Christmas Evil

Saw Christmas Evil, a fairly bananas Christmas film which follows a man who works in a toy shop.  He wakes every morning to some Christmas music and sleeps in a pajama Santa-suit.  His house is decorated with Christmas stuff and he spies on his neighbor's kids, writing down their crimes ("negative personal hygiene") and their virtues ("is just adorable") he's clearly far off the deep end into some Santa-psychosis.

This is the film that I thought Silent Night Deadly Night was.  Whereas that one was plenty unusual on its own, this one is truly inspired.  It's full of strange, art-house flourishes involving the soundtrack and the plot.  Although the film is set in modern times, for example, the climax comes with an angry, torch-wielding mob.  This film is John Waters' favorite Christmas movie.  It has to be seen to be believed.

The plot basically is that the main character has decided to become Santa this Christmas.  He steals toys and rewards the good and punishes the wicked.  He drives about in his broken-down white van, being swept up in jolly corporate holiday parties but also being taunted by snobby church-goers (to their grave misfortune!)  The film has a nice sense of pace and progression, with the good times fueling his madness and the bad times revealing it.

The film is more strange than anything else.  It's not a great movie, nor bad.  The main character has some great philosophy that he shouts out near the end.  His feeling is that although the idea of Santa is just an idea, it's a good idea: a magical vigilante meting out justice to the masses.  This is high camp and needs to be taken almost seriously, you know?

Mother of Tears

Saw Mother of Tears, the last of Argento's Three Mothers trilogy.  This one was made much more recently, in 2007, and follows fight against the last of the witches (or "mothers" as they are called here.)  The plot follows a art historian woman whose museum receives a mysterious urn which, when opened, predictably lets loose a lot of troubles on the land.

The film is less colorful than the previous films in the trilogy.  It's get the standard palate, which is to say plenty colorful but not gratuitously so, as the previous films were.  This one also has the overdubbing that the previous ones did, leading to some truly grating English voice acting.  This I think is what made the previous films feel so distant and alien: the acting is just dead with the dubbing.

Anyway, once the box is opened, there's a montage of senseless violence erupting in the city which is great but which goes on a bit too long and becomes ridiculous.  Similarly, gangs of witch-women start showing up in the city.  The film depicts these witch ladies as obnoxious, punky, woo-girls cackling and strutting around the city.  This is a nice choice, happily wedding the traditional depiction of witches with something modern without it seeming stupid or put-on.  And it also allows Argento to show lots of boobs.

The film is generally like that: it's full of interesting ideas but always a little undercut, a little clumsily executed.  Amazing atmospherics ruined when one of the characters rhythmically dubs their lines.  A montage that goes on a little too long.  It's a mixed bag of hit-and-miss.  As with the previous films, this one goes on a bit too long, even as it is the shortest of the films.  It's morbid and interesting and has some definite moments, but it has some dead keys as well and is sometimes tough going.

Inferno (1980)

Saw Inferno (1980), a sequel to Suspiria, made to expand the Suspiria-verse to include two other powerful witches.  I had seen and not really enjoyed the original, 1970s version of Suspiria and this one is similar to my recollections of that film: very lurid and colorful, fairly sinister but too otherworldly and strange to be really scary or even that interesting frankly.  I kept getting distracted by the clearly plastic sets, the strange way the killers all wear black and red gloves.  Sometimes it works, but other times it's just too mannered.

So, whereas Suspiria was apparently loosely based on Snow White (or, more specifically, on whatever Jungian archetype is exhibited therein,) this one is based on Hansel and Gretel.  Appropriately, it focuses on a brother and sister - the sister writes a letter to her brother begging him to come visit her in New York because she's convinced her apartment building is haunted.  He arrives to find her dead and the apartment building full of sinister and tragic women, either stone-faced or wilting, and the apartment house with walls of screaming red, trimmed with black.  It's so over the top!

Apparently this film was somewhat inspired by Last Year At Marienbad - a film whose idiot director believed that the setting, not the plot or the character, made the film great.  As such, that film spends many tedious minutes creeping over sumptuous wallpaper brocades and carvings and carpets and doorways and mirrors.  Like that film, Inferno also lavishes much attention on the building involved.  Its a gorgeous setting, but I got so bored watching the characters diaphanously glide down the hallways and the slow zooms on air vents.

I don't want to give the impression this is a terrible film, but it's challenging.  There's a scene near the beginning where the sister drops her keys into a puddle in the basement.  It turns out the puddle is quite deep and, diving into it, she discovers a whole submerged room down there, full of floating corpses, with a doorway leading off god-knows-where.  That's so evocative and fascinating to me.  What's down there?  What's going on?  We never find out.  The movie is full of stuff like that.  The trouble is it's very slow and oddly cold and inhuman.  The actors portray no emotion apart from fear which just gets dull after a while.  Sometimes I feel there's a gap separating me from the characters in the movie and this time the gap was present and quite large.

Fair warning to animal lovers by the way: there's a few scenes where cats are mistreated.  There's some scenes where they're clearly fake cats and all is well, but other scenes with some frankly unhappy cats.  I felt bad for one cat who did not want to be carried by its scruff, than you and for another scene where a woman just has cats pelted at at her from off-screen for a while.  Poor woman, sure, but poor kitties!

Anyway, the film is sort of slow and sort of ominous.  It's an interesting, oppressive film, but more interesting in retrospect.  It's so strange though - just bursting with slow strange imagery.

A Cure for Wellness

Saw A Cure for Wellness, another film (like yesterday's Shutter Island) about a spooky psychological institute and a protagonist who all the doctors say is crazy.  This time it's a hydrotherapy institute in the mountains of Switzerland where the waters have healing and healthful properties.  The protagonist is a hot-shot business-boy who is searching for his company's CEO for obscure, business-y reasons.  The film is not bad but very over-long and as focused on style over substance as a Tim Burton film.

The film is very pretty.  There's lots of great, eerie little touches.  A woman cuts up newspaper crosswords and pastes them into her own puzzles, a pretty girl in a gauzy dress, standing on the battlements of a castle, fat women swimming through water like fish in a tank.  It reminded me a lot of Tim Burton's alternately subdued and flamboyant images.  There's a fair bit of gore and violent scenes as well however and I found all of that very off-putting.

It really is over-long however.  It reminded me the most of a video-game, pushing the main character from check-point to check-point, showing days passing in an out-of-character montage before giving you control back.  There's papers that must be collected and scoured for clues, often circled in red pen for some reason.  The whole thing seems lumpy and over-stuffed in a very video-game-ish way to me.

The film is not bad, but it's strange. There's a lot of pieces that don't make sense except in a tonal sort of way.  We establish that the main character is an ex-smoker, for example, but this is only important for a scene where he lights a cigarette and sees something spooky.  Why waste our time like this?  There's other times where this sort of dreamy, abruptness works, but sometimes I feel like we're suffering from sub-plots unevenly cut out of the film.  It either needs to be longer or shorter, I think.

Anyway, it's a style over substance kind of film.  A sort of Tim Butron-ization of Shutter Island.  It's not bad, although I frankly think it would have been a better video game.  The imagery is beautiful, the tone is sinister, the old mansion and accented orderlies are great - just start it with plenty of time to spare.

Shutter Island

Saw Shutter Island, a fascinating, knotty puzzle of a film following Leonardo DiCaprio as a US Marshal investigating a disappearance on an island-institute for the criminally insane.  He suffers from migraines and bad dreams however, and keeps flashing back to his time in the military, when he liberated Dachau, and remembering his wife in a burning apartment.  Something, clearly, is up.

The film gets more and more complex as time goes by and the mystery of the escaped prisoner and Leo's dark past intertwine.  The film shows dreams and contains weird, jarring, intentional continuity errors, such as when a woman is given a glass of water but clearly only mimes drinking it.  This is a slippery film which, although I feel it comes to a definite conclusion at the end, is slippery enough that I'd bet folks argue, Inception-style, about what the end of the film really means.  Delicious!

I really enjoyed this film.  In addition to the complex mind-games, we get to see lots of strange imagery: rats inexplicably swarming the beaches, dead bodies flowing out of train cars, frozen in ice, Ben Kingsley calling Leo "baby."  I also really liked the island locale.  It's small and claustrophobic enough that, as one character puts it, "they'll always find us" but large enough that someone can believably go missing for a few days.  It's like a really high-budget version of The Prisoner.

The acting was solid, but I was mostly there for the plot.  The locale was a nice surprise and everything is shot just gorgeously.  It's got some nice histrionics, but it's a puzzle-film first, like Inception.  If you're not in the mood to pay close attention give it a pass, but if you like mysteries and can stand some ambiguity, give it a shot.

Night of the Creeps

Saw Night of the Creeps, a fun movie which obviously inspired Slither (hat tip Stephen for pointing it out!)  This one is less about small-town America, and more about the college Greek life of the 80s.  As with Slither however, this film follows slug-like, parasitic creatures who make the dead to walk.  This one is way campier however.

The main characters here are teen freshmen, looking for girlfriends and generally for a good time.  Whereas most films cast 30-somethings as "teens" these seem like actual, uncertain children.  They're paired up with a grizzled goofy cop who goofily wants to kill himself.  That character is very strange.  He's written like a hard-boiled, alcoholic monster but is played like Oscar from the Odd Couple: grouchy but more avuncular than mean.  I feel that part was miscast, but then maybe it wouldn't be as fun if there were a sincerely depressed central main character.

Anyway, this film lampshades itself a lot more.  Characters are named Romero and Cronenberg, old ladies watch Plan 9 From Outer Space, and the cop character says things like "what is this, a crime scene or a B-movie?"  Delicious!  Like I say, this is much goofier, much more campy.  The climax takes place not at prom (college remember) but at a prom-like "formal dance".  There's some great scenes of a girl in a prom-dress wielding a flamethrower.  It's not Tarantino-levels, but it's plenty self-indulgent.

I liked the movie okay.  I was worried I'd be annoyed at the teenage main characters but they seemed believably out of their depth and never became the obnoxious Buellers that they might have been.  It's a little dubious at parts (we open on the extremely dubious back-story of the parasites, with baby-like aliens shooting them into space) but it's a fairly fun romp.  It also has a lawn mower, predating Braindead by 4 years!  Also also, I think the roommate is supposed to be kind of bro-mantic, but I read him as sincerely gay, which made me happy.

The Dead Zone

Saw The Dead Zone, a film based on a Stephen King novel which revolves around a New England school teacher (as King stories often do.)  This teacher falls into a coma and awakes five years later with psychic powers: if he touches someone sometimes he sees visions of things that are important to them, often involving deaths.

The film is solidly alright.  It has twists and turns and a chilly, clinical atmosphere.  It was directed by Cronenberg, and there's institutions and doctors (both recurrent elements of Cronenberg's films.)  A mystery is being understood and explored, however we are humans first and are moved by sudden romances or losses.  In this case, the psychic gift also comes with a cost: a physical weakening and a dilemma about seeing the future: how to try to change it without seeming like a crazy person.

The weakness however, is the plot.  We sort of meander from hiding out from the press to helping the cops to tutoring the sullen son of a millionaire.  When the end comes I sort felt let down, like "that's it?"  I mean, I guess that was it.  There's no arc however, sort of a series of vignettes.  Perhaps I'm missing the thrust, but I don't see it.

So the film is alright.  It's interesting and exciting (I loved the house he goes into with the cops - that sequence is great!) It was made into a show more recently and I suppose that makes more sense.  The psychic's adventures don't have a lot to do with each other, aside from some escalation.  It also featured a horrifying, Trumpian politician which made it feel oddly topical.  Apart from that though, it feels like something you'd see on cable and suspect why they cut the last part off.  It's not bad, just … alright.

V/H/S/2

Saw V/H/S/2, the sequel to V/H/S.  Like that film, this one is an anthology film, with four mini-stories plus a frame story.  As anthology films often are, this was hit-and-miss.  Thankfully, the filmmakers learned from the previous movie and this movie is improved in two ways: fewer obnoxious douchebag guys, and more editing.  I pointed out in my review of the last one that they slavishly stick to the idea of found footage and thus do no editing or soundtrack addition (at least none so obvious that I noticed.)  Paradoxically, this only exposes the artificiality of films in general and makes things somehow feel more fake than a conventional film.  With this one, they just embrace editing and soundtrack however.

Ok, so here's a little mini-review of each the films:

• Phase I Clinical Trials
• This film was the weakest of the bunch.  It was about a guy who gets an experimental digital camera eye which we 'see' out of.  It features some truly CD-ROM-tier acting at one point and, although it was the only film to make me jump, it was not very original or interesting.  Pass.
• A Ride in the Park
• This one follows a guy with a go-pro on his helmet who gets zombified.  I think the idea for this film started and ended with "zombie with a go-pro" or possibly just "zombie-cam".  This one was not interesting to me.  There's some playing around with the zombie concept which is somewhat interesting but not enough to save it for me.
• Safe Haven
• We follow a news crew investigating what is clearly a cult.  I loved this one.  It dips into the supernatural (and zombies why not) at the end, but up to that there's creepy, smiling tour guides and loudspeakers barking speeches about Heaven and God.  All that's much more interesting to me because it's real, you know?  People actually drive themselves to murder and suicide because of faith and belief.  That's very sinister, very fascinating to me.
• Slumber Party Alien Abduction
• Alas, we couldn't wholly avoid the douche-bros.  This one features some very clumsy aliens who bedevil a slumber-party of teenagers and pre-teens.  It's interesting in its own way.  I liked, for example, all of the non-alien threats.  The loud bangs and lights are effective.  I believe the escalating prank war between the kids.  It's an inferior Incident at Lake County
• The Frame story
• This was serviceable but uninteresting connective tissue footage.  There was one scene I loved: when the woman's head and hair passes by the camera, he fingers scrabbling dumbly against the floor.  That shit was gold.  The rest is fairly limp though.  The main characters here are investigating a missing college kid.  They find an abandoned creepy house full of TVs and VHS tapes.  They then keep popping VHS tapes into the player in spite of quickly mounting creepiness.  Their VHS obsession quickly becomes unsustainable.  You just saw a monster dude, don't pop in another tape!  Oh well.

I don't really see a unifying theme of this film (other than zombies perhaps) but it's serviceable.  It delivers some scares but not ones so bad that I can't handle them.  The cult short was my favorite, but they're all okay at least.

Vampire's Kiss

Saw Vampire's Kiss, a ridiculous Nicholas Cage movie.  It follows a strange, valley-accented, vapid, psychiatrist-visiting publisher (Nick Cage) who stars unravelling after he imagines a hookup with a vampire.  The film is billed as a dark comedy, so there's a lot of high strangeness about and a lot of surprising cruelty.  It's basically not a great movie, but there's a few amazing scenes which I quoted for a few days.

One of the hits, in this hit-and-miss movie, comes near the end, when Cage's vampire-obsession is reaching a fever pitch.  He tries to buy fangs, but can only afford the white plastic Halloween fangs.  Using these, he does a shot-for-shot imitation of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu in a night-club.  The image of him, pop-eyed and staring with a mouth full of plastic and slobber is hilarious.  Ditto for the following scenes of Cage accosting random (actual, non-actor) strangers on the street, gesticulating and slurring "I'm a vaam-piah!  Kill meee!"  There's a lot of Cage-inflected insanity which is worth the price of admission.

Alas, there are some misses as well.  Particularly, one of the ways he's unravelling manifests with him tormenting some poor secretary.  There's one or two scenes involving this which are fun, but I have too much sympathy for the secretary and a lot of it is just awful.  This poor woman should have quit after verbal abuse session number two at most.  Good lord.  A window into the hiring conditions of the 80s I guess.  All of that stuff is fairly unpleasant.

The film is hit and miss.  It's making fun of its own characters, so feel free to join in with an MST3K quip.  It picks up steam, but it starts off sort of a slog and even the frenetic ending is marred by the business with the secretary.  I want to either feel bad for the main character or laugh at him, but the film wants me to do both, and it's hard.

Random fun fact: Christian Bale allegedly based Patrick Bateman's weird manic/formal behavior on Nicholas Cage in this movie.

M. Butterfly

Saw M. Butterfly, a film based on the play of the same title.  It follows a French diplomat who falls in love with a diva of the Chinese opera in proto-communist China.  She takes advantage of his love to steal state secrets.  This is a reversal of the classic Madame Butterfly opera, which depicts the perfect, stereotypical submissive oriental woman.  Here that trope is subverted - the seduction becomes a trap and the masculine conqueror is himself conquered.

There's a fairly major twist which deepens and complicates all of this however.  It's obvious if you know anything about Chinese opera and in this film they don't go out of their way to hide it, but it's really why I wanted to see this film and it's a prerequisite to all of the things I'd like to say about it.

So, here's the rest of the review in white font.  There's a lot of it.  Highlight to read, as usual:

The Chinese opera diva is of course a man.  This makes the theme of deception deeper and more troubling.  It leads to one of the killer lines of the film, when the diplomat says "I loved a woman who was created by a man."  In the context of the film, the diplomat is talking about the female persona of the opera singer, but it is equally true of the submissive Madame Butterfly archetype which is itself an invention of male writers and artists, inventing the ideal woman who never was.

But then again we now start running into trouble with the plot of the film.  The film is set in the 60s, when transexuals were unheard of.  The nature of opera singer's sexuality is left semi-ambiguous.  He may even be cis and straight.  Now look at my words in the first paragraph: the crafty opera singer "traps" the diplomat with his beauty.  This is a cruel way to talk about what may the doomed, impossible love of a gay man (or perhaps a trans woman) for a close-minded man in an intolerant age.

The film suggests in the end that the opera singer really did love the diplomat, and that helps some, but there's so much manipulation in the relationship that the opera singer still feels predatory to me.  The film was made in the 90s and I think is somewhat Problematic in this day and age, but then again ... then again ... there's something just so neat and satisfying and queer about the arrogant man wanting a submissive woman to obey his orders and stand, naked and exposed, before him only only to be exposed and humiliated himself - his secrets on display to the world.  Perhaps, just as a man can both love and exploit a woman, a gay man can both love and exploit another man.

Whew ok - no more spoilers - but really they're not that major and it's only once you know what's going on that film opens up.  I liked this film a lot.  Much of the power of it comes from the script and the concept alone.  It's directed by Cronenberg and echoes some of his obsessions with identity, but anyone could have produced this and I'd like it just as well.  It was competently made and well acted, but the ideas are the real treasures.

Basic Instinct

Saw Basic Instinct, knotty little mystery film about a cop with a troubled past investigating a cool, bisexual, maneater of a novelist.  The film is clearly evoking Hitchcock throughout, particularly vertigo.  The novelist is a typical Hitchcock blonde and doubles, mind-games, and hair dye feature heavily as plot devices.  There's a hit-tip to Double Indemnity's famous staircase scene early on, and some inspiration from the noirs in the form of the central cop's semi-crooked-ness, but this is a Hitchcock film all the way.

The central engine of the film is the cat-and-mouse, is-it-or-isn't-it game that the cop and writer play with each other.  She's always one step ahead of him, manipulating him and others perfectly, making them dance her tune - or is she?  Maybe she really is just at the unfortunate nexus of stalkers, obsessions, and unfortunate accidents.  This ambiguity is teased until the very last shot of the film.

I found myself getting wrapped up in her mind games myself.  I was so put off by her messing about with the cops (uncrosses legs, re-crosses them) that I didn't trust her at all, but by the last scenes I wasn't so sure.  I wondered how she would have handled a gay detective.  On that note...

This is a very sexy film.  There's many sex scenes of various intensities, there's that infamous leg-crossing scene, and many pretty ladies smooching each other.  There is, alas, one of those basically-rape sex scenes where the girl shouts "no no" but I guess men were expected to be men back in those days, god help us.  That aside: apparently, the central cop was originally supposed to be a lesbian.  That would have been very interesting and might have side-stepped all of this.  This was filmed during the AIDS epidemic when homosexuality and sex in general was becoming much more serious again.  It's nice sometimes to see a film which clearly wants to titillate you and which is so interesting to boot.

This is a good movie.  The sex got a little tedious for me, but it's not intended for me of course.  I enjoyed the mental jousting the main characters do and the subtle interplay of who's acting, who's lying and about what now?  There's a lot of double-negative joking about serious matters and talk of "well if I were a murderer …" which is just delicious.  A nice knotty mystery in the spirit of Hitchcock.  Go see it!

Splice

Saw Splice, a sci-fi horror which is sort of light on horror but long on creature-effects.  It's a Frankenstein-like story about two rockstar geneticists who splice human and animal DNA to create some kind of fast-growing mutant which seems to be female, which seems roughly humanoid, albeit with double-joined legs, and whose blood is a cocktail of beneficial enzymes and chemicals.

The film was made the mid 2000s and although it was apparently inspired much earlier by the photograph of a mouse with an ear on its back, it feels inextricably linked with the start of the internet land rush and the dot-com boom.  The scientists especially reinforce this for me.  They talk about breaking the rules and pushing the envelope.  They get sweetheart deals from accented investors and drift into their lab at noon, listening to heavy metal and wearing hoodies.  Their homes are decorated with anime stills, band posters, and Munny dolls.  They feel like the arrogant techs turned capitalists who are on to something big.  Of course, rather than making mincemeat of our notions of privacy and information, they are hard at work on genetics and notions of humanity.

So, apart from silicon valley, the other inspiration here is Frankenstein - we have a creation, created in hasty exuberance, getting out of control of the creators.  In this case, the creators are a boyfriend-girlfriend pair of scientists, making the connection to parenthood inescapable.  Indeed, parenthood is brought up explicitly in the film, and that's clearly it's overriding theme.

The film gets quickly Cronenbergian once the creature shows up.  There's the self-destructive obsession and body-horror that he returns to over and over, and icky sexual bits.  The film is a lot of chilly fun.  It's most interesting of course just seeing what new mutation the creature reveals, or what new extreme the couple is pushed to, as they try to protect and contain their awful spawn.  The film is fairly dark and ultimately fairly nihilistic-capitalist, once the money-men get involved.  There's many interesting notions to think about but the film is well made enough that you don't really think about these until it's all over.  A good, gripping, interesting film.

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Saw Silent Night, Deadly Night, a ridiculous slasher movie about a boy who is terrified of Santa due to a Santa-costumed guy killing his parents in front of him.  The boy grows up to complete the cycle by going on a Santa-themed rampage as an adult.  The film is fairly sleazy, features many tits, and generated enough controversy that it got pulled from theaters and Phil Donahue devoted an hour-long show to it.

The film is a bit tedious.  The premise is pure camp, but the film doesn't play this up very much.  The central story of this orphaned boy succumbing to his demons is much more tragic and hokey than it is funny or imaginative.  I have a really hard especially believing that the main character could go from a quaking little boy cowering in corners begging Santa to spare him to a cold-blooded killer shouting "Naughty!  Naughty!"  I just don't buy it.  I call bullshit on this unrealistic depiction of Santa-psychosis!

Anyway, the film has a lot of breasts bared, so don't see it with your parents.  It's fairly tasteless and tacky but that's sort of fitting for a film about a killer Santa, I guess.  Indeed, a lot of good imagery is gotten out of manically smiling Christmas ornaments and blinking lights.  The Christmas traditions are very bizarre when you get down to it.  Imagine explaining to an alien why nutcracker soldiers are involved, for instance.

So, bottom line, I think this film is sort of a curiosity.  It's not really worth seeing unless "Santa-themed slasher film" tickles you for some reason.  I found my attention wandering often to the Utah winter, and how cold and nasty and dry it looked.  That was sort of nice to think about, but then this Santa guy kept getting in the way.

Basket Case

Saw Basket Case, a strange and low-budget horror film about a pair of conjoined twins.  One of them looks like a normal lanky dude (apart from a big scar and a giant-ass white-guy 'fro) but the other is just a head with flipper-like arms.  They were separated against their will at a young age and now they hunt the doctors who performed the operation, the normal-looking guy carrying his deformed brother in a wicker basket at his side.

The film is firmly rooted in camp and shlock - it's not making any grand statements, it just wants to shock you with the ghastly deformed brother and for you to be repulsed by the kill scenes.  It's more in the vein of Driller Killer or Studio Troma films - schlock first, but as a second thought, it's also weirdly a kind of subversion as well.  It takes the main characters surprisingly seriously.  It's not actually enlightened (the deformed brother is just a monster) but it's believable, how the normal-looking brother does kind of want a normal life and although he feels bad for the deformed brother, he doesn't share his rage and blood-lust.

It's billed as a horror/comedy but I found nothing to laugh at.  Most of the memorable scenes are shockingly gory or strange or even Cronenberg-ishly fascinating/repulsive (the last scenes of that one doctor's secretary - yuck.)  The mounting exasperation of the brothers' landlord is pretty funny, but it feels like set-dressing for the lawless land of 1970s New York.

I liked the film alright - I was happily surprised by the depth of emotion displayed by the characters, when they're not murdering doctors, but mostly they are just murdering doctors.  It got fairly tedious by the end for me.  It never really overcomes its premise, although it does do that premise justice.  This isn't just craziness for craziness's sake, it's craziness taken seriously and explored.  Net negative for me still, but it had bits of value in there too.

Dead Alive

Saw Dead Alive, an incredibly bloody and surreal horror/comedy from Peter Jackson.  Pre-Lord of the Rings, Jackson was mostly known for effects-heavy trash horror movies and this is one of them.  The Spanish title apparently translates to "Your Mother Ate My Dog" which I feel captures the spirit of this film a lot better than "Dead Alive".  This one starts out slow but gets truly nuts.

The plot follows this dweeby, Norman Bates-like dude who lives under his mother's thumb in a giant mansion.  One day, much to the displeasure of his mother, he goes on a date with a convenience store clerk to the zoo.  The mother follows to spy on them and is bitten by a hideous, stop-motion animated Sumatran monkey-rat.  She dies from this injury but doesn't stay dead (which happens sometimes when Sumatran monkey-rats are involved.)

The film is heavy on gross-out comedy/horror.  Zombie bites suppurate and fester, pus bursting wildly, sending strawberry custard flying onto the faces of horrified onlookers, or into the soup of oblivious gentlemen.  The film keeps ratcheting up the insanity up to dizzying heights until the climax, when a bunch of partiers descend on the mansion.  The final few scenes have got to be seen to be believed.  Let me just say, it takes the metaphor of the controlling mother trying to keep her child hers forever very literally.

There's so much craziness in the film though.  At one point a zombie's entrails fall out of him body.  The entrails get up and start running about, using the lungs as legs and intestines like an octopus's tentacles.  It's like The Thing, but with less budget.  Even before the final climax, there's plenty of nuttiness: there's a karate priest ("I kick ass for the Lord!"), drooling Nazi veterinarians, and zombie sex followed by zombie babies.  It's so over the top!

The humor is quite broad and although a few jokes landed, most of the time I sort of endured them.  I really didn't think the zombie baby stuff was very funny and I kept wondering why on earth the main character guy needed to keep his zombie mother secret.  Surely events have escalated out of your control, dude.  The craziness of the zombie biology is worth it however.

So, this is one of those films you put on for your unsuspecting friends.  They're expecting a campy good time that they can chat through, but they'll get all of this high-grade insanity, some tedious jokes, and five gallons of blood per second during the climax.  This film is an absolute trip.

Suspiria (2018)

Saw Suspiria (2018), a remake of the classic 1977 Itallian film which brought color to horror movies for years to come.  In this remake, gone are the eye-searing pinks and reds, and instead we have a muted, chilly, east German palate.  I saw the original a long time ago, and I remember thinking it was sort of too gaudy and not very scary, and this film is similar and opposite in many ways.  It's quite gaudy in its own way (lots of spooky CGI to be seen, although not as much as you'd think apparently) and although it's not terribly scary, it's sinister in its own way and plenty evokative.

The film draws its horror-energy from the creepiness and magic of performance art.  The film takes place in a modern dance theater ruled by a gang of hard-working, terrifying, passionate and charming women, swanning about in their chunky jewelry and patch-work dresses, they are weaving a kind of magic together.  They draw lines with tape on the ground and speak of energies and lead the girls in strange chants and ancient rituals.  Theater women may well be some kind of witch in real life.  Acting is a kind of possession after all.  I loved thinking about this as the film went on.

The film has an all-female cast and is heavily feminine.  Masculinity is ridiculed and actively rejected when it dares to show up.  The favored weapon of the baddies is a skewer, it's true, but one that's bent like a cat's claw or a surgical needle or a sickle, giving it a kind of earthiness and coyness.  Similarly, the intense dedication and weirdly intimate cruelty of women features in the film's scary scenes.

I really liked this film.  It's true I think this was largely for subjective reasons, given my happy memories of performing myself, but that can be said about any film.  This is an interesting, chilly, intense film that's worth a look.  So look.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Saw Beyond the Black Rainbow, another film by Cosmatos, the guy who directed Mandy.  His movies are really interesting.  Definitely ominous and dismal, but packed with color and a refreshing lack of monsters and aliens or whatever.  This film is set in a futuristic, 2001 Space Odyssey-style psychiatric lab run by gaunt, pale dude who looks like Supreme Leader Snoke.   His paleness however allows him to soak up the lighting like a sponge, becoming green or orange or (most often) deep red.  He speaks in a slow, serious, intense, mocking kind of way to everyone.  He sounds sarcastic but stays with this strange, sensual, writhing energy that's very off-putting.  It's only major drawback is that it's terribly slow however.

As with Mandy, this film derives its magical horror from psychedelics.  In a flashback to the 60s, we see some strange, drug-powered psychiatric experiment on consciousness go wrong, resulting in otherworldly horror and strange spectacle.  I feel this is a sort of update to the Cthulhu mythos: a man drives himself to edges of sanity and there finds inspiration or possession perhaps that wrecks a terrible evil on the land.  In this film, nothing's fully explained, but there's a lot of sinister shit and strange imagery.  Even though everything comes from ordinary drugs and sensory deprivation, it feels like aliens or demons or something.  It's very mysterious and purposeful - dare I say eldritch?

So but the main drawback is that it is quite slow.  You get to soak in every frame of strange imagery, but it crawls by like a snake.  The main character is full of pregnant pauses and long silences, punctuated by spasmodic twitches. The strange imagery does come, but slowly.  The film was interesting to me, but so slow that I don't know I'd want to see it again.  It kind of has to be seen alone because otherwise I think jokes and half-baked speculation will start filling up the pregnant pauses.

Lastly: here's a random head-cannon of mine you can use to blow your mind: what if this film was the prequel to Carrie?

A Night at the Roxbury

Saw A Night at the Roxbury, the comedy about two idiot brothers who are all about the 90's partying and catch-phrases, moronically spouting off pickup lines and spastically flapping about on the dance floor.  I found it pretty winning.  I thought it was roughly a spoof of Saturday Night Fever but, outside of a parody of that famous strut down the street to The Beegees, it's not really.

It's more like Bill & Ted.  The idiot heroes are well-meaning and slack-jawed, smilingly bemused by the world.  They do bother women a lot, but when they finally pick up some ladies and find a quiet bedroom, they still just can't stop saying pickup lines.  They've never gotten this far before and now don't know what to do.  It's sort of cute.

The film is winning, and I laughed a few times.  The humor mostly derives from absurdist, empty-headed TV-quoting and a bizarre running joke about a club owner who thinks his assistant is grabbing his butt.  I only really laughed at bits of outrageous physical comedy - when a pair of border collies dash inside, jumping up on the table, plates and glasses flying everywhere "be good, boys" casually shouts the owner.  I love the violence of it!

Also it's neat seeing the peak early 90s fashions.  I was too young for all of this of course, but the mesh shirts and the plastic visors and flip-phones seem so familiar.  It's too bad it was still considered nerd stuff, but I can imagine these guys getting some tunes off of napster and charging up their mp3 players and heading to raves!

I don't think I learned any big lessons, and I don't think there was a deeper meaning to puzzle out, but the movie was a harmless goof and I enjoyed it anyway.  It's a good way to spend 90 minutes.

Saturday Night Fever

Saw Saturday Night Fever, expecting a Grease-like romp but actually getting a The Outsiders-style harsh look at the desperate lives of kids who hang out in dance halls, their bodies aging and their dreams drying up.  It was a bit of a surprise.

The film follows Travolta, the Dancehall King, who works at a paint shop and dances every Saturday.  He falls in love with a fancy dancy lady who disdains him and his life.  "You're a cliché!  You're nowhere on your way to no place."  She's getting out of there and improving her life, but even she only works in a talent agency and brags constantly about getting movie stars coffee.  Yeah, she's trying to get out of the slums, but she dances the nights away on the weekends too.

Outside of dancing, Travolta hangs out with a gang of tough kids who get into turf wars and get girls pregnant.  There's a theme of people not really having direction - bumbling into marriages or jobs, as though that will bring their lives meaning or give them direction.  It's ultimately pretty sad.

The film is teenage-focused.  It's tough to remember sometimes because Travolta's character claims to be 19, despite Travolta being 23 (and likely only in movie-years) but these are kids, preoccupied by feeling good and looking good.  They're having fun but they're seeing the unfairness of life and slowly recognizing that their dreams are hollow.  But maybe the doomed pursuit of a dream is enough.  They're not going to get fulfilling jobs and they're likely going to get trapped into marriages if they don't die in shootouts first.  So why not just dance?

The film is surprisingly melancholy.  It's not a total bummer.  It dwells in desperation, but there's joy there too.  The film is subtly about a search for meaning in life, and thus is a very adolescent kind of film.  I wish they'd gotten actual teenagers to play these parts, but this is alright too.  You do have tolerate a lot of disco however.  This film loves its dance and musical interludes.

Contagion

Saw Contagion.  I added it to my list of films to watch during the first days of Covid.  It was made in 2011 but eerily echoes what we went through in reality.  The wonky terms "social distancing" and "R-naught" are brought up.  Bodies are tossed into mass graves dug hastily on public land.  It was most interesting to see how the film did and did not predict the future accurately.

The film has an all-star cast.  It tells little intertwining stories spread all over the globe and at all levels of government and medical science.  By bouncing between these stories, we get a sense of what's going on in the world and are also kept rushing along.  We don't get bogged down in the race for the cure but we also don't get too lost in the weeds of the average day-to-day.

The film interestingly overestimates our leadership and underestimates the general public.  Gangs of thugs are seen robbing houses and looting grocery stores.  The army is deployed and crowds of feral, shouting people swarmed them for food.  None of that happened in real life.  In real life there was a run on toilet paper that was left mostly to the groceries to deal with and the leadership, far from deploying the military, largely ignored the virus - saying it was overblown if it was brought up at all.

There's a truly despicable Alex Jones-type character who peddles snake oil to his internet followers and casts doubt upon the well-meaning powers that be.  That's spot on accurate, but I view that man as a kind of avatar of the internet as a whole.  In reality of course, our president was the one pushing a quack remedy (hydroxychloroquine,) and Covid denialism and a refusal to wear masks is now rampant.  The film did completely miss the economic upheaval and of course the quirky Zoom-centric socialization we all indulged in for a while.

The film is fairly chilling, really.  It ends with the virus being repulsed at last and there's some high drama involving the search for the cure, but the scenes that stick with you are the early ones, of a doctor from the CDC trying to set up quarantine only to be interrupted by squashy small-town leaders demanding to know who's going to pay for this, or the finger-pointing over the source of the virus, as though nationalistic face-saving were more important than human lives.  When it originally came out, I suppose the film was ultimately uplifting, but mid-pandemic as we are, it feels sort of comforting and sort of depressing.  Definitely an interesting viewing experience.

Purple Noon

Saw Purple Noon, an early adaptation of the novel Plein Soleil which was more recently adapted into The Talented Mr Ripley.  This film therefore follows Tom Ripley who is sent to Italy to fetch Phillipe, the idle rich son of an American tycoon.  In Italy, Tom copies Phillipe's mannerisms, his way of talking and writing, even wears his clothing.  There's a strong queer undercurrent to all of this of course which is made more explicit in the modern version.  In this version however, all of that is sublimated and Phillipe's girlfriend is made into the goal of Tom's designs.

This film is very understated.  The story works best as a kind of mystery or thriller.  It's fun to watch Tom change identities and swap names and lie and contort and always manage to stay just one inch out of danger.  It was hard for me to follow who he was to different people however.  There were times he told lies or changed clothing and it was clear to me why.  Surely more than one guy has a pin-striped jacket in Rome, right?  Also the backstory is explained through dialog with little preamble.  I was grateful that I kind of knew the story beforehand.

The other drawback of the film is that although Tom is supposed to be a forgettable, chameleon-like, non-entity, he's played by Alain Delon who is one of the most beautiful people to have ever existed.  Tom is supposed to be taken with and fascinated by the "beautiful people" that he encounters through Phillipe.  This dude is so freakin pretty, they look like frogs in comparison.

Anyway, the film showed its age a bit, not only in the elaborate rules of hotels and police, but also in the moral tone of the film which is far less dark and muddy than the modern version.  This is a pity, but whatever.  Mostly I wanted to see this because it had Alain Delon in a queer-coded role, and that it delivered on.

Zathura

Saw Zathura, a strange, space-themed Jumanji rip-off (although to be fair, it's also based on a Chris Van Allsburg book, so "rip-off" is probably too strong a term.) Anyway, I had low hopes going in.  Like Jumanji, I just hoped this would be fun and episodic - the main character kids dealing with each little challenge as their house crumbles around them.  Since this is space-themed, I expected them to ultimately be playing on a little scrap of floorboard, floating in space, perhaps a whimsical lamp to keep them company.

The film is pretty much that.  Each little challenge is dealt with as the next one arrives.  There's a lot of Buck Rogers ray gun iconography, but this is a modern kid-friendly comedy, so everyone has to act laconic and eye-rollingly bored and arch and sarcastic.  This is a little sad, but that's kid's movies for you.  The Zathura game is a great prop however.  The pressed-tin tech looks great and is a neat aesthetic to explore, rather than the by-now-trite clockwork or the carved wood of the original Jumanji.

The central conflict of the film, apart from the whizzing meteors and such, is the rocky relationship between the two brothers, who fight and scream and wish that the other had never been born.  It's fairly sad stuff, more-so for being broadly played.  The older brother is supposed to be a sort of jock bro but he comes off as cruel and aggressive.  The younger boy is clearly the protagonist, and he's supposed to be aggravating, but once again the director can't bring himself to actually make the kid aggravating, so instead everyone else comes off as mean to this poor little moppet.

There's also something near the end that happens that I thought was very weird.  It feels spoiler-y to me so highlight if you're interested: One character turns out to be another one from another dimension or a different timeline or something.  It's fairly confusing to me.  Nothing else that high-concept happens in the movie - it's all Buck Rogers whiz-bang.  I guess the reality-warping game itself could compare, but one thing at a time you know?  It feels like a hat on a hat.

So anyway, the film is exactly what it looks like: an inferior duplicate of Jumanji which was itself not an amazing film.  I have huge nostalgia for it (Jumanji) but that wasn't quite enough to carry me through this film.  It's not terrible and I enjoyed it alright, but it was a little tedious.

Man on Fire (1987)

Saw Man on Fire (1987) which I believe is the original film that the now-more-famous Denzel Washington movie is a remake of.  This original is set in Italy and features a much more John Rambo-ish kind of guy - a long-haired, greying man still heavily rattled from his wartime experience.  Whereas in the modern (2004) version Denzel had a drinking problem, in the 80s, the reality of Vietnam and of course WW2 were fresh enough in the collective memory that merely being in the war was a believable reason that this character would be giving up on life.

Only of course, he gets a second shot of vitality from an adorable, wise-for-her-years moppet who sulks and giggles her way in the main guy's heart.  These scenes are a little more uncomfortable than the 2004 version.  In the recent version they establish Denzel's feelings of care through sports training.  It's a sort of tough love that's not terribly tender.  In this version, the main character is much more fatherly - beatifically smiling and admiring.  They don't establish as well that the girl's real father is absent, and thus the main character feels a lot more like a usurper, or even a predator.  I'm sure it's not meant to come off that way, but I'm just reporting my experience of it here and that was one of discomfort.

Anyway, the film is less action-packed than the modern version.  There's less unstoppable action-hero stuff and more getting shot and wretchedly limping.  But what it lacks in Action it makes up for in style.  There's a lot of weird settings and flourishes.  At one point the cops are showing mugshots to the hero, projecting the images eerily and spectrally against his hospital room's curtains.  A couple of scenes are filmed in swooning slow motion and the when the characters get homicidal, they seem feral, rat-like.

This was an interesting film.  More muted than the original, but more grounded as well, more real.  The hero had more pathos but less power.  It's somewhat dated (that grainy footage) but it's an interesting contrast to the more modern film.

Flushed Away

Saw Flushed Away, a fairly winning Aardman animation film about an anthropomorphized pet rat who is kicked out of his cushy (if solitary) home and flushed down a toilet by a usurper.  There, he finds a bustling rat-themed parody of London, complete with Rolex Big Ben and American rat tourists.  He tries to return to the surface world and to home but along the way (as you might imagine) he learns a few lessons and discovers that maybe the status quo isn't for him any more.

I'll just say a short word about the animation: Aardman is known for their claymation however much of this film is obviously computer generated.  This is fairly off-putting at first because I was expecting warm, thumb-smudged clay and I got shiny, plastic-looking polygons.  You get used to it eventually and I think they either composited claymation with CGI or animated in the little nicks and fingerprints into some models, because I saw some on some characters.  Anyway...

The film is pretty fun - I got the sense that basically everyone was having a good time producing this film.  Ian Mckellen puts in a great, hammy performance as an evil toad and there's a French frog (of course) who has a lot of fun business (and also some not so fun - I loved the physical comedy, I didn't love the nationalistic teasing.)  the central plot of the film revolves around a romance which - okay whatever - but the film keeps zipping along.  I also liked the singing slugs who are the by-now-mandatory, anonymous, musical, marketable, recurring gags.

It's a fun film, not amazing, but definitely not a chore to sit through.  A film that might become a small favorite for someone.

Slither

Saw Slither, a funny horror movie about an alien/demon/monster slug thing that takes over a small town, leaping into people's mouths and turning them into zombies. The film is humorous but not a comedy.  There's moments where you get a rueful chuckle or a 'what the fuck?' kind of laugh.  It's never really in doubt who will win in the end, but it's still satisfying to watch and creepy at parts.

For the most part the film is standard horror movie stuff, with incompetent cops and hysterical ladies, but sometimes it slips into inspired strangeness, such as when the zombies start speaking in unison, or when they encounter a zombie deer.  There's a Violet Beauregarde-alike which is truly terrible and fascinating to behold.  Great stuff!

No film can be all crazy new concepts however, and often we're getting the usual shambling villagers with outstretched arms and screaming women and so on.  All of that's played so by-the-book, it almost feels like camp - but that's just the connective tissue to get the real heart and gristle of the film.  It's a fairly fun and good movie.