Random Picture #2: The kiss.

Movies: Last night a psychopathic clan of murderous wacked-out ex-whale hunters saved my life.

The logline sounds like a goof: It's Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a whale watching ship. And, seriously, Harpoon: the Whale Watching Massacre, from the titular allusion [1] to plot point parallels, puts in a few hours of overtime justifying that pitch. The central baddies are refugees from a shuttered industry that's supported them for generations, only it's whaling instead of meat processing. [2] The imdb flick summary uses the term "fishbillies." But whether it's a goof or not is unclear. And even if you consider it a goof, just who is supposed to be the butt of this joke is a mystery.

And, ultimately, who cares? A sporadically competent flick with a vaguely quirky premise, H:tWWM has all the depth and power of a teenage suburban boy's act of minor vandalism. Fueled by an unearned sense of rage, bounded by an poorly grokked half-hearted anarchism, and suffused by a love of vulgar displays of power and a general disdain for suffering as the mark of the weak, the flick is an energetic, but undirected, middle finger at a wide variety of targets. So wide a range, in fact, that the film's weird attempts at a message get as muddled as its often incomprehensible action scenes. If this is a joke, the comedians forgot to include a punchline. [3]

Our story opens when a ethnic grab bag of tourists hops onboard a whale watching boat to catch a glimpse of the sea's mightiest beasts. Ah, and what an amazing group of soon-to-be-victims this is. You couldn't find a bigger collection of assholes outside a Wakefield Poole flick. Though it's perhaps a talent under-appreciated beyond the confines of the slasher fancy, there's a fine art to the creation of a top notch victim pool. The filmmakers need to make the victims inoffensive enough that viewers can stomach being around them for the 30 or 45 minutes they'll be forced to keep company, but they need to make them vile enough that viewers are happy to see them dispatched. It's easy to screw up, so slasher fans enter into a secret compact with horror filmmakers to count as capital crimes a wide host of behaviors that, outside of the realm of horror flicks, wouldn't raise an eyebrow. [4] H:tWWM's director, Júlíus Kemp, either out of bold disregard or energetic incompetence, totally blows this balancing act. He creates a group so richly unpleasant, it's almost luxurious, a extravagant display of human crappiness that makes one wonder if Kemp isn't a genuine misanthrope simply playing at the flaccid and cynical misanthropy-theater of the slasher genre. From the friend who hangs up on a panicked phone call by her crying twice-sexually assaulted and now held capitve by crazies friend with a blithe "I have it when you're freaking on E" to the woman who, despite the fact that they're fighting for their lives against a murderous clan of "fishbillies," finds time to react with disgust to another character's homosexuality, we've got a collection of superlosers. In fact, Kemp seems almost incapable of creating a character who isn't repulsive. The two "heroes" of flick, the only non-grotesques, are so flat and uninteresting as to be bores. One is a woman who, because Kemp drags her through the wringer early in the flick, is a dazed catatonic character through much of the rest of it. The other is black and gay; but not in any significant way, just black and gay in that "the easiest way to get a liberal to trust you" black and gay way.

If Kemp meant for these characters to be figures of satiric comedy, he missed the mark. He is a decidedly unfunny director, even when he's trying to sell the ha-has. Aside from the laughter inducing plea of a Greenpeace member before he gets an axe to the neck - "Don't do this! I'm a friend of the Earth!" - Kemp's got no touch for comedy. Still, his decision to go full a-hole on his characterization does pay off in one huge way. In the character Endo (played by mono-monikered actress Nae, née Nae Tazawa), Kemp's got perhaps the most delightful "final girl" ever created for horror cinema.

Endo is introduced as the mousy, continually abused personal assistant of the cowardly and misogynistic Nobuyoshi, a repugnant Japanese businessman who is traveling with his timid, emotionally-inert wife Yuko. For the first quarter of the flick, Endo staggers around the set, sullenly carrying out Nobuyoshi's orders and occasionally retiringly to a quiet section of the whale ship to pursue her favorite pastime: chewing off scabs and worrying her wounds with her teeth. [5] Eventually, the clan of murderously irate ex-whalers shows up and begin slaughtering everybody. Like all the other characters, Endo begins fighting for her life. The difference is that Endo brings it. If there's questions about it being here, they are settled. It was brought. The bringer of it was Endo.

Let's take a moment to talk about the final girl. The final girl is the Lady Gaga of horror characters: She gets a disproportionate amount of credit for what is, essentially, a relatively small tweak in presentation, while the ostensible core competency (music for Gaga, being a female victim for horror characters) is really pitched to the comfort level of the audience, by either riffing off a familiar, proven, and predictable pool of inspirations meant to flatter the unjust sense of erudition of the consumer/fan or by relying on common genre clichés. She's easy to like, cause she's built to be liked. She's basically every other dead chick's character: her time to be chased comes up in the rotation and she flees screaming. Only we haven't spent all film inventing reasons - reasons that we don't even believe - that she should die and, though it's been a losing strategy for every other woman in the film, running around screaming works for the final girl. Very rarely, a final girl will show some genuine resourcefulness and vigor. Nancy in the first Nightmare flick is notably feisty, with her pre-game research and booby-trap creation effort. Mostly though, the survivability of the final girl is simply a product of their commitment to cardio exercise and the fact that fans demand somebody whose not the killer be standing in the last reel. Honestly, her importance to modern fans rest mostly on an ill-understood and very dubious theory that states that the existence of the final girl makes it morally okay to watch films that are naked exploitations of the perverse desire many fans apparently have to watch young flesh be ripped apart. She's our out. We're not morbid little trolls because, you know, though we've totally been cheering on the deaths of however many kids, we're Kool and the Gang because, look, we totally were all on the side of the final girl.

But back to Endo . . .

Endo is a final girl we can believe in. The central crisis of the film is a transformative moment for her. When Endo decides she's the final girl, nobody - killers or other members of the victim pool - are safe from her. While the other's are scrambling around the ship, engaging in sporadic and often one-sided encounters with the baddies, Endo sees the this horrific rupture as the end of her old life. The moment a freakin' whaling harpoon plunges through the corpulent body of her boss, Endo realizes that she's not only fighting for her life, but she's fighting for a meaningful life. She won't go back to being the timid, scab-eater we've known for the first quarter of the film. She's reborn. The brilliance of this is that, un-Scrooge-like, this personal revelation turns Endo into a complete bitch. She's willing to gain any advantage over any other character in the flick, from demanding money for taking one of the characters away with her in a dock boat to convincing a mentally shattered and traumatized woman that it's logical to allow Endo to fit her up like a suicide bomber. (In a deliciously nasty touch, Endo decides not to leave the decision to kill herself up to the kamikaze woman/antipersonnel device, so she pushes her onto an enemy harpoon, dooming her and another of the members of the victim pool, who might have escaped without Endo's intervention.) Once Endo really finds her stride, she becomes the most dangerous person in the film. It's a refreshing take on a weak trope that had, long ago, become a goofy crutch for horror filmmakers.

Is Endo enough to make this film worth watching? Look, I don't give number ratings or pretend this is a consumer advocacy sort of thing because I can't imagine you're smart enough to read and yet, somehow, haven't figured out the sort of film you'll dig. If you're into horror, you've already developed a sense of the sort of flicks you'll risk wasted time on and those films you won't. In a genre so filled with stinkers, you've got to evolve such a sense. Slasher flick on whale boat: if that's your thing, go to town.

[1] The allusion is made all the more clearly in the films alternate title: The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre. Apparently, the more locale-specific title graced the flick on its debut in Iceland, but public distaste over the film's more squishy parts led the filmmakers to rebrand the flick with a more generic title.

[2] Curiously, both flicks seem to suggest that generational involvement with a single industry - something that used to be a symbol of community coherence, but is now apparently a sign of stagnation - is akin (no pun intended) to voluntarily limiting the gene pool: working at the same craft your father did means, apparently, that you'd also breed with close relatives.

[3] And this is coming from a big fan of suburban boys' acts of vandalism.

[4] This compact between viewer and filmmaker is the source of the oft repeated, but not wholly accurate characterization of of the killing-for-kissing morality of slashers as "conservative." It's probably a better characterization to say that slashers exhibit a self-contained ironic hyper-punative morality that replaces fate with narrative utility. Characters engage in some putatively "bad" behavior, though this behavior is, honestly, nothing the filmmakers or the viewers care about, in a moral sense. The reason the nubile teen coed shimmies out of her clothing as soon as possible and then gets an axe to the face isn't because the filmmakers or audience members have any investment in the notion that sexual activity should be punished by death. (Indeed, if either party believed this, the film's would be put in the awkward position of condemning both parties - audience and filmmakers - to death for involving them in softcore skin displays. This is why there's not a huge tradition of teensploiter slashers in, say, Taliban controlled cultures.) Rather, the camp tramp gets the business end of a chopper because she was hired to expose her tits and, that being done, there's nothing else to do with her. That there appears to be a reason - the odd moral calculus of the genre - simply serves to obscure the clumsy mechanical nature of the subgenre formula. Maintaining the fiction that there's some non-financial logic to it requires the viewer and filmmakers constantly push the bar to "sin" lower and lower, until we get moral statements like "you're fat, so you deserve death" and "you just know a midget's got it coming to them." Nobody actually holds these absurd positions. They aren't really even positions. We pick them up just for the flick and then leave them on the floor of the theater, with the rest of the rubbish.

[5] It's part of Kemp's, um, charms as a director that he loves the gross shit that bodies do. And, by this, I don't just mean the horrific gore we can emit when somebody unzips some cavity. Kemp seems to take a positive pleasure in showing people vomiting, picking at scabs, sweating, and so on. There's no toilet scene, but I imagine an extensive and utterly repulsively messy scene exists in some director's cut version.

The Great Slasher Research Project of '10: ANTSS needs your help.

In The Onion A.V. Club's "Gateway to Geekery" series, there's an entry on gateways into the slasher horror subgenre. I don't bring up this article to defend its choice of the film to start with - writer Zack Handlen chooses the ironic, post-golden age Scream as the threshold flick - but to point out his definition of what a slasher film is. From the article:

Plus, just what the hell is a slasher? Even seasoned horror junkies have a hard time agreeing on a definition. Much as “torture porn” resists easy classification (although it seems to be, for whoever’s using the term, “violent movies I don’t like”), a slasher film can only be defined by general terms and personal taste. For the purposes of this article, supernatural killers are out, which means no Nightmare On Elm Street. (Also no Leprechaun, Child’s Play, or Friday The 13th movies from part 6 on.) There’s a killer, or a pair of killers, and they’re bumping off people, until a lone survivor (a.k.a., the Final Girl, a virginal young woman who’s probably a bit smarter than her friends) stumbles across the bodies the killer has carefully planted for her to find; a cat-and-mouse game ensues, the Final Girl turns the tables on the killer, and then there’s one final scare before the end credits.

Definitions are always a sticking point - I think most slasher fans count Freddy's films in their canon - but the problem with this particular formula is that not even Handlen follows it. For example, there's no "Final Girl" in Sleepaway Camp, a film he cites as an example of the genre. Nor is Sidney the lone survivor of the killers' murderous spree in Scream.

This isn't to pick on Handlen's definition, but to point to something that's been nagging me lately: I'm not certain that there is a "slasher" formula. From high-minded criticism (see Women and Chainsaw's, the book that spawned the "final girl" trope) to genre in-jokes (see Scream), there's an long-running assumption that there is a widely recognized, essential "formula" of genre conventions inherent to the slasher film. Some of the elements of this alleged formula can be found in Handlen's fomulation: the final girl, the lone killer, the last jump scare, etc. Others get suggested from time to time: nudity; a punitive attitude towards sin; the presence of a signature weapon; a predictable victim-order that requires minorities and sybarites go before the good, white kids; useless adults and authority figures; and so on.

The problem is, when I start talking cases, most of the films I'd consider slashers omit most of the elements people would put on their list. I'm coming to the conclusion that the slasher "formula" is mostly a critical crutch, a convenient catch-all that lumps together the horror films of a certain era, that has become a fan shibboleth.

But instead of just speculating, I want to put this idea to the test. And that's where you come in.

I need some research assistants for what I'm calling The Great Slasher Research Project of '10. This project will have two parts: First we cook up a working definition of a slasher flick, then we watch a bunch of movies to see if the definition holds. We're going to start that first step today.

Part 1: Create a Definition

When I wrote about the characteristics typical of torture porn flicks, I was fairly called to task for defining the genre in a tautological way: to prove torture porn flicks exhibited certain characteristics, I defined films with those characteristics as torture porn. While that certainly makes arguing one's case easier, it's acting in bad faith as a critic. To avoid this, we're going to crowd-source our definition of the slasher flick. Here's how it will work: from now until the 20th, leave a comment on this post that details elements you believe define the slasher subgenre. To keep things simple, use a standard, list like format. Here's a non-slasher example:

I think the elements common to all chocolate chip cookie are:
1. chocolate chips
2. cookie

That's all you've got to do. Don't worry about other people's responses - in fact, don't even look at the other responses before creating your own - just write out the elements that come to mind when you think "slasher." On the 20th, I'll compile the answers, find a subset of broadly agreed upon elements, eliminate outliers, and we'll have a definition reflects the consensus rather than an individual's point of view.

We'll take that definition and use it to complete step 2.

But that's later! Right now, I want to hear from you. Leave a comment. Tell friends to leave comments. The more data, the better. Comment like the wind, my friend!

Movies: Cut to the chase.

Laid to Rest, writer/director Robert Hall's '09, was a bit of a dud with slasher fans. Fans of slashers cited its believability shredding plot, the quality of the acting, the thinness of the characterizations, clumsy dialogue, and over-reliance on jump scares as reasons for their dislike. Though, honestly, those are hallmarks of the sub-genre and are as integral to classic slashers as edged weapons and torn teenage flesh. On almost every standard metric, Laid to Rest falls pretty much dead-center in slasher quality bell curve.

That said, there is something odd about the flick. In approaching the shop-worn clichés of the slasher flick - tropes that had exhausted their dramatic and horrific potential nearly two decades ago - Hall tries to keep things free by 1) going outside the big franchises for inspiration and 2) taking an absurdist, minimalist approach to the material.

The baddie of L2R is Chome Skull: a mask-wearing, knife-weilding slasher straight out of slasher central casting. For an insane homicidal loner, Chrome Skull's a fairly dapper gent: his matching death's head mask and baroque barbed knives jump out against his understated thin suit, with militaristic flourishes that are both handsome and functional (the smart epaulette on is right shoulder serves as housing for his camera), and plain black tee. Furthermore, the innovative use of medical adhesive to secure his strapless mask in place gives him a sleek profile that Jason and Michael Meyers must surely envy. Despite the nice character design, there's a tiring sameness about Chrome Skull. He looks like one those satirically derivative slashers that appear in Hack/Slash. At one point, threatened by one of his victims, Chrome Skull unsheathes his knives and sighs wearily, as if to say, "Back to the old stab-stab." The viewer can sympathize.

It isn't the update look of his killer that's Hall's smartest redeployment of vintage '80s horror detritus. Rather it's the heavy borrowings from Phantasm and The Hitcher, two second-tier flicks, that give this unnecessary trip down retro lane some spark. Though the look is Voorhees by way of The Sartorialist, the Tall Man and his funeral house trappings are equally evident. The overall plot, in which Chrome Skull doggedly pursues a single victim through the lonely back roads (here the Southeast rather than the Southwest) punishing anybody unlucky enough to cross paths with his victim, owes far more to relentless John Ryder than the teen slaughtering villains of the bigger slasher franchises. Hall also reconfigures Phantasm's unusual team dynamic, pitting his killer against a oddly assembled group of determined fighters rather than a relatively defenseless gang of kids. Sure, this doesn't elevate L2R beyond the level of reheated cultural leftovers, but at least we're not being asked to eat the same three meals we've been served over and over.

The other thing that helps L2R differentiate itself from the copies, remakes, reboots, relaunches, re-imaginings, reinvestments, rebrandings, and what have yous is Hall's distillation of the slasher formula to its minimal elements. Hall's flick is essentially an extended final girl chase with all the unnecessary slasher baggage trimmed away. Hall spends as little time on background and characterization as possible. The victims of slasher flicks were always plot points disguised as human beings. With their lack of depth and the irrelevance of their characterizations, they all might as well have been shipped straight to Haddonfield direct from some overseas victim factory. (It is a sign of how little characterization actually took place in any of these movies when the people will cite as an example of good characterization the fact that a specific character fights back against their killer.) Hall recognizes this and embraces it. His final girl, credited as "the girl," literally comes out of a box without a past. She starts the film by crawling out of a coffin with no memory of who she is or why she's in a coffin. The result is a light-weight, nimble flick that runs off grimly absurdist humor. (One of my favorite touches is fact that Chrome Skull, the only slasher to have customized license plates that advertise his identity, actually has a briefcase that matches his mask and weapons - told you he was dapper!)

So why didn't slasher fans go for this? I'm not sure. I suspect that Hall's attempts to streamline the sub-genre stinks of heresy. Slasher fans worship their genre and worship needs ritual. The slasher formula exerts such a powerful drive to orthodoxy because it is so near-perfectly ritualistic. The positives of Laid to Rest are not strong enough to counterbalance what you lose when you deny viewers the ritual pleasures of genre.

L2R is middling slasher. If you're moving-watching agenda has room for such thin pleasures, you could do worse.

Movies: Ain't no sin in Cincinnati.

I was going play this cool and keep my blog cred by not stickin' out my neck for a total ho-hum direct-to-video flick that, perhaps justly, was roundly trashed by the blog-o-sphere. But, honestly, what cultural capital am I worried about burning up?

It's bloggin', not real life.

So here goes.

Tasteless, clumsy, lopsided in pace and construction, needlessly excessive, and embarrassingly self-important, The Hills Run Red is best slasher film in two decades.

Here's the thing with slasher flicks. They all remind me of this old joke: A traveling salesman from Cincinnati made a trip to Iran. (NB: This joke's so old that "Iran" meant 1,001 Nights and not an America-hating theocratic dictatorship.) While there, he was picked up by a princess who felt this strange, pale American was an freakish lark.

When this worldly traveler returned to Jefferson Avenue, he described his adventures to a friend. He told his pal of the princess's exotic beauty; the opulent palace she took him to; the priceless vintage wines they drank; the perfumed baths they took, waited upon by flocks of pale, virginal beauties; the orchestras of blinded eunuchs who serenaded them; the jewels and silks she discarded; and, at last, every sensuous detail of of the princess's shimmering, transcendent nudity.

"And then what?" the salesman's friend gasps.

"Oh, well then its just the same as it is in Cincinnati," the salesman says.

Whatever the foreplay looks like - be it the color-by-numbers knuckle-dragging of the originals, the pomo gags of Scream, or the 3-D projection of the Valentine reimangling - there's a stunted simplicity to the concept of the slasher that's the ultimate pay-off: It's always the same as it is in Cincinnati.

The beauty of The Hills Run Red is that it is happy to be in Cincinnati. It doesn't have twenty years of criticism-proof nostalgia hanging around its neck like a millstone. The makers don't have to worry about hand-holding a generation of fan-entitled middle-aged amateur critics. The result is a film that's pleasingly nasty, joyfully slight, and possessed of a nimble disrespect for the genre that birthed it. In an era of bloated remakes that mistake market penetration for archetypal significance, The Hills Run Red comes the closest to providing the cheap, sullied, dirty, semi-trangressive pop thrill that slashers used to deliver before their audiences resembled Old Home Week crowds.

This isn't to say that THRR is dumb. It's smarter than your average slasher. But it never forgets that we didn't queue up a flick called "the hills run red" to get a lecture on the socio-political ramifications of post-Hostel retro-slasher semiotics. THRR giggles all the way through, but only because it is having a blast and wants you to join in. Unlike the slavishly dogged, emotionally dead recreations that gracelessly spill out on the big screens, it isn't obsessed with limning the rules and preaching to the cult. It's an Anita Loos to their Ayn Rand. (That metaphor pushes all bounds of sense, but it's the only way I could think of to work in Anita Loos, to whom I owe the Cincinnati joke.)

To the degree that slashers have plots, The Hills Run Red focuses on a small crew of would-be documentary filmmakers searching for the legendary complete cut of the titular film: an early Eighties slasher so foul and repulsive that it was pulled from theaters after a brief, scandalous run and never seen again. The leader of this doomed trio discovers that the film's reclusive director's daughter is a stripper at a remarkably well-appointed roadside adult entertainment establishment. (Not that I frequent such places, mind you; but the private rooms are large, genuinely private individual rooms with a whole couch for a single client - I'm in the middle of planning a bachelor party so I'm unusually sensitive to such logistical concerns at the moment.) After essentially kidnapping the girl and holding her through an enforced withdraw of her dope addiction, the documentary director enlists her in the search for the missing film. She tells the documentarian that the director of the missing film - which featured a hulking, malformed, porcelain-mask-wearing mass murderer Babyface - died a decade earlier. However, the director's isolated cabin in the woods, the set of the original film, still stands and is full of The Hills Run Red memorabilia. Perhaps the flick is there.

The documentarians go to the house and, after a few tense scenes, they find the missing film. The cabin is full of old editing and projection equipment, so they watch the film there. It turns out that the film is much more than a cheap slasher flick. It's a undiscovered gem of outsider art. The technique and artistry on display reveals the mind of brilliant, raw talent. The documentarians realize that they've rediscovered a hidden genius of American cinema and, along the way, the shattered daughter of the infamous director and the wounded director of the documentary learn to love again.

Not really though. The film within a film was basically snuff. The daughter's in on it. Pretty much everybody dies. Or gets raped and dies. Which is still dead, of course, but worse.

What's interesting about The Hills Run Red, in the admittedly limited way that slashers can be interesting, is that it, along with Ti West's Trigger Man, it represents the possibility of truly new slasher. Rob Zombie's Halloween films flirted with updating the genre, but ultimately they got tangled up in the imperatives of the marketplace (need to push the franchise's saleable IP markers) and the vampiric life-draining demands of fan-entitlement. What Trigger Man and THRR benefit from is the lack of franchise history. It frees them to create a slasher particular to their time and place. For example, The Hills Run Red doesn't just occasionally borrow the visual language of torture porn, the tension between the formalized, fossilized formulas of the slasher and the more anarchic, unpalatable norms of its replacement subgenre appear as a plot point.

The film also gets a boost from the acting which, about two-thirds of the way into the film tips into a near-camp range that suddenly gives nearly all the actors a sure footing. After struggling for almost 45 minutes to give naturalistic performances, director Dave Parker let's his cast go ape and it gives every performer the freedom they need to hit bizarre operatic heights. There's something pleasingly John Waterish about this film's approach to characterization. Sophie Monk, who has a truly delightful evil-grin face, especially benefits from the freedom to go crazy. Danko Jordanov, stuntman turned slasher actor, should get a few props to for his turn as Babyface. The brilliance of his role is in it journeyman quality. He's weirdly efficient and coolly logical: In one nice touch, he's dispatched the boyfriend of the lone girl in the crew, so he fishes out his cell and starts calling numbers until his next victim's cell starts to ring, allowing him to locate her. The film within a film set-up gives him a distinct focus as a killer who needs to hit his marks and deliver what he's there for. The "creative kills" so beloved of genre fans are the work of others: the directors. I can't think of another film in which the role of the slasher was actually constructed to fit the world of a film as the stuntman who inevitably plays the baddie experiences it and the result appears in the finished product. Jordanov also, for a character who has a single line in the whole film, delivers his dialogue with surprising and well-chosen understatement.

I could ramble on, but you get the idea.

There are a million slasher lovin' dudes out there that will be happy to tell you that The Hills Run Red isn't a patch on whatever slasher they cuddle close at night. And their right. Because it isn't about the cinema necrophilia of '80s slasher love. The flicker ain't perfect, but at its heart is the desire to push things forward.

And I'm all for that.

Let's get the heck outta Cincinnati for once.

Mad science: The scientific implications of drooling slasher fans.

An article in Psychology Today discusses an a psych research experiment that used Jason Voorhees's mom as it's stimuli:

Sensation seekers are also particularly drawn to pornographic and horror films. In one study, subjects viewed a 20-minute segment of Friday the 13th. Sensation-seeking people didn't just enjoy the movie more; they actually salivated more, indicating higher levels of alertness and cognitive processing.

Measuring drool might sound like a surreal way to measure attention, but the link has long been exploited by experimental psychologists. The famous drooling dogs in Pavlov's experiments were not drooling out of hunger, but rather from increased levels of attention. On hearing the bell, they began actively searching for other signs that food would be coming. In theory, they could have been trained to associate the bell with walks or petting and they still would have shown spikes in salivation.

The context for the experiment is the idea that certain cultural products appeal to certain personality types. The hypothesis is that fans of horror and porn are "extroverts—lively, active, social people who crave sensory excitement in the art they seek out. You don't have to be a sensation seeker to be an extrovert, but it helps. 'They're bored without high levels of stimulation,' explains Gosling. 'They love the bright lights and hustle and bustle, and they like to take risks and seek thrills.'"

Honestly, I'm not sure I dig this particular hypothesis. I've got two separate, but related, objections. First, the thrill-hunter model seems to best explain the impact of watching a slasher movie in a decontextualized, one-off way. Slasher fans, I find, watch tons of the stuff and, in my experience, value it as much for its formulaic monotony as for the pleasurable shock of emotion. They enjoy the thrill, but aren't big on risk. I mean, c'mon: Can we all agree that the moment it becomes a wallpaper theme, something has officially become not dangerous?

Slasher fans are hardly alone in this. Most horror fans, when it comes to the form and content of their favorite genre, approach works with a profound conservatism. Despite rhetoric about the desperate need for originality and innovation, fans support the general trend of remakes and rip-offs by voting with their dollars. When asked to produce "best of" lists, remakes and franchise flicks regularly appear in higher spots. There are thrill-junkies, of course, and people who want novelty for its own sake, but the characterization of horror fans as craving innovation ignores the same-but-different quality of most horror films.

Which brings us to the dubious link between horror and porn. Though I've always been fond of the "body genres" theory that proposes a link between horror and porn as the two genres that aim for the gut and not the mind, we have to admit that it’s a pretty shaky premise. Sure the shriek of the horror fan and the orgasm of the porn watcher are obvious signs of the physical impact of the films they're watching; but what about the sobs of the person watching a tear-jerker (even the description implies the almost involuntary physical response these films are meant to evoke) or the gut-level thrill one gets from watching an action movie? It also assume there's no intellectual angle to horror films, which is a more haughty way of restating the intellectually-lazy canard that some films, especially those featuring sensational levels of violence, aren't really about anything other than violence. For example, I find most slasher flicks dumb as can be. However, it would be bullshit for me to pretend that many very intelligent folks have teased out all manner of themes and insights from the very same films. More over, it ignores the difference in reception. Horror fans, as mentioned above, create best of lists, debate narrative details, argue the relative values of works, and otherwise engage their favorite works in way that are still relatively rare in world of porn consumption. Whatever the similarities between the genres, there are crucial differences that, in my amateur opinion, make their easy conflation dubious.

Movies: Who can possibly save us?

Last night, I caught the F13 remilkshake at the Court Street Theater in downtown Brooklyn.

Regular readers should recognize the name, but ANTSS newcomers might not understand the locale's significance. Court Street is home to Brooklyn's, if not the world's, finest cinema-going audience: a collective we at ANTSS lovingly call "the Courtesans."

The Courtesans are to film what the groundlings were to Elizabethan theater, only with more loud cell phone use and less livestock. (In fact, the receiving and placing of high volume calls is so common that the funniest moment of any film at Court Street is the most certainly ironic "Please silence your cell phones" slide that appears before the trailers roll.)

Because this was an 8:25 showing of a movie filled with brutal acts of violence and extended sequences of partial female nudity, about a third of the movie's audience consisted of tots aged 4 to 12. It isn't that Courtesans are, perhaps, liberal to a fault when it comes to their whelps' media intake. They are just frugal: A movie ticket costs considerably less than a night of babysitting. The potential cost of years of therapy for the children is cleverly avoided by revealing to the child the fictional nature of the filmic construct. That is to say, you simply tell the traumatized tike that they are dumb for being scared and laugh at their delightful displays of extreme distress. This is what educational theorists refer to as a teachable moment.

I bring this up because it was just such a mind-raped little nipper that provided the new Friday the 13th repackaging with its finest moment.

About three-quarters of the way into the flick, Jason gets around to dispatching the lone African American member of the victim set, a dude named Lawrence. Now Larry seems like a clever enough cat. Sure, like all African Americans in horror flicks, he feels the need to constantly remind his friends that he is, in fact, African American. Sample dialog from an as-yet untitled slasher project featuring an African American character:

"Anybody want a beer."
"Yeah, the black guy will have a beer."
"Do you have a preference? PBR or Sam?"
"Would you have asked that of a white guy?"
"Um, probably."
"What, you'd deny me the essential disconnect of my experience as a African American in a white man's world?"
"Look, I just wanted to give you a choice."
"You can't give me anything. Freedom can only be demanded and taken. A black man learns that early in life."

If you're writing a slasher novel or film script, feel free to dumb that down a bit and plug it right into your work. Free of charge.

That quirk aside, Larry's displayed average intelligence throughout the film, which makes it odd that he ultimately decides to not listen the two characters that have their crap together and venture out to the tool shed to find another member of this doomed troupe, a character we've already seen Jason send to the Great Beer Pong Game in the Sky. To assure the remaining Jason fodder that he will emerge from this quixotic mission unscathed, he gestures to a wok and fire poker he is using as his buckler and bodkin and says, "Don't worry, he won't touch me."

With friends and audience put at ease, Larry marches off.

After some musical ominousness – the score consists mostly of what sounds to be an instrumental version of Nine Inch Nails "Something I Can Never Have" played at sub-Codeine speeds – Larry and Jason find one another and Jason tries to make with the killy kill, ma ma ma. But, Aw NO! Larry ain't havin' it! After a short scuffle, Larry gives Jason a smashing elbow to the face mask.

At this point . . .

Horror filmmakers, nota bene.

The audience went abso-freakin'-lutely bonkers. The Courtesans were – every man, woman, and child – in agreement that Lawrence's elbow smash was the single finest moment ever committed to cinema. The crowd, firmly in Jason's camp when he was trimming the unsightly edges off the Caucasian and Asian American community, suddenly turned on their taciturn hero. Larry was the man.

Jason, temporarily dazed (not so much out of pain, but simply due to the sheer audacity of Larry's behavior), let's Larry slip out of the shed. Once clear, Larry makes with all do haste to the MVHA. Sensing a historic shift in the paradigm of predator and prey, the audience cheered Larry on. People stood up to holler their support. I think I actually saw two young men, overcome with the immediacy of the moment, spring up and begin running too. It was a riotous outpouring of support.

When Jason, also booking it to the MVHA grabbed a hatchet, the audience began trying to warn Larry. Sadly, Larry didn't even it see it coming when Jason launched the hatchet straight into his back. Felled, the audience's avatar collapsed on a pile of chopped firewood. The Courtesans were stunned. For a brief moment, they'd dared to open their hearts up to the possibility of hope. And now, it had ended, as so many dreams had, in a big honking hatchet in the back.

From the silence, some young kid, his voice straining in anger and dismay, screamed out, "Save him, Obama! Save him!"

And everybody laughed.

And that was about the neatest thing that happened in the film's hour and 30-odd running time.

As a side note, E! reports that F13 history making box office take on opening weekend has been followed up by another record-breaking weekend, in the other direction:

Ticket sales for Friday the 13th fell dropped plunged 81 percent from last weekend. According to Exhibitor Relations, that's the steepest-ever descent for a film playing at more than 3,000 theaters. The record previously belonged to the aptly named Doom, which went skydiving without a parachute in 2005.

That's more informative than just about anything I could say about the flick.

Movies: Do you wanna play house?

Filmmakers seem to hate carnies.

Admittedly, real carnival folk are an odd breed. The mobile life, though much romanticized, basically puts you outside of the common experience of most of the population. Like any subculture, there's the colorful slang, notable in this case for its astounding number of terms related to communicating the distinctions and trouble between carnival-goers and the ever changing cast of locals they encounter (carnival relativity: to a carny, the "locals" appear transient). Perhaps most importantly, so much of the entertainment carnivals provide is based on humbug, a tricky and delicate unacknowledged social contract that promotes certain level of well-meant deceit between the parties involved. It's a suspension the normal rules used to evaluate social exchanges and it can turn really bitter, really fast.

No doubt there are, among their numbers, con men and petty criminals. Though this could be said of any professional group – from cops to bankers – and it has to be admitted that, comparatively, even the most legally dubious carny does comparatively little damage when measured against, say, a crooked hedge fund manager or a corrupt politician.

Mostly though, the carny folk I've met funny, kind, intelligent folks. Witty too. For example, I once met a performer who billed himself as Eek the Geek, the Freak with Space on His Face. The latter part of his lengthy moniker referred to an elaborate astronomically-themed tattoo that covered his entire head. I met him after catching his act at Coney Island. His act included, if I recall, of driving nails into his nose, snapping his tongue in a mousetrap, and placing live scorpions in his mouth. After the show, we struck up a conversation and I offered to buy him a hot dog from Nathan's. "No thanks," he said. "I don't put that shit in my body."

I've met college-educated sword-swallowers and know a young woman who gave up a fairly promising career in publishing to become a fire-eater. I've been lucky enough to cross paths with Todd Robbins, head of Coney's sideshow school. Besides being able to eat shards of glass, Robbins in a gentleman and a scholar. He presided over a friend's wedding several years ago. There's also Dick Zigun, the "Mayor of Coney Island." Zigun's life – sideshow performer, oddity collector, married to a genuine Africa princess – would pass any carny stink test. Yet Zigun's also politically-engaged, knowledgeable and passionate about urban development and social issues, and one of the key figures in the movement to develop Coney in a way that would preserve something of its wild and unruly character.

Despite what one thinks would be a certain affinity, Hollywood's carnies are almost always nasty bits of business. With the homicidal somnambulist of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and several variants of Cheney's murderous carny crooks (two versions of the The Unholy Three, The Unknown), filmmakers set the tone early. Sure, there have been some notable exceptions: The Man Who Laughs lets the straight world play the villain for a bit and the titular characters of Freaks are intended to be as sympathetic as they are scary. But mostly, carnivals are a demonic places full of toothless hicks and sly dealers, filthy people who want only to travel from place to place eating souls or similarly discomforting the locals.

The 1981 fright flick The Funhouse is part of this long cinematic tradition. The flick starts with a ice-breaker "kill" that is all the evidence one needs that the slasher formula had already congealed into a predictable orthodoxy by '81. The opening scene, which says "hey, it's a slasher flick" by simultaneously riffing off Halloween and Psycho, starts with a pov shot of a masked killer getting a knife and making his way into the bathroom of a suburban home. In said bathroom, there's some perfunctory T&A, then the as yet unidentified slasher opens the shower curtain and plunges his knife repeatedly at the naked girl. If you ended the flick right there, you would have pretty made yourself a fully functional slasher movie. In fact, you'd have made one of the better slashers as your flick would have been mercifully short and completely devoid of dialogue.

But The Funhouse continues.

The would be vic screams, fights back, and grabs the attackers knife hand at the wrist. The girl is overpowered and the knife slowly descends down towards "Not Rated" territory. Then, before the beaver shot, the knife plunges and bends harmlessly against the girl's tummy. It's a fake. It's a prank by her younger brother, a little scoundrel of a boy who understands that sometimes, for the best pranks, you need to stalk you naked old sister in the bathroom. Sure, it's a little pervy. But later, in therapy, you'll look back on all the time you spent planning and executing you plan to surprise your sister in the shower and you'll just laugh and laugh.

Sadly, sis doesn't take the long-term view of this and chases little brother to his room. And tells him that someday she'll prank him so had that it will scar him for life.

So ends the flicks weirdly Fruedian intro and on we move to the main event. Freshly showered, the girl – virgin good-girl Amy – joins up with hunky boyfriend Buzz, semi-slutty (meaning she's had, dare I say it, sex!) Liz, and Liz's nerdy college-boy man pet Richie.

They go to a traveling carnival and spend a good 50 minutes or so roaming around, enjoying toke breaks, bumping into various carnies (several of who seem to be crazy homeless people), or otherwise dragging everything out. There make important stops for a ominous palm reading, an extended bathroom break for the ladies to discuss the futility of not giving it up, and a few shots of a two-headed cow. For a little dramatic gravity, there are several scenes in which ominous music kicks in and Amy seems to get hypnotized by some detail of the carnival. It is meant to imply that she's seeing sinister portents, but the effect is that she just seems easily confused by motion and bright lights.

As the teen quartet ever-so-slowly makes their way to killy time. We see that Amy's little bro has snuck out, determined to follow his sister to the carnival. Presumably to watch Amy get heavy-petted by Buzz or something. His trip the carnival is considerably more interesting than anything that is going on at the carnival. He nearly gets chomped by guard dogs and crosses paths with a gun-totting motorist of the "Hey little boy, want a ride variety."

As we wait for little brother to arrive, Nerdelmeister comes up with the funnest sounding idea ever! The quartet should spend the night in the carnival funhouse. As a slightly rundown spookshow dark ride is obviously the most clean, comfortable, and sensual place one could chose to lose one's cherry, Amy agrees. Buzz knows that a gentleman makes a girl's first time special, so he opts for the funhouse over the back seat of his Dodge Charger. Liz, because she's had sex before, will pretty much rut anywhere. To the funhouse gang!

At this point the little bro subplot links up to main story. Little bro watches the gang enter the house, posing a normal riders. But, unable to see that they ditch before the ride is over, he doesn't see them come out. He'll spend most of the next 30 minutes or so cautiously eyeing the funhouse. Hey, it's a horror movie, not an action flick. What do you want?

Inside, the teen quartet finds what appears to be the "trippy gnome village" section of the funhouse ride and starts to grope and thrust. In le mode de les années 80, the couples don't find separate, private areas to have sex in. Instead they just start at it about 20 feet away from one another. Hey, we're all friends here, right? Fortunately, the much delayed carnage begins when their romantic interlude is interrupted by a noise beneath them, coming up from the office of the funhouse. Peering through the slat of the floor, the gang witnesses the hulking, masked assistant of the funhouse ride murder the carny fortune-teller in a sex-for-cash transaction that goes awry. The assistant is unmasked as an albino mutant and his pops, the funhouse barker (who looks suspiciously like all the barkers in the carnival), arrives to figure out what to do with the dead fortune teller. Then, happily, Dorkus McNerdy accidentally drops his cigarette lighter through the slats and the chasing and killing begins in earnest.

(And what happens to the little bro? He finally approaches the house, gets scared by the mutant, and then either gets saved or captured and sexually molested by one of the other barkers, depending on how you read the scene. His parents come to pick him up, but he won't talk – either because he thinks his sister hates or because he mistaken believes his molestation was part of her revenge for the prank, again depending on how you read the scene - and fails to explain that sis entered and never left the funhouse. All of this leads to a nicely frustrating scene in which Amy tries desperately, but futilely to signal her parents to free her.)

What follows is an engaging, but fairly standard by-the-numbers stalk-the-teens affair. The order of deaths is the identity of the final girl is obvious from the beginning of the flick, so all that remains is execution. It's worth noting, however, that the proceedings are, by slash standards, relatively bloodless. With the exception of an extended "axe in the head" scene – the victim of which is already dead when it happens – most of the killing is done just off screen and with a minimum of gore. For the look of the flick, Hooper takes cues from the garish lights and colors of the midway. In some ways, The Funhouse seems like practice for the color drenched carnivalesque look Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2. After the sun-bleach minimalist vérité of Chain Saw, it's as if Hooper started working on ostentatiously artificial style, not unlike self-conscious and mannered style of Italian shock vendors. Only, being slightly down home, Hooper keeps it simple and rough about the edges. It's a garage rock to Italy's opera.

Still, it all seems like a dry run, with the emphasis on "dry."

With talent to burn behind the screen – director Tobe Hooper was just two flicks away from his seminal Chain Saw – the real surprise of Funhouse is how bush league the flick feels. The film feels stilted: uneasy with the confinement of the slasher formula, but unsure or unwilling to go in another direction. Again and again, the best work in this flick comes in the form of asides, most of which are left tantalizing underused or frustratingly unfulfilled. The little brothers fate, for example, or the hints that the fortune teller has supernatural powers or that the carnival might be one big family of crazies; all of these feel like elements of the story the filmmakers cared more about than the stalk-and-slay mechanic of the slasher. In this, The Funhouse has more in common with non-slasher 1980s weirdness like The People Under the Stairs and Phantasm. This makes it quirky and interesting, but ultimately the demands of the formula – demands the filmmakers grudgingly acquiesce to in only a half-hearted manner – drag all that is novel and exciting about the film down a too familiar and (even by '81) quite tired rut.

About mid-way through the film, the foursome of as-yet-only-potential victims sees a freakshow display of a pickled punk, a most likely faked-up mutant fetus in a jar of alcohol. Strikingly misshapen and mutated, but dead on arrival and displayed in lifelessness: that's really a metaphor for the flick as a whole. The Funhouse stands as a case study in how pandering to the "keep it fun by giving me more of the same" mentality behind fan orthodoxy smothers interesting works.

Movies: Stranger things have happened.

In the asymmetrical wake of the media/genre-fancy reaction to the barely-there subgenre of "torture porn," the bar for announcing the birth of a new horror subgenre fell through the floor. Hence, by the arrival of 2008's The Strangers, the debut effort of writer/director Brian Bertino, critics scattered throughout the pro am horror blogging world could confidently speak of the new "home invasion" subgenre of horror; this despite the fact that the new genre could really only be said to consist of four or five notable movies, one of which (Funny Games) was actually a remake of a decade-old flick. Of the home invasion flicks, The Strangers became something of a standard barer for the alleged subgenre in that it was the most financially successful of the lot and, in a surprising counter-programming victory, it was released against Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and managed to score numbers that made some of the horror scribes wax poetic about the coming age of horror box office dominance.

I bring this up not because I do or do not but the existence of a home-invasion subgenre, but because I think it got lumped into "the next big thing" so fast that a taxonomical error occurred. You'll get the most mileage out of The Strangers if you look at it not as another step in the larval-stage of the forming home-invasion genre, then as an efficient and smart revisionist piece that belongs in the venerable slasher genre.

The horror fandom is about to be up to its collective nips in slasher remakes. Somewhere, in some dungeon-like level of the development bunker in the subbasement of the Lionsgate Traumfabrik, some luckless assistant is trying to find out who owns the rights to Splatter University. So, before mediocre drek like My Bloody Valentine: Film in Super Suck-o-Surround become the gold standard by which we're all expected this newest wave of slicers and dicers, I'll like to at least try to make the case that The Strangers illustrates how smart filmmakers can keep a genre vital without lapsing in ironic self-parody or slavish dogmatic adherence to form. Furthermore, the box-office for The Strangers proves, if not that we're headed into a new Golden Age of Horror, at least that genuinely lively and evolving works can be entertaining and appeal to a mass audience.

If you missed out on The Strangers, the recap is super-easy. We open with the discovery of a gruesome crime scene, with a voiced-over 911 call describing the carnage.

Then we flashback for the majority of the flick's slim-and-trim 85 minute running time.

Enter young couple, Kristen and James. After attending an amigo's wedding, K and J are headed to his father's house, an ever-so-secluded ranch house set among an impressive stand of towering pines. All is not well with our protagonist couple. At the wedding, James popped Kristen the Big Question. She said no. On arriving at the house, the two mope about in the strewn rose petals, chilled bubbly, and other wreckage of James's matrimonial plans.

They are interrupted briefly by a spacey young girl, face shrouded in the pine-shadowed evening darkness, who knocks on their door and asks if somebody neither James nor Kristen have ever heard of before is home.

To avoid the long road trip home, James calls a friend and arranges a ride home (he's going to leave their Volvo with Kristen) and then goes out for a head clearing evening drive.

Happily, pulling us back from the brink of mumblecore, enter a trio of masked psychos. Home alone, Kristen becomes the target of these relentless tormentors – two women and a man – who pound on the doors and windows, leave sinister messages written on the windows in red paint, and, worse yet, seem able to enter and leave the house at will. James's arrival doesn't scare off the attackers, but emboldens them.

The rest is a cat and mouse game played between the trio of attackers and our frightened couple.

Simple, no?

Visually, the movie's got a crisply professional look that's awash in autumnal colors and inky black shadows. The sound design – which begs for a spiffy home theater set up – fully uses the conceit of the limited space, with heart-stabbing bumps and clatters coming distinctly from different locations around the house. The acting ranges from fair to excellent, with the actors managing to even squeeze in a genuinely touching moment between their screaming bloody murder. All in all, a solid genre work.

Okay. Here's why The Strangers is the one of the best slasher flicks in the past ten years. Discussing Frank Miller's Spirishtar, Curt "Groovy Age" Purcell dropped a mighty, mighty rumination on what makes a "reimagining" work. Cribbing from the Groovy One:

Miller's reimaginings of Daredevil and Batman are hyper-faithful, by which I mean he zeroes in on certain core facets of their characters and worlds, and heightens those facets to defining principles. He's not imposing something external on them; he's bringing out what's implicit and, in retrospect, essential. The precision and rigor with which he accomplishes this constitutes his departure from previous depictions.

The Strangers is a hyperfaithful slasher insomuch as it finds the real core of the genre and makes it the defining principle. The flick is the final chase – that one long stretch of tension where the final girl runs and stumbles throughout the set in an effort to escape the baddie, never fully eluding him and managing to stumble into the remains of all his previous work – exploded into the length of a feature. Bertino trimmed the genre most tedious excess. He's disposed of the disposable characters, starting the flick with just his final girl and her boy. Gone are all the vestiges of the Reaganite neo-Puritanism. Instead the "axes for kisses" approach to sexuality that was such a crucial factor in the first gen slashers, there's a chillingly nihilistic lack of motivation. (Curiously, the victim couple is, refreshingly, caught not in the throws of hormonal passion, but tackling with an inability to leap to the next stage of a relationship: a most likely intentional, but completely fitting metaphor for the state of slasher genre as it heads into its third prolonged adolescence.) The decision to have these killers pop up ex nihilo is far from cynical though; it is refreshing. Why do cinema slashers kill? Is it really because they hate life and joy, or can't afford traditional store-bought meat products, or have mommy issues? No. The motives of just about every cinematic serial killer, from Bates to Jigsaw, seem, in retrospect, a bit silly. Rather, the carnage exists because screenwriters decree it. There's something pleasing efficient and honest about the lack of backstory here.

In focusing on the real delight of slasher flicks, that wildly tense moment, The Strangers reveals the errors of subpar efforts like the earnest, but ill-conceived Halloween remake (which made the mistake of amplifying non-essential, rather than essential component) or the half-assed, cynical pandering of flicks like My Bloody Valentine (which viewed the genre as little more than a laundry list of crap one had to throw up onto the screen).

Not that The Strangers is perfect. True to form, the flick requires moments of victim stupidity that push against viewer tolerance levels. Also, Bertino occasionally mars the visual storytelling with inexplicable shaky handcam work, as if sections of an earlier first-person p.o.v. effort somehow made it into the work. But both these factors are understandable in terms of genre conventions and first-time director flubs. They don't slow down the ride.

Before you shell out another 12 to 15 smackers for the next sequel/relaunch/reimagining filmed in Smell-Surround!, at least consider re-watching The Strangers instead. You'll have more fun.

Music: Whhhheeeeeeennnnnneehhhh – Whoooooooooooooohoo – Whhhheeeeeeennnnnneehhhh – Whoooooooooooooohoo . . .

This is nobody's fault but my own, but whenever somebody mentions My Bloody Valentine, the middling also-ran '80s slasher about a psycho miner that violently hates Valentine's Day, I can't help but start audibly wailing: "Whhhheeeeeeennnnnneehhhh – Whoooooooooooooohoo – Whhhheeeeeeennnnnneehhhh – Whoooooooooooooohoo . . ." I sound like some demented police siren.

It's a serious condition. Seriously. Quit laughing.

This wouldn't be a problem really except, for reasons totally obscure to me, everybody seems to have decided the coming MBV remake – in 3D nonetheless, the gimmick that made Friday the 13th Part 3 so indisputably the best in the series - will be exempt from the general directive requiring horror bloggers to be hating hard on remakes.

Worse yet, the original MBV is going through a widespread reappraisal by horror fans. Until recently, the flick enjoyed a big fat 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's IMDB rating hovered between 2 and 3. These days it has a 14% on Tomatotron and whopping 5 and change on the Database of All Earthly Knowledge. Never one to miss out on the latest geek circle jerk, Quentin Tarantino made sure to drop the title as his favorite slasher flick of all time or until Return to Horror High is ripe for rediscovery.

(I should point out that these are still utterly crap ratings and before people start wetting themselves over the prospects of a new MBV, they should reflect on the fact that this film needed a critical rediscovery simply to reach the dizzying ratings reserved for such genre landmarks as 2004's Van Helsing.)

All this means that people have actually been giving this flick some attention. Consequently, like some kid unwittingly left in front of a seizure inducing Japanimation show, I find my sell innocently surfing the horror-blog-o-sphere to suddenly burst into "Whhhheeeeeeennnnnneehhhh – Whoooooooooooooohoo – Whhhheeeeeeennnnnneehhhh – Whoooooooooooooohoo . . ."

Needless to say, this caterwauling is driving my poor wife mad. In an effort to get at the root of the problem, I've dug out the suppressed memory that causes this neurotic-compulsive behavior: the video for shoe-gazing legends My Bloody Valentine's tune "Only Shallow."



Now that I've fully recognized why I wail like a spastic electric banshee whenever the title of the movie comes up, we should put the results of this autotherapy to the test. Quick, somebody, mention you-know-what in the comments of this entry!

(Just for giggles, there's a wonderful youtube video featuring MBV – the band, not either version of the movie – that highlights one of the weirder features of this icy, moody, artsy, withdrawn group: They were unbelievably loud. Louder than more ostensibly rockin' outfits could ever hope to be. In his excellent 33 1/3 book on Loveless, Mike McGonigal describes the experience of seeing My Bloody Valentine live as the equivalent of standing in front of a jet liner's roaring engine. For an audio/visual illustration of that metaphor, here's a live clip of MBV playing "Only Shallow" live. You don't have to listen to the whole thing. Just listen for the point where, almost as soon as the band kicks in, this bootlegger's video recorder gets utterly overwhelmed by the band's noise.



Ouch. Somebody may have just blown out their camera's mic.)

Movies: Is everybody in? Is everybody in?

Inside, the co-directing debut of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, is one of the latest flicks in a small but steady stream of bloody French imports. It takes a plot of primal simplicity – one attacker, one victim – and turns it into a stylish, meticulous, energetic, and gore-soaked struggle that initially galvanizes the viewer only to, in the end, leave them feeling utterly exhausted.

Setting against the backdrop of the 2005 immigration riots in the outskirts of Paris, Inside tells the story of Sarah, a pregnant photojournalist who, after losing her baby's daddy in an auto accident that nearly took the unborn child and left her physically scarred, is spending Christmas alone. Christmas night an unnamed woman busts into Sarah's home. Her goal, we quickly learn, is to cut the baby out of Sarah's womb. Think of it as a violent, unilateral form of adoption. (As contrived as this sounds, there have been at least three recorded real-life cases in which crazed would-be mothers have attempted amateur-Cesarean kidnappings.) What follows is a long, brutal night in which Sarah, trapped in a bathroom on the second floor of her home, tries repeated to escape her attacker. This grim stand-off is violently punctuated by the arrival of various relatives, friends, and police officers, all of whom will face-off against the anonymous attacker.

The two key roles are ably played, but somewhat thankless. The fragile beauty of Alysson Paradis makes the lead role of Sarah an effective center to viewer concern, but she's supposed to play an emotional shut-in so there is a real limit to how deeply we can connect with her. Her attacker is played by the truly fascinating Béatrice Dalle, a controversial art house fixture on the French film scene. In real life, Dalle's explosive personality (she attacked a French police woman over a parking violation) and bizarre love life (she was secretly married to unnamed prisoner at a prison she was doing volunteer work in) are the stuff of tabloid dreams. Cinematically, she taken projects that fit her odd profile – including the horrible Trouble Every Day, the worst film this blogger has ever had to sit through. Dalle's oddly captivating looks and hot-and-cold acting style make for an unusually interesting villain. She slides between killing-machine and pathetic-loony with ease, playing with audience expectations. She is also the most stylish slasher in recent memory: she goes to work in a floor length black gown and leather opera gloves.

Like High Tension, the violence of Inside is extreme. In the "making of" featurette for the former flick, the director claimed that French cinema culture was inherently adverse to extreme violence. They are, he opined, lovers, not fighters. The recent spate of bleak and brutal French drama and horror films (Irreversible, Kiss Me, Frontier(s), High Tension, and Inside) would suggest that this is no longer the case. Inside takes practically revels the display of the mushy, fluid details of human existence. Aside from the gallons of blood that the directors practically paint the house with, we're treated to scenes of vomit, tears and snot, and urine. Though the violence isn't particularly realistic – the capacity of these characters to absorb damage and continue struggling stretches disbelief and very nearly tips over into some dark form of slapstick – it is considerably more effecting and graphic that anything I've seen in recent memory.

Set against the unhinged relish with which the filmmakers show gore and violence is the polish of their visual approach and an oddly elegant series of structural binaries used to give the film a thematic and visual template. Like many contemporary horror films, Inside makes full use of DV technology to escape the visual restrictions of its relatively small budget. It has the slick, professional look of films like Hard Candy, Saw, and Hostel. However, unlike those films, Inside borrows occasionally from French New Wave techniques, working in jump cuts and intrusive camera tricks that break the viewers disbelief while adding to the emotional unsettled feel of the picture. The technical proficiency of the filmmakers in and of itself is unsurprising: this slick look is the visual lingua franca of modern horror. What is notable is the overt structuralism of the flick. Our heroine dresses in white, the villain in black. In the flashbacks to the car wreck, which becomes a sort of origin story for both women, the cars are white and black (Sarah's car is actually silver, but it is shot with a glare on it, making it appear white). There are repeated inside/outside motifs. Sarah's trapped in the white title bathroom while her swart-clad assailant lurks in the darkened hall outside. This plays out again and again with the folks who come to the house and then jumps to a different scale when the theme of native versus immigrant conflict is overtly introduced. Like the main characters, rooms in the house end up getting color-coded: the bathroom is white, the upstairs bedroom is blue, the living room is orange, the kitchen is yellow. This is by far the best manically blood-soaked slasher flick that Peter Greenaway never made.

(A comparison of the French film poster, above, and the American DVD cover, below, is interesting. The French poster not only has a curiously – ironic? – patriotic color-scheme, it emphasizes the structuralist bent of the flick: up/down, left/right, blue/red. In contrast, the American box art emphasizes the gore. The blood that is a disembodied design element or abstracted body paint in the French poster gets slathered over a preggers tummy. The Woman in Black's favorite weapon, a pair of scissors, hovers hungrily above the mommy-flesh.)

Curiously, the interplay of all these themes never materializes into a "message." Inside, despite playing with the concepts of motherhood, security, immigration, and violence, does not venture any socio-political theories. It doesn't pretend to offer up insights into the nature of cruelty or reach to attempt to create a metaphor for the sort of fierce maternal instinct (like, say, the final act of Aliens did). I've seen some reviewers criticize the film for groping towards, but failing to achieve any important deeper meaning. I suspect that feeling is a result of these repeated, organizational binaries. We feel that they should communicate something. We're attuned to think of any patterns we find in that way. But, honestly, these tropes are really just surface elements that ground the work visually and serve to keep us fully engaged despite the natural reaction to simply tune out the violence. It is a neurological bait and switch that forces the reader to minutely examine the unjustifiable, to probe the ultimately mute violence for something to redeem it. The answer is, of course, that there is no redemption for what happens. Like the nameless attacker, the flick treats violence as a cipher that sweeps away everything before it. This is, depending on your point of view, either a massive cop-out on the part of the filmmaker or the only genuinely moral way to view violence. While I personally lean towards the later, I sympathize with those who find it a crass and exploitative abdication of the duty of the artist. Nihilism always runs the risk of lapsing into a sort of immature naïveté that mistakes simple-minded extremism for the wisdom of moral certitude.

Whether or not the project fails on a moral or intellectual level, there are some artistic fumbles that mar the film. Like the plot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the plot of Inside can only keep moving forward if fresh bodies stumble into the home. When this first happens, it is genuinely intense. As a pattern, it is simply frustrating. The second problem, for me, has to do with the intensity and regularity of the violence. Eventually I was simply fatigued. Compared to Inside, Hostel and Saw are downright generous with the viewers' sensibilities. There came a point for me, about 15 minutes from the end of the flick, when I was simply unable to muster concern for any of the characters because it seemed so unlikely that any of them could possibly survive what had happened or, honestly, that any of them would want to given all they'd endured. I suspect this is part and parcel of the program of presenting violence as the opposite of the meaningful, as the point where you can no longer talk or wax philosophic and you can only feel. If so, it is philosophically a success, but the experience is something akin to an endurance test.

Did I like Inside? I'm not sure it is built to be liked, really. It is one of the most intense horror film experiences I've had in some time, and its emotional punch is not come by cheaply. But, at the same time, it is not a particularly thoughtful, meaningful, or important film. It is odd: what does one make of something so slight and yet so profoundly unnerving?

Movies: Revenge is a dish best served very slowly.

I have to admit that the first thing that attracted me to the 2004 revenge/slasher pic Dead Man's Shoes was not the reviews it was getting – which tended to characterize the film, either as a plus or a minus, as a sort of up-market slasher flick – but the cover image that pops up in Netflix. The violent anti-hero of the flick appears against a stark white background in an old gas-mask, looking like some cross between Halloween's "The Shape" and DC Comic's wonderful Golden Age Sandman character.

The reviews, which cast the film as a sort of "thinking man's" slasher, are accurate – providing that what thinking men really enjoy is long shots of people quietly walking places. You know, guys walking to an abandoned farm house. Then they walk to town. There are a bunch of unpaved roads, so some people walk on those. There are a lot of grass-covered rolling hills too, don't forget those. They walk the crap out of those hills, man. Walking champs, these guys.

Now all this silent walking is not entirely unmotivated. See there's a small English town dominated by a handful group of small-time villains. This gang of villains brutalized the town idiot, a slightly retarded teen named Anthony. Unbeknownst to this bullying band of chavs, Anthony's brother, Richard, is a former Special Forces type who doesn't take kindly to the treatment Anthony has received.

What follows is a veritable phantasmagoria of ominous walking. Richard walks to the town! From the town! Around inside the town! To other towns! This pulverizing peripatetic pedestrianism is periodically punctuated (very rarely) by some violent imagery. Richard slowly, methodically, on foot, takes out the gang one-by-one. Think of it as a lesson in tolerance and charity, given with extreme prejudice.

The violence isn't anything worse than you'd see in a generic 80's-style slasher, and it's certainly less hardcore than the bloodletting in splatpack slasher-revivals like High Tension. Mostly I suspect the violence we do see is there, along with some nice dialog that has the fresh and natural feel of good improv, because even the best walking can sometimes get monotonous. Not for me, you understand. I'm a huge walking fan. Can't get enough of it. I watched nearly three full seasons of Walker, Texas Ranger before figuring out that they never intended to live up to their promising title.

If I had to pick out a real highpoint in the film, I think I would have to underscore the moment when the auto of the gang breaks down. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they become walkers. Like Richard! The hunter and the hunted become mirror images! If mirrors walked, I mean.

I can't recommend Dead Man's Shoes highly enough for those who like their walking films to have a slight undertone of suspense and fear.

Movies: Drive-by suckers.

Despite the abysmal performance of the cinematic multi-warhead bomb that was Grindhouse, the sadly misconceived and unsurprisingly mediocre mash-note of modern film's two chief apostles of b-grade genre fare from the exploitative side of the tracks, there's still a tendency to look at the z-grade fare that flitted across the screens of America's grindhouses and drive-ins through rose-colored glasses. Admittedly, there are enough gems from the era to make one think that we must have been in some savage and raw period of untamed cinematic brilliance. But this ignores the sadder, simpler truth of this low-budget sub-genre: a vast majority of the flicks justly considered "grindhouse" films sucked. They were not so much savage as pointless, not so much raw as they were inept. They were, in short, a lot like 1976's painfully bad Drive-In Massacre.

Drive-In Massacre, directed by porn auteur turned television producer Stu Segall (the man who produced both The Spirit of Seventy Sex - a porno about the erotic adventures of Martha Washington – and the USA Channel's sleaze-lite detective show "Silk Stalkings"), is a frightless, slow, and unsatisfying slasher flick about the ultimately fruitless efforts of California's least competent and physically fit detectives to track down a sword-wielding serial killer before he claims another victim at the local drive-in.

Our story begins with the slaying of the first couple. Curiously, unlike many slasher flicks, the couples in this film tend to get it the moment they decide not to engage in the sort of naughty hanky-panky that, in your typical slasher flick, attracts edged weapons the way poop attracts flies. In this case, the male half of the victim-couple breaks off foreplay so he can lean out of the car to adjust the speaker system and get better sound for the flick the drive-in is showing. For this, he gets beheaded – in a scene worthy of the comedic splatter effects Roth used in his short "trailer" Thanksgiving - and his girlie gets her throat slit. Later couples will be discussing having a child, informing their spouses that they want divorces, and generally acting in about as un-sexy a manner as you please. Some slasher fans might applaud this as a sort of corrective to the seemingly conservative politics inherent in the have-sex-and-die structure common to many slashers. However, it does mean that instead of being distracted by T&A, we're nearly bored to death by crappy dialog. I'm not sure that whatever small gains that might represent in legitimizing the killing habits of fictional mass murderers among the PC crowd is worth the tedium.

Rolling into pasty action are Detectives Leadbutt and Tubby. The detectives question the manager of the Drive-In, an abrasive jackass who looks like Anton LaVey and dresses like Ron Burgundy's poor cousin, and the theater's retarded handyman, a former sideshow Geek and circus swordswallower. This questioning leads nowhere and, over the next few nights, the sword-wielding killer racks up a few more bodies. At no time does it occur to the detectives to close the theater. In fact, a one point, these two detectives release a suspect to see if he'll go to the drive-in and kill somebody. This, the detectives decide, would prove definitively that the suspect is the murderer. How this would later be explained to the courts and the families of the victims is unclear; but, hell, just as you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, you can't catch a killer without letting him kill some folks.

So that we don't get to close to anything resembling forward movement of the plot, Leadbutt and Tubby interview the handyman several times. That simple description does not do justice to just how painful each and every one of these pointless interviews is. Though the filmmakers never specify exactly what is wrong with the handyman, it seems that he suffers from some sort of mental impairment that causes him to drift off-topic for extended riffs of nonsense in all conversations. To give you an example, here's a review of this movie as the handyman might write it:

This movie is about a drive-in. Hey. I work at a drive-in. People take their cars there. Sometimes in they come in twos. Not two cars. Two people in a car. Then they kiss. I mean, they kiss each other. Not the cars. I don't watch them when they kiss. I look at my shoes. They cover my toes. I have at least three toes on each foot. I used to have more but there was an accident with Slurpee machine. That was when they had watermelon favor and I bought a hot dog. You know, I think those hot dogs are made out of same leather that some people have in their cars. The kind of cars people drive to drive-ins.

If there is any tension in the film, it is a product of the viewer's fear that the two clueless detectives will find themselves trapped in yet another painful conversation with the handyman.

Eventually, after a series of unconvincing red herrings and a pointless montage of the handyman walking among carnival rides, the film simply runs out of suspects – having them all either dispatched by the slasher or, in a moment that threatens to become exciting, getting shot by one of the detectives. Lacking any more folks to hang plot advancement on, the film serves up a title card that tells viewers that the drive-in killings were never solved and even started to spread to other drive-ins.

Then comes the only neat-o bit of the flick: a curious little fourth-wall breaking moment. The film cuts off and an indifferent sounding voice-over announces that it is the voice of the manager of the drive-in you – presumably – are parked in as you watch the flick (the joke makes less sense as you watch the DVD from your couch, but you get the idea). The manager requests you stay in your car and lock your doors. There is a murderer loose in the drive-in! The end.

(Seeing as there's an established pattern in these killings, this reviewer suggests that you and your date should have sex immediately. It's the only way to be sure that killer will pass your car by.)

Though I would normally only say this as a joke: the last few seconds of this film are nice. The whole "he's loose in the theater" bit is charmingly gimmicky, like a slasher nod to William Castle or something. But, still, we're talking about a flick where "the last few seconds of this film are charmingly gimmicky" is the best thing anybody can say about it. A last minute wink at the audience can't redeem this steaming pile. Using the Pulitzer Prize winning Compass Bus Fleet Models Film Rating System, Drive-In Massacre gets a terrible Dennis Lance.