A bizarre combination of The Sound of Music and the Mad Max movies, Welcome to Woop, Woop is a gaudy, flamboyant Australian film directed by Stephen Elliot in 1998. Woop, Woop is a gimcrack, claptrap, ramshackle outback outpost inhabited by eccentric, heavy-drinking desert rats. The village occupies the interior of a sunburnt crater, something like a collapsed salt dome, in the middle of nowhere. The inhabitants are half-feral -- they work slaughtering kangaroos and packing their meat into cans of "Roof, Roof" dog food. Rod Taylor, in a state of severe alcoholic desuetude, play Daddy-O, the brutish leader of the commune. (Taylor's formerly thuggish good looks have slid into shocking disrepair and, at first, I couldn't identify him with the fat, slovenly butcher who controls Woop, Woop with his fists and riflemen -- when someone tries to escape the village by scaling one of its crater walls, he has the refugee shot and tossed into the kangaroo-grinder's hopper.) The hapless women and children stranded in the hamlet spend their nights at an open air theater watching classic Hollywood musicals and the film's soundtrack is lush with tunes from Guys and Dames, South Pacific, and most notably The Sound of Music. (The hymn-like "Climb every Mountain" underscores some of the movie's more spectacular action scenes.)
One of the world's archetypal narratives can be characterized in five words: "A stranger comes to town." In the case of this film, an American involved in smuggling cockatiels gets involved in a farcical, if bloody, confrontation with gangsters and has to flee to Australia. There, he is seduced by a coarse, sexually voracious, Australian girl from the outback -- she refers to sexual intercourse, as "parting my beef curtains." The girl kidnaps the hero, who finds himself a resident of Woop, Woop; he seems to have been brought to the remote village for vaguely eugenic reasons -- the denizens of the town have been interbreeding and their bloodlines have become decadent. The insatiable blonde girl is the daughter of Rod Taylor's Daddy-O. After some acquaintance with the anthropological features of Woop, Woop (for instance, "Dog Day", a day of the week when everyone blazes away with their guns at the local dogs), the hero decides to flee the town -- a capitol offense under Daddy-O's laws. Allying himself with a woman whose husband was shot dead when he attempted to flee, the hero contrives a plan to escape. The escape plot climaxes during the Viking funeral of Daddy-O's wife, the hero and his girl fleeing over the rim of the crater while the dead woman is burned on a huge funeral pyre to the accompaniment of various Broadway show-tunes. The lovers decamp aboard a vast mining truck with house-high wheels and there is a frenzied escape, incongruously set to melodies from The Sound of Music, an action sequenc that parodies the various car and muscle-car chases in the Mad Max movies. Everything is hysterically exaggerated, the Whop, Woop residents extravagantly filthy and mangy, and the climactic vehicular mayhem involves a confrontation with a mythical being, a giant 'Roo who appears in the desert wasteland to take revenge of Daddy-O for the slaughter of his kind. The film is engaging, generally quite funny, and has a weird sort of Wagnerian grandeur -- the tone fluctuates wildly between poignant love scenes and sinister post-Apocalyptic violence, all of this scored to the themes from assorted Hollywood musicals of the fifties and sixties. Stephen Eliot, who made the camp spectacle, The Adventures of Priscilla, the Queen of the Desert, (1993)about a transvestite crossing the outback, has a lurid, baroque sensibility -- he's like his fellow Australian, Baz Luhrman, mad with the imagery of classical Broadway and Hollywood musicals. My sense is that Elliot would be most comfortable simply directing a standard Hollywood musical and the defect in Welcome to Woop, Woop is simply that the film can't ever become what it aspires to be: that is, an expensively produced song-and-dance musical like The Sound of Music or Cabaret.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Monday, November 9, 2015
Gozu
Gozu is Japanese for "cow head" and identifies a figure that appears in this 2003 film by Takishi Miike. The movie is a labyrinth and, I suppose, the title is justified by the cow-headed monster, a sort of friendly minotaur that inhabits the movie's narrative maze. Certain elements of Gozu can be interpreted in a limited way, but, in large part, the film is inscrutable -- the picture displays a vice of all dream-narratives: this imagery feels intensely meaningful to the dreamer but, usually, this impression of significance can not be successfully conveyed to the person to whom the dream is recounted: it's simply too private and the atmosphere of dream, congested, even, turgid with meaning, doesn't translate well to a realistic "photographic" medium. As a consequence, Gozu, a picture that feels like a literal transcript of a dream seems immensely long, weirdly prosaic for much of its two-hours and nine minutes running time, and, ultimately, is in danger of evaporating into colorful mist without establishing any foothold in our imagination.
So far as I can decipher the film, Gozu concerns two Yakuza brothers, Ozaki and Minami. One or both of the brothers seems to be losing his mind in the opening ten minutes of the picture. They perceive a small dog, a Pekinese, as a "Yakuza-killing dog" and bludgeon the little creature to death. Imagining an oncoming car to be a "Yakuza-killing" vehicle, they flee wildly and crash with the result that Ozaki is killed. For a time, Minami carts the body around but when he stops at restaurant for a meal, the corpse vanishes. Minami receives inscrutable messages that tell him to take his brother to the dump, presumably to be disposed-of in that place. But the source of the message is unclear and Minami can't ever quite find his way to the dump; an increasingly surreal series of obstacles confronts him and film slides into a sort of paralysis. People speak to one another in banal gibberish in long scenes, each two or three minutes in duration -- the takes are composed at medium range and show clogged Japanese rooms, mostly commercial spaces in which people seem to be ceaselessly debating things like whether is really hot or really cold. Minami encounters various figures that seem to be guides, Pscyhopomps, apparently -- there is a man with half his face painted chalk-white in a sort of lunar pattern, a brother and sister who operate what seems to be a haunted inn (the woman is lactating and milk runs down her thighs and calves) and, ultimately, the Gozu, or cow-headed figure who offers the protagonist a glass of milk. Minami keeps ending up in the same places, although these locations become increasingly strange as the film progresses -- the haunted restaurant turns out to have a hidden third floor, for instance. The film's rhythm is very slow, deliberately and tediously impeded. Minami can't make any progress; in effect, he is running frantically in slow-motion. As in some of Kafka's novels of this sort, for instance, The Trial, Minami encounters various people with strange, concealed agendas as well as several sexually voracious women. After many peculiar occurrences, Minami finally reaches the dump where he finds that his brother has been placed in a white car and, then, crushed to raspberry-colored pulp. But not to worry -- a beautiful young girl appears in the backseat of Minami's convertible and announces that she is his brother. Minami and his brother, now a girl, confront a mob boss. The mob boss fancies having sex with a spoon rammed up his rectum, apparently, some form of prostate massage. Minami and the girl seduce the gangster and kill him by impaling the boss on his spoon -- it's a ladle with a three-foot handle -- and, then, anally electrocuting the bad guy (they apply a broken lamp with exposed wires to the metal spoon.) Minami, then, has incestuous sex with his sister. Her vagina clamps down hard on Minami's penis and, when he finally breaks free, he discovers a small hand reaching out of her womb. The hand belongs to his long-lost brother Ozaki who is born from the woman in a gory and protracted scene that resembles the "body-horror" of David Cronenberg's earlier films. The film has a purportedly happy ending -- the woman survives the bloody birthing of an entire, fully grown adult male through her vaginal canal and the three are last seen strolling down the streets of Tokyo, seemingly, in a happy mood.
I suppose a second viewing of the picture would reveal patterns in the apparently random and bizarre events comprising the first three-quarters of this film. The film shows that beneath the façade of Yakuza tough-guy there is a hysterical bisexual undercurrent that is, also, intrinsically infantile -- I assume the milk imagery has something to do with the desire to return to the womb, an recursion that Ozaki, apparently, achieves. In one scene, we see the lavishly tattooed skins of murdered Yakuza mobsters hanging like suits in plastic bags. These skins are like cocoons holding souls that are, apparently, fluid with respect to identity and can be reincarnated in various forms. I presume that elements of the film relate to Buddhist and Shinto themes and there is clearly some kind of reincarnation underway with respect to Ozaki. (Wikipedia tells me that Gozu names a demonic guardian spirit of the Underworld, a kind of Asian Charon -- "Ox-head.") Notwithstanding the film's bizarre imagery, it seems tedious, weirdly complicated, with way too many frustrating false endings -- typical of many Japanese films, the movie has a peculiar way of moving toward closure: it seems to end about a half-dozen times and, then, reboots -- it's as if the film can't exactly grope its way toward its conclusion, that it is as lost as its wandering, demented protagonist.
So far as I can decipher the film, Gozu concerns two Yakuza brothers, Ozaki and Minami. One or both of the brothers seems to be losing his mind in the opening ten minutes of the picture. They perceive a small dog, a Pekinese, as a "Yakuza-killing dog" and bludgeon the little creature to death. Imagining an oncoming car to be a "Yakuza-killing" vehicle, they flee wildly and crash with the result that Ozaki is killed. For a time, Minami carts the body around but when he stops at restaurant for a meal, the corpse vanishes. Minami receives inscrutable messages that tell him to take his brother to the dump, presumably to be disposed-of in that place. But the source of the message is unclear and Minami can't ever quite find his way to the dump; an increasingly surreal series of obstacles confronts him and film slides into a sort of paralysis. People speak to one another in banal gibberish in long scenes, each two or three minutes in duration -- the takes are composed at medium range and show clogged Japanese rooms, mostly commercial spaces in which people seem to be ceaselessly debating things like whether is really hot or really cold. Minami encounters various figures that seem to be guides, Pscyhopomps, apparently -- there is a man with half his face painted chalk-white in a sort of lunar pattern, a brother and sister who operate what seems to be a haunted inn (the woman is lactating and milk runs down her thighs and calves) and, ultimately, the Gozu, or cow-headed figure who offers the protagonist a glass of milk. Minami keeps ending up in the same places, although these locations become increasingly strange as the film progresses -- the haunted restaurant turns out to have a hidden third floor, for instance. The film's rhythm is very slow, deliberately and tediously impeded. Minami can't make any progress; in effect, he is running frantically in slow-motion. As in some of Kafka's novels of this sort, for instance, The Trial, Minami encounters various people with strange, concealed agendas as well as several sexually voracious women. After many peculiar occurrences, Minami finally reaches the dump where he finds that his brother has been placed in a white car and, then, crushed to raspberry-colored pulp. But not to worry -- a beautiful young girl appears in the backseat of Minami's convertible and announces that she is his brother. Minami and his brother, now a girl, confront a mob boss. The mob boss fancies having sex with a spoon rammed up his rectum, apparently, some form of prostate massage. Minami and the girl seduce the gangster and kill him by impaling the boss on his spoon -- it's a ladle with a three-foot handle -- and, then, anally electrocuting the bad guy (they apply a broken lamp with exposed wires to the metal spoon.) Minami, then, has incestuous sex with his sister. Her vagina clamps down hard on Minami's penis and, when he finally breaks free, he discovers a small hand reaching out of her womb. The hand belongs to his long-lost brother Ozaki who is born from the woman in a gory and protracted scene that resembles the "body-horror" of David Cronenberg's earlier films. The film has a purportedly happy ending -- the woman survives the bloody birthing of an entire, fully grown adult male through her vaginal canal and the three are last seen strolling down the streets of Tokyo, seemingly, in a happy mood.
I suppose a second viewing of the picture would reveal patterns in the apparently random and bizarre events comprising the first three-quarters of this film. The film shows that beneath the façade of Yakuza tough-guy there is a hysterical bisexual undercurrent that is, also, intrinsically infantile -- I assume the milk imagery has something to do with the desire to return to the womb, an recursion that Ozaki, apparently, achieves. In one scene, we see the lavishly tattooed skins of murdered Yakuza mobsters hanging like suits in plastic bags. These skins are like cocoons holding souls that are, apparently, fluid with respect to identity and can be reincarnated in various forms. I presume that elements of the film relate to Buddhist and Shinto themes and there is clearly some kind of reincarnation underway with respect to Ozaki. (Wikipedia tells me that Gozu names a demonic guardian spirit of the Underworld, a kind of Asian Charon -- "Ox-head.") Notwithstanding the film's bizarre imagery, it seems tedious, weirdly complicated, with way too many frustrating false endings -- typical of many Japanese films, the movie has a peculiar way of moving toward closure: it seems to end about a half-dozen times and, then, reboots -- it's as if the film can't exactly grope its way toward its conclusion, that it is as lost as its wandering, demented protagonist.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
The Silent House
Years ago, there was a computer game named Myst. In the game, the player wanders around a labyrinth seeking clues necessary to advance the plot. But the game was impossibly difficult and the clues fiendishly subtle and so the player never really advanced at all through the maze. Instead, you found yourself exploring the same rooms over and over again, pointing your cursor at the same knickknacks and old books, peering into dark cellars and shadowy alcoves without ever making any progress toward solving the game's mystery. The film, The Silent House, offers a similar experience.
A bargain basement mash-up of The Shining with The Sixth Sense, The Silent House features a female protagonist, a teenage girl of uncertain age, who wanders around a gloomy house in the country for about 85 minutes. (The film was made by Gustavo Hernandez in Uruguay in 2010). The girl begins her adventure with her father, but he ends up dead in the first fifteen minutes and, thereafter, the heroine has no one to talk to -- it becomes for all intents and purposes a silent picture. The handheld camera simply tracks the girl around the premises while she explores the various shadowy nooks and crannies of the house, one of those uncanny structures that seems to proliferate rooms and, even, floors as the film proceeds. It's a dull movie and fundamentally predictable -- the girl turns out to be the evil spirit haunting the house, a place that was used as a sort of brothel for sex parties sponsored by the protagonist's father and his smarmy buddy. This is finally revealed by a series of surprisingly chaste polaroid photographs posted in the attic of the house, evidence of sex parties that seem to have involved lots of drinking but not much else, photographs that feature the girl-heroine back when she was still in the land of the living (like the picture that Kubrick explores in the final image of The Shining). There are a few ineffective spasms of violence -- the girl wields a sickle but the movie is not really gory, certainly, not scary at all, and, more or less, simply confusing and ambiguous. The picture is so low-budget that it seems to have been shot over a sunny weekend in someone's summer cabin -- you can't tell if the murky light is supposed be "day-or-night" representation of after-dark landscapes or just an F-stop that was set wrong. Most notably, the film purports to be shot in a single take, although, in fact, there are plenty of inky black doorways and cellar entries into which the camera can be pointed so that the screen will go black, a cheating effect of the kind you can see at the end of reels in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, also purportedly featuring one continuous take. (The same cheating takes place in Inarittu's Birdman, but that film is made in a much more sophisticated manner and, certainly, is far more seamless that The Silent House). Here this bravura technique seems more or less pointless and, in fact, even lazy and since the film was shot digitally using some kind of low-budget Steadi-cam, the effect is less impressive than annoying. We're stuck with the girl-ghost who apparently has to avenge herself on her father and his buddy for all eternity -- she's like Jack Nicholson stuck at the Overlook Hotel forever. And the movie is so dull and witless that it seems to last an eternity.
A bargain basement mash-up of The Shining with The Sixth Sense, The Silent House features a female protagonist, a teenage girl of uncertain age, who wanders around a gloomy house in the country for about 85 minutes. (The film was made by Gustavo Hernandez in Uruguay in 2010). The girl begins her adventure with her father, but he ends up dead in the first fifteen minutes and, thereafter, the heroine has no one to talk to -- it becomes for all intents and purposes a silent picture. The handheld camera simply tracks the girl around the premises while she explores the various shadowy nooks and crannies of the house, one of those uncanny structures that seems to proliferate rooms and, even, floors as the film proceeds. It's a dull movie and fundamentally predictable -- the girl turns out to be the evil spirit haunting the house, a place that was used as a sort of brothel for sex parties sponsored by the protagonist's father and his smarmy buddy. This is finally revealed by a series of surprisingly chaste polaroid photographs posted in the attic of the house, evidence of sex parties that seem to have involved lots of drinking but not much else, photographs that feature the girl-heroine back when she was still in the land of the living (like the picture that Kubrick explores in the final image of The Shining). There are a few ineffective spasms of violence -- the girl wields a sickle but the movie is not really gory, certainly, not scary at all, and, more or less, simply confusing and ambiguous. The picture is so low-budget that it seems to have been shot over a sunny weekend in someone's summer cabin -- you can't tell if the murky light is supposed be "day-or-night" representation of after-dark landscapes or just an F-stop that was set wrong. Most notably, the film purports to be shot in a single take, although, in fact, there are plenty of inky black doorways and cellar entries into which the camera can be pointed so that the screen will go black, a cheating effect of the kind you can see at the end of reels in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, also purportedly featuring one continuous take. (The same cheating takes place in Inarittu's Birdman, but that film is made in a much more sophisticated manner and, certainly, is far more seamless that The Silent House). Here this bravura technique seems more or less pointless and, in fact, even lazy and since the film was shot digitally using some kind of low-budget Steadi-cam, the effect is less impressive than annoying. We're stuck with the girl-ghost who apparently has to avenge herself on her father and his buddy for all eternity -- she's like Jack Nicholson stuck at the Overlook Hotel forever. And the movie is so dull and witless that it seems to last an eternity.
I Spit on Your Grave (remake)
Many years ago, Pauline Kael famously accused Sam Peckinpah of aestheticizing rape in his film, Straw Dogs. Kael was conflicted about the film and, particularly, incensed by the use of balletic ("languorus" she said) slow-motion for the punches that subdue the victim of a sexual assault. Whatever his pretensions, Peckinpah was an entertainer, a director who cut his teeth on network TV, and he understood that if protracted scenes of violence are to be displayed, something must be done to make them pretty -- otherwise, the whole enterprise is just sadism inflicted on the audience, or, worse, an attempt to induce voyeuristic sadism in the viewer. Film is an art form -- its violence is staged. And, therefore, the manner in which violent events are staged must distance those incidents from viewers. No sane person wants to watch a real rape or real murder.This is a lesson wholly ignored by whoever it was who made the direct-to-video rape-revenge picture I spit on your Grave. (The 2010 picture is a remake of an exploitation film called Day of the Woman released in 1978 and renamed I Spit on your Grave. It's part of a franchise -- there have been two subsequent versions, most recently one made in 2015. Apparently, someone enjoys these films.)
As a genre, rape-revenge cinema probably dates back, most disturbingly, to the interracial sexual assaults that Griffith stages in Birth of a Nation. The modern form of the genre begins with a distinguished example of the form, Ingmar Bergman's uncompromising, if lyrical, The Virgin Spring. That film was remade as a hillbilly exercise in gore, The Last House on the Left, by the late Wes Craven -- the pioneer of the low-budget Drive-in movie rape-revenge horror film. Craven's picture was supposed to be nasty fun -- back in those days, using rape as a plot device to power-up a gory sequence of torture-porn eviscerations and incinerations was supposed to be entertaining. (Craven, who was a literate man, would have argued that his films were Jacobean exercises in grand guignol.) Although today no one would dare remark on this point, the rapes depicted in these films were designed to be titillating, mildly sexual arousing and fun. This was the aesthetic approach that stirred indignation, but begrudging admiration for the director's talent, in Pauline Kael's response to Straw Dogs, probably the most artistically distinguished example of the genre. I spit on your Grave is made in a different era and from a radically different directorial perspective. Today, no one would dare to consider the depiction of a rape today as something "entertaining". One would think that doctrines of political correctness would long since have retired the genre -- today's piety, however hypocritical, about sexual abuse, doesn't authorize an "entertaining" film about rape. The joyless, extravagantly ugly I spit on your Grave proves this point. Or, perhaps, the pointlessness because the principal question which the film raises is why such a movie would be made in the first place.
The first two-thirds of I Spit on your Grave is foreplay for the rape and its torture-porn consequences. A lady-novelist, presumably from New York or Boston, rents a large cabin on a bayou in Georgia or Mississippi or Louisiana. Inadvertently, she humiliates one of the local thugs. With two of his buddies, and the obligatory mentally retarded man-child, the bad guys terrorize the woman. She fights back and flees through the dismal-looking woods, encountering the local sheriff. Of course, the sheriff is just a good ole boy himself and he becomes the ring-leader in the rape party. The movie is surprisingly decorous about the rape -- no real sexual conduct is shown and there is no nudity until all of the filthy acts have been performed off-screen. The girl is repeatedly forced to fellate various handguns as a surrogate for oral sex that the picture is unwilling to depict and her head is held under dirty swamp water for extended periods of time as a form of torture. Mercifully, I suppose, the extended rape scene is just a lot of "before" and "after" with no actual portrayal of the assault. The heroine ends up smeared with filth, naked, sprawled face-down in a puddle of mud on the edge of the lagoon. Before the sheriff can gun her down, she falls sideways off a ramshackle bridge over the bayou and mysteriously vanishes. At this point, it becomes unclear whether the woman is dead or alive and, when she reappears, her eyes are hollow, her face skeletally gaunt, and her hair long, disheveled, and inky black -- she looks like one of the avenging angels that haunt certain types of Japanese horror films, a specter similara in appearance to one of the abused girl-ghosts in movies like Ringu. The last third of the movie is torture porn. The heroine isolates the men that assaulted her and devises punishments customized to their role in her rape -- the voyeuristic hillbilly who filmed her defilement, for instance, find himself chained to a tree with fishhooks through his eyelids exposing his eyeballs to the predation of crows; the sheriff who anally sodomized the heroine gets a shotgun rammed up his rectum; the good ole boy who shoved her head underwater gets his face dipped repeatedly in a solution of lye which dissolves his tongue, eyes, and nose. It's all shot unimaginatively, if effectively, and without any trace of suspense or, even, drama -- in fact, all the mayhem is more or less matter of fact: penises are cut off and rammed into villains mouths and the heroine's vengeance in abetted by a tool shed full of all sorts of sharp and lacerating instrumentalities -- bear traps, chain saws, various kinds of hooks and clamps and metal restraints.
The film is ridiculous and beneath contempt and, of course, the people who made this picture obviously couldn't justify the existence of the film to themselves since they make no artistic effort of any kind in production of the movie; there is no humor or suspense or, even, drama -- and there 's no acting either except the broadest caricatures of southern hillbillies, no supporting players, no subplots, in fact, almost no plot at all. It's all complete artless and perfunctory. One wonders what it was like to spend days filming scenes where the naked girl rolls around in mud while the good old boys insult her or or hours staging shots involving characters having to repeatedly pretend that their genitals are being snipped off with huge shears: "let's do another take, and this time with more feeling! That scream was a little lackluster." Making the picture probably wasn't much fun since most of the principals likely had to spend hours, if not days, shackled to trees outdoors while spills of various bodily fluids were simulated around them. Clearly, the people who made this thing had nothing but contempt for the material and the audience likely to watch the movie. It's as if someone said: Let's make this film in the most unimaginative manner possible and see if anyone will pay money to watch this thing solely on the basis of its subject matter. And, since only vicious louts would watch a movie like this, let's punish them for their voyeurism by making every single aspect of the movie unappealing -- keep the rape off-screen but imply it to be as brutish as possible, keep the heroine unattractive and unappealing to keep anyone from getting their jollies from the rape scenes. Put the torture porn front and center but film it in a completely uninvolving, quasi-documentary style. It's as if the filmmakers set out to inflict injury on their audience on the basis of their detestation for the type of people who would spend their money to watch a thing like this.
Half-way through the film, I noticed something that has become a truism: the only people that can be insulted with impunity in today's films are either Islamic fundamentalists or Southern white trash. (And, most films featuring Islamic villains will, also, depict some kind of a "good Arab.") Apparently, everyone hates Southern white men and they can be portrayed as thuggish, indolent, sadistic human-garbage without anyone's protest. Here is a thought experiment: what would I spit on your Grave be like if the five rapists were African-American males -- that's how the genre began with D. W. Griffith. How would we experience the movie if Black men were cast as the Southern bayou-dwelling hillbillies? No one would dare to make a film of that kind.
As a genre, rape-revenge cinema probably dates back, most disturbingly, to the interracial sexual assaults that Griffith stages in Birth of a Nation. The modern form of the genre begins with a distinguished example of the form, Ingmar Bergman's uncompromising, if lyrical, The Virgin Spring. That film was remade as a hillbilly exercise in gore, The Last House on the Left, by the late Wes Craven -- the pioneer of the low-budget Drive-in movie rape-revenge horror film. Craven's picture was supposed to be nasty fun -- back in those days, using rape as a plot device to power-up a gory sequence of torture-porn eviscerations and incinerations was supposed to be entertaining. (Craven, who was a literate man, would have argued that his films were Jacobean exercises in grand guignol.) Although today no one would dare remark on this point, the rapes depicted in these films were designed to be titillating, mildly sexual arousing and fun. This was the aesthetic approach that stirred indignation, but begrudging admiration for the director's talent, in Pauline Kael's response to Straw Dogs, probably the most artistically distinguished example of the genre. I spit on your Grave is made in a different era and from a radically different directorial perspective. Today, no one would dare to consider the depiction of a rape today as something "entertaining". One would think that doctrines of political correctness would long since have retired the genre -- today's piety, however hypocritical, about sexual abuse, doesn't authorize an "entertaining" film about rape. The joyless, extravagantly ugly I spit on your Grave proves this point. Or, perhaps, the pointlessness because the principal question which the film raises is why such a movie would be made in the first place.
The first two-thirds of I Spit on your Grave is foreplay for the rape and its torture-porn consequences. A lady-novelist, presumably from New York or Boston, rents a large cabin on a bayou in Georgia or Mississippi or Louisiana. Inadvertently, she humiliates one of the local thugs. With two of his buddies, and the obligatory mentally retarded man-child, the bad guys terrorize the woman. She fights back and flees through the dismal-looking woods, encountering the local sheriff. Of course, the sheriff is just a good ole boy himself and he becomes the ring-leader in the rape party. The movie is surprisingly decorous about the rape -- no real sexual conduct is shown and there is no nudity until all of the filthy acts have been performed off-screen. The girl is repeatedly forced to fellate various handguns as a surrogate for oral sex that the picture is unwilling to depict and her head is held under dirty swamp water for extended periods of time as a form of torture. Mercifully, I suppose, the extended rape scene is just a lot of "before" and "after" with no actual portrayal of the assault. The heroine ends up smeared with filth, naked, sprawled face-down in a puddle of mud on the edge of the lagoon. Before the sheriff can gun her down, she falls sideways off a ramshackle bridge over the bayou and mysteriously vanishes. At this point, it becomes unclear whether the woman is dead or alive and, when she reappears, her eyes are hollow, her face skeletally gaunt, and her hair long, disheveled, and inky black -- she looks like one of the avenging angels that haunt certain types of Japanese horror films, a specter similara in appearance to one of the abused girl-ghosts in movies like Ringu. The last third of the movie is torture porn. The heroine isolates the men that assaulted her and devises punishments customized to their role in her rape -- the voyeuristic hillbilly who filmed her defilement, for instance, find himself chained to a tree with fishhooks through his eyelids exposing his eyeballs to the predation of crows; the sheriff who anally sodomized the heroine gets a shotgun rammed up his rectum; the good ole boy who shoved her head underwater gets his face dipped repeatedly in a solution of lye which dissolves his tongue, eyes, and nose. It's all shot unimaginatively, if effectively, and without any trace of suspense or, even, drama -- in fact, all the mayhem is more or less matter of fact: penises are cut off and rammed into villains mouths and the heroine's vengeance in abetted by a tool shed full of all sorts of sharp and lacerating instrumentalities -- bear traps, chain saws, various kinds of hooks and clamps and metal restraints.
The film is ridiculous and beneath contempt and, of course, the people who made this picture obviously couldn't justify the existence of the film to themselves since they make no artistic effort of any kind in production of the movie; there is no humor or suspense or, even, drama -- and there 's no acting either except the broadest caricatures of southern hillbillies, no supporting players, no subplots, in fact, almost no plot at all. It's all complete artless and perfunctory. One wonders what it was like to spend days filming scenes where the naked girl rolls around in mud while the good old boys insult her or or hours staging shots involving characters having to repeatedly pretend that their genitals are being snipped off with huge shears: "let's do another take, and this time with more feeling! That scream was a little lackluster." Making the picture probably wasn't much fun since most of the principals likely had to spend hours, if not days, shackled to trees outdoors while spills of various bodily fluids were simulated around them. Clearly, the people who made this thing had nothing but contempt for the material and the audience likely to watch the movie. It's as if someone said: Let's make this film in the most unimaginative manner possible and see if anyone will pay money to watch this thing solely on the basis of its subject matter. And, since only vicious louts would watch a movie like this, let's punish them for their voyeurism by making every single aspect of the movie unappealing -- keep the rape off-screen but imply it to be as brutish as possible, keep the heroine unattractive and unappealing to keep anyone from getting their jollies from the rape scenes. Put the torture porn front and center but film it in a completely uninvolving, quasi-documentary style. It's as if the filmmakers set out to inflict injury on their audience on the basis of their detestation for the type of people who would spend their money to watch a thing like this.
Half-way through the film, I noticed something that has become a truism: the only people that can be insulted with impunity in today's films are either Islamic fundamentalists or Southern white trash. (And, most films featuring Islamic villains will, also, depict some kind of a "good Arab.") Apparently, everyone hates Southern white men and they can be portrayed as thuggish, indolent, sadistic human-garbage without anyone's protest. Here is a thought experiment: what would I spit on your Grave be like if the five rapists were African-American males -- that's how the genre began with D. W. Griffith. How would we experience the movie if Black men were cast as the Southern bayou-dwelling hillbillies? No one would dare to make a film of that kind.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Halloween Horror: The Devil's Bride, The Curse of the Demon, and Ash v. The Evil Dead
On Halloween, I ate Sauerbraten with mashed potatoes and apple Kuchen. The Sauerbraten had an authentic taste and the gravy, made with ginger snaps and a macerated dill pickle was excellent but my verdict on my efforts was that the rather stringy, vinegar-marinated beef was, perhaps, not worth the effort involved in its preparation. This is generally true of roast beef -- for every superb and memorable pot roast, I have made a half-dozen that were tasteless, dull, and either too tough to eat or decomposed into filaments that embed themselves between your teeth like injurious slivers. While eating supper, I watched The Devil's Bride (1968) a dim-witted, if amusing, Hammer Horror film, brightly shot in the English studio's trademark Eastmancolor. The little ghosts and goblins abroad in the windy night trudged through ankle deep heaps of leaves to reach my front door. In my old age, it seems that the number of trick-or-treaters has steeply declined so that I am always left with a heavy bowl of unused candy when I turn off my porch light at 7:30 to signal that, as far as I am concerned, the bacchanal is at an end. Youth is a time of abundance -- everything is new and seems to last longer with crowds of extras surrounding you: the past is like those movies that dissolve into a yesteryear always characterized by streets full of colorfully dressed people scurrying about their errands: there are lots and lots of people and all of them are handsome and they are all moving about purposefully as if directed to perform very specific and emblematic tasks on a tight schedule. How different, I suppose, from actual pictures of Victorian city streets or western villages: empty arcades and barren sidewalks or gaunt-looking houses strewn randomly across vast, grey plains empty to their treeless horizons. Probably, the traditional trick-or-treating on Halloween eve has suffered attrition due to competitor venues: on a Saturday a week before Halloween, the grocery store was full of small children receiving treats gratis in the aisles of the store, candy dispensed by staff wearing cat-suits or springy antennae on their caps. Then, on the Friday before Halloween, I went downtown to see a jam session, Art Rocks, in the old bank building by the police station. The streets were crowded with trick-or-treaters dragged by their parents from one downtown merchant to the next and it was hard to find a parking place -- I ended up putting my car next to the Lutheran Church three blocks away, across from the mortuary. Most parents, I would guess, ration their children to one orgy of trick-or-treating and a kid that has harvested candy from the downtown merchants or at Hy-Vee between the deli and meat counter is not likely to be abroad on the night of the actual celebration.
The Devil's Bride is not scary. It is a rather refined British period picture in which immaculately dressed men and women in evening gowns stand around well-appointed great rooms in old manors discussing Satanism. You expect the people to speak in a witty and intelligent manner, but, of course, this drawing room discussion is not exactly Oscar Wilde -- rather, it's dreary stuff about curses and spells interlarded with imprecations and spots of Latin. There are lots of shots of lovely old cars speeding through idyllic countryside. Terence Fisher, the director, doesn't really edit -- he spends too much time showing you people walking across pastures or lounging around in palatial rooms waiting for something to happen. When the devil worshippers make their appearance, they are risible: a nicely interracial group of upper-class Brits dressed like High Church choir members gathered around a beefy yeoman in an Aleistair Crowley get-up with an elderly sibyl who slinks around like a harem girl but who, also, seems to be conspicuously cross-eyed. The people all have names that might be latte drinks at Starbucks: there's Tanith and Macota. For some reason, Christopher Lee, the witchhunter extraordinaire in this film, is called Duc d' Richlieu -- is he some kind of relative of the Cardinal, famous among other things, for his appearance in Monty Python skits made about the same time as this film? At one of the mild orgies of the damned, Satan appears briefly, a good-looking chap with horns and a furry beard, a bit like Bernini's Poseidon but with elegant, well-manicured antlers. Satan looks entirely impassive, bland, indifferent to his worshipers who are mostly an unprepossessing lot. He vanishes when the hero throws a bottle at him. Later, the satanic forces besiege Christopher Lee's little band of valiant Christians -- they stand within a protective circle chalked on the floor, back to back, while various phantoms attack or tempt them. There's a skeleton on a big armored horse and a tarantula that changes size from shot to shot -- sometimes its the size of a poodle, other times fist-sized and, at one point, it bulks up to be as large as a Shetland pony. A child is captured and threatened with sacrifice, but, then, a spirit occupying an elegantly dressed woman speaks in a sepulchral voice forbidding the murder and God reasserts His hegemony -- the devil-worshipers vanish in puffs of smoke and an austere cross emerges from behind a fiery explosion that eradicates the devilish diagrams on the cloister wall. Someone who was dead comes back to life and the charming girl-child awakes from her trance and all is well in the world. These proceedings are shot in bright color, the night scenes imaged in bluish day-for-night, and everything occurring against the backdrop of autumnal pastoral landscapes. Everything is visible and clear and, of course, this is unfortunate because what you can see in sharp focus generally isn't too scary. The petty, murderous bourgeois devil-worshippers in Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim are just as banal as this coven, but because we understand them less perfectly and, because they clearly have no magical power except to kill, are much more alarming than the villains in The Devil's Bride.
The devil, or, at least, his fire demon, appears as well in Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon aka The Night of the Demon (1957). Tourneur was a director of B pictures in Hollywood and he made several very effective, and literate, horror movies produced by Val Lewton in the forties -- among them Cat People and I walked with a Zombie. It's pretty widely understood today that Lewton was the actual auteur of those films -- all of them are stylistically similar and demonstrate some of Lewton's trademark effects (for instance, the sudden shock-cut in which an apparition leaps out of the frame to startle the audience). Tourneur made a variety of very good films in Hollywood, including the notable and lyric western Canyon Passage as well as some distinguished film noir. The Curse of the Demon is a British production, one of Tourneur's last films, and it harkens back to the sophisticated and eerie suggestiveness -- the horror is typically intimated but not shown -- evident in the Lewton-produced pictures made almost twenty years earlier.
The French don't use the word "horror" to denote a genre --in French film criticism, a film like The Curse of the Demon is styled "a fantasy film" in the genre of "films of the fantastic." This label seems better to me for an elegant and dream-like movie like Curse of the Demon than calling the film a "horror" picture -- the movie's imagery is mostly lyrically sinister, but not really "horrible". The plot involves a stolid American psychologist, apparently an expert on fear and the subconscious, who travels to England to present a lecture debunking parapsychology. The psychologist encounters a jovial, if evil, sorcerer who kills his victims by handing them a parchment inscribed with runes. When the victim reads the runes, the parchment becomes animate and flees from him so that he can not rescind the spell -- exactly how one would rescind the spell is not clear to me. The runes advise the victim that he will die at a certain time and date. A snarling fire demon with a blow torch for a mouth and long, pointed claws arrives at the appointed time and shreds the unfortunate victim of the runic curse. (The film is adapted from stories by M. R. James but so loosely and approximately that the connection of the movie to its source material is all but indecipherable.) Running afoul of a fat, goateed, and, somewhat slovenly, sorcerer, the hero and his girlfriend struggle to avert the curse of the runes decreeing death to the leading man in three days time. Of course, the evil spell is deflected so that it boomerangs back to the Magus who suffers a spectacular death in the claws of the very demon that he had summoned forth. (The fire demon, who looks a bit like a mentally retarded version of Godzilla eats the sorcerer like an hors d'oeuvre, then, spits out his torso to lie smoking next to some complex, interweaving railroad tracks.) The movie is brisk and nimble, cramming all sorts of weird activity into its ninety minutes running time. Curse of the Demon is flat-footed only with respect to its hero played by Dana Andrews. Andrews is so resolutely obtuse and unimaginative as to defy belief -- surrounded on all sides by evidence of an active and omnipresent supernatural, he continues in his skepticism up to the final appearance of the Fire Demon. And, perhaps, even that apparition doesn't exactly satisfy his doubts -- the demon, after all, is amateurishly contrived, mostly immobile, a leering puppet-like fellow in a smoky rubber suit. Andrews' voice, always remembered as silky and pleasing, has a gruff, gravelly sound in this movie and, when someone else speaks, the actor doesn't know what to do -- so he grimaces and stands stiffly upright showing his disapprobation by the set of his manly jaw. But horror films or "films of the fantastic" don't require much in the way of acting or dialogue -- silence, music, and the occasional sound effect should be more than sufficient to elicit their primitive effects from the audience. And, visually, Curse of the Demon is splendid, even, majestic: the villain, incongruously dressed as a clown with a bulbous nose, conjures up a great wind storm and we see the demon coalescing out of a whirl of sparks and luminous mist; the hero consults runes inscribed on the megaliths at Stonehenge and the great monument on its dreary plain provides a suitably awesome opening shot to the film. In the most remarkable image, the fire demon hops a ride on a locomotive, approaching its victim in a cloud of steam and smoke jetting up from the engine. The hero wanders through a disorienting woodlands with the monster following him, its footsteps smoking in the leaf litter and there is an indelible image of the sinister Magus departing down an ill-lit corridor at the British Museum, a shadowy presence distorted into a mirage against the bright outside light. Tourneur deploys shock effects of the kind he perfected in The Curse of the Cat People -- when burglarizing the bad guy's house Dana Andrews is startled by a cat that turns into a rather unpersuasive leopard; at a Halloween party, the hero (and audience) are jolted by the sudden appearance of a child in a skeleton mask. The movie is elegant and entertaining, not so much scary as poetically eerie. (This is true in particular of a séance in which two old ladies have to croon a pop song of the time to knock the medium into his trance; also effective is a sequence in which Dana Andrews' hypnotizes a man accused of a horrible murder, injecting him with "methyl amphetamine" with the result that the killer runs amuck and, then, plunges to his death through a hospital window.) When I was young, the standard work on horror films was a book by Carlos Clarens. In that book, the author derided this film for spoiling its sophisticated and weirdly suggestive style by actually showing the farcical demon -- in my view, the demon's ludicrous but ferocious appearance is part of the retro-charm of the movie.
"To show or not to show" was one of the questions raised by practitioners in the fantastic genre when I was an adolescent and college student. How much horror should be shown and how much merely suggested? Of course, that question is now beside the point, the industry having decided the issue long ago -- probably beginning with the vomit, masturbation and sarcoma-like lesions in The Exorcist. Horror films of the past several decades have been absurdly graphic, a trend exemplified by the new Starz series, Ash v. the Evil Dead. The premiere episode of this cable series, directed stylishly by Sam Raimi, was broadcast on Halloween night. Replete with geysers of arterial blood, dismemberments, and shotgun beheadings, the show is so gory as to be cartoon-funny: it's like the "Itchy and Scratchy" (Tom and Jerry) mayhem featured as cartoons within the cartoon world of The Simpsons.
Ash v. The Evil Dead illustrates a suggestive, and important point: the genre most closely similar to horror is slapstick physical comedy. Both types of films rejoice in showing audiences the very worst things that can happen. And Ash v. The Evil Dead doesn't resist this comparison -- in fact, the show is marketed as slapstick comedy and, in fact, is very funny. Ash is a late middle-aged hunk of beefcake, overweight and none too smart. While copulating with a pick-up in tavern, Ash discovers that his paramour, a hardened middle-aged barfly herself, is one of the evil dead. Momentarily, discountenanced by this discovery, Ash, nonetheless, doggedly completes the sex act before fleeing to his squalid trailer to try to figure out what is going on. There, he finds that a few days earlier, while smoking marijuana with another woman, he inadvertently had her chant certain nonsense syllables from a Necronimicon-style book, bound in human flesh, that unleash the scourge of the Evil Dead on the earth. With a Honduran side-kick and a homely-looking girl, possibly Jewish, as allies, Ash straps on his chainsaw -- he wears it in place of the hand he had to hack off when it was infected by a bite from the Evil Dead thirty years earlier -- and goes forth to battle the powers of darkness. The comedy in the show arises from the fact that Ash is old, flabby, and extremely stupid as well as clumsy -- he's the kind of fellow who can't carry a sack of light bulbs without spilling them all over the floor. The Evil Dead films are noteworthy because their army of monsters derive from Chinese ghost and horror films from the late seventies -- the dead have skeletal faces with eyes that look like soft-boiled eggs but they are alos tremendously agile and strong, can rotate their heads, with much grisly cracking of bone, to look straight behind themselves and seemingly can fly like decomposing torpedoes through the air. They are cousins to the monsters inhabiting Hong Kong supernatural films like The Bride with the White Hair, undead creatures equipped with tongues that can extend hundreds of feet or ghouls outfitted with acres of animate and malevolent hair in which to ensnare and, then, strangle their victims. Since the dead leap around as if in zero gravity, Ash and his cohorts also have to fly through the air to combat them and so there is much bounding about, wire-work with hero and undead adversaries colliding with titanic force in mid-air, severed heads shooting around like cannonballs The mayhem is aerobatic, jaunty, and extremely cheerful, self-indulgent virtuosity much enthused by itself. If the show can keep up the energy of its first episode, it promises to be a wonderfully amusing guilty pleasure.
The Devil's Bride is not scary. It is a rather refined British period picture in which immaculately dressed men and women in evening gowns stand around well-appointed great rooms in old manors discussing Satanism. You expect the people to speak in a witty and intelligent manner, but, of course, this drawing room discussion is not exactly Oscar Wilde -- rather, it's dreary stuff about curses and spells interlarded with imprecations and spots of Latin. There are lots of shots of lovely old cars speeding through idyllic countryside. Terence Fisher, the director, doesn't really edit -- he spends too much time showing you people walking across pastures or lounging around in palatial rooms waiting for something to happen. When the devil worshippers make their appearance, they are risible: a nicely interracial group of upper-class Brits dressed like High Church choir members gathered around a beefy yeoman in an Aleistair Crowley get-up with an elderly sibyl who slinks around like a harem girl but who, also, seems to be conspicuously cross-eyed. The people all have names that might be latte drinks at Starbucks: there's Tanith and Macota. For some reason, Christopher Lee, the witchhunter extraordinaire in this film, is called Duc d' Richlieu -- is he some kind of relative of the Cardinal, famous among other things, for his appearance in Monty Python skits made about the same time as this film? At one of the mild orgies of the damned, Satan appears briefly, a good-looking chap with horns and a furry beard, a bit like Bernini's Poseidon but with elegant, well-manicured antlers. Satan looks entirely impassive, bland, indifferent to his worshipers who are mostly an unprepossessing lot. He vanishes when the hero throws a bottle at him. Later, the satanic forces besiege Christopher Lee's little band of valiant Christians -- they stand within a protective circle chalked on the floor, back to back, while various phantoms attack or tempt them. There's a skeleton on a big armored horse and a tarantula that changes size from shot to shot -- sometimes its the size of a poodle, other times fist-sized and, at one point, it bulks up to be as large as a Shetland pony. A child is captured and threatened with sacrifice, but, then, a spirit occupying an elegantly dressed woman speaks in a sepulchral voice forbidding the murder and God reasserts His hegemony -- the devil-worshipers vanish in puffs of smoke and an austere cross emerges from behind a fiery explosion that eradicates the devilish diagrams on the cloister wall. Someone who was dead comes back to life and the charming girl-child awakes from her trance and all is well in the world. These proceedings are shot in bright color, the night scenes imaged in bluish day-for-night, and everything occurring against the backdrop of autumnal pastoral landscapes. Everything is visible and clear and, of course, this is unfortunate because what you can see in sharp focus generally isn't too scary. The petty, murderous bourgeois devil-worshippers in Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim are just as banal as this coven, but because we understand them less perfectly and, because they clearly have no magical power except to kill, are much more alarming than the villains in The Devil's Bride.
The devil, or, at least, his fire demon, appears as well in Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon aka The Night of the Demon (1957). Tourneur was a director of B pictures in Hollywood and he made several very effective, and literate, horror movies produced by Val Lewton in the forties -- among them Cat People and I walked with a Zombie. It's pretty widely understood today that Lewton was the actual auteur of those films -- all of them are stylistically similar and demonstrate some of Lewton's trademark effects (for instance, the sudden shock-cut in which an apparition leaps out of the frame to startle the audience). Tourneur made a variety of very good films in Hollywood, including the notable and lyric western Canyon Passage as well as some distinguished film noir. The Curse of the Demon is a British production, one of Tourneur's last films, and it harkens back to the sophisticated and eerie suggestiveness -- the horror is typically intimated but not shown -- evident in the Lewton-produced pictures made almost twenty years earlier.
The French don't use the word "horror" to denote a genre --in French film criticism, a film like The Curse of the Demon is styled "a fantasy film" in the genre of "films of the fantastic." This label seems better to me for an elegant and dream-like movie like Curse of the Demon than calling the film a "horror" picture -- the movie's imagery is mostly lyrically sinister, but not really "horrible". The plot involves a stolid American psychologist, apparently an expert on fear and the subconscious, who travels to England to present a lecture debunking parapsychology. The psychologist encounters a jovial, if evil, sorcerer who kills his victims by handing them a parchment inscribed with runes. When the victim reads the runes, the parchment becomes animate and flees from him so that he can not rescind the spell -- exactly how one would rescind the spell is not clear to me. The runes advise the victim that he will die at a certain time and date. A snarling fire demon with a blow torch for a mouth and long, pointed claws arrives at the appointed time and shreds the unfortunate victim of the runic curse. (The film is adapted from stories by M. R. James but so loosely and approximately that the connection of the movie to its source material is all but indecipherable.) Running afoul of a fat, goateed, and, somewhat slovenly, sorcerer, the hero and his girlfriend struggle to avert the curse of the runes decreeing death to the leading man in three days time. Of course, the evil spell is deflected so that it boomerangs back to the Magus who suffers a spectacular death in the claws of the very demon that he had summoned forth. (The fire demon, who looks a bit like a mentally retarded version of Godzilla eats the sorcerer like an hors d'oeuvre, then, spits out his torso to lie smoking next to some complex, interweaving railroad tracks.) The movie is brisk and nimble, cramming all sorts of weird activity into its ninety minutes running time. Curse of the Demon is flat-footed only with respect to its hero played by Dana Andrews. Andrews is so resolutely obtuse and unimaginative as to defy belief -- surrounded on all sides by evidence of an active and omnipresent supernatural, he continues in his skepticism up to the final appearance of the Fire Demon. And, perhaps, even that apparition doesn't exactly satisfy his doubts -- the demon, after all, is amateurishly contrived, mostly immobile, a leering puppet-like fellow in a smoky rubber suit. Andrews' voice, always remembered as silky and pleasing, has a gruff, gravelly sound in this movie and, when someone else speaks, the actor doesn't know what to do -- so he grimaces and stands stiffly upright showing his disapprobation by the set of his manly jaw. But horror films or "films of the fantastic" don't require much in the way of acting or dialogue -- silence, music, and the occasional sound effect should be more than sufficient to elicit their primitive effects from the audience. And, visually, Curse of the Demon is splendid, even, majestic: the villain, incongruously dressed as a clown with a bulbous nose, conjures up a great wind storm and we see the demon coalescing out of a whirl of sparks and luminous mist; the hero consults runes inscribed on the megaliths at Stonehenge and the great monument on its dreary plain provides a suitably awesome opening shot to the film. In the most remarkable image, the fire demon hops a ride on a locomotive, approaching its victim in a cloud of steam and smoke jetting up from the engine. The hero wanders through a disorienting woodlands with the monster following him, its footsteps smoking in the leaf litter and there is an indelible image of the sinister Magus departing down an ill-lit corridor at the British Museum, a shadowy presence distorted into a mirage against the bright outside light. Tourneur deploys shock effects of the kind he perfected in The Curse of the Cat People -- when burglarizing the bad guy's house Dana Andrews is startled by a cat that turns into a rather unpersuasive leopard; at a Halloween party, the hero (and audience) are jolted by the sudden appearance of a child in a skeleton mask. The movie is elegant and entertaining, not so much scary as poetically eerie. (This is true in particular of a séance in which two old ladies have to croon a pop song of the time to knock the medium into his trance; also effective is a sequence in which Dana Andrews' hypnotizes a man accused of a horrible murder, injecting him with "methyl amphetamine" with the result that the killer runs amuck and, then, plunges to his death through a hospital window.) When I was young, the standard work on horror films was a book by Carlos Clarens. In that book, the author derided this film for spoiling its sophisticated and weirdly suggestive style by actually showing the farcical demon -- in my view, the demon's ludicrous but ferocious appearance is part of the retro-charm of the movie.
"To show or not to show" was one of the questions raised by practitioners in the fantastic genre when I was an adolescent and college student. How much horror should be shown and how much merely suggested? Of course, that question is now beside the point, the industry having decided the issue long ago -- probably beginning with the vomit, masturbation and sarcoma-like lesions in The Exorcist. Horror films of the past several decades have been absurdly graphic, a trend exemplified by the new Starz series, Ash v. the Evil Dead. The premiere episode of this cable series, directed stylishly by Sam Raimi, was broadcast on Halloween night. Replete with geysers of arterial blood, dismemberments, and shotgun beheadings, the show is so gory as to be cartoon-funny: it's like the "Itchy and Scratchy" (Tom and Jerry) mayhem featured as cartoons within the cartoon world of The Simpsons.
Ash v. The Evil Dead illustrates a suggestive, and important point: the genre most closely similar to horror is slapstick physical comedy. Both types of films rejoice in showing audiences the very worst things that can happen. And Ash v. The Evil Dead doesn't resist this comparison -- in fact, the show is marketed as slapstick comedy and, in fact, is very funny. Ash is a late middle-aged hunk of beefcake, overweight and none too smart. While copulating with a pick-up in tavern, Ash discovers that his paramour, a hardened middle-aged barfly herself, is one of the evil dead. Momentarily, discountenanced by this discovery, Ash, nonetheless, doggedly completes the sex act before fleeing to his squalid trailer to try to figure out what is going on. There, he finds that a few days earlier, while smoking marijuana with another woman, he inadvertently had her chant certain nonsense syllables from a Necronimicon-style book, bound in human flesh, that unleash the scourge of the Evil Dead on the earth. With a Honduran side-kick and a homely-looking girl, possibly Jewish, as allies, Ash straps on his chainsaw -- he wears it in place of the hand he had to hack off when it was infected by a bite from the Evil Dead thirty years earlier -- and goes forth to battle the powers of darkness. The comedy in the show arises from the fact that Ash is old, flabby, and extremely stupid as well as clumsy -- he's the kind of fellow who can't carry a sack of light bulbs without spilling them all over the floor. The Evil Dead films are noteworthy because their army of monsters derive from Chinese ghost and horror films from the late seventies -- the dead have skeletal faces with eyes that look like soft-boiled eggs but they are alos tremendously agile and strong, can rotate their heads, with much grisly cracking of bone, to look straight behind themselves and seemingly can fly like decomposing torpedoes through the air. They are cousins to the monsters inhabiting Hong Kong supernatural films like The Bride with the White Hair, undead creatures equipped with tongues that can extend hundreds of feet or ghouls outfitted with acres of animate and malevolent hair in which to ensnare and, then, strangle their victims. Since the dead leap around as if in zero gravity, Ash and his cohorts also have to fly through the air to combat them and so there is much bounding about, wire-work with hero and undead adversaries colliding with titanic force in mid-air, severed heads shooting around like cannonballs The mayhem is aerobatic, jaunty, and extremely cheerful, self-indulgent virtuosity much enthused by itself. If the show can keep up the energy of its first episode, it promises to be a wonderfully amusing guilty pleasure.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Miracle Mile
Miracle Mile (1988) is an 85 minute shot of adrenalin, an excellent film that mysteriously failed at the box office only to achieve posthumous fame as a cult movie. The movie is one of two pictures directed by Steve de Jarnett -- the other Cherry 2000, at least on the evidence of Miracle Mile, deserves revival and a closer look as well. (Both films have recently been reissued in Blu-Ray format.) Miracle Mile translates a tried-and-true formula -- boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl are together in the end -- into the genre of the nuclear apocalypse film. It's like a sophisticated romantic comedy sutured improbably to something like The Day After or On the Beach. Miracle Mile is weirdly poetic, convincingly lyrical as a romantic comedy, and genuinely nightmarish with respect to its end-of-days imagery. It's the kind of picture in which a car rams into a stately LA palm only to cause the tree to drop, like round, furry fruit, a half dozen fat grey rats onto the vehicle's crumpled hood. The director's staging of his hackneyed material is continuously ingenious -- every shot has a peculiar hook or angle or some unexpected vector of motion. When the hero staggers out of department store into which a police car has just crashed we find that the SWAT team previously threatening to kill him has vanished, a sole cop rappelling desperately down the face of the Streamline Moderne building to dash away into the pink and yellow dawn. The bit players are effectively eccentric and the locations lavishly atmospheric -- the movie is shot on the famous Miracle Mile in central Los Angeles, a stretch of museums and architecturally renowned Art Deco-style buildings, all possessing a kind of back-to-the future charm: this was what the future was supposed to look like in 1959 and May's Department Store, Johnnie's Coffee Shop, LACMA, and the hovercraft-like museum at the La Brea Tar Pits all impart a kind of retro-glamor to the proceedings. (The Pan-Pacific Auditorium also appears in a number of shots; the structure burned down the year after the movie was shot.) The actors are pleasant and simpatico; the scenery is superb and the film's real-time action -- it mostly takes place between the hero's discovery that the world is going to end in an hour and the foretold atomic holocaust -- has a kind of surreal, frantic urgency. Time is ticking away and there is no stopping the war-heads targeted for overkill in the LA basin.
The film's screenplay was written ten years before the movie was produced in 1988 when de Jarnett was a student at the American Film Institute. People who had read the script proclaimed it one of the best screenplays ever written and it was featured in the AFI publication, Film Comment, in 1983 as one of the ten best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. The story focuses on a 30-year-old trombone player who meets a charming young woman at the La Brea Tar Pits museum -- the meet-cute at the museum is filmed with languorous abstract tracking shots that are highly stylized and resemble Brian de Palma's museum scenes with Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill. The young man and woman agree to a date when she finishes work -- she's a waitress at Johnnie's Café on Wiltshire. The trombonist's alarm clock fails him and there is a power outage so that he is three hours late to his midnight date. He stumbles into Johnnie's at 3:45 am. When the hero answers a phone call placed by error to the cafe's pay-phone, he discovers that the US has launched a preemptive missile strike on the USSR. Soviet missiles are en route to LA and will obliterate the city in 45 minutes. A mysterious woman, apparently some kind of Department of Defense employee, suggests that the people in Johnnie's meet atop a nearby bank building so that they can be evacuated by helicopter to LAX for flights to Antarctica -- presumably the only place that will survive the nuclear holocaust. The hero desperately searches for the girl that he has just met, finds her, and together they struggle to escape the increasing violence, chaos, and hysteria that besets the city. The film careens forward with the savage energy of a really bad dream -- things just get worse and worse and worse. Not only was de Jarnatt's script superb, the realization of his words is also stunning. It's a B picture made on low-budget although the limitations of the film's funding are not really noticeable -- some of street scenes involving car crashes and looting are startlingly effective. Not all the actors are up to the material and de Jarnatt uses clichés and stereotypes to rocket the film's action forward -- the whole thing is less than 85 minutes long -- and so I can't claim that the movie is flawless. Mare Winningham's performance as the plucky romantic interest is questionable in some respects and the hero, a hapless everyman, is, perhaps, a little too bland. But there is no doubt that this is one of the best, and most purely enjoyable, pictures of the decade of the 80's.
The film's screenplay was written ten years before the movie was produced in 1988 when de Jarnett was a student at the American Film Institute. People who had read the script proclaimed it one of the best screenplays ever written and it was featured in the AFI publication, Film Comment, in 1983 as one of the ten best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. The story focuses on a 30-year-old trombone player who meets a charming young woman at the La Brea Tar Pits museum -- the meet-cute at the museum is filmed with languorous abstract tracking shots that are highly stylized and resemble Brian de Palma's museum scenes with Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill. The young man and woman agree to a date when she finishes work -- she's a waitress at Johnnie's Café on Wiltshire. The trombonist's alarm clock fails him and there is a power outage so that he is three hours late to his midnight date. He stumbles into Johnnie's at 3:45 am. When the hero answers a phone call placed by error to the cafe's pay-phone, he discovers that the US has launched a preemptive missile strike on the USSR. Soviet missiles are en route to LA and will obliterate the city in 45 minutes. A mysterious woman, apparently some kind of Department of Defense employee, suggests that the people in Johnnie's meet atop a nearby bank building so that they can be evacuated by helicopter to LAX for flights to Antarctica -- presumably the only place that will survive the nuclear holocaust. The hero desperately searches for the girl that he has just met, finds her, and together they struggle to escape the increasing violence, chaos, and hysteria that besets the city. The film careens forward with the savage energy of a really bad dream -- things just get worse and worse and worse. Not only was de Jarnatt's script superb, the realization of his words is also stunning. It's a B picture made on low-budget although the limitations of the film's funding are not really noticeable -- some of street scenes involving car crashes and looting are startlingly effective. Not all the actors are up to the material and de Jarnatt uses clichés and stereotypes to rocket the film's action forward -- the whole thing is less than 85 minutes long -- and so I can't claim that the movie is flawless. Mare Winningham's performance as the plucky romantic interest is questionable in some respects and the hero, a hapless everyman, is, perhaps, a little too bland. But there is no doubt that this is one of the best, and most purely enjoyable, pictures of the decade of the 80's.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Blunt Talk
Since comparisons are invidious, it's generally a mistake to invoke an essay by George Orwell in the course of a note of this kind. But, I think, the best commentary on the Starz comedy series, Blunt Talk, starring the formidable Patrick Stewart is Orwell's essay on "The Art of Donald McGill." In that writing, Orwell considers a specific comic genre: smutty postcards sold in "stationers shops." Orwell describes these cards lovingly and, then, remarks that they embody a "harmless rebellion against virtue" and that "human beings instinctively desire to be good, but not too good." Blunt Talk, despite its "hip" Hollywood pretentions, belongs within this genre. It's an example of sentimental and deeply conservative smut -- every dirty joke or off-color scene illustrates a fundamental virtue. This is not surprising since the show is produced by Seth McFarland, a long-time smut purveyor, whose characters on Family Guy and American Dad generally derive from the Archie Bunker school of humor: the gruff, narcissistic bigot turns out to be loveable because his awful remarks and nasty behavior supports a status quo that we secretly admire more than we publicly deride it.
The premise of the ten half-hour shows comprising Blunt Talk's first (and, probably, only season) is that Patrick Stewart is a famous liberal talk show host on a current affairs show -- a kind of Bill O'Reilly of the Left. Like Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke long before him, Stewart has a host of zany writers and producers whose peccadillos and love affairs afford the basis for subplots. Stewart is an alcoholic Englishman with a loyal man-servant, both of them cartoon figures right out of one of McFarland's animated TV shows. In the opening episode, Blunt goes on a cocaine-fueled binge and ends up being arrested with a transsexual prostitute. (The opening episode is the sharpest and most transgressive of the ten shows -- the program softens considerably after its first episode; McFarland is a master of using outrageous imagery as a baited hook.) During the remaining nine episodes, Blunt weathers various crises with the help of his wacky staff and a psychiatrist played by the reliably smarmy Richard Lewis. The show "jumps the shark" by the fourth or fifth episode, descending to more exotic and outré plots to make its points -- for instance, Stewart's own son appears at Blunt's son about half-way through the series: incongruously, the middle-aged man is a professional boxer. Stewart is compelling and it's amusing to hear his Shakespearean diction applied to traffic jams and unhappy love affairs, but the character is more of a collection of zany traits that a believable man. (I guess there's a "fan-boy" aspect to the show as well -- I think that cameos are played by ageing members of the Star Trek crew from Stewart's previous adventures in TVf land.) The show is not particularly funny, although it is compelling due to McFarland's sheer mania to entertain -- the writers try everything, and, then, some to keep things amusing. They don't always succeed but there is certainly a lot going on -- the husband of Blunt's senior citizen producer (she is a kind of nymphomaniac involved in a love affair with a 25-year-old Indian kid) has Alzheimer's disease; one of Blunt's writers is a severely neurotic foot-fetishist who is also a hoarder; another writer is an Englishwoman secretly obsessed with Blunt who suffers a string of futile, pointless one-night stands; the third writer, also a woman, discovers that she is a lesbian and tries to seduce her colleague. There are various orgies, drunken and drug-fueled parties and so on. Blunt who fought in the Falklands War, has post-traumatic stress disorder (we learn) and has to be flogged by his faithful manservant (who happens to be prodigiously endowed) to get ready for each night's show. (The funniest moment in the ten week series is when the characters are talking about one another's sexual perversions. Someone says to Blunt: "Well, you have to be towel-whipped before you can go on air." Blunt responds: "True but that's not sexual." The servant who is knitting in a corner looks up with a stricken expression and asks woefully: "It's not?") The show is very literate -- there are many references to contemporary poetry, particularly the work of Mark Strand -- and the dialogue is reasonably snappy, but the sheer volume of perversity and the excessive effort to name-check as many "timely contemporary" topics as possible is more than a little wearying. And, in the end, the program is deeply conservative -- all of the promiscuity turns out to be unhappy and, so, ends up endorsing something like "true love." Sex is meaningless if not accompanied by some kind of commitment. Perversion is endorsed as a way of demonstrating the show's liberal if obviously staid politics -- "I may be a foot fetishist, but I have good self-esteem and, after all, diversity is good thing," the show seems to proclaim. By the end of the show, the drug-addicted pussy-hound Blunt is shown to be a good and caring father (to his bi-racial son), a kind boss something like Lou Grant on the old MTM show, a crusader for the environment and left wing causes on the order of Rachel Maddow, and a sweet fellow in all respects. It is more than a little sickening.
The premise of the ten half-hour shows comprising Blunt Talk's first (and, probably, only season) is that Patrick Stewart is a famous liberal talk show host on a current affairs show -- a kind of Bill O'Reilly of the Left. Like Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke long before him, Stewart has a host of zany writers and producers whose peccadillos and love affairs afford the basis for subplots. Stewart is an alcoholic Englishman with a loyal man-servant, both of them cartoon figures right out of one of McFarland's animated TV shows. In the opening episode, Blunt goes on a cocaine-fueled binge and ends up being arrested with a transsexual prostitute. (The opening episode is the sharpest and most transgressive of the ten shows -- the program softens considerably after its first episode; McFarland is a master of using outrageous imagery as a baited hook.) During the remaining nine episodes, Blunt weathers various crises with the help of his wacky staff and a psychiatrist played by the reliably smarmy Richard Lewis. The show "jumps the shark" by the fourth or fifth episode, descending to more exotic and outré plots to make its points -- for instance, Stewart's own son appears at Blunt's son about half-way through the series: incongruously, the middle-aged man is a professional boxer. Stewart is compelling and it's amusing to hear his Shakespearean diction applied to traffic jams and unhappy love affairs, but the character is more of a collection of zany traits that a believable man. (I guess there's a "fan-boy" aspect to the show as well -- I think that cameos are played by ageing members of the Star Trek crew from Stewart's previous adventures in TVf land.) The show is not particularly funny, although it is compelling due to McFarland's sheer mania to entertain -- the writers try everything, and, then, some to keep things amusing. They don't always succeed but there is certainly a lot going on -- the husband of Blunt's senior citizen producer (she is a kind of nymphomaniac involved in a love affair with a 25-year-old Indian kid) has Alzheimer's disease; one of Blunt's writers is a severely neurotic foot-fetishist who is also a hoarder; another writer is an Englishwoman secretly obsessed with Blunt who suffers a string of futile, pointless one-night stands; the third writer, also a woman, discovers that she is a lesbian and tries to seduce her colleague. There are various orgies, drunken and drug-fueled parties and so on. Blunt who fought in the Falklands War, has post-traumatic stress disorder (we learn) and has to be flogged by his faithful manservant (who happens to be prodigiously endowed) to get ready for each night's show. (The funniest moment in the ten week series is when the characters are talking about one another's sexual perversions. Someone says to Blunt: "Well, you have to be towel-whipped before you can go on air." Blunt responds: "True but that's not sexual." The servant who is knitting in a corner looks up with a stricken expression and asks woefully: "It's not?") The show is very literate -- there are many references to contemporary poetry, particularly the work of Mark Strand -- and the dialogue is reasonably snappy, but the sheer volume of perversity and the excessive effort to name-check as many "timely contemporary" topics as possible is more than a little wearying. And, in the end, the program is deeply conservative -- all of the promiscuity turns out to be unhappy and, so, ends up endorsing something like "true love." Sex is meaningless if not accompanied by some kind of commitment. Perversion is endorsed as a way of demonstrating the show's liberal if obviously staid politics -- "I may be a foot fetishist, but I have good self-esteem and, after all, diversity is good thing," the show seems to proclaim. By the end of the show, the drug-addicted pussy-hound Blunt is shown to be a good and caring father (to his bi-racial son), a kind boss something like Lou Grant on the old MTM show, a crusader for the environment and left wing causes on the order of Rachel Maddow, and a sweet fellow in all respects. It is more than a little sickening.
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