Breakfast on Pluto

Saw Breakfast on Pluto, a film about Kitty, a male-to-female transsexual, surviving the 60s and 70s in Ireland. The film has a very throw-back-ey feel, with a Oscar Wilde-ian heavy emphasis on flippancy and arch irreverence. The film earns this silliness however, making it less spectacular and funny but more grounded and real. Kitty is an intelligently empty-headed woman, choosing to retreat from harsh realities into a world of double entendres and love songs and the breathy patter of pillow-talk. She is committed to this lovey-dovey nonsense world, we discover, even in the face of death and imprisonment. It provides a defence and sometimes serves as a grotesque sort of weapon.

The film's plot follows Kitty as she searches for her mother (she is also an orphan, you see.) Her journey takes her tangentially into contact with the NRA but unfortunately any trenchant observations about The Troubles went right over my ignorant American head. For the uninformed, these scenes provide a contrapuntal, grim and terrifying reality which we do not believe is any better than Kitty's fantasy land. She is often told to be more serious but she just rolls her eyes and bats her lashes and why shouldn't she?

The film argues the appeal of Kitty's fantasies but this fevered embrace of flippancy really feels dated to me. Perhaps the film's merely mirroring the outlook of the central Kitty, but come on: let's be more serious, can't we?

1408

Saw 1408. The film stars John Cusack as a cynical reviewer of so-called haunted hotels who finds an actually haunted hotel room this time!(!!!) Before the hotel room is revealed though, he stalks about grumpily, making oblique references to an abusive father and an ex-wife and leaving un-smoked cigarettes around the rooms he stays in and generally hinting at a Tortured Past. This was great news for me because it promises a psychodrama rather than a creature-feature and I enjoy psychodrama much better. Unfortunately, the ultimate sorrowful showdown with an imaginary version of his father and wife is kind of a disappointment. We never get to really know Cusack's character beyond knowing that he is a bitter man with a past in which he was bitter and shouted. Without any sympathy for him, I had only clinical disinterest in his squirmings.

Much more interesting was the machinations of the haunted/possessed room. Early on he hurts his hand and drips blood on the carpet before rinsing off the wound. The closeups of the blood being absorbed into the pile of the carpet and being hungrily sucked down the drain are suggestive and creepy. Also, the repeated images of Cuzack's face reflected in the edges of mirrors, his eyes cut off, or weirdly multiplied. It's such a simple thing, but kind of dehumanizes him. Later on, when the walls and windows begin shifting, I enjoyed that too. Unfortunately, there's only so many things an inanimate room can do, I suppose, and increasingly wearying mind-games are played for variety and believability's sake.

The film is best when it's being subtle or overtly hostile. I loved the phone melting and the changing map of the floor (also the suggestive H shape of the building.) The hysterical past-evoking and annoying misdirections evoke not so much The Shining as Being John Malkovich (also there's some jump scares with a hammer-wielding hobo which are bewildering, stupid, and the worst form of this kind of crap.) The cramped cat-and-mouse of room vs human is far more interesting and I wish more had been done with that. As is, it has interesting parts and much promise, but many rotten bits as well. Not bad, just uneven.

The Palm Beach Story

Saw The Palm Beach Story, a screwball. It starts out hard and strong, a maid fainting dead away not five seconds in. The credit sequence takes place over a mad-cap wedding. Brides tied up and gagged, grooms out cold, it's a romp. We then proceed with the years after the triumphant pre-film marriage. (This premise has always struck me as sort of contrived and tortured. It seems like the kind of thing that only sounds good in an elevator pitch.) Anyway, this one pits a scheming and pretty dame against her stolid and jealous husband. She, very practically, points out there's a lot of ways for a pretty woman to make money and even stay pretty chaste. He rebuts that this is the 40s and there's no way in hell they're going to allow that in a movie, even in a farce like this one.

So the dame runs off, effortlessly and delightfully seducing everyone who stands in her way. She's put upon and harried by her adventures, but this is necessary for the audience to like her. He goes after her, bullishly advancing the plot. Normally I hate screwballs like this but I got to liking the main characters. The writing is so damn clever I just wanted to hear what little quip would come out of their mouths next, and what serious double-meaning it had. I had a lot of fun watching increasingly wealthy men make fools of themselves, even if that very idea (that being toyed with by a pretty woman is to make a fool of oneself) is kind of dated and sexist (what, she didn't have anything to do with it?) There's also a good bit of racism (the black servants are both wise and wise-cracking, god help us) so be warned.

A good, funny film, very tame by today's standards but still quite strong. Good show, you screwballs.

A Trip to the Moon

Saw A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 fantasia. Bearded wizard/scientists start us off, becoming excited over an explanation of a moon-trip. They build the bullet-shaped rocket and fire themselves out of a cannon at the moon. There they encounter lobster-monster-men who chase them back to their ship and off, back to earth. The film is fun the way Winsor McCay's work is fun. It's not a lot of fun, but it's very different and weird and... joke-like. Perhaps the age difference is enough that we are actually unable to tell each other jokes, 1902 and I. The film is humorous but not funny. Anyway, this is not supposed to be exactly a comedy, it's supposed to be a kind of Avatar: a special-effects extravaganza with no brain at all. And in this it succeeds. Let's just love it for that.

Pretty Baby

Saw Pretty Baby (thanks, Lea!) A 13 year old Brooke Shields plays a girl raised in a brothel in 1910s New Orleans. There's a lot of extremely uncomfortable scenes mixed in with gloriously tawdry period dresses and amazing scenery. The film is fairly queasy but has such solid performances and such a pretty look to it, I can't bring myself to just dismiss it. The grotesque madam of the brothel I loved particularly. She's an ancient woman with a face that looks almost exactly like a Halloween mask. She speaks in a declamatory slur and pronounces monsieur "mess-your." She is the evil old heart of the brothel and a force of sensuality and dissipation. You can almost sympathize with the puritan protesters who come to angrily sing psalms at them.

But on the other hand, we get to know the world of the brothel, with it's eternal game of dress-up and make-believe. The johns seem almost gentlemanly and Brooke Shields's character, Violet, is delightful and winsome. There's a photographer of erotic photos (based on this guy) who hangs around and at first seems to be asexual, but later reveals his love for Violet. It's not as blunt and confrontational as Leon the Professional, but it's unsettling nonetheless. Doubly so for its seeming normalcy. Photographs are used in a symbolic way in the film: the photographer holds sway over the prostitutes because they like to be admired, Violet rebels at last after one too many eternal photoshoots. The closing scenes show Violet, older and in a less exploitative situation, but always being told to hold still and let herself be photographed.

Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County

Saw Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, a found footage horror about aliens. The film is quite scary. It has no jump-scares, but has a slow burn and plenty of ominous doings. Some of these doings fall quite flat (such as when the aliens mind-control the mother into thinking that the father is still alive) but others are far more effective (the flitting about of the aliens is cheap, but always effective.) It was sufficiently scary that I frequently retreated into analysis-mode, to try and pick apart the scary machinery. It suffers a bit from failed attempts at naturalism. These people are supposed to be 'ordinary,' but of course the mother is an alcoholic (this comes up in a taped casual conversation, as all family secrets do) and one of the brothers is racist (and his sister is dating a black guy! Wuh-oh!) so there's plenty of very artificial feeling drama going on. Also, people in real life speak and act like dithering idiots (for reference, check out your own home movies) and all of the people here act like relatable, eloquent actors. Harrumph.

As I say, most of this nit-picking is the result of genuine, queasy, unsettled-ness on my part so the film was effective on some level. At its best it's very claustrophobic and tense, radiating a sense of disaster and angst. It reminds of me of Dark Night of the Scarecrow in that it is low-rent but surprisingly effective.

Apur Sansar

Saw Apur Sansar, the third in the Apu trilogy. I know I've seen the first and haven't seen the second, so I can't comment on the overarching themes of the trilogy, but this last was (I'm pretty sure) about the good and evil effects of romanticization. The protagonist, Apu, starts off fresh out of college. He lives in bohemian luxury as a penniless tutor (a situation whose romance he is well aware of. this allows him to enjoy, but prevents him from bettering his situation.) He's writing a novel recontexualizing and romanticizing his own troubled childhood (a friend he shows it to cries that it is beautiful.) Suddenly, he's pressed into a marriage when the groom turns out to have been insane (another note in the fantasy-reality theme.) Once married, his bride is taken back to his hovel and there's this awesome scene where she's aghast at the squalid conditions he lives in. Crying, she looks out the window and sees a woman playing with a laughing baby, unperturbed by their poverty. She realizes that her romantic affectations are just elaborate self indulgences and we can almost see her being freed of her pretensions.

The wife does not become bitter however. Rather, her fantasy changes from being a useless, self-pitying one into a playful, beneficial one. The film carries on this vein, showing that Apu lives in and deals with fantasies which are alternately destructive and nurturing. Appropriately enough, the film itself has a feel of being a bit removed from reality. Nothing truly terrible is shown on screen and I kept tensing for the impending crash of harsh reality (the Cometh-ing of the Iceman, if you will.) The film ends with Apu having the same revelation his wife had had. He no longer lives a fantasy, but he has also given up his art. It is a little bitter but mostly sweet.

Just a short addendum about my hated foe, the subtitles: parts of the film are in heavily accented English which was not translated by my subs and several times I got the feeling my subs were condensing in a rather unfaithful way. Very frustrating.

The Great Train Robbery

Saw The Great Train Robbery, the old Edison film. It was extremely stagey, always shot about twenty feet away, the actors make dramatic left-to-right crosses and hammishly gesticulate as they die (indeed one of the robbers doesn't notice he has already received the killing shot and continues to gesticulate.) I found the film bearable in its brevity. The plot is linear, the characters nonexistent. The only interesting bit was some camera trickery (a train employee is suddenly replaced by a dummy) and the ending, which contains the film's only closeup. It's surprising and neat. It was 12 minutes not well spent. One more old movie to go.

Twice Upon a Time

Saw Twice Upon a Time (thanks, Lea!) It was an adorable cartoon. The plot is slightly boilerplate stuff: land of good dreams vs land of bad dreams. The film's strength lies in the writing and animation. I feel like I'm seeing a film that has been imitated many times, badly. It has that 80s-style motormouth where all characters jabber nonstop and the gunky collage look of Ralph Bakshi's stuff but where the motormouth is usually wearying here it keeps things feeling pleasantly busy and slightly chaotic. The gunky collage is wonderfully gunky and often slightly sly. The animation is also great. There's some scenes where black ink is flowing through stock-photos of people in 1950s business attire and great effort has been made to make the ink flow as though it were a 3d space, around people and under desks. I don't know how they did it.

The writing is cute and busy. At one point the leader of good dream land is talking to himself about/introducing to us the minions of the good dream land, who are called "figmen of imagination." He says "Ah figmen, they tap dance not but neither do they fart." That's hilarious. The characters are the good kind of ironic reverse archetype. There's a big dumb hero who mainly gets in the way (and lives inside of a football) and a damsel in distress who winds up rescuing herself most of the time. The main characters are Ralph the all-purpose animal (ie, shapeshifter) (who is voiced by Lorenzo Music, of Garfield and Friends fame. I used to watch that show when I was a kid. His warm, calm voice threw a great deal of nostalgia-points this movie's way.) and Mumford, a comic mime. There's also a long-suffering writer of the nightmares and the pettishly evil leader of bad-dream land (who has "Nixon/Agnew '98" tattooed on his chest.)

So the movie's really good. It (or whatever it's imitating) has been imitated badly a lot, so I was put off at first by the look and feel of it, but it's so messy and fun I was quickly won around.

Edit: oh, by the way there's a bit of swearing in it. At one point the bad guy calls the heroes dipshits. It's nothing major but is fairly bracing to hear come out of a very silly movie.

The Kingdom

Saw The Kingdom, a Danish show by Lars Von Trier, known for such delights as Melancholia, Dancer in the Dark, and Antichrist. The show follows the adventures of a bunch of doctors and patients in a haunted hospital. It's weird and grim and deeply comic. It's also the funniest thing I've seen come out of Von Trier. The end of season one has the minister of public health coming across all of the different, wild threads of the various plots all in one ridiculous night. He finds a secret liver-transplant operation, a secret birth, and a full-blown exorcism. To us viewers, these threads have been slowly and logically developing, but he rightly denounces the hospital as a madhouse. There's also a lot of comedy to be had from the villainous and extremely nationalistic Swedish Doctor Helmer. He's just so evilly and ineffectually conniving and so absurdly disdainful of Denmark (and is therefore the butt of many jokes.)

The show starts out with a Lost-type feel of a mystery that will be explained slowly but surely. We have the ghost of a little girl who was perhaps murdered, the Swedish doctor to corral, a ghost-ambulance which appears every night. Alas, in the second season, one doctor gives birth to a grotesquely huge baby and it turns out The (or A) Devil is behind all the bedlam and the series starts to lose its mind. It's a fun trip while it lasts and I feel a bit sorry that there wasn't a third season, but the series was clearly sliding into ridiculousness by the end.

It is fairly entertaining however, and I think this is Lars at his most pandering and commercial. He doesn't completely suppress his interest in exotic images and eerie situations (the first time a ghost is shown is amazing) but it's a lot closer to tame than usual. (Chaos, for good or ill, never exactly reigns.)

AM 1200

Saw AM 1200, a fairly short, taught horror. It's only 40 minutes long and filled with atmospheric pauses. The plot follows a man who is haunted by an AM station, AM 1200. It sounds silly, but it's set in dark desert highways at night, when radio is the only link to the outside world the protagonist has. The protagonist has just stolen some funds from the business he works/worked at. His bosses are likened to gods and his betrayal and flight linked to the fall of angels. So, it all makes a sort of half-sense, in the way scary movies do. The ending is neat and Twilight Zone like. It appropriately never exactly spells out what evil has taken over the radio-waves, leaving it to our imaginations and interpretations. I feel there are, however, strong hints.

Days of Heaven

Saw Days of Heaven, a typically fraught Terrence Malick film. It follows a family of tramps in the 1910s (I think,) moving from farm to farm, doing odd jobs. The mother and father aren't married and their daughter smokes. She also narrates the film in childish almost-poetry and in a husky voice. At last they hit on a farm where the sickly farmer takes a liking to the mother and asks her to marry him. The tramps decide it won't hurt anything to pretend for a while. These people are predatory and parasitic, but you can't bring yourself to hate them. Malick's films always take place in a world that is suffused with tenderness and compassion. Even vengeance (when it comes) is tinged with regret, even death has its beauty.

The film oscillates between and marries moments of giant, impassive beauty and delicate intimacy. When the blessing over the harvest is made, you can feel the warm-cool air and the golden glow of sunset. Then the camera pans onto endless fields of rippling wheat, dramatic clouds hanging over the horizon. It's beautiful. The whole film is beautiful. The actors are beautiful, the scenes are beautiful, even the climactic scene where the farmer sets fire to his crops in an apocalyptic purge of all parasites, even that has its terrible beauty.

Needless to say, I was quite taken by this film. Malikc's films have a tendency to either entrance me or put me to sleep. They are lulling and gentle, a nice break from the aggressive absurdity I've been watching lately.

Alice in Wonderland (1903)

Saw Alice in Wonderland (1903) It was mainly a special-effects exposé, devoting an entire fifth of its runtime (of 5 minutes) to size transformations. They are done as well as you'd expect for 1903. The film sticks closely to the book, even depicting some minor scenes not shown in other movies. It shows the scene, for example, when small Alice is attacked by a playful puppy and that she uses a fan to shrink herself just before the pool of tears (which is not shown, alas. The joke here is that she is wet with tears and as she dries herself she shrinks like fabric.) It also specifies that the Duchess is the owner of the Cheshire cat (which she is, in the book.) The Cheshire cat has become more interesting as a free agent and many films ignore his owner. This little fact's inclusion was interesting. The film contains some fanciful costumes (which I felt were sometimes a bit sinister, what with the deteriorated film stock and all, but they never got so bad as for me to be able to take a screenshot) and ancient camera trickery.

Safe

Saw Safe (thanks, Basil!) It was an alright action movie. I don't usually like action movies (so consider 'alright' high praise) and kind of resisted this one. It suffered from a lot of the usual action-tropes, particularly the trope of the world being ruled by an elaborate crimocracy, where lone-wolf super-hero cops/marines/seals are the only real agents of justice. The plot follows a five-year-old girl with a photographic memory who the triads kidnap to use as a sort of human PDA. I thought the triad heads were a bit too evil (why force the girl to watch executions? It just seems unnecessary.) but this is the world the film takes place in. Okay.

Jason Statham, the British Bruce Willis, plays an out-of-work boxer whose life is destroyed by all-powerful Russian mobsters. He takes an interest in the welfare of the girl just as a three-way mob fight breaks out over the information in her head. There are shades of Leon the Professional in a few scenes (though the film thankfully steers clear of any creepy innuendo) and shades of Die Hard in others. Statham makes a sympathetic but competent hero and the girl is cute-as-a-button as little girls in movies always are.

The plot hums along steadily, twisting and turning at all the right times. I was always kept in an amused state of confusion (but then I kind of go out of my way to avoid second-guessing films.) The motivations of Statham's character are interestingly left kind of buried, only really spelled out in an aside near the end. The fight scenes are satisfying without being ludicrous. They were more heist-movie-ish in that they were plot points as much as they were spectacles.

It was interesting how much the film referenced the time in which it was made. Often action films are kind of timeless. The exact politics of the situation is secondary to the sweet-ass gun fights. In this one there is an element of globalism in the multicultural gangs (there are Americans, Russians, and Chinese gangsters. All the super-powers have a mob!) Terrorism is referenced often and the disillusionment of Americans against the anti-terrorist measures taken for our safety is also given voice by our protagonist. Don't get me wrong, the film is not particularly political and could be set in London without much re-writing (it is in fact one of those films emphatically set in New York (one character even shouts "this is New York!")) but it gave me something to contemplate when the gun fights got protracted.

Army of Darkness

Saw Army of Darkness. Army of Darkness is one of those films like Blade Runner where there's apparently a ton of different edits. I saw the one with the back-in-the-store ending. Anyway, I loved this one. They've embraced the batshit premise way past winking camp and into full-blown living cartoon land. Skeleton hands come popping out of the ground to preform eye-poking Three Stooges homages on the protagonist. Breaking free he shakes his fist at them and says "I'll deal with you later!" It's a cartoon! I'm not insulting it by calling it a cartoon either. It knows what it is.

The plot is ludicrous of course but here goes: Ash is sent back in time to the middle ages where he must battle the forces of evil (skeletons and other monsters of latex-kind) for the Necronomicon. With the aid of an industrious blacksmith, Ash now has a robotic hand (replacing the chainsaw one from Evil Dead 2) and later, during the awesome, awesome climax, the smith smiths him the most awesome battle-car ever. That climax is seriously amazing. Pure fun.

Best enjoyed as a fun dumb movie, it is gloriously stupid and completely goofy. It's sometimes a bit too dumb, but then I'm hard on comedy (especially when they have show stopping set-pieces like that car and that final battle.)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Saw The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a Lois Bunuel film. It relentlessly attacks Bunuel's old enemy: the upper-middle-class. We follow 3 couples as they try to have dinner together again and again. The first night fails because the hosts have given the guests the wrong date. The next time, the hosts are too busy having sex to entertain. The husbands are meanwhile engaged in a scheme whereby they smuggle cocaine via diplomat. This scheme has brought them attention from the cops and from nebulously defined 'terrorists.'

The couples are made out to be completely hypocritical on every count. They archly sniff at the dangers of marijuana, but they are smuggling cocaine. They smirk at the low-class way their chauffeur drinks a martini while their friends are screwing in the bushes outside. They love the idea of "free love" but only so far as it will get them laid. At one point they dismissively list off all of the popular ideologies of their time (fascism, feminism, religion, peace, etc) implying that they are above all that, but of course revealing that they are merely beneath all that.

On top of all of this is Bunuel's trademark straight-faced absurdity. A maid who looks to be about 20 reveals she is in fact 52. A bishop is for some reason the gardener of one of the couples. We are trapped for several scenes inside of increasingly realistic-seeming dreams (this robs the couples even of a plot!) Indeed dreams and little asides about ghosts are common elements. Perhaps the ghosts and dinners are meant to allude to Macbeth or Hamlet? There's a recurrent image of the sextet striding purposefully down a road which leads nowhere. This is perhaps a straightforward metaphor for Bunuel's conception of the titular bourgeoisie. I see little charm here however and more cantankerous pot shots. Perhaps I've missed this one but, absurdity aside, it all seems a bit done to me. How above it all I am!

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903)

Saw the 1903 version of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I don't really know the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I never had to read it in school and have had to make do with jokes and modern allusions. I gather it's an old book about slavery which is also kind of racist(?) The film is very disjointed and vignette-ish. A woman pleads with Tom to escape. A woman crosses a river on an ice floe. Slaves dance. A girl dies. An estate is sold. Slaves dance. It goes on this way, each scene only loosely connecting to the following ones. Perhaps if I knew the story it would be more comprehensible. Also, not helping matters, is my abysmal copy (feast your eyes on this merry interlude.) I couldn't even tell if anyone was in black face (I'm gonna assume they were.)

On that note, there's definitely some racism going on here (witness the adorable soft-shoe two slave kids preform at the slave-auction) but of course it was 1903 (predating the eradication of racism in America by perhaps as much as 105 years) so what can we expect. It's hard to really discern much of the racism though. It's mainly difficult to tell what's going on. Only a few more of these ancient films to go...

Faust

Saw Faust (thanks, Chris!) It was a film by the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer. Naturally, I loved it. The protagonist is a man who receives a mysterious flier directing him to an isolated courtyard in his home-city. He goes and discovers the backstage of a theater, all set up for a production of Faust. The character of Faust he at first jokingly and then increasingly naturally begins preforming. There is an unbelievable amount of meta-business going on. Theater, puppetry and stop-motion (not film specifically, but the metaphor easily extends) are all closely linked with the film's version of 'magic.' When Faust sells his soul, it is to a stop-motion version of himself. He soon after dons a wooden puppet head and enters more fully into the play. His first bit of magic is to make a horrible stop-motion golem and, fleeing from stage-hands, he escapes into a hole in the backdrop. He later drowns a court of puppet-royalty with cardboard waves. Between the waves, we see the puppets are truly sinking into actual water.

At one point Faust is establishing in a conversation with Mephistopheles that words are "mightier then we." Fumbling for words, he grabs the script to recall his next line (he is just preforming the play!) The demon assures Faust that he will serve him like a slave. At this moment, the stage-call rings and Faust hurries off like a good servant. It is he who is the slave of the theater and therefore of the demons of unreality.

So, we link the specific artificiality of theater to the other-worldly. It seems, though, that Jan is firmly on the side of the demons. He toys with the viewer more than he instructs or uplifts them, playing tricks and elaborate hall-of-mirrors games. There is much tail-chasing to be done and perhaps a chance at an insight into the magic of film (which would provide salvation from this glorious mess) but I doubt it. I think Jan is far more content being a bewildering and entrancing devil than a moralizing saint. We must, ad-hoc, save ourselves.

Shadow of a Doubt

Saw Shadow of a Doubt, my last Hitchcock for a while. It was very cozy for a Hitchcock film. Usually he deals with grandiloquent, rich cops and robbers who are very fun to watch but not very identifiable as people. This one takes place mainly in a sleepy suburb with a boy, two girls and somnambulist parents. The children shout and talk over each other, the parents smile and shake their heads. It's a simplified and cliche snapshot of a family that wouldn't be far out of place in a John Hughes film. Very cozy.

The eldest daughter, Charlie, seeking some excitement, calls up her namesake uncle (uncle Charlie) who we see is a criminal of some sort. She's creepily introduced to the uncle via a soft-focus lens (usually the cinema short-hand for true love) and soon reveals a repressed but intense attachment to him. For his part, the uncle showers her with gifts but is clearly desperately on the run. Soon some feds come snooping around and the daughter Charlie gets involved and their relationship kind of sours. Now the purpose of the sleepy suburb is revealed. What was once cozy is now claustrophobic. What was paternal becomes patronizing. An appropriate giddy and intense climax finishes off the film.

Of note is the strange justification the uncle gives for his crimes. He victimizes the rich and idle, calling them fat animals, drinking and eating up their lives and the lives of others. This sense of (almost) idealism is echoed in the daughter Charlie: before his arrival she is crankily carping about how Mother always has to do all the housework and nothing's ever going to change. I find it odd that the two Charlies are connected via these different forms of idealism and that feminism is semi-equated with murderous redistribution of wealth (which is an element anyway of communism, the redistribution bit that is.) I think these scary ideas were threatening to audiences of the time, particularly the sort of audience who would go to a crime thriller, a genre notorious for their perfectly ordered worlds and black-n-white morality.

Also, there's an ongoing joke where the father of the family is constantly plotting the prefect murder. He amateurishly plays at what the uncle does for a living!

Edit: also, there's a ton of vampire references that were too subtle for me. Good call, imdb trivia.