Classic: Tenebre (1982)

This write-up contains spoilers.

The titular 'Tenebre' is a murder mystery novel within the film. The novel and the way the characters relate to it provides Dario Argento with the means to address some of the discourse surrounding his films. While his films were very popular in Italy, or because his films were very popular in Italy, criticism of their violence was plentiful. Some critics accused Argento of misogyny. Others tried to find Argento himself within his films, as though the man were just waiting to snap and murder women. Others tried to draw a link between violent behaviour in real life and watching Argento's films. Still others noted the profusion of perversions. Having left the giallo genre to make his supernatural classic Suspiria and its cult-classic follow-up Inferno, Argento returns to the giallo with a sense of purpose: to put everything in the open. The intention to hide nothing is represented in the film's overall style, where the characters are not wells of perversion but ordinary people, and where every murder occurs in either broad daylight, indoor lighting, or relatively bright nights. Ironically for a film entitled Tenebre ("darkness"), very little in fact happens in the dark. The killer, at one point, all but announces he's the killer to a detective and the book, 'Tenebre', is nearly a blueprint to his murders. Everything is in the open. Similarly, what critics believed lurking in the dark of the film's subtext is here exposed in plain light.

Three theories about the novel 'Tenebre' are presented in the film. These theories are the crux of Tenebre. The first, what the novel's author, Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), himself tells us, is that the killer of the novel kills to remove life's humiliations and offer himself a sort of freedom he couldn't get without 'the act of annihilation.' The second is offered by a feminist journalist, accusing Peter Neal of misogyny for writing a novel about killing women. The third is offered by a Catholic journalist, arguing that the killer of the novel is ridding the world of those perpetrating aberrant behaviour. In a clever shift employing the critique that his films could make people violent, Argento allows every one of those theories about the novel to be true, not of the novel, but of the 'real life' killing within the film Tenebre.

With the third theory Argento is able to play with the claims that his films could cause violence. The journalist who proposes the theory himself begins killing, not according to the pattern in the novel, but according to his own theory about the killing in the novel. He kills shoplifters, lesbians, trespassers--anyone whom he considers aberrant. Peter Neal is only involved in the case because the killer obsesses over both the novel Tenebre and Neal himself. Ironically, the killer also targets Neal as the Corruptor, a man whose novels don't just depict the killing of the aberrant but also encourage aberrance.

Thus Tenebre contains what must be Argento's fiercest retaliation against his critics: here is the Critic-as-Killer. The critic is not satisfied merely to condemn perversion in the novel, but must also destroy the author in the most literal way. The critic's belief that others are corrupted by the novel, however, is merely a projection of his own perverse psychology. He himself is motivated to kill; in an attempt to escape guilt, he thrusts responsibility from himself to the author. He is not the pervert, he tells himself, but the novel is a perverting influence that has moved him to the destruction of the perverse. The Critic-as-Killer justifies his need to kill the artist by claiming the artist's own work forced him to do so. The Critic-as-Killer, of course, is merely a pervert, a madman who finds in books a key to his own repressed drives and a means of deflecting the guilt that must ensue.

Then the first and second theories take over with a sudden blow of the axe, as the artist, Neal, suddenly kills his would-be-killer. (With Argento's perverse sense of humour, he very likely had the English phrase "hatchet job" in mind.) The first killer's interpretation was incorrect, except about his own motive for killing. The first and second theories, however, have validity both within the novel and within the action of the film. They also allow Argento to humourously deal with the preposterous claims that Argento himself is psychotic. The second killer is Peter Neal himself. Up until the point where he kills the first killer, he has, in fact, been working out his murderous urges by writing violent crime novels. The reason he's been doing so is revealed in some stunning flashbacks. As a youth, he struck a girl he presumably liked but was disappointed to find leading three boys for a sexual romp on the beach. After striking her, the boys hold him down while she kicks him in the grown three times and places the heal of her shoe (red high-heels, an important symbol in the film) in his mouth.

Before going on, I should say something about the depiction of women in Tenebre. Men are represented as predatory and women are represented as sly, dangerous to male security. The first woman to be murdered is caught shoplifting. She escapes charges by promising the store manager sexual favours and leaving him her address. On the way home, she's grabbed by a vagrant in an effort to rape her. She kicks him in the groin and runs away. Note Tenebre's second instance of a groin kick, a humiliating act that targets a particularly male weakness. Another girl attracts the attention of Neal's young assistant, but is later seen with a biker. The biker deposits her outside a fence where a dog beings barking at her. After hitting the fence with a stick, the dog jumps the fence and chases her. In some sense, this is the opposite of the vagrant sequence. Her insult to the (male) dog's strength gets her pursued and mauled. Both the vagrant and the biker scenes match Neal's flashbacks. In one, he strikes her for her behaviour, which seems to sexually humiliate him or offend him. She then humiliates him deeply and sexually by kicking him in the groin and stepping in his mouth. He later stabs her and steals her red shoes. The pattern established here is murder as a solution to humiliation. However, the humiliation is particularly emasculation, sexual humiliation of the male.

So the first and second theories appear one and the same. Peter Neal is not just murdering in his books for catharsis, he's murdering women in his books for catharsis. He needs the catharsis because, we learn, he's in a humiliating relationship with a woman he's too much of a pushover to dump. He knows this woman is having an affair with his agent, yet he remains engaged to her. He also has a beautiful assistant (Daria Nicolodi) with whom he has had no sexual relations for six years. Four of those years were because of his fiancee's proximity and the remaining two, after a split, are unexplained. In a film where males are so predatory or sexist (the male detective, for instance, continually pushes his female partner out of the action and farther from the lens; and Argento's framing explicitly gives greater weight to males), the handsome, famous and wealthy Peter Neal is strangely sedate. When his assistant jokes about a young girl exiting his hotel room, he's quick to ensure her, honestly, that the girl was just fixing the plumbing. He is burdened by sexual humiliation and unable to exert sexual dominance until he performs the act of annihilation, as he calls it in his novel, that removes humiliations: murder.

Consequently, after Neal's first murder, he returns to the hotel to finally have sex with his assistant Anne for the first time. He is now free. This freedom is twofold. For one, the act of murder is itself freeing for him. In this sense, the liberation he wrote of in his novel turned out to be true: life imitates art. However, the ability to murder opens up a world of possibilities. Tom Ripley, in Patricia Highsmith's novels, makes the point that moral qualms present an unnatural limitation to possible solutions. If murder is the ideal solution to a problem, why restrain yourself looking for lesser solutions? Neal has discovered just that point. He realizes he can kill his fiancee and his agent, liberating himself from the possible financial complications as well as the humiliation.

On the one hand, Neal's murders are not entirely calculating and rational. He sends a pair of red shoes to his fiancee before he murders her. Sending her the red shoes symbolically makes her the object of humiliation in his life, an objecting weighing down his masculinity; she is the humiliating obstacle that once removed will free him. On the other hand, Neal seemed to genuinely regret killing (a woman he believed to be) Anne. He no doubt intended to stop killing once his fiancee and her lover were out of the way. His killing was therefore both practical and cathartic. This point suggests that the second theory is actually incorrect. Neal is not really a misogynist, but merely defending his masculinity. He is not killing women in his book, but one woman over and over again. He actually kills four men and two women. Berti, however, kills four women and no men. If the second theory applies to anyone, it's Berti.

There is also a sense in which Neal's killings are constrasted to those of Berti. The Artist-as-Killer, Neal, claims that killing is as easy as writing a book. Murder is for him a creative act. Killing liberates him as art liberates an artist. Interestingly, the Artist would not have become a Killer were it not for the pressure of the critic trying to find in his work what was not really there. The first theory was entirely mistaken; but that misinterpretation set off the whole killing spree. The Critic-as-Killer opens the door for the Artist-as-Killer and becomes his first victim.

Tenebre is, then, Argento-as-Killer--of his critics, that is. The film subverts enough giallo traditions that it demands not to be taken superficially. Everything is exposed. Those critics who focus on the superficial points, such as violence and pop psychology, are Critics-as-Killers and Tenebre, little do they realize, is their death knell. While not the atmospheric masterpiece that is Argento's earlier Profondo Rosso, Tenebre is still one of the finest giallo films ever made and Argento's only explicit statement to the superficial critics of genre cinema--his critics: You're the perverts and you're the killers of great art.

Halloween (2007) - 3.5/4

Filmmakers of any sophistication, when embarking upon a remake, must take firm hold of two major horns: Agon and Interest. Agon is competition, the struggle of one artist to assert his uniqueness from and superiority over other artists. Not only is the artist in competition with artists of his own generation, but also with the artists of previous generations. If he does no more than what they did, he is doomed to unoriginality. He must outstrip them. Any American horror filmmaker in the 2000s must be in an agonistic relationship with John Carpenter. Carpenter is one of the best horror film artists. Howard Hawks used to say one need make only a single great film to be a great director. Carptenter has made at two great horror films, Halloween and The Thing. Rob Zombie, one of the latest generation of horror filmmakers, has taken up agon in the most serious way possible: he's remade the greatest film of the Master, Halloween.

Taking the agonistic angle seriously is important for taking Zombie's Halloween seriously. Much discussion of the film has involved the alterations Zombie made to Carpenter's original vision. While I'm certain Zombie is respectful, even admiring, of Carpenter and his film, he's a serious artist and his relationship to the original Halloween will have to be one of rivalry. Rather than viewing the alterations Zombie made as blasphemous or an ignorant step down, it's worth seeing them in the context of a new artist asserting his own voice.

To illustrate my point, let's take an important scene from the film: Michael's first kill. Much of what is used and revealed late in Carpenter's film is given away in this early moment in Zombie's film. By 'later' and 'earlier' I don't mean merely in terms of narrative progression, but also the progression of Michael's existence. Carpenter saves most of what we see and know of Michael until he's an adult. Zombie deliberately transposes those behavioural traits to his child-Michael. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) arrives in the principle's office to tell Michael's mom that he's a sociopath. While he's talking, Michael slips away to stalk and murder the bully who got him in trouble. While Michael slips away, the famous Halloween theme (composed by Carpenter) begins to play. The use of this music at that moment is very important. So is, moreover, the stalking of the bully, which deliberately quotes the stalking of Jamie Lee Curtis in the original film. There are a few points being made. One is that Michael's behavioural traits began young and, to some extent, chastising Carpenter for neglecting Michael's childhood. More strongly, however, we're being told that Carpenter's Michael is child's play compared to Zombie's Michael. Carpenter's Michael is totally expressed and used up in that childhood moment. Carpenter is out of the way and left behind: now let's see Halloween for grown-ups.

That message is compounded when, a little later, the boyfriend of Michael's sister wears the classic mask from Carpenter's Halloween and the teenage girl is not the slightest bit terrified. The old Michael Myers is no longer a sufficient force for terror. He has become juvenile. I doubt all of this is intended to be a disrespectful statement by Zombie; agon is, as I say, necessary in the artistic order. Zombie is asserting his vision against the Master. His is a unique authorial voice and it must be in competition with its most powerful influences.

These influences are not limited to John Carpenter's films. The sheer number of cameos from the horror and exploitation genres are indicative of an agonistic struggle with the whole of horror history. Multiple things can be true at once. If one asks, "Why is the water boiling?" the answers "Because I want tea," "Because I put it on the stove," and "Because the water has reached a temperature of over 100 degrees centigrade," can all be simultaneously correct. Similarly, claims that Zombie is adding cameos because he's a horror fan and because he wants to please horror fans are very likely true. But as a filmmaker and horror fan, he is in a position of knowing the history of horror cinema and wanting (no doubt) to be a unique presence within the genre. After all, how can one sincerely like a genre and not want to contribute something meaningful to it? His casting of cameos is in some sense his way of appropriating the horror tradition for his own voice.

So much for Agon. Interest is perhaps more important. As when a play is directed by two different directors, the look and weighting of sympathies may be entirely different, a remake naturally centers upon what interests the filmmaker. The original Halloween completely glosses over Michael's childhood and the relationship between Michael and Loomis. Zombie takes a very keen interest in both of these points and in doing so he brings out a lot of valid questions that are lurking in the back of Carpenter's Halloween. Despite opposition to questioning a masterpiece, some of the questions Zombie raises do suggest some flaws in the original Halloween. Or rather, one major flaw: depicting Michael as a supernatural evil, or 'soulless'.

For Zombie, Michael's depiction as pure evil is entirely attributable to Dr. Loomis. This is a point I had never considered in all the times I watched Halloween: that Dr. Loomis should be doubted. Why should we trust Dr. Loomis? He's a clinical psychiatrist who declares Michael the embodiment of evil and ultimately shoots him. Zombie's Halloween turns a very critical eye on Loomis. Loomis comes across as one of those 'celebrity shrinks' who take high-profile cases in order to get juicy book deals. The first frame of the film is a quote from Dr. Loomis explaining that Michael is a soul that's escaped from the pits of hell. I don't recall seeing that one in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. What follows this quote of Loomis's is a childhood that puts the sympathy on Michael. Yes, Michael is doubtless a sociopath. He's also a sweet boy who isn't getting the nurturing he needs to deal with his problem constructively. His life is full of humiliations that push him further and further within himself. The one person able to reach him and help him is his mom.

Unfortunately, Dr. Loomis prevents Michael from spending any significant time with his mom. Michael repeatedly tells Dr. Loomis that what he needs is to go home. Dr. Loomis not only ignores him, but begins to attribute Michael's worsening condition to something sinister within him. Dr. Loomis's major problem is that he takes his failure as a psychiatrist personally. This is typically masculine. The more some system doesn't work, the more aggressively a man will apply it to make the thing obey. Of course, the mind doesn't work that way. Rather than question his training, Dr. Loomis questions Michael. If Loomis is failing, Michael must be something Other, something evil that the system isn't equipped to handle. When Michael decays, Dr. Loomis doesn't take this as proof he has been mistaken in his treatment, but as proof of what he's been saying all along, that Michael is a monster. When Michael becomes pretty much untreatable, Loomis abandons him and writes--wouldn't you know it?--a bestselling book declaring Michael pure evil hiding behind angelic features. He uses a photo of Michael, a sullen-eyed boy (Daeg Faerch), to prove that Michael has no soul behind his eyes. Really, all one sees in the picture is a tired and lonely boy. The evil is purely in Loomis's mind. That is what Rob Zombie brings out and it is a brilliant point.

Michael is not, however, a totally sympathetic character. Zombie's decision was simply to show that he is a sociopath demonized by a crackpot psychiatrist, not a demon psychologized by a decent psychiatrist. Michael's behaviour certainly doesn't earn us much sympathy. Quite the opposite, Zombie is careful to let us see he is a merciless killer. We just understand that he's a product of human stupidity, not of satanic intervention.

Nearly an hour into the picture, Michael finally escapes from the mental institution and the events of the original Halloween take place until the showdown with Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton). If the moments of Agon I described are promising a more gruesome, more frightening, more horrific picture, they are only partially correct. Certainly Zombie's Halloween is more horrific. Michael is described as a sociopath who enjoys watching things suffer. The camera of this film is like Michael: it lingers upon the sufferings of the characters. Carpenter's kills were quick. Zombie's kills, much more realistically, are protracted and agonizing (no pun intended). There is a lot of blood and the violence is unpleasant. The film is also quite scary where it ought to be scary. The problem is that the film is also, in these moments, tedious. I have no idea what it's like to be in such a frightening state of affairs and I hope to never have an idea, but I do know when I watch such scenes I prefer heroines who know how and when to stop whimpering, saying "please," and making typical horror movie mistakes. I won't go into them: if you've seen stupid horror movie behaviour, you'll have an idea of what to expect in these protracted chase/kill scenes. Where Zombie may have gone wrong is in trying to make these scenes too protracted, to the point that he must continue to provide excuse to keep the action going.

Coming from a musical background has also given Zombie a few additional talents. The film's sound is exceptional, occasionally realistic, occasionally ironic, and occasionally expressionistic. The use of diagetic music, such as KISS's "God of Thunder," Nazareth's "Love Hurts, and Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" provide ironic yet insightful commentaries on the action or emotional states. For instance, Michael sitting alone on his front step is intercut with shots of his mother at her stripping job while "Love Hurts" plays. Sometimes the sound effects will stop altogether, distancing the audience from the reality of the action and creating a certain discomfort. Michael's mind has taken over the audio at these moments. In his moments of cruelty, he no longer hears the outside world. Perhaps this is what's happened to him permanently after years of Dr. Loomis. He can no longer even hear the pleas of his victims.

If Zombie wanted to distinguish his voice from Carpenter's and take on the Master, he can certainly be admired for putting up a good fight. His Halloween may not be quite as good or timely as the original, but it is on its own merits a damn good horror picture that provides some thoughtful critique of the original. (Godard discovered the role of critic and filmmaker could be merged by making films critical of other films. Zombie's Halloween is in that tradition. Halloween is about horror movies as much as it's about horrific events.) By this point, it's fairly safe to say Zombie has appropriated the horror tradition for his own authorial voice. But agon never ceases and complacency is never rewarded.

Survival of the Dead (2009) - 3.5/4

Throughout Romero's oeuvre, there have been two persistant themes. One is generational conflict and the other is the need for cooperation. In the Dead movies, it is cooperation that has been especially emphasized. I argued elsewhere(1) that one of Romero's major contributions to cinema is his expert and highly-realistic depictions of arguments. There are arguments in so many of his films because so few characters in his films are able to cooperate. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben and Cooper, the two alpha males, won't cooperate. In The Crazies, the townsfolk, the military, and the scientists all have difficulties cooperating with each other. It's perhaps most pronounced in Day of the Dead, where the soldiers and the scientists rarely cease yelling at one another. In Romero's films, only those capable of cooperation stand a chance at survival. Hence the few survivors of Day of the Dead. The zombies are a frightening and offensive contrast to bickering humans. However stupid, the zombies all share a single goal: eating living humans. They never interfere with one another. Humans, presumably, have a shared goal of survival; but, as is Romero's point, it never goes down that way.

Survival of the Dead is in the tradition of Romero's previous invectives against non-cooperation. The story concerns a small island where two Irish families, the Muldoons and the O'Flynns, have lived side-by-side, with a history of contention, for a good many generations. Six days after the zombie infection begins, O'Flynn has taken to shooting all zombies in the head and Muldoon has taken to preserving them in the hopes of finding a cure. Outnumbered and banished from the island, O'Flynn advertises the island as a safe-haven via the internet. The ad catches the attention of a small group of soldiers, with whom O'Flynn returns to the island to destroy both zombies and Muldoons.

There are a lot of ideas going around in Survival. One gets the feeling that Romero brainstormed and threw everything that interested him, concerned him, had him thinking into the soup without much concern for how readily they can be resolved. To beat the metaphor, it's a delicious if decadent soup. The visual and dialogue ideas are fun. The thematic ideas are interesting if at times a little confused. Some are followed through; some aren't; and many conflict.

For one, there's the issue of sentimentality. All throughout Romero's Dead films, the question has been lurking: Could you kill your friends or family as zombies? Survival addresses the question more directly than Romero's previous pictures. The first scene of the film is of Sargeant Crocket (Alan van Sprang) trying to make a superior officer 'mercy kill' a zombified soldier. The officer's inability to do so sends him directly into the clutches of a zombie, while Crocket coolly dispatches all the zombies. Yet, a little later Crocket and his team encounter a group of men who have placed several living zombie heads on sticks. Not only is Crocket apalled at the cruel treatment of the zombies, but Romero makes all the zombie heads African-American and the perpetrators white rednecks. Although it's possible Romero only wanted to make these men sufficiently unsympathetic for us to not mind if Crocket kills them all, it also seems that Romero is stipulating a racist element to the mistreatment of the living dead. So sentimentality toward the living dead seems to be a bad thing, yet mistreating them is also depicted as morally depraved.

This confusion extends to the conflict between O'Flynn and Muldoon. The first we see of O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), he is demanding the zombified children of a Muldoon family be killed. When the mother refuses, she, a living woman, is killed by his men. O'Flynn thus appears highly misguided, if not an outright villain. But it's O'Flynn who represents anti-sentimentality. Muldoon, on the other hand, starts out very sentimental. He doesn't want a single zombie to be killed because they may just be curable. His position appears, initially, reasonable and noble, if somewhat too soft-hearted (the zombies are, after all, trying to eat everyone living). However, the more we get to know O'Flynn, the more likable he becomes. His strength, surety and wit make him an extremely sympathetic character, despite his heartless approach. Muldoon, on the other hand, comes across as inconsistant, aggressive, and frankly perverse. His home is filled with portraits of family members taken after death along with, most prominantly, a gun-toting self-portrait. He loves dead things just a little too much. Once the film is over, it's still not clear how Romero feels about sentimentality. He seems to admire the practicality in Muldoon's position, but not the sentimental motivation or the necrophiliac personality. Muldoon is willing to kill living outsiders, but not the dead; his perversion tends toward a necropolis. O'Flynn, however, seems a bit too cold, even eager, about killing the zombies. The point, again, is cooperation. Both Muldoon and O'Flynn take extreme positions. There's no reason why some zombies can't be killed and some kept in hopes of a cure. The inability of the two island patriarchs to compromise and work together is what brings ruin to the island.

Patriarchy is another part of the problem. It's the problem of generational conflicts Romero has been emphasizing since Jack's Wife (1972) and Martin (1977), if not Night of the Living Dead (1968). O'Flynn and Muldoon each occupy another age, another way of doing things, that involves tribalism and conflict. The younger characters, such as the soldiers and O'Flynn's daughter, albeit rather mercenary in character, are able to cooperate and reach agreements. Even Crocker, the team leader, functions more like the leader of a democracy than a chieftain. Zombies, Romero has explicitly stated, are a previous generation rising to destroy the current one. Survival as a whole depicts the disorders of older generations destroying the budding one. Muldoon's major perversion is his obsession with past generations. O'Flynn, at least, is a progressive, but still a tribal leader. He is viewed almost as Ulysses, the aged patriarch who returns home to take the throne and finds his once-beautiful land in a fallen state, an apocalyptic world in decay. The ulyssean solution to retake the throne and re-establish his patriarchal authority is, for Romero, no solution at all. The ability to get away from patriarchy and its tribalism, to cooperate, is the only salvation for the newer generations, and indeed for the few survivors of Survival.

One interesting feature of Survival is the dialogue. Or rather the whole approach to the narrative, in which the dialogue falls, that could best be characterized as 'coolness.' That's polite for 'cliche.' Ready-to-hand coolness is usually cliche, because coolness is created on screen before it is instantiated in life (2); it involves a considerable degree of contrivance. The dialogue and mannerisms in Survival seem so calculated for coolness, particularly amongst O'Flynn and the soldiers, that it reaches a new level--that other area of linguistic contrivance--poetry. Perhaps my favourite exchange occurs when we see a hauntingly beautiful zombie (Kathleen Munroe) ride by on a horse, the Boy (Devon Bostick) exclaims, "She's beautiful!", Crocket responds, "She's dead," and O'Flynn concludes, "She's my daughter." Elegant tricolons don't occur so readily in real life, but it sure makes a beautiful rhetorical stroke on the aural canvas. Similarly, the first we see of the character Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) is mid-masturbation in public. However liberated and coarse she's supposed to be, no woman is going to do that. It's utterly contrived, but in the overall tone and cool vibe of the film it's another stroke of poetry. Such contrivances can be annoying, as it is evidently manipulative; but at this extremity and with this mastery, it's pure poetry. The highly cinematic dialogue and mannerisms of these characters is something to be savoured.

Perhaps it's due to this cool and cinematic approach that Survival has another peculiar feature: Whatever is out of frame in Survival is usually invisible to anyone in-frame. However sharp Crocket's senses, he is totally unaware of a zombie right beside him until O'Flynn kills it. This move happens again and again. Anything could be occuring right out of frame and we don't know until a character reacts or it is brought into frame somehow. Survival is as far from the stark realism of Night of the Living Dead as the Dead series has gotten. Romero has dashed headlong into a brazen popular expressionism. It will work for some viewers and it won't work for others; for this viewer, it proved a very charming development.

Survival also boasts some of the finest performances Romero's ever gotten in one of the Dead films. While Romero has gotten good performances in non-zombie films like Martin (John Amplas) and The Dark Half (Timothy Hutton), his Dead films tend to have weak performances, with Day of the Dead containing the worst. Kenneth Welsh gives an excellent and energizing performance as the impish tough-guy O'Flynn. Welsh's quick way with words, charm, sly looks, and deceptively hobbled walk communicate a good deal about the character. The other truly outstanding performance comes from Athena Karkanis. While the other actors in the film tend to embody their characters a little too hammily, everything Karkanis says and does seems utterly natural, despite its poetic contrivance. She moves through the picture like a sexy, female David Hemmings.

So that's Survival of the Dead, a hodgepodge of Romero's late-in-life experiments with ideas and styles both old and new. For any who think Romero has long been over the hill, perhaps the final image and words of the film will draw a cynical nod. For myself, it drew an appreciative smile: Romero's creativity is alive and well, and Survival of the Dead may just be the most lyrical zombie film ever made.
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(1) - I argued in my out-of-date essay, "What's So Great About George Romero?", that the essence of Romero's films is in the arguments amongst the characters. At the time the essay was written, I hadn't seen all of Romero's films. There is much wrong with the essay, but the claim that conflict is essential to Romero's oeuvre remains, I think, a valid one.

(2) - "The Film, the World, and the Fantasy"

The Human Centipede (2009) - 3/4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evil Angel (2009) - 4/4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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