Movies: Put the "psycho" in psycho-plasmics.

Fun fact: Search for "brood" in IMDB and your first hit is not David Cronenberg's 1979 classic, but that long-suffering staple of latch-key kid entertainment The Brady Bunch. What's attracting IMDB's search engine to the story of a lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls (though, only two very lovely girls, really) is the fact that the show's working title was The Brady Brood.

I bring this up because, having found that quirk of the system and having recently re-watched The Brood, I've been replaying plots of The Brady Bunch in my head, but mixing in elements of The Brood. Like, say, everybody's on vacation in Hawaii and one of the boys has bad luck 'cause of a stolen Tiki idol. Only his luck gets so bad that Carol goes insane and starts playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with Mike using psycho-plasmic simulacrum Jans as proxy murderers.

They pretty much all end with "Carol goes insane and starts playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with Mike using psycho-plasmic simulacrum Jans as proxy murderers."

As much as I'd love to review those imaginary episodes of The Brady Brood, I think the blog-o-sphere will be much better served by me posting yet another review of David Cronenberg's film.

Having recently revisited Videodrome, I've been on a Cronenberg kick. Brood is the second film in Cronenberg's Body Horror Period, dating from 1975's Shivers to 1986's The Fly. With the exception of a drag racing pic (the perfectly functional but fairly forgettable Fast Company) and possibly The Dead Zone, the BHP flicks are sciffy influenced horror pics that together make up cinema's most extended riff on how completely gross the human body can be. For a little more than a decade, audiences could rely on Cronenberg's characters to get infected with bizarre diseases, sprout disturbingly sexualized orifices in their tummies, learn to breed through budding, vomit out acids, and otherwise be really really gross. It isn't even a matter of gore. Instead, it's grimly Rabelaisian – a riot of exuding, devouring, spurting, oozing, prolapsed humanity.

Eventually it is the H and not the B that fades from Cronenberg's work. Naked Lunch and Crash are as full of mutants and mauled forms as any Cronenberg fan could hope. What that aren't is straight up sciffy horror in the same way the BHP flicks are.

By the standards of other BHP flicks, Brood is remarkably restrained. The flick opens on a demonstration of "psycho-plasmics," an ill explained psychotherapy that, from what the viewer sees, involves a shrink – one Dr. Hal Raglan – holding conversations with the patient while acting out the role of some figure crucial to the patient's pathological history. Curiously, somebody mentions that Raglan's an M.D., which would mean that he's not actually a psychotherapist. But unorthodox credentials would be the least shady thing about Raglan's operation. There's something cultish about psycho-plasmics. Raglan, in becoming everybody who was ever important to you, becomes literally your all. The vague nature of psycho-plasmics gives it the aspect of a theological doctrine rather than a scientific theory. Finally, the patients and caregivers seem to be charged with an almost sinister anticipation, as is psycho-plasmics was a prophecy of something huge coming down the pipe.

Thrust into this snake pit is one Frank Carveth, played by Art Hindle with the affectless apathy that passed for "Method" in the 1970s. Frank's estranged wife, Nola (the last gasp of Samantha Eggers quality film career before becoming a familiar face in the floating cast of B-list guests in TV-land – her next role was on Fantasy Island), is a patient of Raglan. This has made divorcing her difficult as she spends all her time locked away on the doctor's isolated treatment campus. The need for a break is given extra urgency when Frank notices that Candice, their daughter, has returned home from a visit with mommy covered in bruises and bite marks. Frank appeals to his lawyer, but he's told that there crap all one can do to separate a child from its mom.

In the meantime, Frank investigates the mysterious Raglan and finds some graduates of his psycho-plasmics program have pronounced physical effects, most notably unusual forms of cancer. However, since no connection can be made between these ailments and Raglan's treatments, nobody can do anything.

Frank's frustration turns to fear when his mother-in-law is beaten to death with a meat-tenderizer by a pint-sized assailant. Frank's father-in-law meets with the same fate before Frank survives an attack and the police can recover the mini-murderer's body. A visit to a shockingly calm corner reveals that these sawed-off killers lack standard internal organs, have no reproductive capacity, and show no marks of having been produced in the standard "mommy and daddy's special grown up time" method. On a personal note, I love this scene for the remarkably mild interest all those in the coroner's office show in what is a completely new species of humanoid life. They know it is important, but mainly as an odd clue in an already odd case. Even the coroner, presumably the first to realize that something truly historical has happened, seems only mildly interested: "A new humanoid species of life. Nifty. I'll write it up tomorrow. I want to get home before 7 tonight. They're airing a very special Starsky and Hutch, with guest star Samantha Eggers."

Eventually, the mutant midgets kidnap Candice from her school classroom, after murdering the teacher in plain sight of all the now utterly traumatized students. The audience puzzles it all together just a little ahead of Frank. These munchkins are doing the bidding of Nola. Frank dashes the psycho-plasmic research center. There he confronts Raglan only to learn that Nola spawn these things from herself. They are the physical manifestation of her emotional needs. Raglan proposes a plan to get Candice back, but it will require Frank and Raglan enter the brood's lair and confront the increasing unstable Nola.

Which goes just fine.

I'm kidding – all manner of chaos, some fair amount of death, and a nice sequence of Nola birthing a midget-pod bud from her tummy. It's a suitably grim and discomforting end.

Far more linear than Videodrome or post-BHP like Naked Lunch, The Brood is built along fairly conventional horror lines. There's even something a bit retro in its over-the-top misogyny. The admitted product of Cronenberg's own nasty divorce and custody battle, the women are portrayed, in order, as an abusive bad-mother figure who spawns mutant pod people out of her tummy, a sharp-tongued drunk rich diva type, and a witness to Frank's humiliation at the hands of Nola. Only the young girl, Candice, who is more of a prop than a full character, is unquestionably good. By contrast, all the men are schlubs, victims of their families, their wives, their unlucky fates, cancer, whatever. Even the sinister Raglan proves to have been attempting to contain and control Nola and her offspring. Despite this regrettable knuckle-dragging, The Brood is more successful than some of the later films in delivering reliable genre pleasures. By working within narrowing dramatic ambitions and focusing on an earnestly felt (if philosophical dubious) hatred, Cronenberg made a picture that is darker and more intense than some of the more experimental and intellectually naunced films that would follow. In this sense, The Brood may be a film that appeals more to the horror fan than the fan of Cronenberg.

Before we go, let's talk about Ollie.

Now generally, I'm not the cat to cult out over some now relatively discarded film star from the 1960s and 1970s. There are those who get swampy in their nether regions over the z-grade stars that dot the steaming pile of grindhouse cinema like flies repeatedly alighting on a particularly ripe cow patty. That's never really been my bag. I lack the imaginative faculties necessary to turn the dross of repeated incompetence into stylistic gold.

That said, even I've got my little obsessions. Regular readers know, for example, that I'll watch just about any picture that features an alligator or crocodile, super-sized or not, giving humans a lesson in the contextual specificity of food chain dominance. Why? No idea. It's just one of those things.

Here's another weird critical blind spot of mine: Oliver Reed. Yeah, Bill Sikes from Oliver. That guy. Menacing even when he's trying to be calming, charming, or thoughtful, the young Reed always seemed to me like he might, at any moment, whip out a weighted walking cane and beat the crap out of somebody. Eventually, age softened him a bit, but never enough that he did carry with him the hint of seething. Even his role as Proximo, in 2000s Gladiator, hinged on the fact that you had to genuinely believe Reed could intertwine a worldly paternalism with bloodthirsty self-interest. Reed was perfect for that role in that he probably couldn't have done worldly paternalism without giving some sinister undercurrent.

His casting as Raglan in this flick is brilliant as it exploits the fact that viewers will almost immediately distrust him. (In fact, it takes some suspension of belief to allow that any patients would ever trust him.) Even when he turns out to be "hero" of sorts, his complex motives are murkily communicated by Reed's though a strange stiltedness, as if Raglan has carefully thought through everything he's saying and is now simply recalling the edited and cleaned up results. Is he trying to end Nola's reign of terror, protect her, protect him and his method? Did he see this coming as the ultimate result of psycho-plasmics or is he realizing this is all out of his control? Reed gives the character more life than he needs to carry out some fairly simple narrative duties. Good stuff, Ollie.

Oh and don't forget: the Tales from the Captcha contest runs until Friday. Enter and win fabu prizes!

Movies: The old new flesh.

First and foremost, even for it's early 1980s timeframe, the animated trailer for Cronenberg's 1983 flick Videodrome may rank as the single worst trailer in the history of film.



When I was young, one of the local theaters used to have this trailer for their on-going "Midnight Madness" screenings. It was a late-night showing that was always a double-bill of some shock-schlock thing followed by the The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In practice, everybody watched the first flick and then walked. It wasn't that the budding pyschotronic film cultists of my hometown disliked Rocky Horror. It was just a bad structure. If you really wanted to see TRHPS, then you got all dap, slid on a comfortable pair of fishnets, and slathered on your momma's best lipstick. Assuming you did all that, the last thing you needed to do was sit through some other flick, especially one that might have attracted a fair share on non-Rocky types not dressed like ten buck under-aged rent boys during Fleet Week. Consequently, except on the extremely odd nights when some large pre-planned party of Time Warpers would descend en masse and fill the seats, the film spooled out to a mostly empty theater.

That projectionist must have sat through Rocky Horror some four hundred thirty times. I suspect that there are special clusters of neurons storing every second of that film, coiled up like sleeping brain worms, in the gray matter of that poor projectionist. I wonder if he killed himself eventually.

But I digress.

To advertise this thrice-weekly cultural extravaganza, the theater had a customized cartoon trailer featuring a guitar-wielding rockstar who looked kind of like a neon green stalk of broccoli with a voice like a poor man's Wolfman Jack. He'd thrash out some bad pseudo-Zep riff and then howl. He'd give some banter about how rad Midnight Madness was. When it came time to say the names of the movies, his animated mouth would freeze open for a second and an obviously other voice, often one registering a clear gender disparity, would say, in the bored voice teenaged employees reserve for answering the phones of workplaces that pay minimum wage, the title of the first flick. Then Wolfman Whack's animation would kick back in and he'd threaten the audience with yet another showing of Rocky Horror. Behind Wolfman Whack, for the entire length of the trailer, was a visual effect that I'm pretty certain was achieved by filming a lava lamp for several days and then speeding up the result.

I bring his up because I feel the trailer for Videodrome would have made the creators of the Wolfman Whack spot, previously the most cringe-inducing bit of film marketing I knew, hesitate.

"Should we turn this in?"

"Maybe we should shoot another spot and go with another rocking piece of neon produce? That tested really well with Rocky Horror fans. There's that neon pink Swiss chard we storyboarded . . . "

"Who are we kidding? We don't have time to make a new trailer."

"Damn! If only we hadn't wasted all that time on that tongue animation bit! That was like twenty-six hundred man-hours. We're screwed. Do you call Cronenberg or do I?"

"Paper, scissors, rock?"

I just had to get that out of the way before the review proper.

Trailer not withstanding, Videodrome, an early entry in the now legendary output of David Cronenberg, is amazing.

I saw it ages ago and, when it arrived in its jaunty little red Netflix envelope, I was briefly concerned that time and tide, which wait for no film, will have dated the film, turning the brilliantly imaginative horror film I remembered in a time capsule museum piece.

More than two decades have passed since its premiere, and Videodrome is still as creepy, surreal, and puzzling as I remembered it.

As I suspect that many Screamers and Screamettes may be familiar with the flick already, let's make quick work of the traditional plot summary:

Max Renn, despite having one of those "cyberpunk" names that sound like they belong to sub-Robert Hill stable porn stars, is a high level executive at an on-the-rise television channel that has made a name for itself broadcasting extreme sexual and violent content. In his never-ending pursuit of new lows, Max stumbles across a scrambled broadcast of what appears to be snuff television: an endless series of men and women tortured and dispatched in a orange and black room. The show's called Videodrome.

Convinced that this insane show is the future of entertainment – at least until the masses coarsen again and need even more extreme shocks to get their kicks – Max attempts to hunt down the makers of Videodrome. The search becomes even more urgent when Max's lover, a radio help line host with a pain fetish and the even pornnier name of Nicki Brand, vanishes in her attempt to land a guest spot on the show.

Max's search leads him to a fanatical cult of television worshipers, lead by a dead charismatic media philosopher who communicates with the faithful solely through prerecorded prophecies and McLuhan-like aphorisms. From them, Max learns the truth about the mysterious torture show: it hides a mysterious signal that transforms the mind of those exposed to it. As Max's mind begins to disintegrate under the influence of this mutating signal, and his body begins to sprout new orifices and defensive mechanisms, his quest leads him to Spectral Optics, the mysterious creators of the signal. Trapped between the media-madness of the Cathode Mission and the techno-terrorism of Spectral Optics, Max becomes a pawn in a mad conspiracy to control the future of human evolution. Death, explosions, tummy-mounted vaginas, and techno-human biomechanical splatteriness ensues.

Now I'll be the first to admit that there's a lot about Videodrome that hasn't aged well. The fact that the plot's Philip K. Dick style nightmare centers around videocassettes and television broadcasts feels dated. Ironically, I don't think it is a tech issue. The cassettes that carry the toxic signal here seem no less sinister for being slightly archaic. They seem like the beta version of the contagion-carrying cassettes that would later be the viral medium of choice for Samara. In fact, the datedness of the tech kind works in its favor. In a way that, say, the 8-track and the vinyl record don't, the videocassette still has an aura of shoddy, illicit simplicity. Somehow an unlabeled cassette seems mysterious – anybody could have shot anything. An unlabeled DVD or CD-ROM just looks like a drink coaster. Rather, the datedness has to do with television as the metaphor of the ubiquity of media. There was a time, from say the late '40s to the early '90s, when you could think television represented the nth degree of media penetration. Now, in the age of Blackberries, Twittering, and Youtube, the idea that broadcast television represented the end of the real and the tipping point that tossed humanity into a completely Baudrillardian hyperreality seems, if not naïve, then at least a tad premature. Max, baby, you ain't seen nothing yet. There's also a few gaps in the narrative structure that jar once the shock of initial contact has worn off. (Admittedly, one could, I guess, claim these gaps were intentional products meant to communicate Max's deteriorating state of mind, but that seems like a cop out as narrative weirdness is regularly and overtly credited to Max's rising level of insanity, but simple lacunae aren't.)

Still, those flaws are minor compared to what works. First and foremost, the look of the film has actually grown on me. I like the look of this pic better than I did when I originally saw it. The flat, seediness of the images on the screen was unimpressive the first time I saw the film. I thought what Cronenberg managed to do was more notable in spite of the crappy production values. Now I've come around to thinking that the washed out, dead-feeling, aggressively unattractive look of the film is not only intentional, but an integral part of that crucial Philip K. Dick vibe he's getting at. Part of the crucial craziness of Dick's dark fantasies was the idea that these world- and century-spanning conspiracies could come to a head in the shoddy living room of some strung-out nobody junkie in a clearance-worthy suburb of a dead town. Videodrome has the same feeling. The sinister, perhaps apocalyptic media virus is product of this cruddy little lens grinding shop in a crap section of Toronto – not a bunch of suits in a skyscraping corporate HQ or a bunch of lab coats in some underground max-security research facility. And the opposing force, the fanatical church of television-worshipping postmodernist, is headquartered in a flea-bag homeless outreach facility; it's the kind of place that makes nice neighborhood get all NIMBY. It's also a prefect visual match for the acting of James Woods (doing an early version of the thing that Peter Weller would later ride into parody in Robocop and Naked Lunch) and Blondie's blunted affect depiction of a pain junkie.

Most importantly, Videodrome remains one of the few truly original horror films out there. Even if its media politics have aged slightly (and I'd make the case that this is not because the film was wrong, but that we've grown more naïve about media effects), it remains an example of what a new horror template might look like.

Pop horror, it seems to me, has a peculiarly nasty relationship with its own history. On one hand, the genre is overdetermined by a handful of master archetypes that artists and fans compulsively, almost neurotically return to. While, at the same time, the extensive depth that even the average horror fan brings to the table means that every new work is expected to innovate these archetypes, even when the ground is thoroughly and utterly eroded. The result is, too often, a massive body of stunted visions and a genre that proceeds into the future with a half-hearted, shuffling stagger. Innovation can't get too innovative, or we break what tepid magic these rest-home worthy phantoms still lay claim too. So, instead of new ideas, we simply pack more and more "relevance" into the same six or seven images. Archetypes like the vampire may be able to carry the anxieties of each successive generation, but we've piled them so high with ideological baggage at this point that they look less like dangerous predators of the dark id and more like comically overloaded bellhops.

In Videodrome, Cronenberg spawned new mythologies for new anxieties. He gave a new age its own monsters. And his template is so innovative that, even now, it has the nervous hum of the urgently new. Is it a sci-fi flick? The "mysterious signal" would seem to give the strange visions and surreal manifestations of Max a naturalistic explanation. But does it? The scientific explanation so defies the rules of physics and biology that the mystical ramblings of the TV church are equally sensible and (un)explanatory. So is it a supernatural horror film? The events in the film certainly aren't "realistic" in any sense, nor does Cronenberg seem particularly interested in convincing us that he's playing by any restrictive notion of the real. But what, then, of the possibility that Max is simply going bonkers? A possible interpretation, but not one that Cronenberg bothers to make certain. It is as if Davy boy says, "Hey, if it helps you sleep, then think what you want." The insanity defense is potentially valid, but neither definitive nor, most importantly, comforting. Even if Max did go nuts, wasn't that the point of the videodrome signal? Cronenberg built a movie where even realizing the main character made it all up doesn't mean that the monster isn't real.

Videodrome is mutant genre fiction at its finest. A hopeful monster of a flick that waits for a new generation of creators to spread its brilliantly adaptive qualities throughout the horror genre.

Honestly, y'all probably don't need me to say tell you this, but Videodrome is freakin' awesome.

Except for the ultra-shitty trailer.

PS – special thanks to the boys of Canadian Horror Cinema. The gents behind this young, but equally hopeful monster of a blog dropped a Videodrome in-joke into their blog the other day, sending me back to this awesome flick. Long live the new flesh: Support your up-and-coming horror bloggers!

Movies: In space, nobody can hear you groan.

Somehow – presumably because I was doing something I thought more important, like alphabetically arranging the forks in my utensil drawer or creating plans for a time machine fueled solely by my contempt for the revival of the skirt-over-leggings look – I managed not to see Jason X, the tenth installment in the interminable Friday the 13th franchise, in either the theaters or on DVD.

To my great puzzlement, that problem was rectified last weekend.

Jason X starts in bowels of the Crystal Lake Research Center, an institution that, while high-tech enough to contain an elaborate cryogenic facility, looks pretty much like an abandoned parking garage. Here, scientists have been holding the infamous and unkillable Jason Voorhees using state of the art incarceration tech – by which I mean he's held still by a handful of what appear to be bicycle chains. The head of this fine institution, one Dr. Hottie McFinal-Girl, intends to freeze Jason until such time as a proper disposal system can be developed for him. Unfortunately, her brilliant scheme is disrupted by Dr. Stupid (played by, of all people, famed art-horror director David Cronenberg, shown above, who, I assume, lost some drunken bet and was obliged to appear in this flick) and his crack team of highly trained soldier-victims. They want to take Jason to another location and study his remarkable regenerative properties. Dr. McFinal-Girl objects. Apparently Dr. Stupid's lab would be less secure, though that scarcely seems possible. What, they don't have bike chains at the Saratoga site? Jason, of course, busts free seconds after Dr. Stupid and company arrive. The soldiers, with all their guns and training, prove no match for Jason, now armed with one of his bike chains. Jason then chases Hottie to the cryogenic lab where he and she, through a series of misadventures, get frozen and, Buck Rogers-like, are thrown four centuries into the future.

Our lead icicles are found by a scavenger crew from Earth 2, where humans fled after years of environmental decay made Earth: Original Formula uninhabitable. The scavengers bring both of the frozen folks back to their ship: the Grendel. (We later encounter a ship called the Tiamat – in the future all ships are named by D&D players and it is not unusual to serve on ships with names like the S.S. Encumbrance Check.) They carefully thaw out Dr. Hottie. To her credit, she takes the news that she has just woken up four hundred years in the future and that everybody she knows, and even the plant she called home, are now dead with remarkable aplomb.

Jason, who thaws out on his own (because he's Jason, dammit, and it'll take a bit more than 400 years of exposure to absolute zero to keep him down), also takes the transition well. After several milliseconds of adjustment to his new, high-tech surroundings, he decides that this new context does not radically alter his core competencies, and he begins killing like his old self. After all, teens making whoopie is teens making whoopie no matter what century you're in. And where folks is making whoopie, Jason's got killing to attend to.

Mostly he relies on a future version of his trusty ol' machete, but he finds time to expand his repertoire to keep pace with the rapid changes around him: freezing a woman's face with liquid nitrogen and then smashing it off (in the future, people keep sinks of room-temp stable liquid nitrogen in their labs), impaling folks by dropping them on large drill bits, impaling folks on what appears to be some sort of space anchor.

As an aside, in many ways, Jason's machete is a symbol for the downward spiral of the entire franchise. The young, pre-zombie Jason was a tireless innovator of the fatal applications of garden impliments and construction tools. This was a trait he got from his mother, who, though blinded by murderous rage, found novel ways of dispatching teens. Though, even she seemed like some middle-class housewife once Jason hit his stride and was approaching McGuyverish levels of tool use. However, as time went on, Jason came more and more to rely on the old machete. In many ways, it became as much a part of his persona as the hockey mask. But there was a difference. The hockey mask, which didn't even arrive on the scene until the third flick, was an inspired bit of branding (if a bit of a rip from the less prolific Halloween franchise). The machete, however, is a concession to laziness. Why put in the extra effort when you can just chop away with the good ol' machete? Yep, the ol' machete never lets you down. It is as if, twenty years of unlife later, Jason's lost the fire in the belly. He can still kill as well as you please, but he doesn't want it any more.

As the bodies and contrivances pile up, eventually Jason gets nano-tech'ed up and appears as Uber-Jason – at least, that's how he's credited. This is a bit of a let down as the Uber-Jason is basically the same old unstoppable killing machine who likes to bash people around and whack folks with his machete. That's right. No laser eyes. No death ray from the palm. No missile launcher built into his chest. He gets his eye-color changed and they chrome some parts of him, but otherwise the transformation is shrug-inducing. He comes off like Iron Man's retarded baby brother.

Though somebody deserves some credit for trying to aggressively rejuvenate an increasingly stale series, the combination of genre elements in Jason X adds up to something less than the sum of its parts. The sci-fi trappings, which are only a shade better than a made-for-TV original, work against the horror genre – Jason seems incongruous and silly among the flashing lights and hissing, Trek-style doors. The efforts at self-aware humor – while providing one conceptually brilliant scene, the idea of trapping Jason in a holodeck-style simulation of Crystal Lake circa 1980 – kill the already weakened fright-factor. The gore seems more goofy than visceral; the change in context works against the recognition of frailty that makes slasher flicks work. We can imagine getting whacked in the head by an axe but when you've got to puzzle out exactly what it is somebody was killed with, your fear devolves into slight confusion.

Really, the only thing Jason X has going for it is the also the only convincing reason to rent it: the concept of putting Jason in space is just so bizarre that it has its own attraction beyond the actual elements of the film. There's a certain odd pleasure in watching such a strange and obviously bad concept play out. As such, Jason X is a lame movie that still has an undeniable charm of sorts. Using the justly controversial, but wholly appropriate Order of Battle in the Indochina Expedition of 1940, I'm giving this movie an overall score of the 9th Infantry Brigade, with a bonus 3rd Regiment Tirailleurs Tonkinois in recognition that the film is still kinda fun in a goofy sort of way.