Movies: "You are not content with the stories, so I was obliged to come."

Rewatched Candyman this afternoon. I can't imagine anybody needs a review of this film, so I'll jump straight to my random thought: No flick less justly categorized as a "slasher" than Candyman.

The Clive Barker sourced fright flick, lensed by Bernard Rose, was partially a victim of timing. Film critics, especially the collective pro-am that dominates the dialogue regarding horror films, trade heavily on taxonomic and genealogical observation (both of which speak to core competency: a bent towards the trivial and citizenship status in a large, clannish interpretive community), a strategy that leaves them constantly reaching for existing interpretive models and repeatedly cramming new works into the intellectual boilerplate of previous films. When Candyman appeared in 1992, surrounded by the rotting odds and sods of the long since creatively bankrupt "slasher" moment in American horror cinema, the slasher subgenre was the Procrustean bed the fright fancy chose to stretch the film across. To this day, Candyman is widely considered a slasher: the horror-centric Bloody Disgusting site and the post-Whedon "geek culture" list-and-link-dump UGO site both list the titular baddie in their "Top N Slashers" lists.

To be fair, they're not alone. When composer Philip Glass, who gave the film its revisionists gothic organ and chorus score, saw the finished product, he was so repulsed that he withheld the release of the soundtrack recording for nearly a decade. He had scored the film thinking he was contributing to an artsy indie flick. He felt betrayed by the director. The derogatory Glass used to describe Candyman was "slasher flick."

Either as a slam or critical observation, the label of slasher doesn't fit Candyman. Instead, what Rose delivered was curiously retro gothic tale that owes more to classic Universal monster flicks than it does cynical slaughters of the 1980s.

Candyman himself belongs the odd tradition of monstrous nobility that descends straight from Lugosi's Dracula. Displaying some typically Barkerish traits, Todd's Candyman is a cursed decadent, an envoy from some place beyond our understanding of good and evil, a Romantic and aristocratic character who, it is revealed, is something of a vampiric psychic tyrant, kept somehow in unlife by the fearful worship of the downtrodden residents of Cabini-Green, Candyman's urban Transylvania populated by updated peasants.

The plot has a love-beyond-death seduction angle utterly foreign to the golden age slasher. In fact, the plot somewhat mirrors the plot of Coppola's Dracula relaunch - which emphasized the "weird love story" that was mostly marketing BS in the original film - that appeared the same year.

The film's first coda, with Candyman dropping what's essentially a "we belong dead" line as he and his bride are trapped in a giant bonfire, evokes the two Whale-directed Frankenstein films. We even get angry "villagers" with torches!

Candyman's charms have been buried too long under the misconception that it was just the weirdo entry in the slasher flood. The misappropriation of the flick by subgenre partisans has obscured what it really was: a genuinely interesting effort at updating classic gothic tropes for a modern, urban context. I would argue that the flick wasn't completely successful, but I believe the fusion of an intellectual, urban sensibility with deeply felt traditional gothic themes prefigured quite a bit of the "New Weird" aesthetic of urban fantasy. As source of future inspiration, it languishes in a genre ghetto it doesn't belong in.

I wonder too if we shouldn't credit the film with being an early innovator in the lavish squalor aesthetic that became the signature style of some many modern horror flicks after Fincher perfected it in Se7en. John Doe's nameless city could easily contain this imagined version of Cabrini-Green and you feel like you wouldn't be surprised if Virginia Madsen's Helen came across Jigsaw's bathroom-of-death in some less used section of the project.

Time is ripe for a re-evaluation.

Movies: Gives new meaning to "Midnight Meat Train."

When I went to college, something like a trillion years ago, there was a stylish lit crit term being bandied about the hallowed halls of the academy: "Closeted text." I've not had much reason to keep up with the cutting edge of queer theory (if, indeed, it's still called that), so I have no idea if this term is still in use. Back in the day, when we still fought against the wily machinations of Tammany Hall and regularly fell victim to Yellow Jack fever, the term was used to describe a text that contained two separate and fully functional levels of meaning. On the surface was the "straight" story. Underneath was an allegory of homosexuality. The cleverness of the closeted text is that each layer of meaning was simultaneously functional. You didn't need to grok the queer subtext to puzzle together the straight meaning of the work. Rather, like the Victorian homosexual demimonde that pioneered the form, the queer meaning ran parallel to the straight text, open to those hip to the signs and clues, but otherwise unassuming. Perhaps the most well-known and successful of closeted texts would be Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. At once a classic Faust tale with Gothic overtones and an elaborate metaphor for being a homosexual in Victorian England, this book's continued popularity in American high school English courses is a testament to both the narrowness of the instruction provided the average American student and the unobtrusiveness of the novel's gay themes for those with no need to seek them.

I bring up this possibly antiquated critical term because today's movie, the 2008 Ryuhei Kitamura helmed Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train, seems to me to be a closeted text.

First, let's dispense with the straight story. I should admit here that I can't speak to the fidelity of Kitamura's adaptation. I read the short story a long time ago and, embarrassingly enough, actually remember it more for being the inspiration for a module for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing that appeared in the pages of White Wolf magazine. (A module I then re-purposed for the Shadowrun role-playing game because, dorky as the original was, it apparently just wasn't dorky enough for me.) Now that I've spent all my street cred . . . The movie opens with a photographer, let's call him Dorian. That's not his name, but humor me. He lives with a blonde, available hottie named Sibyl. Again, not the name, but if the shoe fits.

Dorian wants to be a big time photog, but he can't seem to make it work. A studio head tells him that he needs to gritty his work up, so he ends up snapping photos of a potential subway rape, a crime that his presence on the scene foils. However, his intervention leads him down the rabbit hole of a deeper mystery.

Apparently, the powers that be in his city have been using the subway system to send sacrifices down to a clan of subterranean mole people (who have been around for centuries – a cannibalistic diet is good for you). Key to this operation is a gigantic and strangely melancholy gent by the name of Mahogany. Every night, he rides the trains, dispatching meals for the deep ones.

Dorian's effort to stop this conspiracy forms the bulk of the film.

I can actually see why, despite the very public protestations of Clive Barker, the studios hesitated to release Meat Train. It has a very slow wind-up and, and after starting like a typical slasher, it makes a turn for the Lovecraftian. Personally, this shift pleases me. I can't think of anything more dreary than another autopsy of the slasher genre: the hair metal of the horror world. But bait and switch games are always tricky propositions and the addition of supernatural elements in this flick often pushes the film into self-parody.

Some of the blame for this unintentionally comic tone must be assigned to the CGI effects. Kitamura relies heavily on computer effects and the results are often cartoonish, as if somebody was mocking the modern tendency towards ever mounting levels gore. What is supposed to be shocking is, instead, puzzling. One wonders if the film was meant to shock, scare aware non-gorehounds, or simply induce laughter.

That said, aside from the tone issues, Meat Train is a visually arresting film with a couple of fine performances at the core. While I wasn't particularly taken with Bradley Cooper's Dorian, Vinnie Jones and Leslie Bibb (as the killer and love interest, respectively) turn in fine performances. Roger Bart, the reluctant client in Hostel II does a nice job as well. I'm also a fan of the surreal sense the flick gives one of a darker, more sinister reality under the mundane world one knows. Good stuff, well handled.

There. Now you can sell that stuff to the tourists.

Here's the other story behind The Midnight Meat Train:

Dorian has a wonder girl, but for some reason he can't commit. This sexual incompatibility extends to him buying a committed-to-be-engaged ring. His excuse: His photography hasn't taken off and he can't afford to marry her. (Girls, don't by this excuse. Poor people get married all the time. It's how we make more poor people.)

After being told to get grittier photos, Dorian begins sneaking out at night. He ends up taking photos of Mahogany, a strangely compelling man who ushers him, only somewhat unwillingly, into another realm of existence. Dorian researches the world of Mahogany and finds that there's a long, secret history there. There's been a secret, parallel history to the world he knows.

Dorian's not-a-wife suggest that he morbidly obsessed and tells Dorian to "shoot what makes you happy." He claims that she's what makes him happy; but when she starts to strip for some boudoir pics, all Dorian can think about is Mahogany and his world of tunnels and trains. This is part of a string of unappealing depictions of heterosexual sex. After a generic, giggly scene at the start of the flick, we get near rape, a backdoor bang on the counter of a greasy spoon that seems a hair's breadth away from being non-consensual, and this phoitus interruptus scene.

As he gets more obsessed with Mahogany, Dorian, a tofu-lovin' vegetarian, develops this deep inner desire to eat meat. I'm going no further with that particular thread.

Intentional or not, this might be the greatest closeted horror flick since Scream.

Movies: Chasing tale.

According to IMDB, the source of all cinema knowledge, George Romero was originally slated to direct Haeckel's Tale, an adaptation of a Clive Barker short story that held down the 12th slot in the first season of Masters of Horror. Romero couldn't fit it into his schedule, which leads one to make the shocking conclusion that some effort was actually put into make Diary of Dead despite the end result. After Romero bowed out, Roger Corman was tapped for the gig. Corman – who actually had a full schedule: in 2006, Corman produced five films and made three appearances in various film and television projects – took the helm, but then bowed out because of health reasons. This led series producer and Haeckel writer Mick Garris to tap one horror-hit wonder John McNaughton. Though, to be honest, what a hit: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. If you're going to do just one major horror flick, coming out with a flick so bleak and grim that the MPAA slaps you with an X not on the basis of the films violence (which is gritty, but not particularly over-the-top even for the time) or sexual material (which, again, is grim, but, again, well in R territory) but for the films "moral tone." Between Henry and Haeckel, McNaughton tried his hand at one other horror flick, the sci-fi/horror/comedy/train wreck The Borrower, before walking away from the genre. Over time he amassed an interesting, if not always great track record. Among other things, he shot the DeNiro/Murray/Thurman romantic comedy Mad Dog and Glory (penned by crime-lit giant Richard Price), the sun-baked cult sleaze-o noir Wild Things, and several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets (a.k.a. The Wire version 1.0).

So, can a guy with only one great horror flick to his name really be a "master" of horror? I can't say. But I will say that he does a better job on his episode than many, more firmly established horror directors did on their episodes. Haeckel's Tale is moody, well paced, suitably naughty, willing to be absurd, and makes a stylistic nod to the Hammer period thrillers – all in less than an hour.

Having never read the Baker story, I'm not qualified to tell how loyal it stays to the original. The flick opens with a framing device involving a widower who wants a local witch to bring back his dead wife. The witch says that she will do so, but only on the condition that the man listen to the tale of Ernst Haeckel. If, after her tale is done, the widower is still keen on the idea of resurrecting his spouse, then she'll do it.

Open on a surgical theater in Boston medical college at the turn of the Eighteenth Century. The titular doctor, having studied the notes of one Frankenstein, informs his med school prof that he can re-animate the dead. Forced to make good on the boast, Haeckel makes a mash of it and ends up setting his subject, a female corpse, on fire. After a hearty round of mockery, Haeckel is left with his failure and a local body-snatcher suggest that he should perhaps look in on "Professor" Montesquino. Montesquino, played as a cross between Caligari and a used car salesman by Homicide vet Jon Polito, is a necromancer that Bostonites credit with the ability to bring back the dead.

Doubtful, Haeckel sees Montesquino's show. After watching the necromancer bring back a dead golden retriever (a bit of anachronism: efforts to create the golden retriever didn't begin until the 1860s, with the "first" of the breed being registered in the first decade of the Twentieth Century), Haeckel attempts to bribe the secrets of reviving the dead from Montesquino, but is rebuffed.

Shortly there after, Haeckel receives news that his ailing father has taken a turn for the worse. Haeckel takes to the open road, hiking from the metropolis into the country. On the road, Haeckel finds shelter at the modest Wolfram cabin, home of Mr. Wolfram and his lovely, if creepily otherworldly, wifey: Elise. (As an aside, Elise is played by Leela Savasta, so if you're life has been incomplete because you haven't seen the lovely boobies of Battlestar Galatica's Tracey Anne, then run, don't walk, to your nearest video rental joint.)

I can't go much further without ruining the plot, but rest assured that the Wolframs' have a nasty secret that turns things all messy right quick and involves something that rhymes with "ROM bee hex." I kid not. It's based on a Clive Barker story. You could see it coming. You know what these zombies saw coming?

Where was I? Oh. The movie.

So, aside from the Ye Olde Talke™, which grates a bit before you get into the groove, the period trappings have the lush and stagey artificiality of Hammer or Amicus flicks, though the coozed up climax, if you will, of the flick is considerably more explicit than either of those inspirations implies. The graveyard set is especially nice. The acting is adequate to excellent, with the exception of Elise, who is more of narrative conflict than a character. The plotting moves along purposefully, with enough slack to add some tangential stuff and avoid giving the viewer the feeling that their on a forced march. The mood of the film goes from lushly Gothic to darkly, almost nihilistically, comedic. There is, I guess, a sort of "approval of alternate lifestyles" subtext here, but the metaphor is hopelessly clumsy and one gets the feeling that the message was in the original but that McNaughton didn't give a crap about it. The result is that whatever ideological content there is remains vestigial and under-developed. The film has too much fun with the eerie/goofy surreality of its own plot to try to hone it into some sort of take-home message.

Haeckel's Tale is really one of the highpoints of the MoH series. Playful and nasty, taboo breaking without being ponderous or smug, thoughful without being preachy of clumsily political, it's fun times.