Film Review: Kimberly Peirce's Carrie

A good remake, huh?  Okay, it can happen once and a while.  Right?  Perhaps.  A good remake (oxymoron perhaps?) must tread that fine line between being faithful to the original while also giving us something fresh and (ironically perhaps?) new.  In essence, Kimberly Peirce's remake of Brian De Palma's 1976 horror classic, which in turn was, of course, an adaptation of Stephen King's iconic first novel, does the first part well.  She may not imbue the film with the almost satiric visual prose that De Palma did, nor does her film have the visceral urgency of the original (De Palma's film is more stylistic, of course), but the director does give her version enough of a chilling realism vibe, to make it more than merely passable as inevitable homage.  But as for the second half of our aforementioned fine line treading, Peirce falls woefully short of the proverbially intended goal line.  Nowhere inside this basically faithful remake, is there even an ounce of freshness.  Peirce seems to bring nothing to the table, or screen, in the way of a fresh outlook on the story.  Sure we get the necessary updates (poor Carrie White's surprise menstruation fiasco goes viral on Youtube) but otherwise, unlike those few fresh remakes we get now and again (Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and Soderbergh's Ocean films come immediately to this critic's mind) this film is given no real reason to even exist.  Harsh I know, but all too true.

Peirce (coincidentally, to give a bit of a shout out, the director was born just a few months after me in the same town from where I hail), who is only now getting around to her third film, after her spectacular 1999 debut Boys Don't Cry, and her rather lackluster 2008 film, Stop-Loss, handles the chores of remake helmsman well, using intriguing camera angles and imposing, though perhaps a bit too obvious, religious imagery, throughout her film, but as I have said already (hounded about actually), the director gives nothing fresh to the story.  Some have claimed this to be a more faithful adaptation of King's novel than De Palma's film (I've never read the book, so I cannot weigh in on that), but the film seems to follow De Palma's original pretty well (so much so that I keep complaining about nothing new being brought to bare here), so it really can't be that much more faithful. But really, De Palma is one of those directors you either love or hate, and for those of us who love the guy, it is hard to imagine anyone doing something better than he.  Well, except for Hitchcock, but that's a whole other story. So that leaves the performances, and how they fare up to the somewhat unfair, but completely inevitable comparisons to the original.

Sissy Spacek was an unearthly Carrie White, something akin to a living ghost, a beautiful young woman, but not in the so-called typical way, while Chloë Grace Moretz, a stunning girl herself, though more classically pretty (apparently more like how the character is described by King), gives Carrie an almost typical teen angst vibe - albeit a typical ten from hell kinda angst.  Moretz, who at sixteen is more age appropriate for the role (Spacek was a full decade older when she played the seventeen year old high school senior), does a fine job with the character (she is given more depth than De Palma allowed in his auteur take on the book), but let's face it, Carrie isn't the real horror of this horror show.  No siree, the real terror here is Carrie's mother-from-hell, Margaret White.  In De Palma's film, Piper Laurie gave one of the most chilling performances in the genre's long history, and here, Julianne Moore nearly equals such a feat.  The actress brings forth a vibrant, dangerous, and quite freakin' scary as hell demeanor to the role, and pulls it of with a stunning array of subtly and chutzpah.  

As for the rest of the cast, other than Judy Greer's fine take on the Betty Buckley role of good samaritan gym teacher, they are pieced together by a bunch of look-a-like pretty boys and girls with no real depth or soul amongst them. Not that Amy Irving and Nancy Allen, as good girl and bad girl respectively, were ever considered at the top of their fields, but both handed in fun performances in the original.  Hell, one of 'em even went onto marry, and later divorce, the director (the other did the same with Steven Spielberg, but another day for that tale).  And let's not forget John Travolta as Allens' ne'er-do-well boy toy.  We get none of that in the remake.  So yeah, Moretz and Moore do commendable jobs in their iconic shoe-filling, and Peirce does do some good work with her retelling of De Palma's adaptation of King's original source material, and overall, it is a passable remake, sort of something in the realm of Gus Van Sant's inexplicable and quite unnecessary near shot-for-shot Psycho remake, but without anything new being brought to the damn thing (hell, even the Footloose remake from a few years back had some balls to its retooling, so why not here!?), there is really no reason for the film to even exist, no matter how well the leads play their parts.   Then again, such a thing can be said about 98% of the remakes around today.  My suggestion?  Go out and get yourself a copy of De Palma's 1976 classic (there is a lovely Bluray on the market), and watch that instead.

Film Review: Adam Wingard's You're Next

When recommending this new thriller from Adam Wingard, I cannot say, with any semblance of seriousness, that what you are about to experience is a movie bathed in originality, or even any huge amount of creativity.  You're Next is not a film that will have you talking about the bravura acting prowess of any of its cast, or the sparkling wit and witticisms of its script.  You're Next is not a film that will surprise you much with it's so-called twists and turns - unless perhaps you have never seen a movie before this one.  No, You're Next is not something groundbreaking like The Cabin in the Woods or High Tension, two films of which I was hoping to be able to compare this one.  What you will get with You're Next though, is a fun and surprisingly funny romp through the silly blood and guts of the genre.  Not the high art set of horror/slasher films, but still an oddly enjoyable one.

The premise of the film is simple enough.  A wealthy and appropriately dysfunctional family come together for the parents' 35th wedding anniversary, only to be attacked by a gang of animal mask wearing home invaders who take joy in picking off the family members one by one.  At this point  the film is merely another home invasion story (though one fellow critic called the film a blend of Ordinary People and Scream) but a few twists and turns later, though admittedly easily predicted twists and turns, and we have ourselves an intriguing little arthousey kinda slasher flick.  Even though the film isn't necessarily scary in any way (a handful of gotcha moments), it is fun to watch everything unfold, and there are some rather interesting types of death, especially in the penultimate kitchen fight scene.  

With the Mumblecore movement at its core (Mumblecore bigwig Joe Swanberg even joins in by playing the most obnoxious of the four quite obnoxious siblings), You're Next never sports a big budget or a big name cast (Swanberg probably is the biggest name), and this D.I.Y. attitude helps to make the film work better than better known faces would have done.   Overall, the film, if not anything spectacular (I really was hoping here), is quite fun, and as I stated earlier, quite funny.  Then again, perhaps I am just a bit more twisted than most.  So yeah, I do recommend You're Next, if for nothing else, the chutzpah of the final girl, and the closing scenes.  And don't even get me started on the creepy feel that the eternally looping "Looking For the Magic" by The Dwight Twilley Band, gives to the overall enjoyment of the film.  Fun, indeed.

Film Review: Marc Forster's World War Z

Now I have not read Max Brooks' best selling novel upon which this film is based, so I am not among those who are up-in-arms about how drastically the story was changed when going from page to screen - and it was apparently altered quite a bit, from everything I have read and heard on the subject - and because of this, I cannot judge the film as an adaptation, but only as a zombie film, on its own merits.  Doing that very thing, I can say that World War Z, as a zombie film, on its own merits, ain't half bad.  Granted, I had expected more out of the film, but what I got, what we all got, the aforementioned nay-saying source material lovers aside, was a fun Summer blockbustery romp, that may not go down in the annals of film history as one of the apex-setters of its genre, but is surely something with which to waste an afternoon in the dark. 

That being said, I must make one note, repairing a misconception that is only made more evident by that big blaring Z in the title, and was even added to by my own necessitative use of the word in the above opening salvo.  World War Z isn't exactly a zombie film per se.  Yeah, yeah, the Z-word is used more than a few times in the film, and I assume, in the book as well, but this film, this sub-genre if you will, is much more akin to something like 28 Days Later than it is to the likes of George Romero's gut-wrenching oeuvre or AMC's The Walking Dead (best damn show on TV btw).  World War Z is an outbreak movie more than a living dead film, but then there I go again, griping about apples and oranges, when I should just be reviewing the damn movie.  And speaking of that, as an outbreak movie, on its own merits, World War Z is a damn fine romp indeed.  Perhaps not great (the aforementioned 28 Days Later being the apex-setter of that genre) and perhaps lacking the depth of The Walking Dead or the balls-out intensity of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, but still a fun film.

As for the acting, there are some fine actors hiding away in this film, but let's face it, this is Brad Pitt's show, and there is nothing wrong with that.  One of the more overlooked actors around (he's too pretty to be truly talented seems to be the general, subconscious response), Pitt is actually quite the chameleon.  From 12 Monkeys and Kalifornia back in his early days, to Moneyball and Inglourios Basterds as of late, Pitt can more than stand his ground with the best working today.  Granted, there really isn't all that much acting needed in a film like World War Z - the CGI-action, sometimes good, ofttimes not so good, is the real star here - but Pitt still gives it what he's got (see Brad run below - run Brad, run), and the grand scale entertainment is let loose.  Even so, the film never quite reaches the heights it is most likely aiming for here.  Apparently Brooks' novel is as much an indictment on government corruption and isolationism as it is on balls-out zombie action, and it would have been nice to see more of that aspect in the screenplay, a screenplay that has been written and rewritten several times, including by Cabin in the Woods' Drew Goddard (he also did a lot of work on Buffy and Lost, if that is your thing) and comicbook writer J. Michael Straczynski (he had a great run on The Amazing Spider-Man and his current recurring book, Ten Grand, currently on sale via Image Comics, is one of the best comics of 2013), but flaws and foibles aside, it is still a more than competent take on the subject matter.  

In fact, flaws and foibles aside once more, there are several moments in the film that can be called rather breathtaking.   From the taking of the walled city of Jerusalem to the airplane ride from hell to the penultimate set piece taking place inside a World Health Organization facility overrun by those damn Z's (the latter is actually some of the best use of subtle intensity on film in a long long time), and even if the film doesn't quite deliver as much as this critic had hoped for, it is still a damn fine piece of popcorn entertainment.  And in the throes of a long hot summer, what more could one ask for?  Okay, that was a rhetorical question, but hey, the film was fun, so who am I to complain?  I'll leave that up to those who have read the book and are crying bloody apocalypse.

Guest Review: Carter Liotta Looks at Val Lewton - Part II

The following is the second in a series of guest reviews by my good friend, Carter Liotta.  Mild mannered eye doctor during the day, and ravenous cinephile at night, Liotta, whose writing, digital videos and pithiness can be found at his delightfully droll Wordpress sight, takes a look at the works of legendary film producer Val Lewton.  We here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World (which means, me) are glad to have him aboard.  Enjoy.

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I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Two months before Cat People opened in 1942, the cameras had started to roll on producer Val Lewton’s second film. RKO Pictures had tested and approved the title I Walked with a Zombie, and now wanted a movie based on the title.

Zombie is a movie loved by most critics in spite of its failures and gaping plot holes. It works because it is about mood and atmosphere rather than horror itself. It’s about voodoo, mental illness and alcoholism. It may even be about zombies. Like many Lewton films, it’s never quite made clear.

Most of all, I Walked with a Zombie is an exercise in misdirection, including the title itself. Audiences expecting to see hordes of brain-eating zombies on the march have an entirely different experience.

The film begins with two figures walking distantly on a beach. It’s not clear who these people are, and the film never returns to this scene to let us know definitively. A voice-over from Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) explains in a wistful tone that “I walked with a zombie last night.” It’s the same tone in which Meryl Streep says “I once had a farm in Africa.” It promptly defuses any notion that walking with a zombie is anything other than a calm, etherial experience.

Connell, a Canadian, has been recruited as a private nurse to the ailing wife of a sugar baron named Paul Holland (Tom Conway). Holland lives on the fictitious West Indian isle of Saint Sebastian, where the black population was brought in chains generations ago and now practices Haitian voodoo.

Once on the island, Betsy learns that her charge is “a mental case.” Taken by fever, Mrs. Holland is now nonverbal and detached from the world except to sleepwalk or be guided by the sane. Concurrently, there is an unspoken, hard-boiled tension between Paul and his alcoholic younger half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison), the result of a love triangle with Jessica prior to her becoming a vegetable.

Betsy decides to find a cure for Jessica, and is told by the two white medical experts on the island, including the brothers’ own mother (Edith Barrett), that it’s hopeless. At night, however, Betsy hears voodoo drums, and realizes that voodoo medicine may be able to break Mrs. Holland’s trance.

And so, Zombie is a movie of opposites: white people and black people, Canada and the Caribbean, medicine and voodoo, living and dead. Rather than being contrasted, the lines are blurred so that the audience does not have a good sense of right and wrong and how to judge the situation.

Adding to this disorientation are the sets, which seem to move in subtle ways. Does Betsy’s room look out upon the courtyard? The sugar fields? Paul Holland’s living room? Does Mrs. Holland live in a tower? Under a tower? In a room beside the tower? Moreover, why do seemingly important plot devices end up meaning nothing? Is it that a bad B-Movie was careless with the script and the shooting? Or are we being told that realities are far less explainable than what simple plot devices normally allow?

For a 1943 movie, I Walked with a Zombie is remarkably modern in its portrayal of its black characters, the history of island slavery, and even in its respect toward voodoo. It is surprising, given the films exploitative title, that it fails to exploit such low-hanging fruit. Lewton became fascinated by Hatian culture while working on the piece, and spent a percentage of his paltry budget hiring genuine voodoo drummers and a Hatian cultural and voodoo expert named LeRoy Antoine as a technical adviser.  It is quite possible that the relationship between Lewton and Antoine allowed a black perspective into the writing, rather than it being a white man’s perception of slavery and voodoo.

Mark Robson, in The Celluloid Muse, noted that Lewton was a difficult man with whom to work. He wasted time and seldom could accomplish anything without the pressure of a deadline. When his employees went home at night, his insomnia would keep him up, rewriting the script and mulling over new ideas.  Lewton encouraged extensive collaboration, but then made the end result deeply personal.

Hired to write the script was Curt Siodmark, whose work writing horror pictures for Universal monster movies was well known. Lewton’s plan had always been to throw away the Universal formula, and eventually he threw away Siodmark, himself, replacing him with screenwriter Ardel Wray.  As in many Lewton films, Val Lewton re-wrote the final draft of the script, but never took writing credit.

And so, we’re never sure whether the forces that lead to discord and death are spiritual or human, or whether the moon reflecting upon the water is beautiful, or whether it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies and is the glitter of putrescence.  What’s beautiful and benign can seem eerie, and those things that cause us great concern can, in the end, be benign.

Guest Review: Carter Liotta Looks at Val Lewton - Part I

The following is the first in a series of guest reviews by my good friend, Carter Liotta.  Mild mannered eye doctor during the day, and ravenous cinephile at night, Liotta, whose writing, digital videos and pithiness can be found at his delightfully droll Wordpress sight, takes a look at the works of legendary film producer Val Lewton.  We here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World (which means, me) are glad to have him aboard.  Enjoy.

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Cat People (1942)

In 1942, the studio heads at RKO gave Val Lewton his first title to turn into a movie,  Cat People.  On a budget of $150,000 and with no-name actors, what could have become a display of sub-par special effects and bad makeup instead was turned into a taut, psychological drama by Lewton and his team.

Written by DeWitt Bodeen, and directed by Jacques Tourneur, Cat People follows the Lewton formula for which his other movies would become known: two scenes of implied, questionable horror, one scene of actual, graphic horror, cut, wrap, print.  Lewton’s sense of terror dealt with the unseen and the unknown – the feeling of being followed, or the sense of being watched, rather than the blood and gore of slasher films, or the terrifying monsters of Universal Studios.  Indeed the first half of Cat People could easily be mistaken for a relationship drama.

We are introduced to Irena (Simone Simon), an immigrant from Serbia, and Oliver (Kent Smith), the architect that meets her at the Central Park Zoo in front of the panther cage and decides to court her.  By the time their first date ends, she has dramatically recounted cultural lore: the village she left behind was filled with Satanists who ran to the hills when King John brought Christianity to Serbia. Allegedly, there are still descendants of these Satanists who, provoked by anger or sex or jealousy, turn into giant panthers.  

Irena believes that she may be one of these “cat people,” but Oliver assures her that the lore is poppycock and marries her.  Fearing demonic transition, Irena refuses to kiss her husband, much less consummate the marriage, and Oliver, thinking that his wife is crazy, seeks advice from a psychiatrist (Tom Conway) as well as his co-worker, Alice (Jane Randolph).  When Irena learns that Oliver is seeking counsel and emotional support from another woman, she begins to spy, and is piqued by jealousy.

It is during the third quarter of the movie that it launches into horror.  Neither Oliver nor Alice believe that Irena can really turn into a cat.  But why does Jane feel she is being stalked?  Did the wind rattle the bushes, or was something there?  Are the shadows in the indoor swimming area a giant cat, or a trick of the eye and reflections of the water?  Moreover, Irena has the keys to the panther cage at the zoo – so if it is a cat, is it the zoo panther, or Irena?

Beyond the obvious plot, are the movie’s subtexts – Irena’s shame of sex and emotion brought on by the religion of her youth, further given life by Simone Simon’s cold, detached performance.

Cat People was lensed by Nicholas Musuranca, who, with Jacques Tourneur went on to make Out of the Past, a noir masterpiece.  Like a great noir, the movie is as much about fog and shadows, sharp angles and high contrast black-and-white, as it is about the actual plot devices.  Cat People is also about sound, be it the clicking of shoes on pavement or the echoing of screams in an indoor pool.  Sound is cheap on a low budget, and John Cass, an A+ Foley artist working for RKO’s B-movie department, provides terrifying ambiance.

Of note: The luxurious apartment in which Irena lives was the mansion set constructed for Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Cat People cost $134,000 to make, and grossed $4 million, while Ambersons cost $850,000 and lost $620,000.

Guest Review: Carter Liotta Looks at Val Lewton - Introduction

The following is the introduction to a series of guest reviews by my good friend, Carter Liotta.  Mild mannered eye doctor in the daylight, and ravenous cinephile at night, Liotta, whose writing, digital videos and pithiness can be found at his delightfully droll Wordpress sight, takes a look at the works of legendary film producer Val Lewton.  We here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World (which means, me) are glad to have him aboard.  Enjoy.

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Val Lewton: Movie Producer

In 1941, RKO Radio Pictures was struggling.  The studio, famous for releases like King Kong,  was being run into the ground by studio president George G. Schaefer.  Schaefer’s goal had become producing “quality movies at a premium prices,” and its relationship with auteur Orson Wells had buried the studio $2 million in the red at a time when a half-million dollar return was considered a good year.  By 1942, a full shakeup was in order.  Schaefer resigned, and many RKO employees who were not fired or did not seek jobs elsewhere were demoted to RKO’s B-movie unit. 

Charles Koerner was hired to replace Schaefer, and made an immediate decision regarding the studio, embodied in his motto: "entertainment, not genius." It was Koerner who, observing the huge profits that Universal Studios was making with monster movies, made the decision to hire a young assistant producer away from David O. Selznick to head up the B-Unit Horror division at RKO.  His name was Val Lewton.

The rules of the game were simple: Lewton world be paid $250 a week to produce movies that cost less than $150,000.  They would each be less than 75 minutes long, to play the bottom half of a double feature.  Finally, Lewton would be given a title that had been market-tested, and would have to conjure a movie based on the title alone.  What he did with the title was up to him.

Lewton brought a number of talented people with him, including screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, who also worked for David O. Selznick.  The two would often screen dozens of monster movies from other studios, long into the night, with the intention of "eliminating as many cliches of the genre as possible."

In addition to Bodeen, Lewton hired director Jacques Tourneur, with whom he worked on the second unit of Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities.  Lewton also gave RKO soundman, and later West Side Story director, Robert Wise, his first break at the helm.

Shooting schedules were generally under a month - some as few as 18 days.  Lewton, in spite of a limited budget, used the resources at RKO to their fullest extent.  He frequently utilized sets already built for other movies, took advantage of RKO's vast prop department, integrated stock footage from other films, and had the luck of working with talented editors and Foley artists who previously worked with Orson Welles and on expensive productions.

Charles Koerner died in 1946, forcing an upheaval at RKO and the shattering of Lewton's department.  Lewton worked the major studios until his own death in 1951.  Lewton's most famous body of work were his RKO productions between 1942-1946, and in the coming weeks, I will review the films found in The Val Lewton Horror Collection:

• Cat People
• The Curse of the Cat People
• I Walked with a Zombie
• The Body Snatcher
• Isle of the Dead
• Bedlam
• The Leopard Man
• The Ghost Ship
• The Seventh Victim

My hope is to re-introduce the movies of a man who did great things on film with virtually no budget.

Film Review: Fede Alvarez' Evil Dead

The promos for the new Evil Dead, read: "The most terrifying film you will ever experience."   I have a few rewrite suggestions.  How about "The most ridiculous film you will ever experience," or "The most boring film you will ever experience," or maybe my favourite, "The most unnecessary film you will ever experience."  Any of these adjectives are better choices than terrifying.  Any of them.  One could also toss in such replacement words as, in alphabetical order, dense, dull, dumb, foolish, futile, half-baked, ill-advised, inane, laughable, ludicrous, mindless, moronic, pointless, slow, sluggish, think and witless, just to give a few basic choices picked from the thesaurus.  Take your pick.  Any of these are better choices than terrifying.  Hell, I saw a rerun of the Golden Girls the other night that was more terrifying than this film.  Granted, Bea Arthur can be quite scary, but that is another story for another day.  Suffice it to say, this new version of the Evil Dead, be it a prequel, a sequel, a remake or a reboot, or whatever the hell it may be, is anything but terrifying.  In fact, it is downright, and dreadfully so, boring as all get out, and is a strong contender for my year end worst of the year list.

Now don't get me wrong, I suppose the thing is a moderately well done film when compared to most of what passes as horror these days, but still, much like those films that pass as horror these days, Alvarez relies way too much on gross out effects (nothing we haven't seen before, and in much more creative ways) and literally buckets and buckets of blood (Alvarez did go old school on the film, and tried to use less CGI and more traditional effects magic) and scenes of what have become known, both favourably and unfavourably, as torture porn, and way too little on sensible storytelling and narrative that does not reek of contrivance and stupidity.   Sure, it's a horror film, and people act stupid in horror films - don't go in the basement/attic, don't walk backwards when there are monsters or madmen in the house, don't split up to cover more ground, don't read aloud satanic passages after you are warned doing so will summon evil spirits from Hell - but the level of stupidity found in this version of the Evil Dead is beyond belief.  But, on the other hand, why worry about such things like sensibility and intelligence when you can just make it rain blood or have someone saw their own fucking arm off?  Really?

Now, how does this new version play into the whole Evil Dead franchise, you may ask.  I'll tell ya, but first a quick primer on all that has come before.  In 1981, after a student film-cum-prototype called Within the Woods, Michigan State lit major and future writer/director Sam Raimi, known by more mainstream audiences as that guy who made the first Spider-Man trilogy, fellow Spartan econ student and soon-t-be producer Robert Tapert, and college dropout-turned actor Bruce Campbell, made the first Evil Dead.  It was followed up in 1987 by Evil Dead II, basically just Raimi remaking and restyling the first film with a slightly larger, though still quite miniscule, budget, and then in 1992 by Army of Darkness, known in some circles as Evil Dead III, which transports Campbell's character Ash, back to Medieval times to fight evil minions known as the Deadites.  These films have quite the cult following, and are quite enjoyable as modern day comic-horror classics.   This new version, produced, not so incidentally by Raimi, Tapert and Campbell, acts as not a sequel or even a remake, but as a separate story involving the same book of evil found and used by Ash and his cohorts in the original films.  To compare this film to the others is just silly, since it cannot honestly hold up to such comparison.  

This film will have a sequel of its own, and, if rumour has it, a Raimi-directed followup to Army of Darkness, and eventually, again, if rumour can be trusted, a seventh Evil Dead film that will tie together Ash's story with that of Mia, from this version.  And what of Mia and her cohorts in this version.  Well, we do get a few fun things, some hidden cookies if you will.  We see a character wearing a Michigan State shirt, in homage to both the first film, and to Raimi's alma mater.  There is a visual reference to Ash's car from the original as well, and in a neat little play on letters, the first letter of each of the five main characters here, David, Eric, Mia, Olivia and Natalie, spell out demon.  Other than these cute little self-referential tidbits though, this new version of an old favourite, is just as drab as drab can be.  Even my quite low expectations going in were not met.  The most terrifying film indeed.  And as for Campbell's involvement (stay after the credits for what is essentially a completely unnecessary cameo, but also probably the best moment of the movie), in a 2011 interview, the man with the chin said of the then-upcoming film, "We are remaking Evil Dead. The script is awesome. The remake's gonna kick some ass.  You have my word."  I think me and Bruce need to have a talk.

Film Review: Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End

From the director who gave us the Phantasm series and the enigmatic Bubba Ho-Tep, comes yet another strange creature of a film.  John Dies at the End, adapted from the novel of the same name by David Wong, is a horror-comedy that is part Kafka, part Evil Dead, part Cronenberg (the earlier stuff), and part "Naked Lunch".   These things all rolled together make for a fun film - perhaps not a great film, or even an overly good one, but still a fun film.  I know, I know, damning with faint praise and all that, but hey, what can a guy do?  The film is silly and stupid, but in that good kind of way, often associated with the likes of earlier Sam Raimi, whose films are obviously a big influence on Coscarelli's film, but the film is also quite one-note, and such a one-trick pony show as this cannot expect to survive 99 minutes of itself.  

The film stars Chase Williamson, in his feature debut, as David Wong, and Rob Mayes as John Cheese, which incidentally are the nom de plumes of Jason Pargin, writer of the book and senior editor at Cracked.com, and fellow internet writer and old school chum, Mack Leighty.  They are sort of a slackerish duo of supernatural detectives, here pitted against demons from another dimension.  All this is fine and dandy, and a whole lot of fun when it wants to be, but the film often just sags, and therefore saps the inherent fun out of the whole shebang.  Then again, we go into such a film as John Dies at the End - a title that may or may not hold true by the way - not with whims of cinematic glory, hoping and praying for a new classic, but with giddy anticipation of something akin to the great fun that was the even sillier and even stupider (yeah, I know) Bubba Ho-Tep.  We do get the latter part, in part, but is that enough to save the film?  I would have to say, with honest-to-goodness sincerity, that the answer to that question is a big fat...um, maybe.  Perhaps?  Kinda?  Yeah, right.

Sure, the film never makes one feel like a daffodil or anything like that, but it does have some rather fun moments interspersed within its walls.  Moments like a faux Rastafarian telling fortunes for beers at a kegger before literally losing his head, or a giant spider/crab-like creature that can only be seen through one's peripheral vision, and that sufficiently freaks the fuck out of newspaperman Paul Giamatti, an actor often found in bizarro worlds such as this, or a festooning swarm of, um, of whatever that festooning swarm is of, or a talking and driving dog, or a frozen meat-creation that looks like a butcher shop exploded all over one of William S. Burroughs' mugwumps.  Okay, perhaps I did enjoy the film more than I thought I had.  Like I said, it may be far from perfect, but at least it is fun, even if that fun is sapped out long before the ending where John may or may not, die.  But then, there sure is a lot worse out there in movie land.  Again, with the damning with faint praise crap.  Oh well.

Battle Royale #4: Battle of the Horror Movie Giants

Welcome to the fourth Battle Royale here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World.   It is an ongoing series that will pit two classic cinematic greats against each other - and you can vote for who is the greater by clicking your choice over in the poll at the top of the sidebar.

With our fourth edition of the popular Battle Royale, we are going to get a little scary.  I remember first seeing many of these two great actor's films on late night television.  Back when I was growing up - that would be the 1970's and early 1980's if you are keeping score at home - before there was constant 24/7 TV broadcasting, there was a thing called the late show.  These late shows, or sometimes, late late shows, were where I first saw such classic horror movies as Dracula and Frankenstein and The Black Cat and King Kong and The Wolf Man and The Creature From the Black Lagoon and many many more.  These films had stars such as Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Lon Chaney, Sr. and Jr. - not to mention Julie Adams in that white bathing suit in The Creature From the Black Lagoon.  But none of these great stars were a match for the two that are invariably numbers one and two on any self-respecting classic horror movie star list - Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Béla Ferenc Deszo Blascó was born in 1882 in the town of Lugos, in what then was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and is now called Romania.  After changing his name to Bela Lugosi (taking his stage name from his hometown), the great actor became famous for portraying Bram Stoker's legendary Count Dracula on both stage and screen.  Meanwhile, William Henry Pratt, born in 1887 in London England, and going by the name of Boris Karloff, became equally as famous as Mary Shelley's creation, Frankenstein's Monster.  Always rivals (Lugosi was the first choice to play the monster in James Whale's film) but also always friendly and cordial to each other, Karloff and Lugosi were the kings of Universal Horror in the hey days of the 1930's.  When the horror craze began to wear down (it would speed back up again then in the 50's) it was Lugosi's career that would be damaged the most.  He would end said career with a series of films with the notoriously terrible director Ed Wood.  Meanwhile, Karloff's career (and the actor would not get typecast as badly as his rival, able to make some non-horror films as well) would pick back up again, albeit in the most b-picture manner, until one of his final roles as Byron Orlok, a not so thinly disguised version of himself, in Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 debut masterpiece Targets.

So you must ask yourself, is it Lugosi's creepy charm or Karloff's wicked charisma that gets your vote?  Do you go for the guy who was buried in one of his Dracula capes (at his son and widow's bequest, not his own as is commonly believed) or the man who gave voice to that mean one, Mr. Grinch?  The man who gave blood sucking its original debonair style (long before today's glittering fops turned such a thing into a running joke) or the man who bitch slaps a lone gunman into submission at the end of Targets?  The man who scared the bejeezus out of poor Lou Costello or the man that scared the bejeezus out of poor Lou...oh, yeah, they both did that.  Anyway, it is time to pick your favourite of the horror movie giants.  Karloff or Lugosi.  All you need do is go on over to the poll sitting up there at the top of the sidebar, and make your choice.  You can make as many comments as you wish on this post (and please do just that) but for your vote to count, you must vote in the poll in the sidebar.  You will have three weeks to get your vote in, at which time we will announce the scary victor of our fourth Battle Royale.  And also, if you have any ideas for future battles (preferably in the classic cinema mold), please let me know.  And let's try to get into the triple digits in voter turnout this time around.

Film Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

This film may not be the worst time Abraham Lincoln has ever had in a theatre, but it is darn close.  Too soon?  Oh well.  Seriously though, this alt-history take on our sixteenth president, wherein the young Mr. Lincoln, between studying for law school, decrying slavery and bashfully wooing the wealthy debutant Mary Todd, makes his way through life in the titular profession of vampire hunter, coulda, woulda, shoulda had much more, pardon the inevitably obvious pun, bite to it.  As a genre piece, the potential for something as subversive as Cabin in the Woods or perhaps as satiric as Shaun of the Dead, is inherently imbedded in the premise, but alas, Kazakh-born director Timur Bekmambetov, just could not give it, here we go again, the bite it needed to succeed.

Adapted from the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith (also the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which has made its own various unsuccessful attempts at filmdom lo the past three years or so), the film, through his secret diaries, tells of president Lincoln's attempts at stopping a vampire uprising in the nation.  We find out lots of fun things, like how the Confederacy was manned by the undead or how Harriet Tubman helped free slaves from not oppression so much as being blood-drained fodder for the plantation owners, most of whom by the way were apparently vampires.  The film stars Benjamin Walker as our intrepid vampire slayer-cum-great emancipator, and his blandness (think the poor man's Eric Bana) certainly does not help this already lumbering, languid movie.  We do not get much from the rest of the cast either.  Ramona Flowers herself, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as Mary Todd, really has nothing much to do.  Relegated to the thankless Olivia de Havilland role opposite Walker's lanky, lackluster Errol Flynn, Winstead never sees any action.  I mean c'mon, can't a woman be a vampire hunter?  The only interesting role, and the only interesting performance comes from Dominic Cooper as Lincoln's mentor Henry.  Granted, it is not all that meaty a role either, but by comparison, it almost soars.

In the end though, what it all comes down to is the sad fact that a film, whose premise is as inherently silly-sounding as this one's is, could have been something oh so much more than what it ends up being.  In the hands of a more competent genre filmmaker, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter could have been something akin to such cult horror faves as The Evil Dead or the aforementioned Shaun of the Dead.  I would be very interested in finding out just what someone like Joss Whedon or Zack Snyder or J.J. Abrams would have done with such a story.   Any of these three directors would have given the film so much more than what we get here.  Think of Whedon's ability to interact his characters or Snyder's brazen visual bravura or Abrams' blue lens flares as Walker's young Mr. Lincoln swings his mighty silver-tipped axe.  They may not succeed in making it a great or even good film, but they would almost assuredly make it more interesting.   Sadly though, we get the heavy handed Mr. Bekmambetov, whose best claim to fame is the equally silly and equally ham-fisted Wanted.  In Bekmambetov's direction, we get nothing of the necessary sense of humour the film so needs.  Not necessarily a comic film, but a sense of humour toward the story is needed to make a film such as this work, and we get nothing but blank seriousness from the director.  So perhaps this isn't quite as bad as getting shot in the back of the head while watching a mediocre production of Our American Cousin, but brother, it ain't much better.

Film Review: Chernobyl Diaries

I really have no one to blame but myself.  No one assigned this film to me.  I was not paid by any outlet to review this movie.  No one challenged me to see it.  No one dared me either.  No no no.  Not me.  I decided of my own free will and rather stupid volition to pay good money to see this film - knowing full well that what I was going to get would inevitably be something in the range of terrible to godawful.  Well guess what?  Yeah, I only have myself to blame.

With expectations quite low (and again, only myself to blame) I went to see this film and believe me when I say my expectations were indeed met.  This is the story of a group of genre-appropriately stupid twentysomethings who decide it would be a good idea to get in a van with a shady Ukrainian guy named Yuri and sneak into the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear facility for a tour.  Well guess what?  Yeah, that's right.  Let's just say it doesn't go quite as planned.  All the tricks and tropes of the genre are here.  Van doesn't start when they try to leave.  Creepy shadows in windows.  Strange noises that the characters go toward instead of run away from.  Creepy tour guide goes missing.  Dissension in the ranks.  A brother trying to prove himself.  More creepy shadows and noises.  Flesh-eating beasties.  It is all here, as is the eventual picking off one by one of these aforementioned genre-appropriate idiot twentysomethings, but none of it ever manages to scare and/or titillate for even a quick token moment.

We never get anything new or fresh here.  It is all pretty standard boilerplate stuff.  And therein lies the problem with the film.  A better script, with some more interesting characters and more interesting ways to die could have saved this film from the mediocrity it currently wallows in.  Sure, we can get past the inherent stupidity of the characters.  Kids are supposed to do stupid things in the horror genre.  They are supposed to go into the creepy attic.  They are supposed to split up and head to the woods to have sex.  We expect nothing less.  But the problem here is not the stupidity of breaking into a radioactive-laden abandoned nuke plant - we would be disappointed if they did not do such - it is how ordinary everything that comes after ends up being.  With no real imagination, first time director Bradley Parker and writer Oren Peli of Paranormal Activity "fame", hand us the blandest horror movie West of the Pecos.  Well, like I said earlier - I only have myself to blame.

Film Review: The Cabin in the Woods

Building on what things like Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead did in the 1980's and Shaun of the Dead and especially the Scream franchise did last decade, director and co-screenwriter Drew Goddard and producer and co-screenwriter Joss Whedon have taken tight hold of the horror genre and squeezed and twisted and folded and mutilated it until it screamed for mercy, then pushed it just a bit further until it figuratively and literally (not to give any spoilers away) came tumbling down on its own already fractured head.  An elaborately structured M.C. Escher house of cards that not only deconstructs the genre in all its giddy meta-cinema glory (or gory) but also gives it the kick in the ass wake-up call it has so desperately needed for oh so long.  This ladies and gentlemen, is The Cabin in the Woods.  For those in the more self-aware camp of moviegoers (i.e. the film geeks and cinephiles among us) this film should delight and entice.  For those looking for your typical horror flick, good luck.

Taking the typical tricks and tropes of the genre, Whedon and Goddard have concocted a film that by all outwardly appearances looks to be that same said typical horror flick, but once turned inside out and/or upside down, becomes a creature unlike anything else in this world or the next.  After a short prelude of men and women in lab coats walking around some sort of sterilized government-esque facility, talking about their marital problems and having mysterious conversations about how Stockholm has fallen and how the Japanese will always be number one, screen-filling red block letters announce the title in what appears to be an homage of sorts to Michael Haneke's Funny Games, and we are underway.  Next up we see the stereotypical college kids (suspiciously quite post-grad looking in appearance) getting ready for a weekend trip to the titular vacation spot, all in their respective genre-specific roles.  This is where we see the typical genre archetypes line up for the slaughter.  At this point, if you think you know what is coming next, think again.  Than after that, think again some more.  Repeat when and if necessary.

Now to give away any more of the twisted, topsy-turvy plot here would be giving away too much, and even though bits and pieces are given away in the trailer and any even semi-knowledgeable moviegoer would easily be able to decipher at least the most basic aspects of the secrets of the film, I would not wish to spoil the unfolding, multi-layered events for anyone out there.  Suffice it to say that we do get to see these aforementioned genre archetypes - the jock, the slut, the stoner, the scholar and the virgin  (or at least virginal seeming in this case - "we work with what we got") - get their all-important comeuppances, and we are allowed some of the other tricks of the so-called trade - the creepy, semi-toothless redneck who warns our intrepid collegiates of their impending doom, the dark basement where of course our brave soldiers giddily tread, the ubiquitous, albeit rather tame game of truth or dare, strange noises and happenings and of course the requisite zombie or two - but once plot twists begin putting a stranglehold on the deconstructive proceedings, and especially once everything goes completely batshitcrazy (look out for a rather bloodthirsty unicorn - I joke not), this will never be you grandpa's horror movie again.

Now as part of the ever-expanding Whedonverse (along with Goddard, this film contains several Whedon regulars including Dollhouses's paranoiac Fran Kranz as the stoner who figures it all out, sort of, in a haze of weed) one should expect nothing less than batshitcrazy antics from a film like The Cabin in the Woods, and therefore nothing, even the surprises (and if one looks closely they will see many hidden easter eggs in here), should really surprise one all that much, but still, watching the layers of the film, and therefore the layers of both cinematic sanity and genre manipulation (and possibly many of our real-life nightmarish ideas), come peeling off quicker and quicker as the film pushes forward - ofttimes in seeming turbo mode - this possible game-changer of a film is a film geek's wettest dreams come to, appropriately enough, its very own nightmarish reality.   What we get is a film that mocks the genre while at the same time caressing its finer points like a love sick puppy.  We get a movie that obviously loves the genre while simultaneously desiring to rip it to shreds - and then perhaps rip those shreds to shreds as well.

In what Whedon has called a 'loving hate letter', the producer/writer/director of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, an astonishing run on Marvel Comics' Astonishing X-Men, internet favourite Dr. Horrible and the upcoming big budget wouldbe boffo The Avengers, says this of The Cabin in the Woods:  "On another level it's a serious critique of what we love and what we don't about horror movies. I love being scared. I love that mixture of thrill, of horror, that objectification/identification thing of wanting definitely for the people to be alright but at the same time hoping they’ll go somewhere dark and face something awful. The things that I don't like are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances. Drew and I both felt that the pendulum had swung a little too far in that direction."  And rip it to shreds they do, but in the most alluring manner indeed.  We, like the characters herein, know we are going to a dark and dangerous place, but we, like they, ignore the warning signs, no matter how blatant they may very well be, and proceed forward anyway, knowing full well our doom awaits us at the end of the journey.

Populating their wooded cabin with veritable unknowns led by Kristen Connolly as the wouldbe final girl (the relatively untested soap opera actress more than holds her own in the role), the aforementioned Mr. Kranz (indeed a performance that could be used in any legalize pot ad) and bohunk Aussie Chris Hemsworth (during the nearly two year post-production hiatus this film suffered due to MGM's financial woes, then unknown Hemsworth has become the Mighty Thor and is these days basking in the glow of it-boy status) and popping in a few relative names (Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Sigourney Weaver), Whedon and Goddard have created a sturm und drang of cinema that does for the horror genre what Todd Haynes' equally audacious, cut and paste I'm Not There did for the biopic.  I do not think I am being presumptuous in calling this the best American film of the year so far, and a sure bet for my eventual Best of the Year list.  I do not think I would be wrong in calling this puzzle-cum-mindfuck of a motion picture, the most batshitcrazy of the year as well - even if many horror fans will not get or like it.   In the end, when the gauntlet is almost literally thrown down, all we can do is wonder what could  possibly follow this inevitable moment zero in the horror genre.  I know that I for one am both frightened and titillated by the possibilities.

Retro Review: Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.

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Teeth is a giddy mish-mash of genre monikers, from female empowerment movie to coming-of-age saga to black comedy-horror to rape and revenge drama to Lynchian suburban melodrama. Pop artist fil Mitchell Lichtenstein gives us the story of Dawn, a white picket fence pretty young girl coping with growing up "pure and virginal" in a world obsessed with sexual innuendo around each and every corner. This includes her own house as her lecherous big bad wolf epitome'd stepbrother sniffs after her with tongue a-flicking. After a date gone horribly, horribly awry, Dawn finds out that she is cursed with the mythical mutation known as "vaginal dentata" - aka she's got razor sharp teeth in her pussy, yo!  The result is that Teeth ends up being a quirky (how could it not be?), sunnily macabre work of neo-candy pop gyno-horror that can in no way whatsoever be watched by anyone of the male gender without constant squirming and shuffling about in what are suddenly very uncomfortable seats.

Opening in the suburban shadow of a nuclear power plant with towers billowing grey choke from their own gritty teeth, as if a nod-and-a-wink absurdist homage to The Simpsons.  Teeth struts out with a creeping small town menace overlying everything, and proceeds down a road of desperate reciprocatory acts of the most bizarre nature.  With the perils of male violence festooned within every darting-eyed nook and cranny moment, Teeth takes place in a world completely ensconced within one of those old sex ed filmstrips made to keep junior high school girls legs clamped shut until their wedding night - and first-time director Lichtenstein tosses this all at us with the sincerest kind of camp style.

Dawn, played with a scared forest animal comic frenzy by Jess Weixler, looking every bit the girl next door on the verge of bad girl in the basement is spokesperson for a promise ring wearing teenage purity movement - a movement lampooned on Family Guy but given real "teeth" here. Dawn is seen as the ultimate sexual goal-cum-prize by just about every male classmate in her school, as if every teenage boy is some sort of licentious lycanthrope ready to pounce and deflower every pretty girl they come across at the drop of a hat - or any article of clothing. Dawn sees herself as such too and fights even her own naturally budding urges (a scene showing our intrepid heroine in bed "thinking" about a boy she longs for attests to such) to keep her vow of chastity upright. That is until one fateful swimmin' hole romp that ends with the lake being dredged for the body of Dawn's unfortunate date sans one pretty important body part.

Once the newly deflowered Dawn throws away the moniker of cursed hoo-hah and looks upon her mutation as a rightful empowerment to avenge her becoming the victim of the seemingly rampant male violence of this strange new world the film goes from anti-sexual to proto-sexual. With Dawn going from Little Red Riding Hood to the Big Bad Wold herself, the film here turns from strangely charming fantasy to something straight out of a seedy dogeared pulp fiction paperback. It is at this point that Teeth philosophically joins in with such rape & revenge films as Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 and its more recent counterpart The Brave One from Neil Jordan. Teeth though is a much less mature, more light-hearted film that the aforementioned. After all, horror-edged or not, Lichtenstein is going for laughs here. Leaving a hilarious slew of severed penii (as well as four fingers of a rather over-amorous gynecologist) in her wake, Dawn strews her victims "better halves" across the landscape like discarded cigarette butts in the early dusky morning after a concert in the park.

One scene, inevitably choreographed, involves Dawn's salacious step-brother (played with a grim concupiscence by snarky Nip/Tuck regular John Hensley), his pet rottweiler and his freshly decapitated member half eaten with its pierced tip discarded like so much gristle. Though obvious in its outcome, this scene is certainly the pièce de résistance of this giddily twisted fairy tale of female empowerment overtaking a male dominated society of sexual despotism. On a whole, Teeth is funny, though a little bit crotch-writhing for those of us so engendered. Lichtenstein's film is a delight of, albeit stereotyped caricatures, fumbling their way through a darkish suburban nightmarescape that combines the punchy humor of a youthful Almódovar with the clean efficiently disturbed Middle America of a budding David Lynch. This critic for one, looks forward to what will come next. 

[Originally published as a DVD review at Plume Noire on 02/04/09]

Film Review: The Woman in Black

I think what surprised me most about The Woman in Black was not the post Potter acting of Daniel Radcliffe - he is a capable actor, if nothing else, and that was to be expected - but how out of time the film seems to be.   In this day and age of the paranormal found footage films and the omnipresent torture porn taking the horror genre way off course, The Woman in Black plays out as an old fashioned ghost story, even while still using more modern tricks of the so-called trade.  Set at the end of the Victorian Age, in an appropriately creepy looking gothic house, in the middle of an appropriately spooky looking foggy moor, just outside an appropriately cursed small village, this appropriately old school horror movie takes on aspects of Jack Clayton's eerily designed 1961 haunted house tale The Innocents (which in turn was an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw) while simultaneously playing out as a sort of retooling of The Ring.  In other words, this film takes both the old and the new and blends it into a surprisingly hearty and quite fun horror movie.  Imagine that.

Now granted, the film does leave something to be desired - some more scares would have been nice, and perhaps a stronger actor than Radcliffe - but when compared to the sheer gross out factor so rampant in what passes as horror these days, this is a film more people should be seeing - especially those who think chaining a woman up and systematically carving her up is the be all and end all of horror.   With strong supporting turns by Ciarán Hinds and Janet McTeer, Radcliffe's rather stunted acting does get by here - the way the story is told, for the most part he need only react to what is going on around him, and he seems capable of doing at least that - and we are allowed to ignore such and just let the story, which is basic but well honed, engulf us in its appropriately scary (though never too scary - my main criticism) tale of a long dead woman whose ghost makes the village's children kill themselves in order to fulfill her revenge on those who locked her away and took her own child away.

Directed by James Watkins, who's only previous directorial effort was the the horror film Eden Lake, about a gang of teens chasing down and torturing a young couple (and of course one of the couple is played by Michael Fassbender - seriously, is he in everything?), The Woman in Black, in all its old school charm of ghostly wet footprints and dead-eyed children and dolls and toys come to life (seriously, that shit is scary!), is enough to remind one of those great woebegone B-pictures of the genre that permeated the 1950's and early 1960's.  This too is appropriate as the purveying studio that brought many of these ghost and monster stories to life, the iconic Hammer Films, is out of seeming hibernation and has their logo front and center at the opening of the film.  All in all, a classic tale of wickedness and the netherworld that never falls prey to the siren call of the modern day torture porn set - and a film that ends on the strangest happy note one can imagine.  That is a happy ending, right?  No?  Really?  C'mon, you know it is.

Some Good Old-Fashioned Halloween Fun w/ Michael Myers, John Carpenter and the Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis

The following is my contribution to The LAMBs in the Director's Chair #21: John Carpenter.

Although both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Canadian film Black Christmas precede it by four years, much claim can be staked on the proposition that John Carpenter's 1978 now-classic horror film, Halloween, was the starting point of the slasher genre that would erupt in the 1980's.  Of course Carpenter himself admits to being greatly influenced by Hitchcock's Psycho, the true sui generis of the genre, when making Halloween, so who the hell knows from whence the genre truly came.  What one does know for sure is that Carpenter's seminal slasher flick was a great, if not the greatest, influence on horror moviemaking lo these past thirty some years.  For better and for worse, Halloween gave the genre, from the giddy, gory slasher films of the eighties to the torture porn obscenities of today, its tricks and tropes and foibles and flaws.  It gave the Scream series its rulebook and Rob Zombie a career resurgence.  And then there is that creepy ass music - but more on that later.

I actually sat down to watch the original Halloween for the first time just this past week (yeah yeah, I know) and though the low body count kind of surprised me (at least in comparison to the slew of hawkish, low budget disciples that followed, Carpenter's film is quite low on violence and gore) I must admit to at least a certain amount of creeped-out narrative tension - but such a thing is Carpenter's forte after all.  The director's ability to surprise you with both what is around the corner and what is not, has always been a mainstay of his cinema - especially in his three greatest works, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing and here in Halloween.   More than the eventual pay-off, which is by no means a slouch, it is Carpenter's knack of making us wait in heart-pounding anticipation not just to the veritable breaking point, but beyond, until we think we are safe at least for the moment, and then - BANG!!

Much like contemporaries Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, as well as more recent examples such as Richard Linklater, P.T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, Carpenter has always been a filmmaker greatly influenced by those who came before him.  So much so that Pauline Kael even (unfairly) criticized him for such in her scathing review of Halloween, saying "Carpenter doesn't seem to have had any life outside the movies: one can trace almost every idea on the screen to directors such as Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and to the Val Lewton productions".  It is in this homage making style that Carpenter has created his interesting, if not a bit uneven, oeuvre.  To go back to his great triumvirate of the director's early years - after Assault on Precinct 13, his urban-decay take on Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo but before his graphic, paranoiac retooling of the Howard Hawks produced The Thing, came Halloween, his most Hitchcockian film, and therefore his film with the biggest, and most classically inspired BANG.  

Not only does Carpenter name the master's Psycho as his biggest influence on Halloween (along with Night of the Living Dead, which incidentally was also an influence on the aforementioned Assault on Precinct 13) but he paid homage to that film in several other ways as well.   One of these ways was the naming of Dr. Sam Loomis, the obsessed psychiatrist played by Donald Pleasence.  Sam Loomis, as any fan of Psycho can tell you, is the name of Marian Crane's lover in the film.  The most obvious homage though is the casting of Jamie Lee Curtis as the movie's final girl, Laurie Strode.   Originally Carpenter had wanted to cast Anne Lockhart, daughter of June Lockhart, but due to scheduling conflicts she could not take the part.  This particular scheduling conflict was particularly fortuitous, for when Carpenter found out that another actress interested in the part was the daughter of Janet Leigh - Marion Crane herself - he had to have her for the part.  Starring in the short-lived TV version of Operation Petticoat at the time (the original film version coincidentally starred the actress's father Tony Curtis), the nineteen year old Curtis was the perfect pick for the film.  What better homage than casting the daughter of the master's Scream Queen as his own Scream Queen?

Playing the chaste babysitter who lives, while her promiscuous friends are slaughtered (a trope that would become a cliche of the genre, as well the joke behind Wes Craven's Scream) Curtis is the terrorized victim who in turn must be saved by Pleasence's Dr. Loomis (and yes, feminists have taken note) from the man in the mask.  Of course we all know that the man in the mask is actually Michael Myers, who at the age of six brutally murdered his teenage sister, and who has, fifteen years later,  escaped from the mental hospital to come home and terrorize those oh so slutty teens of Haddonfield Illinois.  On the subject of the virgin surviving while death comes to all those who have sex, Carpenter explains, "The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that's killed him. Not because she's a virgin but because all that sexually repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy."  Simple as that.

To make the terror all the more terrifying, Carpenter used P.O.V. shots when showing Michael stalking his prey.  The opening scene, where the six year old Michael is watching his sister and her boyfriend before stabbing his sister to death post-coitus (the guy of course gets up and leaves after sex, and is thus spared the violent end), is done completely in the point of view of the psychopathic child.  The ultimate stabbing is shown through the eyes of Michael's clown costume.  These P.O.V. shots continue upon Michael's return home.  We are put into the eyes of the killer and see what he sees (again, many are critical of this - stupidly claiming it breeds violence in children) and this makes it seem all that more terrifying.   Of course the thing that makes it the scariest, in my not-so-humble opinion, is that damn music.  Second in scariness only to The Exorcist's Tubular Bells, the film's music, composed by Carpenter himself, in rare 5/4 meter, is a simple yet haunting score.  It is enough to bring chills up and down the spine of, not just this critic, but pretty much everyone out there.

In the end it is Carpenter's prowess as a filmmaker that makes Halloween work as well as it does.  Beginning with his love of cinematic origins and history, and his ability to transform that love into his own work (this obvious Hitchcocko-Hawksian even sneaks in the original Thing From Another World as he has his characters watching said film on television) and continuing with the director's bravura stance on cinema (he brashly blows away a little pig-tailed girl in Assault on Precinct 13, so what is to stop him from doing pretty much anything to anyone in any movie), Carpenter created a genre masterpiece in his original Halloween.  The film would go on to spawn seven sequels, as well as a remake and even a sequel to the remake, none of which were directed by Carpenter, and become, for better and for worse again, one of the most influential films ever made.  Carpenter himself would continue with a later career that has yet to match his output of the seventies and early eighties (his most recent, 2011's classically-influenced The Ward, is definitely a step in the right direction though) but no matter what the future brings, his legacy will surely live on and on and on.

I have written about two other John Carpenter films recently.  The first is the director's second feature, Assault on Precinct 13, published elsewhere on this blog.  The second is a review of the director's latest work, his first picture in a decade, The Ward, published over at my review site, The Cinematheque.

Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Best Movie Vampires

Here we are again true believers, with what is my sixteenth weekly 10 best feature for the fine folks over at Anomalous Material.  For those of you not in the know, those same said fine folks have given me a (possibly foolish on their behalf) regular weekly gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects (and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor - yes I am a list nerd).  This week's feature is a special treat for Halloween.  To go along with the scary (or at least supposedly scary - it depends on your outlook I suppose) holiday, I have chosen my ten favourite movie vampires - along with a few runners-up and special mentions and what have you.

Read my feature article, "10 Best Movie Vampires" at Anomalous Material.

And if you are looking for a little vampire fun, Lonely Planet Travel Guide highly recommends the Titty Twister, nestled snugly between Mexico and Hell.  Be careful of the floor show though - it's a killer.