November is always a month my wife and I look forward to. Sure, for us horror zonks, October is the Halloween month. And we always watch a series of good movies. But sometimes we get bored of quality. We don't take it for granted--we get bored of it. Quality is always the same and all too stable, unless it's accompanied by a genius like Roman Polanski. But 'bad' movies are unpredictable, bubbling over with the unconscious, and capable of achieving greatness even without genius--or perhaps it's just a different kind of genius. That's where the November Turkey Challenge comes in. Hosted by Mr. Zombie CPA on the IMDb horror board, the Turkey Challenge is a race to watch as many 'bad' movies (rated lower than 4.5 on IMDb) as you can in a month.
My wife and I deliberately began the challenge on a risky note. We tried Dying God, a poorly-rated film from a new director. All we knew to expect was Lance Henriksen. What we got was a perverse, gritty detective movie about an Amazonian demon that rapes women to death. All the detective and monster-rape cliches are there in abundance and they come together to make a fairly entertaining SOV movie. As always, we asked ourselves, 'Why is it rated so low?' That our first movie raised that question boded well.
From there, we moved on to some 'turkey' favorites, namely, Roberta Findlay, Fred Olen Ray, and David DeCoteau. Roberta's movies are always bizarre, incoherent, and in a world of their own, but peculiarly entertaining. Blood Sisters, the only of her horror films we hadn't seen, proved her worse, however--and that was the end of our Findlay for the month. The Oracle and Lurkers still come recommended, though.
DeCoteau came to our rescue with his series of made-in-one-day-in-his-personal-mansion-with-a-series-of-moderately-attractive-twinks-in-their-underwear movies, 1313. Cougar Cult was the first. We were dazzled by the resurrection of scream queens Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, and Michelle Bauer, and asked ourselves, 'Which one aged like fine wine, and which like an abandoned grape in a Frenchman's underpants?' Quigley seemed to have had some work done--I don't recall her canteloupes being quite so...canteloupey. Weren't they more like peaches before? They all looked good. I can't pick. I couldn't--I was distracted by the incredible werecougar transformation sequences. Who needs elaborate practical effets when you can just paste an non-animated gif image on screen, riht? Screw American Werewolf in London. Watch Cougar Cult.
Fred Olen Ray, however, was more our savior. He is every year, really. His Paul Naschy epic, Tomb of the Werewolf (2004) was a delightful fusion of two very different aesthetics, namely Ray's b-movie, T'n'A-fests, and Naschy's bonkers werewolf movies. My wife loved it. I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed Phantom Empire a lot more--a rewatch for me, but a very pure Fred Olen Ray film: it follows likable, goofy characters thrown into a confusing adventure-horror-sci-fi-fantasy plot that they joke their way out of while exposing plenty of tits along the way. Witch Academy followed. While a very enjoyable film, particularly Robert Vaughn's portrayal of the devil, it's one of those films from the end of Ray's really creative movies, closer to Evil Toons than to Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.
I, however, gave myself a mega-dose of Ray's creative, '80s epics on my own. As my wife slept, I ingested The Tomb (1986), Scalps (1983), Alienator (1990), Bad Girls from Mars (1990), and my favorite, Beverly Hills Vamp (1989). Watching Beverly Hills Vamp, I realized it was one of those few films that gives me true joy--a desert island movie, a cheer-up movie, a watch over-and-over movie. Whether it's Eddie Deezen's flailing-arm approach to emoting, the 'this isn't going to be a habit with you' woman, the bizarre masochistic butler, the sexy vampire babes, or the unique vampire hunting team of Deezen, Robert Quarry, and Jay Richardson, I don't know--but I love it.
I would also be remiss not to note another 'savior' of 'bad' filmmaking, Mr. Jim Wynorski, the truest disciple of Roger Corman. His career followed pretty much the same trajectory as Ray's. I'm convinced Fred Olen Ray's creative arc started downward just when he teamed up with Wynorski, actually. Fred just couldn't do titty movies the way Wynorski could--Wynorski's somehow more convincing. Not of This Earth, a Corman remake, is one of the best b-movies ever made and watching it thrilled me. The made-for-SyFy epics, Bone Eater and Pirahnaconda were just silly fun. Cleavagefield was rubbish, but amusingly so.
What really makes the Turkey Challenge, however, is not revisting old budies like Ray and Wynorski. It's meeting new friends. And if there's one I did make this challenge, it was definitely Jeff Leroy. I knew nothing about this filmmaker before last month--though I had heard of Werewolf in a Woman's Prison--but I gave him a shot entirely on the basis of--well, I liked the title of his movie, Creepies. It's fun to say. Creepies. Creepies turned out to be a fun, ambitious, giant insect movie. Anyone with Leroy's budget wouldn't have tried the giant spider vs tank warfare he went for, but he did--and it works mostly due to his enthusiasm. Creepies 2 was pretty much the same thing, just a lot more, with pretty much the same budget. It's a fantastically fun homage to Harryhausen, Godzilla, and giant insect movies. Werewolf in a Woman's Prison is also an homage to various b-movie subgenres, but is ultimately a much more mature work. Like An American Werewolf in London crossed with Caged Heat, it's every bit as exciting, salacious, and enjoyable as the title promises, with great practical effects and some nice tits--especially on this one Mexican girl. Leroy keeps her in the movie a lot longer than justified, bless him.
Some other interesting acquaintances were Jeffrey Scott Lando, whose Alien Incursion, rated a whopping 1.9, is actually a pretty fun alien-beasts-attacking-idiots-in-the-woods movie. Bill Rebane, the outdoorsman-cum-b-movie auteur who made the apocalyptically boring Monster-a-Go-Go--a film not unlike getting one's face dragged through mud--turns out he made a good movie about an old American town with a haunted past, Demons of Ludlow--check it out. Richard Friedman. We started by watching Dark Wolf, his werewolf epic made in the 2000s. A sensual, arty, and meandering werewolf movie that's overlong and tries hard to create its own mythology. It has its moments. We were plenty surprised to find his career began in the '80s with the extremely goofy Doom Asylum--like a National Lampoon horror movie made for $500. We also watched Phantom of the Mall, which is somewhere between Dark Wolf and Doom Asylum and is every bit as uneven as that sounds. It also contains ample Pauly Shore.
A somewhat less interesting acquaintance is James Nguyen. The kind of acquaintance you snub on the street, because he'll just keep talking to you about his haemorrhoids, even though you just told him you're on your way to your little girl's first dance recital. You might know him as 'the Birdemic guy.' Because he made Birdemic. A very bad boy-meets-girl movie, involving the blandest, most robotic human simulacra, that gets interrupted by some terrible animated gifs of eagles he found on google image search. The movie ends when Adobe Premiere crashed. You can learn all about it in my upcoming interview with Jimmy N., "Nguyen Nowhere: The True Story of Birdemic."
But the excitement of the Turkey Challenge, unfortunately, does peter out about halfway through the month. The unconventional starts to become the norm, I start craving a good western, and my wife insists we play a video game instead. We still enjoyed a few Charles Band movies--The Dead Want Women and Evil Bong II being recommended--and the frustratingly bleak Wrong Turn 4 and 5 movies--why are those damned inbred hicks so invincible? shouldn't they have trouble standing up? They can't learn multiplication tables to save their lives, but they can rig elaborate Saw-esque traps? Shouldn't they spend all day biting the callouses that formed a natural boot over their feet? I dunno, maybe it's just me. But the challenge did end on the pleasant note of Haunted High, a Jeffrey Scott Lando made-for-SyFy haunted highschool movie. Best part of the movie? The fat computer nerd. Can't get enough of that guy.
As always, we come out of the Turkey challenge renewed, refreshed, with a new appreciation for quality, genius, animated gifs, and tits. Anyone who hasn't done the Turkey Challenge yet, I invite you to participate, see with new eyes--it's an education and a fun, unpredictable ride. For those who have participated, thank you for being my Comrades-in-Arms.
Until next November, stay hungry!
Notes from the Turkeyground II: Another Month of Bad Movies
Slices of Life (2010) - 3/4
Slices of Life is a horror anthology film containing three stories, all directed by Anthony G. Sumner. Each story addresses an aspect of life--work, home, and sex--and are bound by a frame story in which an amnesiac girl starts to remember her own life.
Anthology horror movies are very difficult, especially on a low budget. The short horror film is a difficult craft in itself. Justifying the inclusion and order of the short films in an anthology often appears arbitrary. Sumner's approach shows a degree of thought and seriousness, as well as familiarity with the genre, that is of an unusually high order and these virtues are consistently present in each story.
The first, and best, of the stories, "W.O.R.M." concerns a sadsack mailroom clerk who uses experimental technology to make people be his friend. He's actually a rather likeable guy, thanks to a fine performance by Jack Guasta. But he has the misfortune of inhabiting a kafkaesque corporate office that rewards jerks and bullies exclusively. Sumner crafts this environment so expertly and believably that the eruption of a Cronenbergian sex-and-violence nightmare into this environment seems an appropriate and fitting end to its denizens.
The second story, "Amber Alert," is a well-crafted ghost story in which a pregnant woman begins to receive visitations from a kidnapped little girl. The outcome is a bit predictable and the telling too reliant on digital effects, though they are at times beautifully inventive. The depiction of an African American male may strike some viewers as either amusingly or lamentably racist.
The final story, "Pink Snapper," concerns a brother-and-sister duo who leave their abusive uncle and stumble upon a mansion in the woods where a girl is chained up in the basement and a body has been butchered in the bathtub. "Pink Snapper" is an excellently structured suspense-and-gorefest with a Hennenlotter sort of vibe. It works primarily on a visceral level, and it works very well. The practical effects in this segment are particularly praiseworthy.
The films are ordered almost like a work of classical music, the first movement exciting, the second slow and somber, and the third fast and playful. I found the momentum of the film highly engaging, making the heavily-allegorical conclusion, venial if a little misplaced. Sumner's work in each short is deft and thoughtful. It's a degree of
seriousness too often lacking in independent film. The stories and gore
are all consistently entertaining and thought-provoking, and the overall
design of Slices of Life is as elegant as the creepy scrapbook props of the
frame tale.
It's a shame that an independent, anthology horror film that's this good is so viciously trashed in its Internet Movie Database rating (3.7 at time of review). Slices of Life is what horror filmmaking is and a horror fan must be pretty jaded not to get some thrills from it.
Rosewood Lane (2012) - 2.5/4
Rosewood Lane is the latest film from Victor Salva. A vaguely supernatural thriller, it concerns the incessant harassment of a neighborhood by a teenaged paperboy. In particular, the paperboy becomes obsessed with Sonny Blake (Rose McGowan), a radio psychologist who has just moved into the house of her deceased father--who himself may have been murdered by the paperboy.
Victor Salva is always a complex filmmaker to approach, and not entirely for good reasons. Due to his unfortunate past, in which he sexually abused the boy star of his first film, Clownhouse, there is a tendency to look for biography in his work that may not be there--or, worse, to dismiss or express disgust with his work because of that past. Salva, however, is an undeniably skilled craftsman in the tradition of Spielberg, Coppola, and Hitchcock. Anyone ignorant of his past can enjoy his horrors and thrillers for the entertainment value alone. Nevertheless, Salva does have a tendency to personalize his films, a tendency often obscured by either unpleasant misreadings or pure enjoyment of the films. To do justice to Rosewood Lane, I will consider both the film's craftsmanship and Salva's personal expression.
Salva begins delivering the tension very early in the film. An elderly neighbor ominously warns Sonny against having anything to do with the paperboy. Salva compounds this advice with some eerie shots of the paperboy sitting stationary, on his bicycle, in the middle of the road, blocking the path of a moving truck. He's distant enough to be aloof from interaction, but the shots of him suggest he's watching and listening.
Soon, the paperboy is knocking at Sonny's door, and she's starting to notice objects in her house subtly rearranged. This begins an alternately suspenseful and infuriating cat-and-mouse game. The paperboy's seemingly supernatural speed and slipperiness, and his mystifying obsession with Sonny, give Salva the material to create considerable tension. The boy's smugness and abilities, however, can be infuriating. Had Salva not written Sonny as such a strong and intelligent character, this infuriating quality would have been tedious. As it is, however, our frustration is one we share with Sonny.
What ensues is really a power game to see who is going to dominate who. Sonny begins trying to reverse the cat-and-mouse roles by tracking down or chasing the paperboy. He manages to give her the slip each time with his apparently supernatural swiftness, even mocking her in some eerie setpieces. But she forces his hand to a final confrontation and a surprising conclusion.
Salva enriches the material somewhat by Sonny a past haunted by childhood abuse. The features of the house Sonny used to avoid abuse--basement, heating vents--become the features the paperboy uses to hurt her. There is a somewhat psychoanalystic sense of the paperboy being Sonny's victimized past returning to victimize her, a sense probably not intended except to create more emotional tension, at which it succeeds. Mostly, however, it strengthens our conviction that Sonny is tough and unwilling to let herself be victimized.
The character of the paperboy is, as noted, very dislikable. And his ability to outsmart or at least outrun everyone can create tedium. Sonny's aggressive nature mitigates this somewhat, because what we're really wanting is someone like her to 'teach him a lesson.' However, I think this is an instant where Salva's personal interests have triumphed somewhat over his craftsmanship.
What we observe in Rosewood Lane is a handsome, underage boy trying to worm his way into an adult's home and life, a boy who deliberately takes pleasure in showing what power he can exercise over adults. When he sits in front of the moving truck, for instance, or when he moves objects in Sonny's home; just being in her home or even the mere act of listening to her conversations, are ways he exercises power. (Listening is a relatively common technique children use on adults, especially foster children who need to feel in control of their situation more than most children.)
Knowing Salva's past as a convicted child molestor, it is difficult not to make something of this. But, in order not to be trite or glib, we have to be careful not to read in our own prejudices. The superficial reading would be that the film's dynamics represent a sort of allegory for Salva's own obsession. He struggles to lead a normal, respectable, and, due to his work, mildly public life, all the while he is victimized by this boy. The boy represents his own obsession with boys, and the boy's incredible sneaking powers shows how hard it is for Salva, how anywhere he turns the obsession may have slipped in unnoticed, much as how Jeepers Creepers II features a group of attractive, teenaged boys without shirts.
While that would be a fairly accurate picture of how such sexual addictions work, and while that may even partially describe what Salva is expressing, I don't think it exhausts it. I think Salva's mind is more complex and his vision more ambiguous.
The primary characteristic of the paperboy is his defiance, his need to express his own indomitability and his power over others. I don't think it's just the nature of addiction being allegorized in the narrative's action. I think, for the addict, the object of addiction is dominating and defiant. It exerts a power over the addict that he or she does not want it to do. This is true especially in one's fantasy life. And to pursue one's fantasies in the real world, as Sonny's pursuit of the paperboy, is doomed to failure.
I don't want to suggest Salva is cast into turmoil every time he sees a boy, but I do think the narrative presents a case of victimization by a boy that is akin to what someone like Salva may sometimes feel. That Salva's film releases have routinely been protested by his victim, Nathan Forrest Winters, adds another element to the idea of boy as dominant and defiant.
Reading more elements of the film into this sort of analysis would be possible. But I don't see the value in taking it any farther. Salva's films always seem torn between entertaining and expressing, and he always prefers to err on the side of entertainment. As he's quite good at creating suspenseful setpieces and his films have never yet failed to entertain me, I don't see a problem with that. Rosewood Lane is a suspenseful, fun film thanks to Salva's skill for thrills and McGowan's tough-but-vulnerable performance.
State of Horror Address: The Bad Horror Movie
It was Aristotle who stipulated that what makes something bad is failing at its function; and it was Jim Wynorski who retorted that what makes something bad is not having enough tits. But there's no such thing as 'enough tits,' so that definition is useless. And if the horror movie has any one function, I don't know what it is.
What I do know is there are some filmmakers who, like a Russian bride after the wedding, just don't care. They make movies for the same reason God makes yeast infections: just because. They make movies like they make bowel-movements, imagining no audience at all.
One such type of filmmaker is what I and his mother call 'the DeCoteau.' David DeCoteau's movies are made on miniscule budgets and guaranteed to turn profit by means of Netflix distribution deals. DeCoteau distributes these movies to put food on his table and cocks in his mouth. If he ever makes a good film, as he sometimes does, it is thanks to the screenwriter and Kamapuaa, the mighty Pig God of Hawaii. It's certainly not because he has any desire to keep you entertained.
Another type is the middle class white kid who's gotten so bored of World of Warcraft and not having sex, that he gets a few buddies together in mom's backyard to shoot a movie. Rather than concluding the result of his hobby, much like his Star Trek quilts and Naruto fanfics, is best hidden beneath his Final Fantasy 'doujinshi' porn comics, he decides to try distrubute it as a real film. This is possible thanks to indiscriminate distributors like Brain Damage Films, which carries the full oeuvre of virgins like Todd Sheets. Unless you're the 'director's' grandmother, these films offer you nothing. Like a smooth, prehensile turd, they're fun to make, but no fun to watch.
Some filmmakers really do care, however. But like true cowboys, they can't let you know they care. Quite the opposite, they go out of their way to make you think they don't care. They give their movies ostentatiously bad titles that impishly dare you to hope they'll be good, titles like, "Big Tit Schoolgirls in the Playground of the Dead," or "RoboPimp Flamethrower vs. the Bible Belt Hookers." Sometimes these titles, like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Schindler's List are a cue that you'll be getting cheaply-made, tongue-in-cheek entertainment. But often, the titles are the best part of the movie, as in the case of Bikini Girls on Ice. And this way, when their movie does suck, they can play dumb, DeCoteau, or dead, and say they weren't even trying.
Finally, there are the filmmakers who, unlike Rhett Butler, give a damn and an unnecessary urine sample. And often these filmmakers, like a clumsy but earnest lover, will hit the right spots and transport you to horror movie heaven. We're not interested in them now. We're interested in the earnest lovers who get us wet and sticky in the wrong places, and makes us laugh when we should be moaning; the heroes whose indelicate probing has caused me to beat the hell out of this metaphor. In this category we have our fertilizer salesmen like Hal P. Warren, who saw The Wizard of Oz and said, "I could do this with a broken wind-up Bolex and my knobby-kneed drinking buddy." And transvestites like Ed Wood who wrote the most epic sci-fi horror since Little Women and tried to make it with ten bucks and a 98% dead Bela Lugosi.
Yes, this is the category of filmmaker who is full of ideas and passion, so much passion it has to beat the crap out of know-how, talent, and common sense to make extra room. These are ideas so grand that they can only be realized with ineptitude. But from the cousins of ineptitude and pennilessness come the inbred children of strangeness and uniqueness. Plan 9 from Outer Space, Troll 2, Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Chooper, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, and, of course, Intercessor: Another Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare are bad movies, but brilliantly entertaining in their earnest zeal to excite, shock, and terrify with stuff that isn't remotely exciting, shocking, or terrifying.
At the end of the day, the beginning, even sometimes during the middle of the day while eating a sandwich, horror fans are an accepting crowd. Yes, we ask to be entertained, sometimes shocked, frightened, horrified, maybe even intellecually engaged--but really, the bare minimum we ask is some passion. When the filmmakers don't even care--and we know, not through our ubiquitous bathroom cameras, but through intuition--that's what makes a bad horror film. We just want to know you love us. You don't have to say it; we just have to feel it.
In memory of Ray Dennis Steckler
State of Horror Address: Teagan Clive
Some things just inspire poetry. The acts of great men have inspired Homer in The Iliad, and Walt Davis in Sex Psycho; the beauty of nature inspired Wordsworth's "Rain Cloud" and Max Hardcore's "Peeing in a College Girl." Teagan Clive is one such entity. I have had the opportunity to see her twice and feel she's strong in the Force once. Both times I've seen her has been in b-movies, and each time she had even less clothing than they had plot. One is Interzone (1987) by Deran Sarafian, the other is Alienator (1990) by Fred Olen Ray.
Teagan, if you've yet to encounter her in her brief cinematic oeuvre, is a modern, powerful woman. I don't mean powerful like Hilary Clinton, but more like the sasquatches of the WNBA. She has an immaculately-sculpted, muscular body that nears the boundary between "sexy aerobics instructor" and "where's the penis?" but keeps on the good side. Unlike many female body builders, her face does not resemble Jackie Chan's left foot or a frozen mop, but rather retains its voluptuous femininity. Her beauty is a strange but striking combination of the Grecian and the Californian ideals, except heterosexual.
Armenian director Deran Sarafian knew that for his epic second feature, Interzone, a post-apocalyptic action adventure, he required the inspiration of a Homer and the visual splendor of the Sistene Chapel--but for only $2000. Thus was Teagan cast as Mantis, the sociopathic warlord who is constantly posing for an unseen Sports Illustrated shoot. Opposite Teagan is Bruce Abbot, a smug cross-breed of Bill Pullman and Elias Kotias. He plays Swan, a wheelin' dealin' douchebag who gets by on wisecracks and streetsmarts, like a white Morgan Freeman. But this descendant of Indiana Jones and Pinocchio is drawn, as all heroes must be, by love and prophecy into saving the treasures of the Interzone from Mantis.
Interzone is an immensely fun movie that will do for your brain what a bubblebath does for your anus. But the highlight of the movie, and not coincidentally, the most Teagan-filled sequence, is--like the cleansing effervescence of my Ninja Turtles bubblebath--when Swan decides he must seduce Mantis to defeat her. As in real life, this triggers a five-minute montage of Teagan posing in silhouette while a band of harpists play an endlessly looping tune of about five notes. Once the posing is done, Teagan graduates, as any warm-blooded woman with Bruce Abbot would do, to blindfolding him then hand-feeding him bananas and sardines.
What I'm saying is not just that Teagan happened to partake in this playful, creative, charming scene like a fat kid in gym class. I'm saying that that scene could no more be conceived without Teagan than the Gospels could without the Jesus, or the Mona Lisa without the prostitutes. The scene is composed from Teagan's unique features: her exquisitely-honed female form with its intimations of power even greater than William Shatner's testicles; her seductive femininity with its subtle vulnerability, not unlike a kitten with a shotgun; and her playful expression of sexual desire. What makes Teagan so extraordinary is that, like a cheesecake, she makes contradicting features complementary.
In Alienator, Fred Olen Ray, like an Asian parent, takes these features of Teagan's and pushes them farther. Much like Crime and Punishment, Alienator is about a space criminal who escapes to earth. The Alienator is not, as Marx argued, the capitalist wage system, but rather a cyborg entity sent to retrieve the space criminal. Combining nearly-invincible super-strength and cosmic destructive powers with a highly-toned female physique, the Alienator can only be played by Teagan--with due apologies to Ernest Borgnine's supporters.
Just as in Interzone, there is one sequence of Alienator in particular that both encapsulates and is directly inspired by Teagan--a Teaguence, if you will. In Alienator, it's a single shot of Teagan, in her full space armor as any self-respecting Alienator must be, reclining against a tree. She holds out her hand to a deer, perhaps grieving a dead mother--we just don't know--and it comes to her without fear or even lust. The shot combines the physical power of Teagan's physique with the opposing tenderness in her femininity; the Alienator's destructive potential with her gentleness toward the innocent and harmony with nature. In doing so, it almost spiritualizes these features, not unlike Patrick Swayze in Ghost; and it achieves a photogenic sublimity--photogeneity being, according to Delluc and Epstein, the very essence of cinema.
Perhaps you will think I'm going too far. But there is no denying the real importance of the photogenic in cinema. And Teagan's body and elegant movements are powerfully photogenic, leading to unforgettable moments of fun and charm in what could have been forgettable movies. I don't know where Tegan is now. She, like Sylvester Stallone and Matthew Broderick, has not acted since 1990. But she was a b-movie Muse while she was active, and her few contributions deserve this long overdue recognition.
P.S. Come back, Teagan!
State of Horror Address: The New Wave of French Horror
The French first surrendered to horror only a short time ago. Like a furious Napoleon, but with even more DVD sales, they raged overseas and made passionate love to American markets. And we embraced them, because their horror films were the moist, nay excrementally runny camembert to our hard and mouldy cheddars. But now we've forgotten about them like an uncle's unwanted touches. Has the Muse left them to star in a Japanese bukkake video? Has their inspiration run drier than Charles de Gaulle's foreskin? Or do we just have the attention spans of an epileptic monkey? Let's find out what made this phenomenon even shorter-lived than existentialist bellydancing.
Even under the dictatorship of Jerry Lewis, there were French horror movies before High Tension (2003). But no-one in France could find the right red wine to accompany them, so they gave up. Finally, when the young Alexandre Aja fermented a Dr. Pepper, the New French Horror Film was born. With High Tension, the tasteless fish roe of Dean Koontz was so smothered with the Heinz Ketchup of gore, Americans had no choice but to eat it. Even before we'd swallowed the last spoonful of delicious Koontziar, Aja was letting us know it was a meaningful, lesbian love story all along. And his snobby, French accent was so compelling, nobody even minded the plot hole the size of Dean Koontz's mustache.
Aja left France and, like Napoleon before him, dedicated himself to fun and gory remakes. But his massive, French balls had already done their damage in Paris. Like the leader of a gangrape, he set the model for what was to come.
Pascal Laugier's Martyrs (2008), a film originally intended as a Bible epic follow-up to The Passion of the Christ (2004), is the most remarkable and extreme of the lot. Laugier took all the elements that made High Tension a charming Pepe Le Pew--things like character depth and suspense--and flushed them down the nearest street urinal. What remained was a gory, disturbing, and fun-free pure Pew. But he dowsed that Pew in enough pseudo-intellectual, self-important cologne, that we ate it up like a deep-fried eclaire, reminding us of Descartes's dictum, "I make you think I'm smarter than you, therefore I am."
But where Descartes failed, Xavier Gens succeded with Frontier(s) (2007). Because Gens took all that made High Tension fun, but channelled it directly at the American cinematic prostate that is Nazi-hatin'. And the 's' in parentheses informed us that the gallons of inbred, Nazi blood actually means something. That's what we loved about these movies: they weren't content to just give us backwoods, inbred maniacs butchered with buzzsaws; they gave us backwoods, inbred maniacs butchered with ideas.
More idea-butchery was going on in Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire (2004). So much so, no-one even noticed it's really a Belgian movie. Like a Louis Quatorze chaise, but with even more bestiality, Calvaire brought psychosexual profundity to the backwoods rape-torture movie. And, taking a page from Gerard Depardieu's autobiography, du Welz made his backwoods, gay rape respectable with Biblical motifs.
But not all French horror movies are inflated bags of Sartrean nothingness. Some are filled with Sartrean party favors instead. Sheitan (2006), for instance, reminds us that French, inbred mutants can be just as fun as American, inbred mutants--and they can milk a goat even better. A l'interieur (2007) shows us not only the Italians have the cajones to carve out a fetus. And in Ils (2006) we find out French kids are every bit as shitty as our own. But most importantly, each of these films offers more tension than Marie Antoinette's cakehole, and at least as much unpretentious gore as Gerard Depardieu's wedding video.
So why have we forgotten them like a Polanski rape charge? Because their commitment to the genre was flimsier than a soggy baguette? Because the few Frenchies still doing horror surrendered to American producers faster than they could say, "Jessica Biel"? Because we got tired of subtitles, so we're just gonna watch SyFy? Or because Japan and Korea are offering the same deal, but with more substance, plus a guarantee to commit seppuku in shame if we find their films dishonorable? Quicky: Yes, Yes, No, and Yes--not to be confused with the Japanese bukkake video of the same name.
To be fair, there are still five people who believe the French make the best horror movies. And someday they may be rewarded with the Even Newer Wave of French Horror that will deluge them in buttery, gourmet horror treats. For now, the Wave has crashed in some kelp-choked sputters that sounded vaguely like, "La Horde," "Mutants," and "Jerry Lewis, pardonez nous." As of August, 2012, all hopes rest on Marina de Van, a film I haven't seen called Livide, and the long-delayed release of Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried, the goriest, most disturbing Holocaust film ever made. Until then, we'll just have to remember the Wave fondly and enjoy its treasures for what they are: a series of thrilling gorefests masquerading as art films.
In memory of Jean Rollin.
State of Horror Address: The SyFy Channel
The SyFy Channel has something in common with Nixon. I don't mean the fact that they've both made the supergator battle the megashark. I mean no-one ever admits to loving made-for-SyFy movies, yet there they are. Someone has to be watching them. A few people may obsessively watch them out of pure, overwhelming hatred, much as I do my neighbors. But most must watch them with the love a husband shows his agred, arthritic wife as he watches her drool in her sleep. Or the love a committed stalker shows the D-list celebrity who doesn't know he exists.
Where Nixon is rightly despised for his hideous holiday sweaters, however, what is it about made-for-SyFy movies that rankles the cankles of horror and sci-fi nerds? Could it be that they use CGI instead of giving work to chronically underemployed monsters, like the sasquatch and Eric Roberts? Or are they resented for recycling plots in a time when we've grown tired of sorting our plastics from our cardboards? Maybe the problem is a sense of general low quality, not General Lokualitay the trusted Nixon defense secretary, but the lack of concern for the audience's sophisticated blue cheese and caviar tastes.
Modern tastes demand a certain verisimilitude. Not Vera Sommilee-Tood the trusted Nixon secretary of labor, but the approximation of reality. Modern audiences want a superconda they can believe in, one that looks, sounds, tastes and plays footsie like a real superconda would. If they can't find a superconda, a megagator, or even a damn-dats-hugeamander, as the great Hitchcock personally tranquillized and wrangled ultragulls for The Birds, there are other options. The benchmark for practical effects was set by Carpenter's The Thing, Spielberg's Jurassic Park, and Cameron's Revenge of the Titanic. When you watch Jurassic Park, you imagine you could ride, pet, or get a happy-hour drink with the t-rex. But apparently these effects are only practical if you have a hundred million, not Italian Lira or Japanese Yen, but good ol' US green to spare.
But can't our computer overlords satisfy our verisimilitoris? Or is the CG-spot just a myth? We readily received Lawnmower Man into our hearts, even if it resembles Deep Blue's checkmate vomit. And nobody minds that Anthony Perkins was a poorly-rendered polygon in Psycho. But it was new then. Since then we've been spoiled by The Mist, The Host, and motion captured apes named 'Andy.' Like Paris Hilton's vagina, we want big, expensive things. And if we must have illusion, we want it to be of expensive things being destroyed. Hence David Copperfield's most famous illusion, "Corporate CEO Sodomy."
So, it seems that we, like Peris Hilton's vagina, have become too sophisticated and needy to enjoy good ol' fashioned American Dyna-Mation. Not Dinah-Mae Shunn, the Nixon press secretary, but original special effects of b-movies, the wonderfully imaginative clay models our grandparents tried to tell us look realistic. Or the highly-ineffective rear-screen projections of giant turkey vultures--are we too good for them now? Because made-for-SyFy movies are in the grand, old tradition of the over-reaching American B-movie that had more hopes you were drunk than they had budget or talent.
But we didn't have to be drunk to enjoy The Giant Gila Monster. We had a sense of fun. And that same fun awaits us in the likes of Rage of the Yeti--you'll find it right beside Yancy Butler's cocaine money. If anything, these movies have gotten better because there's about twenty minutes less of scientists arguing with military guys. Because these days scientists have proven that blowing things up is better.
That's why we're watching these movies. Not because Lou Diamond Phillips has to eat or Yancy Butler needs her blow, but because they're pure, American B-movie fun. With that comes a lot of bad dialogue, plot drag, occasionally silly monsters, and disbelief so suspended you've defiled the graves of its ancestors. But if you're a horror nerd, you know it's worth it.
And here's something the SyFy Channel doesn't have in common with Nixon. I'm not referring to Nixon's delicious, secret raspberry jam recipe. I mean the SyFy Channel is not a crook. They uphold their end of the bargain, not just with Yancy Butler's nose candy, but with intentional, B-movie fun. Maybe you can't imagine a good game of Scrabble with the Sharktopus, but you sure can join the 'Oh! Shit!' guy in enjoying the megashark eat a Boeing 737, and you can join the supershark in agreeing it's appropriate he right a tank with legs. Because that's the B-movie tradition Nixon didn't want us to have.
That's why I'm--well, not exactly proud, but at least moderately pleased to say, "I voted for SyFy!"
P.S. Nixon's jam secret is the pinch of nutmeg.
American Horror: Studying Argento's Trauma (1993)
Two-Headed Shark Attack (2012) - 2/4
Wolf Town (2010) - 2/4
A group of youngsters take a road trip to a local ghost town where they are attacked by an unfriendly wolf pack. They have to use their ingenuity to defeat the wolves, hiding in the abandoned buildings of an old mining town. Not a terribly inspired plot. Wolf Town would be a fairly indistinct, low-budget animal-attack movie were it not for a few admirable quirks that made me want to write about it.
The most impressive of Wolf Town’s features is, oddly enough, its psychological realism. The film’s psychology is, in fact, infuriatingly realistic. In countless films, a total wimp like Shaun in Shaun of the Dead becomes an ass-kicking badass the moment a real threat shows up. Perhaps we all believe really intensely in the fight-or-flight response or, as I think, we believe the world works like video games. If we’re really good at Resident Evil and have shot enough zombies, we’ll be ready for a real zombie threat. I suspect the people who spend all day playing Resident Evil would do little more than defecate and die when the real zombies showed up. Lazy, videogaming nerds like to believe they have inner badasses just waiting to come out, but they don’t: a pussy is a pussy is a pussy is a pussy, as Gertrude Stein never said. It’s curious how this implicit belief is one also shared by the conservatives who think video game violence can translate into real violence. Both are wrong, of course. Video games and real life threats are totally unrelated.
The protagonist of Wolf Town, Kyle (Levi Fiehler) is a pussy, as his friend tells him. He’s so afraid to ask a girl out, he contrives the road trip just to do it. He’s humiliated when he sees her with Rob (Josh Kelly), an alpha male sort of guy who did ask her out. When Rob says ‘Let’s just go to Vegas’, Kyle is ready to back down. When the wolves arrive, Kyle remains a pussy who whines and cries, while Rob remains an alpha male, barking out orders and making decisions. This is psychological reality. Meek guys like Kyle do not become alphas whenever a tense situation arrives. And as much as the film’s sympathetic focus on Kyle may make us dislike Rob, and as tedious as overconfident people are, someone has to make the decisions and Kyle is clearly not up to it. This is the psychological realism I admire in Wolf Town. It’s very refreshing, even while it’s infuriating. We want Kyle to man up, but he, like many of us, can’t just do that: it’s not who he is.
That said, there is a feeling of cheapness to Wolf Town. What budget Rebel did have was probably spent on the ghost town setting, a charming concatenation of shacks with an inexplicably intact saloon. The sense of cheapness is probably due to the wolves clearly being huskies and alsatians with a bit of fur-paint, and we rarely see more than two on screen at any given moment. On the one hand, director John Rebel deserves praise for using real animals instead of CGI. On the other hand, the use of real dogs does limit what he can do. We’ll never see a wolf injured in any way on screen, for instance, nor will be see them performing impossible jumps.
Rebel settles for editing the dogs wherever they need to be, giving the wolves a strangely mystic quality. This mysticism would be egregious were it not pervading the whole film. The dogs don’t just try to scare their victims off; they disable their car and steal their cell phones. The film’s subtext is one of nature vs humanity. The wolves just want a space to be without human interference, a place that belongs to nature. It’s a line of argument I don’t think carries much weight, whether in Wolf Town or in Avatar, because humans and their activities are a part of the natural order; but it is what it is.
Wolf Town is a mildly entertaining way to pass eighty minutes, especially for wolf-lovers. But the film does drag. However praiseworthy the real dogs and psychological realism may be, Wolf Town could have done with a ton of CGI wolves getting chopped to pieces by a bunch of badass nerds. In a film like this, fun is more important than realism.
A Psychoanalytic Look at Organizm (2008)
The plot is deceptively simple, even hackneyed. A high school teacher warns military officials that they must not disturb the old base they’re destroying, because his mother told him so the night she killed herself. The army takes him seriously and investigates, causing a cancerous mass to explode from a body into a sea of tendrils that spread over the base and begin growing at an exponential rate. The teacher and a female soldier discover the developer of the tentacular organism is his father, a Russian scientist who defected to the
What is interesting in this plot is its gradual progression deeper into the subconscious. We begin with the pure, conscious facticity of the present: tendrils swarming military artillery and invading a bowling alley, where a soldier tries to flee and fails. This is the diseased, apocalyptic present, a present in extreme conflict. We then rewind thirty-three years to a boy being terrified by his disturbed mother. She warns him to remember “sublevel 3, vault 12” at all costs, carves it into his hands, and sashays out to kill his father. If the present is the consciousness in conflict, then the flashback we’re given is to the source of the trauma that would eventually erupt into the diseased state we see thirty-three years later. We’re given the two extremities of consciousness that matter; in between is the period of festering in the subconscious, metaphorically ‘sublevel 3, vault 12’.
We then join the high school teacher (Jonathan Schaech) on his way to the army base. We realize that he is the little boy we saw. Therefore, this film is to be his psychodrama. He has heard that the base is to be destroyed, so he comes to warn the Colonel that there is something that should not be disturbed. When he busts in, he’s captured, but by the intelligent records experts who decide his story is worth hearing, despite the Colonel’s objections. They are going to plumb the depths of sublevel 3, vault 12. It is this exploratory action that releases the disease into consciousness, that causes the eruption of the tendrils into the light of day. What they discover in the vault is a man’s pickled body with a horrendous, spreading growth on his chest. From this body the tendrils spring.
What’s interesting thus far is the teacher’s relationships to father figures. We know that when he was a child he witnessed the death of the man he thought was his father. When he arrives in the town where the army base is located, he tries to get the attention of an old man, who simply walks away without answering. The Colonel in charge of the army base is difficult to get in touch with, and, when he is reached, doesn’t want to deal with the teacher. He tries to reach out to older men instinctively, and finds it impossible to have a meaningful connection with them.
The teacher’s difficulty with father figures is important to note because of the next major plot point. As the teacher escapes with a female solder who just lost her husband to the rampaging tentacles, they speak to the old man who shunned the teacher earlier. They discover through him that the body at the source of the tendrils is a Russian scientist and that this scientist is the teacher’s real father. The source of the eruption of the diseased consciousness and the reason for the childhood trauma, then, is the teacher’s biological father. The repressed horror at the heart of his subconscious is the father.
The teacher and soldier run from the growing tendrils to a school where they watch an old film reel. The reel shows the Russian scientist discussing his work, explaining that his quest for the ultimate biological weapon ended in his own body. His own tissues were growing at a phenomenal rate, consuming any energy at all, from fire to nuclear radiation. At the same time, the teacher is infected and successfully fights off the tendrils, turning his blood into an instant tendril-cide. However, we’ve just learned that the tendrils are, literally, his father’s body, meaning that tendril-cide is a sort of patricide.
Now the teacher and soldier realize they have to go to the body at the source of the tendrils and kill it. To protect the soldier, the teacher coats her in his own blood, but the imagery is that of a newborn covered in birth-blood. They then fly a helicopter to the base, landing in a disturbing terrain of all tendrils. They are plunging into the subconscious, to the repressed monstrosity of an absent father. In a stroke of excellent set design, the tendrils swarm the closer they come to the center.
As they do this, the threat of bombing looms. The military plans to drop nuclear bombs in hopes of destroying the tendrils. Curiously, the Russian scientist described the
Finally the teacher confronts the body of his biological father, simultaneously alive and dead, present and absent. In the center of his father’s chest is what is unmistakably a throbbing, pulsing anus out of which all the tendrils grow. As perverse as any Greek myth, the teacher thrusts and knife into his father’s heart-anus and digs, metaphorically fucking his father. He then slices at his hands, drawing blood, and thrusts both hands into the orifice, in an act that can be best described as fisting his father to death.
Meanwhile, the soldier is sidetracked by the discovery of his husband in some sort of amniotic sack. Clawing with her hands, she digs the sack open, giving birth to her own husband in a way, but washing the protective blood off her own body in the process, leaving herself vulnerable. Fortunately, the father dies from the fisting just in time. The trauma has been overcome in facing the repressed, subconscious absent father that the disturbed mother so desperately tried to repress in sublevel 3, vault 12.
Not everything in Organizm makes sense to me. I don’t even mean the chronology, which would make the obviously late-thirties teacher in his fifties. I mean it’s not really clear how the tendrils form an amniotic sack and what the interplay of birthing imagery in this film really amounts to. I don’t think the psychoanalytic structure of the film means it’s a film filled with great depth: what good is reiterating Freud, really? This is a film made more with the subconscious than with the conscious. Its beauty is in how perverse it all is in representing diseased consciousness. From the reproductive imagery of the tendrils, through the birthing imagery, and the anal father-son fisting imagery of the conclusion and the anti-oedipal implications of such, the film is just perverse in the story its images tell, whatever the cheesy plot may be.
Amphibious 3D (2011) - 2/4
I've always been fascinated by Yuzna's work. He always teeters on the brink of hackwork, using story-ideas that are disarmingly insipid. Yet, when you watch the films, you see he always takes a different approach than any other filmmaker would, and there's always something, some wealth of subconscious, buried in the play of creative gore effects and strange appetites. With Rottweiler (2004), he pushed the killer-dog movie about as far as it could logically go until the killer dog became an archetypal fiend, a sort of symbol of fate, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Amphibious 3D, unfortunately, never does get pushed into the archetypal realms quite like Rottweiler does, but, as with any Yuzna film, it teases with more below the surface; and Amphibious is a good deal more subtle than most monsters-from-the-sea movies we've been seeing from SyFy, the Asylum, and several other b-movie filmmakers who hopped aboard that particular shark-filled train.
The plot, a fairly typical one, concerns a pretty female researcher interested in some scientific thing or other--it doesn't matter what--and chartering a boat from a charming local white guy. They uncover the prehistoric monster, which the researcher has no trouble identifying, and together slay the beast. In this case, the charming boat owner, fittingly named Jack Bowman, is Michael Pare and the researcher, with the pornstar name of Skylar Shane, is played by some TV actress from the Netherlands.
What makes Amphibious 3D stand out is not the 3D, but the remote Indonesian setting. Most of the action takes place on a fishing platform so far out to sea that you can't see the mainland. Here a part-time smuggler and full-time fishing-platform foreman manages his child slave labour. Some of the action does take place on an Indonesian island where a religious ritual, reminiscent of footage of voodoo rituals from Haiti, is taking place.
One of the children on the fishing platform is a dark, scrawny child sold by a witchdoctor. The other kids taunt him and call him something like 'voodoo boy.' The researcher, it turns out, lost a daughter on a scientific survey and now hallucinates her daughter in the island ritual, and finds a surrogate for her daughter in the weak boy on the fishing platform. It is in this material that the film's darker depths are to be found, with its play on maternity and on the mystique of a culture that threatens to devour the outsider.
Unfortunately, subconscious depths does not imply interesting action, in this case. Much of what happens on the fishing platform is boring, as we're just waiting for the monster action to begin. The character drama, the shallow interactions, is not good enough to sustain interest, even in these interesting locations.
Worthy of note, however, is the cool monster. I won't spoil what it is, but Yuzna uses real effects, as he always does, so that the monster is really, physically present with the actors. When someone sticks an axe in the creature's 'head', he really does that. Though little of the monster is seen until the end, the climax, for anyone who loves classic monster movies and creature effects, more than makes up for the scarcity until then.
Amphibious 3D is admittedly sub-par Yuzna. There are moments where it suggests the possibility of being a giant sea monster version of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but it sadly never rises to being as clever and haunting as that film. It has a lot more going on in its depths, a perverse subconscious that bubbles up in the film's final, disturbing moment, than the likes of Two-Headed Shark (2012) or Mega-Python vs Gatoroid (2011), but it's never as much fun.
Forget Me Not (2009) - 2.5/4
After a mildly mysterious, but not particularly encouraging pre-title sequence, Forget Me Not introduces us to a menagerie of tedious high school seniors and their sad little lives of fucking and drinking. Quite nice camera movements are wasted on a student house party that looks like the student house parties you see in every high school comedy or drama since the '90s, with lots of attractive, half-naked teens drinking and writhing, "having fun". I don't make a point of describing this lifestyle in a deliberately contemptous tone because I was never invited to these parties, but because I think the director, and co-writer, Tyler Oliver, purposely sets up a 'normal' (as defined by movies) group of high school buddies to disarm us. Then he starts to screw with it--and that's when it gets fun.
In the middle of a round of "tell your first time" the responsible Final Girl character, Sandy, decides to tell her first kiss instead, which took place during The Game. "The Game!" everyone says, "let's play!" Their banal existences suddenly take on some meaning, a tinge of mystery. What is this bizarre game these bland people play? Well, they chant a creepy chant about ceasing to exist and going to hell, pronounce one person "The Ghost" and then the rest hide. The Ghost touches each one, making them ghosts, until there's only one non-ghost left. When they play this game again, a strange girl joins in. After she appears to commit suicide and then disappear, despite having won The Game, each participant starts disappearing in real life. The catch is that the only one who remembers the ghosted participant is the Final Girl. Everyone else forgets that person existed. The whole world changes, as though that person never existed.
Forget Me Not plays out as a fun metaphysical mystery, not unlike one of those episodes of Star Trek where they'd get trapped in a time loop or some godlike being's anus. And the drive to crack the mystery, the full solution to which Oliver manages to hold out of reach for a good while, is what kept me engaged. Even after the mystery is cracked, there are some metaphysical shenanigans that will keep the intellectually-engaged viewer interested. For instance, the pattern of The Game played in the first act dictates much of what will happen for the rest of the movie. What is the significance of that?
Of course, interest does not equal plausibility. One wonders just how a person can be erased from the time-space continuum. The most superficial answer provided is strongly inadequate. And the other possible answer, suggested by the final shots, isn't explored in quite enough detail, tantalizing as it is. As allegory, however, it presents an interested interplay of how individual lives vie to be remembered, how our lives are valuable after death mostly for the way we impact the living, whether a close friend or the whole world. Death is frightening, but being forgotten may be even worse. You have to do something worthwhile to be remembered. And when we watch the first ten minutes of the movie, we wonder how many of these young people will really deserve to be remembered, and how many will go the way of the third eunuch in the Court of Tiglath-Pilesar?
Forget Me Not does also contain some proper ghost-monster action that is not as successful as the rest of the film. For horror zonks, the gittery, fast-moving ghost-monster, with its 'crick'-'crick' body sounds and large-mouthed roar, will be mildly annoying, because we see this monster in every low-budget supernatural horror movie, sometimes even on youtube. Otherwise, they're fairly creepy creations out of which Oliver gets some good mileage. Forget Me Not has a good many creepy, spooky moments, the best of which are, naturally, of a more metaphysical variety.
Chain Letter (2010) - 2.5/4
When I took some sociology courses back in college, I remember the professor assigning an essay by Ted Kaczynski, also known as The Unabomber. Most of us were skeptical, because we knew him as a bomber rather than as a scholar. However, he's an intelligent man with developed ideas about technology and man's place in society. Having read his thought, I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a full-blown philosophy. But he had ideas. The ideas, however, are more shallow than his 'fans' would care to admit. Basically, he argues that humanity has, through technology, built up an environment that is so dramatically different from the environment it was evolved to inhabit, that it has dehumanized itself, made happiness impossible and alienation the norm. While I certainly think the argument is coherent and even somewhat convincing--has the oddness of our technologically sculpted world not struck all of us in some circumstances?--there's a tinge of paranoia to the view that I could never ignore. Beside the paranoia, one also wonders, 'What dehumanization?' Most humans thrive in the environment we've created. In fact, as with any animal that transforms its environment, our transformations have been designed with our own comfort and even flourishing as an end. What he thinks is lost in not living primitively is nebulous, a loosely defined notion of how things ought to be. His claims are just a complicated reiteration of the belief that things aren't what they used to be, that the past was better, that the changes we're bringing on ourselves are for the worse. Historians have discovered evidence that there were worries that writing itself would be the ruin of mankind. The same worries cropped up about email, and now about cellphones. There have always been those who resist technologies and the way they alter human behaviour and consciousness, and the Unabomber was just a more zealous one of those.
The Unabomber is mentioned during Chain Letter, an indie horror film that just hit Netflix Instant for instant viewing in your home via the miracle of modern technology. In fact, all of the ideas I bring up in the above paragraph are raised in the film. From the opening credits, a montage of reports with soundbytes regarding contemporary technology's intrusion into our lives and its discontents, it's clear Chain Letter is striving to say something about technology and its antagonists. There have been quite a few horror films that try to have something to say about technology, or that are just content to use it, but Chain Letter manages to be an unusually intelligent effort.
The plot concerns a chain letter unleashed upon one student at a high school. The student, out of spite and stupidity, sends the chain letter on, and from there it spreads. Whoever deletes the chain letter is murdered, often in a particularly cruel manner. Naturally one of the students starts digging deeper to figure out just who or what is behind the killings. A detective (Keith David) does likewise.
Chain Letter succeeds largely because the writing is smart. The script tries to stick to the ideas, even while playing out the horror formula. Discussions about the role of technology, and vignettes of possible intrusions by technology, blend naturally into the action and do not seem out of place in the characters' lives or minds. The film's engagement with its own ideas is sufficiently developed that there's some ambiguity about its position. Those who use technology for dangerous ends, those who abhor technology, and those who embrace it unthinkingly are all equally criticized.
Where Chain Letter falters, and very badly, is the horror action, unnecessary and unfitting 'torture porn' that seems particularly egregious in light of the film's climactic revelations. To make a point about the dangers of technology, need one really have a girl pulled to pieces by two cars? Or a boy chained up and ignited via trip-wire trap? There's no reason for any of that other than the desire to create some Brutal Horror setpieces. They are fairly brutal, but they're place in the narrative is hardly seamless. Chain Letter will be more enjoyable if you enjoy the ideas and issues it raises.
