Walled In (2009) - 2.5/4

Walled In, based on the psychological thriller Les emmurés by French author Serge Brussolo, concerns a pretty, young engineer (Mischa Barton) assigned to find a building's weak points for her dad's demolition company. The building is an odd structure built in the middle of some marshland by an eccentric Italian architect, Malestrazza. During construction, a madman cemented several inhabitants into the walls. The only inhabitants left are Deborah Kara Unger, her intense son, and two other weirdos. Assisted by the boy, the engineer finds discrepencies in the building's blueprints and gradually uncovers more of its secrets.

Walled In is the sort of European thriller that would have been very much at home in the '70s, alongside films like The House of Laughing Windows. Like such films, Walled In has a serious, artistic sensibility that seems at odds with the conventional macabre the content seems to keep steering toward and yet never revealing. At times psychological thriller and at times suggesive ghost story, Walled In never quite settles until the disappointing climax. The building itself and its provocative nature is really what sustains the whole film.

The source of just about all the trouble with Walled In is how much the narrative fixates on the teen boy. After a fascinating first twenty minutes that sets up the film's major conflict between a talented engineer and an almost living building she respects too much to want to destroy, nearly all the plot twists and turns center on whether she can trust the boy or not. The questions of what Malestrazza was up to, what the real purpose of his mysterious building is, whether it is haunted, what was the real reason for the immuring of the victims--all the truly interesting questions, in other words--are largely left in abeyance and only answered peripherally to the questions regarding the boy.

The boy is just not that interesting. As a side-order grotesque, he would be fine. But as the entree, he is not. This is not the actor's fault at all. On the contrary, Cameron Bright performs the character with the awkward stiffness the character seems to really need. The screenplay is at fault for presenting the character as just a bland, melodramatic device. It is unfortunate that the tale's climax and conclusion ultimately hinges on just this melodrama.

While I have not had a chance to read the novel, I suspect it is filled with philosophical discourses and historical speculations that director Gilles Paquet-Brenner was at pains to work into engaging cinema. There are a lot of great ideas throughout that just don't quite work. Walled In certainly has much to recommend, particularly Karim Hussain's beautiful and potent photography of the spooky, dystopian set and the Saskatchewan grasslands. Much as similarly confused films, like Mariano Baino's Dark Waters, Walled In will probably be re-discovered a decade or two later as a forgotten gem of 2009. Do yourself a favor and just discover it now for what it is

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.

Hanger (2009) - 2/4

Aristotle claimed that comedy is ideally populated by our inferiors. If that were true in degree as well as in kind, Hanger would be the greatest comedy ever written. As it stands, it is a sporadically amusing comedy disguised as a horror film, more juvenile than any Wayans, National Lampoon, or Adam Sandler comedy and far more intent on disgusting the audience.

Knowing Hanger is a comedy from the beginning may just help in appreciating it. If one expects a horror film, the over-the-top squalor of pimps, prostitutes, victims of disfigurement and mutation, murder, rape, feces-flinging, fetus-ripping, turkey-slapping, amongst many other surprises I'd rather not spoil, immediately strikes one as ridiculous and forced. The Book of the Courtier (which I'm fairly certain has never, ever been mentioned in a review of a Ryan Nicholson film before) recommends the perfect, entertaining courtier practice the art of 'sprezzatura'. Sprezzatura is the practice of making all of one's hard-earned skills and abilities, like musicianship and joke-telling, appear totally spontaneous. The effort behind the activity should be disguised. The grotesque, grimy squalor of Hanger is without spontanaeity. Harmony Korine's squalor shows sprezzatura; Ryan Nicholson's certainly does not. Its sheer ridiculousness, however, is quite effortless. And I can't deny I laughed a partially-forced and partially-surrendered laugh many times throughout.

The film concerns a boy named "Hanger", so-called because his mother's pimp ripped him from her womb with a hanger. Hanger works at a junkyard sorting recyclables with his roommate, a disfigured, tampon-fetishist Asian. Together they watch porn, drink beer, avoid getting raped by the local (disfigured, of course) homosexual, and spy on the always-masturbating, porn-star boss's daughter. Meanwhile, Hanger's dad contrives to get revenge--at last!--on the pimp who killed Hanger's mother.

More an exploration of a particularly squalid, morally vacuous milieu of perverse sexuality and disfigurement than a narrative, Hanger is nearly an unintentional art-film, as non-narrative as Last Year in Marienbad, but with more shots of floppy artificial penises. What could be padding in another film is, in Hanger, most of the film. The revenge plot only occasionally gets in the way of seeing the boss's daughter masturbating or the Asian digging through the trash for porn and tampons.

What Hanger all adds up to is hard to say. The disfigurement is distributed wildly. Hanger necessarily is disfigured and has prosthetic and make-up effects. But the Asian, played by a Caucasian, also has heavy make-up effects and a prosthetic. Hanger's father has a huge, prosthetic nose and, in most of the film, age make-up. The pimp, a black man played by a white man, has a prosthetic nose as well as make-up. Nearly every man, except the boss of the junkyard, is treated to some sort of make-up effect disfigurement. The women, with two exceptions, are undisfigured, leaving their porn-star-perfect faces as intact as their silicon tits. Were the distribution of the disfigurement not so random, one could read something about the ugliness of human nature in Hanger or something about perversion and the subconscious. But I can discern no real pattern. Hanger, the Asian, and Hanger's dad are all rancid people in their own ways, as are the pimp and the film's lovely whores. The disfigurements are just hideous ornamentation upon a world of ugliness and vileness. It's a world where there are just a lot of ugly, awful people and the rest are beautiful, awful people. They all have strange minds that don't quite work right and a total absence of moral reasoning.

For whatever reason, it's this last point that makes it all so funny for me. This is somehow more post-apocalyptic than any Mad Max movie; this is post-human sludge-porn that marries the absurdist bleakness of Samuel Beckett and his casts of degenerates with the gleeful foulness of John Waters, but does so ineptly and with a $2000 camcorder. Hanger is a very stupid movie, but I like it. I would rather not, but I like it.

Laid to Rest (2009) & ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011)

Laid to Rest is, to put it plainly, a horror fan's horror film. Everything a lover of horror films enjoys in the genre, including some of its more charming weaknesses, is offered by the bucket in this film. Kind of a miracle, in that it pushes the more salient features of slasher films to an extreme and is, on top of that, a competent and very good film.

The extremity to which I refer is in brutality and gore. We're now in the Third Wave of Slasher Films. The First Wave began the genre with the well-known conventions and equally well-known franchises: Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.. The Second Wave of Slasher Films distinguished itself by an awareness of the films' history, a self-consciousness of the slasher-esque situation they present. The major franchises of the Second Wave are the Scream films, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legends. The Third Wave of slashers is distinguished by its Return to Purity. These films look to what made slashers fun and try to give the viewer that. Adam West's Hatchet, the Wrong Turn films, Rob Zombie's Halloween films, and Laid to Rest all fall into the Third Wave. (It's no coincidence that Rob Zombie resurrected Michael Myers for the Third Wave, after all: Michael is the first and purest slasher monster.) The plots of these movies are as thin as need be, the women are hot, and the 'monsters' are impossibly strong--despite, in the cases of Hatchet and Wrong Turn, genetic decadence working against them--so that they can cut through skulls, rip apart heads, and do whatever godawful violence the make-up department can come up with.

Of the Third Wave of Slashers, the direct-to-video, independent pictures tend to be more brutal. Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 is about as brutal as a studio-released slasher could ever be--and it is indeed pretty brutal. Laid to Rest exceeds that film by a margin and Laid to Rest 2 exceeds it by miles. The slasher-monster ChromeSkull has no difficulty passing his blades through skulls, lifting corpses with one hand, or even exploding heads in the first film. In the sequel, bodies and faces are carved in every disturbing way imaginable, including a clumsy mastectomy. Since writer-director Robert Hall has had a long career in the make-up department of horror movies, it's no surprise that this area of his films keep up. Every slice is accompanied by realistic gushes of blood and nebulous chunks.

Where Laid to Rest impresses is in going beyond this first step of brutal set-pieces. West's Hatchet scarcely has a plot or characters; both are a clothesline on which to hang the slightly tongue-in-cheek brutal kills. Wrong Turn, similarly, offers more of a situation than a plot: there are dangerous, inbred hicks and there are people they want to kill. Rob Zombie's Halloween films stand out amongst Third Wave slashers for their intricate plots and, especially in the second film, three-dimensional characters. Laid to Rest exceeds these films in plot as well: a girl wakes up in a coffin in a funeral home with no recollection of how she got there; she's immediately pursued by the vicious ChromeSkull. The pursuit is the exciting, suspenseful slasher action. But the question of who she is and why she woke up in a coffin lingers through the action, giving the film a layer of mystery and a touch of absurd nightmare.

That Hall's script is able to provide answers to the mystery while sustaining the action is really the miracle. Instead of wasting our time with flashbacks, video footage, minimal dialogue, and realistic character behaviour gradually reveals the answers to some mysteries and leaves others remain--as some should. The film's structuring is a thing of beauty.

What isn't so beautiful about Laid to Rest is a flaw it shares with Third Wave slashers. This is a general callousness toward its characters. The brutality I praise above can and will strike any character, no matter how deserving of some nobility and dignity. Now it can be argued that a psychopathic killer could care less about how well a character as fought back and is fair game for brutal slaughter as anyone else. That is, of course, true. I'm not blaming the killer; I'm blaming the writer's approach. Laid to Rest, unlike, say, Hatchet, doesn't contain a great deal of comedy. ChromeSkull's kills are serious business. There is only one kill that is kind of a joke, based on a running gag and delivered to one of the film's most likeable characters while everyone watches. The death is disturbing (an inflation death), inexplicably tongue-in-cheek, and left me feeling there was no point caring about anyone's life--a rather important thing to do if a horror film is to be a good one. Compare to the death of Annie in Zombie's Halloween 2, where Zombie devotes a cinematic Moment of Silence to the character. While Zombie's approach is out of place and overdramatic, it's nevertheless superior to a glib dismissal.

Laid to Rest 2 shares the flaws of the first film and intensifies them. The protagonist of the first film, for instance, is casually dispatched within the first few minutes. Unfortunately, it also dispenses with the mysterious plot that made the first film so good. In this film, ChromeSkull is revealed to be the head of some organization of psychopaths who devote themselves to helping ChromeSkull set up his 'laboratory', make his weapons, and find his prey. Perhaps Hall believed the mystery of who these people are, why they're helping ChromeSkull, and who ChromeSkull really is, should hook audiences even more. But these are two different kinds of mysteries altogether. The first film gives us a close mystery of a single character's nightmare, loss of identity, unexplained location, and unknown enemy. In this film, we have more a conspiracy than a mystery. The conspiracy involves an annoying playboy who wants to be the next ChromeSkull. Unfortunately for him, the first ChromeSkull still lives and has no desire to be replaced. Meanwhile, ChromeSkull's other assistant (Danielle Harris) finds him another victim, a mostly-blind girl, to be his comeback prey.

The strong structuring and screenwriting of the first film is entangled, in the sequel, by its own ambitious plotting. Hall wants us to follow the ChromeSkull wannabe, ChromeSkull, the efforts of the police force to find the blind girl, the blind girl, a remaining character from the first film and how their threads all cross each other. Our attention is so dissipated, we care about no-one. Laid to Rest 2 is, consequently, a messy film. Characters are forgotten as the film jumps from one plot point to another, the protagonists don't really protag, and the various questions the film does raise by way of conspiracy are left unanswered. It is not a good thing that this drew comparisons in my mind to the infamous Thorn plot of Halloween 6. This is not to say the plot is all uninteresting; just that, in all its increased complexity, it lacks both the intimacy and mystique of the first film.

Perhaps a bit of hubris got in the way. Laid to Rest is a really good film and ChromeSkull is a really good slasher. But much of Laid to Rest 2 is devoted to telling us ChromeSkull is a really good slasher. When Hall has ChromeSkull walk over Godzilla's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so as to say, "Here is horror's latest and best," we're given a basic theme of this film: ChromeSkull is already a legend and piddly psychopaths want to be as badass as him. The amazing thing is that Hall is almost able to justify this kind of hubris. When we see this dork trying to be ChromeSkull, we do side with ChromeSkull; we want him to show up the dork like Stormare stuffing Buscemi into the woodchipper. There are levels of evil and ChromeSkull is something beyond a common psychopathic serial killer. The mystery of him and his motive is really the core strength holding Laid to Rest 2 together; in fact, the full title, ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 is quite apt.

Ultimately, though, Laid to Rest 2 ramps up the extremity at the expense of the intimacy and wonder that made the first so remarkable. In this way it loses itself in the same trap as most other Third Wave slashers. While it's not fair on Hall to ask that he simply remake the first film in the sequel and while his experiment in expanding the Laid to Rest universe is impressive in its own right, it is fair to note the experiment isn't entirely successful. Perhaps a decade down the road, in hindsight, this film will be viewed with the affection given to other bonkers sequels like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2--but I doubt it.

Overall, the Laid to Rest films are an impressive series of independent slashers and about the best the Third Wave of Slasher Films has to offer.

Death Stop Holocaust (2009) - 3/4

There are an awful lot of films trying to be grindhouse or drive-in films. The Tarantino and Rodrigues picture Grindhouse is the most prominent and is perhaps responsible for many similar films. On the other hand, with Tarantino making the style so mainstream and his followers and fans taking it up themselves, making films of this sort stigmatizes the 'grindhouse' affectation as being just more Tarantino-ism. There are, on the other hand, original grindhouse/drive-in filmmakers still working. Herschell Gordon Lewis, inventor of the gore film, just released his latest film, The Uh-Oh Show (2009), on DVD; it is as true a grindhouse picture as 2011 will allow and it is, needless to say, a small-budget ($25,000), shot-on-video picture. Tarantino's Death Proof or Rodrigues's Planet Terror can only be wearing the grindhouse aesthetic as an affectation. No drive-in filmmaker ever had a budget near Death Proof's ($30,000,000). It's unlikely they'd ever seen that kind of money in their lives. Whatever Tarantino did to popularize the nostalgia and willful imitation of drive-in and grindhouse flicks, his stigmatized followers in the shot-on-video, b-movie market are more truly grindhouse flicks than his films will ever be.

That said, even shot-on-video flicks must affect the grindhouse style. Death Stop Holocaust is a shot-on-video picture that affects the style as unabashedly as any other. The filmmaker, Justin Russell, goes so far as to insert burning celluloid effects. We know this is an affectation, because the film was shot on a Panasonic HVX 200 (a $4000 digital camcorder). There is no celluloid to burn. Nor is there any illusion that I'm at a drive-in when I recline on my futon and watch the DVD screener on my laptop. While in most cases, the affectation, then, is all it is; it goes no further than affecting the style in reference to a style of cinema that happened to appeal to and influence the filmmakers. Call it an homage or call it being hip, it is equally limited. Death Stop Holocaust seems to me a rarity in going beyond mere affectation to making use of the style to comment upon the content. Before we get to that, the content.

Death Stop Holocaust, a title seemingly drawn from a mad lib, concerns two college girls, Liz (Lisa Krenisky) and Taylor (Naomi Watts look-a-like Jenna Fournier), taking a vacation at Liz's family summer home on a nearby island. As soon as they arrive on the island, they find its denizens behaving strangely. A man tries to run them off the road in his van, a waitress distracts them while their gas is stolen, and hardly anyone else will say a word. Before they can get to the summer home, they're being terrorized by three maniacs in creepy masks.

Naturally a movie of this sort--a movie, that is to say, so threadbare in plot that it is purely about the experience--stands or falls on the effectiveness of the terrorizing. Holocaust stands. Justin Russell has the ambition, and the talent, to strive for something more than the usual maniacs-terrorizing-babes set pieces. He's definitely experimenting in Death Stop Holocaust and the results are often quite effective. The influence of The Strangers perhaps rests a little too heavily, as the masked maniacs wander the negative space of the frame silently, toying with us as much as with the victim, but not really accomplishing much else. On the other hand, this behaviour is unsettling if only in virtue of its inexplicability. And their ability and willingness to commit upsetting violence is established before the toying around even begins. We're therefore always left in suspense as to when and what they're going to do, though there's no doubt of their being able to do something whenever they please.

Beyond the maniacs, however, is where Holocaust transcends its generic conventions and approaches the truly nightmarish. For one, the town itself appears to be held in the grip of some spell, behaving in accordance with the maniacs' goals. That the oddness of the supposedly normal people in a town where Liz has fond childhood memories is never really explained, moreover, submerges us, as in our dreams of familiar places somehow altered and decadent, in the uncanny, the horror of the familiar perverted against natural order. In fact, one of the screenplay's missteps is in having a character explain any of the mystery at all, though, wisely, not much is explained.

Death Stop Holocaust transcends not just in the narrative, but also, as I alluded to earlier, in its form. The grindhouse paraphernalia are not merely doing the work of affectation. They play a role in Liz's consciousness, in the relationship between reality and nightmare. We're introduced into the film world via the classic "Our Feature Presentation" drive-in intro. This establishes the filmic reality of the world we're witnessing as the concrete reality. At times of intense horror the 'celluloid' burns up. The first time the celluloid burns is during a rape attempt; the second time is when Liz is sedated and has a nightmare. The suggestion is that reality itself, or at least Liz's experience of reality, is compromised by the sheer horror of the situations she's in. Since this also suggests a certain subjective relationship between the form and Liz's experience, we experience with her the reality of the island as a disjointed, absurd flow of nightmare. What she experiences in sedation, a sequence reminiscent of moments in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, is an indistinguishable part of her experience of the maniacs, one no more real than the other.

Despite my praise, Holocaust is not a masterpiece debut. For all of the nightmarish effects and grindhouse allusions, it may strike many horror fans as a tame picture, representing much of its brutality elliptically. That might not be a problem if the film didn't offer us suggestive glimpses of that brutality. And the various narrative lacunae, while strengthening the mysteriousness of the events, at some points simply dissatisfies. This is particularly true of the film's conclusion, which left me a little disappointed. If the film builds up to an event, some clue in the narrative must be present to make us see that event as significant in itself; and there are no such clues in Holocaust. A nightmare, after all, is uninteresting to anyone but its dreamer unless it has a point.

However, Holocaust is still a very strong debut, showing Russell's influences to be as broad as '70s exploitation, David Lynch, and modern invasion horror like The Strangers. Some work will have to be done for Russell to make his influences work with one another, but on the strength of Death Stop Holocaust, I look forward to seeing him experiment more. Death Stop Holocaust is indeed a true heir to drive-in cinema and, thanks to Russell's adventurousness, also much more.

Dark House (2009) - 2/4

So often these mid-budget horror movies have one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, whether ghost, demon, witch, or banshee; and this creature leaves you so underwhelmed, you wonder, "THIS is the terror?!". Dark House doesn't come up with anything better; it just multiplies it. Instead of one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, we get a whole gaggle of them. The result is, actually, effective. While one of these creations underwhelms, the extra effort exerted in creating a horde of different creatures keeps each set-piece of the film novel and allows viewers to wonder what creature will pop up next.

The premise of Dark House is, in fact, built around these creatures. A crazy amusement ride entrepreneur (Jeffrey Combs) has designed his masterpiece, "Dark House", a haunted house using a series of lasers to produce holographic horrors. Each room of the house has some new hologram to freak out customers. The few humans are a class of student actors hired to interact with the holograms and customers. The one catch is that the house used as the "Dark House" really may really be haunted and one of the actors has a hidden past with the house. Naturally, the holograms go ape and folks start dying.

This familiar plot is a generous sampling from William Castle movies. A portion of House on Haunted Hill, a lot of Thirteen Ghosts, and maybe a dash of The Tingler, and you have Dark House's backbone, a loose basis for the various murder set pieces. Castle's films are haunted house rides, designed to give lighthearted, even cheesy, thrills in isolated moments. Dark House inherits that spirit. It even inherits Vincent Price's hamminess from House on Haunted Hill, channeled here by Combs in his eccentric millionaire performance. Copying something good is better than an original bad idea: like any William Castle movie, Dark House is fun.

Unfortunately, the screenwriters get a little too ambitious and try to throw us some unnecessary twists toward the end. As is often the case, these twists are fig leaves over something screenwriters tend to find embarrassing: simplicity. A straightforward haunting or insanity story can be elevated with a twist; but more often than not, as in this case, it's simply confused. Some may enjoy the twists, however, and some may not; but the story's simplicity throughout the majority of the film allows us to enjoy the film's real meat, which is just the inventive creatures and their kills.

La Horde (2009) and Mutants (2009)

Mutants and La Horde are two French fast-zombie movies that follow the Romero format: hole up in a building for shelter and fend off sieging flesh-eaters while the survivors fester from within. Since these films are superficially so similar, I am reviewing them together.

La Horde (2009) - 3/4

Amongst the many zombie genre trends to come from the films of George Romero, one I've never been keen on is badassery. Badassery is common in American cinema, deriving from the Western, in which tough-as-nails gunslingers have to show one another just how tough they can be. The Italians made badassery so ridiculous with films like Django that Terence Hill and Bud Spencer turned it into comedy with considerable success in the Trinity films. Romero, like, but perhaps not to quite the same extant as John Carpenter, is influenced by these western tropes. The cockfight between Ben and Cooper in Night of the Living Dead, the bluster of the scientists and military personnel in The Crazies, the opening of Dawn of the Dead, and most extremely the entirety of Day of the Dead, all show these tropes. Day of the Dead is an apotheosis of badassery and its messiah is Captain Rhodes, who yells to the zombies eating his intestines, "Choke on them!" Captain Rhodes is really responsible for the profusion of badassery in zombie films. Rough, tough guys who are always ready to kick ass, zombie or human, and who never go down without a fight: that's a badass.

Since Day of the Dead, there is scarcely a zombie picture without a healthy dose of badassery: Army of Darkness, Dead Alive, The Undead, Romero's own Survival of the Dead, just to name some well-known films; there are also the multitudes of straight-to-video films that are assembled of crumbs from Romero's table. The latest in this trend is La Horde.

La Horde is ambitious, however: it doesn't want to be just another badass zombie film; it wants to be the badass zombie film. That's not to say the film is badass, as some synonym for epic, but that all of the characters are 90% Captain Rhodes, 10% unique personality. We begin with a team of rogue cops agreeing to storm a tenement and get revenge on the gangsters within for killing a cop. Not only are the rogue cops a collection of badasses out for blood, and not only do gangsters, much like western outlaws, get by on their badassery, but when they're put together, they must constantly strive to out-badass one another. Explosions from the city and the sounds of creatures from within the building interrupts their conflict and, wouldn't you know it, puts the cops n' crooks together to be a badass team of badasses.

I claimed not to be keen on badassery and I should say why. Let's go back to Romero. What makes Day of the Dead an inferior entry in the series than Dawn for many critics is that Day is emotionally exhausting. Emotional exhaustion is acceptable in a film that earns its emotions. But in Day the exhaustion is due to characters constantly throwing tantrums at one another, making threats, and "getting up in each other's faces." They're trying to get the dominant position over one another, to out-badass the other. These displays of power, a necessary part of badassery since no badass can give in to domination, are pissing contests; and pissing contests grow very dull and tiring when the bladder never empties, if you'll excuse the strained metaphor. Badassery is a social ritual within the group, symbolic action that is stylized, formal, repetitive and grows tedious very quickly because we sense the artifice behind it. It works best in small doses, like the saloon fight in Shane, or when played tongue-in-cheek like in Army of Darkness. If overused characters never have an opportunity to simmer down and talk reasonably; they can never be themselves: every moment is a tense moment of heightened emotion while they play the badass. Flourishes like the famous Rhodes death scene are very effective and the reason badassery continues to get deployed. However, filmmakers don't seem to realize that it must be used with temperence.

Dawn of the Dead works so well because once the characters get to the mall and have peace, they don't need to be badasses anymore. Even Day offers moments of respite amongst the three protagonists. La Horde offers no respite of any kind. The characters never for a moment stop struggling to prove what badasses they are. This brings with it a host of problems. Badasses often forget to think, for instance. In La Horde, these badasses never figure out that zombies must be shot in the head or indeed shot at all: There are two lengthy hand-to-hand fights with zombies that amount to choreographed fights with growling punching bags. These two scenes are kind of fun, if too protracted. A life-long viewer of zombie films, I just kept commanding them to just shoot the zombie in the head. With Romero's zombies, punching might work; but these zombies are inexplicably faster and stronger than normal humans.

We also get, as in Day of the Dead, the exhaustion. These characters are forever yelling at and threatening one another, pointing guns, getting face-to-face for slowly- and gravely-spoken "This is how it is" moments. With the life-threatening situation raging around them, one would think they'd set the badassery aside and focus on staying alive. Not so. They're all Captain Rhodes. For anyone who found the constant badassery in Ghosts of Mars tedious, La Horde will be found considerably more tedious. However, as with Captain Rhodes, this does yield some impressive moments, including a one-versus-dozens moment guaranteed to get anyone cheering. And in the midst of the tedious badassery, La Horde does manage to deliver some tense moments of zombie pursuit and exciting zombie action.

Zombie action and badassery aside, there is also a political component to La Horde that most outside of France won't get. France has a lot of riots. We all know this. The reason they have so many riots is that they've allowed loads of refugees, who could care less about France, to become citizens. These people do whatever they want, because France isn't their home and they have no respect for it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them and they're well-armed. These are the film's gangsters, all Africans or Czechs, now put alongside the cops and made to feel what it's like to be a helpless victim in a country they thought was theirs. The zombies' behaviour is holding up a mirror of sorts to these invaders, showing them how self-destructive it is to work against the country that gave them freedom and security. Not being from France myself, it's difficult to say exactly what is the political message, whether a plea for cooperation or rather an invective, even against the very badassery the pervades the film for tearing the country apart and leaving it vulnerable to much worse potential situations.

Mutants (2009) - 2.5/4

The perfect antidote to the ostentatious and egocentric behaviour that is badassery: love. Other-centered, self-effacing is genuine love. For at the center of Mutants is the necrophiliac love story between a doctor and her zombifying husband, who must resist the urge to eat and/or rape his wife with all his inner resources. They hole up in an evacuated hospital and she struggles to save him and get help while zombies and a band of badasses with guns get in her way.

Zombie love stories have been done before. Soavi's Cemetery Man is probably the most famous instance and a tough precedent to beat. Arguably, it has been overcome already with Yuzna's underrated Return of the Living Dead 3. Yuzna follows the trajectory of his couple's relationship through the zombification process and shows a fascination for the effect of the zombie infection on the thoughts and emotions of the infected member, Julie. She describes the agony and hunger of being a zombie, the way it changes her, and yet she never does abandon or harm her lover. Without any explicit mention from the characters, we can see that love can overcome the desire to eat brains.

Mutants isn't quite as sentimental as Cemetery Man and RotLD3. While the doctor and her husband do love one another, practicalities override affection. When her husband seems dangerous, she doesn't hesitate to chain him up and he doesn't hesitate to put a gun to his own head. Where RotLD3 culminates in a Romeo and Juliet moment, Mutants culminates in the stark realization that maybe infection wins and maybe what seemed to be love can be reduced to simple biology. There aren't many optimistic zombie movies, are there?

Unfortunately Mutants doesn't focus on the husband and wife relationship. As with so many of the recent French horror movies, Mutants seems afraid of allowing interiority and emotional space privilege over a barrage of external events. That's fine if the promise or hint of interiority is not offered, as in La Horde. Here filmmaker David Morlet tantalizes us with the necrophiliac relationship, but would rather give us a group of badasses with guns barging into the hospital and slapping the doctor around rather than allow more than a few minutes emotional development between the couple. Had these characters been in the film from the beginning, their presence would have constituted interesting dramatic tension. However, they only make entrance toward the end of a film with a meager 80-something minute runtime. We simply cannot care about them; they just distract from the more interesting matters. These characters are, of course, an excuse for zombie and human carnage. But we've all seen zombie carnage before. Zombie films need some new contribution, new idea to rise above the rest. Mutants had an opportunity to give that, but sadly failed to appreciate the opportunity.

Perhaps the film's attention defecit issues are simply a result of its cynicism. Practical reality, such as infection, zombies, idiots with guns, and the need for supplies do consistently override love. And if pregnancy is the film's symbol for love, a protective force throughout, the film's ambiguous final note may be the most cynical of all. If this is so, the film sacrifices not just its opportunity to investigate love in time of zombie apocalypse, but also some of its entertainment value: The inconsistency makes it difficult to enjoy the film's action, as it never sustains interest in anything, the relationship, the human conflicts, or the zombie-killing. Although what it does offer of each is competent and occasionally fascinating.

The Twilight Saga - 3/4

As a relatively little-read internet reviewer, I question the wisdom of writing about the Twilight series. What can I have to say that hasn't been said? I don't care to wade through all the internet literature on Twilight; I can only hope I, as an impartial outsider, have some fresh insight to contribute. For my part, writing about the films will satisfy a need to express just why, despite not being the target audience, I find these films so fascinating. ("These films," incidentally, refers to Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse.)

The gist of the series is as follows. Bella, a fairly normal albeit melancholic and diffident teen girl in her senior year of highschool, returns to her hometown to live with her father. While fitting in with the normal students, she's drawn to the strangely contemptuous and pallid Edward. Soon they fall in love and she learns he's a vampire. The complication comes from Jacob, a childhood friend with whom she also falls in love and who happens to be a werewolf. Throughout the films Bella learns about both vampire and werewolf society and of the antipathy between them. She realizes she's not being fought over by two attractive young men, but by two whole societies. To choose one is to preclude herself from the other. The indecisive Bella dicks both men around for an inordinately long time and causes both conflicts and truces between the societies as she does so.

What most interests me about the films is Bella's dilemma. I suppose that's what interest teenage girls as well, but for different reasons. I'm fascinated by her dilemma because of what it represents, namely, class conflict. The vampires have extremely white skin, traditional nuclear family structure (despite not being related to one another), high education, elegant clothes, a spotless and modern-design mansion, and impeccable manners. The werewolves, in contrast, all have tanned skin, a loose and shifting family structure (follow the character Leah), trade learning (motorcycle repair), wear nothing but shorts, live in wood cabins, and often roughhouse.

The contrast is between what Nietzsche classed as Apollonian and Dionysian impulses; between cultured life and natural life (i.e. the Noble Savage). Cultured life has always been seen as high class and natural life low class. On the other hand, as in Rousseau, cultured life is seen as phony and natural life truer and purer. These prejudices have been in place as long as human civilization. There are certainly virtues to both 'sides', if indeed it's necessary to have sides. Cultured life can be seen as too secondary, detached from lived experience; too effete in situations that really count. A library science scholar is useless in a survival situation; a mechanic isn't. However, sophistication has attractions: artistic and poetic beauty, deep conversations, romance and comedy.

The sexual implications, however, are at the forefront of Twilight. The sexual implications of the class distinction is, as in Twilight, centered upon the men. Women are supposed to, and often do, want men who are aggressive, muscular, tough, good with their hands, often sweating and getting dirty--"manly" men. On the other hand, they like men who are romantic, poetic, witty, and intellectually stimulating--cultured men. The men who are of the "manly" variety are made to feel inadquate for their lack of refinement; the refined men are made to feel inadequate for not being manly enough, as though culture is feminizing. (The arts are oftened considered 'sissy' stuff by the uncultured.) Hence the depiction so often found in Hollywood of a woman who marries a cultured man then has an affair with a brawny, working-class man. The lower class is seen as good for sexual stimulation, the upper class as good for intellectual stimulation. (It is on this prejudice that the whole of interracial pornography seems to thrive.) Bella's position in the film is in choosing between the two ends of the spectrum women desire: men who can be wild and men who can, as Shakespeare put it, word them.(1) Edward can word her; Jacob can thrill her.

This distinction is represented faithfully in the films. Edward is always seen as having to restrain his passion (his desire for her blood), Jacob is always free to express his passion. Where Edward has graduated from school countless times, as he's perpetually 17, Jacob spends his time roughhousing and cliffdiving with his fellow shirt-allergy sufferers. (McConaughey and Danzig would make good werewolves.) The most revealing scene, presented so chastely for the teens of course, is when Bella is being kept safely on a frosty mountain. While she freezes in the tent, the undead Edward, whose body produces no heat, is unable to keep her warm. Jacob, however, produces more body heat than the average human. So he has to slip into bed with Bella to warm her while Edward sits, observing. That's the distinction in a nutshell: hot/cold in bed, good/bad with words, restrained/unrestrained emotions.

Of course, the distinction is objectionable to men. Cultured men are not incapable of being wild lovers or aggressive fighters; 'uncultured' men are not incapable of being poets or sensitive lovers. What is unfortunate about the Twilight Saga is that it never provides an alternative. Rather than suggest that this dichotomy is unnecessary or an illusion created by over a century filled with penny-dreadful romance novels, soap operas, and pandering movies, Twilight takes us into the mind of a girl who is indeed choosing between the sides and never learns how erroneous that is. A bildungsroman Twilight is not. The progress is not interior; it is merely exterior. She chooses and that is all. To be fair, Edward, at least, does not fit his stereotype; he is able to thrill her in between his sullen, soft-spoken speeches. Also to be fair, Bella herself is choosing between the individuals as individuals, not as archetypes.

While both individuals Bella has to choose from are admirable. It would be difficult for any woman to really find either Edward or Jacob anything less than desirable. Both are very handsome young men; both are very sincere and loyal; both are a teenage girl's dream come true, albeit in different ways. Bella's insistance on keeping both men on a leash while she chooses thus makes her a rather unpleasant character. One might argue that Jacob is a puppy that doesn't give up. Rather, he's a practical man who needs to be given a clear and straight-forward denial, which is not forthcoming from Bella. She prefers to keep him around so she can dangle in front of him like a carrot, leading him to do whatever she wants but giving nothing in return. Edward, on the other hand, she keeps closer, but frequently humiliates when she wants to make sure Jacob doesn't leave her grip and thus throws him a bone. Why either of these genuinely nice young men want anything to do with her is puzzling to me.

But it's just a girl's fantasy. I'm taking a fantasy too seriously. The films are and must be seen as the fantasies of a girl as she daydreams on a rainy day, listening to indie rock on her iPod. The dream is of two implausibly attractive and generous young men fighting for her; of whole cultures fighting to protect her, because she's the fairest princess in the land. Because this is her fantasy, it doesn't matter if she's kind of a bitch. Because this is her fantasy, we can set aside the realism and just enjoy it for what it is. Hopefully girls who fantasize this way will grow up and learn that real people can be so much more than cultured and wildman archetypes.

The events of the series that are not directly concerned with Bella's dual love are caused by it. An evening game with Edward's family attracts the attention of some renegade vampires. The rest of the series deals with the repercussions. Both vampire family and werewolf family strive to protect Bella for the sakes of their smitten members. This results in some conflicts between the families and some temporary truces. Bella's interference with the cold but cease-fire relationship leads to a perhaps more amicable peace. I would like to relate this to the class-conflict issue discussed earlier, but I can't, except as a dream of risible optimism. The point is that a shared love unites classes and cultures. But of course, all people do love and long for the same things and it hasn't worked yet.

Each film manages to include some fantastical fight scenes. These are enjoyable for their kinetic and aggressive qualities. Vampires can take and deliver punches that are just impossible in real life. In other words, the fights are very much descendents of The Matrix's fight scenes. Either you like this sort of fight choreography or you don't. Personally I prefer traditional, Jackie Chan-style fights; but there's undeniably quite a lot of enjoyment to be had in seeing a werewolf tearing a vampire to pieces.

What isn't fun is the constant posing. Before a fight, after a fight, and sometimes randomly, the characters, usually the vampires, will strike book-cover style poses. The artificiaility is cloying. Nobody randomly poses in real life. And I don't remember it being the plight of vampires to randomly strike poses. It's an artifact of the filmmaking, allowing poster-shots mid-film. The results are silly and tedious.

Overall, the series is surprisingly entertaining. They are indeed geared for a female audience, a girl's fantasy. But girls fatasize much as men do. Men fantasize about fighting for girls; girls fantasize about being fought over by men. Our fantasizes couldn't be more compatible. We still have fights, love, sex, suffering, more fights, and more love. So choose a side and dive into the fantasy. I chose Edward, if you must know.

(1) "He words me, girls, he words me." Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.

The Hole (2009) - 2.5/4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


































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

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

La Rose de Fer (1973) - 3/4

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

Ils (2006) - 2.5/4

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

I could watch her in her panties all day.

House of Wax (2005) - 3/4

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

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



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

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

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

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

Unrated: The Movie (2009) - 1.5/4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorority House Massacre III (1990) - 3.5/4

AKA Hard to Die (a much more appropriate title)

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

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

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

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

976-Evil II (1990) - 2/4

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

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

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

Bikini Girls on Ice (2009) - 1/4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giallo (2009) - 2/4

There is considerable presumption in titling a film, even a film directed by Dario Argento, Giallo. The giallo film is, of course, a highly-influential subgenre of horror-thriller that flourished in the '70s thanks primarily to Argento, as well as Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, and, the maestro, Mario Bava. For Argento, after making giallo films for nearly four decades, to make a film called Giallo is tantamount to promising us a total summary of his career thus far, a summa of the whole subgenre, from The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) to Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005). Giallo does not keep that promise.

Giallo concerns a killer, known as "Giallo," who kills for abstract sexual gratification. A hideous, troll-like man, he targets women whom he could never bed and traps them in his taxi cab. As a proxy for real sex he tortures and kills the women. One of the women is a model who happens to be using her cell phone when kidnapped. Her sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) thus has a lead and works closely with the maverick inspector Enzo (Adrien Brody), whose mother was murdered before his eyes as a child. The film is a straight-forward police procedural of trying to find the killer and save the girl.

Giallo, alas, is not written by experts, but by casual fans whose previous works have all been CGI monster movies for the Syfy channel. Had the film been scripted by Argento himself, it may have attained some sublimity. Sean Keller and Jim Agnew, however, only understand the superficial conventions of the giallo film: sadism to women, an opera (referencing Opera (1987)), a taxi (referencing Suspiria (1977)), and the man-woman detective team (referencing Profondo Rosso (1975), amongst others). Imagine a Hitchcock tribute film consisting primarily in close-ups of keys. This is indeed a link to Hitchcock, but a very superficial one. Similarly, Keller's and Agnew's grasp of the essence of the giallo film is superficial.

The essence of a giallo film, more than anything else, is grounded in amateur detective work. From The Girl Who Knew Too Much onward, the police are scarcely a presence in solving the crime in a giallo. The police proceed by a rational methodology, much like the viewer weened on Sherlock Holmes stories, that proves ineffectual. The protagonists are nearly always individuals who are by chance privy to a sliver of information they can't fathom. (That, incidentally, is an important trope left out of the Agnew-Keller screenplay.) Like the symbolism of a novel, one must reach the end before the significance becomes clear. The detective process is thus not one of deduction, as in Sherlock Holmes stories, but one of hermeneutics, interpreting material as one interprets a poem; the amateur detective uses lateral thinking, following instinct, personal inclination, and sometimes ideas that are entirely inexplicable. The masterpiece of hermeneutic detective work is Argento's own Profondo Rosso. In that film, Marcus Daly first remembers a lullaby he hears during an attempt on his life; he is then informed that the lullaby was written of in a book of local legends; he then tracks the book down and finds a picture of a house inside; he then inquires from a florist about the plants in the photo so he can locate the house, even though he has no idea if the house is significant. After finding the house, we realize he's actually stumbled into the site of a murder we witnessed in the film's prologue and on it goes until he does indeed stumble upon the killer. Marcus's detective work is not a process of deduction. He couldn't logically draw any links between the moves he makes. Yet, he finds the killer while the detectives eat sandwiches and shrug their shoulders. That is the essence of the giallo.

Starting with The Card Player (2004), Argento started to evade this giallo convention into flat-out police procedural. I would go so far as to argue The Card Player is not a giallo at all, but that's a discussion for another essay. Giallo continues the style of The Card Player, following a detective, Enzo. Enzo claims to not play by the book, yet his investigative procedures are basically logical, tracking evidence and waiting for lab results. The only unorthodox feature in his method is how he treats the criminals. Basically, he kills them. I'll come back to that later. Enzo does get an assistant in Linda, the sister of the killer's latest victim. While she aids in the investigation, her discoveries too are purely logical. She deduces from the last words of a victim, "yellow," that the killer probably has a liver disease. That makes too much sense for a giallo. So one of the most fundamental aspects of the giallo tradition is absent. The investigation in Giallo is not a hermeneutic effort, but a deductive one.

Complementing the amateur detective work is the audience involvement in the investigative work. Ordinarily the killer kills for a motive of sexual perversion so convoluted as to be virtually un-guessable, such as the gender confusion in Four Flies on Grey Velvet. That the amateur detective manages to figure out who the killer is comes as something of a shock. And yet, when the motive is itself illogical, how could anything but an illogical investigation uncover it? The method of investigation ideally suits the object of investigation; the form fits the content. One might even go so far as to say the elegant murder set pieces that occupy a traditional giallo (also absent from Giallo) are works of art that demand not investigation but interpretation to solve. The consequence, at any rate, is that we never know more than the protagonist. In fact, as the protagonist's leaps of "logic" can be difficult to follow, we often know less. Discovering who the killer is and why the killer has been killing all along is one of the singular pleasures of the giallo tradition, sometimes outstripping the coda of Psycho (1960) in sheer over-explanation.

This, too, is absent in Giallo. We're shown the killer around the middle of the film, before Enzo and Linda find him; and when they discover who he is even by name, we can only shrug. He's just a guy. There are no red herrings--a fundamental feature of giallo films, especially Sergio Martino gialli--leading us to think it may be one of several familiar characters. Even The Card Player featured this trope. Giallo does not. The killer is a man named Flavio Volpe ("Blond Fox"). This is not a spoiler, as you will never meet him except as the killer. And his motive is uncharacteristically simple: He's ugly and gets his sexual gratification from torturing girls. The sexual perversion trope is indeed present, but highly simplified in comparison to Argento's earlier pictures, such as the baroque Trauma (1993).

All of this discussion is to say that Giallo is not a summa giallica; it may not even be a giallo. This wouldn't be significant were the film not obviously representing itself as the ultimate giallo, or, what the screenwriters themselves called a "kitchen sink giallo," were the film not superficially attempting to be a summary of giallo tropes. That does not, of course, mean the film is necessarily a failure. Even if it isn't a giallo, it can still be a good crime-thriller. But it isn't that either.

Enzo is a frankly charmless detective, very far removed from David Hemming's Marcus Daly in Profondo Rosso. Brody, himself a very charming screen presence, struggles to make Enzo appealing with minimal success. The notoriously wooden Emmanuelle Seigner, moreover, is fiercely arborial thanks to her vapid character. This leaves the twisted Giallo to amuse us and he actually does, with broken English lines like, "No move or you blind" and the general glee with which he sets about torture. He's seen reading a pornographic comic at one point. A knowledgable friend informs me the comic is a Final Fantasy 7 comic depicting one of the main characters sexually engaged with a dog. So he masturbates to cartoon bestiality as well as pictures of the tortured women. What a guy. He's a grotesque portrait of slacker/doper culture, inhaling aerosol and masturbating all day. Unfortunately, we spend much more time with Linda and Enzo than we do with Giallo.

The film's strongest point is in drawing a link between Enzo and Giallo. Both characters have suffered trauma and both characters have turned to violence in response. Enzo, as mentioned, witnessed his mother's murder. We see this in a beautiful flashback. Giallo also gets a frankly implausible flashback to his in utero existence, where his heroine-abusing mother ruined his life from the start. Giallo mutilates women, perhaps as revenge on his mother and perhaps out of sheer resentment. Enzo plays maverick detective. Once he finds a killer, he kills him. He never explicitly says so, but the film strongly implies this is what he does and that the chief employs him for cases that require this maverick behaviour. He's a police assassin and his current target is Giallo. This creates the narrative's sole moment of moral complexity: If Enzo kills Giallo, they may never find the girls he's kidnapped. Satisfying his bloodlust would therefore be as selfish an act as Giallo's self-gratification.

The film's weakest point is in the near absence of female content. One of the most curious stylistic choices of the film, and one that's repeated too often to be unintentional, is having helpless women yelling out repetitive insults at men from the background. Men dominate and women are helpless and irritating voices of outrage, chastising them from the background or from out of frame. Rather than have any emotional effect, these moments are annoying. One of the victims yells at the killer, as he goes about his business, that he's ugly and he's sick. She yells this a good two dozen times, mostly from out of frame. A later rhyming scene has Linda yelling at Enzo from the background for far too long. I can see what Argento and the writers were trying to achieve. For one, they again link Enzo and Giallo. They also represent women as a damaging influence from behind--the background and offscreen serving as a metaphor for the past, haunting both Enzo and Giallo. But the effect is just to make the only women in the film with any significant screentime extremely annoying. They are shrill voices, banshees, assaulting from out of frame or out of focus. An interesting but ultimately flawed stylistic choice that poisons the few glimmers of femininity in the film.

Despite the multitude of flaws, Argento's visual style pulls one along so that the film never quite becomes boring. Occasionally it insults, occasionally annoys, but never bores. Nevertheless, one hopes Argento either return to writing his own screenplays, or find much better screenwriters in the future. Argento's style just couldn't save the film from a hopeless and misguided screenplay, or, to be fair with the blame, his own peculiar artistic choices.