Yet again, the annual tradition of watching allegedly 'bad' movies dawned in our household. November 1st is eagerly anticipated like a harvest feast. We stockpile for it all year long. "We can save that movie for the Turkey Challenge!" So we do. It's the Saturnalia, the Carnival season, when all the checks and guards can be dropped and taste is turned on its head. The usual measures of taste, value, and pleasure are no longer so restricted. The gates are open and one never knows what will wander in. Movies that would seem a waste of time in June are, in November, a discovery, a gem, or just a damn good time.
This year, we knew what to kick off with. Those wacky SyFy movies, often produced by The Asylum, that just seem to be getting wackier all the time. There was always a tongue-in-cheek element to those giant shark movies, but they were still playing at being serious. That is, they were still about a giant shark or some other massive terror. I think, as they've come to realize they don't have to play serious, they've gotten better. They've given in to their worst impulses and that kind of perversion is always rewarded in a creative element. The best of these are directed by Griff Furst.
The anaugural film of the challenge this year was Furst's Ghost Shark, a film whose very concept is preposterous enough to amuse. It plays out almost as good as it should. A shark is assaulted by grenade-tossing rednecks, as all good sharks must be, and retreats to a semi-submerged druidic temple to die. The druidic powers that be make the shark not just a ghost, but a ghost that can materialize in any body of water, anywhere, no matter how small or shallow. The shark appears in puddles, cups, sweat, condensation, swimming pools, eating children, teens, more children, and a boardroom executive. This is what we waited all year for, and it was worth it. Thank you, Griff.
Furst also delivered in Arachnoquake, a severely underrated disaster flick about flame-breathing spiders and the all-girls softball team and the drunken tour bus driver that kick their bulbous asses. But he outdid himself with Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators, where Louisianan yokels are chomped by gators with actual red necks and then themselves transform into angry, you could even say ragin', Cajun redneck gators. Such flagrant disregard for making sense deserves to be seen, however average the result. Hopefully Griff continues in this direction.
Next on the list was similar director, Mark Atkins, whose films are quite a bit more hit-and-miss, but also quite a bit more varied in style. His worst, Alien Origin, is an almost silent film, with a bunch of Filipino non-actors whispering in the jungle and the back of a restaurant with no music or special effects to speak of. His best, The Haunting of Winchester House, is a rehash of the same thing seen many times before, just done better than its larger-budget comparisons. Sand Sharks also deserves mention for its relentless goofiness, thanks largely to Corin Nemec's brilliant portrayal of a massive ahole into which all sharks must flow.
Unfortunately, as a dog that turns to lick its own feces, we returned to David DeCoteau for another try and got more of the same. In 1313: FrankenQueen we found very little Franken and even less Queen. A milfy scientist is supposedly conducting Frankensteinian experiments, but spends 20 minutes straight running a 'probe' (a dollar store flashlight) along one of the buff boys' half-naked body. The boys walk around in a trance a little. Then are merged into a single buff boy who kills her. But 1313: Giant Killer Bees! was totally different, a breath of fresh air, it was--just kidding, it was the same garbage with some bad CGI bees inserted into a few of the frames. DeCoteau's Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft, however, was a predictable, but entertaining private school drama with a playful witchcraft element. I'm assuming it was
ghost-directed.
At this point, we decided to return to Griff Furst and see what his earlier career had to offer. Swamp Shark proved a much more average 'ancient shark awakens from the deep and wreaks havoc' film. His take on the Richard Matheson classic, I Am Omega, starring Mark Decascos, was quite a lot of fun. Decascos unleashes his usual martial arts moves on some monstrous non-CGI creatures, hooks up with a city girl, kills some rednecks, and blows stuff up. The more independent film, 30 Days to Die--a title that describes nothing in the film, really--is a combination of serial killer slasher mayhem and women-in-prison flick, with a deranged sheriff running headfirst into a very mismanaged teen girls' juvenile rehabilitation camp, at times very dull and at the same time one of the month's highlights.
The third of our SyFy heroes was Steven Monroe, who provided us with the very entertaining Mongolian Death Worm, which used the wise technique of overstuffing the plot and making good use of its washed-up actor star, Sean Patrick Flannery, as a charming rogue. Monroe's Grave Halloween was a strange Japanese ghost story, set in a spooky forest. Although a great setting, as the only setting the forest provided highly monotonous to the point of sopor.
Unfortunately, not all SyFy directors are created equal. Leigh Scott offered up Flu Bird Horror, in which silly pterodactyls attack teen delinquents in the woods and spread a plague. These plots awkwardly converge with little satisfaction. The Possession of Gail Bowers, starring Griff Furst, was the average possession movie, copying all The Exorcist's moves. The film's vulgarity is what it really has going for it. Finally, Hillside Cannibals, which tries to be deep and anthropologically serious as well as grim and gory while ripping off The Hills Have Eyes ends up being tedious and shrill.
Relief from the SyFy movies came from the UK thanks to Jonathan Glendenning. His S.N.U.B! was a boring mix of Yes Minister without the comedy and unduly slow apocalyptic zombie film. Night Wolf was a little better, hiding the werewolf for far too long and giving us only irritating characters who never get naked. But Strippers vs. Werewolves, a goofy, playful, comic-booky splatter movie with lots of good gore and nudity delivered everything a b-movie ought to deliver and in abundance. Perhaps the most outstanding film of the whole month.
At last, we decided it was time to stop waiting and give Sharknado a try. Can it be as fun as the premise? Can it offer all the pleasures it should? Of course not. The premise is hilarious, but when it comes to stringing it into a plot and real humans, you're stuck taking it too seriously. It's impossible not to take that plot too seriously, as any seriousness is too much. It should only exist as a lost Monty Python skit. At any rate, Sharknado is still fun in its gleeful nonsense, particularly the skydiving climax that so eagerly pisses in Newton's face.
Having watched Sharknado, we had to give director Anthony Ferrante another shot. Hence Hansel and Gretel, a very enjoyable if often wilfully stupid backwoods slasher about a clan of cannibals. Dee Wallace is excellent as the madwoman at the heart of the cannibal mayhem. The Headless Horseman is also a very enjoyable SyFy movie about a backwoods town with an ancient curse. It delivers: a. sinister inbred yokels. b. an ancient curse. c. a malevolent spirit that steals people's heads. d. a pit to hell with little ghostly hands. and e. a sexy hillbilly with pigtails. Sharknado may just be the least of Ferrante's ouevre.
The last of the new directors we met this year was Dennis Devine and hoo boy this fella's a basket case. All of his movies are shot with three ingredients: a bunch of girls from the local college's acting class, a digital camcorder, and Randal Malone. He bakes them not so much to perfection, but to a bizarre, lumpy hodgepodge of catfights, bitchy comments, dark pasts, flashbacks, Agatha Christie style reveals, doughy bodies in bras and bikinis, and cheap stage blood. Yes, every Dennis Devine movie has a large number of cat fights. The most enjoyable part of each of these slashers must be Randal Malone's earnest delivery, used best in Don't Look in the Cellar. Alice in Murderland comes second, thanks to its cat fights, and last and least is Blood Mask, a confusing possession movie with braindead teens, priests, robes, and cheap goth makeup. I'm not sure how I feel about these movies, but I'm glad to have watched them.
Not much time, with all the new friends, to revisit our old buddies. I trekked through Fred Olen Ray's backyard on my own, enjoying my annual treat of Beverly Hills Vamp, and this year Fred's tna classics Evil Toons and Witch Academy. I also paid Steckler a 'What's up, dude?' by rewatching Blood Shack and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. But it was really Charles Band my wife and I spent the most time catching up with, enjoying the political incorrectness of Ooga Booga and the mindnumbing pleasures of the latest Evil Bong movie, Wrath of Bong. I'm not sure I know who Charles Band really is. He can make a brainless titty movie like Doll Graveyard, a heady French philosophy-referencing surrealist gem like Blood Dolls, and then a wacked out stoner-flick like Wrath of Bong. He's hard to peg. I just realized this.
I'm glad to say we closed out the year on Wrath of Bong and not the wretched Witchcraft movies we decided to try out. Overall it was a fine month of turkeys, where The Asylum scored a lot more hits than I would have ever imagined. Yet, a month where nothing mindblowingly great was discovered, and a lot of our new company proved little more than fleeting acquaintances. Most of all, I'm glad to have met Griff Furst, a gang of strippers and werewolves, crossed Mongolia with Sean Patrick Flannery as guide, and enjoyed the familiar comforts of Michelle Bauer's bosom and Eddie Deezen's flailing-hand emoting.
Until next year, stay hungry and hold the cranberry sauce.
Notes from the Turkeyground III: A Month in Bad Movie Asylum
Gallowwalkers (2012) - 2.5/4
Gallowwalkers is a new entry in the relatively rare subgenre of the horror-western. The film's real attraction to most will be the star, Wesley Snipes. Perhaps expecting a westernized version of Blade, some viewers will be disappointed. But for those with broader expectations, Gallowwalkers is something new, something strange, ambitious, a truly inventive spectacle.
The horror-western is very difficult to pull off for several reasons. One is that horror really needs to feel immediate and threatening, whereas westerns are set in a past that is increasingly distant. Ghosttown and House II, for instance, get around the problem by having undead gunslingers appear in the present. These films end up being more goofy than anything else. Andrew Goth, who wrote and directed Gallowwalkers has a much more creative idea: invent an entirely new fantasy world. It's a much more difficulty strategy to work, but he pulls it off.
The world of Gallowwalkers is a sort of alternate-reality American old west. There are references to being in America, but this is no America I know. This is an America populated by creepy, long-haired blond men who can't grow beards and prostitutes in push-up bodices. We never really see where they live, but it's somewhere in the desert. Also in the desert are some mountains where the Sisters of San Diablo keep the gates of hell shut. Mercifully, Goth never takes the time to explain any of this. He shows enough for you to know this is an alternate universe and its inhabitants are so familiar with it, they don't waste their time explaining it. Why would they?
Unfortunately for Wesley Snipes, the Eastwood-esque nameless gunslinger whose story this is, the Sisters of San Diablo are falling down on the job. A cadre of rapists he already killed has come back from the dead and these undead jerks are wreaking havoc on all the albino ladyboys, stealing their skins and such. Snipes decides they have to go back to hell where they belong. Therein lies the minimalist plot.
Gallowwalkers relies less on plot and more on a mystical atmosphere comprised of Leone-esque longshots, close-ups, and sparse, bleached-wood sets. Closer to El Topo than to Blade, the film is bound to alienate and frustrate some viewers. I found the film beautiful in its Zen elegance, and fun in its outburts of violence and undisguised borrowings from Once Upon a Time in the West.
Certainly there are some flaws to be found. The mythos of the titular 'gallowwalkers,' once explained, loses a great deal of its urgency and is clearly much smaller a problem than originally presented. There are also several continuity issues. While Goth tends to make liberal use of elipsis, there are times when a character has plainly just transcended time and space. For instance, Patrick Bergen's character is on the gallows at one moment, then in a shoot-out in the next. The film's geography, because so abstract, is always difficult to pinpoint. These continuity errors make it patently disorienting.
Nevertheless, Gallowwalkers has something that has become an increasingly rare commodity: originality. This is something different. It isn't great, but it's new. A horror-fantasy-western that takes itself seriously. Certainly more difficult to enjoy than the latest remake of an '80s slasher, but also worth the effort. Check it out.
The Paranormal Activity Films
As I finished the fourth Paranormal Activity film, the most recent of the series to date, I found myself reliving the same disappointments I experienced with the first three films. As I reflected upon these consistent problems--problems for my enjoyment, at least--I realized that maybe these aren't so much flaws in the films as they are a new narrative approach to horror. While I don't particularly enjoy this narrative approach, the series' millions of fans suggests it is working. This leaves me with a lot of questions. Why do I keep coming back to the Paranormal Activity films? What is it they're doing that isn't 'doing it' for me but is for so many others? Why is this approach so popular? I can answer some of these questions better than others, but mostly I want to ponder them.
The basic progression of every Paranormal Activity film is the same. A camera-obsessed family member records nearly every waking minute of mundane household life. This coincides with the eruption of some supernatural evil that takes its sweet time manifesting itself. Highly repetitive, static shots of inactivity are presented rhythmically until, finally, something of a spooky nature happens in one of those spaces. While the characters may discuss these events and the emotional effects of them, ultimately they do nothing until the supernatural evil possesses someone and kills everyone else.
Basic narrative functions much as your high school English teacher taught you. You have your exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. A protagonist fits in there, centering the action and either triumphing or falling in the climax. Harry Potter always triumphs and Hamlet always dies. The Paranormal Activity movies can be pinned to that structure in some sense. You get to meet the characters, the supernatural evil takes a while to appear, and then it kills everyone--I guess that's a climax. However, this pinning comes loose the more you scrutinize it. A fiction editor for Weird Tales used to say, "A protagonist must protag." The Paranormal Activity protagonists do not. They observe. Then they die. They never fight back against the spiritual force. Nobody calls an exorcist, breaks out the holy water, tries a circle of protection, or any other supernatural movie bullshit. They just die, because the supernatural force can throw them like ragdolls.
This is what I don't like about the Paranormal Activity movies. Static shots of mundane life is lightly touched by creepy incidents for a little over an hour, then everyone dies without making any effort to extricate themselves from the nightmare. What keeps me coming back is that there are some creepy moments and they are quite well done. I just keep imagining that, as narrative invades the barebones approach that was the first Paranormal Activity film, a protagonist might actually emerge. So far, no luck.
What is it about this lack of a protagonist that pleases so much of contemporary horror viewers? There was a time when the plucky, resourceful heroine was the stuff of which great horror films are made. Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, David Arquette in Scream--all great heroines of horror. Perhaps self-confidence, the ability to fight and defend oneself against horror is too predictable, too old, too contrary to reality. Or perhaps it is too similar to reality. Perhaps we need horror movies that makes us feel powerless and doomed in the face of an omnipotent evil that wants us dead not because we need to be punished, but just because it doesn't like our faces. Is that an American phenomenon? Or is there a guilt to being human that's only gotten worse without any true adversity? Maybe it's just that life is too peaceful and mundane in the West today and the thought that a supernatural evil may just destroy us at any time is the kind of horror we need; it's exciting. I don't know.
Perhaps there's just a purity to the Paranormal Activity movies that the youtube generation enjoys. With the Paranormal Activity movies, you get a series of isolated, almost abstract creepy scenes, like youtube vignettes or even an animated gif dropped on tumblr. "Wouldn't it be creepy if you just turned around in the dark and there were like fifty people standing there looking at you?" Boom! Climax to Paranormal Activity 4. Yes, that would be creepy. Good work. With these movies, you aren't bothered by the tedium of a story, a narrative you have to follow and get behind emotionally or intellectually. You just get creepy moments. Of course, wouldn't they be a lot better with a story? With emotional investment? With the sophistication to order them in a mounting way? I think so; but I am in the minority.
George Romero's Philosophy of Violence
Romero has two general film structures that he frequently revisits. The one for which he is best known is the co-operation structure. The central issue of these films is the inability for groups of humans to cooperate in the midst of a swarming, supremely cooperative invasion. This broad structure can be found in Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Crazies (Romero, 1973), Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978), Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985), Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005), Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2007), and most recently Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2009). The other is his self-realization structure. The central issue of these films is self-realization through the release of pent-up emotional energies in violence. This structure can be found in Jack’s Wife (Romero, 1972), Martin (Romero, 1976), Monkey Shines (Romero, 1988), The Dark Half (Romero, 1993), and finally Bruiser (Romero, 2000). In each film the structure is used to investigate a unique issue. However, each of these films follows the same pattern in dealing with its issue. In the following, I will describe how this structure underlies each of the five above-mentioned films and how Romero uses and develops this structure in new ways with each successive film. In doing so, we reveal something about Romero’s techniques, obsessions, and attitudes toward violence that can be applied in more in-depth studies of his work.
Jack’s Wife
Jack’s Wife is the first film to deploy the self-realization structure and thus basically sets the pattern for all the following films of the structure. The film is about a housewife, Joan Mitchell, who gradually begins to realize her life is not satisfying her emotional needs. Joan has disturbing dreams of her husband keeping her in a cage and on a leash like a dog. Meanwhile, her daughter’s boyfriend provokes her to outrage by mocking her old-fashioned values. The dreams and the teasing affect Joan strongly because she’s sufficiently aware that the traditional gender role she has assumed stifles her. As we gather from her conversations with her daughter’s boyfriend, she is of high intelligence but limits her ideas on ideological grounds.
When Joan begins showing interest in witchcraft, however, her dreams take a more defensive and violent form: an intruder is breaking into her home and she has to use her resources to escape him. As she progresses further into witchcraft, she gets closer to defeating the intruder within her dreams. At the same time, she also begins to take control over her life, to the point of having an affair with her daughter’s boyfriend. Finally, the dream comes true and she shoots a real-life intruder, only to discover the intruder is her locked-out husband. She’s now free, no longer oppressed.
In this plot Romero creates the structure that will, with its interplay between violent fantasy and violent action, inform all his following self-realization films. Joan’s dreams are clearly indicating that her husband is the intrusive presence in her life and, with him, the whole ideological background of gender roles she had been holding. Witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, empowers her to use violence within her fantasy life, expressing her inner rage or frustration at being oppressed. The violent fantasy, however, liberates her through violent action in a way she never consciously intended. The pattern revealed in Jack's Wife is oppression leading to frustration; frustration to violent inner energies and fantasies; those violent energies to finding a proxy for them that is both frightening and attractive (witchcraft); and, finally, the proxy leading to discovering or freeing one’s true self through the release of the violent energies.
Martin
Despite considerable differences, Martin follows the pattern created in Jack’s Wife quite closely. Martin is about a young man, Martin, who is sent to live with his Lithuanian Catholic cousin, Cuda. Cuda believes Martin is a several-decades-old vampire in need of salvation and destruction in equal measure. Martin struggles with Cuda’s surveillance and paranoia while maintaining a job during the day and a habit of drugging, raping, and killing women and drinking their blood by night. He confesses his vampiric identity to a radio show and explains his difficulties relating to the opposite sex. Finally he falls for an abandoned housewife and vows to commit no more violence, but is killed by Cuda when the housewife commits suicide.
So, for Martin, oppression is a result of the expectations of his family and of traditional masculine values. Slightly effeminate and shy, Martin displays little interest in women or masculine activities. His foils in this are Arthur, the possessive, macho boyfriend of Cuda’s daughter, the womanizing husband of the lady to whom he delivers groceries, and the adulterous lover of one of his victims. Perhaps it is this that leads Martin’s family to view him as so extremely different, namely a vampire. Where he likely only suffered social anxiety originally, the insistence by his family that he is a dangerous vampire has perverted his sexuality so that he seeks unconscious women for release.
Rather than resist the preposterous notion that he’s a vampire, Martin embraces the fantasy and wilfully construes himself as a vampire. A very timid young man, vampirism empowers Martin as much as witchcraft empowers Joan Mitchell. The form of oppression in Jack’s Wife is oppression of women in the traditional gender roles, so the sort of empowerment Joan finds is empowerment to liberate herself from that oppression. In Martin, the oppression is not actually about oppression, but about family and sexual confidence. So, the empowerment Martin finds in vampirism is one of mastery over the opposite sex.
The two films can readily be taken together as unconventional investigations of traditional (violent) horror motifs (witchcraft and vampirism) as potentially liberating, regardless of their lack of basis in reality. Romero’s radical idea in both of these films is to turn a somewhat sceptical eye on their reality, yet allow their value as therapeutic fictions. So, just as witchcraft was Joan's proxy for relieving violent energies, the myth of vampirism is Martin’s. The choice of horror motif, moreover, is particularly apt in each film. As a matriarchal religion like witchcraft empowers Joan to liberate herself from an oppressive husband and be independent, vampires, ever since Bela Lugosi’s turn as Dracula, have usually been represented as suave, attractive, strong men, with infinite powers of seduction. The fantasy allows Martin to imagine himself as a suave, powerful male. Soaked in Gothic imagery out of a Universal or Hammer horror film, Martin’s fantasies of his past are part of his self-mythologizing and thus give him permission for violent action. Where Joan’s violent fantasies are dreams, Martin’s are not only conscious, but he believes them to be genuine memories of his life a century or so in the past.
Martin’s belief that he is a vampire, then, is an empowering fantasy for him. As many young men, Martin feels he is (and is in fact) being watched and having his freedom constricted by his family and by society. By seizing upon the mythologizing power of the notion of vampirism, he liberates himself to do violence to others and, with this ability to overpower, to be confident, efficacious with women. He can tell himself he is performing violence out of the strictest necessity, for, as ‘nosferatu’, he must kill to survive. When Martin does kill for blood it, in turn, affirms his mythologized identity. When, however, Martin does find a woman to have consensual sex with, he resolves to abandon his vampirism; for, now being freed from his oppression and accepted by a woman, he no longer requires the violent action or the violent fantasy. The tragedy is that his violent self-mythology has caught up with him and ultimately destroys him by Cuda's hand. This idea is developed much further in Romero's next film.
Monkey Shines
With Monkey Shines, Romero uses the structure to address the theme of masculinity and the expectations that come with it. The film begins by showing the idyllic male life of the allegorically-named Allan Mann. Mann is in great shape, handsome, successful; he owns his own home; he has a beautiful trophy fiancée and a good job. He has, in other words, achieved everything the American male is supposed to achieve to be a good, stable man. He has all a man could want. Within minutes, however, a truck hits him and he is rendered quadriplegic. In his impotent state, he finds his fiancée has left him—for the surgeon who repaired his spine, no less. Are Successful Males so interchangeable? His mother smothers him with maternal attention. And his caretaker takes over his home. With all the trappings of successful masculinity removed, he’s either abandoned or exploited by women. He is oppressed by femininity, both without (his mother, caretaker, etc.) and, insofar as his outward signs of masculinity have failed, within.
In the scenes following his hospitalization, he is extremely irritable. His frustration and with it violent energies are mounting. Ella the lab monkey, initially a gift to help Mann around the house, becomes Mann’s proxy for his violent energies, just as witchcraft is for Joan Mitchell and vampirism for Martin. As Joan, Mann begins to have violent fantasies about the women who have taken advantage of his impotence. He begins seeing these fantasies enacted through the eyes of Ella the monkey. His violent fantasies, he discovers, have actually been channelled telepathically to Ella and translated into real life violence by her. One-by-one, all of the women who have taken advantage of his impotent state are destroyed by Ella. With each murder, however, Ella begins to dominate Mann. Soon, she's feeding him the monkey treats and he's at her mercy. The proxy for violent fantasy has turned on its originator; all of Mann's violent energies have been translated into a physical form that now turns back on him.
Another elaboration on the structure, extending that found in Martin, is that Mann’s vengeful rage has a distinctly feminine and primitive face in the monkey. Mann must ultimately act against Ella, the very proxy of his violence, to save the one woman who treats him as a real man (i.e. has sex with him). At the moment he acts against the personification of his own violent energies, he regains his ability to move, his potency. He kills the monkey, and, of course, gets the girl. However, rather than a conventionally masculine ending, Mann has exited the horror realizing the Successful Male type he had been inhabiting is a precarious sham. At the film’s end he has achieved a more realistic masculinity that does not depend upon social conventions. His new relationship is one of mutual respect with a less-attractive but much more intelligent woman, a woman who has seen his weakness and loved him just the same. Through violence, Mann has been brought to face the worst in himself and transform into a better person. Romero extends this notion further with The Dark Half.
The Dark Half
The Dark Half concerns a writer, Thaddeus Beaumont, whose creative power is linked to a violent inner nature that takes physical form as a partial twin growing in his skull and is surgically removed during childhood. As an adult he’s a professor of creative writing, writer of serious literature, and, on the sly, writer of violent crime novels under the pseudonym George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to reveal his identity, he comes public and realizes he can no longer write novels about his uber-violent character Alexis Machine. George Stark then takes on physical form through a handy bit of magic realism and begins a real-life killing spree of everyone involved in suppressing Beaumont’s George Stark identity. The film climaxes with a show-down between Stark and Beaumont to discern which personality will triumph. Naturally, Stark is destroyed.
Romero’s attraction to The Dark Half, of all Stephen King novels, was no doubt its inherent relationship to the self-realization structure Romero had visited three times prior. While the film necessarily contains a tension between Romero’s interests and the source material, the pattern is still discernible. Beaumont’s oppression comes from a literary community that will not accept that a writer of serious literature can simultaneously be a writer of violent pulp novels, let alone that the violent pulp novels are perhaps serious art. Just as Romero is pigeonholed as a horror director, the literary community forces Beaumont to be either “Thaddeus Beaumont” or “George Stark.”
As we begin The Dark Half, Beaumont has already learned to channel his frustrations into violent fantasies and, even further, to channel the violent fantasies into violent art instead of violent action. Beaumont is, however, still split, divided; he may be in equilibrium, but, so long as he continues to divide his personality between Beaumont and Stark, he has not attained the liberating self-realization Joan Mitchell and Mann attain. So long as he persists in equilibrium, he remains oppressed and divided. When he is forced to reveal that he is in fact George Stark and thus to stop writing as Stark to preserve the serious, socially-admired Beaumont identity, his violent fantasies finally begin to translate into real violence in the real world. As with Joan Mitchell and Allan Mann, Beaumont never consciously wills the violence; quite the opposite, he abhors it. Nevertheless, Stark is a manifestation of his inner life, his violent fantasies. As Allan Mann, Beaumont ultimately faces off against the proxy of his violence and only emerges victorious when he accepts violence as a part of himself by fighting Stark. As Stark is physically removed from the world, Beaumont is left not a divided person but a whole, integrated person who, presumably, will be able to write both serious and violent literature.
Curiously, Beaumont’s violent fantasies do not arise in response to external oppression. This is doubtless the influence of King: Beaumont has a dark, violent nature quite apart from any oppression. His violent energies are not the cause of social forces, but a part of himself that he’s learned to compartmentalize, and it is this very tension that oppresses Beaumont. Like Martin, Beaumont’s proxy is kept in check in the realm of fantasy. Once the proxy is removed, the fantasy is no longer contained and seeps into the physical world. Like Joan Mitchell and Alan Mann, Beaumont is horrified to discover that his violent fantasies—so difficult for him to own that he must create both George Stark and Alexis Machine to distance himself—are resulting in violent action. The climactic face-off with the horror of violent action, having, as Mann, to face the proxy for his violence in physical form, leads him to discover his true self as an integral being rather than two halves, uniting his artistic nature and his violent nature. King’s narrative of two dualistic souls fighting for one body, alas, obscures the Romero-esque moment of self-realization in a wave of fantastical sparrows; yet the pattern is still present.
What is most interesting about The Dark Half is how it appears to be self-reflective upon the self-realization structure of Romero’s films. Thad is, after all, denying his need for and pleasure in violent fantasy itself. But in Romero’s self-realization films, violent fantasy is shared by all the oppressed, and any human may potentially be oppressed. For that matter, Romero’s films, like Thad’s writings under ‘George Stark,’ are violent fantasies. The immature attitude of much of Western society toward violence as sin or jest is the root of the problem is The Dark Half, a problem Beaumont ultimately has to resolve on a personal, psychological level, as society is not going to change. That Romero could use his self-realization structure to reflect upon his self-realization films, in a sense, shows what a powerful structure it is in Romero’s hands and just how far he had developed it by this point in his career. Unfortunately, with the next self-realization film, the structure’s development takes a step back.
Bruiser
Bruiser is about a stereotypically nice guy, Henry Creedlow, whose boss mistreats him, whose best friend is stealing his money, and whose trophy wife, he learns, is sleeping with his boss. Even his wife’s pet dog and the cleaning lady take advantage of his good nature. As he goes about his daily business, he has violent fantasies of standing up for himself, such as throwing a lady who cuts in line under a train, seeing her head split open graphically. Upon learning of the many betrayals of those he trusted, Creedlow’s face suddenly disappears, replaced by a blank, white mask of sorts. With his newfound anonymity, Creedlow begins to take revenge, killing first his cleaning lady, then his wife. The film climaxes when Creedlow successfully kills his helpless, hapless boss and escapes police to find work as an office mailboy, his face and identity now returned to him by whatever forces had taken them away.
The source of oppression for Creedlow, what keeps him from being himself, is his commitment to a particular notion of ‘success’ that his personality is really not formed to handle. He is surrounded by sociopathic jerks who have no qualms about exploiting him for their own success. One might say that this commitment is his own damn fault, but one could do likewise for Joan Mitchell. Both Creedlow and Mitchell are victims of their social circumstances. Creedlow’s milieu is one of American capitalism. He believes his success as an individual depends upon having a high-paying job, a large house, a limitless credit card, a nice car, good stock investments, and, of course, a gorgeous wife. In this, Creedlow is a newer incarnation of Allan Mann, to some extent. As we first see Mann rising out of bed with his sexy wife to go for a jog, we first see Creedlow going through an extensive morning grooming ritual and entering the bedroom to view his sexy wife. The difference is that for Mann this lifestyle of the Successful Male is a reflection of his notion of masculinity, and he’s achieved it as the film begins. For Creedlow it is a reflection of his notion of identity, and it’s as incomplete for him as his plastic-covered house is. Creedlow ties the notion of being ‘somebody’ with a very materialistic model of success. By marshalling his life in such a way as to present himself to others as this kind of ‘somebody’, he creates his own sense of identity upon this materialistic success. Creating identity is, after all, what Creedlow does. As he refers to himself, he’s a ‘face man,’ a man who finds beautiful women to put in magazines and creates for them an identity from of their outward appearances.
After Romero dedicates the first act to showing us Creedlow’s own ‘face’, the social identity he’s created for himself, he dedicates the second act to stripping it away. First Creedlow discovers that, because his investments have been returning much less than he expected, he doesn’t have sufficient assets to get a limitless credit card. Then he sees his wife giving his boss a handjob at a barbecue in the boss’s yard, a profoundly emasculating experience. Finally, when he confronts his wife about it, she subjects him to a heinous verbal castration: she tells him that he was too wimpy to punch out his boss, or her, for their transgression and that, though she only married him to get ahead, she hates him for not even being successful enough to justify her gold-digging. With these few effectively cruel scenes, Creedlow loses his trophy wife to the boss who totally dominates him and loses his very image of himself as a successful man. With the loss of all the paraphernalia he used to define his identity, he is left stripped of all identity, symbolically rendered by a loss of his facial features.
This magic realist mechanism that strips Creedlow of his facial features is itself the proxy for his violent fantasies. While Creedlow is oppressed by an amoral and self-interested society, he is only capable of violent fantasy. He imagines pushing a woman under a train and sinking an axe into his wife’s head. However, he could never perform any of these actions so long as he was afraid of losing the paraphernalia (wife, house, job) upon which he had built his social identity. A magic realist riff on The Invisible Man, this total loss of social identity to the point of facelessness, empowers Creedlow to perform violence on those who were responsible for inhibiting his success and with it the identity he had chosen for himself.
Where the need for violence is entirely obvious in Jack’s Wife, as the violence frees her from oppression in a very concrete way, the violence in Bruiser is more a matter of principle. The ability to be violent, to defend oneself and one’s principles, “standing up for” oneself, is part of creating a solid identity. There is no integrity without the possibility of violence. Creedlow hasn’t just had his identity stripped away, but even the very power to confer upon himself a new identity. As a magic realist fantasy, we could say his identity has literally been taken away by each person who betrayed and humiliated him. By killing them, overpowering them with violence, he regains his power to create his identity. Hence after killing his wife a portion of his face briefly returns to normal skin. It is as though their perception of Creedlow as nothing is, in a way, what is responsible for his loss of identity. By killing them, he frees his identity from their negating perception.
Having killed all of those who formerly humiliated him, Creedlow regains his identity and chooses to be a quasi-hippie working as a mailboy in an office. Like Mann, Creedlow does not return to his previous idea of success (or masculinity, in Mann’s case). His process of violence is one that leads him to realize that he was never suited for his old identity. He now finds a model of success and identity more suited to his personality. Unlike Mann or Beaumont, though, Creedlow never has to face off with the proxy for his violence to achieve this synthesis. Rather, like Joan and Martin, his proxy simply enables him to reach a state where he is free to be himself. For whatever reason, Romero chose to end Bruiser by showing Creedlow's face vanish and violence erupt at the slightest provocation from his boss, a move that undermines much of what preceded. Whatever its flaws, Bruiser is certainly the purest of Romero's self-actualization films, stripping the structure almost to its pure framework.
Coda
If I have made my case successfully, it should be undeniable that the self-realization structure is present in each of Romero’s non-zombie films. Each of these five films is patterned on the notion that oppression breeds violence and with violence one can liberate oneself from that oppression to arrive at a better state. Martin alone required any mental gymnastics on my part to make the structure fit. This is not because the structure is not present but merely complicated by how very ambitious that film, one of Romero’s best, happens to be.
While each film has its unique theme that Romero adapts the structure to address, there is an overall attitude or worldview expressed in this films that is remarkably consistent. The myriad ways in which human beings allow themselves to be oppressed or even oppress themselves, must result in violent energies. In Romero’s films, violence itself is not evil, but can be a real response to the ways in which we are oppressed. Violence is not an innately immature solution, but rather our attitudes toward violence are immature. Most of us are unwilling to accept the violence inherent in human nature, lest we not appear as culturally and spiritually advanced as Gandhi. We watch horror movies only to swiftly disavow the reality of the violent fantasy, to say it is not fantasy at all but entertainment and harmless. We would not dare admit the satisfaction of the violence or how similar it is to our own fantasies of abusing our abusers. Of course the fantasy is harmless, but it is a fantasy humans all need and have always needed. We have all had Joan Mitchell’s fantasies, Creedlow’s fantasies, and sometimes even the self-aggrandizing fantasies of Martin. Like Thad Beaumont, violence is a part of us and it is to our detriment that we deny our need for it and its ability to liberate us on individual or social levels. While most violence is senseless, not all is. Romero’s films give us the fantasies. The action is left to us.
Maniac (2012) - 3.5/4
Maniac is a remake of the 1980 William Lustig classic slasher of the same title. Lustig didn't just approve, he also produced this remake, helmed by P2 director Frank Khalfoun. What makes Maniac really stand out, however, is the casting of Elijah Wood as the titular maniac, replacing the overweight and middle-aged Joe Spinell of the original. While the plot remains very similar, the new casting recasts (pardon the pun) the entire meaning of the film with impressive results.
Wood plays 'Frank,' a mannequin collector/restorer in New York. He was raised by his single mother, who whored around for cash and/or pleasure, often bringing men home where little Frank saw way too much. Frank now has a very ambivalent relationship to sexuality. Specifically, he likes to scalp women and place their hair on mannequins instead of screw them. One day the photographer Anna takes an interest in his mannequins and seems to offer womanhood some redemption at the same time.
A film like Maniac will never come anywhere near the Oscars or any other glitzy award ceremony. Yet, Elijah Wood's performance is as deserving of those awards as any other modern performance. Even as hampered as Wood is by the mostly-POV photography, where we share Frank's eyes, he still allows us to share Frank's anxieties, joys, and anguish through his voice and the few mirror shots Khalfoun provides. Wood proves, again, that he is the most versatile actor around, and easily one of the most talented we have.
The decision to force the film's viewpoint to be almost entirely Frank's was certainly a risky one. The intention, of course, is to make the audience sympathize and even empathize with a sadistic serial killer. Initially, however, the effect is alienating and uncomfortable. As the film's tensions increase and it hurtles toward an emotional climax, the discomfort is long forgotten. Wood's performance and Khalfoun's deft direction make it work. I'm still not sure it was necessary; but it works. By Maniac's end, I was entirely on Frank's side. I hoped not for the survival of a 'Final Girl,' but for her brutal slaughter. That became the happy ending: the serial killer protecting his heart from the awful people in the world. What kind of relationship between art and morality does this illustrate? I don't know. But Michael Haneke wishes he'd made Funny Games this well.
That is not to suggest the the film's psychology is insightful. Coming from the pen of Alexandre Aja, rewriting for Joe Spinell, there is little psychological realism present. Horror film psychology has always been a little glib, from the weird videos in Peeping Tom and the instant diagnosis at the end of Psycho on. Maniac pushes this to a point at which it has gone beyond even touching reality. The psychology of Maniac is fantasy psychology, where blood-spattered mannequins wearing fly-covered scalps can be models of purity for a psychosexually tortured psyche. I empathized with Frank and even rooted for him because, despite the near camp moments of fantasy psychology or maybe even because of them, there is a strongly pronounced emotional reality to the disturbed Frank, a wounded core that does not seem beyond redemption.
The bottom line is, Maniac makes very few missteps of any kind. It is a traditional slasher film made in 2012 that exceeds nearly any of the modern, ultra-violent slasher films made in the last decade-and-a-half. It also happens to be one of the finest horror film remakes I've ever seen. Khalfoun went way beyond what he'd done with the average P2, and Aja as screenwriter reiterates his ability to remake his favorite horror films. Bravo to all the talent involved.
The Devil's Rock (2011) - 3/4
Nazi occultism is always an interesting subject and certainly ripe material for a horror movie. I am inclined to think the occult tendencies in the Third Reich were purely decorative and symbolic. But that doesn't make it any less fascinating for a curious imagination. Paul Campion writes and directs The Devil's Rock, a low-budget, three-or-four actor movie that tries to capture the drama of the individual Ally soldier against the Reich and this its most intimidating aspect.
The Devil's Rock concerns Captain Ben Grogan, an unfortunate New Zealand soldier who accidentally washes up on a beach in the Channel Islands prepared to kick ass. He soon discovers it's the wrong beach in more ways than one. On this island, Nazi occult experiments have summoned a succubus that the Nazi Colonel hoped to control for the glory of the Reich. And the Colonel has lost control.
Where Campion really excels and shows an incredible talent is crafting, in a very limited set with only three actors, the impression of a much larger world. The geographical and historical sense of the mid-WW2 world is created purely out of good dialogue well-delivered. More than that, through dialogue with the demonic succubus and the German occultist, he gives reality to the demonic planes that we of course never get to see.
Where Campion does not excel is in generating real suspense. He has all the elements: a mysterious screamer locked in an equally mysterious room, a bunker filled with dead bodies, a highly claustrophobic set. Unfortunately, Campion wastes very little time revealing to us that the woman locked away is a demon. He makes an effort, after the reveal, to craft some psychological thrills in that the demon looks like Grogan's dead wife. But we already know she's a demon! We've seen her red with black, curled horns--like Tim Curry in Legend. The reveal should have come nearer the film's end, leaving us to wonder if the Germans didn't somehow resurrect Grogan's wife or indeed to just wonder what the hell is going on. The audience, namely myself, should have been kept wondering and then the psychological thrills would have really worked. We would have been wary for Grogan as he was drawn to his wife. As it stands, the only suspense is between the Nazi and Grogan.
When I checked Campion's filmography to research this review, I was surprised to find that I had already seen one of his shorts some time before The Devil's Rock was released. A minimal, strange film called "Eel Girl" that is actually a bit more suspenseful than The Devil's Rock, but based on the same notion. A scientist is sexually drawn to an attractive monster-girl kept in an aquarium. As he gives in to his lusts, the eel girl stretches her mouth to devour the scientist whole.
Reflecting on the similarities between "Eel Girl" and The Devil's Rock, I wonder if I didn't find Campion's problem. You see, there are some people who have peculiar fetishes, one of which is called 'vore.' Vore fetishism is finding sexual stimulation in seeing someone devoured by something: a monster, a snake, a demon, whatever. There are also some men who find monster-girls particularly arousing as they appear in horror movies, comic books, and Japanese cartoons. The thought of being devoured by these monster girls really interest some men. Campion is a clever enough director, I wonder if he didn't knowingly sacrifice suspense for his own interest in monster-girl devouring. That would be a foolish move, since vore fetishism has very niche appeal.
Whatever the reason for the blunder, it does leave The Devil's Rock limping. What could have been one helluva feature film debut is more of a promise of great things to come than a great thing in itself. The Devil's Rock is still impressive for its limitations and a decent horror film in its own right.
Carrion Creativity: The Sources of Evil Dead
Evil Dead (2013) was not a candidate for review on Lair of the Boyg. With 404 external reviews already on Internet Movie Database, mine would be a drop in a lake. Had I written a review, I would have expressed an equivocal appreciation. While I was disappointed with the film as a remake or quasi-sequel to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981), the film's gushy, violent energy made it a fairly entertaining horror film. In other words, without the Evil Dead label, I would have branded it a decent but unspectacular horror experience.
Instead of writing that review, however, I've decided to reflect on something more difficult to concretize. I started thinking about Sam Raimi's masterpiece, Evil Dead II (1987) and its relationship to its milieu. One hurdle is separating the myth from the reality. ED II is the first horror film I remember watching and it scared the snot out of me. I became certain Henrietta had moved out of her cool, dank fruit cellar into my cramped and toy-bestrewn closet. This film had a huge impact on nearly every horror fan and many cinema buffs, and is now referenced in their films more readily than any of the Hollywood classics. The layer of myth in all this being that Evil Dead II was offering something brand new, a barrage of original ideas this upstart independent filmmaker in the middle of Nowhere, USA invented himself.
The thing about Evil Dead II is, if you really study it and other good horror films made around the same time, you start to see that Sam Raimi's genius is really more synthetic than it is inventive. Rather than make such a statement and move on with a few examples, I would like to really examine the issue.
The first case in point is House (1986), Steve Miner's minor classic of '80s horror, just a step or two short of greatness. House, much like Evil Dead II, is a high-energy assault of rubber monsters, insanity, and goofy humor. House's own psychological seriousness and inability to anchor its insanity with some concrete explanation is what ultimately kept it from greatness. However, the techniques and ideas Steve Miner and Fred Dekker deployed were gleefully absorbed by Raimi. The dexterity of House's monsters, like its winged skull-creature, able to grab and use a shotgun, is mimicked in ED II by Henrietta in her skull-monster form. House also contains the all-important tool shed, where both its protagonist Roger and Evil Dead II's Ash find their shotguns. The scene of animated inanimates in the Evil Dead II cabin is an amplification of House's animated mounted fish and flying garden tools. House even contained an evil severed hand making all sorts of mischief.
The second case in point is Hooper-Spielberg's Poltergeist (1982), a masterpiece of horror filmmaking in its own right, one of the greatest haunted house films if only for throwing everything Spielberg could invent at the characters and audience. Poltergeist's chaotic climax includes an animated tree crashing through the children's bedroom window and grabbing the little boy with a giant tree hand. Evil Dead II's chaotic climax also includes an animated tree, which crashes a giant tree hand through the wall of the cabin to grab Ash. After the tree attacks in Poltergeist, a vortex between worlds opens up, sucking the tree to wherever. In ED II, as Annie finishes reading the incantation, a huge vortex opens, sucking the tree to wherever. The shots of the vortexes are almost identical. As the vortex opens, Carol-Anne is almost pulled to the other side as she grips her bed. Similarly, in ED II, Ash grabs a board as the vortex begins pulling him in. Both end up getting pulled to the other side. The finale of Evil Dead II, where the face of the demon manifests itself in the doorway, also borrows from the moment in Poltergeist where Craig T. Nelson pulls one of the more alarming denizens of the other side through the closet door. Poltergeist also contains flying, animated inanimates that could have provided equal influence on Raimi's animated lamps and chairs in ED II.
Other, smaller elements of Evil Dead II come from all over. The idea for the book and the demons it unleashes comes from the very strange 1970 film, Equinox. The skewed shots Raimi uses, suggesting the cabin being viewed from a presence only partially in our plane of reality, is a development of the technique Robert Wise used to make the house in The Haunting (1963) seem alive. With some effort, I'm sure several more sources could be found, perhaps even one for the famous roving camera movements, or 'demoncam.'
Nearly every element of Evil Dead II comes from some other source. Raimi took every cool technique he saw being effectively used in other horror movies and he made sure to use them in his own movie to thrill, scare, and entertain. This is not to detract from Evil Dead II. The film is a masterpiece, in a very real sense the Citizen Kane of horror movies. Just as Orson Welles had done with Citizen Kane, Sam Raimi took the best elements of style and the best ideas in horror at the time, and he deployed them all together for the first time. They were not used willy-nilly, as the effects in House tend to be, but very deliberately toward crafting a supreme experience of horror intensity.
If we return to Evil Dead (2013), I wonder if it had been made with the same synthetic genius as Evil Dead II, would it have been any better? Perhaps the case could be made that it would be just the same. If the films championed as the best of our time are James Wan's Insidious and Xavier Gens's Frontier(s), we're aesthetically impoverished. Insidious was a fun ghost movie, but it really invents nothing. If we really have become conditioned to see it as our The Haunting, Poltergeist, or even House, our demands on horror filmmakers have become too light. Evil Dead II was possible because of the general fertility of imagination in horror filmmaking at the time. Raimi was borrowing, yes, but he was borrowing fragments of genius.
The best Evil Dead (2013) gets is in the bloody final fifteen minutes, a great deal of which is borrowed from Xavier Gens's Frontier(s) and a little from Paco Plaza's [REC]. Both of these are very good films, but of the two only [REC] can be credited with real inventiveness. Frontier(s) is little more than a Gallic, very bloody Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We need filmmakers to take chances again, to try to come up with new ways of scaring us and disturbing us. We need new techniques, new styles, new camera movements, new sounds, new sights. Then, when another Sam Raimi does come along, he'll be able to steal from the best. Because right now, I don't think another Evil Dead 2 would be possible--we don't have enough good ideas to steal.
The Dark Halves: How Stephen King and George Romero Reflect Themselves in The Dark Half
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
Bad Kids Go to Hell (2012) - 2.5/4
Probably every reviewer that took on Bad Kids Go to Hell has described it as "The horror version of The Breakfast Club." Yes, there is even a Judd Nelson cameo. I suppose to some extent that's true. To a greater extent, I think Bad Kids Go to Hell is really one big joke--and not a bad one, actually.
The plot of Bad Kids Go to Hell is that a bunch of private school rich kids--and one not-quite-as-rich kid--with behavioral issues and seething resentment for each other get stuck in an 8-hour detention in the school's new library. By coincidence, all the students present had something to do with the library's construction on land once owned by a stubborn old Injun. When the students are a-dyin', either they're killing each other or it's a good ol' fashioned Injun ghost curse.
I'm not sure if it comes through in that plot description, but the whole scenario is over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek. You have the Poltergeist Indian curse deal, The Breakfast Club, the privileged teens, and the preposterous reason for locking them in one spot. I don't think director Matthew Spradlin had the least intention of treating this seriously. This is not a sneering attack on privileged children, an ironic treatment of horror themes, or a realistic take on The Breakfast Club. It's a joke.
The spitfire venomous dialogue in which every character expresses Tennessee Williams-level hatred for one another only makes the situation even sillier. These people are so hateful and acerbic. You certainly want them to die. But that's not the point either. The point is that it's all intentionally overblown. You can't take it seriously.
The best part of Bad Kids Go to Hell by far, however, is the series of flashbacks to what these kids are like in everyday highschool. With peppy techno music and slow motion, their wacky antics are presented with such deadpan realism and conviction. I know Spradlin doesn't take it seriously, but his trick is to make you feel he does. Interspersed amongst the venom, these absurd and hilarious flashbacks are moments of bizarre brilliance amidst the bizarre mediocrity.
The tone of Bad Kids is entirely inconsistent. The editing is often clumsy, with the flashbacks appearing without introduction. The acting is all over the place. The resolution as illogical and melodramatic as the rest of the movie. That really all adds to its charm. Bad Kids is far from a great movie, but it's good comedy. It cracks me up. I'm looking forward to Spradlin's next opus.
Deadheads (2011) - 3/4
Deadheads is another heartwarming zombie horror comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead and the legions of other heartwarming/hearteating zombie comedies. If you're sick of zombie comedies, as I am, Deadheads will still please you, because it is a genuinely charming and funny movie.
Mark wakes up to find himself a zombie in the middle of an outbreak. He's one of the few zombies that can actually think and talk. A smart zombie. Or smombie, if you will. (But why would you?) He teams up with another smart-zombie, Brent, a slacker doofus who just wants someone to hang with. They acquire a pet stupid-zombie, Cheese, and an old war vet with a TMI problem. Together they try to find Mark's girlfriend and help Mark perform his last planned action before death, propose marriage to her. Unfortunately, the usual anti-zombie elements are in place, like a black guy with a shotgun and dudes in hazmat suits.
The characters' personalities are established quickly and they're immediately likeable misfits. These are zombies you'd want to hang with so long as you had some Fabreeze nearby. Their misadventures consequently prove amusing. Goofy jokes that might ordinarily be groan-worthy work quite well. I particularly enjoyed Brent's constant movie references. I enjoyed spending time with these idiots and I wanted them to win.
I also found it amusing how much of Deadheads's structure is based on Star Wars. Cheese is clearly intended to be Chewbacca, down to some outright shot-references. While Brent ought to be Han Solo, the incestuous vibe had to go. So the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker roles flip between Brent and Mark. The girlfriend, Ellie, is Leia. Her dad is Darth Vader. Watch the movie and see how much the roles fit. I believe it was conscious on the part of the writer-directors, the Brothers Pierce.
Like Star Wars, Deadheads is a crowd-pleaser. It is self-consciously a crowd-pleaser. The douchebags are all really douchebags, the good guys are really good guys, and goodguyery will triumph over douchebaggery. Sometimes that's tedious and saccharine. Deadheads does it right. Cliches and spotty acting will quickly become negligible. This movie is a lot of fun and you will indeed be pleased by it. Watch it when you're depressed. It'll do you better than that whiskey in your sock drawer.
