"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #9.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Poster for The Thing (1982), featuring, among others, T. K. Carter and Keith David.

Music: G. I. Joe versus The Thing!

After an entire series devoted to silent cinema, what better way to get back to the regularly scheduled Screaming of And Now said action Starts than a music entry? Today, my little screamers and screamettes, we take a look at the video for the French electronic music duo Zombie Zombie's song "Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free."

Why, you might well ask, should you care about a Zombie Zombie's first video?

Because, cool cats and kittens, it is homage/remake of John Carpenter's sci-fi/horror classic The Thing that uses meticulously created miniature sets and G. I. Joe figures instead of human actors.

I won't go so far as to say this video is the reason the Internet was invented (because I have it on good authority that tranny-granny watersports porn is reason the Internet was invented), but it is the coolest use of G. I. Joe figures perhaps ever.

Dig, children.

Movies: Abortive.

After mainstream reviewers sprained their collective wrists beating off all over the ham-fisted "satire" of the Joe Dante's astoundingly dumb contribution to the first season of Showtime's Masters of Horror series, Homecoming, it was inevitable that the second series would include several stories that pushed what filmmakers believed to be "hot button" issues into the foreground in an effort to garner some love from straight-world reviewers. Dante turned his attention from the Iraq War to the war between the sexes with his The Screwfly Solution. Dario Argento adapted F. Paul Wilson's Pelts into a gory, sleazy, and surreal anti-fur tale. Rob Schmidt went all Schiavo on us and directed Right to Die. Peter Medak did the camp horror revisionist history flick The Washingtonians, in which we find out George Washington was an evangelical cannibal bent on making the early United States a nation of people-eaters (I kid you not). Finally, John Carpenter used an abortion clinic as the backdrop for his Pro-Life.

As a strategy for garnering more mainstream attention, this sudden interest in the political was a complete flop. First, certain issues, such as the abuses of the fur industry, just don't have the media pull of others. Second, Bush hate operates at a uniquely low level of discourse. If you want discuss abortion in a metaphorical way, you're going to find the level of discourse is intense, emotional, and profoundly personal. In contrast, comedians can score zingers on Bush without trying. I recently heard Bill Mahr get yuks from a studio audience simply by observing, "Does anybody listen to this asshole anymore?" Finally, for all its faults, Homecoming was earnest in its political intentions. That didn't make it a better or smarter movie; but it wasn't using the Iraq War as a semi-disposable prop, an attention-getter that honestly didn't impact the movie in any significant way. None of the "political" films in the second season seemed quite so genuine in their convictions. In many cases, such as Pelts, the issue was simply an excuse to thematically unify the mode violence the director wished to visit upon his characters. In other cases, such as Pro-Life, the director's political point of view was muddled or non-existent, leaving viewers confused as to just what the reason for bring up the issue was in the first place.

The irony might be that failing as propaganda made these flicks better as horror films. Pro-Life is a clumsy contribution to the artistic debate surrounding abortion. It is full of stereotypical stock characters, revolves around a concocted moral dilemma that pretty much makes a mockery of the real ethical implications of the pro-choice/pro-life split, and has a taste for gore and over-the-top violence that nakedly reveals the filmmaker's real interest in the story. Still, if you can get over the considerable tackiness factor, you'll find Pro-Life is more entertaining, disgusting, and thrilling than the ideologically-correct dullness of Homecoming.

The story of Pro-Life is an adequately functional graft of Carpenter's beloved siege plot with a post-Roe v. Wade Rosemary's Baby plot. On their way to work, two abortion clinic workers find a panicked girl fleeing unidentified pursuers along a secluded forest road. They take the girl to their clinic only to find out that she is preggers and wants the baby aborted. They also find out that the girl's daddy is a pro-life extremist (played with cool menace by Ron "Hellboy" Pearlman) whose history of threats and violence against the clinic have forced the clinic to put a restraining order on him.

As the plot unfolds, the young woman's baby grows at an alarming rate and the doctors quickly determine that whatever is inside the girl is not human. The girl claims that she was raped by a demon (in her backyard – the devil lives under her old swing set – no foolin') and the "child" is the off-spring of that unholy forced union. Meanwhile, outside, daddy and his sons get armed and decide to lay siege to the clinic. Things get bloody fast, including what might be the most tasteless torture scene I've seen in long time. If you're eating, skip the rest of this paragraph. Ok? Basically, one of the abortionists gets his fetus-vacuum, or whatever it is called, turned on him. But, since the doctor is a guy, Pearlman's character has to cut him a vagina first. Ugh.

Aside from some not-so-special effects and a trippy, but disbelief inducing, flashback demon rape sequence, Pro-Life zips along. The actors handle the material ably, with Pearlman and Bill Dow, a long-time television and film bit-part man who takes on the role of the clinic's chief physician, turning in noteworthy performances. Carpenter has done so many siege flicks that you'd think he'd be phoning them in at this point, but he manages to keep the clinic assault tense and energetic. There are some weird hanging threads in the script. I'm not sure if I was supposed to be making certain assumptions about the fates of certain characters or if the screenwriters just forgot to follow up. Either way, it is only the sort of thing you wonder about after the movie is over.

As a comment on abortion, the film is a mess. The crisis that propels the plot – "What if it's a demon baby?" – is the sort of "What if you kill the next Shakespeare/let the next Hitler live?" sort of thing that only passes for debate on the Internet. Other than serving as a plot point (and it ultimately isn't even that as the demon baby is too far along to abort pretty early in the film) and as a setting, the whole issue of abortion simply isn't all that important to the film. Either out of disinterest or an effort to complicate the issue by having characters come at it from novel perspectives, the film ends up simply burying the abortion issue in irrelevance. It quickly becomes clear that this flick takes place in some other world and the abortion we're discussing is a completely fantastical contrivance. But this is, I think, a good thing. Does anybody really watch an installment of Masters of Horror to help them get a grasp on one of the more contentious political issues of our time? And, if they did, would their point of view be intelligible anyway?

For many viewers the simple fact that it brings up abortion but then takes the whole thing so lightly will push this flick into the realm of the irredeemably tasteless. And there is little reason to argue against this view; the film's accomplishments are so modest and limited as to make arguing for its importance as a statement on abortion impossible. But, looking past the somewhat cringe-inducing attempt at a political subtext, Pro-Life is an entertaining installment the MoH series.

Movies: Aliens + Ghosts = Ghalians? Alosts?

Writing a review for Ghost of Mars feels strangely like talking about a talented retarded kid. What the kid does is not entirely unimpressive, within the extremely narrow context of his own limitations, but any objective assessment of his achievement is going to come off as ruthless criticism.

In its own clunky, uneven, and embarrassing way, Ghost of Mars isn't utterly stupid. (See how awkward this for me?)

When reviewers can't think of an intro because the film has robbed them of the capacity of insight, they leap quickly into a plot summary, like so:

In the distant future, humans have begun to colonize Mars. They are terraforming (that is sci-fi geek speak for "creating a reason for the actors to not have to wear big old un-photogenic space suits") the planet and a series of title screens at the beginning of the flick reveal that Mars's atmosphere is very nearly like that of Earth. These title cards also inform the viewer that Mars is home to a matriarchal culture. This is the first of several odd creative flourishes that aren't totally wasted, but also never completely develop into a significant subplot. In fact, one of the most interesting, and simultaneously frustrating, things in this flick is the number of odd plot devices and narrative techniques it introduces only to fail to develop them in any real way.

Into this skiffy setting, we place a western plot. Specifically, a Howard Hawksian plot. Carpenter seems to have a real thing for Hawks. He remade The Thing, which legend has it was directed via proxy by Hawks. Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 lifts liberally from Hawks's classic Rio Bravo. And now we've got Ghosts of Mars which lifts from Hawks's El Dorado. Not that this is a bad thing. If you're picking influences, you could do a heck of a lot worse.

The flick starts with Nattie "Species" Henstridge at a discovery hearing. Nattie is the sole surviving member of a crew of Martian cops who traveled to a remote mining town to secure wanted outlaw Ice "Three Kings was a highpoint" Cube and bring him back to the capital for trial. At the hearing, she begins to describe what went down on her ill-fated mission. This will begin a series of flashbacks and narratives within narratives that, at first, strikes the viewer as an interesting way to tell what would otherwise be a straightforward action story. However, it quickly becomes clear that the leaping between perspectives doesn't change the essentially objective nature of the story. We don't get into conflicting viewpoints or get our expectations messed with. It is, like the gender politics that get introduced only to ever get lightly touched on, just another example of the flick's unfulfilled potential.

What unfolded was this: Nattie and crew – including the fortune teller's daughter from Carnivale, Pam "Coffy" Grier, Jason "Why am I famous at all" Statham, and some dude who dies first – find most of the town's citizens have become possessed by the spirits of the primitive and warlike pre-colonization Martians. These Martians spend most of their time inflicting themselves with piercings, listening to their leader rant in Martian, and killing humans. The cops, along with a trio of gang members who came to spring Mr. Cube and a handful of the town's survivors, must battle their way back to safety (except we know they don't 'cause the film reveals from the start that Nattie is the sole survivor).

What follows is, depending on your standards, fun general carnage or brainless explosions and lots of running around. The standard battle plot is given a slight tweak in that every time a baddie is dispatched the ghost inside them goes looking for a new host. Consequently, taking down a bad guy is in many ways worse than letting them live. That said, this too doesn't come too much (another wasted opportunity) as the solution the heroes come up with is to shoot the crap out of the possessed folks and simply hope for the best.

In fact, that seems to the prevailing ethos of the flick in general: just shoot a lot and hope for the best. And, that plan works about as good as can be expected. Which is to say, not all that well. Both the characters in the flick and Carpenter would have done well to come up with a plan B.

Music: Zombies, demons, and, then, something really scary.

Are all you Screamers and Screamettes having a swinging and screamin' good weekend? As a little Sunday treat, here's two tunes to dig on followed by one that will either induce laughter or tears, depending on your tolerance for bad 80s retro crap. We'll start with the good stuff (that way you can cut out early if you want to avoid the neon-colored punchline).

This Sunday, we're giving you the ol' psychobilly one-two. Starting with Creepshow, a horror-tinged quartet from Ontario. Formed in 2005, Creepshow consists of Hellcat on guitar and lead vocals, Sickboy on the upright, the Reverend McGinty working the keyboard, and Matt Pomade in the engine room. The band spent their first year working on a live show that, by all reports, is a wild and rocking good time. After building a loyal fan-base, the dropped their first long-player: 2006's Sell Your Soul. Currently the quartet is touring with an alternate line-up. Frontwoman Hellcat is on maternity leave and her sister, Sarah Blackwood, is filling in. Here's the original line-up performing their short, but sweet, "Zombies Ate Her Brain."



Eagled-eyed viewers may have noted the appearance of a Creature from the Black Lagoon lobby card in the background of the breakfast scene. Now that's a band with excellent taste (no pun intended).

Keeping it all in the family, Hellcat's hubby, a cat who goes by the name Hooch, also fronts a psychobilly band. He's the face of The Matadors. Here's the man who knocked up Hellcat and his crew rockin' their "Creeping Demon."



Finally, last night, after grilling up a mess of ribs and drinking many a beer, a friend and I got to talking about the career of Kurt Russell. These things happen when you've had enough to drink. This led, as such conversations should, to a the topic of Big Trouble in Little China. And that led, of course, to us popping said flick into the old DVD player. Until last night, I had not noticed that director John Carpenter is not only the man behind the camera on this picture, he's the dude responsible for the very, very 80s soundtrack and he can be heard singing the closing credit theme song. Screamettes and Screamers, I present to you John Carpenter's overlooked masterwork: the music video for "Big Trouble in Little China."

Movies: Three ring circus.

In his super-sized tome Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace describes a video that kills anybody who watches it. When the terrorist who made the tape is asked why he created such an odd weapon, his reply is that it was designed to kill only Americans. He claims that only Americans would, knowing that the tape will kill them, watch it anyway. He thinks a uniquely American combination of jaded thrill-hunger and media addiction makes the citizens of the United States particularly vulnerable to such a weapon. In this review, we'll be watching Wallace's theory in action by looking at three movies that feature movies that kill: Cigarette Burns, Ring Two, and a short film called Rings, which is featured in the extras of the Ring II DVD.

Let's start with Cigarette Burns. This short flick (clocking in at under an hour in length) was John Carpenter's contribution to Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series. I don't get Showtime, so I'm just now catchin' up to the rest of y'all.

The title refers to the circular marks that appear in the upper corner of films to communicate to the projectionist that it is time to change the reels. The era of digitized filmmaking, distribution, and projection is slowly, but unavoidably, sending the cigarette burn on its way to becoming a historical film studies artifact on par with live piano accompaniment. Which brings us to an interesting thread that tends to run through almost all of these "media products that kill" films. The media products in question are almost always quaintly outdated. Despite the 21st century setting, the Ring flicks all revolve around a video cassette, not a DVD. The madness inducing flick in Cigarette Burns appears on these giant, old-school film spools. Even the imagery in both the Ring video and the film within a film in Cigarette is notably retro: they are both bad imitations of the silent era surrealist landmark work Un chien andalou. I don't know if this is a product of the slow trip from concept to finished film versus the rapid manner in which media platforms evolve. Technology moves faster than culture these days. Maybe it has to do with nostalgia on the part of filmmakers for the mediums they fell in love with versus the mediums they now work in. There needs to be a sort of magically dangerous black-box quality to a medium for people to feel something spiritual is happening within it. Filmmakers, having seen the guts and innards of modern filmmaking might need to look back towards their own first encounters with the medium in order to evoke that awe-filled ignorance. Perhaps the ever-improving quality of formats is to blame. As playback improves, the artifacts of transmission that were once ignored are eliminated in the quest for an illusion of a truly un-mediated experience. This makes it difficult to visually represent the medium itself. That is to say, DVDs lack the lines, the static, the hissing, the stuttering flicker, the things that made you aware you were watching a video or film. Think of something like the Ring and you realize the ghost is identified with the medium's limitations. The ghost is static and jagged cuts and artifacts left by tape damage. Perfect fidelity doesn't leave you any room for hauntings.

But I digress, Cigarette Burns involves an art house theater owner who is hired by a creepy rich dude (played with typical slimy grace by Udo Kier) to find the only remaining print of the film La Fin Absolue Du Monde. This film was shown once in a Paris film festival and it drove the audience into a violent, insane frenzy. The French government seized the film and destroyed it. Or so they thought. Turns out Udo's hip to the fact that a copy of the film still exists. How? See if you can follow this: Udo knows a copy of the film still exists because he keeps an angel chained in a room off of his study. This angel was captured and mutilated to make the infamous movie. As such, it is bound to the print of the film and, if all the prints had been destroyed, the angel would no longer be bound to this plain of existence, or something like that. In desperate need of the money, the theater owner takes the gig.

Cigarette Burns suffers from the 50-minute format of the television series. There is a substantial subplot involving our hero's dead wife and his vengeful father-in-law that is compressed to the point of becoming a plot detail instead of genuine character development. The smaller scale of the project as requires that characters relentlessly push towards the conclusion of the story, often at the expense of suspension of disbelief. For example, seeing a captive angel with his wings chopped off doesn't a) give our hero pause about working for Udo or b) convince him of the reality of the film he's looking for. He takes it as he'd take a gig to find one of the several pairs of ruby slippers used to make the Wizard of Oz.

The film also suffers from somewhat clumsy borrowings. At one point in his search, our hero stumbles across a cult of Fin worshiping snuff-film makers. The scene belongs in Hostel II and is such a bad fit here that the film doesn't even bother to explain how our hero gets out of it. The plot also reminds me of the film-studies-monograph-meets-horror-novel Flicker, though, if it was a source, it is not listed as an inspiration. The use of the circular cigarette burns as a visual motif obviously echoes The Ring. Finally, the film within the film reminds me, as I mentioned earlier, of the Ring video and Un Chein. Why do all killer movies look like bad NIN videos? Wouldn't it have been more interesting if, as in Flicker, the movie itself is not scary. The method to the madness could be in editing techniques, a secret series of cuts that creates a pattern the human mind can't handle or something. Just once, let the killer flick be a musical or a love story.

Overall, however, Cigarette Burns works. The mystery element keeps the viewer's attention. The acting is serviceable (with the exception of Kier's slimy collector, who is a pleasure). The gore is well handled. There's an especially nice bit when Udo threads his own intestines through a projector. The scene is not particularly bloody, but the concept is so wonderful that it transcends its execution. The ending is definitive and satisfying. A minor and effective work, but no masterpiece. Using my well-loved "Legends of Turkish Volleyball" rating system, this gets three out of five Sinan Erdems.

Unlike Cigarette Burns, the sequel to The Ring falls flat on its face. Directed by the Japanese filmmaker who created the original Ring, the second outing is a dull, pointless, and illogical waste of time that makes so little sense that it actually undermines the premise of original.

Ring Two finds the reporter, Rachael, and her son, Creepy Kid, living in the small Oregon town of Astoria. She is working for the local rag when a local teen dies under mysterious circumstances. Rachael figures out immediately that the boy was the victim of Samara, proto-long-haired Japanese evil ghost child. Rachael finds the tape responsible for the youth's death and destroys it. This, apparently, breaks the well-established rules of Samara's game and allows her to begin doing pretty much whatever the hell she wants to anybody at any time, regardless of tape watching or television proximity or any of the other things that marked the previous film. The result is that Samara appears and attacks seemingly at random. Instead of feeling that you're watching a plot unfold, you realize you're watching thematically-link but essentially random images pile up. Eventually, somebody tells Rachael how to get rid of Samara, but that doesn't work and some other, completely unrelated thing dispatches the little ghost girl (maybe – leave everything open for a trilogy, natch). This may rank as one of the sharpest declines in horror franchise history – right up there with Jaws II for worst follow-up up to a genuinely good film. In the "Traffic Circles of Washington DC" rating system, this lemon doesn't even rank a full Pinehurst Circle.

Just about the only reason to rent Ring Two is a short film you can check out in the special features section that I believe, if memory serves, is called Rings. Though only about 15 minutes long, shot on a virtually nil budget, and having a cast of nobodies, Rings approaches genuine moments of horror film brilliance. Shot as a sort of "link" between the first and second film, Rings tells the story of a young man who finds an underground subculture dedicated to exploring the mysteries of Samara and the killer video. These groups expose their members to the video tape and then record what happens during the 7-day countdown. When the experiences of being a video victim get too intense, the tape is passed along to another member in the group. Our new recruit, hungry for new thrills, is determined to take the Samara video death trip further than any other videonaut has gone before.

During the course of the short film, we get to see how the subculture links with other groups over the Internet and even has developed their own slang. This, more than the random plot of the genuine sequel, speaks to the draw of the killer video/film concept, which is, really, the draw of horror films. How much can you take? It also harkens back to the concept I brought up at the beginning of this entry: how far can your own courage and wit hold out in the face of the unknown? Americans aren't especially thrill-hungry and media-addicted. After all, the Ring concept is as old as Wallace's book and has its origins in Japan. Instead, what Wallace failed to get as is a uniquely American faith that with a little planning, a bit of smarts, and some guts, you beat anything. Can you outsmart and contain the danger or are somethings not meant to be explored? Americans clearly believe the former. Does anybody doubt that, in the real world, if hipped to the existence of something like Jason, that American teens would be buying up Jason as Che t-shirts and going to Camp Crystal Lake in droves to get photos of the deathless mass murderer? Wouldn't somebody have tried to contain and exploit Jason in a sort of mass murderer Jurassic Park?

This is classic stuff. Unlike the protagonists of Ring Two who are essentially victims who get battered around until they accidentally stumble on a solution, the kids in Rings are genuine actors in their own story, trying to beat Samara at her own game, and this sets up real dramatic tension. With the concept behind Rings, the people in charge of the franchise had the real sequel that needed to be told. Instead, they wasted the chance. In the unlikely event of a third Ring flick, they should revisit this wonderful short. Using the "Bands of Gary Moore" rating system, this short film gets a full Thin Lizzy.