just how governments operate. Salvage thus seems to be both a '50s monster movie and a modern hysteria-panic movie at once. It took me to midway through the film before I figured out whether Salvage is more The Crazies or more 20 Million Miles to Earth. I won't tell you which it is or if it's a clever hybrid. Gough works hard to manipulate the tropes of the structure and create ambiguity. Either way, Salvage exhibits the cynicism of hysteria-enforce movies.

The strongest and most powerful aspect to Salvage, however, is how Gough tapers the cynicism. He offers an antidote to the military intervention and cynicism: love. In total contrast to the harsh paternalism of the military is the love a mother feels for her child. Once the Threat asserts itself and the military arrives, we are with Beth from beginning to end. We see her struggles to get to her daughter, her unrelenting courage in the face of danger. She and the man she was found in bed with, Kieran (Shaun Dooley) are both parents and are both carved out as emotionally real beings. As Kieran's children aren't in danger, his main goal is to survive. Beth's goal is to reach her daughter and protect her at all costs. By presenting the film entirely from Beth's perspective, Salvage mounts a powerful indictment against ungrateful children. Parents, especially mothers, sacrifice so much of their lives, energy, and being for their children and only ask for a little love in return. When we're teens we recognize this so little, enrapt in a sinister ecstasy of egocentrism that permits no perspective outside our own chemical self-importance. And when we're adults and the chemicals have receded, has the egocentrism? Time is short and lives fleeting. The light of clear perception rarely shines through the clouds of hardened self-love. Take the time to tell your mother you love her; let her know those sacrifices have been appreciated before it's too late. Why not do it now? Happy Mother's Day, Mom: I appreciate it all, what I know and what I don't. Happy Mother's Day to all mothers.

To return to the review, Beth is nevertheless not presented in an entirely flattering light. She was screwing some guy when her daughter arrived on Christmas Eve. She moreover seems to exhibit no maternal extinct for a distressed girl who isn't her daughter, leaving her behind to die. Beth's moral complexity is one of the most interesting aspects of the film. She is at once admirable and contemptible, a hero and a very selfish woman. Some of her vices can perhaps be attributed to Patriarchal expectations of how women, especially mothers, should be. She's a woman who has chosen a career over family life, casual sex over a husband. But some of her vices are pure moral failings. Neve McIntosh, well-known to UK horror fans from her performance as Fuschia in the Gormenghast miniseries, is able to carry those ambiguities extraordinarily well.

With Salvage, Gough has achieved with Romero couldn't in The Crazies. Romero is a director of ideas and his characters enact his satirical ideas as well can be expected. But Romero has difficulty humanizing, reaching the emotional. Gough clearly does not share this difficulty. His satire isn't as relentless or as clever as Romero's, but Salvage is still a clever film and, most of all, an emotionally powerful film.

ClownStrophobia (2009) - 1.5/4

ClownStrophobia is, I suppose, a tale of two psychiatric patients, one of whom is creatively known as Patient X and the other is 'Snuffles' the murderous clown. Both patients are under the care--and I use the term 'care' very lightly--of Dr. Janelle Wethers (Suzanne Lauren) and her own psychiatrist, Dr. Boyd (Rocco George). Dr. Wethers suffers from coulrophobia because her brother is Snuffles and he killed their parents. To overcome her fear, she concocts some sort of conspiracy that is never wholly explained. She manipulates Dr. Boyd into bringing a group of four juvenile delinquents, all of whom share her coulrophobia and a link to Patient X, to the asylum for a therapy session and then into releasing Snuffles. Ostensibly her intentions are to cure everyone of coulrophobia, but it becomes clear she has something much more sinister in mind. Meanwhile, a busty nurse monitors Patient X, who delivers emotionally unsettling monologues.

I found it interesting how the psychiatric hospital in ClownStrophobia hasn't been closed down. It is the most bizarrely unprofessional place. Patient X's nurse continually resists X's delusions. Even a first year nurse would know that one should never do that. It takes years of therapy to work through delusions. They must be humoured temporarily. Then there's the staff. They play cards with prescription drugs as ante. They're also permitted to have a costume party in the asylum. A few confusing scenes suggests they torture patients for kicks. Then there's Dr. Wethers's treatment of the delinquents. She shakes her head in exasperation when one well-mannered boy in the group explains how he lost his temper and struck his principal. It's very odd. Perhaps this was all intended as sly satire on the part of writer-director Geraldine Winters. Either way, it creates a sense of the total incompetence of those charged with the care of the mind, their total obliviousness when dealing with the very subject of their expertise, the human mind. They're mad psychiatrists, like the lunatics playing doctor in Peer Gynt.

There have been a few mad psychiatrist films lately. Scorsese's Shutter Island, DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum, and now ClownStrophobia, all involve conspiracies designed by those charged with the science of the mind. Ordinarily medical doctors were the cinematic mad scientists, taking liberties with the body, taking apart the body. The social need to address medical science with paranoia seems to have subsided in favour of a need to so address psychiatric science. Perhaps fifteen years of programs like E.R., Grey's Anatomy, and so forth have made us more trusting of doctors than ever. Psychiatrists haven't been so vindicated. Many have a fundamental distrust of them. Those who can heal can harm.

Although the concept of a mad person of science is still present, the shift to a science of the mind has transformed the mode with which the madness is expressed. The traditional mad scientist is extremely antisocial, concerned only with his experiments. Colin Clive's portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein (1931) is as a man so obsessed with science he risks losing his fiancee. The mad scientist's experiments are private, obsessively private, admitting no external examiners unless necessary. Usually this is because their experiments are either so ridiculed or so reviled in academic and social circles that they've become recluses. One sees this in Frankenstein, WereWolf of London (1935), The Devil-Doll (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Les yeux sans face (1960), "The Incredible Doktor Markesan" in Boris Karloff's Thriller (1962), and nearly every other mad scientist film. The transgressive experiments become objects of horror in their creation, where, as in Les yeux sans face and The Body Snatcher (1945), people must be murdered for the sake of the experiment; and they become objects of horror in their expansion beyond the control of the scientist, where, as in Frankenstein, Re-Animator (1985), the experiments themselves begin terrorizing and even killing.

Mad psychiatrist films lack this isolationism. The psychiatrist is in an inherently social position. The object of a psychiatrist's study is not something that can be taken to an isolated lab and taken apart. The psychiatrist must be in a position of trust and with that of power. The experiments of the psychiatrists in all three, Shutter Island, The Pit and the Pendulum, and ClownStrophobia, involve a conspiracy involving multiple people. The experiment is a social one, with society itself and the individual minds of those acting within society as the objects of experimentation as opposed to a tangible substance. The experimenter remains coldly above society, a master manipulator arranging people in her project as Dr. Frankenstein arranges body parts. The experiment doesn't need to become an object of horror, as it is already an object of horror. As countless Big Brother films and series like The X-Files show, the project of manipulation en masse is already feared. So if mad scientists films condensed a general fear about what blasphemous abominations scientists could be developing behind the closed doors of their laboratories, mad psychiatrist films condense a fear about the abominations psychiatrists could be making of us before our very eyes, under our very noses. In a society saturated in anti-depressants perhaps this distrust isn't unwarranted.

On the other hand, the psychiatrist may just be semiotically valuable. In films where the terrors of the mind are expressed in the physical world, a psychiatrist is the ideal mediator and even instigator for the transfer of a subconscious nightmare into an experienced reality. In some sense this is what's going on in ClownStrophobia. Janelle's conspiracy is never totally clear, but her experiment relies upon manifesting the object of horror, the clown, in the world in the hopes of ultimately not just repressing it as has been done for years but of finally destroying it. Winters puts considerable care into making the clown and clown-fear motif pervasive. Both Patient X and Dr. Wethers's brother are obsessed with clowns. Dr. Wethers's father, who founded the asylum, was a birthday clown. Patient X's parents were, she claims, circus clowns. Patient X's nurse, Dr. Winters, and all the juvenile delinquents are afraid of clowns. One of the delinquents even claims, rather foolishly, that clowns steal souls. Janelle's experiment makes the clown-fearers face their fear in the body of the clown-obsessed in situations where they must destroy or be destroyed by the object of fear. Her experiment also involves Patient X somehow. All of the juvenile delinquents are supposed to have a connection to her, but in actuality only one is revealed to have a relationship to her and this relationship is never given any significance.

The whole experiment is, unfortunately, fundamentally confused. Snuffles the killer clown naturally begins killing everyone. If the plan is to cure anyone, well, they aren't afraid of clowns anymore: they're dead. If the plan is to hope the delinquents will kill Snuffles, she must be a gambling woman, because it's highly unlikely that they would kill him. The moment that should tie everything together, when we learn the relationship of Patient X to another character, only emphasizes how dissipated the film's events are. The character's relationship to Patient X contributes nothing to the narrative's action and in fact no characters are privy to the information. The idea of an unrealized relationship can be found in Picnic at Hanging Rock as well. But where it has a purpose in Picnic, it is merely a miscalculation in ClownStrophobia. The moment is obviously supposed to be important. That importance, however, evaporates under the slightest scrutiny. The character's actions and fate all occur by chance, the relationship explaining nothing, concluding nothing.

The best scenes in ClownStrophobia, incidentally, are those with Patient X (Ebru Yonak). Winters's does her best writing for these scenes. But the real value in these scenes comes from Ebru Yonak. Yonak's performance is unsettling and powerful. Her muscular control, vocal command, and delivery is exquisite. She caused me genuine unease as I watched, waiting for her to explode. Everything she says sounds like she's trying to restrain a flood of raw emotion, whether she's speaking threateningly of dark secrets or meekly requesting her nurse's pantyhose. Yonak is easily the most talented person involved in ClownStrophobia. In these scenes Winters suggests that the rest of the film may be in Patient X's mind. Janelle shares the clown-father and Snuffles the clown-obsession with Patient X. They could both be parts of her subconscious life. The rhyming nature of the film's conclusion further suggests this may be the case. Unfortunately, the unclarity of the writing leaves this merely a possibility and one that isn't developed enough to have much significance. It's never really clear what Winters is trying to suggest or if she knows herself. From what I understand, she wrote the script as they went along. That explains a lot. The possibility is also suggested that Patient X is the real Janelle Wethers. There are a lot of suggestions in ClownStrophobia, but nothing more.

Clarity is not always necessary in a movie. David Lynch's recent films, especially INLAND EMPIRE, have been models of unclarity. They would have been weakened by clarity, in fact. But if a film's plot elements or intentions are fundamentally unclear, the film must cater to alternative modes of appreciation. Lynch's films have strong emotional appeal and are visually and aurally powerful. Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery, which is another very unclear movie, offers ideas and viscerality. Experiments using weak narratives or no scripts at all have their place, and that place is to give space to raw performance or visual experimentation. ClownStrophobia does not have performers, save for Ebru Yonak, who can carry raw, improvisational performance. Nor are the characters other than Patient X given any material to create powerful performances. Many lines, such as "Don't you touch him!" and "Don't say that!" are heavily repeated. The only other performance to stand out is, for its camp value, Rocco George's turn as Dr. Boyd. Moreover, the visuals in ClownStrophobia are not only mundane, but frequently incompetent, as when the tops of heads are removed by the frame and some characters linger half out of frame. It does offer gorey deaths but with nowhere near the creativity of Fulci or H.G. Lewis. Rather they resemble the kills in Mardi Gras Massacre. ClownStrophobia's main focus is clearly the web of mysteries Winters tries to weave and unfortunately this web is constructed too lazily to make an enjoyable movie.