Full trailer for Let Me In, the American adaptation of the book Let the Right One In.

I’m hearing a lot of people bitching that this movie appears to be a shot for shot remake of the Swedish movie. These people are clearly on crack. Yes, there is undoubtedly be a few shots that are similar. They’re adapting the same same story. There’s only so many ways you can shoot two kids sitting on a jungle gym playing with a Rubix cube. I don’t think they should deliberately go out of their way to make anything different from the previous film. They just adapt the book how they adapt the book. There are bound to be similarities between the two movies.

Besides, you can’t please everyone. People will bitch if it’s too much like the first film. They’ll bitch if it’s not close enough to the first one. Whatever.

All I care about is whether it’s a good movie or not. The book was brilliant, the Swedish film was brilliant and this movie has potential to be brilliant. We’ll see. Everything I’ve seen so far looks good to me.

You know what the scariest, most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in a movie is?

Fucking Zelda, Denise Crosby’s sister with MS in Pet Sematary.

Jesus fucking Christ, I got freaked out just doing the google image search to find this picture.

In 1981, Stephen King published a nonfiction book called Danse Macabre. It was an in-depth, extensive analysis of modern horror (as of the late 70s/early 80s) by one of the foremost minds on the subject. It’s a fascinating read if you can get past Kings sometimes cocky, sometimes slightly pretentious attitude. (I’m willing to forgive him on that aspect, simply because his status as the best selling fiction writer in the world was new to him, and he was at the height of his alcoholism and cocaine addiction) I often mentally refer back to things I read in that book when I’m doing my own critical thinking about modern horror and it’s place in our culture.

Specifically, I most often think about the notion King puts forward that there are really only three kinds of monsters. These monsters (as described by King) are The Vampire, The Werewolf and The Thing Without a Name and he names three definitive tales that encompass those three ideas. The Vampire is Dracula (naturally), the Werewolf is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Thing Without a Name is Frankenstein’s monster.

Frequently when I watch horror movies (especially monster movies) I mentally categorize the antagonist into one of these three archetypes.

The monster in Splice is very much The Thing Without a Name. In fact, so much so that it’s basically a retelling of Frankenstein, if Frankenstein and the Monster were chicks and the Monster wanted to bone Frankenstein’s husband. Oh, and if there wasn’t all that boring shit in the middle of the book where the monster learns how to speak french and boring stuff at the end when they go to the south pole and pretty much the entire friggin book. If you leave out all of the boring stuff and look at the core idea of the book, you’ve got Splice. The relationship between father and son, creator and creation, and man’s desire to conquer God.

If you’ve watched more than, say, two science fiction movies ever, you probably know that when man tries to play God, it never works out. Not in fiction anyway. God has a real hard-on for copyright infringement. Anyone in a horror or science fiction story who tries to copy (or, even worse, improve upon) one of God’s original works is in for one hell of an asswhuppin.

In this case, our Dr. Frankenstein comes in the form of a brilliant biological engineer named Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and her partner Clive (Adrien Brody), who are a pair of scientists working on building freaky hybrid animals by splicing together genes from various sources. The idea is that through this work they will be able to create new medicines and medical advances. Anyway, bla bla bla, eventually they end up breaking their strict code of ethics and splicing a set of human genes with some of the animal genes they’ve been working with, just to see if they CAN do it.

And you know what Ian Malcolm has to say about THAT.

What they end up with is this freaky looking half animal/half hot French chick with goofy eyes, kangaroo feet and some kind of weird scorpion tail thing that has a poison nail thing that pops out to kill people. Here’s where Splice starts to get interesting. Like I said, the story itself isn’t anything groundbreaking. It’s a really straight forward Frankenstein kind of tale about people trying to manipulate nature and it biting them in the ass. It’s a typical cautionary tale about not fucking with God. When you have a story like that, a story that’s relatively predictable and expected, you need to bring something else to the table to supplement. In this case, it’s a really fucking crazy looking monster named Dren.

Dren is played by French actress Delphine Chanéac and her look was designed by artist Dan Ouellette, who does these kind of Geiger-esque, Hans Bellmer-esque demented sexually charged images and sculptures in his regular life. Clearly he gave them what they were looking for in his design, because it suits the character of Dren pretty damned well.

You see, unlike the emo, crybaby monster in Mary Shelly’s novel, Dren is a hot (well, hot in a mutant sort of way) chick that wants to fuck. Personally, I prefer the hot, horny monster.

Though I have to admit that it IS somewhat awkward and uncomfortable watching Dren do sexy things when she’s also kind of like a little kid. She can’t talk (only makes these weird chirpy sounds and screeching, and she can spell words out with Scabble pieces, which I never really quite bought) and she’s got a rapid aging process, so she’s really only a few weeks old or something, so I dunno. Either way, my point is that sexuality is a major component of this character. And it’s a major component of the movie as a whole. Sexual repression is a theme and sex as violence is a theme. Gender issues and rape and incest and child abuse and pretty much every dark, family related drama that can be squeezed into one Frankenstein story is present here, to some degree.

These two doctors are about to lose their funding for genetic splicing and they desperately want to add human DNA to their experiments, because they think it will allow them to cure any number of genetics based illnesses. So they secretly create Dren, and like any good Frankenstein’s monster, she quickly becomes too big to contain, and like our friend Dr. Malcolm suggests, “nature… finds a way”.

They take her to a barn up in the country, and that’s when shit starts to get real. First of all, we find out that Sarah Polley’s character had some kind of fucked up, demented asshole mom that apparently abused the shit out of her when she was a kid. That becomes important as her relationship with Dren develops. You see, because even though both doctors are involved in creating Dren, it’s really Elsa who is the driving force behind it. Clive repeatedly expresses his reservations about the experiment and tries to end it a few times before it’s too far gone to stop. In fact, Adrien Brody’s character does very little in the story other than get dragged along with Elsa’s self destructive bullshit, and have creepy sexual encounters with this hot naked little girl monster.

The sexuality in this movie is not really a fun sexuality. This thing isn’t cute little Leeloo in The Fifth Element. She’s not some over sexualized furry fantasy from Avatar. She’s very much a monster. A sexy monster, but a monster none-the-less. Even worse, she’s the product of a lot of very bad decisions that come from a very dark place. It’s clear from the get go that she is not a force of good. It’s not even ambivalent or vague morality. Pretty much right away we know that she is very much a dangerous, wild animal and not to be fucked with or treated like a baby.

But, of course, that’s what ends up happening. And because these two doctors become mother and father to this monster, the dark, evil shit in Elsa’s past starts to rise to the surface and we’re treated with one of the more disturbing scenes of sexual child abuse that I’ve seen in a while. Even though the actress playing Dren is clearly an adult, the character is a child, and watching the darkness wash over Sarah Polley’s face as she transitions from mother to abuser is pretty fucking intense.

I don’t want to get too much into specific story elements, but there’s an idea put forth that Elsa wanted Dren so that she could have a disposable child. That’s some fucked up shit.

So we’ve got Sarah Polley the monster abuser, we’ve got Dren the abomination, and we’ve got Adrien Brody, the almost simple minded idiot along for the ride.

Well, not JUST along for the ride. He’s got his share of problems too.

Most of the sexual attraction element of this story centers around Clive and Dren. In an example of the Electra complex, we’ve got a animalistic, primal female monster who wants to fuck her father. The problem is that the father isn’t really all that morally grounded himself. It’s starts pretty much at the beginning during a somewhat disturbing scene where Elsa and Clive are fucking on a couch and Clive notices that Dren is watching them through a curtain, and then he doesn’t really do anything about it and just looks at her watching them. It’s not a sexy scene at all. It’s actually pretty gross. After that, you know shit is going to get demented.

And it does. Of course. The question is whether or not it works.

It does work, but just barely. Honestly, it’s almost funny. There was one part in particular that wasn’t supposed to be funny (it was actually quite an intense, dramatic scene) but the audience I saw the movie with exploded into laughter, myself included. Sometimes the ridiculousness of it all is just a little too much to bear.

It’s these moral questions that save the movie. Luckily the movie has the balls to ask other questions in addition to the standard Frankenstein cautionary tale. Questions about gender and abuse and sex. If it had simply been about “SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLAY GOD!” then I probably would have hated this movie. But it saves itself with some interesting philosophical ideas. And even though it couldn’t really escape a mostly cliche final confrontation scene, they managed to even rescue that by adding another couple of demented elements to the mix at the last minute.

Because, honestly, I have no interest in cautionary tales about playing God. I just don’t buy. I don’t believe it. I find them to be the paranoid, pathetic fears of cavemen, afraid of lightning and fire. I don’t believe that man CAN play god. It implies that man somehow exists outside of or above nature, and I don’t believe that’s true. If man creates a new animal or reanimates life, then that’s natural and that’s okay. That’s not to say that people aren’t going to be stupid about it. I just don’t fear it out of some kind of inane fear of retaliation from a higher power. So I need more than that in my cautionary tales. Splice provides more than that, and I appreciate it.

In the end, Splice is a decent flick. Yes, it’s quite corny in parts, but it’s also an interesting story and nice and demented. I’m hesitant to call it a horror movie really, but it’s scarier than your average science fiction movie. I suppose it’s as much a horror story as Frankenstein ever was.

Most importantly, this is a movie for all those fanboys out there boohoohooing on the internet and shaking their bruised and krovvy rookers at unfair bog in heaven for Hollywood’s obsession with remakes and sequels. Here’s a good, solid original horror movie. Get your asses into the theater and support it or you don’t have a right to bitch about your perceived lack of originality in Hollywood.

The last thing I’m going to mention is that this is the second Canadian movie I’ve seen this year that was actually pretty decent (the other being Defendor, which I’ve been working on a review of but forgot to finish for about a month) so yeah, good job Canada.

OH, one more thing.

This movie is “presented” by Guillermo del Toro (who serves as a producer as well). I’m really digging this trend. It seems to have been mostly started by Quentin Tarantino, but Peter Jackson and Eli Roth and a bunch of other filmmakers have been doing it to, and I think it’s great. Basically established filmmakers find projects that they believe in and want to support, and they lend their name to the marketing campaign to generate interest. I think that’s amazing. Sometimes it’s just a name, and sometimes (like with Peter Jackson and District 9) it’s a full on producer roll, but I like it. I like seeing good filmmakers supporting up-and-coming talent in a public way. I hope it continues.

PS: I also think it’s goofy that she has no hair anywhere on her body, but she has eyebrows and eyelashes. Just sayin.

Well, after a year or so of constant speculation, contemplation, discussion and anticipation, today I went and watched the new A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’ve already written my guts out about my feelings about these movies, this character and remakes in general. So I won’t bother rehashing that much.

I’ll do my best to keep the review relatively spoiler free as well.

I try and go into any movie I see with a clean slate. Whether it’s an original story or an adaptation. I try to anyway. I feel like it’s only fair to give each movie the chance to tell it’s story in it’s own way without any sort of expectations or preconceived notions about what it should or shouldn’t be. It’s not always easy to drop all of that, but I do my best.

But to pretend that I went into this movie without any baggage would be disingenuous. In fact, it would be flat out bullshit. It would be completely impossible to watch a retelling of A Nightmare on Elm Street without mentally comparing it to what came before. What I can (and did) do though was allow myself to enjoy what this movie had to offer that perhaps the previous movies either couldn’t or wouldn’t bring to the table. I’ll get into that in a bit.

First and foremost, the big question (for me anyway) was whether or not someone else can step in and play Freddy Krueger. Because without that, there is no movie. I just looked it up and nine different actors have portrayed Jason Voorhees over the course of eleven Friday the 13th movies (skipping the first film, where Jason wasn’t even the killer, as well as skipping actors playing him as a child) and eight different actors have played Michael Meyers over the course of nine Halloween movies (skipping the third movie and child actors). While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these actors are interchangeable, it’s certainly not a drastic move to recast either of these two characters. Throw a goalie mask onto a stuntman and you’ve got yourself a new Jason.

Freddy Krueger is a different story though. Only one actor has ever played Freddy up to this point, and that one actor played him in such a specific way, with a such a specific attitude and tone and posture that the idea of casting another actor to play that role seems… awkward at best, sacrilege at worst. Robert Englund embodied Freddy Krueger, quite literally, for some twenty years or so.

So Jackie Earle Haley had a big, thankless job to do. Not just in reinventing the role to suit his own acting style, but also the nearly impossible task of balancing being scary with being entertaining. Being evil with being charming. And he has to do all of that while being compared to another actor’s performance. Not many actors have to deal with that. I highly doubt that Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore had to deal with people screaming and crying because Hollywood had the audacity to recast James Bond. I kind of doubt that Michael Keaton was sweating about what fans of Adam West would say about his performance as Batman. Fanboys are a fickle, borderline premenstrual-psychotic bunch of picky bastards. There’s no satisfying them. There will always be something to get up in arms about. There will always be something to post angrily about on message boards.

At some point, I’m sure, the people making this movie have to just tune that out. I know I would. If I was making a movie that’s controversial among fanboys, the first thing I’d do would be to unplug my internet and try and make my movie in a vacuum. Because, honestly, fuck fanboys. I don’t like this notion that if fans of a particular franchise bitch loud enough Hollywood will bend to their will. Filmmaking isn’t a goddamned democracy. The internet has empowered fanboys in a way that’s both dangerous and incredibly fucking annoying. In the last ten years we’ve seen geeks like Harry Knowles actually influencing the way that movies are produced and sold. Fox studios scorned Harry a while back by having the audacity to not invite him to a screening and he’s been torpedoing their movies ever since. The fact that studios even remotely feel the need to run things past fucking Harry Knowels kind makes me sick honestly. This isn’t meant as an attack on Harry, but honestly, who the fuck is he? Why do geek fans get an influential voice? Why do they get a say? Fuck geeks.

Sidetracked. Sorry. Back to Elm Street. 

In preparation for writing this, I re-watched the first A Nightmare on Elm Street last night. I’ve seen that movie many, many times, but I’m always struck by just how different it is than the rest of the Nightmare movies. Especially the Freddy character. When I think Freddy Krueger, I picture an amalgam of all the movies. I rarely picture what Freddy was in the first movie, which was little more than a grinning, cackling boogie man. Honestly, in the first NOES, Freddy didn’t do much more than yell “Hey Tina! Look at this! BLAH!”. He had very little personality and was actually barely in the movie at all. The first NOES was all about the kids and how they reacted Freddy. Freddy was just a chuckling voice in the shadows.

Wait. Hold up. I just want to point something out that I noticed when I watched NOES 1 last night that I thought was hilarious.

Okay, so Freddy is chasing Tina through the neighborhood. Tina’s running and screaming and Freddy’s chasing her in that weird like, little kid run that he does. I guess this was before Freddy figured out that he doesn’t actually have to run after his victims. He can just pop up in front of them. Anyway, so he’s chasing Tina through this alleyway and then yells “HEY TINA!” and she fucking STOPS and TURNS AROUND like “What?” then she stands there and watches as he cuts off a couple of his own fingers. Then she freaks out again and goes back to running away. I just love that she stopped running and turned around just because he called her name.

I think the shit is funny.

Anyway.

What I’m actually getting at here is that, as much as it pains me to say so, the first Nightmare on Elm Street was not a perfect movie. In fact, it was quite corny in a lot of ways. Now, because it was the first, and it invented a lot of the elements that went on to become keystones of the series, it gets all the credit in the world. And it was scary in a lot of ways, don’t get me wrong. I’m not hating on NOES by any stretch. I’m just saying that there IS room for improvement. Always. There’s room for refining and redefining.

Freddy himself isn’t above that either. While Robert Englund very much was Freddy, that embodiment of the character didn’t really come into swing until later. In the first movie, he was barely there. He had very little personality and it wasn’t until the third movie that we got a good look at what Robert Englund could bring to the table. But honestly, through the entire series, Freddy never really became an actual character. He was always just a boogeyman. Especially in the first movie.

It’s strange too, because his character is all about vengeance. He’s punishing the children for the crimes of their parents, right? Yet he never really seems to have any kind of personal investment in any of it. It just seems like he likes scaring people. He doesn’t really seem too angry or vengeful. He’s just a dick. Rewatching the first NOES last night, that was something I missed. That personal investment.

I missed it because Jackie Earle Haley brought it to his Freddy.

So that brings us to Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy Krueger. That’s what we’re all here to talk about, right? I mean, we can go on about the story and the direction and atmosphere and whatever, but honestly, it all hinges on whether or not Freddy works.

All things considered, I really really liked Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy. I was actually surprised by how much I liked him. Hell, I’d go so far as to say that I actually liked Jackie’s Freddy in this movie more than I liked Robert’s Freddy in the first Elm Street movie. If you were to just compare the first Elm Street movie with this new movie, I’d say that Jackie’s Freddy is a far better defined character and he has a lot more personality than Robert had in the first movie.

Most importantly though, Jackie brought some motivation to the character that was simply never there before. We were told that Freddy was out for revenge, but we never really saw it before. But Jackie’s Freddy is fucking pissed.

Okay, fuck all this. I’m starting over.

It’s been a couple of days now, I’ve rewatched the first movie as well as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and I’m gonna start over again.

You know me. Nightmare on Elm Street is my jam. Freddy is my dawg. We’re tight.

But honestly, there isn’t any one Nightmare on Elm Street movie that is, in of itself, a great movie. There are a few that have really great, innovative, interesting things in them. But in all honestly, they’re all fairly flawed to different degrees.

I tend to hold the first NOES movie in pretty high esteem. It’s one of the great eighties horror movies and Freddy is my favorite horror icon. But even that movie, honestly, had some serious problems. What it did well, it did REALLY well, but that doesn’t change that it’s not a perfect movie. Far from it. A lot of the acting and dialog was pretty cheesy. NOES 1 had the least defined Freddy of all the movies. He had no personality or motivation. He was just an almost faceless boogieman. That’s not to say that I needed him to crack jokes and play videogames on a Freddy style Nintendo Power Glove.

But watching the first movie, I did miss some of that Robert Englund personality. Even the strut and the posture hadn’t been defined yet. Freddy just wasn’t quite Freddy yet.

There were hints of him there. Some of that Dracula-esque demented sexuality found its way into the movie.

But really, Freddy didn’t hit his stride until the third movie or so.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the first movie. It was easily the scariest of the bunch. But what made the first movie great wasn’t really Freddy, but more the idea of being killed in your sleep. The scene of Tina being tossed up onto the ceiling by an invisible murderer while cuts open up on her body from seemingly nowhere was terrifying. The shot of Tina in the body bag standing in the school hallway gave me nightmares for a long damned time.

If there had never been any sequels to NOES, and the first movie stood alone, that Freddy Krueger character would be pretty much forgotten. The movie itself would be remembered because it was scary and innovative, but the actual Freddy character wasn’t really a huge part of it. It’s the mental merging of the two elements that make me such a fan of this series as a whole. You see, in my head, these movies were as scary as the first one was but also had this amazing villain that the later movies developed (before running into the ground in the last few movies).

THAT is what I needed from this new retelling of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I needed a movie that was scary in the same way the first movie was scary, but with a villain that was defined in the same way (or at least to the same degree) that Freddy was in the middle movies.

And that’s pretty much what I got. I mean, the movie certainly didn’t venture into uncharted waters as far as the scariness goes, but what it did do was round out the Freddy Krueger character in a way that had never been done before. For the first time, Freddy Krueger has a personal stake in what he’s doing. Before, Freddy was like a cat playing with a mouse. He taunted and tortured and killed seemingly for the joy of it. I never got any sense that he actually had any investment in it. Freddy just seemed to be having fun, grinning and chuckling and throwing out his one liners.

But this Freddy is fucking pissed. He’s back for a reason, and it’s to punish these kids. Not just because they happen to live in the general vicinity to where he was killed but because they were directly involved in the incident that got him killed. He’s genuinely angry.

Another thing is the whole child molester aspect of the Freddy Krueger character. That’s always been kind a gray area in the NOES mythology. In the first movie, Freddy is described, very specifically, as a “dirty child killer” by Nancy’s weird, orange, drunk mother.

There’s always been the suggestion and assumption that Freddy was a child molester before he died, but I don’t think they ever came right out and said it. I seem to remember one scene in Freddy vs Jason where there was a flashback showing Freddy in his boiler room before he was killed and he licks a photo of a little girl in this really creepy, child molestery kind of way.

But yeah, they seemed to be unwilling to completely commit to that idea in the series. In a way I was grateful for that, because I liked Freddy. I still like Freddy in that way we love any horror icon. He’s an entertaining, fun character. It’s hard to reconcile that with a child molester though. I don’t know why the line is drawn somewhere between “dirty child killer” and “child molester” but that seems to be the case. Like, it’s okay to find someone simply killing children acceptable, but as soon as a sexual element comes into play it suddenly becomes wrong and creepy.

They don’t have that issue with the new Freddy Krueger. It’s quite clear that this Freddy is a child molester. In fact, he’s not even a child murderer. He just molested them. The parents find out about it and burn him to death. It’s a different kind of experience, watching a Freddy who is well over that line between child killer and child molester. It’s certainly a more uncomfortable experience. It’s not quite as much fun, but it’s more disturbing and it’s scarier.

One thing about this new movie is that they put all of it into question. There’s something of a mystery element to the story that was never there before. They’ve got you questioning whether Freddy was ever guilty at all or if he was a scapegoat for abusive parents. If perhaps the revenge he’s inflicting isn’t because they ratted him out, but because they lied about what happened. Was Freddy innocent? It’s something they ask in this movie, which was a fun twist to the story.

The major difference between the Freddy we know and love and this new Freddy is that the new Freddy is just scary. I wouldn’t say that there’s no humor to him, because there is, but it’s not funny ha-ha. It’s more just funny to him. It’s like Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. You can’t watch Michael Madsen torture that cop and laugh at his jokes at the same time. It’s not so much that it’s funny, it’s just that much more disturbing because this character finds it funny.

That was something I was concerned about going into this movie. It’s a delicate balance, the humor and scariness. One that the original NOES movies had a really difficult time maintaining. As we saw in the first movie, Freddy wasn’t particularly funny. He was just an asshole. By the time the fourth, fifth and sixth movies came along, Freddy was funny, but not really scary anymore. Freddy needs to be both to work.

My main concern was that they would work so hard and making Freddy scary that he wouldn’t have any personality. He’d go back to just being the boogeyman again. But no, they made it work. He certainly has personality. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Jackie Earle Haley’s interpretation of the character has a fair bit more personality than Englund’s interpretation. Englund brought a very specific style and strut and charisma to Freddy that is certainly irreplaceable. And very specific to Robert Englund.

I mean, just looking at this picture, it’s very specifically Robert Englund. He’s able to convey so much personality in just his posture and silhouette.

But that Freddy was never really defined as a character. He was always something of a cartoon. It wasn’t Englund’s fault, it was the just the way the character was written. But regardless, you never really got any sense of what Freddy was thinking or needing from the situation.

With Jackie’s Freddy, we see his investment in it. We see him actually interacting with the other characters.

There’s one scene where Freddy has a girl pinned to her bed and is basically on the verge of sexually assaulting her, and she’s got her head turned away and is crying and he stops talking and screams “LOOK AT ME!” at her. It pretty much epitomized his character for me (even though that was kind of sort of ripped off of The Joker in The Dark Knight). I think that ties into the choice of making him a child molester rather than a child murderer. Sexual predators need that control and domination, and that’s very much what this Freddy is about. He’s not just playing with these people because it entertains him. He needs it. He’s fulfilling a demented need to make these kids afraid of him before he kills them. To make them understand that he is in control.

While Robert Englund’s Freddy was sexual in a kind of antagonistic but corny sort of way, as well as the almost romantic relationship he develops with Nancy by the end of the third movie, Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy is sexual in a really fucked up, disturbing way. In one shot he leans in and licks this girl’s face. And I don’t mean his tongue just kind of touches her. He full on licks her face like it was a stamp. It’s fucking disgusting. It’s sexual, but not sexy in the slightest. It’s just sick.

I was reading that the initial makeup tests were actually too disturbing and they had to dial it back. They talk a lot about how they wanted him to look more like an actual burn victim, but I don’t think they really explain the purpose behind that. There are a lot more clearly lit, full view extended shots of Freddy’s makeup in the movie than I expected. Certainly more than there was in the first couple of NOES movies. The reason for that, I believe, is to force you to look at him. To really look at him.

There’s something very disturbing and awkward about seeing a burn victim. Someone whose face is melted. It’s almost a taboo thing to talk about, because it can hurtful to someone who deals with that in their life. But that doesn’t change the reality of it. It’s a gut reaction that’s very difficult to overcome. It’s embarrassing and you feel bad about it but it’s the truth.

The people who made this movie understand that and exploit it. Robert Englund’s Freddy didn’t really look like a burn victim. He looked like someone with a lot of movie makeup on. Not because the effects people did a bad job with it, but because nobody looks like that. People who have been burned don’t look like that. It’s scary looking in a monster sort of way, but not in any sort or real way. You don’t look at Freddy and recall an actual burn victim that you’ve seen.

This Freddy, on the other hand, looks just a whole lot like someone whose face has been melted. It IS difficult to look at.

His eyes are little pinholes of rage drilled into a mass of melted flesh. I mean, his fucking ears are melted off. This is some seriously messed up shit.

It’s not just scary looking, it’s disturbing looking. It’s offensive looking, because it puts you in a place where you remember that one time. You know? That one time when you went into the bathroom or were at a sporting event or at school or at work and saw a person with a deformity or a massive birth defect or someone whose been burned horribly and you were scared. You were scared and disturbed and you felt guilty about it. You felt guilty because you were afraid of this person. It’s a terrible, uncomfortable, devastating feeling and it’s one that the makers of this movie have exploited.

By doing this, they aren’t just making him disturbing to look at and therefore scarier. They’re also using it as a little more motivation on his part. By showing him as this burned up human being, you get a better sense of why he’s doing what he’s doing. You get a better sense of what was inflicted on him by the parents of Springwood. He may have been a child molester, but he was also the victim of vigilante justice by a mob of angry parents. Led by Clancy Brown no less.

I mean, it’s one thing to get burned alive. It’s another thing entirely to get burned alive by the fucking Kurgan.

I know I’m talking a lot about Freddy specifically rather than whether or not the movie is any good, but honestly, for me, whether the movie is any good hinges on whether Freddy is any good.

And Freddy is good. No, he’s not the Freddy we know and love. It’s a new Freddy. It’s awkward yes. It’s kind of like having to call mom’s new boyfriend “dad”. But ultimately, it works. For me it works. I want to see more of this Freddy. I want to see this Freddy in a better movie.

Because the movie itself, honestly, it’s just okay. It’s not terrible. I wouldn’t say that it’s any worse of a movie than any of the other NOES movies. There are plot holes and huge jumps in logic, but there were plot holes and huge jumps in logic in the original movies as well. That’s just how these movies are.

I wouldn’t say that this movie is scarier than the original NOES, but it’s more disturbing, and it has potential to get scarier with subsequent movies. I think that if you had never seen a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, this would be one hell of a scary movie. I didn’t find it overly scary because I know all of these tricks already. There’s little that Freddy can do that’s going to scare me.

One problem they had was a problem that the original movies ran into. That is that there’s only so much that Freddy CAN do. I mean, people have to sleep. That’s just reality. It’s hard to justify keeping characters awake long enough to come to the conclusions that these characters come to (IE, we’re all having the same dream and there’s a killer who lives in our dreams and can kill us IRL if he kills us in our dreams we have to fight him before he kills us so don’t fall asleep okay??!!) in any sort of realistic way. I mean, really, you get maybe three or four days of total sleep deprivation before you go insane. But since Freddy pretty much just kills people, it gets to be a bit much to have characters repeatedly almost getting killed by Freddy, only to wake up just in time with a ominous souvenir from their dream or a scratch on their arm. Nancy can only burn or scratch her arm so many times before it just gets silly.

This movie fixed that a little bit by letting Freddy lead the kids somewhere to find something for him, kind of like in The Ring. But it is a little tedious. The cast (aside from Jackie himself) was mostly boring and generic. I liked the girl they got to play Nancy though. She reminded me a bit of Emily Watson.

There were a lot of nods to the original, most of which ended up in the trailer. This is another reason why the movie may be scarier to someone who hasn’t seen the original, because for me, the scene where Freddy is killing Tina was scary as fuck, and when they basically recreated that scene in the new movie, I was entertained but certainly not scared.

It bugged me to see them use CGI for things that were done practically in the first movie. Specifically, this:

It was so much more effective and scary to just have Robert Englund press himself against a sheet of latex than this goofy looking CGI interpretation of the same goddamned thing. It was scary in the original, because it was unexpected and incredibly strange looking. Here it just feels like jerking off. It’s not scary and is a weaker version of what we’ve already seen. If you’re gonna pay homage to the original, at least understand what was scary about the original scene. I don’t like seeing people use CGI in movies for things that can be easily don’t practically. If the CGI is cheaper and looks as good or better than the practical effect, then fine. But don’t use it just because you can.

Anyway.

I want to see them take this character and this set up into another movie. A completely original movie. I don’t know how they would do that, but I’m sure there’s a way. Jackie’s signed on for three movies and they announced today that they’re going forward on the sequel. What I’d really like to see them do is focus more on the dream aspect of it. That’s one of the reasons why NOES 3 is my favorite of the series. That’s the one that, to me, that dealt most heavily with dreams and the surreal nature of them. I want to take it out of the boiler room and into these characters heads. There was a bit of that in this movie, but they could take it further. There’s so much that can be done with this premise. I just hope they don’t fall into the trap of setting up a new set of kids like bowling pins and then just watching them fall. I hope they can do something interesting with it.

So, in closing, I enjoyed watching the movie. I really enjoyed Jackie Earle Haley’s Freddy Krueger. I think the movie itself, as a whole, could have better crafted, but I’d give it a solid B.

It’s getting shit reviews. That’s okay. The first NOES initially got shit reviews as well. Fuck reviews. I got what I wanted out of it. That’s more than I can say for most movies.

I’ve watched a few DVDs that I’ve been meaning to get to over the last week or so. I thought I’d share a few quick reviews.

Pathology

FYI, there are spoilers in this Pathology review. The spoilers are pretty damned obvious once you’re fifteen minutes into the movie, and honestly, I don’t think that knowing these spoilers will hurt your experience of watching the movie… but if you haven’t seen it and want to remain spoiler free, I’d recommend skipping to the next segment.

This is the one that I just finished watching. It stars Jess from the Gilmore Girls as a med student working in a Washington DC morgue. (I’ve always been confused by the whole doctor/medical school thing. I mean, they’re doctors, but they’re still in school. I don’t get how that works. But whatever. Sandra just explained it to me. Nevermind.)

So Jess is the new kid (though I think he’s supposed to be in his late twenties) in this class of forensic pathologists. Of course, as expected, there’s a group of “cool kids” that are both cool and dangerous. We learn via his wise and fair instructor that he’s a very promising doctor with lots of potential to be the best in his field. Of course.

Oh, btw, there’s a scene where Jess is attending a lecture by said instructor and I almost crapped my pants because HOLY SHIT IT’S “Q” FROM STAR TREK!

Man I miss that show. The last time we saw John de Lancie playing a doctor, he was molesting that chick in The Hand the Rocks the Cradle. Good times.

Anyway.

So Jess ends up getting roped in with the cool, dangerous kids, and comes to find out that they play a “game” where they take turns killing someone and then collectively try and figure out how the person was killed. They use the old Dexter justification of “We only kill bad people”, but of course it gets out of hand.

The main cool/dangerous kid is the PI that House hires to follow Wilson around last season on House MD, who is now occasionally on the show as the guy who’s boning Cuddy.

Things spiral out of control and there’s lots of crazy shit that happens, the end.

Over all, it’s a pretty decent movie. I was surprised. It didn’t look that great, but honestly, I couldn’t find a whole lot to complain about. It wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t bad either. It was just pretty decent. I found that Jess’ acting wasn’t that great, honestly, but I’ve never particularly liked that guy. (btw, Sandra thinks it’s funny that I think of him as “Jess from the Gilmore Girls” instead of “That guy from Heroes” but I don’t watch Heroes, so whatever) The PI guy from House was sufficiently creepy and played the part of a psycho dick pretty well.

Alyssa Milano plays Jess’ law student fiancé who is waiting until she passes the bar exam to join him in the big city so they can start their life together. As you can probably figure out pretty much from the beginning of the movie, things don’t end well for her. If I have a complaint, it’s that the story isn’t entirely unpredictable. I imagine it’s hard to work against conventions of it’s genre, but honestly, I’d still like to see them try. What saves it from being obnoxiously predictable is that basic concept of the movie is interesting and relatively unique. The predictable portions of the story are the trappings of the genre, not the story itself. This kind of mystery based horror story tends to need someone you’re emotionally invested in, but who isn’t the lead character to kill off. In this case, poor Samantha Micelli was the unlucky candidate.

One thing I found interesting about this movie was it’s flagrant mixing of sex and death. A lot of horror movies kind of dance around this potent mixture, but Pathology just went for it. There’s a LOT of fucking in this movie, and a lot of killing, and of fucking among mutilated corpses. I’m a big fan of blurring the line between sex and violence/death in art. I think it’s something that human beings, on a core level, connect with and I find that when these two animal instincts are thrown together, it causes a visceral reaction in the audience that’s easily exploited for the sake of entertainment. Exploited in a good way.

Some of it is kind of corny. I rolled my eyes when during Jess’ first encounter with the little group and their “game” they have a crank fueled mini-orgy around the body they’re supposed to be examining. It was a little too much too soon and felt forced. But all through the movie, in almost random places, there are these intense sex scenes, generally with a dead body in the immediate vicinity.

All that was kind of cool.

Another way they use sex to manipulate the audience that I found interesting was that they made a point not to get Alyssa Milano naked until the end of the movie. At first, watching the movie, it’s easy to assume that she just simply didn’t want to get naked. She’s a big star (well… sort of) and it’s not unexpected that she might make that choice. Maybe it bumped her fee up or the director felt that there was enough of the hot redhead chick getting naked to meet the titty quota.

Maybe they wanted to keep her character “pure” so that it’s that much sadder when she eats it later on. Either way, they seemed to be making an effort to keep Alyssa Milano clothed, even in sex scenes.

So it was that much more of a surprise and unnerving when, at the end of the movie, she’s getting her own autopsy and she’s completely naked. Like, fully, harsh lighting, nothing covered, free labin nakers. It’s almost like they teased us (or, at least, me) with some hot naked Sam from Who’s the Boss action, but when they finally delivered, they delivered in a big way, but with the unfortunate side effect of her being really really dead. It was tricky, what they did.

We’ve got full on nakers Alyssa Milano but we’ve also got full on dead Alyssa Milano, getting the old autopsy Y incision and her organs being removed and weighed and hypodermic needles in her eyes. Again we’ve got that blurring of the line between sex and death. Very crafty. I loved it.

So yeah, it was an interesting movie. It maybe tried a little too hard at times, and was a little silly in parts, but over all, it was certainly worth checking out. Plus, the gore effects were particularly nice.

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Pontypool

Ugh.

I can probably count on one hand the great Canadian films I’ve seen. The really solid movies. I’ll give them The Changeling (the George C. Scott one, not the Angelina Jolie one), Fido was pretty decent, I liked Hard Core Logo, though had it not ended the way it did, I probably would have forgotten it. And maybe Videodrome? Sure, I’ll give them Videodrome, though it was the last movie Cronenberg did before he said “Fuck Canada” and shipped off to the States to make The Dead Zone. I’ll even give them the first Ginger Snaps, even though really, it’s a pretty average movie.

Pontypool is a Canadian zombie movie(sort of), and I think this movie kind of sums up the entire Canadian film industry as a whole. Or, at least, my perception of it.

I’ll get to that in a minute.

Pontypool is about a recently fired radio talk show host named Grant Mazzy who has been forced to take a shitty news and weatherman job at a tiny little radio station in a middle of nowhere Ontario town called Pontypool. He’s a big fish trying to adjust to a small pond. Good so far. The bulk of the movie consists of a Grant in his radio booth, reporting on information he’s getting over the course of a day as a zombie virus takes over the small town.

It’s a really interesting, potentially brilliant premise. Kind of like Talk Radio meets Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately, nothing ever really comes from it. Director Bruce McDonald seemed either unwilling or unable to pull the trigger on the horror aspect of the movie. It just simply wasn’t scary in the slightest. I don’t know if the premise was flawed or if the creative team handling the premise weren’t able to handle it, but regardless, the movie never delivers on any kind of horror. Or really, on anything even remotely interesting.

A big problem is that the source of the “zombie” outbreak is absolutely ludicrous. The idea is that there’s a virus that is spread through the English language. Simply hearing and comprehending certain words transmits the virus. That idea in and of itself is completely and utterly retarded. Unfortunately, the last half of the movie relies heavily on accepting that idea and the characters carry forth based on that idea. They completely lost me when that element of the story comes into play, and the fact that in order to take the story seriously you have to accept that idea, makes the story pretty much useless to me.

I probably could have gotten past that if the movie had at least been scary, but it just wasn’t. The idea of hearing about these zombie like events via the radio could, theoretically, be quite scary in an Orson Welles/War of the Worlds kind of way, so it’s an even bigger disappointment when this movie fails so miserably to even do that. The threat of the “zombies” (and I put the word “zombies” in quotations because the filmmakers themselves have said that they aren’t zombies, even though they basically are) isn’t felt in the movie because we never really see the zombies do anything scary. We hear about them piling onto cars and eating people, but once the zombies actually show up on screen, they don’t DO anything. They just wander around being zombie like. We’ve got one zombie who shows up earlier than the others, but all she does is beat herself up running into a shatter proof glass wall until she ultimately expires.

Not scary. At all. In fact, there’s really only one on screen zombie confrontation, and that doesn’t even actually happen on screen. They run into a small child zombie in the studio and Mazzy and another chick dispatch that zombie off camera. The camera pans away from the violence. I don’t know if it was meant to be an “off screen violence is more intense than on screen violence” like in the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, but it didn’t play out that way at all. What it actually felt like was that they felt we just couldn’t deal with seeing something so horrific, so we’re just going to look at the wall instead. In other words, it was a pussy ass thing to do. If they’d managed to properly build the fear and suspense up enough so that when we actually get a zombie attack, it’s a culmination of all that tension, then maybe, sure, that might have worked. But given that at this point I just wanted SOMETHING to fuckin’ happen in the movie, I felt more ripped off than anything.

Once the characters figure out that the virus is transmitted via language (which is a pretty goddamned unrealistic jump in logic for our characters to make) they also figure out that it’s specific to the English language, so they start speaking French to each other. You know, since it’s Canada. This is where the obliquity social/political message most zombies movies have comes into play. The problem is that any political message about French/Canadian relations is completely lost in this idiotic premise of a language virus. Also, the fact that I couldn’t possibly care less about French/Canadian relations doesn’t help any.

It’s not all bad. Just mostly bad. Stephen McHattie is quite entertaining as the shamed shock jock, and had the movie not sucked so hard, he probably could have carried it through a few small flaws.

I was far more interested in his character and his experience being ostracized from the big city radio world into this small town than I was with any of the zombie outbreak parts of the story. I would have liked to have seen just an entire movie about that. Like I said, the idea of a group of isolated people experiencing a zombie outbreak via second hand information is a very interesting idea. It’s just such a shame that the movie failed so hard in delivering on that idea. There was one interesting scene where Mazzy figures out that he can reverse the effects of the language virus by disassociating the definition of certain words. So when a main character becomes infected, he’s able to reverse the infection by convincing her that the word “kill” means “kiss”, which prompts the formally infected woman to say “Kill me” when she meant “kiss me”. Again, that mixture of sex and violence I talked about in the Pathology review. Just an incredibly pussified version of it.

In the end though, Pontypool was a huge waist of an interesting premise. The solid performance by Stephen McHattie wasn’t nearly enough to save this movie from total sucktitude. 

This film, to me, also completely epitomizes what’s wrong with Canadian movies in general. To say that the Canadian film industry is weak would be understated. I’m talking about Canadian films specifically. I mean, there are a lot of talented people working on films in Canada, but they’re working on American films that choose to shoot in Canada for cost effectiveness. Most anyone skilled enough at their trade in the film industry in Canada ultimately makes their way to America to make their movies. There have been plenty of great Canadian filmmakers… but they don’t make Canadian films. David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman, James Cameron, Paul Haggis, Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason Reitman. They all started off in Canada and came to America to make careers for themselves.

Of course, there are Canadian filmmakers who choose (or aren’t good enough to do anything else) to stay in Canada to make Canadian films for Canadian audiences. Bruce McDonald is one of those directors. Previously, he directed a film I actually liked (Hard Core Logo) and one I didn’t bother seeing (The Tracy Fragments, starring Ellen Page). It’s a shame that he wasn’t able to pull this particular film off because the mockumentary style direction he gave to Hard Core Logo would have been perfectly suited to a story like this.

But like so many other Canadian films, this movie was so mired in it’s own attempts to be distinctly Canadian that it lost sight of the ultimate goal of making a good movie. I don’t know if this is a product of the stipulations of government funding (which is ample in Canada) that insist on a certain degree of “Canadian content” in it’s films or if it’s just an attempt by the filmmaker simply trying desperately to make a specifically Canadian film. Either way, it’s distracting and takes away from the quality of the movie.

Another problem is that Canada has very little in the way of cultural identity. There isn’t much about Canada that is uniquely Canadian. Hell, I’ve lived in Canada for the last ten years or so and I don’t think I’ve learned much in those ten years that I can call distinctly Canadian. Pretty much everything that I knew about Canada and everything that I thought of as being distinctly Canadian is pretty much the same now as it was before I moved here. Canada’s got hockey, maple syrup, Mounties, curling and politeness. And the aforementioned French Canadian separatist drama. Other than that, Canada is basically like a more relaxed, easier to digest version of the United States. That’s not a whole lot to work with. It’s not like England or Australia or Ireland or Scotland or America or any of the other European founded countries. All of these countries have easily defined and recognized cultural identities. Canada just simply doesn’t have that.

So when you see these half-assed movies that are trying so desperately to celebrate things that are uniquely Canadian, it’s just kind of sad. There’s so little there to work with that it’s pointless to even bother, honestly. Pontypool was a last ditch effort by me to try and take a Canadian movie seriously. But, as I kind of expected (based on Canada’s track record) it failed miserably. In it’s effort to wedge a Canadian political theme into the movie, it lost sight of the more important goal of making a good movie. The idea of a language based virus is a great way to establish a catalyst for some kind of Canadian political commentary… unfortunately, it’s a horrendously shitty idea to base an entire zombie movie on.

Now, I understand there’s an American movie that takes a very similar premise (radio DJ experiencing a zombie outbreak via secondhand information) that came out last year called Dead Air. It stars horror movie icon Bill Mosely as the DJ and was directed by Corbin Bernsen of all people. I’ll definitely check this movie out when I get a chance. Hopefully they had better luck with the premise than Pontypool did.

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Zombie Strippers

I’m not really sure why I expected more from Zombie Strippers than what I got, but I did. It’s clear from the title alone that we’re not dealing with a serious movie, but yeah, I guess I wanted it to be at least a little bit serious. Or at least funny if it’s not going to be serious.

Zombie Strippers stars temporarily retired porn icon Jenna Jameson as a stripper named Kat. She works in an illegal strip club owned by the great Robert Englund. A group of mercenaries are brought in to deal with a nearby laboratory full of zombies and one of the infected mercs escapes and ends up in the strip club. Kat is bitten and killed by said infected merc but quickly comes back from the dead as a zombie. It’s then discovered that being a zombie makes you an exceptionally good stripper. So Robert Englund’s character, being the slimy business guy he is, decides to keep the zombie Jenna Jameson on and eventually she starts infecting the other strippers. Naturally, all hell breaks loose and zombies start killing everyone and bla bla bla.

The story is, obviously, completely idiotic. That’s fine. It doesn’t need to be anything special. The movie delivers on what it promises, which is lots of gore and lots of zombie tits flying around. I wanted just a little bit more than that.

There’s a certain subgenre of horror movies that revel their own shittiness. This is where Troma movies live. I know these movies have their audience, and that’s fine. I enjoy these kind of movies from time to time. There’s also part of me that feels like it’s all so tedious. It feels like a waste of time when a filmmaker is deliberately making the choice to make silly, cheesy movies. I suppose that just makes me the wrong audience for them, but at the same time, so what? I love horror movies. I love zombie movies. I love boobs. I get  a little bit insulted when I’m watching a movie and it feels like they just simply aren’t trying as hard as they could to make the best movie possible. Maybe it’s the aspiring filmmaker in me that gets resentful seeing people getting paid to cinematically jerk off.

There are a lot of shitty horror movies out there. Low budgets and poorly executed films are a consistent reality in the horror genre. It just comes with the territory. As horror fans, we’ve had to lower our standards, simply because there just aren’t enough quality movies out there to fulfill our needs. I understand that and I’m okay with that. It’s just the way it is.

But at the same time, even when I’m watching a movie that by other genre’s standards is crap, when I feel like the filmmakers are trying their hardest within their means to make the best film they can make, I respect that. Here it feels like we’re dealing with a filmmaker who is using that lowering of standards as a crutch. This idea that they’re making a deliberately bad movie for the entertainment value that bad movies can bring is a waste of my goddamned time, and leaves me feeling like we’re just dealing with a shitty filmmaker.

For instance, Robert Rodreguiz and Quentin Tarantino made Grindhouse, which was a deliberately silly movie made by two guys who clearly take what they do very seriously. The end result was, while silly as hell, still a pretty solid movie (or couple of movies, depending on how you look at it). You can tell that they did their best to make the greatest silly movie they could possibly make. And, for me, it worked.

Here though, I feel like we’ve got a subpar filmmaker who is able to make movies simply because of this excuse that people will pay to watch shitty movies because they’re shitty movies.

I just don’t like that.

Zombie Strippers could have been a solid, well made cheesy movie. They could have taken this ridiculous premise and given it their all. Could’ve made the best damned shitty movie they could make. What we’re left with is an unfortunate waste of time.

Now, what they should have done is simply made an actual porno movie out of it. Why beat around the bush? There’s certainly a market in the porn industry for hardcore horror movies. Joanna Angel did The XXXorcist and Re-Penetrator . Belladonna has made a whole pile of horror themed porno movies. Hell, Jenna Jameson herself has made at least one that I’ve seen (Bella Loves Jenna). It’s not uncommon.

I’m not sure why they didn’t just go for it. It couldn’t have been for financial reasons, because there are plenty of porno movies that have bigger budgets and are more successful than this movie ever could have expected to be. It seems like, to me, that if you’re going to make a movie whose sole purpose is to be a vehicle for naked zombie chicks to strip, forgoing quality filmmaking, acting and directing, then you may as well just go ahead and make an actual porno. Why fuck around with pretending you’re making a real movie if you don’t particularly give a shit about making a good real movie? Make a really good porno movie and save us the trouble of trying to pretend like you give a shit.

To be fair, I thought that Jenna Jameson did a fine job in the capacity that she was used. She clearly has the stripping skills required, and the familiarity both with the abilities of her own body as well as interacting with the camera. She has a decent sense of comedic timing and isn’t a terrible actress. I’ve never been a particularly huge Jenna Jameson fan, as far as her porn work goes, but I did enjoy her in this. She seems to have an enthusiasm for horror (both here and in other things I’ve seen her do) which I appreciate, and she was willing to give it her all in this role.

Robert Englund was… well, Robert Englund. He was fine in the role he was given, which seems to be the default non-Freddy horror movie role people like to give Robert Englund these days. It was basically the same character he played in 2001 Maniacs. The low rent spastic Jack Nicholson kind of character. It was also interesting that he was playing essentially the same guy (description wise) he played in the episode of Masters of Horror called Dance of the Dead, which had a very similar premise as Zombie Strippers. In that episode, he played a strip club owner in a post zombie world who puts on a show where they take female zombies, strip them down and then shock them with cattle prods to get them to move. The difference is that Dance of the Dead (based on a story by Richard Matheson, written for the screen by his son Richard Christian Matheson and directed by Tobe Hooper) was actually really interesting and a solid piece of work, where as this was just silly and pointless.

I guess Zombie Strippers is worth checking if only for the actual zombie stripping. There isn’t nearly enough of that in the world. But honestly, as a movie, it’s a waste of time.

Like I said, I really shouldn’t have been disappointed, given that it was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be. I guess I just hoped they’d try a little harder.

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Surveillance

I’ve been looking at the dvd box for this movie pretty much since it came out. People kept telling me that it’s this amazingly twisted and fascinating movie and I kept blowing them off. The name David Lynch carries a certain amount of baggage with it. Some of the baggage is good, but a lot of it is cumbersome and annoying.

Plus, the premise of the movie just didn’t interest me. Looking at the box, all I could see were Mulder and Scully knockoffs. The idea of a movie centered male/female FBI team just seemed tedious to me. Plus, for some reason, I got it into my head that this was the pilot for a failed TV show. I was completely wrong about that, but somehow that bit of false information wedged into my brain. Also, the idea that David Lynch is producing his daughter’s movie just seemed kind of suspect. Like, really, what are the chances that it’s going to be good?

At this point, I had no idea who Jennifer Lynch was other than that she had the same last name as David Lynch was was probably related to him somehow. I didn’t know that she had written and directed the decidedly fucked up movie Boxing Helena some fifteen odd years ago.

Anyway, I finally broke down and watched it last week.

IT WAS INCREDIBLE.

Really, really great.

The story centers around a brutal highway murder outside of a small Kansas town. Two FBI agents (played by Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) show up at the local police station to interrogate the remaining witnesses, a cop (played by Kent Harper, who also co-wrote and co-produced the movie), a coked up chick fresh from robbing a drug dealer (Pell James) and a little girl whose entire family was murdered at the scene. He interrogates them by putting them each in separate rooms and setting up cameras and a microphone in each room. He questions them over an intercom. The FBI is in town to investigate another murder that took place and they believe that the highway murder may have been done by the same masked spree killers who committed the first murder.

The real meat of the story is the way they illustrate each witnesses take on the events, eventually building to something like a complete picture. The cop and the coked up chick both have reasons to lie about what exactly brought them to the scene and we’re treated to a kind of movie example of the axiom “There’s my side, your side and the truth”. The truth, it turns out, is far crazier and more fucked up than anything these people are trying to cover up. The joy of the movie is figuring out, along with the characters in the movie, just what the fuck is going on.

Also in the movie are Michael Ironside (see you at the party, Richter!) as a beaten down Police chief, former SNL cast member Cheri Oteri (who is becoming something of an indi-darling herself) as the little girl’s doomed mother and French fucking Stewart as the partner of the cop witness.

Okay, here’s a collection of words that I never expected to articulate into a sentence, but here it goes… French Stewart was fucking amazing. If I hadn’t seen his name in the opening credits, I never would have recognized him. He plays this crooked, demented asshole cop and is downright sinister and creepy, but in a pathetic sort of way. I had no idea he had this in him. Bravo French Stewart, bravo.

Given that Jennifer Lynch has only directed two films in the last twenty years, I really hope she steps it up a bit and starts doing more work. There simply aren’t enough kickass female directors out there. Especially not in this genre. While Surveillance isn’t exactly a horror movie, it’s not really close enough to any other genre to call it anything BUT a horror movie. It does very much fit into whatever genre most David Lynch movies fit into. Mystery I guess? I dunno. She’s certainly got a lot of her father’s influence in her work, but honestly, I prefer this movie to pretty much anything David Lynch has done. It’s like David Lynch, hold the pretentiousness.

I’d say that, of all these movies I’ve reviewed in this post, Surveillance is by far the best. It’s a fascinating movie that’s hard to look away from, because you don’t want to miss any crucial bit of information. You don’t know what’s relevant, who’s telling the truth, who’s lying and really, what the fuck is going on. Because everyone is lying, it’s incredibly riveting.

My last observation about this movie is that Bill Pullman is turning into Dennis Hopper, which is good since Dennis Hopper seems to be not long for this earth unfortunately.

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The Fourth Kind

Meh. This movie sucked. That’s about it.

After however many years it’s been since it first came out on video and I thought to myself “Maybe I should watch that movie” I finally got around to watching that movie. It only took twenty something years of hemming and hawing. I was fascinated by the cover of the video when I was a kid, but there was always something slightly more intriguing or gruesome looking to watch. Also, of the three big slasher names, Michael Myers was the one I found least interesting. Later I found out that Michael Myers isn’t even in that movie, but by then I’d pretty much lost interest. So I never really got around to it. Until today.

Here’s the run down:

The movie opens in classic John Carpenter style. Bad 80s computer graphics and an even worse original score by Carpenter, apparently composed on his Casio keyboard. Like all of his other scores. We then find a crazy man running from some stoic guys in business suits. He narrowly gets away.

Then we cut to our hero, who is a guy with a mustache that is apparently some kind of doctor. We meet him as he’s arriving at his bitch ass girlfriend’s house. For reasons completely alien to me, he duckwalks into the room with his jacket pulled up over his head. My first thought was that maybe he was trying to keep covered from the rain, but considering that he’s completely dry, I’m left confused.

So anyway, he gives the bitch ass girlfriend’s ungrateful dickhead kids a couple of cheap ass Halloween masks. The kids are disappointed though, because they wanted Silver Shamrock Halloween masks, not shitty ones from the dollar store.

Bitch ass girlfriend bitches (as bitch ass girlfriends are prone to do) the entire time until he’s called back to the hospital for an emergency. Bitch ass girlfriend bitches about this.

The emergency is that the crazy man from earlier has stumbled into the hospital, babbling about “THEY’RE GOING TO KILL YOU ALL!!”. He is then murdered by one of the very stoic men in business suits. Stoic business suit man then goes in the parking lot and lights himself on fire. Mustache doctor guy finds this a little strange.

Later (we know it’s later because of a series of Shining-esque title cards telling us what day it is) we meet the crazy man’s daughter. Crazy man’s sexy daughter has traveled all the way up from Los Angeles (oh, and this movie takes place in  “northern California” which is  only slightly vague) to identify the body of her father. She is sad. Mustache doctor guy is puzzled.

Cut to a few days later and we establish that mustache doctor guy has something of a drinking problem. He’s sitting around in a bar (a bar that apparently plays cartoons all day) when the crazy guy’s sexy daughter comes into the bar (because the nurses said that she could find him there… hmmm. What kind of fucking doctor is this guy? Is this Jack’s dad from Lost?) to do some investigating into her father’s death.

Then, very abruptly, mustached doctor guy decides to help crazy guy’s sexy daughter get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her father’s murder. Through some very quick, crack investigation, they figure out that her father went to some weird Irish town in the middle of Northern California. Because, you know, Northern California has quite a few Irish towns scattered around. In the town is the Silver Shamrock factory.

OH.

Did I mention the commercial? The company that makes the kickass Halloween masks that the kids wanted more than the shitty dollar store masks was called Silver Shamrock. And they have a commercial. Here, enjoy their commercial.

They play that commercial about, oh, I don’t know… eighty five times or so. It’s so not annoying at all.

Anyway…

So doctor mustache calls up his bitch ass girlfriend to explain that he has to go out of town for “boring doctor stuff” but he can’t tell her where he’s going or what hotel he’s going to be at. PHEW! Off the hook! Oh, and apparently he had to buy a six pack for the road as well. This guy has a serious problem.

They get to the weird Irish town and start their investigation. Mustache doctor guy comes up with the not at all shady idea that they should pose as a husband and wife who are in town to buy Halloween masks for their store. Oh, and that they should also get a cheap motel room together. And that they should probably get shitfaced drunk.

At the motel, we meet the most annoying characters in the movie. I don’t remember their names, but I’m pretty sure it was The Asshole Family. It consists of Mr. Asshole, his lovely wife Mrs. Asshole and their kid, Asshole Jr.

They’re in town because Mr. Asshole is the #1 salesman of Silver Shamrock Halloween Masks, and he’s there to pick up an order(?). Apparently Silver Shamrock doesn’t actually ship any of their products out. They require store owners from around the world to travel to somewhere in “Northern California” to pick up their orders. Anyway.

We also meet this angry saleslady, who is also in town to pick up her order of masks, and she’s none to happy about it. In fact, she’s acting like a raging twat. But really, I probably would too if I had to drive all the way out to weird Irish town in “northern California” to pick up my shipments.

They figure out (again, though their crack detective work. The old “look at the hotel registration book” gag) that the girl’s crazy dad ALSO stayed at that motel. The daughter is understandably excited to get to work finding out why her father was murdered. But Dr. Mustache tells her to slow her roll, because it’s been almost an hour since he got shitfaced, and he needs a drink. So they decide to put off looking for clues about her father and stay in for the night, drinking and fucking.

Oh yeah, apparently Dr. Mustache is also a cheating man whore.

After some good fucking, Dr. Mustache decides he needs another drink, so he heads out to pick up a bottle.

Oh, and there are cameras all over town and a loud speaker that announces that the curfew is six pm, so everyone better get the fuck back inside or… something… will happen. This is never explained.

So Dr. Mustache gets his bottle and then runs into a disgusting wino who was hiding around the corner in an ally, waiting to ambush him and ask him for a drink of his delicious booze.

After letting the disgusting wino drink directly from the bottle (HELLO THERE, HEP C!) Dr. Mustache then quizzes him about the strange town. He finds out pretty much nothing other than that the town is run by the owner of Silver Shamrock, some Eurotrash millionaire guy. The wino then tells Dr. Mustache that he wants to burn the factory down with a “case and a half of Molotov cocktails”. I wasn’t aware that they sold Molotov cocktails by the case, but hey, you learn something new every day.

Back at the motel, crazy dude’s sexy daughter meets up with the pissed off mask buying woman from earlier, who makes a point to show her (us) that the plastic Silver Shamrock from the back of the masks tend to fall off.

You know I love me some good old fashioned unjustified exposition. Please, just tell me what’s happening. Don’t bother making it relevant to the story. I hate working for shit. I HAVE A FEELING THAT MAY BE IMPORTANT INFORMATION LATER. WINK WINK.

Before long, it’s imperative that the crazy dude’s sexy daughter have a shower. I has to be done at some point, because that’s the way things go in 80s movies. Back then, a movie wasn’t complete until there was a “hot girl in the shower” scene. I miss those days.

After some more fucking (two times even) between Dr. Mustache and the grieving daughter (who is clearly very bereaved, as well as sexy) we cut to the angry business lady next door (who we find out has a store in San Francisco, which explains her obnoxious New York accent). Angry business lady is getting all snuggled up for bed in her weird bedazzled kimono thing when she realizes that the little plastic logo do-hicky that fell off of the mask has a mysterious computer component embedded in the back of it. She’s all like “wtf is this shit?” so she pulls a bobby-pin out of her hair and starts fucking with it. That’s when a crazy blue laser shoots out of the thing and busts her face open and makes her eyes go all fucked up.

Okay, I’ll admit, that was kind of friggin cool. Even if a goddamned bug crawled out of her mouth afterwards, which makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever.

The sound of the angry business lady’s face getting busted open interrupts doctor mustache and the crazy guy’s sexy daughter. They were busy fucking. Again. They quickly get dressed and run outside to find out what happened. That’s when a bunch of vans from Silver Shamrock show up and they take the now very dead angry business lady away.

The next day Dr. Mustache and the crazy dude’s sexy daughter decide to go to the factory to investigate. While they’re at the factory, they run into the Asshole family who have been invited to take the tour by the Eurotrash Millionaire. It’s all very boring and bla bla bla until the crazy dude’s sexy daughter notices her father’s car half covered in the factory. She runs up to investigate, but is stopped by stoic dudes in business suits.

They return to the motel and decide to GTFO. They’ve had enough of this silliness. Dr. Mustache has to go make a phone call (this was before motels had phones in the rooms apparently) and runs to the front desk, deliberately leaving the door open for some reason. Like, he makes a point to leave it open. I don’t get it.

While he’s gone, of course the stoic business suit guys come and abduct the crazy dude’s sexy daughter. I’m not sure WHY they abduct her. Everyone else they’ve run into they’ve killed mercilessly. The crazy dude and the wino at least. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, the stoic business suit guys killed the wino. They pulled his head off. It was stupid.

We then get about 45 minutes of Dr. Mustache running around in the town, diving behind bushes and trash cans, trying not to be seen by the patrolling Silver Shamrock cars.

Eventually, he gets back to the factory.

He’s very quickly caught and carted off to the Eurotrash Millionaire, who is in some kind of control room getting ready to reveal his evil master plan. He shows Dr. Mustache a TV monitor where he can watch as the Asshole family (who have apparently been on this factory tour for ten hours or so) are being escorted to this pretend living room where they’re going to get some test screenings of the awesome Silver Shamrock commercial. Remember the commercial? Oh yes.

The commercial instructs Asshole Jr. to put on his mask, which he obediently does, because kids always do whatever the TV tells them to. We’re then subjected to this seizure inducing flashing pumpkin image.

The commercial triggers the little plastic logo thing on the back of the mask, which then makes Asshole Jr.’s head turn into a bunch of bugs and poisonous snakes.

Wait, what?

Yes. That’s what happens.

It’s fucking ridiculous.

And Dr. Mustache finds it very upsetting indeed.

As you can tell, he’s clearly not coping well with watching the murder of a small child.

Now that we know what happens to kids who are wearing the masks when that see that awesome commercial, we get a montage of kids buying and wearing their Silver Shamrock masks all over the country. We also find out that the commercial is instructing all kids with Silver Shamrock masks to stop trick-or-treating and go home at a specific time and watch TV because there is going to be a BIG GIVE AWAY. You know, on the TV. It’s pretty vague, but as we’ve established, kids are clearly mindless automatons who do whatever the TV tells them to.

In classic bad horror movie form, the hero is strapped to a chair and forced to listen as the big bad guy (in this case, Mr. Eurotrash Millionaire) explains his master plan.

The unfortunate thing is that even after he explains his master plan, it still doesn’t make any fucking sense.

What Mr. Eurotrash Millionaire explains is that he knows the REAL meaning behind Halloween, which is that witches used to sacrifice animals and children at Stone Henge on the pagan high holiday Samhain and the rivers ran red with their blood. He then said something about the planets aligning and how the time has come again to sacrifice children to his evil pagan god. Oh, and he also STOLE one of the big Stone Henge rocks and, apparently, had it shipped to “Northern California”. The rocks are full of powerful energy, you see, that when focused with vague computer parts, can make blue lasers that can bust your face open and turn your head into bugs and snakes. So they’ve been putting little tiny fragments of the Stone Henge rock into the logos on the masks, and watching the the flashing pumpkin graphic triggers the energy and turns your head into snakes and bugs.

That’s his master plan. To use fragments of Stone Henge, embedded in Halloween masks, to turn the children of America’s heads into bugs and snakes.

I still don’t really understand what he’s accomplishing with this plan. I guess he’s counting the whole masks turning kids heads into bugs and snakes thing as mass sacrifice, but I never really understood what that sacrifice accomplished. Also, he talked like he was there, three thousand years ago, when the last mass sacrifice happened. So I guess Mr. Eurotrash Millionaire is three thousand years old as well? I dunno.

OH! I forgot to tell you something.

Remember those stoic guys in business suits? Androids. Yep. They’re fucking robots. Robots filled with orange yogurt.

Also, you can apparently disable them by punching them in the stomach. Good to know.

So yeah, remember that they’re androids, because that shit is important later.

Anyway, so Dr. Mustache is strapped into a chair in a holding cell in front of a TV. Dr. Eurotrash has left him there with a mask on, apparently alone for the next hour and a half or so until the commercial is supposed to air and kill anyone wearing a mask. Because, you see, before the stoic business suit/android guys just crushed the skull of anyone who happens to get in their way, but for Dr. Mustache and his new girlfriend, they get strapped to chairs and left alone for hours on end.

Oh yeah, the crazy dude’s sexy daughter is strapped to a table in another cell.

So, left alone, Dr. Mustache kicks the glass of the TV in (I think someone behind the camera has a beef with television and consumerism, but doesn’t quite have the George Romero/Dawn of the Dead skills to properly execute a social commentary/satire via horror movie) and uses a shard of glass to cut himself free of the straps. He then (of course) escapes by crawling through the massive ventilation duct in the room.

We then get another half hour of Dr. Mustache evading Silver Shamrock employees (androids) by diving and ducking and slinking through shadows Sam Fisher style. He frees crazy dude’s sexy daughter and then figures out his big escape plan. What he does is sneak back into the control room (using the old “hide behind a rolling cart of Halloween masks” gag. I’m surprised they didn’t have them carrying a friggin bush).

The androids are very busy and distracted by their work of looking at clip boards and moving around sliders and dials on control boxes to notice them. They’re able to sneak in. He turns the commercial on (because he knows exactly which buttons do that) and it plays on a bunch of TVs in the room. He then climbs up to some kind of catwalk scaffolding thing and drops a box of those logo disk things with the computer component and piece of Stone Henge over top of the androids. The commercial triggers the blue lasers in the chips, killing everyone in the room (but conveniently missing both of our two heroes, as well as eurotrash millionaire guy). Then the Stone Henge rock in the middle of the room turns blue and shoots a laser at the eurotrash millionaire guy, which makes him turn blue and then makes him disappear.

So that was the end of the three thousand year old pagan eurotrash halloween mask making dude, as well as his army of orange yogurt filled androids.

OH, and then the factory blew up. Luckily, it waited for Dr. Mustache and the crazy dude’s daughter to escape and get in front of a blue screen where they could be superimposed over the explosion.

PHEW! The end, right?

WRONG, FUCKER! Not even CLOSE.

Dr. Mustache and the crazy dude’s daughter are driving home. Crazy dude’s daughter is being suspiciously quiet and uncommunicative. She then abruptly grabs Dr. Mustache’s face and makes him crash into a tree.

When Dr. Mustache gets out of the car, he finds her arm still holding onto the door handle. AND IT’S A MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ARM! DUN DUNT DAA!!!!!

So then the one armed android crazy dude’s sexy daughter starts attacking Dr. Mustache. Her only means of attacking is choking and grabbing his face though, which makes her not a very affective killer android. Luckily for Dr. Mustache, the trunk of the car popped open in the crash and he was able to grab a tire iron and knock her head off with it. If this movie had any kind of balls, it would have knocked her shirt off too and we could have gotten another look at those sexy tattays! But oh well.

That should have been the end of it, but we go through about fifteen more jump scares of various parts of her body grabbing onto him. FINALLY he’s able to take off running and escapes.

So I’m not entirely sure if we’re supposed believe that the crazy dude’s daughter was an android the entire time, or if she was somehow replaced by an android at some point. Maybe it was some kind of Blade Runner/She-doesn’t-know-she’s-a-robot-kind of thing? I don’t really care either way to tell you the truth. I’m done trying to make sense of this fucking movie.

Eventually Dr. Mustache ends up at a gas station, where he starts calling the TV to tell it not to play the commercial. I couldn’t really get a sense of who exactly he was calling, but whoever it was apparently had the power to change the programming of paid advertisers, and was also willing to do so just because a crazy doctor with a mustache calls in screaming about how they have to take the commercial off but he can’t tell them why but it’s because WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!

So they take the commercial off of one channel. Then these kids, who are also in the gas station and watching the TV, change the channel and the commercial is on THAT channel too. So Dr. Mustache says “It’s on the other channel! TAKE IT OFF THE OTHER CHANNEL!! WHY?! BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!” so they take the commercial off of the second channel as well. Then the kids change the channel again, and the commercial is on THAT channel too. So Dr. Mustache starts screaming about “YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE COMMERCIAL OFF OF THE THIRD CHANNEL OR WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!! BECAUSE I SAID SO!!”

But then, apparently the guy on the other end of the phone (who has the power to change the programming of not only one television station, but apparently at least three) finally grows a pair and puts his foot down. He was willing to be bullied by an anonymous dick on the phone to take down two commercials, but not three. No way. That’s going to far. Nobody bullies that guy into taking down THREE commercials. Not today, motherfucker.

And that’s how the movie ends. Apparently the three thousand year old pagan eurotrash mask maker’s plan still went off without a hitch. And, apparently, millions of kids all over America got to experience their heads turning into bugs and snakes. The sad thing is that nobody on the east coast bothered to warn the people in the other time zones not to watch the commercial. I mean, shouldn’t the people on the west coast have figured out by then that something fishy was going on, given that it was three or four hours later or whatever?

Anyway. That was Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

Final thoughts?

That movie was fucking retarded. I wish I hadn’t watched it.

So when I was looking up information about Last House on the Left (gotta fact check my shit you know) on Wikipedia, I did what I usually do when I’m on Wikipedia and I started clicking links to other entries which then lead to links to other entries, until I’ve spent four hours looking at all kinds of random shit and I’m no where near where I started.

Except in this case I didn’t wander TOO far. I went from Last House on the Left to Wes Craven to A Nightmare on Elm. And really, in my world, eventually all road lead to Freddy. That’s just how I roll.

Anyway, I got to reading about how apparently the song Dream Weaver by Gary Wright (which will, in my mind, forever be associated with Wayne longing for the Strat in the guitar store window in Wayne’s World) was one of main inspirations for A Nightmare on Elm Street and that main Nightmare theme is based on that song. The entry on Wikipedia says that the “main synth riff” of the Nightmare theme is from Dream Weaver.

I’ve listened to Dream Weaver about six times now and I just don’t hear it. I’m trying to, because I think that would be awesome to be able to hear A Nightmare on Elm Street in this cheesy fucking song. But I dunno. The weird opening and closing music (which sounds just a whole lot like Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd) is kind of similar in style, I guess… but I don’t hear anything that sounds like the main riff of the Nightmare on Elm Street theme.

Dream Weaver

The Nightmare on Elm Street theme.

Can someone please listen to both of these and show me where I’m missing it? Because I know that Wikipedia is never, ever wrong and obviously it’s my ears and brain that are broken.

Speaking of which.

I hate how people are so fucking uppity about Wikipedia. Like it’s completely full of shit all the time. Sure, there’s stuff on there that isn’t perfectly accurate all the time. It’s an imperfect system, I know. But more often than not, it’s a valuable and awesome wealth of mostly accurate information.

For instance, this:

I was at work the other day and somehow got to ranting at a customer (which I’m prone to do at times) about how pandas are evil, wicked animals to be feared, not loved. My rational is that they’re bears, and that bears vicious killing machines that will stop at nothing in their quest to devour your soul and bath in human blood. It was a couple I was talking to, and the chick decides to pull out this fairly common, but totally wrong little factoid “Well, actually Pandas aren’t really bears.” I said “WHAT? of course they’re bears.” to which she said “No, they’re marsupials.” Which is not only completely incorrect, but totally stupid as well.

I’ll give people that up until somewhat recently, scientists weren’t sure exactly WHAT pandas are, but they have been officially classified as bears. They certainly aren’t fucking marsupials though.

So I told her “I actually got into this discussion with someone recently,” (which is true) “and I had to read up on pandas to prove my point that they are, in fact, bears.” and then mr. boyfriend comes in with “Oh yeah? Where did you read that?” and I said “Wikipedia” and he gets all sarcastic and says “OH! Well if it was on Wikipedia then it MUST be true!” like I’m a fucking moron. Then he goes on to say “I study genetics and I can tell you that pandas are not bears. They’re actually from the same family as raccoons.”

Okay, first of all, fuck that guy. Second of all, yes, until recently, there was debate as to whether pandas were bears or a type of raccoon. But now that they’ve done genetic testing on pandas, they’ve figured out that guess what, they’re fucking bears. You study genetics? THEN YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS SHIT, FUCKHEAD.

This is from the WWF’s site (the World Wildlife Foundation, not the wrestling company) on their panda FAQ.

“Are pandas bears?
Giant pandas are biologically unique. They are classified as bears, but unlike other bears, cannot store enough body fat to hibernate. “

Which is the same thing it says on Wikipedia.

That fucking condescending (and wrong) fuck. Fuck. I’m going to keep saying fuck a lot. Bear with me.

AND, even if that fucking dipshit was right, and they ARE some kind of huge ass raccoon… that would be EVEN WORSE. A bear sized raccoon? FUCKING FORGET ABOUT IT. Raccoons are even scarier and more evil that bears in my eyes, so either way, fuck pandas. My argument stands.

Not that it matters, because pandas are bears and they’re evil and I’m glad they refuse to fuck and are going extinct. When I’m rich, I’m going to own a black market panda fur coat.

Fucking pandas.

Fucking customers. Marsupials my ass. Hey lady. What are you, retarded? Hey. Hey! Hey guess what, silly woman. KOALAS are marsupials. That’s what you’re thinking of. They’re also big fat dopey slow tree eating idiots. Just like you. You fucking fuck.

…

Okay, I’m over it.

In related news, I very much want a shirt with this image on it:

Also, this:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/thelasthouseontheleft/

Ya know… I hate to say it… but this looks like it could be a pretty decent remake.

Actually, I don’t hate to say it at all. I’m very glad to s ay it. I want this to be good. I really do. What I’d hate is if it turns out to be another stupid, pointless remake.

I’ve talked about my position on remakes in general and I’ve talked a bit about how I feel about horror remakes specifically (since they’re do so many of them these days) and, from what I can tell, Last House on the Left is a good example of a movie that really could stand a decent, modern remake.

Last House on the Left was an important horror movie, but it was a dated horror movie. It was definitely a product of the low budget, Texas Chainsaw Massacre era of movies (though it predates TCM by two years) and it did a fine job of being intensely disturbing and graphic. Wes Craven came out of no where and redefined what a horror movie could be.

People talk a lot about “torture porn” these days. Acting as though this trend of overtly violent and gruesome movies like Hostel and Saw is some new thing. But really, Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did that whole scene back in the 70s. And they did it well. Fuck that “less is more” bullshit. That’s fine if you’re doing a suspense movie. But that anti-gore attitude in horror can be a bit pretentious. Sometimes more is more. Sometimes it’s seeing characters that you care about being horribly maimed and disfigured that can get to you.

Last House on the Left didn’t beat around the bush. The main characters (a small gang of vicious criminals) were sadistic, vile, evil people. And the violence they inflicted on these two teenage girls was intense and unrelenting.

There’s one shot in particular that really disturbed me. Mostly because I didn’t expect it. The gang is two guys, a chick and a teenage boy. They’ve got this teenage girl out in the woods and are kind of casually raping and torturing her. The shot I’m talking about shows two of the guys talking about something or other, and the girl is on the ground, just barely in frame, crying and writhing. While they’re talking, the woman gang member’s head pops up into frame to say something. It pops up from between the tortured girl’s legs, where you suddenly realize that she was down there eating her out. I remember seeing that and going “OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY WENT THERE!” That was some intense, crazy shit that I certainly didn’t see coming. It was like “oh yeah, rape, torture, murder… AND LESBIAN RAPE”.

Anyway, my point is that while Last House on the Left was kickass for it’s time, and an important chapter in the history of horror movies, it was also kind of silly. The music was goofy, and while that was somewhat intentional, it still pushes it into that weird corner of low budget 70s movies along with Walking Tall and Billy Jack. Those movies that you watch, and enjoy, but you also kind of have to say “well, the 70s were kind of lame”.

Looking at this trailer (which seems to give away pretty much the entire movie, which is fine for giving me an idea of where’s they’re taking it, but really annoying for anyone who isn’t familiar with the story already) it seems that they’ve followed the original story pretty closely. From what I’ve read about it, they didn’t hold back on the violence, gore and disturbing nature of the original either. And, from what I can tell, it looks like they’ve gone back to the original story (which was cut and re-edited to appease the ratings board) where the daughter is alive when her parents find her. I dig that they did that.

So here’s to hoping that this remake is decent. I’m typically skeptical of remakes in general, but I always want them to be good. I’m perfectly cool with remaking a movie if you can bring something new and interesting to it. I just get tired of forcing movies that were otherwise fine just as they were into the cookie cutter standards of today’s horror movies.

A small bit of trivia for you… the main bad guy character (the gentleman on the left in the picture above, played by David Hess) was named Krug, a variation on the name of a kid who bullied Wes Craven when he was a child. That bully’s name was Freddy Krueger.

Currently Listening: Dream Weaver / Gary Wright

Two of my favorite things! Christmas and horror movies!

This dude has got to have been one of the scariest fucking dudes ever. He showed up at my door and it started raining and he was demanding that I let him in, I would probably shit my pants.

And, for the record, I miss Craig T. Nelson ever so much. He was awesome.

About five years ago I watched a movie called Audition. It was directed by controversial Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. I’d seen only one of his movies previously, the ultra violent Ichi the Killer.

Ichi the Killer made an impression on me, though I don’t know if it was necessarily a good impression. It was just an impression. I finished that movie thinking "well… that was different" and that was about it.

This was relatively early in my exploration of various forms of Asian cinema. Being something of a horror fan, but not overly experienced with "foreign films" it seemed like the obvious place to start.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve come all that far in expanding my library. I’ve watched many of the staples. The obvious shit like the Ring movies and Ju-On movies and Suicide Club and Battle Royale and The Eye and Old Boy and Lady Vengeance. Other stuff too, but my point is that I stick fairly close to the surface. I’m far from knowledgeable on the subject.

I do know what I like and what I don’t like.

I know that I’m burned out on Japanese ghosts. Specifically, ghosts of chicks with their hair hanging in their face and who move like they exist only in stop motion photography.

I also know that I’ll still watch all those Japanese ghost movies because they scare the ever loving shit out of me.

I’ve seen a few Miike movies. Ichi the Killer, it turns out, was the silliest of his movies that I’ve seen so far. Audition kind of stands at the other end of the spectrum.

The first time I watched Audition (again, about five years ago) I enjoyed it a bit, but honestly found it kind of boring. I guess I was geared up for another awesome splatter fest and wasn’t expecting what I got, which was essentially a drama.

Also, I should note, I was somewhat baked at the time, which may help explain my displeasure at the lack of visual stimulation. I sat there going "BORING! SOMEONE KILL SOMETHING!" because nothing was really happening.

I watched it again last night, sober this time. I felt the urge to watch a movie but, because it was one in the morning, I knew it had to be something I could watch with the volume fairly low. So I browsed through my foreign movies, knowing that the subtitles would allow me to keep the noise to a minimum, and settled on Audition. I picked it up used at Blockbuster for six bucks a while back and had been planning on watching it again.

I’m sure glad I did.

I didn’t fully appreciate how this movie worked the first time through. I think I was half expecting the boombastic gore festival that was Ichi, and didn’t really know what to do with it.

Audition is essentially a drama about a lonely guy trying to fill the hole left in his life by the death of his wife. It’s notorious for it’s gory and disturbing imagery, but this is pretty small aspect of the over all movie.

It centers around a guy named Aoyama, a middle aged guy trying to get his life together. His wife died from an unnamed illness seven years earlier and he lives along with his teenaged son.

A movie producer friend of his comes up with a plan. He advertises an audition for a fictitious acting role, which brings in hundreds of resumes for attractive women, all ready to line up and meet Aoyama. They hold the audition and interview the women, asking personal questions that would reveal various flaws and highlight interesting aspects of each woman.

Aoyama becomes entranced by a woman by the name of Asami, who comes across as kind of strange but cute in a weird girl sort of way. He calls her up and they have dinner and the movie starts rolling.

The next hour or so is spent showing Aoyama struggling with the morality of manipulating this woman by implying that there was a role to be won. He eventually tells her that the financing on the movie fell through and that it won’t be made, but that he’d still like to keep seeing her. By this point he’s totally in love with her.

His movie producer friend comes in and is like "dude, this chick is loco" and, of course, Aoyama blows him off.

Weird shit starts to happen and yada yada yada, big climactic gory ending.

I don’t want to tell anymore, because if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s one of those things you should really go into fresh.

What I missed the first time around was the incredible build up. The ending is so shocking and disturbing because the entire film has built up to it. It’s not a roller coaster. It’s more like a free-fall ride. You spend the majority of the ride sitting in the car, listening to the track click click click as it drags you up and up and up and when the drop finally happens, you’re so tense from the ride up that it’s that much more intense.

Weird shit happens all through the movie. There’s a section where Aoyama has decided not to call her anymore and wait to see if she calls him. I believe it went on for two weeks. When he finally does call her, we see that she’s just sitting on her knees on the floor of her apartment, staring absently at the phone, a mysterious bag of something sitting off in the distance. The phone rings and she smiles ominously.

It’s creepy as shit.

There’s another scene where Aoyama is trying to track Asami down and he finds this dude with his feet sewn into these wooden planks and some kind of weird stitching thing going on with his shins that I can’t entirely explain. It’s only on screen for maybe two seconds but it’s enough to tweak your mind.

Where as Ichi the Killer was a bombardment whose philosophy seemed to be "show EVERYTHING" Audition is pretty much the polar opposite. The horror in Audition is almost entirely in it’s tone and the performances of the actors. Specifically, of Eihi Shiina, who plays Asami. She’s someone you somehow fall in love with even though you KNOW she’s completely insane. And you, like Aoyama, are punished for it.

I think what really drives the horror home is that the tone of the majority of the movie is very uncomfortable. The movie is centered around this bullshit audition that these two guys hold. It feels creepy and lecherous. Watching the movie, you’re sympathetic towards Aoyama, but at the same time, you also kind of feel like he crossed a line by participating in the scheme. It’s exploitative and he’s using these women. Just as he is ultimately used.

Naturally, the punishment doesn’t exactly fit the crime. But, when does it ever, really?

Also, in contrast to Ichi the Killer (which I’m just using as an example of an entirely different sort of style by the same director) much of the gore is off screen. Sure, there are some pretty gory shots. But they only linger long enough for you to say "is that what I think it is?" and then it’s gone.

What makes it disturbing and hard to watch is everything around the gore. There’s a part where Asami is pushing acupuncture needles into a man’s chest, stomach and eyes. You don’t see much of the actual penitration of these needles. What you see is her face, smiling, almost giggling, as she’s slowly sliding them in. She says something that sounds like "kitty kitty kitty" which is a quite pretty and somehow musical thing for her to say, and which translates (according to the subtitles on my DVD) to "deeper, deeper, deeper". It’s both cute and terrifying at the same time.

While it’s hard to really even classify Audition as a horror movie, it’s hard to find anywhere else it fits. It’s like a drama/horror movie. The majority of the movie is an exploration of guilt and loneliness. It’s just that ending that really pushes it into horror territory. But that the rest of the film is essentially build up to that horror ending almost makes the entire thing a horror movie.

I don’t know. I suppose it’s beyond classification, and that’s okay too. It is what it is. And what it is is awesome.