Movies: As far as Mr. Sullivan is concerned, the whole "y'all got bigger penises" thing is all the reparations anybody has got a right to expect.

An unnecessary sequel to an uncelebrated remake of pretty trashy film, 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams marks a step back for a young director who has yet to take any appreciable steps forward.

I have a soft spot for this flick's grandpappy. I'll honestly admit that Two Thousand Maniacs! (Lewis's punctuation, not mine) provides a completely unjust and tawdry revanchist thrill to what little Dixie pride I might have, but that is not the film's chief claim on my nostalgia. Rather, my predominant attitude towards horror as a genre was formed by Lewis's cheapee little splatfest.

First, as a child of the slasher besotted 1980s, horror's dreariest era, I was pleasantly shocked by Herschell Gordon Lewis's general disdain for his supposed protagonists and his blithe willingness to off them mercilessly. Compared to the jump-scare-to-the-kill spasms of slasher flicks, character's in TTM! suffered fates worse than death and then died. Watching, one got the sense that the survivors got out not because they were privileged - like the schematic final girls of slasher cinema - but rather because Lewis's cruelty, like that of cat, is bounded only by his ability to get bored easily. It was as if he'd simply had his fill of blood (or run out of money to buy more red paint), announced the martini shot, let his remaining near-victims go free, and called it a day. Whether this was a genuine insight into the narrative strategies Lewis was trying to employ or not, it left me with an exhilarating, teasing sense of horror cinema as something that was played without a net. To this day, if I can tell in the first reel who makes it to the last reel, I feel played for a sucker through the rest of the flick.

The second, and perhaps weirder legacy, has to do with a single scene in Lewis's original. In the 1964 flick, one of the victims gets placed in a wooden barrel and sealed in. Then long metal nails are driven into the sides of the barrels. Finally, the barrel is rolled down a hill. At the bottom of the hill, the barrel is opened to reveal that the nails have done their fatal work and the victim is a bloody mess. The redneck cannibals go wild! Ever since I saw that scene, I've been obsessed with the idea that there's got to be some way to survive this trap. I haven't fully figured it out yet. I'm convinced that a person desperate enough to survive could, in fact, push against the sides of the barrel and brace themselves throughout the ride. This would send nails into your back, which admitted would suck a billion kind of ways. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be fatal. In fact, it may just be what saves you, as being impaled from the start might help you from bouncing around the inside of the barrel. The problem is, as I see it, even if you survive the ride down, you've ended up at the bottom of the hill severely injured and surrounded by a mob of pissed-off ghouls. That's the sticking point: how to get out of the barrel and use the lead you've gained by rolling down the hill to your advantage. I'm still working on that part. Anyway, the important thing is that it started in me an obsession with watching films with an eye towards thinking, "How would I get out of that?" This isn't your standard "victims are stupid" stuff - on the contrary, perhaps my least favorite aspect of slasher cinema is its cynical formula that dooms certain characters from the start, essentially robbing characters of the opportunity to genuinely fight to live - but rather a fascination with what humans could do if facing impossible odds.

The two things are connected, of course: to get the sense that you're able to battle against the odds, one has to get the sense that there are still odds. A cinema without a safety net is the only cinema in which you can feel people are really struggling and the outcome is always in doubt. And that, oddly, is perhaps my criteria for what makes good horror, though I know it's inadequate to solving genre disputes or helping folks bash Twilight: a good horror film pits humans against the most extreme consequence, without the consolation of a predetermined end.

Oh, here I've rambled on and not discussed 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. Though, honestly, I'm okay with that.

Mad science: Are we inherently tasty?

In what must surely rank as one of the strangest articles ever posted by Slate, writer Jesse Bering pulls and info dump on long pig in the name of making "an evolutionary case for cannibalism."

Bering brings up the work of Lewis Petrinovich argues "contrary to critiques arguing that man-eating is a myth conjured up by Westerners to demonize "primitives"—we really have been gobbling each other up for a very, very long time. We're just one of 1,300 species for which "intraspecific predation" has been observed. Among primates, cannibalism can usually be accounted for by nutritional and environmental stress, or it appears as a reproductive strategy in which mothers, for example, consume their unhealthy infants to make way for more viable offspring."

To be honest, I don't know if I'm sold. If one is going to make the case that evolution tricked us out with the ability to eat other humans, then you have to make a similar case that it also tricked us out to make it fairly uncommon. (In the article, Bering attempts to make the case that cannibalism is, in fact, more common then we admit, but I don't buy it; Bering is probably right in the assertion that cannibalism has happened more often then we'd care to think, but the real comparison you'd need to show is that it happens regularly when compared to other eating habits, and compared to how often we eat something other than people, the practice is still statistically negligible.) Furthermore, there's always the possibility that it is simply a side effect of some other, less sensational adaptation. For example, we evolved to eat meat. People happen to be meat. The adaptation wasn't aimed at them, but it opens up the possibility. That said, I can't really do justice to his argument here, so check out the article.

Still, whether or not Bering successfully achieves he goal of evo-devoing up a just so for anthropophagy, there's quite a bit of weird data to found in his article. Here's some choice tidbits, as it were.

One pair of anthropologists, for example, actually crunched the numbers, concluding that the average human adult provides 66 pounds of edible food, including fat, connective tissue, muscle, organs, blood, and skin. Protein-rich blood clots and marrow are said (by the rare connoisseur) to be special treats.

Or this bit on inducing mammalian cannibalism in the lab:

Pinpointing the specific factors that cause cannibalism is a rather difficult affair in the laboratory, mainly because of those pesky university ethics review boards. Still, an intrepid Japanese researcher shrugged off these considerations and induced cannibalism among a captive population of squirrel monkeys by feeding the pregnant females a low-protein diet. This led to a high rate of abortion and the mothers' devouring their aborted fetuses—a much-needed bolus of protein.

The idea that we're all cannibals and that it can be induced by controlled conditions was actually the middling Hunger, reviewed on this blog not too long ago. I was also reminded of philosopher Max Stirner's grim vision of the human condition as metaphorical cannibalism: "For me, you are nothing but my food - even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use."

Oh, and happy new year.

Movies: The 10:45 Meat Train, Local.

Raw Meat, release in '72 under the name Death Line, suffers somewhat from misleading genre expectations. The logline, involving a clan of cannibals prowling the London Underground, and the delightfully lurid title can't help but suggest either a British Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a precursor to Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train (Raw Meat arrived a decade and some change before Barker's short story published). Sadly, the film is neither of those things. Happily, what it turns out to be is a pleasing, if slight, hybrid gothic fantasy/policer with some nice characterizations, some eye-catching gore work, and a surprisingly sympathetic baddie.

The film intertwines three parallel plots: 1) the police investigation for a missing government official, 2) the rocky romance of the young couple who were the last two people to see the official alive, and 3) the desperate survival efforts of a cannibalistic morlock who, with the death of his female companion, must face the final extinction of his tribe.

Of these three narrative threads, only the story of the couple falls flat. The chemistry between the two, a young American man presumably waiting out 'Nam in the UK and flighty British woman, is notable mainly in its complete absence. The film already casual pace grinds to a near halt whenever it's time for these two to take center stage. I do give actress Sharon Gurney credit for rocking the urban she-mullet look though. Her hipped-up distaff take on the work-in-front, party-in-the-back hairstyle can be found once again roaming freely through the streets of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and she deserves credit as a fashion pioneer.

The police investigation scenes are carried - or, rather, stolen and carried off - by a hammy Donald Pleasance, whose Inspector Calhoun is a poor man's Morse, a curiously fastidious crank, with a wonderful Wallace-ish Home Valley of West Yorkshire accent. Pleasance seems to delight in Calhoun's petty displays of office tyranny and his vague disregard for civilians - he seems to find crime victims and their demands the only thing that louses up what would otherwise be a pretty cushy gig - and this delight turns what might otherwise be tedious misanthropy into something more comedic and charming. The investigation plot also has a nice cameo by Christopher Lee, who takes the opportunity to trade barbs with Pleasance in a nifty little ham-off.

Balanced against the tone of the police plot, we get the grim adventures of a character identified only as "the Man." Part of a small group of male and female workers that were trapped in the tunnels in a cave in years ago, when we meet "Man," he's trying fruitlessly to keep his bedridden companion - "the Woman" - from death's door. When she passes, Man's priorities shift and he begins to look for a new mate among the people he previously considered foodstuffs. Re-enter the mulleted young woman from plotline one . . .

There's a lot that make no sense whatsoever about Raw Meat. Most notably, one can't help but wonder why, if the morlocks managed to dig their way out, they didn't just leave the tunnels and continue with their normal lives. If you're worried about starving, seems Plan A should be "go to the cornershop" and not "stay in these pestilent tunnels preying upon the occasional late-night train rider and hoping nobody notices our murderous ways." Still, much of the illogic of the basic story is mitigated by the tone of the morlock's tale: it shares more to the gothic subterranean exile narratives of things like Phantom of the Opera than it does to the vérité shocks of TCM (though our atavistic tunnel-people are considerably more downmarket than Erik). Furthermore, while Man is never particularly likable in any way - his diseased appearance and communication limited to subhuman vocalizations makes him sufficiently repulsive - one gets a real sense that he's a human facing the end of his world. There's something of the wounded, and therefore both dangerous and pathetic, animal about him.

Raw Meat isn't the off-the-hook monstrosity that the title and central concept might imply. But if you're looking for something a bit slower, a bit softer, and just a bit more thoughtful, then there's some nice things to be found here.

Movies: I've got "cannibals" written on one hand and "Franco" scrawled on the other.

The very idea of a Jess Franco cannibal picture called to my mind a scene from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter. In that superlative flick, Bob Mitchum's surreally hammy psycho preacher, Harry Powell, relates a quick summary of all Christian theology using his two prison tats: the words love and hate inked across the flesh covering his metacarpals. The short review of several thousand years of religious thought involves him intertwining his fingers and physically acting out the struggle between good and evil, flipping his fists and raising and lowering his hands to show the relative strength of each concept.

For this review, you can imagine me doing pretty much the same thing, only I've got cannibals written on one hand and Franco scrawled on the other. (Though the technical details of the execution of said tattoo elude me at the moment.)

Long time readers of this blog know that I break for two subgenres of fright flick: alligator/crocdile pictures always have my attention and you can always interest me in a cannibal flick. We won't dwell on the charms of crocogator stories here, but a quick rehash of what makes cannibal films so interesting to me might be in order. Mainly, there's something pleasingly simple about the motivations of the baddies in such flicks. Sometimes a filmmaker decides to slather an ideological gloss over the whole thing - á la Cannibal Holocaust - and use people eating as a critique, but these efforts are almost universally doomed to self-parody by the extreme nature of the act they evoke.

Even in Deodato's infamous flick, perhaps the most intellectually overworked example of the subgenre, the idea that our violent, neo-colonialist filmmakers are punished for their hypocritical "civilized" mentality requires two conceptual slight of hand trick. First, the filmmakers themselves aren't deluded about themselves or human nature: they've filmed man's inhumanity to man and make no bones about violence, created and represented, being their bread and butter. They're, in a sense, cannibals. Second, the "natives" that ultimately turn the crew into brunch are, even prior to the intrusion of the filmmakers, a pretty nasty bunch: we see them delivering death-by-rape punishments to their womenfolk and, oh yeah, they think people are food. When the documentary makers and flesh-eaters finally clash, it has all the moral aspects of a dogfight: man is wolf to man, regardless of the man. It seems clear that Deodato wants to invoke some cultural relativism here, but the practical result of that is to announce that only the film crew's actions can be judged and it relegates the moral character of the natives to some sort of black box, which then transforms them into a plot device rather than characters. His effort to critique the filmmakers' inhumanity requires using humans as props.

Far better to avoid trying to make a moral case for anthropophagy and just pit a bunch of suckers against people-eatin' people. Admittedly, this is probably no less dehumanizing and racist, but then you at least avoid making an ass of yourself by flaunting your intellectual and moral superiority as you commit the same foul.

Which brings us to Jess Franco's Cannibals - a.k.a. Mondo Cannibale, White Cannibal Queen, Eaters of Men, The Goddess of the Barbarians, The Cannibal God, Mondo Cannibale 3: The Blonde Goddess (the movie is at once the original and its own sequel - this represents Franco's greatest cinematic innovation), and, of course A Girl for the Cannibals. Franco, as unconcerned about the politics of cannibalism as his is about the elements of good filmmaking, avoids tangling his slender flick in the weeds of moralizing.

Cannibals opens on an ill-fated Amazon expedition. The expedition's leader, Dr. Taylor, and his family are attacked on their boat by the oldest, least fit, whitest cannibal tribe in the Amazon. Human meat, Franco seems to be telling us, is not lean. Mrs. Taylor is killed and eaten on the boat. Like all good Euro-cinema cannibals, this tribe often takes its meat raw and on-the-go, and they think nothing of pausing in the middle of a sneak attack to grab a little person tartar appetizer. Dr. Taylor and his young daughter are taken back to the village. There the good doctor loses his arm, but manages to escape. He leaves his daughter behind.

Flash forward - crippled and emotionally scarred (but not too emotionally scarred, he's working on a new love interest in the form of his nurse), Taylor approaches the wealthy Barbara Shelton and her weirdly fey older-man toy Fenton to back a rescue expedition. They agree, but on the condition that they can come along. Why? I'm not sure. See the Amazon, shoot some cannibals, maybe find the half-chewed remains of this dude's baby girl. It'll be a lark.

As good an idea as a pleasure jaunt into cannibal country is, it all goes so very unexpectedly wrong. Socialites and local guides fall before the arrows and dental work of the flabby foe. And, to top the whole thing off, the premise of the "rescue" is compromised when Taylor discovers that his daughter has gone native: she now the White Goddess of the tribe. We know to capitalize that as her proper title because the cannibals, whenever they mention her, break out of the painfully lame ooga-booga of their native tongue to say, in English, "White Goddess."

So, which fist wins?

Sadly, Franco is not a spice. The genre pleasures of the cannibal flick evaporate in the face of the limitless indifference of Franco's rigorous commitment half-assed filmmaking. Slackly paced, barely acted, peopled with the worst blackface tribe this side of a Dan Rice show, and hobbled by a laughably crappy script, the whole thing is a testament to the career of a man who famously claimed that he's never made a movie he liked. I hear you loud and clear, Jessie.

Really, the only thing worth pondering about the film is whether or not Jess Franco hated the idea of making a cannibal so much that he botched it on purpose. I don't propose the possibility to be flip. In an interview in the special features, Franco makes his contempt for the cannibal features his flick apes (perhaps satirizes poorly?) clear. He refers to them as "stupid," which appears to be Franco's go-to condemnation (for example, he expresses his contempt for Sabrina Siani by calling her the Queen of the Stupid People). He especially mocks them for their extended bouts of viscera eating and claims that the longer a flick lingers on such things, the stupider it becomes. Then why, we're then forced to ask, is Cannibals punctuated with repeated close-up, slow-mo scenes of Franco's un-natives gumming raw steak? In fact, these endless scene that are so extremely shot that they nearly become abstract cinema are the film's most distinctive visual feature. Franco made sure to pack his flick with what he states is the stupidest part of any cannibal flick. Is it a mistake? Or did he do it on purpose?

Food: Ich bin ein your dinner.

If you're a surgeon with a notably flexible interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath or a person who thinks you're being burdened with unnecessary body parts, then the forward-thinking restauranteurs behind Flime would love to hear from you.

A soon-to-open Berlin restaurant is touting for diners willing to do just that: donate body parts that it says it will turn into gourmet meals according to the age-old cooking habits of an Amazonian tribe infamous for its cannibalism.

The promotion has been declared grossly distasteful by a growing number of protesters, who say it is in particularly bad taste following the case of a real cannibal in Germany.

In a prominent advertising campaign on the internet, in German newspapers and on television, the restaurant, Flime, is appealing for willing donors and diners to become members of what it hints at being a new dining movement.

"Members declare themselves willing to donate any part of their body," the advertisement reads, adding that any resulting hospital costs will be taken on by the restaurant. They say they are also looking to employ an "open-minded surgeon".

The location of the restaurant – if it exists – is being kept a secret, as is the identity of the owners and investors behind it. As a foretaste of its menu, Flime is suggesting traditional Brazilian dishes such as bolinho, which it describes as "fried tatar balls with a sweet-sour dip", or feijoada, a main course consisting of "various pieces of meat with black beans and rice". It does not specify what type of meat is used.

The restaurant cites as its inspiration the indigenous Brazilian Waricaca tribe, which once practised the ritual of "compassionate cannibalism", or eating parts of the corpse of a loved one to emphasise the connection between the living and the dead, which was said to help with mourning.

Widely held to be a joke, local politicos are unamused by the hoax eatery and some evoke the specter of Armin Meiwes, the cannibal killer who sexually mutilated and partially consumed a willing victim in 2001.

"I'm working on the assumption that this is some sort of a warped joke," he [Michael Braun, the vice-chairman of Berlin's Christian Democrat party - CRwM] told Bild. "But it's disgusting, not least because it wasn't long ago that we had the case of the Berliner who was murdered by a cannibal."

Braun was referring to the case of the computer technician Bernd Jürgen Brandes, who in 2001 volunteered himself to the self-confessed cannibal Armin Meiwes, who chopped off his penis and prepared it as a dish seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic.

Meiwes then killed Brandes and consumed his flesh over the following months. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006.

The case drew attention to a growing underground cannibal movement. Experts believe cannibalism has about 800 followers in Germany alone, only a minimal number of whom have carried out the practice.

It should be noted that the restaurant owners reveal a decidedly one-sided understanding of the Wari' tribe (for instance, they prefer that non-tribesmen refer to them as the Wari') and the cannibal traditions they allegedly practiced before their pacification in the 20th Century. The "compassionate cannibalism" mentioned did take place. After a member of the tribe died, family members would embrace the corpse. Then the body was left alone for an unspecified number of days. After this aging period, the dead person's closest of kin would prepare the body of dead and offer tokens of meat to members of the extended family (given that the Wari' practice polygyny, these family networks can get pretty extensive).

However, this was only one of the cannibal practices of the Wari'. The other allegedly involved the consumption of fallen enemies. Wari' warriors would bring back the bodies of slain enemies and offer them to the women and young men of the tribe. Children were forbidden to eat the flesh of enemies and the warriors, due to an elaborate system of religious assumptions, stayed away for fear that consuming the flesh of a fallen foe was a form of auto-cannibalism that would weaken you. Because this latter form of cannibalism was triumphal and less constrained by ritual, it's here that the artistic and creative aspects of cooking humans were allowed to take the fore. If, in fact, Flime exists and it is using recipes from the Wari', it is more likely that they are pulling inspiration from this latter tradition and not the tradition of "compassionate cannibalism."

The image above is artist Lulu Allison's "Cannibal Figger."

True Crime: "I still have 83 more women to kill."

The francophone Afrik News has a story on the proliferation of serial killers across Africa and the unique problems they pose to nations that often lack the investigative and communication infrastructures to identify, track, and capture such criminals. Drawing extensively from the work of Stéphane Bourgoin, an expert on African serial killers, the article paints a nightmarish portrait of these predators. Along with the police organization and data sharing issues that would hound detectives and researchers in any country, the article points out the way in which local cultural traditions can, for lack of a better word, normalize serial killing in some African communities. From the article:

And while these rampant murders are are sometimes not linked to tradition, most of them are. In southern Africa, sangomas [midwives, healers and soothsayers] call on hired killers who, for the pleasure of killing end up as serial killers, provide them with some of their tools of work. The sangomas sometimes prepare concoctions containing human body parts. A beverage brewed from a child’s sexual organ, for example, is believed to cure impotence.

"Muti killings", murders committed by puncturing the organs of a living person, is the cause of hundreds of deaths per year. "Africa registers more crimes related to cannibalism and vampirism than anywhere else in the world". Eating someone means capturing the soul and spirit of that person. And the victims’ blood are believed to contain life. It is no secret that fetish priests and some traditional worshipers believe that by drinking human blood they either become immortal or are reborn. "This kind of belief explains the acts committed by the two Kenyan serial killers: Philip Onyancha, who drank the blood of his victims and George Otieno Okoth, who collected human hair.

Besides the "muti killings", it can be noted that across Sub-Sahara Africa, many of those often labeled as witches or wizards, mostly by fetish priests, are poisoned, drowned, hacked to death with machetes or buried alive at will in an attempt to deliver their souls from the snare of the ‘devil’. Here again, a killer could evoke witchcraft in order to be given the leeway to kill to satisfy his whim. Only last year, a Zimbabwean judge, Justice Ndou, ruled that 32 year old Vusumuzi Ndlovu’s unshakable belief in witchcraft was an extenuating factor to spare him from the southern African country’s legally imposed punishment, after he killed his neighbor whom he accused of witchcraft.

The title of this post comes from Philip Onyancha, shown under arrest above.

Books: Whose woods are these I think I know.

When I was a college radio DJ - back in the prehistoric days when music came imprinted onto the surfaces of solid objects and "streaming" was an adjective used mostly in conjunction with urination - we had this goofy in joke that hinged on unnecessary intensification. It worked like this: Describe X by taking Y, which possesses trait T to a high degree, and claim that X is Y if Y had T to a high degree.

We were radio DJ's, not stand-up comedians.

We'd say stuff like, "That band's like Jesus Lizard, if Jesus Lizard was a noisy toxic spill of raging rockness" or "Sarah is like Amy, if Amy was a cold and unforgiving iceberg." (For the record, "cold and unforgiving" was the key to Amy's stupidly insane hotness; like so many sexual Shakletons looking to discover magnetic south, Amy's attractive pull to the dumber of the species was directly proportionate to how likely the effort to conquer was to end in your demise - but I digress.) It was an unnecessarily convoluted way to say how intensely Y possessed T. To put it in a horror blog context, we'd say, "August Underground is like the Guinea Pig series if the Guinea Pig series was a gory, f'ed up mess" or "That post is like a horror blog 'top' list posts if 'top' list posts were lazy, lame fan-service circle jerks." It was Bergsonian joke: The ha-has came from how inefficient a way to express yourself it was. Plus, there was humorous assumption of ignorance at work because you pretended not to really get X. It doesn't work in a blog so good.

Anywho, I bring this up because, at first glance, Richard Laymon's The Woods Are Dark seems to have been earnestly built on the premise of writing a Off Season if Off Season was violent and savage. The comparison between Laymon's book and Ketchum's book is unavoidable. Both feature vacationers in a fight against atavistic cannibal tribes. Both books foreground the idea of turning savage in order to survive. Curiously, both books even suffered similar fates at the hands of their editors: Off Season and The Woods Are Dark were famously butchered by their original publishers, only to be restored in complete texts decades later.

Despite these similarities, Laymon's book plays at a very different game. Though neither book is particularly realistic, Laymon's work becomes a grim and fantastic allegory about the relative sense of civilization and the "us versus them" mentality that may be one of humanity's most essential psychological tools. It ultimately shares more with Jackson's The Lottery and The Wicker Man than Ketchum's gore soaked thriller.

That Laymon's books is a curious world-building exercise is easy to overlook. World-building is often synonymous with purple prose excess and baggy exposition: Think of all the torturously bad poetry and unnecessary genealogical asides scattered about the works of Tolkien. Laymon's compact prose rockets the story along. His style is an odd sort of trick: He uses a hard-boiled minimalism to construct a bug's-eye view of a surprisingly large fantasy vision. Nowhere is this taut style better on display than the opening chapters of the book. Laymon wastes no time introducing our protags and throwing them into harm's way. The books opens with a splatter of surreality: Two friends, Neala and Sherri, on a driving holiday get a hand thrown at their car by a legless mutant on the roadside. Seriously. That's how the story starts. It's all done in a paragraph or two.

Neala and Sherri stop at a greasy spoon in Barlow, the next town they reach, and debate their responsibilities with regards to reporting hand-throwing mutant half-people. The debate quick tips in the realm of academic when the other patrons of the restaurant rise up and kidnap our heroines. They are trucked out remote location in the woods where they are joined by the three members plus guest of the Dill family, vacationers who were snatched from a Barlow motel.

The six captives are bound to a stand of much-abused trees and left there. It doesn't take long for the prisoners to realize their fate: They've been left as a sacrificial offering to the Krulls, a savage tribe of cannibals that have kept a grim and uneasy truce with the people of Barlow. The people of Barlow regularly drop off a handful of outsiders - the men and the old get eaten, the young women are kept for recreation and breeding purposes - and the Krulls don't prey on the folks of Barlow. What neither the prisoners nor their would-be slayers know is that, on this particular night, the nasty, but effective truce between Barlow and the Krulls is going to collapse. Instead of the regular sacrifice, and impulsive and dissatisfied young man from Barlow decides to buck the system and free the hostages/dinners. This act leads to a horrific two-day battle between the hostages and the Krulls.

The plot is familiar. If you've seen any horror film in the past three decades that contains characters who could be described as "hillbillies," then you know the drill. And, admittedly, there's a lot of factory standard stuff in here: We get all the highlights of the subgenre, from the body parts as fashion wardrobes to the ineffectual post-feminist era spineless intellectual who must suddenly become as vicious as his enemies to defeat them. Laymon occasionally pushes the elements further than most - Lander Dill, the transformed milquetoast, actually becomes a psycho looney who is far more dangerous to everybody around him than the Krulls are - but, for the most part, he hits these marks with an energy and enthusiasm that is effective if not original. (I hate to side with the forces of Big Publishing - those clueless mainstream editors who horror fandom is absolutely certain just don't get it - but much of the restoration work done on this novel centers on the Lander Dill plotline. In this case, Big Publishing was correct. Lander is the novelist weakest link. His transformation from wussy to dubiously sane killing machine seems insincere and so broad as to be comical. It is Laymon's only major misstep and whatever editor trimmed that subplot down is to be commended, not condemned.)

Where Laymon's truly unique contribution to the subgenre is comes in is his expansion of the worldview of the Krulls. Originally presented as wild beasts, Laymon turns a surreally nasty anthropologist's eye on his fictional tribe of regressives and fleshes them out to a degree similar stories never bother. Over the course of the novel, we comes to learn how the Krulls see themselves: A pure strain outlaw community that lives only by the primal laws of nature. We get their origin mythology, which is a bizarre cross between Genesis and the rugged individualist frontiersman tropes of our own civic religion. And, ultimately, come to understand that they view themselves as humans beset on all sides by enemies as concrete as the savage man creature that shares their wood (a odd, possibly supernatural man-bearish thing that they believe to be their Adamic ur-father turned demonic persecutor) and as abstract as the modernity they are fully aware of, but reject. This is not to say that the reader sympathizes with them. The Krulls' woods aren't even a nice place to visit. But Laymon shows that not only are they fully human, but even capable of sacrifices that, according to the own grim mores, are sincerely poignant. There are moments, brief transcendent shards of pure unadorned sympathy with raw humanity, that pierce though Laymon's depiction of the Krulls that remind me of John Smith's diaries of the Jamestown settlement or Jean De Lery's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. That sense of an alien world that reveals itself to be, after all, recognizably human - but still fraught with the potential for danger and unspeakable horror - infuses Laymon's book at its best moments. It's the Krulls you miss when the bog is done. (And, personally, I'd love more about the citizens of Barlow. Laymon seems to forget them, even to the point of not considering what happens when the survivors tell their tale to the authorities. There's a massive search of the woods, so they do tell the police what happened. But wouldn't that mean that the citizens of Barlow are in deep doodoo? We never find out. Frustrating!)

I thank ANTSS regular Shon for giving me the opportunity to enjoy this book. It was a genuine pleasure.

Mad science: Ancient Europeans were sick puppies.

Wired Science reports a grisly archeological discovery:

At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests.

Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.

“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.

The article gives the grim details:

Work from 2005 to 2008 — led by Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and Fabian Haack of the archaeology division of Germany’s Directorate General for Cultural Heritage — unearthed additional human bones, mainly skulls and limb bones bearing incisions. Remains of an estimated 500 people have been found so far.

Pottery resting among the bones accumulated over no more than a few decades, the researchers say. Some pieces came from Neolithic sites located 400 kilometers from Herxheim.

The pits that surrounded Herxheim provided no protection from invaders but may have marked a symbolic boundary for a ceremonial settlement, Boulestin proposes. At first, Boulestin’s team, like Orschiedt and Haidle, thought that the dead were brought to Herxheim for ceremonial reburial.

But Boulestin and his colleagues’ opinion changed after they analyzed 217 reassembled human bones from one deposit, representing at least 10 individuals.

Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.

Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.

People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.

And later:

Whatever actually happened at Herxheim, facial bones were smashed beyond recognition, “giving an impression of the destruction of individual identity, a kind of psychic violence against the person,” Thorpe says.

In the article, researchers speculate that the community may have faced some catastrophic food shortage that forced these people to dig up and consume their dead. Evidence of reburial ceremonies supports this theory. Chemical analysis may further support this explanation.

Link Proliferation: Eat yourself fitter.

"The Ultimate Revenge of the Art Nerd

The New York Times reviews the MoMA's upcoming "Tim Burton" exhibit and, sadly, finds it lacking.

Given the tremendous visual appeal of Mr. Burton’s movies, you would hope that “Tim Burton,” the Museum of Modern Art’s expansive retrospective of his noncinematic art, would be equally exciting. Alas, it is a letdown. Focused mainly on hundreds of drawings dating from his teenage years to the present and including paintings, sculptures, photographs and a smattering of short films on flat screens, it is an entertaining show and a must for film buffs and Burton fans. To see the raw material from which the movies evolved is certainly illuminating. But there is a sameness to all Mr. Burton’s two- and three-dimensional output that makes for a monotonous viewing experience.

I will most likely see it anyway, though it sounds like MoMA's basically installed three galleries worth of Hot Topic merch. The entrance to the exhibit (see above) looks fun.

Roll Save Versus Anxiety of Influence

The Escapist takes a look at the literary influences on the earliest iteration of D&D. Shocking, it isn't the name J.R.R. Tolkien written out 1,000 times.

Still, it's interesting that the game's original foreword, which Gygax penned in November 1973, long before any legal concerns entered into the picture, states: "These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste." There's no mention of Tolkien there and indeed, even with the aforementioned references to Hobbits and Balrogs and the like, there are probably even more references to the Martian creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the text of the game itself.

How Evolution Makes Some People Better Cannibals

Kuru is to cannibals what mad cow disease is to beef eaters. In Papua New Guinea, where the cultural traditions of once required some tribes to eat dead, the disease claimed more than 2,500 people before cannibalism was officially stopped in 1950.

The legacy has left a curious tag on the genetics of the some of the cannibals and their non-cannibal descendants: In the last 200 years, the cannibals evolved a anti-kuru gene that researchers now call the "most clear but evidence of human evolution in action."

Mead and his colleagues discovered the mutation after comparing stored DNA from 152 dead Fore victims of the disease with DNA from more than 3000 living Fore, including almost 560 who participated in the ritual eating of brains before it was banned.

In 51 survivors and their descendants, they discovered a hitherto-unknown variant of PRNP, the gene which makes prions, the proteins that spread the disease. These prions become malformed and in turn make all healthy prions they encounter malformed as well, in a chain reaction that ultimately destroys brains by turning them into a spongy mush.

The change in the gene comes at a position called codon 127. Throughout the animal kingdom, the codon contains the same amino acid, called glycine or "G", from each parent, giving the form G127G. To their astonishment, Mead and his colleagues found a variant of the codon never seen in nature before, in which one of the glycines has been swapped for a valine amino acid, giving the new variant the name G127V.

Initially, Mead and his colleagues thought that because the variant had never been seen before, it must have damaging rather than beneficial effects. "We thought we'd found the trigger for how kuru happens, that someone ate the brain of someone with the mutation and that's how the disease started spreading through the cannibalistic funeral feasts," he said.

"Instead, we found the complete opposite, which is that it was protective."

Movies: Learn to live like an animal.

Though it may be the product of some sort of strong blow to the head - most likely suffered in childhood - I actually enjoyed Jonathan Henseigh's 2007 Welcome to the Jungle, a clumsy first-person-shooter jungle romp that owes a huge debt to the vastly overrated Cannibal Holocaust and the still hotly debated Blair Witch Project. And I say that knowing, on an objective level, W2tJ is a very, very dubious flick.

The plot of W2tJ is simple: Four ex-pats - one stick-up-the-butt couple and one boozin' and sexin' pair of goofs - living in Fiji get wind of a old white dude spotted amongst the cannibal tribes of New Guinea. After a bit o' research, the quartet decide that the mysterious white shadow must be none other than the vanished Michael Rockefeller, who vanished in the cannibal jungles of New Guinea in 1961. (The true story of the young Rockefeller is fascinating and, while it hardly justifies the "based on a true story" tag this flick gets, it does justify a quick Google exploration of your own.) Visions of tabloid gold dancing in their head, the quartet grab some jungle-grade camping gear, get two camera, and set off into New Guinea to find the famed missing scion of the Rockefeller empire. In the tradition of Cannibal Holocaust, they run afoul of locals - from crafty urban traders to the cannibals that act as the film's final baddies - and, in the tradition of BWP, they turn on one another under the stress. As a result, our heroes fare little better than characters from either of W2tJ major inspirations (indeed, one is even dispatched and displayed in a manner that alludes to Holocaust's infamously grisly girl-kabob gag).

There's ample reason to consign W2tJ to the dustbin of horror film history. Primarily, there's the first-person camerawork. Taking all the wrong lessons from Cannibal Holocaust, W2tJ mixes what appears to be vérite style third-person shots with first-person subjective camera work. But, unlike Holocaust, there's no in flick justification for the back and forth. Consequently, there are several scenes where the viewer is left pondering whether or not they are supposed to think anybody is behind the camera - a distraction that break you out of the film and diminishes the impact of the visual style by underscoring how contrived it is. Even when the film does fully commit to the premise of first-person p.o.v.'s, the conceit make a hash of certain scenes. Most notably, there's a scene is which our young cannibal kibble run into a particularly testy set of New Guinean military patrolmen. There's some sort of dust-up between the smart-ass male of the group and one of the army men, but the whole thing happens mostly off scene and what we do see, shot in low-light and with the camera's stabilizers set to Parkinson's, is fairly incomprehensible. One could argue that this sort of low resolution opacity fairly mimics the nervous isolation of our main characters and communicates to the viewers as sense of their own frightened ignorance of what's going on. But the result of repeatedly leaving the viewers literally and metaphorically in the dark doesn't heighten the tension. Instead, it give the viewer the sense that plot incidents are happening willy-nilly, so investing the mental bandwidth to attempt to puzzle out what's happening and why we should care seems like a bad call. The result is a sense detachment. We begin to feel like what we don't get wasn't getable and doesn't really matter.

But let's accentuate the positive!

W2tJ was sot on location, in jungle surroundings so beautiful that its almost cheating. There are a few set ups in a the flick that, despite the hand-cam conceit, look epic. Given the ever increasing quality and portability of film equipment, it's kind of a mystery why small budget filmmakers don't get out more. If you lack the budget to create the lavishly squalid dungeons of Jigsaw, go find a rotting hospital structure like the one that practically stars in Session 9. Think of the brilliant way the birch trees in Blair Witch became a grim, minimalist series of white slash marks on a pitch-black background. You aren't going to get that in a studio. Perhaps it's a genre-specific distrust of the beautiful: Other than the occasional final girl, horror too often seems to pride itself on the rigor of is grotesquery and see the beautiful as a sort of softening, feminizing indulgence. There also a distinctly American strain of fantasy that focuses on the intrusion of violent or uncanny of the quotidian - a manifestation of America's defensively suburban mentality - that has long replaced the early modern gothic of Poe and Hawthorne or sci-fi-hued apocalypses of the early Atomic Era. The sets for such horrors are cookie-cutter tract homes, shopping malls, and high schools proms. There's little room for for the spectacle of beauty in such flicks; it's a cinema of touchy possessiveness, a horror that wants you off its lawn. In contrast, there's an expansiveness to W2tJ visuals that is pleasing. It wants to explore new places and pit its characters against the challenges that await those bold or foolish enough to venture forth. It speaks to a sense of heroic questing, rather than peevish insularity. That said, Henseigh's vision falls a bit short of the naturalistic poetry in recent Aussie flicks like Wolf Creek, Rogue, or Black Water. In those flicks have an almost pagan vibe. Nature is vast, ancient, and possessed of a brutally serene indifference to the activities of the mortals who intrude in her realm. Steeped in classic action tropes, Henseigh treats his jungle more as a series of tests for his characters rather than something that exists on another plane of being.

W2tJ also gets points for being happily free of the untidy, ill-concived "philosophical" baggage that makes Cannibal Holocaust such a particularly embarrassing failure. Admittedly, the "who are the real savages" nonsense in Deodato is little more than a beard, a clumsy bit of misdirection meant to justify the film's energetic wallowing in exploitation extremism; but it's a beard Deodato seems determined to sell. We get our cheap kicks smothered in in a overly generous helping of the unearned and juvenile revelation that modern man can be cruel; a philosophical "discovery" that is all the more embarrassing for the fact that Deodato doesn't seem to believe it himself as he takes pains to make the cruel documentary freaks who act unlike any of other folks in the flick. (Curiously, the idea that all humanity is inherently evil and incapable of evolution past its most essential and savage core must be a great comfort to artists from formerly fascists nations who must otherwise ask themselves the less comfortable question of how rational, well-meaning human beings commit unspeakable evil.)

In contrast, W2tJ plays strictly for kicks. This isn't without its problem: The specters of Burroughs, Haggard, and the worst of Kipling haunt the film, not full exorcised by the native's bloody revenge at the end. But we're mercifully spared the hectoring voice of the filmmaker trying to convince us that he's speak great truths. In this aspect at least, W2tJ is far superior to is deluded predecessor.

Henseigh's cannibal flick also shows cannibals that act like humans rather than excitable zombies: They hunt their food carefully and strategically, they ration out their meat, they even keep a separate butchery and killing field so as to not litter their home with messy people parts. That's a real step forward in the presentation of cannibals.

W2tJ is great film. In fact, with it's occasional lapses into visual incompetence, I can't even say its a very good film. Furthermore, because its aims are so much more modest than Blair Witch, it never achieves that flick's creeping existential dread. However, it's a honest flick with some well-made scenes. If there's room enough on your Netflix queue for such easy and unremarkable pleasures, you could do worse.

And now, because we've all got it stuck in our heads now . . .

Movies: There's always the baker and the candlestick maker.

Perhaps the most successful Halloween costume I ever whipped up was something we ended up calling the the "pig butcher." When I was a young lad, Halloween costuming was a joint creative endeavor for my mother and me. Deciding on a season's costume was part logistical issue (what could we reuse, what do proton packs cost, and so on) and part aesthetic negotiation. Because we both had to wrap our heads around core concept, anything that was a wholly unilateral obsession was not going to make the cut. One result of this was that I never really ended up dressing as specific characters. With the exception of a rather elaborate Dr. Stantz ghostbusting outfit, all my costumes were more general types: short and tubby cowboy, short and tubby astronaut, short and tubby mad scientist, short and tubby ninja, and so on. Oh, and I was one of the gang from A Clockwork Orange once (an unusually subversive gimmick my mother cooked up that beat The Simpsons to the punch by several years), but not specifically any particular one of them. Whichever one was the shortest and tubbiest, I guess.

This tendency towards the abstract continues today. When I do the costume thing these days, I tend towards original creative expressions that don't have any particular model. (There's an exception for lucha legend Blue Demon, but he's so uniquely awesome that he doesn't have to submit to any rule he disagrees with.) The "pig butcher" was one of these ex nihilo dealies. The name's a bit deceptive as the intended meaning is not "somebody who butchers pigs," rather it's meant to communicate the notion of "a pig that butchers somebody." Basically, I wore a grocery store butcher's outfit: dark pants, work shoes, white shirt, bad tie, white apron. The whole thing was topped off by this really grotesquely realistic pig's head mask. I accessorized with a prop knife and a tin bucket of plastic people parts. Though originally meant as little more than a visual goof, the end result was surprisingly grim and distressing (I'm told - I couldn't see crap through the mask). A few folks dug a completely unintended, but completely logical pro-vegetarian vibe, but most seemed to see it a sort of memento caro, an unsettling reminder that we are all made of meat. Anyway, I remember that outfit fondly.

Which is why - against my better judgement - I watched The Butcher, Edward Gorsuch's derivative 2006 "crazy redneck psycho clan" flick, on Hulu. The promotional image Hulu posts next to the flick's link is a off-kilter full portrait of a chainsaw wielding dude in what is more intense version of the beloved "pig butcher" outfit.

Yet another copy run built using the very familiar Texas Chain Saw Massacre template, The Butcher involves a sextet of young folks are packed into a SUV on their way to Vegas. To absolutely nobody's surprise, they end up on a rural shortcut that leads them straight into the clutches of a small band of mutant hayseed cannibals.

The Butcher is a pretty awful movie. First time feature director Gorsuch is a prolific writer of Skinemax grade softcore such as Sexual Needs (2004), Sexual Retreat (2004), Sexual Revenge (2004), Sexual Indiscretion (2005), and Sexual Cravings (2006). Perhaps Gorsuch isn't comfortable working outside his comfort zone, but the movie's plot is predictable, direction is leaden, and the scares are tame. The movie earns itself some goodwill with its workman-like efficiency: the film completes the characterization of its victims (the jock a-hole, the final girl, the black friend, the lesbians - A and B, the nerd) and racks up the first kill by the four minute mark. There's also a nice late game twist that is not absurd and genuinely moves the plot forward. We're not talking a "Bruce Willis is dead" flip here, but many a better movie has been marred by more poorly handled twists. There's also some allusions to more quirky entries in the "crazy family" subgenre - everybody references Chain saw, but how many People Under the Stairs allusions do we get - that suggest a diversity of inspiration. These are not, however, enough to redeem the picture.

The problem with The Butcher is that it's too softcore about it occasionally creative ghoulish touches. Through laziness or craziness, there's a lot of wacky crap going on in film - but the film repeatedly passes up these opportunities for sustain strangeness in favor of grinding cheerlessly along with its plot. For example, the first kill in the pic involves lesbian A in a topless tree branch accident. The lesbian is topless, not the tree. Lesbian A gets ripped in half. Her lower half drops into the truck while her upper half is left on the road. The remaining characters pour out of the truck and begin to debate what they should do about their bisected friend. Meanwhile, lesbian B has gone to recover the upper half of lesbian A. She drags it all the way to the truck, begins embracing it, talking crazy about how lesbian A promised they'd never be apart (ha! a visual pun!). Lesbian B refuses to leave either half of her lover behind, so when the rest of group goes off looking for help, she stays behind with both halves of her better half, acting crazy. Admittedly, we're not talking great drama here; but if you're going to put all this in your flick, shouldn't you just play it for every freaky detail it's worth. Shouldn't this whole thing be at least as morbidly bizarre and out-there as, say, Macabre. Instead, the whole thing is underplayed. We barely see the damage done to lesbian A and little is made of the fact that she should be spilling all manner of messiness about the truck. Her lover moderately spotted with stage blood, but doesn't look like somebody who has been embracing a recently split open corpse. There's no sense of transgression, no energy, no weirdness.

The film does this again and again. Promising scenes get stepped on or rushed through. When the flick slow enough to start getting deeply gonzo, the director gets gunshy and pulls away. How can a guy wrote made a movie called The Sex Spa II: Body Work be so demure?

While you're thinking of an answer, enter yourself in the EDCSKEC - our latest and greatest contest!

Movies: Memorial Day weekend with the ol' parental units.

A solid and squirm-inducing entry into the "girl in a dungeon" subgenre, the filmmakers behind the microbudget Brit torture porn Mum & Dad set out to create a distinctly British Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In an interview with writer/director Steven Sheil, he's explicit about this goal. Fascinated by what he calls the "fucked-up family" trope, he wanted to give the concept a distinctly Hillingdon accent. The result is a sort of bracingly tasteless, nihilistically absurd, inky-black comedy that, while confidently executed and fully committed to its grim project, is so foul that even those horror fans with extensive exploitation and torture porn experience will find themselves wondering just why they are suffering through this.

More a horrifically surreal study of a handful of satiric character types than a "story," the plot of M&D is easy summarized. Lena is a Polish immigrant working on the night shift cleaning crew at the offices of London's Heathrow airport. One night, she meets the loquacious Birdie and her sullen, silent adoptive brother Elbie. Lena opens up to her new friend despite reservations over Birdie's very fluid sense of personal property rights and hints that Birdie's personality goes from friend to bitch with great speed and little warning. When Lena, due to some clever stage management by Birdie, misses the night shift shuttle, Birdie offers her a ride. If Lena comes home with them, Birdie's dad would be happy to drive her to her apartment. The house, she's reassured, is just a short walk away and Birdie's dad will be happy to do it.

Of course, it is all a trap and, instead of going back to her apartment, Lena ends up trapped in a nightmare house full of vicious sadists.

Before we get to the vicious sadism, I should mention that Sheil actually handles the mandatory mise en place grunt work with atypical style. Many horror films rush to get their victims lined-up or traffic in this weird sort of characterization seemingly meant to make us hate their main characters, presumably so their violent demises will be that much welcome when they do inevitably come. In contrast, the beginning of the M&D quietly and sympathetically shows tired and lonely people bonding over a fairly thankless job. Sheil's sense of narrative efficiency means we don't spend more 10 or 15 minutes on this intro, but it was well done. You can imagine that, in some other film in some parallel universe, Lena takes the cab home and lives out the rest of her life in a nice little indie drama about immigrants and working-class London social norms.

In our world and in this film, however, she's clubbed, drugged, chained to a bed in the basement, and wildly abused for the next 70 minutes or so. Here the film's plot and the filmmaker's interest diverge. The ostensible story is Lena's struggle for freedom. But what the filmmaker really wants to do is hangout with the family, using them as a sort of wildly grotesque parody of British working class family life. The result is a sort of looping narrative of chores and outrages that resembles a sort of bizarro world family sit-com. I remember when Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers came out, a film critic for the Washington Post praised Stone's creepy use of the sit-com format – complete with canned laughs – to present Mallory's backstory. Full of none too subtle references to alcoholism, incestuous sexual abuse, and regular child beatings, and anchored around a chillingly slimy performance by Rodney Dangerdfield, the scene was a standout in a film packed with over-the-top scenes. Still, the reviewer mused, the curious thing about that scene was why Fox didn't already have a show like it one the air. Steven Sheil has, essentially, made the pilot for that hypothetical television series. (The sense that you're watching some television show go off the rails must be even stronger for Brit viewers who will recognize Lena – played by Olga Fedori, soon to be in the Wolf Man remake – as a reoccurring character on EastEnders.)

The clan, in this case, consists of the titular Mum and Dad, the two siblings viewers met in the airport, and – after a long bit of suspense as to what exactly lives in the attic – the nearly vegetative Angela (the Brit analog, I guess, to the mummified attic-dwelling grandparents of the Hewitt clan). The interplay between all these characters is the real meat of the flick. Dad is a portly, brutish figure – a sort of ape-ish man boy constantly demanding a dignity that is underserved. Cruelly disciplinarian, his own lusts and drives are given free reign. Think of a fusion between Leatherface, Benny Hill, and Archie Bunker and you've got vague approximation of Dad's character. Obsessed with porn and such a grotesque sexual predator that he literally fucks the organs of one of his discontinued adopted daughters (the close-up image of the abused organ leaking his seminal fluid probably ranks as the top "thing CRwM didn't need to see" in all cinema), he is simultaneously so desperate for affection that he looks on the verge of tears when he asks Lena if she wouldn't mind giving him a foot massage. In all of his inarticulate, collapsed, furious and stupid monstrosity, Dad, played by Brit-tube vet and Sid and Nancy alum Perry Benson, is one of the most compelling villains in contemporary cinema. Assuming you can stomach watching him.

Curiously, Mum and Dad aren't a team. Though they share co-leadership duties, Mum is the more emotionally manipulative of the two. She is constantly framing her own perversions – she, like Dad, is a sexual predator (though, unlike Dad's polymorpheous sexuality, she seems more strictly lesbian) and she enjoys carving elaborate patchworks of scars into her children – as the kinder and gentler alternative the abuse Dad would bring if she were not there to "protect" her children. In a way, Mum is really the more sinister of the two in that she's just a hateful and vile as Dad, but she wants you to be grateful for what she's inflicting on you.

After spawning the barely alive Angela, Mum and Dad increase the size of the clan by "adopting" sons and daughters. Birdie, the chatterbox "daughter," best reveals the bizarre dynamic that holds "kids" to the family. Forever fearful that Mum and Dad will, one day, stops screwing them and start dismantling them, the children of the clan must play a constant game of one-up, appealing to the "love" of their parent/tyrants while making sure that their other siblings are always on the outs with Mum and Dad. Think of a game of Big Brother where those booted from the house are, instead, horribly violated pre- and post-death. Those siblings who don't make the grade either end up as sexual aids or dinner, seeing as Mum and Dad are definitely not signatories of the Asner-Struthers Pact of 1975. This puts all the siblings in cruelly untenable position. They must constantly bring in fresh meat for Mum and Dad, but any one of these new playthings could potentially figure out the rules of the game and flip the script on you, meaning that you and not the new bit of flesh is headed to the basement mattress of the dinner table. To further complicate matters, Mum and Dad's fantasy of domestic bliss requires that all this bizarre gaming of the sibling system be somewhat covert. The conflict between the expert, but perhaps too settled and complacent gameswoman Birdie and the desperate-too-survive-and-escape Lena makes for most of the drama in the plot.

Elbie's, sadly, is a bit of a dud in the equation. Intended to be a mystery, he's not given enough serious material to give him the illusion of depth. There are hints of what the character could have become, and those moments are ably handled. Seemingly sympathetic, the silent and stoic Elbie (played by a game Toby Alexander who makes the most of what little he's got to work with) reveals himself to be capable of profound cruelty. In one scene, Lena has provoked the wrath of Dad. He ends up zipping her into a piece of luggage (the whole family works at Heathrow – Dad's a luggage handler) and he wails on the canvas bag with a large mallet. He then hands the hammer to Elbie who, at first, gives the bag a few half-hearted whacks. But, as Dad watches on, the blows become harder and more frequent. Eventually, Elbie is really having at the bag, with Lena inside. He doesn't stop until Dad pulls him off and pets him affectionately. The expression on Elbie's face is at once exhausted, repulsed, fearful, and exhilarated. Is Elbie just letting out the pent up feelings that his captivity must fill him with? Does he, like Birdie, think a new sibling is a threat that must be snuffed? Is he, like Dad, just desperate for any sort of approval that he'll get it however he can? Scenes like this threaten to give his character real depth, but they are too few and far between to really build into anything.

Visually, Shiel's flick is efficient and effective. He places a premium on clear storytelling, with clear establishing shots and carefully handled traditional editing. He likes a palate of washed out lights and dark grime that places his film closer to the lavish decay of Hostel than the color-washed dark pop look of Saw or the artsy crisp look of Martyrs. That said, Shiel makes a few first-feature mistakes. Given the emphasis Shiel places on clarity of narrative, he often loses viewers in regards to the layout of the clan's house. Compare this to the film's most obvious influence. After a single viewing of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, most viewers could draw a diagram of the Hewitt House. Here things aren't so clear. In fact, after mentioning the basement several times, I'm now thinking that Lena's room and Dad's torture chamber are on the second floor of the house. Maybe.

Also, given his preference for strictly narrative storytelling, Shiel makes a few diversions into idiosyncratic narrative techniques that really stick out. Most jarring is the use of shots of planes arriving and leaving the nearby Heathrow airport. Meant to provide a sort of visual ellipses, the are unfortunately more evocative than Shiel intends. I assumed they linked to Lena's immigrant past and, perhaps, pointed to a reading of the film that posited it as some sort of absurdist nightmare about the sacrifices one makes to assimilate into a new culture. That is, I think, more than the film intends. The planes are, I've concluded, intended as mini-breathers that have been included to give an external structure to what would otherwise be too numbing and repetitive. The irony is that many viewers find the planes themselves maddeningly repetitive.

Mean-spirited, brutal, tasteless, and juvenile – it is hard to recommend Mum & Dad. Well-built, honestly consistent in its aims and effects, and containing a couple of remarkably solid performances, M&D is also the most unpleasant flick in the already universally unpalatable torture porn subgenre. It lacks neither the pop sensibility of the Saw franchise, the rigorous aesthetic polish of Hostel, or the gloss of high-minded pseudo-intellectuality of that redeemed Martyrs for many. But, in its hints of an almost Swiftian misanthropy, it suggests that torture porn may have finally found its artistic purpose: as the satiric equivalent of a Tactical Long Range Nuclear Sanitizer. That makes for an interesting theoretical development, but not a pleasant viewing experience. Watch at your own discretion.

Link Proliferation: !

Sharks!

One of the curious things about Jaws is that for all the technical difficulties that plagued the original high-budget Hollywood blockbuster, the film's inspired slews of brilliant backyard D.I.Y. lo-fi remakes and tributes.

Here's a new one: The Bronx's video for the "Knifeman," which features the band, sub-aquatic rock action, and a vicious toy shark.



Cannibals! (And Philosophers!)

The first chapter of An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is available as a free download from Princeton Press. But, be warned, you've got to wade through this sort of jargon.

This history of cannibalism can be reconstructed as three successive stages, part historical and part conceptual. In the first, the cannibal is viewed as a creature from the perspective of natural law. In the second, the cannibal becomes the diabolical retort in which the flux of particles confounds the calculations of theologians and metaphysicians. The third stage is that at which we seem to have arrived today, when the cannibal is a creature of circumstances and education. Natural law, materialism, and anthropological relativism are the three major contexts that impose a division in the history of the cannibal’s passage through thought and which are, in their turn, clarified by his presence.

Nevertheless, the present work is not one that is primarily historical. First of all because it is in no way a history of cannibalistic practices. Of course, the instances of verifiable anthropology have sometimes left their traces in the ideal productions of the philosophers. However, whether cannibals existed or not is a fact of marginal importance. My cannibal is in the first place a scholarly creature, a personage who animates theoretical texts, and only to a lesser extent, if at all, is he a subject for the anthropology of the aberrant.

Robots!

A Swedish newspaper is reporting that "a Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm."

The article summarizes the whole attack:

Public prosecutor Leif Johansson mulled pressing charges against the firm but eventually opted to settle for a fine.

"I've never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this," he told news agency TT.

The incident took place in June 2007 at a factory in Bålsta, north of Stockholm, when the industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," said Leif Johansson.

The matter was subject to an investigation by both the Swedish Work Environment Authority (Arbetsmiljöverket) and the police.

Bones!

Christine Quigley, mistress of the macabre, has an excellent post featuring shots of this unbelievable, skeleton-filled tomb in Peru.

Notice that each skeleton is topped with two skulls.

Movies: Curious George.

It's a curious fact of the pan-medium state of contemporary horror that anthologies are a significant and vibrant segment of the genre in comics and literature, but they've struggled to find legs on television. This despite the fact that, historically, the anthology format has been crucial to the development of the genre in all three mediums. Horror lit has always done much of its best work in the short story format and the anthology has long represented the vanguard of the genre in that medium. Anthologies are arguably still the dominant format for comic horror, as they have been since the 1930s. And dozens of television anthology series, from Twilight Zone to Tales from the Crypt, stand out as genre landmarks. But, today, only comic and literary anthologies seem to still have any life in them.

(Anthology films, by contrast, seem to have always been a fairly marginal phenom within the medium. In the studio system days, they usually functioned as cash cows that could be turned around fast using existing talent stables. In the modern era, they tend to be thinly disguised vanity projects or a work around for cash-strapped filmmakers.)

This break with historical continuity makes the tepid reception and un-mourned demise of series like Showtime's cable-grade Masters of Horror, and its even more short-lived network analog Fear Itself, an interesting puzzle for genre watchers. Perhaps genre television has simply taken a temporary shift towards the soap operatic. It could be that done-in-one stories feel too slight and disposable to fans hungry for Lost-style multi-seasonal epics. There's always, of course, the argument that these series simply sucked and their death is proof that there is some crap not even horror fans will eat. There was, for example, an unfortunate turn towards the preachy after the heavy-handed Bush-bashing zombie episode Homecoming. This was followed by the abortion themed Pro-Life, the assisted-suicide-centric The Right to Die, the anti-fur tinged Pelts, and the gender war informed Screwfly Solution. The never produced third season would have presumably included horror films based around recycling, Congressional earmarks, and the federal government's purchasing of toxic assets. Still, the faults of individual episodes aside, the series boasted quite a bit of talent. The directors list was a virtual who's who of old school American horror, spiced with a few Italian and Japanese imports to keep everything well-rounded. As for source material, the episodes adapted classic comic pieces from well-regarded series as well as short stories from contemporary masters. It's hard to believe that, with that much good stuff on tap, MoH had nothing tasty to serve up to horror fans.

Personally, I can't help but wonder if one of the series's greatest strengths – the near complete freedom producer Mick Garris reportedly allowed the various directors – contributed to the problem. On one hand, it meant that each show was distinct and fresh. On the other hand, it produced wide variations in tone and approach. If this lack of series-wide coherence was a spur to greater creativity, it also meant that viewers never really knew what they were getting from episode-to-episode, leaving the larger series with no clear identity.

An example of just how far off the reservation an episode could stray, The Washintonians, a second season entry by The Ruling Class and The Changeling director Peter Medak (perhaps the only director on the MoH roster with a flick currently available in the Criterion Collection), stands out as one of the weirdest episodes of the lot. Basically an elaborate goof, The Washingtonians is a silly, gory mash-up of National Treasure and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It's not without its charms, but it is difficult to imagine an audience that would, at any given time, by as happy to see this episode as they would have been to see Miike grim and relentless Imprint.

The story opens with the a family who, while organizing their mother's estate, discovers a letter that appears to be from the first President of the United States, threatening to devour his enemies' children. This discovery blows the lid off a murderous conspiracy to hide the fact that George Washington – of powdered wig and Father of Our Country fame – was actually a murderous cannibal with a particular liking for virgin girl-child flesh (that, we're told, is the real subtext of the "chopping down a cherry tree" story American children know so well). Apparently, Washington first tasted human flesh in the harsh winter of '77 in Valley Forge. At the lowest point of the revolution, the army was forced to eat the dead to survive. Washington, however, found he rather enjoyed people meat and he took to it with a passion.

Wait, it gets better.

The clan charged with protecting Washington's rep is a cult of powdered wig-sporting cannibals known as the Washingtonians. They jealously guard all evidence of George's culinary predilections and happily feast on those who threaten his legend. They also maintain a lovely collection of forks made from the femur bones of every member of the Continental Congress (though the collection shown seems far short of the 343 forks that should be there). Finally, like their hero, all the Washingtonians have replaced their teeth with a truly rank set of ivory, bone, and wood choppers – the better to eat you with, my dear.

These cultists terrorize the family for the letter, eventually kidnapping them for the inevitable TCM-style grand feast – here done in period costume, giving the gruesome proceedings a discordant touch of class.

If all this flies well beyond you threshold of disbelief, rest assured that it did the same for the filmmaker. The episode starts with anti-Bush jab that makes a weak bid to political relevance, but it can deliver on it with a straight face and one almost wonders if the whole thing wasn't a satire aimed at the half-assed political aims of other MoH directors. Rather than a political horror flick, Medak fashioned something like a conspiracy slapstick. If there's a political undertone to the episode, it's in the way the film joyously lampoons the modern era of paranoid dietrology.

The episode is far from perfect, of course. In an effort to maintain a silly and over the top tone, the show sometimes s more strained than genuinely funny. The acting, while perfectly functional, is broad and unremarkable. There's a child actor involved, and that's so rarely a good thing. One notable exception to this is the work of the excellent Saul Rubinek. His intense Professor Harkinson, a crusading historian who wants to use the family's discovery to destroy the Washingtonians, appears way to late in the flick for my taste. Finally, while there are some gross-out moments and hints of suspense, the episode isn't particularly scary. It is hard to process the threat level represented by a gang of dudes who look like the Upper Crust.

That said, there's still something kinda appealing about The Washingtonians. Perhaps it's just that it is such a stupid idea done so happily. I enjoyed it.

And now, via wiec? (the coolest NYC bank robber since Willie Sutton), George Washington as you've never seen him before: in super low-quality animation!