Zombots!

Don't Look Back in Anger (although it's hard not to): 2011

2011-12-31T11:00:00.000-05:00

I watched A LOT of movies this past year, and, sadly most of them were crap. Okay, yes, sometimes crap is thoroughly enjoyable, but there's no fun to be had in Resurrection County or Gacy House. This year's list of best and worst films seen in the past 12 months is by no means exhaustive, but I did my best to single out the movies I really enjoyed and to pair them with the really bad/disappointing/infuriating ones I had the misfortune of watching.

Christopher Smith strikes again!: Black Death
Sean Bean journeys to a plague-free village in search of witches and finds what he's looking for. With a vengeance.
Hollywood strikes again!: Season of the Witch
Nicholas Cage journeys to blah blah blah witches.

Delightfully violent: Batman Year One
Despite its lack of Kevin Conroy, this Batman animated feature still delivers.
Straight-up terrible: Carver
Some friends get killed by a fat guy. That's it. Also there's a lot of shit. Literally.

Will keep you up late: The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass and the Pit (1967), The Quatermass Conclusion (1979)
These three Quatermass movies are all very different and all very good. Recommended viewing for everyone.
Will put you to sleep: Gacy
The story of John Wayne Gacy, as told by someone who dislikes serial killer movies. I did, quite literally, fall asleep while watching this.

Look out! It's right behind you!: The Host
South Korean monster movie that will knock you on your ass.
Look out! It's right in front of you!: Creature
American monster movie that will leave you wondering how this got a theatrical release and Tucker and Dale didn't. Made record lows at the box office.

Should have been in theatres: Tucker and Dale vs Evil
Hillbillies Tucker and Dale square off against a murderous yuppie in this brilliant killbilly satire.
Should have been destroyed: Run! Bitch Run!
Would-be exploitation reaches a new low in this woman-hating film.

Here there be monsters: The Trollhunter
Brilliant mocumentary about Norway's trolls.
Here there be monsters: Hatchet 2
Pointless sequel to a mediocre film.

Oh Canada!: Hobo With a Shotgun
Over-the-top exploitation feature about a gun-toting bum.
Oh: Dead Genesis
Unbelievably bad movie about a group of zombie hunters, in which the film itself is unsure about the story it's trying to tell.

Don't wait any longer to see it: Daywatch
The follow-up and conclusion to Nightwatch, this Russian extravaganza pulls out all the stops and is loads of fun to watch.
Just...don't: In Search of Lovecraft
Quite possibly one of the worst movies I saw this year. Something about trying to prevent the world from ending... I don't know.

Cup 'o tea: Attack the Block
Teenaged hoodlums must protect their home against monstrous aliens. Amazing creature design and great balance of horror and humour.
Cup 'o shit: Chain Letter
Teens are chain-killed by a chain-themed chain-killer. Chain.

Honourable Mention: The Edison Death Machine
I would file this under "bad" because it really is terrible, but the filmmakers just went whole hog with this one, it's hard not to kind of like it.

Jingle Bells, Batman Smells

2011-12-21T13:38:00.000-05:00

I hate Christmas music. With the exception of Fairy Tale of New York by The Pogues, Xmas songs are irritating, overplayed, and badly produced. Worse still are the more traditional songs and carols that have been covered and "updated" by contemporary artists. And don't even get me started on Band Aid, with their message of oppressive cultural and religious homogeneity.

This year, because my workplace demands I play some seasonal tunes, I've added two songs to my playlist. They're Chistmassy. Sort of. They mention Christmas. And one of them even features Santa Clause.

Jonathan Coulton - Chiron Beta Prime

Jon Lajoie - Cold Blooded Christmas

Sint

2011-12-18T14:28:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I'm an idiot. Like, really very dumb. It stems from a place of ignorance, which is a little ironic given how arrogant I am about my knowledge and intelligence. But the fact of the matter is, I (sadly) don't know everything about horror, and I really don't know much about European continental horror. And if I'm being honest, I'm not always keen to watch and learn, either. I gotta be in the right mood. You know what I mean. But when first I heard about Sint a year ago, I was immediately sold on the idea of a Dutch horror movie about an evil St. Nicholas.

The Dutch "Christmas" is St. Nicholas Day, which falls on December 6. The night before and the day of celebrate St. Nicholas' birthday, during which he brings presents to all the good children. According to legend, bad children are rounded up by his helper, Black Peter, placed in sack, and shipped off to Spain.

Sint spins a much darker yarn. In it, the generous Sinterklaas of legend is recast as an immortal Bishop hellbent on murder. When the full moon shines on December 5, St. Nicholas arrives to exact his bloody vengeance upon Amsterdam. Goert has seen Sinterklaas in action, and he's done his best to warn his colleagues at the police about the danger, but they all think he's nuts. So when people start dying after sunset on December 5, no one's quite ready to accept that Sinterklaas is to blame.

From what I understand, The Netherlands doesn't produce a whole lot of horror, which leads me conclude the country hasn't developed its own special genre aesthetic. But still I was surprised by Sint's straight-up slasher nature. Stylistically the film follows American horror conventions, but it isn't stupid, insipid, or insulting to its audience's intelligence.

Except for the part where they describe St. Nicholas' ship as a schooner. It's clearly a carrack.

Sint is a fun watch, and is fairly imaginative by North American standards. The gore is delightfully ridiculous, and the movie maintains a fairly light tone. Of importance to this reviewer is the fact that Sint doesn't make a big deal about religion or morality, which I found both surprising and refreshing. The film does end on a bit of a down note, which brings it more inline with what I assume is a Dutch tradition of downer or ambiguous endings.

This holiday season, if you're looking for something in the evil Santa vein, but with a bit of a twist, this Dutch take on a Christmas horror tradition is well worth it. Foreign without being alienating, Sint is also good movie to broaden your scope of European genre film.

For other Xmas alternatives, check this out!

You Are What You Watch

2011-12-13T17:42:00.000-05:00

Not too long ago I had kind of a bad day, and when I got home all I wanted to do was watch an action movie. Something with violence and explosions. Whether we're conscious of it or not, our emotions influence our movie choices. It only seems natural that I'd crave catharsis when I'm feeling angry and powerless; the effect of watching an action movie will rid me of my negative emotions and help me attain homeostatis.

Die Hard 4 is my preferred choice when I'm mad at helicopters.

But is it possible to link all genre preferences to different moods? Back when it was possible to survey video store customers, researchers in Connecticut did just that--in 2004 they questioned store patrons on their moods and movie selections. The researchers had three main hypotheses regarding mood and movie selection, all of which were drawn from a body of theory called mood management. According to mood management theory, people will want to maintain or increase good moods, and minimize bad ones. Audiences, therefore, will make choices to regulate their level of arousal in an effort reach or maintain optimal arousal.

Researchers hypothesized that store customers who were in a heightened state of arousal (not sexual) would choose comedies, which are thought to be soothing. Conversely, bored patrons would be more likely to choose action, drama, or horror movies to get them worked up. Researchers believed that people who were feeling clam or energetic would also choose comedies and maybe action movies, but would shy away from tense, suspenseful, or serious movies. And finally, people who were in a bad mood would again choose comedy to alleviate their negative feelings.

Researchers were unable to guess what gassy customers would rent, but they were likely to watch it alone.

After surveying 242 video store patrons, researchers found they were right about some predictions and very wrong about others. Notably, people who rated themselves as feeling nervous chose horror movies as opposed to something more soothing or uplifting. For nervous people, their feelings of anxiety intensify the gratification felt at the end of the movie when the villain is defeated. Comedies can't offer that same release. Furthermore, customers who had no plans for later in the day (after the movie) were more likely to walk out with a horror movie than any other genre.

Also surprising to researchers was the fact that people in bad moods didn't choose happy movies. Instead, they tented to select crime movies. The reasoning is that bad moods and negative emotions don't always need to be avoided or mitigated. My own bad mood resulted in a preference for action, a subconscious need to revel in an intense emotional state.

Of course, mood isn't the only predictor for movie genre selection. Stable personality traits play a role in determining what people are likely to want to watch and influence genre preferences. But these things are harder to assess during a two-minute interview outside a video store. Speaking in general terms, the results of this research show that it is possible to determine movie genre selection based on the viewer's mood, and that horror and similar-type movies are important for mood management, offering people chance to deal with their negative emotions.

Reference

Strizhakova, Yulila and Marina Krcmar
2007. Mood Management and Video Rental Choices. Media Psychology, 10. pp. 91-112.

Seeing Fear

2011-12-08T11:59:00.000-05:00

Horror lovers don't need to explain it to one another, horror's awesome. For non-lovers it's perplexing. They don't get it. The violence, the gore, and the scares aren't fun for them and they can't understand how anyone could have a good time at a horror movie. Sometimes curious non-initiates thoughtfully and carefully ask me, "Why do you enjoy horror so much?" Other times the question is less carefully, but no less thoughtfully worded as, "Jesus Christ, how can you watch that crap?"

The truth is, I don't always enjoy horror movies because a lot of what I watch is, in fact, total crap. Usually the crappiness stems from bad writing. Less common is the decent horror script suffering a bad director. In either case, the film isn't scary and I don't get to experience that rush of fear--what academics like to call negative affect.

I've got a big pile of papers that deal with the need for affect, negative affect, and the appeal of same in relation to horror. Summing it up, horror lovers watch horror movies because it allows them to safely explore a powerful emotion they don't feel very often: fear. Fear itself is rather subjective, but a skilled filmmaker knows how to work the medium to his advantage, to scare as many people as possible.

Back in the day, directors relied on things like experience and talent (and good writers) to make their horror movies scary. Today they use science.

The amygdala is a cluster of neuclei nestled deep in the brain. It's part of the limbic system, which handles emotions. In particular, the amygdala is believed to process fear. When we're scared, the amygdala is hard at work, and if we were to watch it in action, we would see it light up.

That's an fMRI (the f stands for functional) capture of a test subject's brain while he/she/it is experiencing fear. This kind of neuroimaging might well be the future of filmmaking--it's already the present of film marketing, having been used by studios cut better trailers. In fact, filmmaker Peter Katz used fMRI to see how his audience reacted to his movie, Pop Skull. He was surprised to learn the more creepy and suspenseful moments generated more of a fear response than the jump scares.

Pop Skull was a finished product when Katz hooked his audience up to the machine, so there was little he could do with the results. But when the Dowdles were making the Poughkeepsie Tapes, they used fMRI help them determine if a particular scene needed re-editing to make it scarier. The directors were keen to use a green filter, believing the colour shift would incite fearful emotions in the audience. The results showed the green filter actually detracted from the scene, reducing its effectiveness.

Although neuroimaging proved useful to filmmakers as a tool to gauge scariness, these two examples also take us into the minds of the directors themselves. What we're seeing here is that some genre filmmakers clearly have no idea how fear works and what scary is. In short, they don't seem to understand horror. It's powerfully ironic, but also kind of sad.

The benefit of neuroimaging is that fMRI might improve future horror projects, as directors slowly learn how to tap into the amygdala and make movies that are truly frightening, but there's a risk that filmmakers (read: studios) will confuse the technology for creativity, replacing one with the other. As was/is the case with 3D, technology can certainly enhance the movie-going experience, but it cannot substitute for story and plot.

A Glitch in the Netflix Matrix

2011-12-05T14:10:00.001-05:00

Browsing Netflix I came upon Death Bell. Curious, I read the short synopsis.

Click to biggify

Sold!

Terrible Moments in Taglining

2011-11-27T13:14:00.000-05:00

"The day they arrived two billion people experienced a synapses implosion and died instantly. They were the lucky ones."

In order to properly intimate how bad it is for those who didn't die, those who did should have suffered horribly. A synapse implosion sounds pretty awful (and impossible), but since death by such means is instantaneous, it kind of doesn't seem so bad.

Predator 2: Electric Bugaloo

2011-11-25T17:36:00.001-05:00

I don't know exactly what I typed into the Internet that brought me to this video, but I do know it had nothing to do with Predators or dance crews.

Episode 50

2011-11-22T10:16:00.000-05:00

Have you seen or heard of Series 7? It's brilliant. Really. The film is presented as a marathon, the seventh series of the The Contenders, a reality television show. Not once does the film break its format, and you really do feel like you're watching an intense TV show.

Episode 50 is nothing like that.

For its 50th episode, the reality ghosthunting show, Paranormal Investigators, will spend a weekend inside the West Virginia Lunatic Asylum, one of, if not the, most haunted buildings in the country. Unlike other shows, Paranormal Investigators seeks to debunk hauntings, and the film opens with clips from episode 49 in which they explain how and why one couple is experiencing "paranormal" activity in their home. As episode 50 begins, the PI crew learn they won't be exploring the asylum alone--they'll be joined by ASSC, a small group of bible-thumping true believers who have an axe to grind with PI's leadman, Jack.

As day turns to night and then back to day, the PI and ASSC crews experience different but related phenomena, and each come to their own false conclusions as to what it all means. In a bizarre and narratively irrational twist of events, both crews are forced to leave the asylum in order to resolve the plot.

The film's premise is kicked off by Jack's meeting with the asylum's owner (I guess state institutes can be purchased by private citizens in West Virginia). The owner is a world-class scumbag who claims to have repeatedly "broken all of God's commandments" and now that he's dying, is worried he's going to hell. He's hired PI and ASSC to find proof of ghosts because, according to his logic, if ghosts are real then so is hell.

In his review, Count Vardulon referred to Episode 50 as "confirmation bias: the movie." It's an apt re-titling. Jack and the rest of PI record solid evidence of ghosts but parlay that into disproof of an afterlife. ASSC, on the other hand, are being jerked around by a demon and they turn that experience into proof of ghosts. Anyone who stayed awake in grade eight science will tell you both teams are running their experiments backwards, re-interpreting results to reinforce their theories.

Thing is, Jack secretly wants ghosts to be real. In fact, his desperation drives his ghost hunting. So why, when presented with incontrovertible evidence for ghosts, does he continue to insist the opposite? Because this movie doesn't understand how to write a character or tell a story. If Jack were self-destructive that'd be one thing. If he were a fervent non-believer, that'd be another. And if he had some kind of hidden agenda, that'd be something else. But Jack is just a self-righteous ass, prone to convoluted flights of "logic" that the film uses to maintain conflict within its plot.

Speaking of logic, let's take a closer look at the inciting incident. So this guy wants to know if there's an afterlife because he's worried he's going to hell for being a murderer. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure if you believe there's a hell, you must, by logic, believe in the possibility of going there. Also, logically speaking, if ghosts exist, so does the chance that your spirit will not journey to the netherworld but will be stuck in this world after you die. Proof of ghosts doesn't actually equal proof of hell. The film confuses theology and religion with spirituality.

Episode 50 is well shot, with good effects, but that's about all it's got going for it. The film is awash in bad dialogue and logic problems, and is a mess of plots, philosophies, and locations. But, perhaps worst of all is that it's not a found footage or mocumentary film, and it should be. Episode 50 should be Paranormal Investigators' raw footage, cobbled together to create a complete story of their shoot. But it's not. It's a conventional narrative film. A film that repeatedly breaks scene. And I don't mean in a tearing-down-the-fourth-wall kind of way. I mean the film constantly switches back and forth between its reality TV conceit and standard film format, forcing both the characters and the audience disengage and re-engage with the proceedings over and over in different ways.

Also, it's got this four-class paranormal hierarchy which is totally stupid. According to Episode 50 poltergeists are...malicious tricksters?

Dead Genesis

2011-11-17T12:48:00.001-05:00

There are some things in this world that I will never understand. Like how the universe is expanding. Expanding into what? Or why anyone ever bought a Hummer. You live in Yorkville, you jackass! Another thing I just don't get is deliberate hand-held camerawork in any movie that's not found footage or first-person POV.

Dead Genesis establishes early on that it has a crew of (reasonably) skilled filmmakers. The first couple of scenes are filmed with a certain amount of competence, including some artsy slow-mo. But then the movie switches from mounted to hand-held camera and this, in part, makes the film unwatchable. The change in technique comes when a documentarian heads into the woods to spend a couple of days with a group of zombie hunters. Now if all the hand-held stuff was shot through her camera, that would be fine stylistically, but the film maintains its third-person POV.

And I just don't get it.

Moreover, she proves to be the world's worst documentary filmmaker. And that's the other thing that makes Dead Genesis such a painful experience, the writing. The dialogue, the characters, the plot (such as it is), are all terrible.

After the initial panic at the onset of zompocalypse, humanity has come to terms with the new status quo. Most people live in safe zones, but some live on the outskirts of civilization, waging a war on the zombies. The Dead Heads are one such group, perhaps the most well known hunters around, and Jillian has been granted permission to spend two days with them, documenting their activities. Her goal is to show everyone back in the safe zones what the "war on dead" is all about.

Judging from this synopsis, you would expect the film to be largely shown through Jillian's handycam, but it's not. As I said, the story is entirely told with an omniscient and poorly-wielded hand-held camera. You might also expect the Dead Heads to be a curious group of interesting folk, but no. Half of them don't even know why they're there, and the other half, well, we don't get to know them at all.

Dead Genesis has a built-in plot device that should introduce its characters in a relatively simple fashion--Jillian's documentary. But because Jillian is so bad at her job, she only interviews half the Dead Heads, and though she asks them why they joined the group, none of them can provide the audience with a satisfactory answer. To make matters worse, the Dead Heads appear to resent Jillian's presence, but again offer no good reason why.

Adding further insult to injury, outside of a few half-hearted attempts to capture the Dead Heads on camera, Jillian fails to film anything at all. Dead Genesis is rife with clumsy inter-personal conflict and zombies, but Jillian resolutely captures none of it. The one time she makes a real effort to video the hunters, she's flat-out told not to, and her camera goes back in her bag.

Dead Genesis is clearly a movie that doesn't know what it's about. With a thin story and flimsy characters, the film serves as little more than an elaborate make-up screen test. The zombie effects are rather good, but everything else about this movie is so bad that it's not worth seeing.

Beneath the Earth 2011

2011-11-03T07:30:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago (late October it was), I juried an on-line film festival. Beneath the Earth is not a genre film fest, but open to all filmmakers who have a short film in the can. This year's Best Film is Photographs. The Audience Award went to After Ever After.

Photographs (Winner, Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Soundtrack)

This animated short, about an elderly woman who finds a Polaroid camera, is a powerful emotional journey. After picking up the camera, the nameless woman takes photos of herself all over town. It's a fun afternoon, but tinged with a sad loneliness because she's all by herself. The film's final moments are deeply moving, as the true nature of the photos are revealed.

Photographs is a beautiful film, and was my personal favourite. Silent, in the sense that there's no dialogue, the film captures emotion and expression through action and soundtrack. The hand-drawn animation is particularly good and gives the film a nostalgic quality, which is very apropos.

After Ever After (Winner, Audience Award)

Sidney has broken up with his girlfriend and is devastated. Just devastated. But after a good cry, he believes he's okay. But he's not okay, he's got four phases of post-break-up emotional and mental instability to live through before he can start feeling fine again.

Getting dumped sucks, and After Ever After artfully captures that suckiness through Sidney's imagination. We see the world through Sidney's eyes, and experience his self-pity, denial, and eventual acceptance, as a series of small fantasies; Sidney's outlook is reflected back at him by what he sees.

Sidney as a character is rather pathetic, and his maudlin attitude detracts from what is otherwise a good movie. The film's strength lies in its visuals, and effectively uses imagery to communicate with the audience. Getting over a bad break-up is something we can all relate to, After Ever After does a great job expressing the loneliness and pain of the experience.

#omgimtrending (Winner, Best Cinematography)

Oh hipsters. So...ironic. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. Much in the same what that I'm not entirely sure what this movie is about, but that didn't stop me from really enjoying it.

Shortly after he's dumped by his girlfriend, Fletch's fixed gear bike is stolen by a dude dressed as a pink unicorn. Life continues to get worse for Fletch, as he starts hemorrhaging twitter followers. But when he courageously embarks on a journey to retrieve his bicycle, he starts gaining followers and his girlfriend returns to him.

At times clever, weird, and incomprehensible, #omgimtrending asks its audience to consider what's really important to them. And also what FTW means. The movie is light, pokes fun at hipsters, and is just a tiny bit recursive. Well deserving of its Best Cinematography award, the film is extremely well made and fun to watch.

Grave Encounters

2011-11-01T09:12:00.000-04:00

Looking back, I don't think anyone expected the glut of found footage movies that we have today. Sure it was, and still is, a relatively cheap and cheerful way to make a movie and the format is perfect for horror, but could anyone alive in 1999 anticipate the sheer volume of found footage we'd have twelve years later? Me, I'm kinda surprised it took this long.

Not everyone likes found footage. They can cause headaches and nausea, and for the physically unaffected they can be hard to engage with. I'm rarely bothered by the camerawork (except in the case of The Butcher) and I'll buy into almost any premise (but not Frozen), so I'm a good audience for found footage films.

For academic reasons, I don't refer to found footage as cinema verite although the two filmmaking techniques have a similar goal: to document reality. But in found footage movies, the documentary aspect of the film is part of the narrative--it is, in fact, the premise. Found footage should also not be confused with straight-up mocumentaries. Fake docs such as The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Lake Mungo, are documentaries produced after the fact that attempt to tell the complete story of the event. In the case of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, the film is about a stash of videos found in the former dwelling of a prolific serial killer. Lake Mungo chronicles one family's struggle to deal with a very personal haunting. Mocumentaries are finished products, but found footage films have been edited together from existing footage and can vary in conceit from amateur, such as Paranormal Activity, to professional quality, such as REC.

By my count, I've seen 13 found footage movies which have varied in quality from amazing to awful. The vast majority of these films are about hauntings, and because I'm such a sucker for ghost stories, they have all freaked me out at some point. Even the ones that are shit. Grave Encounters, the most recent found footage film I've seen, creeped me out enough that I had to call Lady Dinwhistle to calm me down.

Grave Encounters is a ghost hunting television show hosted by Lance Preston. For the show's sixth episode, the crew spends the night locked inside Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital. The film chronicle's the crew's time inside the building as they look for and eventually encounter the supernatural.

Taking a cue from The Last Exorcism, the ghost hunters aren't true believers; their show is one of many that capitalizes on cheap entertainment. Postmodern in the extreme, the "behind the scenes" footage exposes the scripted and structured nature of reality television. The film, which we've been told has been edited for time (74 hours of tape was recovered at the scene), has also been edited to show us how the producers create the "reality" of the Grave Encounters television show.

When it turns out the hospital really is haunted, the characters are forced to undergo a sudden and difficult paradigm shift. The constructed reality of the TV show is usurped by the true reality of the hospital. Normally this is where many found footage ghost hunting plots end, with the imagined thing proving to be real. Grave Encounters takes it a step further by altering reality itself.

A world unto its own exists inside the hospital, and once the characters are initiated into that world, the hospital, for lack of a better term, starts fucking with them. What happens isn't a breakdown of reality, but rather in the same way that Lance Preston is building a fake supernatural reality for his audience, the hospital reconstructs its physical reality for the crew.

The film makes the most of its location, and name-checks Danvers State Hospital, suggesting similar events to Session 9 will take place in Grave Encounters. But where the former limited itself to ghostly manifestations of mental illness, the latter goes all out with the whole "haunted hospital" thing. Insanity isn't a plot point, but the film, it could be argued, goes crazy with the torments it heaps upon the characters.

Grave Encouters, while certainly not the worst ghost-hunting/haunting movie I've seen, isn't the best. It drags. It goes on for too long and stops being scary. It never stops being interesting, but there is a point in the film when atmosphere gives way to jump scares, and suspense is replaced with waiting. The film is definitely worth seeing, especially if you enjoy found footage films, but know that once the plot is played out, there's still ten minutes to go.

Note: In my review of The Last Exorcism, I define it as a mocumentary because it exhibits a finished quality similar to Lake Mungo (which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest horror mocumentaries ever made). Strictly speaking, The Last Exorcism is a found footage movie because of how it ends, but it has been larely filmed and edited as a professional documentary, and maintains its look and feel until the last few minutes of the film.

The Halloween Blog Post

2011-10-30T13:00:00.000-04:00

I love Halloween. I love it because it's a time when everyone gets into the horror spirit, and it's not just me staying up late to watch scary movies. It's a time for parties and dressing up and holiday-appropriate movie marathons. It's like Christmas but without the forced cheer.

But what's the point of this horror blog blogging some special horror for Halloween? So many other wonderful bloggers have already beaten me to it. I think instead I'll take the time to reflect on some of my preferred non-horror films.

Zombots! presents movies to help treat the Halloween hangover:

Airplane! and Airplane II: The Sequel

Two of my favourite comedies. These films epitomize the lost art of literal, visual comedy. In the first film, which is largely a parody of Zero Hour and Airport, Ted Striker has to overcome his fear and self-doubt to successfully land the plane he's on. The second movie is pretty much a rehash of the first only this time it's a space shuttle flying to the moon. The first film gave us "Don't call me Shirley" and the second has one of my favourite sight gags ever.

The Sting

Set in the 1930s, it's about a couple of grifters who undertake an elaborate con to relieve a banker of his overburden of wealth. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and a DGA award for outstanding achievement in directing. You know that thing people do, when they touch their nose to indicate they're down with the plan, it's from this movie.

Miss Congeniality

Sandra Bullock goes undercover as a contestant at the Miss United States Pagent when the FBI finds out that it's been targeted for terrorist attack. The humour is sharp and intelligent, and the film doesn't pander to the audience (unlike the sequel).

Sneakers

A heist movie with con elements. Robert Redford (who also stars in The Sting) heads up a professional hacking company. But when he's hired by the NSA to steal a newfangled enigma machine, he becomes entangled in a sinister techno-terrorist plot. Highly underrated, Sneakers doesn't get nearly enough exposure as it should.

Empire Records

A slacker comedy/coming-of-age film about a day in the life of the kids who work at an independent record store. And what a day it is! Robberies, in-store signings, love, betrayal, fake funerals, and the expectation that the free-spirited employees will toe the line of the store's new corporate owners. The film failed to perform at the box office and critics didn't like it, but it gained a cult following in the years after its release.

The Blues Brothers

Jake and Elwood reassemble their band in order to raise money to pay off a tax debt. A quasi musical with performances and a dance number, the soundtrack features some excellent tunes. Perhaps best known for its music, the film is a fantastic showcase of vehicular mayhem.

The Corridor

2011-10-27T20:33:00.000-04:00

I turned to Mark. "I'm not entirely sure I understood the end," I said.
"I'm just glad he wasn't crazy," came the reply.
But he was crazy. That's the thing.

Tyler went nuts the day his mom killed herself. His friends found him hiding in the closet with a knife, ranting about open doors and keys and all kinds of crazy stuff that didn't make any sense. One violent confrontation later, Chris and Everett have been injured, and Tyler's in the loony bin. Year later, shortly after Tyler's release, the friends gather for a weekend of bonding. They're staying at Tyler's cabin, where the memory of his mom, Pauline, hangs in the air.

Tyler is keen to mend fences, to put the past behind him, and to no be crazy anymore. But a supernatural force filed in the woods challenges his sanity. Luckily, everyone can experience it, too. The force field, which takes the shape of a rectangular box, opens up the men's minds and the more contact they have with the thing, the more open and inhibited they become. Tyler is relatively unaffected because of his medication--pills meant to block out the crazy--but he's worried his friends will catch his mental illness. His worry is justified as his buddies grow increasingly obsessive and violent. As the problems within the cabin escalate, the supernatural box elongates, stretching into a corridor begging to be explored.

Is it a film about mental illness? Possibly. Is it a film about adulthood? Probably. Tyler is struggling to return to a normal life, and we learn his friends each have personal issues as well. When the mystical qualities of the corridor lay bare everyone's secrets, Tyler's insanity isn't any worse than Jim's impotence, or Bobcat's depression, but his mind is a danger to others because of repressed memories. These memories trigger the latent violence in everyone else as they act out their own pent-up feelings of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

The Corridor isn't all subtext and metaphor, however. The corridor is a very real presence and it's likely what drove Pauline over the edge all those years ago. Blending sci-fi with straight drama, the film waffles between the fantastical and serious, and does an okay job balancing the two up to a point. It's toward the end of its 98-minute running time that the film gives over entirely to its sci-fi element, and that's where it looses its narrative thread. As the physical world seems to unravel down the length of the corridor, so too does the film's plot. There's no reconciliation between the drama instigated by the the corridor's psychic properties and what happens at the end of the movie.

At least, none that Mark and I could figure out. But the film won Best Canadian Feature at Fantasia and Best Screenplay at Fantastic Fest, so it's worth seeing. Just keep an open mind.

Terrible Moments in Taglining

2011-10-26T09:23:00.001-04:00

"You can't run from evil when it lives next door."

As a matter of fact, you can. If the evil were in your house, then no, probably you couldn't run from it. But there are walls and rights-of-way and zoning bylaws separating you from the evil on the adjoining lot.

Book Report: Midnight Movie

2011-10-24T19:20:00.000-04:00

There are three bookstores where I live. Two are used bookstores, one of which I can't go into because it induces acute claustrophobia. And I'm not claustrophobic. The standard bookstore I also shy away from because it a) has a terrible selection, and b) is so poorly organized that I get anxious and pissed off just thinking about it. Also, the two women who work in there radiate an attitude of unfriendli- and unhelpfulness. Like I'm interrupting their day by wanting to spend my money in their store. Jerks.

So anyway, last time I was in O-Town, I was keen to visit a proper bookstore. Unfortunately the horror section at the Chapters on Rideau Street kinda blows. It's weird because their mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, and "literature" sections are well-stocked. But for some reason, horror is two measly shelves, way at the back. And it's all zombies and vampires and I'm so tired, so very tired of it.

I stared at the shelf. The shelf stared back. The people sitting by the window were being noisy and wanted to tell them to "Shut the crap up!" because I was mad, mad at the books, which is just stupid when you think about it. I stared at the shelf some more and then I saw it: a slim volume crammed between two other, fatter books. Midnight Movie by Tobe Hooper.

In 2009, Tobe was invited to SXSW to screen Destiny Express, a film he made in high school. Tobe wasn't sure how Dude McGee got a hold of his movie, but he agreed to go, and together with about thirty other people, he watched the nonsensical flick. Shortly after that, some strange things started happening in Austin. And then elsewhere across the US. Soon the entire country was suffering some kind of pandemic, a nation-wide case of the crazies. All because of the crap film Tobe Hooper made when he was sixteen.

In an interview Tobe describes his book as being "cinematic." And it is. The story is told through interviews, blog posts, twitter feeds, and news clippings, and has a distinctly documentary feel about it. The format works to great effect, presenting the material, as insane as it is, as fact. Of course, as is the case with many documentaries, some conclusions are foregone; it's not always a surprise who lives and who dies. But the story is always interesting.

And sometimes brutal, violent, and gross.

I always like stories and movies about "the scariest movie ever" so I was keen to read Midnight Movie. In a fun twist, Tobe's teen-aged masterpiece isn't particularly scary or good. But it strikes a nerve with its audience. Weirder still, Tobe has no memory of the film; he knows he made it, but that's it. Memory loss and the controlled access to information are common themes in Midnight Movie, suggesting that some of our life experiences are at the mercy of a force we can't control. The book doesn't go so far as to to question the nature of experience (thank God) but sometimes there's just something magical about watching a movie with a roomful of people.

Since the book was written by Tobe Hooper (with his writing partern Alan Goldsher), and since Tobe appears as a character in the book, one wonders how much of Tobe is really in there. Again, in an interview he says he's not nearly as misanthropic as his character in Midnight Movie, but he talks about Chainsaw an awful lot, playing on the fact that he's still riding that train.

Midnight Movie, which I read in record time, was a real treat. I've seen a lot of shit films and it was fun to read about one for a change. I can even sympathize a little with the violent reaction to Destiny Express. But I'm not about to set any fires.

Not yet.

Robot Jox

2011-10-20T18:17:00.001-04:00

As per Count Vardulon's request, I have produced this article on the gender politics and masculine discourse of Robot Jox.

Introduction

After the devastating effects of WWIII, war was outlawed and all geopolitical conflicts are resolved through one-on-one robot battles. The robots are giant constructions and are piloted by a jokey, or jock. The Russian Confederation and the Western Market are currently battling for the sovereign territory of Alaska, rich in natural resources. A best of ten series of fights, overseen by a neutral group of referees, determines the winner. In the ninth battle, Confederation jock Alexander kills his opponent and the Western Market announces that Achilles will pilot their robot in the final fight. Achilles is one of the greatest jox to have ever lived. He's won all nine of the battles he's fought an is coached by Tex, a former champion jock. During their battle, Alexander pulls an illegal manoeuver which threatens the lives of the spectators. In his attempt to block Alexander, Achilles unwittingly kills the people in the stands. The referees do not name a winner and another battle must be fought.

Achilles and Tex are members of the old school, and although their backstories are never revealed, it is assumed they worked and trained very hard to become the skilled professionals they are. Their legacy is threatened by a new breed of jox, pilots who have been bred specifically for the purposes of controlling the fighting robots. Achilles' and Tex's disdain for the younger generation is summed up by their use of the slur "tubie", meant to insult these test tube babies. Achilles takes particular offense to Athena, a female jock, believing that women cannot pilot robots. Athena is not offended by Achilles' overt chauvenism; she does not understand gender inequality, and possesses the same skill, agility, and fearlessness as her brothers. In fact, Athena proves herself better than her peers when she wins a training competition.

She examines his body and finds nothing special.

Achilles eventually takes an interest in Athena, and although he displays a certain sensitivity toward her, he still harbours a deep-seated sexist attitude regarding jox. Athena leverages Achilles' sexual desire, using her femininity to gain access to his quarters, pretending to be interested him. When she gets Achilles into a vulnerable position, she shoots him with a tranquilizer, explaining that she will pilot the robot in the final fight.

It is necessary for Athena to usurp Achilles because he undermined her first chance at fighting. After Achilles concludes his tenth match he quits his job as robot jock. Officially, Achilles has fulfilled his contract with the Western Market, but he is actually suffering from a crisis of conscious, feeling responsible for the deaths of 300 spectators at his last fight. When it is announced that Athena will pilot the robot, Achilles returns to work with the goal of replacing Athena in the cockpit. On the surface, Achilles' actions are chivalrous--he does not want to see Athena get hurt, but the fact remains that Achilles simply does not believe Athena capable of piloting the robot.

After Athena drugs Achilles she hijacks the robot and faces off against Alexander. She gains the upper hand early in the fight, but quickly looses her advantage as Alexander and his robot prove to be better than she. Athena is knocked unconscious and as the robot lies prone on the ground, Alexander stands over her ready to deliver a final, crushing blow. Alexander's robot has a secret weapon. Hidden in what can only be described as the robot's crotch, is a chainsaw. Straddling Athena, Alexander activates the chainsaw, lowering it toward her with the intent of cutting her robot open and sawing her in half. It is the ultimate insult to Athena's feminism, a violation of her body--both her physical body and her extended robot body--and an act of unquestionable male dominance. Unconscious, Athena is powerless to stop Alexander, and survives only because of Achilles' intervention. A true hero, he rescues her from the cockpit at just the right moment, and defeats his enemy in one last fight.

Don't even get me started on the film's geopolitics! At least his robot isn't all red.

Spectacle and performance

Robot Jox shares much in common with action-adventure film, and is, in essence, an arena- or competition fight movie. Because the fighters pilot giant robots from inside a cockpit, the robots can be viewed as extensions of the physical body; the robots' movements are twinned with the movements of the jox. Furthermore, damage to the robots can mean physical harm for the pilot.

Action movies, more so than any other type of film, are built on spectacle. Part of that spectacle are the action sequences themselves, but spectacle also includes elaborate displays of masculinity. Normally, masculinity and the male are displayed through the bodies of action stars such as Jason Statham and The Rock, but in this case, the robots act as a proxy for the male body. The obvious example of the robot/male pairing is the chainsaw hidden inside Alexander's robot, which he whips out in a masculine display of power.

The action genre generally promotes rebellion, universal liberty, and self-determination, and there is nothing inherent in the narrative conventions of action movies that dictate its heroes' gender. Usually following one of two conventional plot-lines, action movies are either about a lone hero who has the skills necessary to overcome adversity and defeat the bad gay, or the films follow a small group of people led by a hero who takes them out of the "wilderness" and back to "civilization". There is nothing to suggest the hero need be male, but the patriarchal nature of mainstream cinema sees a male hero become the focus of power.

Athena's pedigree would suggest that she is just as capable as any man, including Achilles, but her ability to pursue the action plot to its conclusion--to defeat the bad guy--is undercut by her inability to effectively pilot the robot. Once she's knocked unconscious, she transforms from potential heroine to woman-in-peril, a sleeping beauty in need of rescuing. But Athena's shortcomings aren't a product of her gender. Rather, her failure stems from something outside herself, namely the nature of the robots. The robots of Robot Jox are male.

Many action movies, despite their initial gender neutrality, are set in distinctly male environments like battlefields, prisons, and sports arenas. In each of these locales, masculinity is on display, performed for both the characters and the audience. In this sense, there is a particular status associated with male performance, but it must be understood sexual performance not what's on display. Rather, it's the spectacle of the powerful body, to which weapons and explosions are added to increase the hero's status. The robots in Robot Jox are enormous machines, outfitted with a variety of weapons, and are capable of space flight. In a performative capacity, Alexander's phallic chainsaw is overkill, and his use of this weapon on the helpless Athena is a sexual power play in what is supposed to be non-sexual combat. The chainsaw doesn't make him more masculine, it only reinforces his position as the antagonist.

Supporting the male environment as the milieu for action, are the costumes and uniforms associated with masculine performance. As part of her plan to take control of the robot, Athena dresses in Achilles' uniform, hiding her face behind the helmet's face shield. Dressed this way, Athena is mistaken for Achilles and she gains access to the cockpit. She raises suspicion when she fails to properly greet the ground crew, and is outed as an impostor when she reacts to being smacked on the ass. Being unfamiliar with the traditions of the ground crew, Athena is unable mimic Achilles' behaviour; she can dress as a man and even pilot a robot, but she cannot effectively engage in male performance.

Conclusion

Robot Jox was released in 1990, at the tail end of a decade that celebrated masculinity through increasingly spectacular displays of bodies, action, and violence. Although technically a science-fiction film because it's set in the future and features giant fighting robots, Robot Jox can be viewed as a competition or fight movie and partly belongs to the action-adventure genre. Understood in this way, the film may be analyzed in terms of male performance and spectacle.

In the film, masculinity is displayed through robot fights, where the robots represent physical extensions of the male body. Masculine performance includes combat, the traditions surrounding combat, and a general attitude of arrogance indulged in by the jox. Achilles' masculinity is further bolstered by his sexism. Achilles' chauvinism is initially introduced as a character flaw, but his gender politics are reinforced by the film's narrative; Athena was bred to pilot robots, but she is categorically unqualified to participate in the male arena of robot fighting. In the future world of Robot Jox women may be many things, but they are not jocks.

References

Jeffords, Susan
1993. Can Masculinity be Terminated? In Screening the Male: Exploring masculinities in Hollywood cinema, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. Routledge, New York. pp. 245-252

Neal, Steve
2004. Action-Adventure as Hollywood Genre. In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker. Routledge, New York. pp. 71-78.

Tasker, Yvonne
1993a. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, genre and the action cinema. Routledge, New York.

1993b. Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the body, and the voice in contemporary action cinema. In Screening the Male: Exploring masculinities in Hollywood cinema, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. Routledge, New York. pp. 230-244.

The Thing: The Musical

2011-10-13T09:41:00.003-04:00

I have no desire to see The Thing requel, but I will anyway because I'm a glutton for punishment. But until the time comes when I pay too much money to watch the lesser version of a first-rate film, I will spend my time enjoying this loving tribute to The Thing.

Many thanks to Don Guarisco for telling me this existed.

Carver

2011-10-10T13:31:00.001-04:00

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: September 10, 2004

Subject: Movie!!!!!!1

Let's make a movie!

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: September 10, 2004

Subject: Re: Movie!!!!!!1

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: September 11, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Movie!!!!!!1

I've got it all planned out. I found this Super 8 camera at a flea market so I'm thinking snuff, of course.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: September 11, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Movie!!!!!!1

you want to make a snuff film?

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: September 11, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Movie!!!!!!1

Yes. Well, no. I want to make a movie about snuff movies. Duh.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: September 11, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Movie!!!!!!1

oh. ok

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 2, 2004

Subject: Snuffed Out

dude, whats with all the shit? seriously. like those are the grossest toilets ive ever seen. and all the pissing? but anyway, im worried this movie isnt working out. you wanted a movie about snuff but its just about a fat guy killing people. and your weird poo fetish.

so these kids find some snuff movies in a barn or whatever but they dont know theyre snuff? and then they go drinking and then they return to the snuff barn (for no good reason) and then what?

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 5, 2004

Subject: Re: Snuffed Out

And then they die. Don't worry about it.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 5, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Snuffed Out

but i am worried. snuff has got nothing to do with anything in this movie. no ones filming the kids as they die. the big fat guy is just killing them because he loves murder. and you set up fat guy's brother to be an accomplice in the killing but he hasn't done anything and im worried youre trying to save it for a surprise at the end. no ones going to believe these people are that stupid.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 7, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Snuffed Out

oh. so now youre not talking to me?

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 12, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Snuffed Out

Sorry! Sorry, I was on this cinematography course thing. I got some great ideas for some cool shots. Have you seen my Spaceballs DVD?

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 12, 2004

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:Snuffed Out

did you also learn to edit? because that excrement...

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 12, 2004

Subject: The shit stays

The shit stays.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 23, 2004

Subject: that shit has to go

good god, man. not only did you do everything i told you not to do, you somehow made it worse than i thought possible. what was up with that meta-moment where she kills the stunt double? that can't happen in this movie. and i told you not to dress all the blonde women in the same underwear; its impossible to tell their corpses apart. and then you shoot someone point-blank only to have her appear unharmed in the next scene. and it absolutely does not track that it takes the entire length of the film for that last guy to figure out the fat murderer isnt working alone.

seriously. im trying to think of the right word here...cohesive? coherent? some co-word. whatever it is, this movie doesnt have it. it kinda looks like you just made it up as you went along.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 30, 2004

Subject: Carver

Yeah you're right about the snuff. I mean it's in there alright, but I'm thinking we'll call it Carver instead. Get it? Because the snuff family is named Carver. And, and he carves people up.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: November 30, 2004

Subject: Re: Carver

dont contact me about this ever again.

From: Frank Guerrero Jr

To: Frank Guerrero Jr

Date: March 8, 2007

Subject: Re: Re: Carver

Dude! We got distribution!! We should totally make another one.

Terrible Moments in Taglining

2011-10-02T22:43:00.000-04:00

"For years the wooded mountains have been the setting for many myths, horror and ghost stories told one generation to the next on camping trips. Only, what no one ever thought to consider was, what if there was someone in those woods worse than myth imaginable?"

Firstly, that's a tag-paragraph. Secondly, it's badly written. I won't bother with the technicalities, the copy speaks for itself. "Worse than myth imaginable"?

Check this out: "What if those campfire ghost stories were true?"

My services are for hire.

Halloween Horror Nights 2011

2011-09-27T22:34:00.001-04:00

A year ago I promised my friends that no matter where I was, I'd be in Orlando for Halloween Horror Nights.

In its 21st year, HHN Orlando is faced with the unappealing challenge of having to meet the bar set at their 20th anniversary. Using 21 to their advantage, they chose a luck- and gambling-themed icon to temp the masses. Lady Luck presides over HHN this year, warning park-goers that "the house always wins."

The "house" certainly outdid itself in terms of haunted houses. In Nightingale's Blood Prey, a WWI-themed house in which you wound your way through the trenches, stalked by monstrous nurses. H.R. Bloodengutz was a horror host who went crazy one broadcast, murdering his way through his holiday show. In the future world of Saws 'n Steam: Into the Machine, all the water has run out and a few enterprising individuals have taken to harvesting humans for their juices. The Thing takes you on a tour of the Norwegian Antarctic research station where an alien life form has infected the scientists. In Winter's Night, you stroll through haunted Hawthorn Cemetery. In Nevermore, Edar Allen Poe's darkest nightmares come to life. The Forsaken introduces you to the unfortunate souls who sailed on Columbus' fourth ship and were lost at sea, and The In Between takes you into another dimension populated by otherworldy creatures.

The entrance to Nevermore.

All the houses were equally impressive in terms of design, but some impressed me more than others. This may be due to the fact that you're always moving through the houses, and because of some unlucky timing I missed out entirely on the jump scares in some of the houses. The way it works is, you walk through the house and scare actors periodically jump out and scare you. Others get right up in your personal space. It's startling, unnerving, and loads of fun. But, because of the constant flow of people, not everyone gets scared; sometimes you see it coming, other times you just missed it.

For my money (I paid extra for the express pass--front of line, totally worth it), the best house was The In Between. It's in 3D. You're handed a pair of glasses before entering because parts of the house have been painted to create a 3D effect. The 3D combined with glow-in-the-dark set pieces completely draw you into the otherworld of the house itself. I also greatly enjoyed Saws 'n Steam, charmed by its decrepit steampunk aesthetic. Nightingale's was another winner for me, and The Forsaken made me think of The Fog, another great John Carpenter film.

In addition to the houses are the Scare Zones, spooky street scenes to help set the mood. The best one by far was Acid Assault which presents a harrowing vision of the future. Here, the "survivors" of an acid rain-soaked city roam the street while the buildings around them crumble into dust. Projected on the facades are videos of the buildings themselves, and they tumble as you watch.

This year, Universal added a drum show to the event, called Death Drums. My friends and I only heard part of it, and we saw the drumming apparatus, which looked cool enough, but we missed out on the show. We also missed the chainsaw drill team, not because of bad luck, but because they were noticeably absent from the event. Although my friend Sarah will disagree, I think it's shame we couldn't all be chased by chainsaw wielding paramilitary soldiers.

But still, the night was dead fun and I learned that my current knee-jerk reaction to being scared is to scream "oh Jesus!" while trying to effect a fetal position while standing.

Haunted Houses
Nightingale's Blood Prey
H.R. Bloodengutz
Saws 'n Steam: Into the Machine (was a scare zone last year)
The Thing
Winter's Night: The Haunting of Hawthorn Cemetery
Nevermore: The Madness of Poe
The Forsaken
The In Between

Scare Zones
Your Luck has Run out (icon, Lady Luck)
Acid Assault
Grown Evil
7
Canyon of Dark Souls
Nightmaze

Blade

2011-09-21T17:22:00.000-04:00

Blade came out in 1998, a slap in the face to 94's vampire fairy tale Interview. Bleak and unrelenting, the movie tells the story of Blade, a half-vampire, who very simply hunts and kills vampires. That's it. It doesn't vacillate and question its own morality, nor does it wax philosophical about power and immortality. Vampires are evil and Blade exists to kill them.

Yes, okay, yes Blade is half-vampire but he doesn't brood. He doesn't spend his days mourning his innocence and daydreaming about the might-have-been. At least not on screen. Both the character and the film cut through the bullshit, excise the melodrama, and deliver on killing vampires.

That's not to say I don't love a good, melodramatic, gothic love story. Just not all the time. Blade appeals to the other half of my psyche.

There is no love in this film, only lust. No promises of a better tomorrow, no matter how elusive. And no reprieve from evil, no matter how temporary. Blade's stoicism is refreshing, if a bit unnerving. His directness is necessary, and he makes no apologies. "Get over it," he says to Karen after she accuses him of using her as bait.

The world of Blade is populated by vampires who eke out a careful existence, doing their best to fly below human radar. Vampire upstarts, young vamps with no sense of decorum, prefer instead to indulge in hedonistic bloodlust, tempting humans with promises of immortality. Blade's world is populated by Whistler and Frost. Whistler is Blade's surrogate father, his hunting buddy, and when the need arises, his drug administrator. Frost is Blade's quarry. He's one of those upstarts, looking to overcome his "turned" status by resurrecting and becoming a blood god.

Blade's world grows a little bit larger when he meets Karen. But it isn't by love or accident that Blade opens his world to Karen. She's drawn in through pity. Blade takes pity on Karen and tries to save her from becoming a vampire, mimicking Whistler's attempts to rescue Blade from his vampire half. It's an instinct born from loss. Both Blade and Whistler lost their families to vampires. Saving Blade helped Whistler reclaim something of himself; saving Karen might help Blade deal with his mother's death. But Blade can't save Karen any more than he can suppress is bloodlust. Karen has to cure herself. She's a strong character and her strength, together with Whislter's loyalty are Blade's connection to his humanity. Blade's vampire half is slowly winning the battle within him, and it's unclear how much longer he can hold out.

But this movie isn't really about Blade's inner conflict, as interesting and rife with melodramatic potential as that may be. No, it's about him preventing Frost from waking a vampire god. Blade is a vampire-on-vampire action movie, and the action is pretty clean and fun to watch. Although Blade carries a sword--a katana--the movie features a fair bit of karate. More notably, the film's fight scenes are underscored by techno music, a pairing that was made trendy a year later with The Matrix in 1999.

Blade is also worthy of closer attention because of its use of CGI. The '90s were still early days for computer generated imaging, animation, and graphics, and Blade put the technology to use to help Frost achieve his godly transformation. Sitting where we are today, it's easy to criticize the quality of the graphics and the studio's choice to include them in the film, but Blade proved to be a good testing ground for CGI. The film made over $100m, and the graphics added to the movie's high visual style of urban horror/fantasy.

A stoic ass-kicking halfbreed, a megalomaniacal villain with delusions of grandeur, a brilliant self-rescuing woman, and a techno soundtrack. That is Blade. Indeed, other comic book-inspired vampire movies share some of these qualities, but most mitigate their action with introspection, love stories, or werewolves. Blade just is; unapologetic and dark.

Red State

2011-09-12T15:46:00.002-04:00

Insitution Zombots!
Referee  DM

Case ID  Red State
Patient Name  Kevin Smith

Preliminary Diagnosis  Tarantinoitis
NB  Spoilers


Patient History Patient is known largely for indie comedy but appreciates horror. Patient has expressed frustration with the studio system and mainstream film production, but enjoys success as a filmmaker and an actor. In this Referee's opinion, Patient's greatest accomplishment is Dogma which exhibits a maturity of subject matter and competency in script not present in his earlier work.

Case History Red State is not dissimilar to Dogma in that it deals with themes of Sex, Religion, and Politics. Red State's themes are embodied by the characters of The Boys, The Preacher and His Flock, and The Authorities. Red State opens on The Boys and follows their sexual misadventure which brings them into contact with The Preacher and His Flock. The Preacher and His Flock have a reputation for gross intolerance, and The Boys learn first hand just how hateful these people are.

The Authorities are aware of The Preacher and His Flock, and through an unfortunate series of events, they are forced to confront one another. The situation escalates into a shoot-out between The Authorities and The Preacher and His Flock, with no satisfactory resolution for either side.

Observed Symptoms Red State exhibits lengthy monologues and prolonged dialogues, and abrupt shifts in focus and tone. For too long The Boys discuss their upcoming date, and The Preacher pontificates excessively to His Flock. The resulting stall in story causes the audience to disengage, and the experience is akin to the impatience effected by Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. This is not to suggest Patient is incapable of writing good dialogue, there is simply too much of it. To Patient's credit, dialogue is limited during action sequences.

Red State's trifecta of themes nearly matches the film's three part structure. Sex begins with The Boys and overlaps slightly with The Preacher and His Flock. When The Boys arrive in the care of The Preacher and His Flock, Religion becomes the predominant theme. Sex and Religion are usurped by Politics when The Authorities enter the story and gain narrative control.

Red State's resolution, or denouement, is told entirely from the point of view of The Authorities. Immediately prior to the denouement, the story experiences a moment of insanity in which characters and audience alike are forced to question reality. It is Red State's finest moment and best exemplifies Patient's creativity.

Recommendation It is the recommendation of this Referee that Patient engage in increased script editing in the future. Increased editing will significantly improve the pacing and enjoyment of Patient's films. Patient is encouraged to continue to explore chapter- or episodic storytelling but should refrain from abrupt, jarring, or otherwise unstructured transitions in narrative voice and point of view.

Name That Tune

2011-09-08T17:13:00.000-04:00

Zombots! is very please to present its first soundtrack quiz. Can you name all 15 movies?

Book Report: Bedbugs

2011-09-05T10:11:00.000-04:00

I had bedbugs. I thought it was allergies. I was all itchy around my wrists and ankles. I was lucky they didn't migrate from the mattress, but was stupid to not figure it out sooner.

In Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters, Susan Wendt is painfully aware of her bedbug problem, but is much less fortunate that I was.

The Wendt's new apartment is nearly perfect but shortly after moving in, Susan begins to experience some things she can't explain: there's a faint pinging sound coming from nowhere in particular, and she finds a small photo of the previous tenants, caked in blood. The building has a dark history. The owner's husband killed himself in the basement, and the last tenants disappeared without a trace. Susan is willing to accept that her family's new home is a little strange, as long as there are no bedbugs.

But there are bedbugs. Lots of them. And they're after Susan.

Bedbugs blends urban paranoia with deep-seated psychosis. Bedbugs are a real problem in some cities, and Winters uses the threat of bedbugs to explore Susan's fragile psyche. Susan left her job at Legal Aid to return to painting and take care of her young daughter. Susan's husband, Alex, runs his own commercial photography business and enjoys a limited amount of success. In her darker moments, Susan believes Alex is resentful of her, but that is her own resentment reflecting back on herself. Since quitting her job, Susan hasn't once tried to paint, and her subconscious feeling of unfulfillment manifests as a slight persecution complex.

When the bedbugs first appear to Susan, she has trouble convincing Alex they might have a problem. But they bring in an exterminator anyway. The place is clean. There are no bugs. But Susan keeps getting bit, and she develops a kind of fanaticism, retreating into the online world of bedbug websites. Finding solace in the forums, Susan is just barely able to manage her paranoia, but outwardly she's exhibiting some alarming signs of a growing insanity. The woman has been scratching herself raw.

Bedbugs uses a slow burn to help the reader better appreciate Susan's descent into madness. When the story reaches its climax, the line between fantasy and reality has become so blurred, you're uncertain about who's really crazy. But all is made clear in the end, as Bedbgus reveals its true nature.

Winters is the best-selling author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. With Bedbugs, he steps out of the past and into the present to prey on contemporary fears. Unseen by most people, bedbugs feed on human blood, and dealing with an infestation can be financially and emotionally draining. Bedbugs can be a real horror show, and Winters has taken it a step further because his insects feed not only on the body, but also the soul.

Bedbugs is infesting booksellers beginning September 6, 2011.

Fan Expo Canada 2011

2011-09-01T18:30:00.000-04:00

Ghoul Friday Attic Raiders Tall Gear Industrial

Fear

2011-08-24T22:53:00.000-04:00

Like the song says, we're going back in time. All the way back to 1996, an Olympic leap year of nautical disasters, Beast Wars, and what might be the longest prison sentence ever handed down. Alanis Morissett became the youngest artist to win Album of the Year, GM's EV1 was put into production, and 2Pac died of acute lead poisoning. On the big screen, genre fans bore witness to egregious plot contrivances (Independence Day), flying cows (Twister), paradigm shifts (Scream), and Steve Buschemi stuffed into a wood chipper (Fargo).

It was also the year Mark Whalberg contributed nothing of note to film and television. A year after his appearance in the acclaimed Basketball Diaries, and a year before he dropped trow as Dirk Diggler, Mark Whalberg starred alongside Reese Whitherspoon in a quiet little thriller about obsessive, psychotic love.

Fear is certainly not the best movie out there, but it succeeds where so many others like it fail; it's a believable teen thriller. And it was rated R. Of course, an R in '96 is a very different thing from one today, but the rating speaks of a movie that doesn't pander or pull any punches. The film isn't overly violent, and most of the action is saved for the climax, but Alyssa Milano gets the shit kicked out of her, and William Peterson is repeatedly pistol whipped. Reese Witherspoon's relationship with her father is completely believable and her behaviour accurately reflects that of a love-struck teenaged girl.

Nicole meets David at a party and the two fall almost immediately in desperate love. Only David's love for Nicole tends toward possessive obsessiveness. It becomes a real problem when he attacks Nicole's best guy friend, Toby, but David's appropriately apologetic and Nicole can't help but forgive him. But their second honeymoon period is not to last and again Nicole breaks it off, this time in the most passive-aggressive way possible, by not returning his calls. Spurned, David turns on Nicole, on her family and friends, and the movie reaches it final, climactic personality clash.

It's a pretty straightforward story, and probably takes too long to get going. Although it follows a standard three-act structure there is a very clear division in the plot: before David turns scary, and after. But the argument could be made the film is following Nicole's arc, and hers alone. She is the central character and the object of David's "love". As such, the relationship evolves in her time because it is her narrative. Indeed, the audience is privy to David's emotions and actions, but only as a set-up for conflict. In this sense the movie hums along at the pace of teen romance which needs time for its passions and melodramas. And when the relationship finally tanks, it happens fast and with devastating finality.

Underscoring the Nicole-David relationship are all the other secondary inter-personal relationships that support the plot. Nicole doesn't really know her father or his wife, but she's loved at home and is well-adjusted. The family clashes in numerous vectors--as all families do--but not enough to take away from the main David-conflict. Rather, the family dynamic reinforces belief in the characters, their situation, and the action they take.

Most teen genre films are straight-up horror movies, and PG-13 slashers at that; Fear is kind of an odd duck with its lack of nudity, low violence, and R rating. Despite its quirkiness, it is far superior than most other teen chillers. Through its careful control of pacing and on-screen relationships, the film is wholly believable as a study in teen-aged relationships and, albeit, fucked-up love.

Terrible Moments in Taglining

2011-08-18T15:42:00.000-04:00

"Christine Brown has good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future. But in three days she's going to hell."

That's not a tag line. That's a plot summary.

Gamer

2011-08-12T18:52:00.001-04:00

1.
In 1992 Neil Esterbrook wrote “cyberpunk is dead,” stating that most cyberpunk authors had moved back into mainstream science fiction. Cyberpunk exists as a subgenre of science fiction literature, a subversive exploration of a ruling technocratic corporate culture. Indulging in both a fascination with, and fear of technology, cyberpunk often blurs the lines between what is natural and what is completely artificial, sometimes even reversing the two.

Cyberpunk was born in the 1980s and offered a glimpse into the not-too-distant future. Building on then-current technologies, the subgenre followed their development and applications to one possible, horrific conclusion: that technological enrichment does not equal societal enlightenment. Although grounded in tech, cyberpunk dealt with changes to human consciousness and behaviour—changes brought about by technological advancement.

As a film subgenre, again couched within sci-fi, cyberpunk is less strict in its temporal element, as some “cyberpunk” films are set in the present. As a result, cyberpunk movies aren’t necessarily steeped in the technological and amoral decadence that characterizes the books. But there is still a subversive undercurrent to the proceedings, and some commentary on the nature of technology, humanity, and society.

Bruce Bethke, father of cyberpunk, makes it clear that he did not invent the subgenre’s tropes—that was largely the work of William Gibson. What Bethke did create was both the word, cyberpunk, and the type: “a young, technologically facile, ethically vacuous, computer-adept vandal or criminal.” As Bethke’s creation took on a life of its own, cyberpunks morphed into anti-heroes, rebelling against a corrupt corporate ruling class. In the books and films that came after Bethke and Gibson, cyberpunk grew into a subculture with its own aesthetics and guiding principles.

Bethke's original cyberpunks were influenced partly by the punk music scene, and partly by group of computer-literate teens he had run-in with in 1980 (artist: Bob Walters).

In film, cyberpunk has five main themes:

-technology’s negative impact on humanity
-the fusion of man and machine
-corporate control over society
-subversive underground movements and revolutions
-the ubiquitous access to information

If any of these themes are missing from a film, it cannot, in all fairness, be considered cyberpunk. Conversely, the film Hackers is devoutly cyberpunk because it embraces, for the most part, Bethke’s original idea: punk kids whose technological prowess allows them to undermine authority and acquire a certain amount of power.

2.
Gamer comes very close to being cyberpunk, falling just short of the mark, and the film’s failure to be cyberpunk is the main reason why it doesn’t succeed. In the world of Gamer, Ken Castle has cornered the entertainment market. His pioneering nanotechnology—self-replicating nanites that take over the brain—has allowed him to create two very different but equally successful live-action “games”. Society is a simulation, much like Second Life, in which players remotely control real people, and end up indulge in all manner of debauchery. Slayers is a first person shooter in which convicted felons are remotely controlled by a gamer and must survive a series of urban warfare scenarios. After thirty successful games (success is measured by not dying), a felon’s conviction is expunged and he is set free.

Kable and his gamer, the teenaged Simon, have won 27 games. They will be the first ever Slayers champions. It’s a big deal, for both Castle and Kable, but Castle is working against Kable, trying to sabotage the game. For personal reasons, Castle cannot let Kable walk free. A secretive and mysterious group of people, who call themselves Humanz, contact Simon and Kable, providing them with hacks and assistance to undermine Castle’s cheating, with the ultimate goal of overriding Castle’s proprietary body-and-mind-controlling nanotechnology.

As a would-be cyberpunk movie, Gamer appears to address the subgenre’s five themes with a particular sensitivity for current trends in popular culture and technological innovation. But Gamer isn’t cyberpunk, and it should have been.

2.1
The negative impact of technology on humanity

Not pictured: lifeless human shells devoid of agency. Pictured: boobs.

The only technology featured in Gamer is one which assumes control of a person’s neurocortex, robbing them of their free will. The characters in Society and Slayers are nothing more than avatars to be controlled at a distance. It might even be appropriate to suggest they’re robots of a sort, programmed by and with the will of the controller. Castle’s endgame is to be able to control everyone, everywhere with his tech.

By adopting a gaming conceit, Gamer is able to mine gaming culture for a horrific, logical outcome of developments in videogame culture and technology. Gamer suggests that videogames will supplant reality, blending one person’s gaming with another person’s being. In Society and Slayers, the subject/object opposition of the gamer/avatar dissolves and the two become one. Identity is undermined by the anonymous nature of Society, and the gamers and players in Slayers share one consciousness as both are play-fighting for survival.

2.2
The fusion of man and machine

I have a soft spot of Johnny Mnemonic.

The man/machine theme lies in Castle’s nanites. No other tech is featured in the movie, and world of the film is distinctly contemporary. Nanites are microscopic robots that are able to replicate themselves. They are injected into a human subject and replace that person’s brain cells. The fusion exists out of sight of the audience, but its effect is that it turns people into avatars, empty shells for others to control. The tech has no agency of its own, of course, but then neither does the person once his nanites are activated.

Gamer fails to truly embrace the organic/inorganic reversal so important to cyberpunk because the avatars, or players, are always under the control of a person. The nanites cannot be removed from the host—the person would die—but they can be overridden. Although the complete fusion of man and machine is present in Gamer, it happens out of sight of the audience. This aspect of the story could be an interesting point, but the theme is undercut by a virus that allows the host to regain control of his body.

The issue of identity is only ever addressed through the character of Angie, Kable’s wife. In order to make ends meet, she works as an avatar in Society and is, unsurprisingly, controlled by a fat shut-in. Outside of Society, Angie is treated like a second-class citizen, suggesting that people who willingly choose to give their bodies over to the tech are lesser beings. Rather than revelling in technophilia, Gamer disdains its technology and pushes an agenda of organic purity.

2.3
Corporate control of society

The man can't be trusted. Just look at his shoes.

Truly this is where Gamer beings to shed its cyberpunk skin. While it would appear that media conglomerates and Castle’s company exhibit a certain amount of control over society, there is no single, unified front lording over the world.

Cyberpunk’s political theory states that technology drastically changes the distribution of power. The owners of the tech are the ones in power, and will struggle against the adept users who do not wish to be ruled by and through technology. Current technological innovation and development is spearheaded by corporations and companies that specialize in research and design. Governments are incapable of competing with large corporations, and financial crisis leads to corporate takeover of governmental institutions.

There is nothing to suggest this happened in the world of Gamer. Rather, the film presents a world much like our own in which one person can achieve great fame and power through his contribution to society. Granted, Castle owns a huge market share in the gaming and entertainment sector, and has struck a deal with the department of corrections, but he is a man, not a megacorp, and there is nothing in the film to suggest that he is directing society.

Castle’s ambition cannot replace the subgenre’s trope.

Arnie survives the shit out of The Running Man, representing man's fight against tyranny and oppression. Gerard Butler walks away from his figurative battle in Slayers to punch Michael C. Hall in the face, which represents man's distaste for dance breaks.

The Running Man is perhaps the movie that bears the closest resemblance to Gamer. In it, prisoners are run through a gauntlet with the promise of freedom should they survive. Set in 2019, the world is fixated on The Running Man game show and a live feed is broadcast all over the country on public televisions. The show encourages and reinforces the populace’s belief in freedom even though they are under the thumb of a totalitarian regime. The show acts as a pacifier and an outlet for society, but unbeknownst to its audience, is one hundred percent fixed and its champions are all dead, killed by the network.

Slayers is like The Running Man in that it is wildly popular, but the circumstances surrounding the two shows are very different. Whereas The Running Man is set after America’s financial collapse, Gamer’s social, cultural, and political milieux are largely unknown. Slayers exists only as a form of entertainment, and while it does serve as a kind of social commentary, there is no depth to its argument.

2.4
Subversive underground movements and revolutions

Vintage arcade games. Get it?!?

Gamer’s revolutionaries are woefully underwritten, and this only further removes the film from its cyberpunk pretentions. We learn very little about these people, and their impact on the story happens late in the film.

The Humanz group is actively trying to subvert Castle by creating a virus that will crash the nanites and free the avatar. Humanz understand the danger Castle poses to society, and their pre-emptive strike against him prevent him from taking over the world, thereby subverting one of cyberpunk’s main themes (see above).

Humanz supply Simon with a hack that will allow him to speak with Kable—communication is not permitted between gamer and gamee. The hack forces Simon to relate to Kable as a person and not just a character, and though Kable is still under Simon’s control, he is able to reclaim a certain amount of agency. If Gamer were a better written film, if its writers were able to fully understand and exploit this turn of events, Simon, Kable, and Humanz could continue subvert to Castle’s tech, methodically “freeing” the avatars while the film comments on the nature of identity and agency.

Instead, Gamer eschews subtlety in favour of bland action. Before the final battle, Simon relinquishes all control over Kable and he leaves the battlefield. Kable, now in full control of himself confronts Castle, cutting Simon entirely from the story. And it doesn’t even mater that Simon is so easily dismissed—he has nothing invested in exposing or defeating Castle. Simon, due to his complete lack of characterization, has as little life as any of Castle’s avatars. This too, could be an interesting point, but the film isn’t smart enough to understand it.

2.5
Ubiquitous access to information

Ubiquitous access to loud prints.

It is only through Simon that we, the audience, are aware of the state of the World Wide Web. Simon spends most of his screentime in his room, surrounded on all sides by the Inertnet. He is completely immersed in the online world, and being a gaming superstar, is constantly barraged by fan mail. At one point, Simon’s Internet access is suspended, but he’s back online in a matter of minutes.

Although Simon, and by extension everyone else in the world, would appear to have unlimited access to information, there seems to be no government censorship or control over that information. And there is no need for control because the government has no terrifying secrets about how evil they are (see 2.3). Only Castle carefully guards a secret that would destroy him, but that particular bit of information resides within Cable—no one else is privy to that information.

Information, for the most part, is of little consequence in Gamer. It neither helps nor hinders the characters in the film. Nanite technology is well-known; there is no larger conspiracy that needs exposing, save for Castle’s master plan, and Humanz is incapable of convincing anyone that Castle is evil. Castle himself is the cause of his defeat, due to a logic flaw in the story.

3.
Gamer is supposed to be a movie about identity, individuality, agency, and consciousness. It’s supposed to tell its technological horror story using cyberpunk conventions, detailing a future in which nanotechnology presents an unseen but tangible threat to society. But by failing to conform to the subgenre’s principles, Gamer is incapable of commenting on the ways in which technology influences culture.

The world of Gamer is indeed one without meaning, affectation, or communal bonds, and this artifice is exemplified by the decadent unreality of Society and the cold detachment of Slayers, but there is no story of human experience set against this bleak landscape. Gamer fails to wed humanity with technology, and instead pits them against each other. The tragedy is that Gamer should be cyberpunk, but its shortcomings in terms of character development, and its short-sightedness with regards to story prevent it from realising its potential.

Badass 'splosions? Check. A thoughtful exploration of the human condition using robotic mind-controlling technology? Not so much.

Infographic: Jason Voorhees Death Toll

2011-08-09T11:01:00.000-04:00

I love infographics. If I were good at design, I'd make my own. Fortunately, there are other geeks out there who are making up for my shortcomings, and today we are blessed with a poster detailing Jason Voorhees' murders across ten movies:

Click to biggify.

Variations on a Theme

2011-08-06T10:09:00.000-04:00

So I had this song stuck in my head. After trying--and failing--to excise the tune from my brain, I just let my mind do its own thing and I found myself thinking more and more about movie themes. Not instrumental themes, but theme songs. Songs custom-made for film, that play over the credits and are only available on the soundtrack. You know, like how every James Bond movie has its own song. That kind of thing.

I thought, you really don't hear a lot of those any more. And it's a bit of a shame, really. While the songs themselves aren't all winners, their presence helps complete the package; the film as product. What prompts a producer to pursue a special-purpose song? It's all part of a film's marketing--radio play certainly helps keep the film front-of-mind. And casting a singer in a major role generally ensures a unique musical composition. Conversely, an actor might seek to expand into music by lending their voice to the film's soundtrack.

Some movie themes are awesome. Others, not so much.

Original Sin - The Shadow

Taylor Dane lends her soulful voice to The Shadow's incongruous theme song. I could make an argument about how the lyrics fit the film, but why bother. It's not a very good song, but I still kind of like it. I feel the same way about the movie.

Batdance - Batman

Danny Elfman wrote a brilliant theme for Tim Burton's Batman, but Prince went another way with his contribution to the movie's soundtrack. There's no questioning Prince's talent, but the song and video skew more campy than dark, harking back to an earlier Batman.

She's a Looker - Looker
Michael Crichton's dark exploration of media and advertising has an 80s-tastic theme song that completely fails to capture the movie's mood and atmosphere

Shocker Theme - Shocker
There is no official video, as far as I know, which just goes to show you how well Shocker was expected to perform.

Cancion Del Mariachi - Desperado
I don't speak a word of Spanish, but that doesn't stop me from absolutely loving everything about this song, starting with Antonio Banderas. The song is performed over the opening credits and segues seemlessly into the start of the film.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me - Batman Forever
A rare instance in which the song and video are far, far superior than the film itself. I still have no idea what this song has to do with the movie, but it's freaking U2 so who cares.

Beast Loose in Paradise - Dark Floors
This might be cheating a bit, because Dark Floors features glam metal band Lordi as the monsters who torment the film's characters. But I like Lordi, and while this song isn't their best, it was written for the movie.

Princes of the Universe - Highlander

Queen is all over the Highlander soundtrack. It could be argued that Who Wants to Live Forever is a better song, but it wasn't the official movie theme song.

Flesh and Bone - Suck
Cheating again! Suck is a rock 'n roll vampire movie so it stands to reason the soundtrack would be chock full of custom built songs. However, Flesh and Bone is not performed by the movie's heroes. It's sung by the badguy.

We Don't Need Another Hero - Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
Auntie sings about a better life beyond the Thunderdome. Weirdly, I can't find an official video for the song, but it was a huge hit for Tina Turner.

Never Ending Story - The Never Ending Story
Holy shit, Limahl's a dude.

Terrible Moments in Taglining

2011-08-02T10:13:00.001-04:00

"Evil will do anything to live."

If evil is not "alive" then what threat does it pose? And if evil can create itself into being, willing itself alive, what hope do we have of stopping it? The answer to both questions is none. There is no threat, no hope, and no point to this film.

Other Dangers: Scary Stories to Disturb Your Kids

2011-07-30T12:06:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago, I exposed a shocking case of children's cannibalism. Today I present to you not one, but three cases of no-way-is-this-suitable-for-kids children's lit.

One of my favourite books growing up was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The book, published in 1981, is a collection of urban legends and folktales. That in itself might seem pretty tame, but the pictures that went along with the stories...

Oh God.

There are no gods here.

Stephen Gammell provided the illustrations for Alvin Schwartz's stories. Stories with titles like "Old Woman All Skin and Bone", "The Dead Man's Brains", and "The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers". The collection features tales you've probably never heard before as well as some classics such as "The Hook" and "The Babysitter". Admittedly, not all are scary. "The Viper" is a well-told joke, and "Wait Till Martin Comes" features a child-hero who knows better than to stick around for the titular character.

But those pictures!

Gammell is a self-taught, award-winning artist who specializes in illustrating children's lit. Despite the disturbing nature of his art, there's no question his drawings exhibit a rare talent. I said Scary Stories was one of my favourite books, due in no small part to their art. The pictures are downright terrifying, and I first gazed upon them when I was just a little girl.

Explains a lot, I guess.

Scary Stories is the first of three books in a series of youth horror lit written by Schwartz, all illustrated by Gammell. The pictures, in combination with the books' more violent stories, led to angry challenges launched at the American Library Association. In fact, so many people contested the books that the series was the number one most-challenged "book" of the 90s.

Beware the subversive prose of Judy Blume.

My parents obviously didn't have any problems with Scary Stories, and I've held on to my copies in the hopes of one day passing them down to a new generation of horror lovers. I might wait till my imaginary beneficiary is a bit older than I was when I first cracked those covers. Seven might be a bit young.

You're never too young to have your innocence devoured.

Here Lies My Thirst

2011-07-28T10:11:00.000-04:00

I found the brochure in a cheese shop a week ago. Coffin Ridge Winery? You had me at wine.

Nestled in the rolling hills of Northeastern Ontario, Coffin Ridge is the area's first commercial vinyard. Ontario wine mostly comes out of the Niagara region, but the soils to the north are just as fertile, it seems. A boutique winery, Coffin Ridge grows a handful of varietals, but offers a diverse collection of wines, including a silver medalist at the 2011 All Canadian Wine Championships.

I asked why the place was named Coffin Ridge.
"Well, that's Coffin Hill over there," explained our host. He pointed out the window. "And we have a sense of humour, so..."

A dark sense of humour, for sure. The winery has embraced a death motif, with its black and red painted building, to the black bunting, to the coffin-shaped shelves and windows in the tasting room. The vinyard exudes goth; the Bone Dry Riesling is very nice, I've yet to taste the Back From the Dead Red, the Resurrection Rose is that award-winner I mentioned, and all can be purchased as gift-coffins.

In the tasting room, you're given three wines to sample and then you may purchase more wine to drink on the premises. If it's a nice day, I recommend taking it outside to enjoy with a lovely view of Georgian Bay. You might also want to indulge in what was the most delicious cheese plate I've ever seen.

Coffin Ridge has only been around a few years, but if their awards are any indication (five in all), they've hit the ground running. I can tell you I liked everything I tasted, and my friends and I walked out of there with many bottles between us. Its gothy aesthetic sets it apart from other wineries but doesn't smack of effort; over the decade, wine marketing has taken on a new dimension by targeting discreet demographics with "funny" and "hip" labels (i.e.: Fat Bastard, Guilty Men, Cat's Pee on a Gooseberry Bush). Coffin Ridge isn't pandering to the goth market through design. They're just having a good time.

And making great wine.

Book Report: The Fever Series

2011-07-21T11:49:00.000-04:00

As a joke, a friend bought me a romance novel. I loaned it out to a couple of girlfriends and each one told me that I had to, had to read it. It was terrible. It was wonderful. It was sexy, hilarious, erotic, irritating, and satisfying. I thought, I'll read more in this series.

I haven't yet. I will. I promise.

That same friend who gave me Beyond the Highland Mist recently told me about another series by the same author. "It's so good," she said.
"Much sex and sexiness?"
"Not so much sex."
"But there is sex." I wanted to make very sure.

I never thought I was one for romance novels. I'm still not, but they're fun to read every once in a while. Mostly I shop in the horror section. Or YA lit, which can also be richly dark and fantastic. So when I learned about a dark fantasy series written by a romance author, I was sold.

MacKayla has traveled the long way from Ashford, Georgia, to Dublin, Ireland, to find her sister's killer. Shortly after her arrival in Ireland, Mac learns the world is not the sunny, carefree place she thinks it is. The world is a nightmare realm populated by powerful, deadly beings. The Fae are a race of god-like fairy creatures that arrived on Earth millennia ago and have been meddling with the world ever since. The Seelie are the stuff of fairy tales, pretty and magical. The Unseelie are monsters straight from hell. Many long years ago, the Unseelie were imprisoned, kept a safe distance from all worlds. But over time the prison walls grew thin and some Unseelie slipped through into our world. Now the mysterious Lord Master is plotting to tear down the walls and unleash hell.

All for want of a book.

Mac can sense Fae objects of power, and this one book is the most powerful object of all. In it is the dark knowledge of the Unseelie King, and numerous parties are searching for it. The book has something to do with her sister's death, so Mac must walk a dangerous path if she's going to get her revenge. On her journey she meets monsters, a vampire, druids, and a sisterhood of similarly-gifted women. But what's really got Mac in trouble is the storm of jealousy and hatred that ??? around her current mentor Barrons and her would-be protector V'lane. Mysterious, powerful, and dangerous, Barrons collects Fae objects of power and uses Mac to locate them. Equally powerful is the Seelie prince V'lane who, in addition to wanting Mac help him locate the book, keeps trying to have sex with her. Devastating, passionate sex.

My friend was right. There is a lot of sexiness in the Fever series, but not a lot of sex. Sex gets in the way of the story moving forward and author Karen Marie Moning has cleverly woven that into the text. The books are about Mac's journey from innocent girl to powerful woman and sex is both a roadblock and transformational process.

Mac's growth is slow, painful, delayed, and extremely frustrating at times. It makes for an engrossing read, though tinged with aggravation. Making up for Mac's shortcomings is Barrons, a hard-edged and hard-bodied bookseller who takes what he wants from the world. He is without pity, without morals, and without a doubt the best thing about the Fever series. His erotic love-hate relationship with Mac underscores the end-of-the-world tension in the story; Barrons says he doesn't care if the world ends, but he cares enough to keep Mac alive. So long as she's useful to him.

Although the series is full of darkness and danger, it's not nearly as bleak as it could be. Most everyone accepts change as it comes without embracing a depressingly fatalistic outlook. The series' darkness is tempered by the late addition of Mac's parents to the plot, a development this reader didn't much care for. That one criticism aside, the Fever series is a rich, dark fantasy drenched in blood.

Potential readers take note, Moning is not a horror author, but there are horrors to be found in this series of books. Some are personal for the characters, some are visceral for the reader, and make for an engaging, engrossing read.

Terrible Moments in Taglining

2011-07-19T09:42:00.001-04:00

"He should never have been born..."

Technically, he was laid.

Paranoid Activity 2

2011-07-17T16:48:00.000-04:00

Fade In

Day One

The three of you have just moved into your new house and are unpacking

Day Two

Party time! You're having a house-warming party
You've invited a psychic as entertainment
The psychic tells two of the three you that a dark energy has attached itself to you and that you cannot leave the house

Day Four?

You awake to find someone/thing has emptied all the kitchen cabinets onto the floor
Two of you are freaked out

Day Five?

You awake to find someone/thing has emptied all the kitchen cabinets onto the floor
All three of you are freaked out

Day Whatever

Same shit, different day
Not one of you has thought to phone the psychic, even though he said he could "close the door" and free you of the evil that surrounds you
Nor do you think to film the strange happenings in the kitchen

Some Time Later

It hasn't occurred to you that only two of you are cursed, meaning the third roommate can leave the house

Even More Time Has Passed

You have not left the house in at least a week; no one has called, no one has come to see you

What about work? What happened to all your friends? I guess your party really sucked

Ten Minutes Left In This Interminable Film

The ghost appears
Your terror brings on a clarity of mind you have never before experienced. Scared though you are, and painfully aware of your own mortality, you cannot help but marvel at the significance of your inaction--it was not indecision that brought you to this moment, nor did you make the wrong decision. Failure to choose any course of action is what doomed you.
You die

Fade Out

The End

Embodiment of Horror

2011-07-13T16:53:00.000-04:00

I have two tattoos. I'm thinking of getting a third.

Probably not this one.

While searching for an image for a recent episode of TheAvod I unwittingly stumbled into the horror tattoo subculture. I love looking at pictures of awful tattoos and I thought I just hit pay dirt. Turns out that a lot of horror tattoos aren't ugly at all. Rather, they're artful and skillfully done.

But still, you get some real eyebrow-raisers.

And so, without further comment I present D's gallery of horror tats:

Hell on Earth

2011-07-08T11:39:00.000-04:00

I recently returned from a trip to the Cayman Islands, where I spent a good deal of time underwater. When I wasn't breathing compressed air through a plastic mouthpiece, I was alternately sunning myself/reading the shit novel my friend bought me at an airport bookstore.

We rented a car on our last day on Grand Cayman, and toured the island. One must-see attraction was Hell. Hell is named for an acre-large geologic formation on the island's west end. There, black limestone pokes out of the ground; pointy, craggy rocks reaching toward the sky. There's no clear history on why the place is called Hell, but one story tells us that a local official was heard to say, "This must be what Hell looks like."

I have in no way altered this photo. I didn't paint over the clear blue sky or desaturate the trees.

Hell, Grand Cayman is one of a handful of places named such. It might surprise no one to learn there are two Hells in the US, and, oddly, one in Norway.

Norway's Hell was not named for the mythic place, although it does exist within Norwegian theology, spelled Hel. Rather, the Norwegian Hell (insert necessary "cold" joke here), comes from the word hellir, which means overhang or cliff cave.

Hell, California, was a short-lived town the middle of nowhere. Founded in 1954, the town at one time boasted a gas station and a bar. Now, from what I understand, it's just a sandy patch in the desert off I-10.

Hell, Michigan, unlike it's California cousin, still exists today. Officially named Hell in 1841, the place is a major kitsch distribution centre. Interestingly, Hell, MI, might get its name from the German hell, meaning bright. Story goes that a German couple descended from their stagecoach into the bright summer day and exclaimed "So schon hell!" The locals overheard their remark and, for reasons that are lost to us but might have something to do with misinterpretation, named the place Hell. Another, much more dismissive story suggests the town was so named as a gentle "fuck you" to town founder George Reeves who said, "You can name it Hell for all I care."

If you ever happen to be on Grand Cayman, in southern Norway, or in Livingston County, MI, I'd suggest taking a detour through Hell. Although there wasn't much to Hell, C.I. other than some cool looking rocks and a dude named Ivan dressed as a devil, it was worth it just to say I'd been to Hell and back.

Where the hell?

Rituals

2011-06-24T17:59:00.001-04:00

Oh, Canada. Your filmmaking incentives are the foundation upon which the contemporary American film industry is built. But, Canada is also capable of making its own movies and they're not all about weird sex.

Rituals, for instance, is about five friends on a hiking trip getting stalked and killed by a crazy person. Any comparison with Deliverance glosses over the film's unique handling of the situation. Also, no one gets raped.

What begins as a week-long hiking trip for a group of old friends turns into endless days of torture and fear as the group is slowly culled. The film follows the men as they try desperately to extricate themselves from their terrible situation, but there is little hope of them surviving either their attacker or the vast Canadian wilderness. The situation is dire, the outlook bleak. And it just keeps getting worse.

With little remorse or redemption for its characters, Rituals offers little more than an exercise in torment and survival. But it's a tense, compelling film. Unlike similar, later films, Rituals offers an attempt at understanding its cruelty, and its characters are heartbreakingly human. In the midst of all the chaos, there is time for grief, and the film mourns the passing of its unfortunate heroes. Some die in spectacular, horrifying ways. Others in mundane accidents, but no one person's death is any more or less tragic.

Rituals is, in a word, merciless. But it is not senseless, either in its story or violence, and I think that is what elevates it above your run-of-the-mill killbilly fare.

The Traveler

2011-06-12T14:20:00.000-04:00

What is going on with this movie? The last time I asked that question, it was in reference to the layered meaning in Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre. This time I'm asking about the two-faced approach to storytelling in The Traveler.

On Christmas Eve, Val Kilmer walks into a police station with a murder confession on his lips. The cops process him and discover, too late, they're caught in a supernatural vengeance plot, while you, the viewer, have the strangest feeling that you've seen something like this before.

The Traveler has all kinds of problems. I could use this space to write up a laundry list of the inconsistencies, logic errors, and bad of dialogue that are featured in the movie, but I've decided instead to use my powers of criticism and analysis for lesser evil and produced this handy after-the-fact guide to screenwriting:

Click to biggen.

Vampires by Day

2011-06-02T23:56:00.002-04:00

I think my desk calendar is trying to tell me something. It was a gift. One of those tearaway calendars. Vampire-themed. Each morning I tear off a page, revealing the new day's date and vampire-related fact.

Fact: I'm learning a lot about vampires.
Another fact: It's all bullshit.

Okay, maybe not bullshit. That's a bit harsh. But certainly made up. And I don't mean made up in the sense that vampires are fictitious to begin with. The "facts" on my calendar are bits of folklore, re-tooled to lend more credence to vampire "truths" and histories.

For instance: Celtic Vampires (Part 1). According to Celtic histories, the Sidhe (Celtic word for what today are called vampires) once dominated Ireland... The Tuatha De Denaan used their powers to put four curses upon the Sidhe. On two seemed to have worked: one that would cause the light of day to scorch their skin and burn their eyes, and one that would allow no water to quench their thirst.

Here's the thing: Sidhe may be a people, or it may be a place. The Sidhe might be the Tuatha De Danann, or their descendents--regardless, they're fairies. Or they might be the mounds in which the fairies live. One this is clear, though. They're not vampires.

Nor was Vlad Dracul, for that matter.

And just in case I haven't yet sucked all the fun out vampires, a brief history lesson: It's rather hard to pin down just where vampire folklore comes from. Granted, the Hungarians do have their share of stories, but vampires were also invoked as a means to explain how and why corpses decay, and as agents of the plague. Likewise, prophyria was often written off as vampirism. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, Europe's vampire folklore was canonized.

Required reading for any true vampire aficionado.

Vampire lore has grown so large that it can no longer be constrained by the "rules" that govern the original incarnation. Anyone can say anything they want about vampires and all of it has to be given equal consideration. It's an evolution of sorts, a public domain property free to be copied and altered, and new generations will either survive and reproduce, or fade into obscurity.

But as vampire fiction grows and changes, something else is happening outside the realms of film and literature. And it's all being recorded on my calendar.

It's culture. Vampire culture and society. There is an organized group of individuals who believe they are vampires. They may not actually drink blood, but they feed off the energies of humans, explaining that psychic energies are akin to blood in that both are essential parts of being. Like any culture, these vampires have their own history (it's a pastiche of regional folklores), as well as a kind of ranked society with its own set of morals and tenets.

Like this one: Lifestyle. Be aware to set an example with the way you behave in the community.

That's good advice. And not just for vampires. We should, all of us, be mindful of the things we do and say. Another page, I believe it was sometime back in March, told me to treat everyone with respect. I'm assuming that includes non-kindred beings.

The anthropologist in me finds the whole thing kind of fascinating--the rise of a "vampire" culture within modern society. But the armchair psychologist in me thinks its nothing more than a group of loners who never got over their "misunderstood" phase of adolescence.

Or they just watched a lot of Vampire Knight.

My calendar with its fake vampire mysticism serves as a great introduction to contemporary cultural vampirism. But why vampires? Why are people identifying with bloodsucking monsters of lore? To begin to answer that question we have to consider how vampires have changed over time, from nightmare monsters to figures of romance. Humanized, contemporary vampires keep the monstrous side of their personalities in check. Their extraordinary abilities and afflictions make them special. No longer fearsome antagonists, vampires have transformed into reluctant, romantic heroes. Weakness has been re-written as vulnerability, and their distinct otherness makes them special, as opposed to freaky.

For the teen or the self-identified outcast, modern vampire fiction offers a kind of emotional support and justification for their feelings of disconnectedness, and isolation. It’s not a huge leap from identifying with vampires to believing one is a vampire, and it is possible that modern vampire culture grew up around transitional vampire fiction.

In addition to vampire social etiquette, my calendar also lists vampire books, movies, and music—songs about vampires. The calendar doesn’t comment on the possible connection between vampire society and vampire pop culture, but I can’t help putting the two together.

The hard part seems to be determining where one ends and the other begins.

I'm sure the line does not bisect puppets.

Trailer Review: The Unleashed

2011-05-31T18:54:00.000-04:00

This just in!

Canadian production company Dark House Films is releasing The Unleashed on 8 July 2011.

There's a reason Madison hasn't returned home in eight years. But after her mother dies, Madison must go back to the family home and put her house in order. With the support of her friends Madison is coping with her past, but a night of Ouija board fun releases something more dangerous than dark memories.

Tickets may be purchased for the world premier on 25 June 2011 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Toronto.

That Horror Look

2011-05-22T20:25:00.002-04:00

Not too long ago I read this article about book jacket design. In particular, the article pointed out how a great typography can take the place of an image or graphic, creating its own kind of allure and appeal. This got me thinking: I don’t know a damn thing about graphic design and commercial art.

I like to think I can pick out good design. Like I have some instinctual sense for what works visually, and this will, in turn, reflect the value of the product I’m about to consume. I’m probably just kidding myself, but of the books and movies I’ve judged based on their cover art, most of them turned out to be pretty decent.

Most.

Complete. Waste. Of time.

A great movie poster should peak your interest and make you look twice. It’s supposed to pull you in, make to want to cross the street to see the film. This has always been the case, but it may surprise many readers to know that poster design has changed a great deal since the dawn of film.

A Brief History of Movie Posters

Movie posters developed not out of theatre posters, but print adverts for the circus. Like the circus posters, early movie posters were colourful, striking, and lurid—designed to catch the eye of passersby.

Wrote a poster designer in 1914: "It is evident that the mission of the poster is to attract people. The poster must bring the people across the street. Secondly, having gotten them there, you must tell them, in as few words as possible what they will see when they get inside. You must excite their curiosity sufficiently to make them part with their [money]. Thirdly, you must appeal to their artistic sense…"

Movie posers were present as early as 1900 and were an integral part of the movie exhibition business by 1915. In these early days, movie posters were made by independent lighographic companies. Studios were not in the habit of producing mass marketing materials in the first years of the 20th century. Instead, poster companies provided generic art directly to the film exhibitor through a local film exchange. These posters ranged in quality and scope, from advertising individual films to art that could be used to promote a variety of movies.

Early movie posters, like this one from 1895, often advertised film exhibition rather than the film itself.

Eventually theatre owners started making their own posters. Some of the posters obtained through the exchange were pretty poor, and in-house production was one way of ensuring good quality.
By 1915 studios were making their own posters which they distributed to exhibitors. This gave the studios more control over the marketing of their films. Presumably, the move toward in-house poster production saw a decline in public outcry against ill-conceived artwork. While independent designers were free to draw up whatever images they pleased, exhibitors were often chastised for displaying misleading posters—the posters did not properly communicate what the audience should expect from the movies they were seeing.

Once that controversy was quelled, another took its place. Movie posters were indeed holding true to their films’ content, but the images had become too violent. Beginning around 1909, cities throughout the US started banning movie posters and establishing censorship committees to approve posters for public display. The issue of lurid and immoral imagery (usually pictures of crime-in-progress) was tied to classist arguments regarding filmgoers. Only the lower classes were going to the movies. If the film industry wanted to flourish, movies would have to appeal to a wealthier demographic—a population that, presumably, is drawn to spectacle. The poster ban and censorship led to standardization in movie poster design.

Art by Design

From their beginnings as an offshoot of the circus poster tradition, movie posters have grown into their own as both a means of advertisement and as an art form. A great many books have been published on movie poster art. With respect to horror, Hammer released a glorious coffee table book of their poster art, and countless blogs and posts celebrate genre posters.

But what makes for a good movie poster? Certainly, part of the allure has to do with personal taste, but poster design must also follow some loose guidelines in order to generate mass market appeal. The poster must be attention grabbing; it must create interest across demographics—not just the target—and have lasting appeal while communicating the movie’s theme or plot. Lasting appeal is even more important for sequels and franchises, as recognisability is key for poster series.

Ghostbusters hit all the targets with this design. The communicative logo appears in the film, creating an instantly recognizable brand.

Poster art is, first and foremost, commercial art. This has influenced poster design in significant ways, as is evident by the variety of posters types that exist. Many modern horror posters focus heavily on star power, believing this is what will bring people to the cinema. "Floating head" posters are boring to look at, but they let potential audiences know who’s in the movie—this is all the more interesting when you consider the fact that faces, more so than names, are what audience members will identify and remember.

Compare the floating head design of I Know What You Did Last Summer, to a poster for True Grit. Like I Know, True Grit’s poster uses star power to generate interest, but relies on names alone. True Grit also uses typology and style to communicate the movie’s genre and theme. Done up like a wanted poster, there’s no mistaking what kind of movie this is. The poster appeals to western fans, Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges fans, and Cohen Brothers fans alike. Whereas I Know’s poster is likely to attract only to horror fans and teenagers, True Grit’s audience, by virtue of its poster, is much wider in scope.

Two movie posters that use star power in different ways to market the films.

I Know and True Grit, it could be argued, exist at opposite ends of the poster spectrum. A variety of designs occupy the space in between. Consider posters that still feature the films’ stars, but forgo the floating heads in favour of full or medium shots. These more stylized posters are generally for more stylized movies; the poster art uses the same imagery as the film. Interest is generated through casting, as well as through the film’s artistic design.

Moving away from star-driven marketing, some designers rely more heavily on imagery to communicate plot, theme, and atmosphere to the audience. Popular and celebrated posters from the 70s and 80s often display this kind of aesthetic. Take for example the poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The poster features an image of a screaming girl about to be brutally chainsawed by Leatherface. Note, the villain is in the foreground, and is the point of focus. The copy, too, speaks to the film’s plot of slasher violence. The poster for Saw, by contrast, simply depicts a severed limb. The rather minimalist poster design effectively communicates the film’s violence without lifting any of its scenes or images.

With respect to sequels and franchises, Saw’s design also managed to create recognisability. The unique font coupled with the recurring theme of body parts easily translated into a branded marketing campaign. Saw, in fact, was able to reproduce its brand across two different designs that each drew out key aspects of the franchise, the "white" pseudo-campaign, and the "black" poster series that highlighted the films’ traps. Saw what you want about the movies, the posters were a great success.

Saw had two different poster campaigns with wildy different visual aesthetics.

Along these same lines, some designers eschew pictures in favour of graphic logos. Whereas Saw’s branding happened over many posters, Ghostbusters and Jurassic Park were able to instantly generate interest and recognisability with their logos and logotype.

What with all the remakes it makes sense to now consider their posters within the context of the film as a product. Remakes are generally a pretty sound investment, capitalizing on two demographics. I’ve ranted about remakes in the past, and I’ll restate here that remakes of "the big three" all repositioned the villains as the stars. This re-envisioning is represented in the films’ posters. Compare the original posters for Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween with those for their remakes. In each of the three new posters, the villain is featured prominently, whereas in the original posters, the villain is present as an abstract. The original designs all managed to communicate location- or date-oriented violence and terror, but at the hands of an unknown aggressor. The new posters bank on our familiarity with the films, and their design reinforces the movies’ villain-led structure and plot.

Posters for remakes of popular franchises leave little to the imagination.

In much the same way remakes of popular horror make us nostalgic for decades-old movies, there exists a similar nostalgia for horror movie posters. Canadian Will’s "in depth" look at posters on horrorbid.com is a short lamentation on the decline in quality of poster art. He blames modern graphic design programs for the change, stating that anyone can now produce "art". It’s a rather simplistic understanding of the situation and fails to take into account changing trends in marketing and aesthetics. Moreover, what Will and other similarly nostalgic writers fail to notice is there still exists a corpus of talented graphic designers who produce great commercial art.

One Missed Call: I come down on the side of this being creepy rather than laughable. The screaming mouths for eyes lends the face a distrubing quality that draws the eye and forces the viewer to consider the "wrongess" of the image.

Cloverfield: The copy, "Some thing has found us", perfectly sums up the plot while the image of the iconic Statue of Liberty, now headless, promises violence and mayham.

Pandorum: Although the film is not the body horror piece the poster might suggest, the art is still evocative and the implications horrorifying.

V for Vendetta: Inspired by mid-century propoganda posters, this design successfully communicates the movie's facist political setting. The colour scheme reflects that used in the film.

The Mechanic: Someone does indeed have to fix the problems, and the tool they use is a gun.

Identity: One potential problem is that if you think too hard about the poster, you'll figure out the twist. Alternately, you might be smart enough to get to the bottom of the mystery before the movie ends.

Dracula: The poster's gothic design mirrors the film's atmosphere. Dracula is an easily recognizable character, but his image is replaced by a gargoyle. The copy would suggest a humanistic slant to the proceedings, but the monstrous face undercuts any romantic notions you might entertain.

The Eye: The hand crawling out of the eye harkens to creepy Asian horror special effects and suggests this American remake might be just as atmospheric and scary as the origial.

The Descent: This is a recreation of the photo, In Voluptas Mors, by Philippe Halsman and Salvidor Dali. Used, in this case, to market a scary movie, the image of the film's stars forming a skull effectively communicates the horror the women encounter.

Trinity and Beyond

2011-05-17T13:25:00.000-04:00

Why, you may ask yourself, is she reviewing a documentary that's not even about genre film?

Well, I would patiently explain, it is about explosions. Very large explosions.

Trinity and Beyond, subtitled The Atomic Bomb Movie, is just that. Declassified atomic test footage. Narrated by William Shatner, the film recounts how America entered the atomic age, from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt in 1939 to the limited test ban in 1963. In the intervening years, the US performed 331 atmospheric tests of A- and H-bombs, and the movie is largely footage of these bombs going off.

I once heard this story, I don't know where, about the Soviets' own atomic tests. I heard how they kept building bigger and bigger bombs until they detonated one so huge it scared them and they stopped. I don't know how much of that is true, but the "Russ" did build and set off the largest atmospheric bomb in the world, a 50 megaton monster, in 1961.

I love a good explosion in a movie. They're amazing when done right. The explosions in Trinity are awesome in a way that no Hollywood blockbuster can ever hope to achieve, and not because they're so much bigger, and so very real. I think it's because their frightening power is tempered with an odd beauty. Which just makes them all the more dangerous. When the bombs go off, and the light finally fades, the clouds form. And some of them are quite beautiful.

I never gave much thought to war. It isn't a part of my life, thank god. Bombs and wars were something I learned about in school, a chapter in a history book, like Louis Real or Babylon. But I did manage, over the years, to cultivate an appropriate fear of nuclear war. And then I went to Washington.

Touring the Air and Space Museum, I came upon the missile and bomb display (it's hard to miss). Standing in the shadow of those weapons I felt, for the first time, truly afraid. I was terrified by their destructive power--something which I can only just begin to comprehend. The missiles were so much bigger than me, so much bigger, I thought, than all of us.

Interspersed throughout the 'splosions in Trinity, are interviews with Drs Edward Teller and Frank Shelton. Dr Teller, at one point, speaks about how is involvement with the Manhattan project changed his outlook. Teller had never intended to be the "father of the hydrogen bomb" but after witnessing the results of early atomic testing, he wanted to keep pushing the limits, to see how far science could go.

It was this sentiment, I think, what gave me pause at the museum. Its small collection of arms are just waypoints on the path to assured mutual destruction. War will take us only so far, curiosity will push into the limitless beyond. And that's really, very scary.

The desert sands melt into glass and sparkle in the bomb's furious light.

Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre

2011-05-10T12:53:00.000-04:00

What is going on with this movie?

That's not meant to be negative, by the way. Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre is good.

A group of people head out one morning to go whale watching. An unfortunate accident leaves them stranded in the middle of nowhere, but they don't have long to wait before they're picked up by a local fisherman. It's perhaps not the most inspiring rescue, but it's a rescue nonetheless. Things only get worse for the poor whale watchers when they transfer to the fisherman's boat and the titular massacre begins.

The film is pretty straightforward, and does a good job of navigating the contentious issue of whaling. Whaling was, at one time, the primary industry for a number of countries, including those represented in the film: Iceland, Japan, and the United States. Over-fishing, the discovery of petroleum, and, most recently, environmentalism, have spelled the end of whaling, although certain cultural and ethnic groups retain a right to hunt whales as part of their heritage.

Harpoon doesn't comment on cultural whaling rights, but it does touch on economic rights--a belief that you have a right to exploit a resource because that resource has, in the past, benefited you. In the film, conflicting viewpoints with regards to the Icelandic whaling industry are represented by the antagonistic former whalers, and the benign whale-watching sea captain, an old whaler himself. Where one group simply substituted people for whales, the other kept up with changing attitudes and parlayed their hunting business into a tourist industry.

But there's more going on in this movie than just whaling. Along with the dichotomous Icelanders, a number of other nationalities are represented in various ways. Most interesting are the American and Japanese characters. Not only do they share an economic whaling history, but between them, the characters embody current stereotypes and archetypes.

Marie-Anne is selfish and lonely. More than just a bitch, she's self-centered to the point of being a pathological narcissist. Leon, on the other hand, is selfless and heroic. He is everything Marie-Anne is not--is her saviour, in fact--but he's also black and gay. The subversion is subtle, as Leon demonstrates none of filmic "black" or "gay" qualities audiences would normally expect. Subverting standards like this, Harpoon demonstrates a keen insight to horror film.

Mr and Mrs Nobuyoshi are what you would expect of a caricature Japanese couple. He is arrogant and demeaning, she is meek. Their interpreter, Endo, on the other hand, though small, is perhaps the strongest character in the movie. She fights, murders, and bribes her way to survival with a single-minded determination matched only by the evil whalers. Endo herself is not evil, but her actions might undercut an etic post-WWII Japanese sensitivity for negotiation tempered by a global understanding of the current "scientific" Japanese whaling expeditions.

Harpoon is a movie about people getting killed by whalers, but it is also more than that. It's about defying expectations and subverting the horror genre. And then there's the whole whaling thing: individual stasis in a changing economic landscape. Originally released as Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, the name was changed for North American audiences. That happens a lot, and I'm not sure there's much to be said about it, but in a movie chock full of meaning, I'm willing to bet on a layered reading of Harpoon's title.

Also, it's a movie with the word "massacre" in the title with a cameo by Gunnar Hansen. Come on!

A Watery Grave: Sphere

2011-04-25T13:41:00.002-04:00

I didn't know it, but I'd already seen this movie. It was called Event Horizon.

So there's this spaceship, right. And it crashes into the ocean and, like, Dustin Hoffman has to go check it out. And he's got some friends with him, only they're not, like, really friends. But whatever. And you'd think they'd all be jazzed about checking out a spaceship, but they're not and that's really weird. So anyway, they go to the bottom of the ocean and go inside the spaceship and it's big. Like really really big and there's a dead guy inside and they figure out he's American because he's got like this bag of airline nuts. Oh yeah and he was killed. So they figure out the spaceship's from the future and it traveled back through time. And there's this sphere on board that's, like, alive or something and they go back to their underwater base where they're living and the sphere starts talking to them and they want to go back and check it out some more, but they can't for some reason, but this one guy goes anyway and he starts acting all weird and there's a storm and then all this crazy stuff starts happening and the sphere's all like "Don't call me Jerry" even though that's it's name, and it turns out they're all superpowered because the sphere gave them powers and they're imagining things that then happen.

If that sounds really stupid, that's because it is. Really stupid. Here you have a contemporary movie about a time-traveling spaceship with an alien life force on board, and what does the story focus on? Fear. Sphere is about fear. The film muses on human nature, eschewing the far more interesting story of a telepathic alien space ball for a plot about how people are jerks. The fear angle is that the sphere, Jerry, has given everyone mental powers--they can think their fears into being.

And that is what happens for most of the film. Never mind that you've got a goddamn space ship that survived a trip through a black hole to splash down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Forget about the mystery of the murdered crew member, or the intriguing ship's log. Or the golden, omnipotent ball of wonder in the cargo hold. No, let's tell a story about how humanity is still in its infantile stage of development and despite our infinite capacity for goodness, all we do is hurt one another.

With our fears.

At least Event Horizon had the decency to exploit its characters' weaknesses. Sphere just uses them set things on fire.

I'd heard the movie was a misstep for pretty much everyone, but not only is the story all wonky, so is the science. Granted, it does toe the sci-fi line, but a film set at the bottom of the sea should still adhere to some basic laws of nature/physics/common sense. I'm willing to let the film slide on the issue of deep sea corals, but other things I just can't let go. For instance, saturation diving is a real thing, and the movie makes a point of explaining everyone's breathing hydrogen, but a glaring script error, in which the gas is referred to as oxygen, is just embarrassing.

What's even more embarrassing is neither the mathematician nor the physicist even consider the fact that time might not be linear.

Trailer Review: Dylan Dog

2011-04-15T20:12:00.000-04:00

Dylan Dog has a bad pedigree.

Producer credits include Terminator Salvation, Superman Returns, and Cowboys and Aliens. The movie has no less than eight executive producers, three co-producers, and four producers. That's fifteen people who aren't the writers (two credited) or director who likely had some kind of creative input on a project to which they might only be tenuously connected.

Rubber

2011-04-02T13:39:00.000-04:00

For no reason. If Rubber were to have a motto, that would be it. According to the film's opening monologue, all great movies have things happen in them for no reason. ET is brown for no reason. Nobody uses the can in TCM for no reason. JFK is shot for no reason.

I fought the urge to put up my hand. "Um, ET's brown because he was designed that way. You don't see people use the toilet because that's boring, and JFK was shot because someone wanted to kill him. And that actually happened. In real life."

"Will you shut up. You're ruining it."

"I'm not ruining anything. This prologue is completely unnecessary. I already know this film is going to be quirky and weird. It's about a goddamn tire that kills people. I don't need a man dressed as a cop to lecture me on standards and expectations."

"Yeah well..."

"Killer tire. Killer tire."

"Entirely unexpected, right? Amiright?"

"Well, not really. I mean:

"But it's so crazy. Don't you get it? And postmodern."

"I'm not sure you using that word correctly. Rubber isn't postmodern. Rubber's just strange, verging on surreal. I think that's more what you're going for. Surrealism. Maybe even satire. And I'll tell you what--you even succeed at times."

"See! I--"

"Let me finish. I said 'at times'. Really, I think it's that opening bit that kills it. Tough break, man."

"But what about the Greek chorus? And the meta-narrative?"

I shrugged. The film had me there. The chorus was entertaining. I couldn't decide if the meta-narrative was brilliant or smacked of effort. I thought really hard a moment. Then it came to me, "

"You always gotta win, don't you. Why are you like this?"

I shrugged again. "No reason."

I'll Eat Your Toes: Adventures in Children's Cannibalism

2011-03-29T11:09:00.000-04:00

I don't know how and I don't know why
But I just thought of Alligator Pie

As I was sitting in my office pouring over my work, I suddenly thought of cannibalism. At the time of writing, my work has nothing do with people eating other people. But, for whatever reason, cannibals stuck in my head. Not just any cannibals, though. One very specific instance of cannibalism, memorialized in rhyme.

I couldn't remember the poem exactly. Something about knees and place names. Canada has a lot of funny place names, like Wawa and Regina. The cannibalistic children's poem I was thinking about rhymed cities and body parts as a kind of geographic table d'haute. Appropriately, the rhyme was published in a book called Alligator Pie.

Alligator Pie is an award-winning children's book by Dennis Lee. It's a collection of poems, each one brilliantly illustrated by Frank Newfeld. I, along with a whole generation of Canadians, grew up with Alligator Pie, giggling at the rhymes and marveling over the pictures.

Pictures like this:

"Marveled" might not be the right word, come to think of it.

"Stared at in slack-jawed amazement"'s more like. I'm sure I spent many long minutes pondering that sad man's cruel fate. But I was probably on the side of the dragon.

It wasn't so much the words of the poem, as the pictures that came back to me that morning as I sat at my desk. I recalled severed arms and legs. A hat, too, I think was on the menu. I remember as a kid thinking it was silly and fun, and maybe a little bit weird and off-putting, but I liked it. I liked everything about it, even if it was a poem about eating someone piece by piece, on a cross-country culinary tour of Canada.

But what was it called?

With a pressing need to sate my desperate hunger for knowledge, I put my considerable intellect to use and phoned my mom.

The poem is called In Kamloops.

Click to biggify.

Book Report: Zombie, Ohio

2011-03-23T20:16:00.000-04:00

I'll be honest, I don't read a whole lot of zombie lit. I read Monster Island last year because my roommate had it and loaned it to me. Every now and again I take up space in the bookstore debating whether or not I really want to buy World War Z. I never do, of course--buy WWZ. And I have yet to read the two sequels to Monster Island.

So it was with little familiarity with the genre that I sat down to read Scott Kenemore's Zombie, Ohio.

Not to give too much away, but Ohio, indeed the whole world, is suffering through a zombie apocalypse. Peter Mellor doesn't remember much about the time before the zombies happened because he is a zombie. Possessed with little more than consciousness, some fuzzy memories of his living life, and a passionate desire to eat brains, Peter takes to roaming Knox County. He fills his days with philosophic musings on death and undeath. What are the ethics of zombiedom? Are the undead bound to a moral code of conduct? Is it possible for a zombie to have a spirit animal, and if so, does it have to be a turkey?

Peter explores these questions and others as he journeys through Ohio. In much the same way as he occupies a plane between living and dead, he waffles between being on the side of good and just going to town, eating every brain he stumbles upon.

And he so very much wants to eat brains. I think that's what I enjoyed most--the "return" to zombie "roots". Granted, it was Return of the Living Dead that introduced and canonized the zombies' hunger for grey matter, but, in my limited experience, few zombies today embody that passion. So yeah, Peter eats a lot of brains and oh my, do they ever taste good.

What I didn't enjoy so much was the unfulfilled expectation of a first-person account of a (former) man trying to solve his own murder. The back of the book would have you believe Zombie, Ohio is, in part, about Peter investigating his own death. It isn't. It's a side-plot, the resolution of which raises some interesting questions about actions, reactions, and consequences. What the book is actually about is Peter's journey through his after-life, the things he sees, the things he does, and the people he meets (and eats).

Zombie, Ohio is not a heavy read, despite all that stuff about philosophy and junk. Between bouts of melancholic introspection, Peter does enjoy moments of levity and the book is more uplifting than this review might suggest. True a lot of people get eaten, and maybe they didn't all deserve to die, but it is a zombie novel after all.

Sawn In Full

2011-03-11T09:15:00.000-05:00

I know you. I know what you're thinking. You're wondering how many traps were made by Jigsaw and his associates. You want to know what moral lessons were taught to unwilling students. And you would really like a precise body count for the entire Saw franchise.

Well, here's your answer, honkytonk!

Many thanks to the good people at WayToBlue for drawing up this infographic chart to help us navigate the Saw franchise.

Click to biggen.

Camp Fear

2011-03-08T19:05:00.001-05:00

It's Spring Break. That time of year when American undergrads kick off the responsibility of college education and hit the beach to drink and screw and forget where they put their sense of decency. It's also a great time to get caught up in a horror movie scenario.

With that in mind, last night my friends and I took in a little film called Camp Fear. And by "little" I mean, it's 80 minutes long and made with a video toaster, and by "took in" I mean "drank too much and slept through parts of it".

It's Spring Break and Professor Hotstuff is taking a handful of choice and nearly-nude coeds into the woods on an archaeological investigation of the local historic landscape. The group barely makes to the hills when they're set upon by a biker gang and a very large druid. The latter is the more immediate threat because the druid is looking for four women to sacrifice at his own personal Stonehenge in order to prevent the world from ending.

I think. There's also a sea monster in the lake.

Somewhat unbelievably, Camp Fear suffers from overwriting. And poor research, but that's not such a big surprise. The fact that the world can be saved by four sacrifices is a real problem for the plot because, on the one hand you don't want the women to die, but on the other hand, you really don't want the world to end. Almost by accident, four people do end up dying thereby preventing the apocalypse, and this turn of events completely undermines the film's story. I'm not entirely sure how it happens that the film manages to fulfill its premise by not actually accomplishing it's plot, but I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about it.

What is worrisome is the idea that a druid has a cuneiform tablet on which is written the apocalyptic prophesy. And that a cultural anthropology undergrad can read it. There is just so much wrong with that. Not only does it violate well known culture histories, it also demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what anthropologists actually do.

Oh yeah, and the movie takes an hour just to get the point where people start dying.

Did I forget to mention the Geiger counter and the Indian chief?

The Last Horror Movie

2011-03-03T23:04:00.000-05:00

I really don't have much to say about this one, but I feel I need to comment nonetheless.

I watched it because it purports to be a movie about snuff. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But anyway, the synopsis went something like this: Kevin has taped over the VHS copy of a film called "The Last Horror Movie" with his own snuff film. He arrives at the home of the renters and then kills them, adding their deaths to the video.

Seems promising, right?

Now that I've actually seen The Last Horror Movie, I'm here to tell you that it is not at all what that synopsis suggests. Yes, there's a video that's been taped over. And yes, there's a Kevin that goes around filming murders. But this movie isn't about that, it is that.

I've got no problems with mocumentaries. I've got few problems with recursive horror movies. But I've got a lot of problems with recursive mocumentaries that are self-conscious and self-aware to the point of diminishing their postmodern premise. The Last Horror Movie is little more than one man's sophomoric philosophizing on morality and psychopathy.

Kevin's waxing is repetitive and tiresome. Also, he fails to understand the difference between knowing right from wrong and caring about it. This misunderstanding fuels a lot of his discussion. He's also impossibly egotistical, which I suppose is an effect of him being psychopathic, but really it's just irritating. The kills are good, I have to say. And there is one funny moment, when Kevin comments on self-conscious horror movies--it's delightfully self-reflexive, but it can't redeem the film's overblown sense of self-importance.

For Fuck's Sake: A Look Back at Torture Porn

2011-02-17T22:00:00.002-05:00

When we left the theatre after watching Hostel, Mina and I were debating the relative merits of what we'd just seen. We both loved the gore, but we pretty much hated everything else.

"If you want to make a porno, make a porno," Mina exclaimed. "And if you want to make horror, then make horror. But don't make half a porno and half a horror movie."

Ball gags do not a porno make.

The first half of Hostel focuses on a boys’ sex romp through Europe, while the second half features people being tortured, escaping from torture, and killing their torturers. But the film’s flaws, both in its story and direction, are overshadowed by its novelty. Simply put, Hostel blew everyone out of the water with its onscreen violence and gore. No mainstream audience had seen anything like it in a really long time.

Despite my own feelings about the movie (I think it’s clumsy and self-congratulatory), I have to admit Hostel did a lot for horror. The film’s commercial success, as well as its failure to strike a positive chord with critics, helped to formalize and canonize a sub-genre that had, until 2005, been largely relegated to the direct-to-video market. Looked down on, criticized, and generally under-appreciated, exploitation and splatter films were languishing in the gutters of modern horror cinema culture—sure, people liked them, but as a guilty pleasure that lacked any aesthetic value. Whether Hostel itself has any aesthetic value is debatable, but a lot of people have written a lot of words about how Hostel led mainstream horror into new, explicit directions. The name given to this nearly-new breed of film was “torture porn”.

Penetrating the Fog of Confusion

The first use of the phrase “torture porn” comes from David Edlestein’s 2006 article in New York Magazine, "Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn", in which he describes a new wave of horror cinema. Cresting that wave were Hostel and Saw, and Eli Roth’s critics and detractors seized upon torture porn as the perfect negativism; the phrase spoke to their own cultural, personal, or political objections to alienating, dehumanizing movie violence.

The fallout from Edlestein’s article is apparent in later publications. Though he never explained what he meant, most people interpreted the phrase to mean sexualized displays of bodily violence and/or violence that was meant to sexually excite or please the viewer. It is a literal reading, but it is not correct. Like the horror genre itself, torture porn is nuanced, and defies literal interpretation. Indeed, much of horror is sex, but not all sex is porn and not all porn is sex. Ironically, this popular, if flawed, take on torture porn perfectly sums up Hostel’s dichotomous structure. The movie is, to a greater or lesser extent, half torture and half porno.

Writing about superhero comics, Cyraique Lamar identifies a trend among superhero writers called “superhero tragedy porn”:

“[S]uperhero writers often turn to dark 'n gritty plots to give their comics’ greater narrative heft. Unfortunately, these "adult" story lines are to tragedy what porn is to sex: a hyper-stylized, wholly disposable facsimile of the real thing. […] Tragedy rockets into our heroes' lives without warning. The horrible event is often written simply to elicit shock… ” (Lamar 2010).

Lamar’s comments succeed in defining porn in abstract terms, something that Edelstein never bothered with and others have failed to do (Williams 2008; Daniel 2010). The “porn” of superhero tragedy porn is not sensual, sexual, or erotic. What it is, is titillating, shocking, and wholly without value. Likewise, torture porn is not meant to arouse the viewer, at least not sexually. Rather, the sub-genre exists to put extreme bodily violence on display and nothing more.

Welcome to the champagne room. Just take a seat and your drink will be served shortly.

Coming to an Understanding

Roth’s apocryphal claims of using his films to express his disgust for the injustices suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib was meant to legitimize the violence of Hostel (and, to a lesser extent, Hostel II), but there is nothing about his movies that suggests this might be true . Torture is meant to degrade, belittle, demean, and injure both physically and psychologically, with the purpose of extracting information. The torture endured by victims in torture porn movies exists for no other reason than to cause bodily harm—no secrets are revealed, nor are they sought.

Torture porn is violence for violence’s sake, and is part of what Seltzer (1997) describes as “wound culture”—a fascination with torn open bodies and a collective gathering around shock and trauma. Wound culture is what drives the public’s interest in violent killers (real or fictitious), and motivates the more visceral aspects of the horror genre. In this regard, when Hostel and Saw premiered, torture porn wasn’t new to horror fans, but it did put on a show for non-fans through its mainstream dissemination.

Torture porn waned in popularity over the latter half of the 2000s, perhaps to due market over-saturation. Now, with the close of the Saw franchise, it’s possible the sub-genre will return to the direct-to-video market, out of sight of critics and theorists. What the torture porn debate has shown us is horror’s ability to transcend intellectual boundaries and widen the scope of genre criticism. Unfortunately, the misidentification or misunderstanding of horror violence by mainstream critics limits the genre’s impact on film in general.

References

Earle, Daniel. 2008. Torture Porn: Conceptualizing a Current Trend in Graphic Imagery. http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p256857_index.html

Edelstein, David. 2006. Now Playing at your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn. New York Magazine, January 28. Available online at http://www.nymag.comlmovies/features/15622

Egan, Mary Ellen. 2007. Box Office Gross. Forbes 180, 1, pp. 94-98.

Lamar, Cyriaque. 2010. Superhero Tragedy Porn is Bad for Comics. http://io9.com/#!5489560/superhero-tragedy-porn-is-bad-for-comics

Seltzer, Mark. 1997. Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere. October 80, Spring, pp. 3-26.

Williams, Reginald. 2008. Torture Porn: Why This Horror Genre Moniker is a Misnomer. http://blogcritics.org/video/article/torture-porn-why-this-horror-genre/page-1/

Chain Letter

2011-02-12T11:54:00.000-05:00

While writing this review I was struck by an idea. How to best represent the unstructured, incoherent mess that is Chain Letter? With an ordered, thoughtful powerpoint presentation of course!

Vanishing on 7th Street

2011-02-02T15:56:00.000-05:00

We're all a little bit afraid of the dark.

After seeing the trailer for Vanishing on 7th Street , I summed up the movie thus, "They meets the best part of Session 9". I wasn't entirely wrong. They, if you haven't seen it, is a movie about monsters that live in the dark. It's not a great movie, but I like it. I like it because I generally tend to like movies about mysterious, ineffable, and invisible threats. Session 9 is another Brad Anderson movie, one that explores the human psyche and the roots of insanity. My very favourite scene in the film takes place in a tunnel; a character who's afraid of the dark finds himself stuck underground as the lights go out, one at a time. He runs for end of the tunnel, but he can't outrun the dark. Combined, these two movies comment on our struggle with and primal fear of the unknown, represented in turns by darkness and mental instability.

Vanishing on 7th Street tackles these same themes but in a much more fatalistic way. One day, out of nowhere, darkness descends and everyone disappears. Anyone lucky enough to be near a light source that is not powered by a car or the electrical grid, is spared. Three days later the few survivors have learned to stay in the light, but as the days grow shorter and batteries drain faster, it becomes increasingly difficult to stave off the darkness.

No one ever thinks to light a fire. I don't know why.

Most of the movie's action is set inside a genny-powered bar. While a handful of characters debate their next move, they take turns waxing philosophical about the dark. Why is this happening? What does it mean? The film is short on answers, which is just fine with me, but Thandie Newton's religiosity grows tiresome--her character is a reformed addict, who found strength in god. That's great for her, but as Hayden Christensen rightly points out, Thandie's "left behind" rantings are really irritating.

What's even more irritating is the film's inability to learn from its own script. The movie makes reference to the "souls" that live in the dark. We hear them sometimes, as their shadowy presence closes in--unintelligible whisperings in the night. The problem is no explanation is offered to counter Thandie's religious theory. Hayden Christiansen spits out the word "aliens" at one point, but he's just being facetious. And John Leguizamo's story of being taken away to some mysterious place and then returned to earth is ultimately dismissed as the hallucinations of a man with a concussion. The movie ends inside a church, no less, which only lends further support to Thandie's belief in the rapture. Thing is, Vanishing on 7th Street is absolutely not about religion or god. At least not a benevolent one. We're warned to distrust any light source that is not our own, because the dark is tricky. And the dark is, at all times in this movie, a malevolent force.

At times it feels like Anderson is trying to tap into the alienation and loneliness that permeated Kairo. Only Kairo was about the unconnected or disconnected nature of human life at the hands of technology, and Vanishing on 7th Street is about...something that's not that. There is a sense of alienation that underscores much of Vanishing, but it's an effect of the world being empty of people, and is not a comment on society.

Returning to what I mentioned at the start of this rambling investigation, Vanishing on 7th Street, does make an effort to push the mysterious nature of the creeping dark by referencing the lost colony on Roanoke. The film hints that what's happening now is just another mystery in a long history of unexplained disappearances. Is it possible the very same thing happened on Roanoke over 200 years ago? The film doesn't know, and it largely doesn't matter. What does matter is the survivors at Sonny's Bar are running out of time.

As the dark encroaches on the light and the shadow people crowd in, the survivors repeat the mantra "I exist" in an effort to cling to their conscious presence in the world. In the same way that Vanishing on 7th Street is not a comment on society, it's also not meant to be a metaphysical treatise on the nature of existence even though it could be read that way. At its core the film is about fear and survival. Death is inevitable, certainly, but it's not necessarily something to be afraid of.

There are worse fates waiting in the dark.

Jennifer's Body

2011-01-27T08:58:00.000-05:00

Here is where the problems begin: those desks open the other way.

I remember the hype when this movie premiered. I mean I should--it wasn't all that long ago. But more importantly, I remember the bitching. And I'm kind of embarrassed to admit it, but I jumped in, contributing my worthless two cents, my opinion devalued by the fact that I'd never seen the movie I was talking about. That hardly mattered to me; I was entitled because I'm a girl.

The big deal, as I remember, had to do with the film's feminist subtext. Also, it was penned by an Oscar-winning screenwriter.

In short, the film tells the story of a band who, looking to make it big, sacrifice a virgin to Satan. Only the girl they choose, Jennifer, is "not even a back door virgin". The band still manages to sign with a label, suggesting that Satan isn't all that fussed about the purity of his sacrifices, and Jennifer is now possessed by a demon. Once Jennifer figures out what's happened to her, she tells her best friend, Needy. Needy is appropriately freaked out and decides she'd better put Jennifer down for the greater good.

"Hell is a teenage girl," narrates Needy. It's the film's opening line and is supposed to set the tone for the next 102 minutes. Heathers crossed with Mean Girls, one person wrote. I was a teenaged girl, and I can assure it was hell some of the time. In fact, being a girl, albeit an adult one, is still hell occasionally. When the movie came out a lot of reviewers quoted that line because it segues nicely into angsty, feminist deconstructions of a female-written, female-directed, and female-lead horror film.

But Jennifer's Body isn't feminist. It's not even post-feminist. It's just a movie about a slut. It's all right there on the screen--Needy figures out Jennifer's been possessed by a succubus, a hell demon ho-bitch who feeds on men. There's no subtext, no deeper empowering meaning. At least not as far as Jennifer is concerned.

Because this movie isn't really about Jennifer. It's about Needy. Needy. Sure Jennifer changes--sort of--but Needy changes more. Jennifer becomes strong. Needy grows stronger. The subtext, so desperately sought after by critics, lies in how Needy manages her change, which is (badly) juxtaposed with Jennifer's possession. Needy narrates the goddamn movie--it's her story. Perhaps not the most well-told story given the film's uneven acting, plot holes, and structural instability, but still this film is about Needy's transformation from doormat to dominance.

What everyone should have been quoting is one of Needy's last lines of dialogue. "You know what this is for?" she asks, brandishing a knife. "Cutting boxes."

Book Report: John Dies at the End

2011-01-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

If David Wong is to be believed, his book began as a single story, published online late one night. I have no reason to not believe him--he makes me laugh. That one story eventually led to others and they were soon strung together and published as a tangible book.

Dave, the first-person narrator, is best friends with John and the two of them are suddenly and unwillingly drawn into a complicated world-domination plot helmed by monsters from another universe.

Given the book's genesis, it's not surprising to learn the story reads as if it were composed in fits and starts with little editing or oversight. Do writers have oversight? I don't even know. My point is that John Dies at the End, while entertaining, doesn't really go anywhere. Wong does a good job of building up to something, but in this reader's opinion, the big reveal wasn't all that revealing. Motives are still shrouded in mystery, events lack explanation, and the larger story being told feels unfinished.

Or, quite possibly, Wong peaked too early.

That was supposed to be a dirty joke. The book is full of dick jokes. That's not a criticism. Some of them are really very funny.

Most of the story is couched within an interview. Dave is speaking with a reporter, telling him a wild tale of horror and adventure. The reporter is skeptical, but as Dave tells his outlandish story, reporter and reader both are drawn into the plot. A mysterious drug called soy sauce rockets you to a higher plane of existence, but most people who take it die--usually by explosion. Dave and John don't explode and suffer the side-effect of being constantly attuned and receptive to paranormal activity.

Dave and John are special, but before they even begin to understand what that means, they and a handful of other soy sauce survivors are kidnapped as part of a larger plan to rip open a hole in the universe through which nightmares will pass. Time and again Dave and John wisecrack their way to saving the world, to the point where it almost becomes hackneyed. Wong's repetitive cycle of "weird shit, down time, weird shit" does well to impress upon the reader the magnitude of the world domination plot as well as the tenacity of the villain, but, like I said, the payoff comes to soon.

Nailed it that time!

Wong balances the ridiculous with the horrific, which lends the book a kind of in-between quality, caught betwixt comedy and something more serious. The story isn't unbalanced, per say, but I hesitate to call it a horror-comedy or a comedy-horror because I simply don't know how to approach it. I certainly enjoyed it, though. The horror is imaginative, even balls-out crazy at times, and I always appreciate a story that attempts something new.

The book's been optioned and I'm curious to see how it's adapted. Especially given all the nudity toward the end.

And Soon the Darkness

2011-01-11T18:04:00.000-05:00

"I want you to see this movie. It's got that guy you always talk about."
I talk about a lot of guys. "I talk about a lot of guys," I said.
But Sarah kept on. "No, that one guy. You like him."
"...Liam Neeson? You know I bumped into him once. Like literally--"
"No, not him. How many times are you going to tell that story?"
"Karl Urban?" I asked for no reason.
"Yes!"

Weirdly, I'd already heard of And Soon the Darkness. The original, anyway. I'd seen a trailer for it at a friend's house. Made fun of the trailer, is more accurate. From what I could tell, the movie's about two girls who go on a bike ride and are followed around by some poncy asshole.

I was curious to see Karl Urban do ponce.

He doesn't, by the way.

Stephanie and Ellie have ditched their bike tour and cycled around Argentina on their own. After a spat, Steph rides off alone but when she returns to Ellie, Ellie isn't there. Karl Urban is. He offers to help Steph, but she would prefer to deal with the police. The local policeman isn't very helpful and Steph eventually takes matters into her own hands, tracking Ellie down. This course of action leads her back to Karl Urban, and, finally, Ellie. And then things start going really badly for everyone.

As entertaining as this movie was, it is incredibly frustrating to watch. It's well made and well acted and all that, but there's a certain...laziness...about the script. I don't mean the movie lacks for excitement and suspense, I mean the story relies on cliches to keep the tension high. The really frustrating part is that the film had a perfect opportunity to undermine convention while at the same time delivering anxious thrills.

A certain amount of plot is devoted to people making stupid decisions with unfortunate results. The girls' situation is pretty dire--about as bad as it can get. Although the film succeeds in being suspenseful, it would have been even more suspenseful and a great deal more satisfying if people made smart decisions with the same unfortunate results.

I will say this for And Soon the Darkness, for all its lazy writing, it did manage to surprise me from time to time. I think this is the root of my criticism; the film doesn't hesitate to make a bold move, but the rest is just so hackneyed. There's nothing so frustrating as wasted potential.

Zombots! for Mayor

2011-01-07T20:58:00.000-05:00

Click to vote!

This just in: Zombots! has been nominated for an award. The good people over at Total Film have seen fit to nominate this space for Best Fan Blog. I'm honoured to be recognized next to other horror bloggers I hold in high regard.

While I can't guarantee a vote for Zombots! will significantly improve your life, it'll certainly prevent you from being devoured by mutant cannibals.

Another Year Gone By: 2010

2011-01-01T09:37:00.003-05:00

Here again is my best and worst of the past year. I still haven't managed to keep on top of the new releases, though I think I did see more movies in theatres this time 'round. Regardless, I've again compiled a list of movies I watched and either loved or hated in the last twelve months.

Omigodomigodomigod: Lake Mungo
Phenomenal mocumentary about a how a family deals with the loss of their daughter.
Oh. My. God.: Antichrist
Horrible movie about how a family deals with the loss of their son.

Life-affirming: Ravenous
Frontier-era cannibalism.
Total disappointment: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Platinum Dunes' latest cash grab/atrocity.

Why did I wait so long to see this: The Road Warrior
Mel Gibson drives hard in a post-apocalyptic Australia.
I should have known better: Birdemic
Global warming causes eagles to attack.

Totally worth it: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Rock opera about organ repossession.
Stop wasting my time: Repo Men
Predicable drama about organ repossession.

Better than it has any right to be: Blood and Bone
Michael Jai White kicks ass. That's all.
And now to shove this fork in my eye: The Final
Described by Count Vardulon as being "pro-Columbine". Unpopular kids torture popular kids. Lots of speechifying ensues.

Ha! That's awesome: Sukiyaki Western Django
English-language Japanese western by Takashi Miike.
Seriously?: Piranha 3D
It's exactly what it sounds like. Piranhas. In 3D. You'd think it'd be hard to screw that up. You'd be wrong.

A fun time at the movies: Psycho Beach Party
Subversive satire of the Beach Party movies from the 60s.
A fun time at the proctologist: Kill Theory
Stupid people make bad decisions.

While composing this list, I realized I've seen a lot more movies in theatres than I reviewed. So, here are some honourable mentions that, for one reason or another, didn't appear on Zombots! or were only mentioned in passing on TheAvod:

Let The Right One In - An intelligent American remake of a fantastic Swedish film.
Machete - Despite its lackluster ending, Robert Rodriguez does the trailer justice.
Inception - Kinda mindblowing. Best fight scene I've seen in ages.
The Expendables - An ensemble cast of action stars mount an offensive against Eric Roberts. Lots of throat-stabbing.

Dear Santa

2010-12-22T17:10:00.000-05:00

It's a Very Cthulhu Christmas

2010-12-22T12:52:00.011-05:00

It's Xmas and you know what that means: duck and cover. For those of us who do not worship the holy trinity of Jesus, Santa, and the Almighty Dollar (and for those who do), I here present an alternative to western monothesim. And the best part is, it's in song! The HP Lovecraft Society rewrote a number of beloved Christmas carols to sing the praises of the Old Ones.

It's Beginning to Look at lot like Fishmen

I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth

If I Were a Deep One
Okay, so not a Christmas carol, but Cthulhu bless the HPLS for including this one.

Away in a Madhouse

And my personal favourite, Carol of the Old Ones

Skyline

2010-12-19T22:43:00.000-05:00

...or test reel the movie.

I saw the teaser trailer for this movie and was immediately sold. I knew nothing about it--just that aliens invaded and sucked people up into the air and something about evil lasers...

As it turns out the film doesn't have much to offer beyond that. Aliens arrive, start abducting people en masse, and we're stuck in an LA condo with Eric Balfour and Turk. The drama is centered on the folks trapped in the building as they fight for their lives against the alien menace. It's simple, it's straightforward. Sure, the interpersonal conflict is awkward and largely unnecessary, but you don't go to see a movie like Skyline for the character study.

You go for the aliens.

The movie culls from a number of different sources. The spacecraft look like something out of The Fifth Element, and their ascendo-rays are eerily similar to the deadly light blasts from the bugs in Starship Troopers. The smaller flying aliens are dressed-up squiddies from The Matrix, the smaller terrestrial aliens are shrunken monsters from Monsters. Then there are the big guys.

They've got mouths for hands.

Whatever Skyline may lack in narrative sophistication is made up for by its emic approach to the subject matter. Imagine ID4 told from the point of view of some random dude on the ground. That's Skyline. And the movie does a good job keeping pace with the invasion right up until the end. Then it all goes to hell.

I almost mean that literally.

The film kicks it into high gear toward the end. Erik Balfour is surrounded on all sides by the alien menace and they just. Keep. Coming. No amount of military firepower can stop them and it's an explosive special effects extravaganza! i.e.: the test real. And it looks good, too, for the most part. But it doesn't end. Not when it should.

Skyline comes very close to delivering a fatalistic, nihilistic alien invasion story. Unfortunately, all that goes out the window when the filmmakers push their talent too far. Showing off for the camera, Skyline's confined story explodes into a mess of idiotic cliches and tonal shifts that no amount of aliens can make up for.

The Walking Dead (season one)

2010-12-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Right around the time the comic was making waves, I was reading another, different comic about zombies. I never did read The Walking Dead.

The announcement that AMC was producing The Walking Dead for TV was big, exciting news--even for non-comic people like me. The first of its kind, the series features a group of zombpocalypse survivors trying to make their way in a new world. You'd have to have something seriously wrong with you if you weren't immediately sold on the premise. And the show's record numbers proved that everyone was on board for televised zombies.

The only problem is that The Walking Dead never did manage to get past its premise. The show garnered interest because it was new, novel, and different from all other programs. Banking on these things, The Walking Dead never bothered with story or character development, and motored through its six-episode first season on cruise control:

E01 Rick Grimes wakes up in the hospital and finds out he's one of the few survivors a zombpocalypse. He decides to go to Atlanta to find his wife and son.
E02 Rick escapes a hoard of zombies in Atlanta and meets up with a small band of survivors. His wife and son are alive and living outside the city.
E03 Rick returns to the survivor camp and is reunited with this wife and son.
E04 Rick goes back to Atlanta to retrieve a bag of guns. Glen is kidnapped, then rescued.
E05 The survivor camp is attacked by zombies.
E06 The survivors seek refuge at the CDC. The CDC is about to explode. The survivors leave.

So very little happens that it's impossible to actually describe what's going on. It's a serialized television show with no forward momentum. Little changes from one week to the next; there are no challenges that can't be overcome within the space of 40 minutes, and no real threats to anyone's well being. Yes, there are zombies but The Walking Dead isn't really about zombies, per say. It's supposed to be about the people (the title is a play on words), but the people, like the story, aren't exploited to their full potential.

Pictured: unfulfillment.

While Rick is positioned to be the lead in the show, it's an ensemble cast. But since we don't ever learn anything about anyone else, Rick is the lead. This wouldn't be a problem if Rick were interesting, but he's not. Even more frustrating is the fact that Rick is surrounded by potentially compelling characters, but their development is just as stunted as Rick's. In fact, everyone's problems are so inconsequential to the show that most are addressed and dismissed in the same episode: a wife abuser is killed by zombies; a crazy man kills himself; and a woman shoots her zombified sister on her birthday. In the final episode, one of the survivors chooses to stay at the CDC and die in a fiery explosion--it could have, indeed should have been a poignant moment in the show, but since we don't really know a thing about this woman, we can't understand her choice.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the The Walking Dead is the haphazard nature of the writing. In episode 1, Rick meets Morgan and tells him he will speak to him every morning on the radio. Not until episode 5 does Rick pick up the radio and make the call. It's one of the show's better moments, Rick speaking to no one, sending his words out into the ether and clinging to the desperate hope that Morgan is listening on the other end. It would have made for a great recurring theme, but it only happens this one time. Nor do we ever find out what happened to Morgan. Another loose end takes the form of Merle Dixon, the resident white trash racist. He gets chained to a pipe and winds up cutting off his hand to escape what he perceives as an inevitable zombie attack. Merle, too, is never seen nor heard from again, though his potential storyline was rife with possibilities for real drama and conflict.

I stand by my statement that a show like The Walking Dead was and still is a good idea. But a good idea needs a good follow through, and The Walking Dead, quite frankly, stalled in development. The one thing the show does manage to get across is a vague sense of nihilism, but that's due mostly to everyone's lack of agency and action, rather than say, constantly having to run away from fucking zombies. It resonated with me, though--I have no hope for a promising second season.

Fucking zombies.

Happy Robanukah!

2010-12-02T08:41:00.000-05:00

Unstoppable

2010-11-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

Militant Canadian that I am, I couldn't help but scoff at the Unstoppable trailer the first time I saw it. Amused and bemused by its claim of truthfulness, I turned to Don and said, "That's totally Canadian." And without waiting for a prompt from His Schlockiness, I delivered a history lesson unto him:

On 8 February 1986, two trains collided outside Hinton, Alberta. A freight train hit a passenger train, killing 23 people. An inquiry found the freight train engineers to be at fault, and condemned Canadian National Railway for poor employee practices (at least one of the engineers fell asleep as a result of bad shift scheduling).

Truth be told, I don't know for sure if Unstoppable was inspired by the Hinton crash, but since they both involve a runaway freight train, it's easy to see how I came to my conclusion. And since I'm being honest, I'll admit I wasn't super jazzed about seeing this movie. Not because I care about its dubious truthfulness, but I just simply wasn't taken by the premise.

It's a Tony Scott film. I should have known better. Unstoppable is an exciting ride. Sweeping camerawork matches the momentum of a fast-paces script. I have very little time for bullshit in an action movie, and this film doesn't waste any of my time. Granted, there are some clumsy attempts at drama and inter-personal conflict, but the film, for the most part is rather lean. That's not to suggest the story is thin, it just isn't padded with useless plot.

The story is pretty straightforward: Due to human error, a freight train carrying thousands of gallons of volatile chemicals is barreling through northern Pennsylvania, unmanned. Rookie railroader Chris Pine and veteran engineer Denzel Washington, after narrowly escaping being rammed by engine 777, decide they're going to try to slow down the train before it has a chance to crash and explode and kill a lot of people. They're hindered by corporate, aided by a local yardmaster, and being watched by the media.

The media angle is particularly interesting. Downplayed in the actual story, the media's coverage of the event takes up a significant amount of screen time. I hesitate to suggest there's some kind of commentary at work here, but the fact of the matter is the news clips, which are cut into the action, add to the film's tension and excitement. TV news loves an exciting, potentially tragic, unfolding story, and a runaway freight train loaded with explosives and headed toward derailment in a populated area is just the kind of thing that would put the world on hold. The filmmakers do an excellent job recreating the kind of bloodthirsty coverage you see in the news of similar events, constantly reminding the audience what's at stake and the risks involved. When Chris and Denzel devise their own plan to stop the train, the news media picks up on them and forces the railway's hand in formally endorsing their plan of action. Almost clever and subversive in its use and portrayal of TV news, Unstoppable works the media angle more to the benefit of the audience than the story.

And you know what, I don't think I would have liked it as much as I did were it done differently. Despite its rather hilarious opening (the look and feel leads you to conclude engine 777 is possessed of an evil will), the film grabs you almost immediately and maintains its momentum right up to the end. It's exciting, it's simple, and it made me forget that I'm not a huge fan of Denzel.

Is it just me, or does it look like Chris Pine might be entirely made of CGI.

Zombie Phylogeny

2010-11-22T11:51:00.001-05:00

A phylogenetic tree is a visual representation of descent or ancestry. Phylogenies help us better understand evolution and speciation. There are a number of different ways to draw a phyolgeny, and I've here drawn up a proposed tree for movie zombies.

The tree reads from the bottom up, from the first ancestral undead to the most recent type of zombie (origin unknown). I've also included the mummy and two varieties of vampires, because these undead are similarly descended from the ancestral undead.

Click to biggify.

Danny Phantom (TV)

2010-11-17T18:25:00.000-05:00

I know what you're thinking: What the hell am I doing watching a crummy kids' show? The answer may surprise you: It's a hell of a lot better than the other crap on TV.

I'm not kidding. And I watch a lot of crap.

As the I'm-a-little-embarrassed-to-be-listening-to-this theme song explains, Danny Fenton's parents built a portal to the ghost zone that accidentally mutated Danny's DNA so that he can turn into a ghost at will. In his ghost state, Danny can fly, turn invisible, turn intangible, and shoot ghost lasers from his ghost hands. As the series progresses, he also learns to create a shield and use a ghostly wail to weaken his opponents. Being a super-powered ghost has its disadvantages, however, as Danny must balance crime fighting with attending school and managing his social life. He is just 14, after all.

The show has all the moralizing you would expect from a Saturday morning cartoon; it waxes philosophical on responsibility, ethics, friendship, and good and evil. Each week Danny learns a valuable lesson about being a good person, but the show stops short of preaching to its audience. Rather, the cartoon contextualizes Danny's dual nature--his duality represents the challenges and temptations of right and wrong.

And here we come to the show's true genius: Danny's split personality is not a simple representation of an internal struggle of good vs evil. Although most of the ghosts in the show are villains, Danny faces off against human antagonists as well as another human/ghost hybrid. Things are further complicated when Danny crushes on one of his enemies (episode title), and when the students at Casper High fall sick with ghostly ailments ("Doctor's Disorders"). Moreover, a constant reminder of Danny's status in the "real" world is the weekly bullying he endures at the hands of Dash, the school's star ~~jerk~~ athlete.

You gotta love the title cards. That wolf only speaks Esperanto, by the way.

Danny's main nemesis is Vlad Masters, a hybrid like himself, who's ghostly alter-ego is Plasmius. As a man, Vlad poses a threat to Danny's home life--he's in love with Danny's mother. As a ghost, Plasmius is exponentially more powerful than Danny. Danny's victories over Vlad/Plasmius are not due to his enemy's bumbling (though that does happen on occasion), but are the result of Danny's own ability to balance his humanity with his ghostliness--something Vlad is unable to do. Whereas Vlad is motivated by power, using his ghost powers to help him aggrandize in the real world, Danny is only motivated to stop Vlad. Danny's defensive plays are backed up by his friends, Tucker and Sam, and his sister, Jaz. Vlad, on the other hand, has no friends and his offensive actions only serve to further separate him from everyone else.

Other villains who make regular appearances are Skulker, a "great white hunter", Technus, a ghost that possesses electronic equipment, and the Box Ghost, who's totally lame. These and other villains (with the exception of the Box Ghost) challenge Danny on a weekly basis, forcing him to use his cunning as much as his super powers. Although Danny is sometimes quick to dismiss his enemies, he learns to respect them--not for who they are--but for what they represent: Desiree grants wishes, teaching us to be careful about the things we say to one another; Johnny 13 has a living shadow, forcing us to understand that people can and will surprise you for better or worse; and Walker strictly enforces the rules in the Ghost Zone, teaching us to both respect the law and, in a subversive twist, to question authority when it's called for.

Danny's teacher, Mr. Lancer is voiced by Ron Perlman. Another reason to watch.

A variety of themes are explored over the show's three seasons, including jealousy, vengeance, and selfishness. In "Control Freaks", a human who has no ghostly powers himself is able to bewitch ghosts and have them do his bidding. In "Shades of Gray", Danny's classmate Valerie becomes a ghost hunter with her sights set on Danny Phantom, and in the long-format "The Ultimate Enemy", Danny forsakes his ghost powers altogether, believing them to be too much of a burden--a decision with terrible consequences.

Created primarily for a young male audience, Danny Phantom, unlike girl-only cartoons, is accessible to both genders. Helped along by a good dose of melodrama and some well-drawn female characters, the show has girl appeal while maintaining its male-lead action-adventure roots.

Danny Phantom's first two seasons are typical of an episodic cartoon; each episode is largely self-contained. Although some story development does take place--notably Jaz' accidental discovery of Danny's secret--little changes in the lives of Danny and his best friends Tucker and Sam. In the show's third and final season, the format switches to something a bit more serialized. Vlad manages to get himself elected mayor of Amity Park, almost assuming narrative control of the entire show. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if his character was still the scheming, creepy jerk he always was, but Vlad/Plasmius is re-written as more of a buffoon than in previous seasons, which lessens his impact as a villain. And because he's now in a position to really meddle in Danny's life, his lack of competence undermines his villainy. This character assassination is a real shame for fans because the Vlad/Plasmius-Danny's parents dynamic presented some of the more challenging and adult stories; Vlad's constant attempts at sabotaging Jack and Maddie's (Danny's parents) relationship commented on the bonds of family and friendship, while Maddie's own sometimes complicated feelings toward her husband called love and marriage into question.

This never happens, but thanks to the fans on deviantart, I can pretend like it did.

Thankfully, the show's third season is short, but as a kind of final insult to fans, the series finale is almost just as bad as Vlad/Plasmius' bumbling. Loose ends are tied up, of course, and a long-standing romantic, melodramatic story arc is ended, but the show has, by this point, burnt out and is merely a ghost of its former self.

If you can't help but like cartoons, Danny Phantom is worth watching. But do yourself a favour and give the third season a miss, except for "Urban Jungle", because it's got Mark Hamill.

About Saw

2010-11-08T09:59:00.000-05:00

It's taken me a couple of weeks, but I think I've finally wrapped my head around the Saw franchise. Rather than attempt to explain the complicated though processes involved in writing a Saw sequel, I've created a kind of mind map to assist in understanding how people think about Saw.

click to biggify

Trailer Review: Midnight Son

2010-11-02T10:59:00.000-04:00

Let's be serious a moment: what some indie films lack in competency, they make up for in effort. Most of the time. Midnight Son's only real problem, on the other hand, seems to be its lack of distribution. From the look of things, this independent production might give some bigger-named vampire movies a run for their money.

Just yesterday I was reading about strange coincidences and then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself floating in a sea of happenstance. It was only last week I reviewed a hard-edged book about urban vampires, and then came the trailer for Midnight Son, delivered to my inbox.

Midnight Son appears to be about a guy who's slowly turning into a vampire. He's none too sure about the changes that are happening to him, but there seems to be others who are more aware of his predicament than he. Along for the ride is a cokehead girlfriend, who I can only assume is having a hard time dealing with her own problems, and I'm guessing that together they learn some valuable lesson about life and, well, vampires.

The film looks like it takes a dark and dirty approach to its subject matter--I hesitate to use the word gritty. Unglamorous might be more suitable--the vampire angle in Being Human comes to mind. I can only hope the movie, when it finds distribution, fulfills its promise of dark introspection and bloodlust.

A Night at the Opera

2010-10-31T18:43:00.018-04:00

I love opera. It think it's amazing. The signing, the music, the presentation--all of it. And opera, like any other artistic medium, has limitless potential for horror.

The other night I went to reprise showing of the Met's broadcast of Das Rheingold. Written by Wagner, this is the first of four operas that are collectively known as The Ring Cycle. A few years ago, the Canadian Opera Company mounted a Ring Cycle and now the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned a Cycle of its own.

Das Rheingold tells the story of the god Wotan, who must find a way to prevent his sister-in-law, Freia, from being taken away by a couple of giants. Wotan learns about a ring, forged from gold stolen from the Rhine River, that will give its wearer limitless wealth and power. The ring is in possession of Alderich, a gnome, who uses it to force his brethren to mine more gold. Wotan captures the ring and the gold, and returns home to rescue Freia.

If any of this sounds at all familiar, it's because Tolkien borrowed from Wagner when he wrote the Hobbit and LOTR. Peter Jackson was able to capture the magic of LOTR for the screen, and Robert Lapage has done the same for The Ring Cycle.

Often described as a visionary, Lapage has this amazing ability to first conceive and then make real some truly mind-blowing stage effects. I have seen four of his operas to date and each one has left me speechless. In his debut double bill Bluebeard's Castle/Erwartung singers defied gravity and emerged out of a mini-lake that flooded the stage. In Siegfried, actors on wires hung out in trees and formed the shape of a dragon's head. Finally, in Das Rheingold, Lapage again turns to gravity-defying wirework this time incorporated into a moving set.

Each of these operas also benefit from a dark and fantasmagorical production design, similar to what Del Toro does and Tim Burton used to do. I suppose it's a little sad that some of the best genre production I've seen in the past decade has been on stage and not screen. You would think film would have a corner on the lavish production market, but Lapage's most recent creation puts horror film to shame. His moving set, lighting design, and wirework--all of which are presented for a live audience every few nights--blow every movie with a similar or greater effects budget out of the water.

If horror is looking for new directions, new inspirations, or simply a return to form, then it has to look no farther than the stage--which is appropriately ironic.

The Walking Dead (pilot)

2010-10-28T10:17:00.000-04:00

What can I say about The Walking Dead pilot?

I shall heft upon it my highest praise and say it didn't suck. Better still, it was actually pretty good. And it made me dream I was tyring to survive a zompocalypse, so there's that.

Officer Grimes' day begins like any other, sitting in his squad car with his partner Shane. Weeks later, Grimes wakes up in the hospital, disoriented and alone. He learns he's one of the few survivors of a zompocalypse and decides to head to Atlanta in search of his wife and son. This isn't such a good idea because Atlanta is overrun with "walkers" but Grimes doesn't know that.

I'm always impressed when genre films never say the name of the monster. Like how Near Dark never mentions vampires. Similarly, no one in The Walking Dead has yet said "zombie" preferring instead to refer to them as walkers. There's something about saying the name out loud, speaking the word into being. By avoiding saying zombie, characters are permitted to believe in the fantasy that it might be a dream. That's not to suggest The Walking Dead is dream-like in its story or execution, but the show has managed to find a delicate balance between fantasy and reality.

The pilot is not without its faults. The highly predictable union of two characters almost caused me physical pain, never mind the fact that the audience is already predisposed to dislike the woman half of the couple. I do believe that love can blossom on the battlefield, but I simply don't care about this woman's happiness. She's a bitch. Stop wasting my time.

To end this review on a positive note, because the pilot was good and drew me in, the zombie effects are well done. The dead are appropriately nasty, and run the gamut from recently deceased to partially decomposed. The show is, unsurprisingly, light on gore, but the zombie hoard that inhabits Atlanta is impressive and suggests an underlying futility in survival.

It is on this downer note the pilot ends, and I can only hope the show maintains the same tension and momentum over the next five episodes.

Book Report: Knuckle Supper

2010-10-24T13:36:00.003-04:00

I know I said I was over vampire literature, but Knuckle Supper, as it turns out, is not your typical vamp fiction. Short on romance and melodrama, Knuckle Supper forsakes vampire literature's gothic roots as author Drew Stepek re-envisions the undead as drug-addicted gangsters.

Main character RJ lays it out for us: Vampires can't fly, change form, do magic, or make other vampires. What they can do is tear you to pieces and eat you up. They're fast, they're strong, and they're mostly assholes. It's the drugs--it makes them selfish, brutish, and without pity. Although vampires need blood to live, they need drugs to survive. Heroin, coke, meth, whatever. They all have their preferred drug and the gangs they run in distribute their drugs of choice.

RJ is the leader of the Knucklers, a small-time gang with illusions of grandeur all of whom are hooked on H. Into his shabby life strolls Bait, a 12 year-old prostitute. For some unknown reason, RJ can't bring himself to kill her. Even after she totally embarrasses him by dressing goth and dragging him to a "vampire" club. RJ tries very hard to dispossess Bait of her romantic notions of vampires and vampirism, but she refuses to believe him. Even after she's totally brutalized by RJ's gangbangers.

Soon after he takes in Bait, RJ's pitiful life begins to unravel. Not only is he nearly busted by LA's vampire drug lord for back-door dealing, his gang is falling apart, and an old acquaintance has got it out for him. And then things start going really wrong.

Knuckle Supper is unrelenting and unforgiving. RJ's self-centered first person narration makes for a challenging read because he is, for all the world, a complete dick. RJ's only redeeming quality is that he doesn't abuse or murder children, but he treats Bait as little more than a pet--a puppy that needs indulgence from time to time. But still the book draws you in. Probably because it's so open and brutal. RJ makes no excuses for his behaviour; he is what he is, a violent, drug-fueled killer.

Partway through the book, the story takes a sharp turn. It's a little jarring, and this reviewer wasn't entirely sure about things. I was worried the story, which was chugging along quite nicely, was about to suffer derailment. In truth, there is a bit of a slowdown, as RJ is removed from one plot and dropped into another, but the interlude proves to be extremely enlightening and Stepek writes us a brand new origin story for vampires.

Vampirism has often been associated with disease--a blood-born pathogen. Recently, drug abuse has worked its way into the subtext. What Knuckle Supper lacks in subtlety is made up for in creativity and balls. Beginning at addiction, the book explores how and why its vampires exist in a perpetual state of needing-to-get-high. The answers, when they come, are outrageous and damning. I said Knuckle Supper has little to do with "classic" vampires, but the truth is religion still has a role to play. Rather than exist as abominations of God, RJ and his ilk are divinely inspired creations. They may be druggie murderers, but their lives, like all life, are miracles.

What begins as an outspoken, unglamourous story about street life and abuse turns into a condemnation of religious fundamentalism. Stepek doesn't hold back and the book is, at times, a dirty, violent read. With no clear good guys or bad guys, Knuckle Supper's moral ambiguity only serves to further its point about choice: not everyone gets to choose their life (vampires), and those that do (humans) can choose poorly. And for those like Bait, who have few options to begin with, it helps to have someone around who cares--even if they are a vampire.

I guess Knuckle Supper is a bit of a romantic melodrama, after all.

Perhaps it's with Bait in mind that Stepek and his publisher have joined with Children of the Night, a charitable organization that assists and rescues child prostitutes. Up to 10% of the revenue from Knuckle Supper will be donated to the non-profit, helping to provide specialized intervention and care.

The Sound of Fear

2010-10-21T21:32:00.003-04:00

I recently saw Let Me In with Don Guarisco and Ian. We were pleasantly surprised, impressed even, with the film. We talked about its relationship with the source material and how it managed to maintain the same integrity as the original--something so rare. Then Don made a comment about the music. He said, "And the music was great."

"I'm so glad you said something," I said.
"Who's gonna drive you home..." sang Ian.
I continued talking, "So few modern horror movies have any real memorable themes or music."
"I know, there's no melody."
"It's just, like, noise," I explained, rather lamely.
"Tonight!"

It's with this conversation in mind, and the fact that it's almost Halloween, that I take a look at some of my (and hopefully your) favouritest horror movie musics. It doesn't take a genius to know that music helps set the set the mood, and if I had any kind of musical training, I'd be able to further elaborate on this point. But I don't, so I'll just get to the good stuff:

Tubular Bells - theme from The Exorcist

Mike Oldfield wrote the haunting Exorcist theme and then managed to turn that one short piece of music into four albums (at least). The theme has been remixed any number of times, but the the creepy melody hasn't changed and continues to evoke a sense of dread.

Beetlejuice Theme

Danny Elfman - Beetlejuice - Main Theme

Found at abmp3 search engine

Danny Elfman's frenetic, brass-heavy composition builds up to a dramatic, vocal climax that seems on the verge of spinning wildly out of control. It's the perfect accompaniment to Tim Burton's film, a movie perched on the edge of insanity.

Helen's Theme - Candyman Suite

Philip Glass' Candyman Suite is typical of his other works: mindblowing. But Helen's Theme, which is a simple solo piano piece, is sparse and beautiful and offsets the complex nature of the film.

Hello Zepp - theme from Saw

Saw - Saw Thene Song

Found at abmp3 search engine

Despite my lamentations regarding the lack of good music in horror these days, Charlie Clouser wrote a thrilling, sticks-in-your-head composition for the climax of Saw. The piece, titled Hello Zepp, has since appeared in all the Saw movies and now serves as the franchise's theme song.

Jigoku Nagashi (Hell Flow) - Hell Girl OST

Takanashi Yasuharu - Jigoku Nagashi

Found at abmp3 search engine

Hell Girl is an anime series about Ai Enma, a young girl who ferries condemned souls to hell. Takanashi Yasuharu's soundtrack is both light and dark, with a clear sense of sadness that permeates throughout. Hell Flow plays when Ai takes flight in her flaming carriage to visit the damned on Earth before she carries them off to hell. The tone is energetic, suspenseful, and ultimately damning.

theme from Halloween

A kind of modern renaissance man, John Carpenter co-wrote, directed, and composed the music for his now-classic film, Halloween. Minimalist and haunting, the piano theme plays over an equally minimalist opening credits sequence. The music hints at the suspense and horror to come, but the simple visuals give nothing away.

Monsters

2010-10-15T17:41:00.000-04:00

Movies generally aren't complicated. A story is told, people watch, the end. Movie advertising, one would assume, is even less complicated. Ads are produced to get people excited, the end.

On the surface, Monsters isn't a complicated movie. It's about a man who escorts a woman through dangerous territory. They get to know each other over the few days it takes them to cross from one side of the danger zone to the other, and fall in love. This blossoming love story is set against the backdrop of an alien infestation. Six years ago, a spaceship broke up over Mexico during its re-entry, infecting northern Mexico with alien life. Now northern Mexcio is closed off and it's dangerous (and expensive) to pass through. Due to some bad timing and an unfortunate series of events, Caulder is forced to escort Samantha through the infected zone.

Doesn't sound too bad, and Caulder and Samantha's love might be challenged and tested by the monstrous aliens all around them and the dangerous situation they're in. It might be. You expect that it would be because you know:

Except that it isn't.

For all its posturing, Monsters is not a horror movie about two unlikely lovers fighting for survival in a hostile world. Monsters is actually a movie about two unlikely lovers who encounter no obstacles on their way to recognizing and expressing their feelings for each other.

I said Monsters isn't complicated--it's a simple love story. The film's marketing, however, is bewildering. And frustrating. That poster up there would have you believe Caulder and Samantha are constantly at risk of giant spider attack, poison gas attack, and possibly even an outbreak of Triffids. Indeed, the aliens do make an appearance but their presence and behaviour only underscore the love story. I don't mean to suggest that horror fans are incapable of appreciating love, but they're unlikely to enjoy or engage in the romantic notion of dangerous adventure when there is, in fact, little danger involved.

Monsters is one of the oldest tropes brought to life and then dressed up as a horror/sci-fi adventure. The film is successful in telling its story, but at the expense of duping its audience. This risky move--advertising one type of movie as another--almost always backfires. The audience, expecting a horror movie with a love story subplot is presented with just the opposite, and duplicitous advertising will fuel the fire of viewers' disappointment.

Word will spread like a bad rash: don't got see it, it's not what you think.

Adapt to what? In fact, it's like a dream come true for America because now there is a giant wall between it and Mexico. Interpret that any way you like.

Rampage

2010-10-05T21:41:00.000-04:00

I feel the need to review this movie, but I'm kind of at a loss for what to say. I think my confoundedness is fitting; it reflects the film's own uncertainty.

Rampage has the dubious honour of being one of Uwe Boll's personal creations. Although it did not spawn from a video game, the film does have a first person rail shooter feel as the audience follows Bill Williamson while he goes on a killing spree. Somewhat unbelievably, Rampage is kind of clever, but whatever chops Boll possesses as an auteur are overshadowed by his politics.

Bill is 23 and living at home. He's got a job but no real goals in life and though his parents are loving, they've decided it's time for him to move on and move out. Bill takes this all in stride but he's pretty comfortable living at home. And it turns out he has made some plans for his immediate future but he's been keeping them to himself as they involve killing a lot of people, robbing a bank, and blowing up cops.

Rampage is pretty simple and you kind of have to admire it for its straightforwardness. It can, at times, read soulless and nihilistic, but I think these criticisms gloss over the film's darker purpose. What really kills the movie, though, is that Bill's rampage is couched within the terms of social commentary. Bill's friend Evan complains incessantly about how society is going down the toilet, how civilization as we know it teeters on the brink of self destruction. Although Bill doesn't appear to share Evan's opinions, the film ends with Bill stating the only way to fix society is to just kill everyone. Contained within Rampage is an unnecessary social message that negates the movie's actual plot. Rampage, you have to understand, is not about one man's revenge upon a cruel and uncaring world, it's actually about a heist. A carefully planned and well executed heist.

It's unfortunate the film goes off on its wild social tangent. Boll's rantings on society's ills derails the heist plot and the movie stops short of making a real or meaningful point...about anything. Having never seen Falling Down, I can't really comment on the similarities between it and Rampage, but the latter does perhaps owe something to Michael Douglas' angry white man. Brendan Fletcher, however, isn't suffering a complete mental breakdown, and though Rampage may be outrageous it lacks any real sense of humour.

I hesitate to suggest the movie had limitless potential (the lone gunman plot can only go so far) but Rampage amazingly teeters on the brink of being an accomplished film. In the end, though, I have to say that Rampage is a film that doesn't really know what it wants to be--a social commentary, a heist movie, or even a character study--and might reflect Boll's own personal battle with filmmakers and film critics.

Halloween Horror Nights XX

2010-10-03T19:05:00.000-04:00

Remember in Beetlejuice when Lydia's mom tells her it can't be Halloween every day? I agree with Lydia when she says it can. At least the Halloween spirit can last throughout the year--the trick or treating would probably get tired fast if it happened all the time. But the spookiness and the fun, even the costumes; it's always a good time to indulge. Of course, not everyone thinks like this. Most of society, I think, sides with Lydia's mom and waits for the appropriate time to celebrate fear.

And some of these people, they really go all out. Maybe precisely because they wait for so long.

I haven't been to a lot of haunted houses. I really should endeavour to visit more. But I think I might be spoiled now for haunted houses, because last week I finally went to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, Orlando. The event takes place inside the studio park where sound stages have been transformed into elaborate haunted houses, each one with a different theme. In addition to the traditional haunted house attractions, a more atmospheric horror can be enjoyed in the scare zones. Scare zones are street scenes, and as you walk down each street and marvel at the costumes and decorations, the actors do their best to frighten you.

And then there's the chainsaw brigade. Which is exactly what it sounds like.

I can be argued all you really need for a good haunted house is creativity and motivation, but few can match Universal for scope. Although the primary scare tactic in any haunted house is the jump scare, HHN goes all out on sets and costumes. The houses are very different one from the next, and though there isn't a lot of time to stop and marvel at how well each house captures its theme, an impressive amount of creative detail is on display.

This year marked HHN's twentieth anniversary and one haunted house was a retrospective of past years' hits. I recall Alice dining on the White Rabbit, a man harvesting body parts, and what looked an awful lot like a killer klown from outer space. This house also features a tour through a prop warehouse. Unfortunately, we always had to keep moving so I couldn't stop and inspect all the Chucky heads on display or the bust of Darkness.

Of the eight houses, my favourites were Havoc, Catacombs, and Zombiegeddon. In Havoc, you enter a military bunker in which an experiment to create super soldiers has gone terribly wrong. We all agreed the actors in this house were the most into their roles, and really made an effort to scare the crap outta you. Catacombs takes you on a tour through the Paris catacombs where the restless spirits of plague victims taunt the living. Here the attention to detail can really be appreciated as the house was modeled after the real Paris underground. Zombiegeddon was meant perhaps as the "comedy" house. I didn't have high hopes for this one, mostly because I didn't like the name, but I found that I loved the anti-zombie propaganda posters plastered throughout and the zombies managed to jump out and scare me.

My favourite scare zone was HHN 20 Years of Fear, which featured an assortment of amazing costumed freaks, including one man dressed as one of The Seven Gentlemen. The steampunk-themed Saws 'n Steam was also a big hit with me, but I got chased through most of it by a chainsaw-wielding maniac, so I didn't get to spend as much time there as I would have liked.

Haunted Houses

Horror Nights: The hallowed past

Prop warehouse and highlights of past years

Catacombs: Black death rising

Archaeological exploration of the Paris catacombs

Havoc: Dogs of war

Military experimentation gone wrong

The Orphanage: Ashes to ashes

Burnt-out shell of an orphanage now haunted by the ghosts of dead children

Zombiegeddon

Living in a post-zompocalypic world

Hades: The gates of ruin

A journey through the Greek underworld

Psychoscarapy: Ghosts of Shadybook

Haunted insane asylum

Legendary Truth: The Wyandot Estate

Ghost hunting in an old house

Scare Zones

HHN 20 Years of Fear
Fear Revealed (Fear, this year's icon, and his minions)
Zombiegras
Saws 'n Steam
The Coven
Esqueleto Muerte

Road Kill

2010-09-27T18:22:00.000-04:00

There's this weird thing about Canadian cinema. It feels like it needs to be distinct in every conceivable way from its American counterpart. Or that used to be the case, at least. Since the collapse of the tax shelter incentive until just recently, Canadian film sought to push an aesthetic agenda of moral ambiguity. I can't tell you whose great idea it was to present to the world a cinematic culture based on bleak visual metaphors (it was probably Telefilm), but their time is slowly coming to an end as Canada is now starting to turn out fewer downers.

This is all just a preamble to help contextualize my thoughts upon viewing the first few minutes of Road Kill. They went something like this: "Canada should be looking to Australia for lessons on how to make a horror movie. I've seen some great horror coming out of Oz."

The first few minutes of Road Kill feature some wonderful cinematogrpahy that truly captures the isolation of Australia's Outback--a landscape just as remote and beautiful as the Canadian wilderness (which, by the way, takes up a lot of the country). Unfortunately, due to some terrible writing, the film quickly squanders its promise.

The premise isn't all bad; it's about a big rig that harrasses and then possesses four kids on a camping holiday in the Outback. If that sounds at all strange, look at this way: If you're going to make a movie about an evil truck you generally have to pick one of two options, Duel or Maximum Overdrive. Road Kill opts for the latter, but with a twist in that the truck is actively searching out potential new drivers.

The content is interesting overall, but the movie has so many problems that neither its premise nor its cinematography can make up for the glaring errors in plot and character. One of the first lines of dialogue uttered makes little sense given the situation, and it only gets worse from there. The film's internal logic is a complete mess--and I'm not talking about a quasi-sentient truck that also happens to be vehicular manifestation of Cerberus. I mean things happen that are either a) impossible or b) never explained. And it's not a case of deliberate vagueness, rather the film exhibits a kind of lazy ambiguity; what might have seemed obvious to the writer is not at all apparent to the viewer and yet somehow the director failed to notice the discrepancy.

Road Kill is one of eight titles released under the Fangoria Fright Fest banner--Fango's answer to Afterdark Horrorfest. I've already seen one other FFF title and it, too, was a let down. But if Afterdark could score a couple of hits with Mulberry Street and Lake Mungo, there's hope for Fango. In the mean time, I'll keep watching Ozploitation but only because my beloved Canada has yet to fully shed its suffocating cinematic cocoon and emerge a new creature.