Movies: Without a paddle.

So Joel Schumacher.

Yeah, I know. Right?

So, this cat starts his directorial career with a Lily Tomlin comedy based on a not-comedic Richard Matheson novel.

He delivers two '80s classics in a row - St. Elmo's Fire and The Lost Boys - and INXS's "Devil Inside Video" (not to mention the stylistically sharp Flatliners).

But before all that, he turns his hand to a stateside attempt at a Euro style sex farce featuring swinger semi-incest.

Then, of course, there's the weird Falling Down, a the sheep in wolf's clothing film that, despite its clear plotting that D-Fens was nuts from the jump, became a political rally point for the sort of genre-guzzling white male middle class jackass who takes a factory-standard antinomianism from every creative work they see as an excuse to play the victim and point out that they're smart enough to read something into a film.

Flashforward to the his bizarro world kamikaze takes on the Batman mythos. Like Burton, Schumacher was smart enough to realize Batman was a pop icon evolved from thousands of influences, serving the needs of millions of fans, rather than, say, a "realistic" figure. Unfortunately, Schumacher seems to have been open to every crappy influence, every shitty idea. The day-glo disasters he delivered are rightly reviled and I can only hope that when the inevitable "rediscovery" happens, by bloggers of future desperate to score hit numbers off the "scandal" of their original take on the films, I am dead and buried.

(Aw heck, somebody should just kick it off. Tired of the lame "Black Swan is teh horrez!!" meme snagging traffic digits, start penning your "Batman and Robin: the Definitive Take on a Legend?" post now.)

What comes after the plastic nipple Batman? Why, a flick about snuff films, of course. And then - what the hey! - a Dogme 95 remake of the first half of Full Metal Jacket!

I bring all this up to point out that Joel Schumacher, director of today's flick - the solid, if unremarkable Blood Creek (2009) - has actually had a hell of a career. And, yet, there are few directors less interesting.

He's an anti-autuer, the last of the workman directors: a weird holdover from the days when you got your assignment, you shot it, and you moved on. Watching a Schumacher movie is to be transported back to a time before French film theory elevated the status of director to make it the equivalent of Artist with a Capital A. He's a technically-proficient skilled laborer working with other skilled specialists to get a product to market. This is director as factory foreman.

And, ultimately, that's what Blood Creek feels like: a competently made product as devoid of the stamp of individual artistry as a lug bolt. That doesn't mean that its devoid of interest, or even beauty. If you've got a set of lug bolts, look at them with open eyes and you'll see a certain futurist glamour there. Still, that's a product of the inevitable gaps that occur whenever a mind considers the work of any human hand, not matter how standardized. It can't be said to reflect the artistic intentions of the guys and gals down at the RAD GmbH factory.

Blood Creek takes its inspiration from a classic American hoax. Inspired by then theories, now since proven, that vikings explored America nearly a century before Columbus's much celebrated "discovery," hoaxers in Oklahoma and Minnesota created rune stones: slabs of stone a few few long and about a foot wide, covered in "ancient viking runes." The first stones were discovered in the 1890s by farmers and sent to the University of Minnesota and Chicago (it's unclear if the farmers were in on it, or if they were the first victims of the hoax). Since the initial "discovery," stones popped up every few years, as late as 1967. The stones caught the public imagination in the 1910s and '20s. Stories of viking raiders doing savage battle with Native American warriors showed up in newspapers and pulp fictions (such a plot inspired a cycle of "Conan" stories, for example). However, nearly every reputable linguist and historian has declared the stones fakes. This doesn't stop hobbyist and local boosters from touting their authenticity; but as much as I think it would be awesome, the stones are utter bullshit.

That said, here's the link - part of the original defense of the hoax was that scholars couldn't translate the stones because the farmers who found it, not knowing the value of what they'd discovered, used the stones to build their farms. In the case of the most famous stone, it was said to have been used as the stepping stone to the discoverer's granary. This alleged abuse left the stones illegible to experts, thus negating the experts' testimony.

Here's the narrative hook of Blood Creek: During the Depression, Nazi scholars were sent all over the US to use the rune stones that rube farmers have built into their farms to conduct an ancient ritual that would put the ultimate occult power into the hands of the rising Nazi party. One such mission goes pear shaped, and the Nazi occultist is trapped on the farm he was sent to. Decades later, two brothers on a mission of revenge assault the farm and unknowingly unleash the seemingly undying occultist.

Zombie horses show up too.

I'll be the first to admit that the log line sounds promising in a trashy b-movie sort of way. And, honestly, it's hard to imagine that anybody picking this film up won't find enough to keep themselves interested. The visuals are strong; imported talent Darko Suvak (who, oddly enough, did cinmo duties on 8MM 2) washes the screen in inky blacks, deep blood reds, and muted yellows. Go-to-Nazi Michael Fassbinder does as good a job as one can do buried under make-up: the Nazi magi needs to carve runes into himself to keep going, so his body is a nasty patchwork of decay and black metal scar-graffiti. Like so many plots involving magic, the whole moves forward on a series of periodically introduced "oh, I forgot about this rule, but . . ." moments that will either count as world building or a cop out depending on your personal preferences.

What's the take away? I've had Blood Creek in the to-be-reviewed queue for something like a month now. It's been sitting there so long because I simply couldn't find enough to say about it one way or another. It's a film that exists beyond criticism by virtue of the fact that it has this dumb, mute, rock-like factuality. It's there to fill a segment of time. There's nothing else to be said about it.

Well, one more thing. On the directors commentary, Schumacher discusses the effort required by the actors to perform some of the more physical scenes. As he talks, he drops this fabulous line about his feelings regarding asking the actors to do demanding things: "That's great filmmaking, unfortunately." Three of those words totally apply to Blood Creek.

Books: "And right away, I was scared. We were all scared."

In his new book, The Lampshade, journalist Mark Jacobson investigates the origins of lampshade made out of human skin: a lampshade that was purchased for $35 at a yard sale in New Orleans and may be one of the infamous lampshades that Ilsa Koch (inspiration for Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS) allegedly constructed for her husband out of the skin of Jews slain in Buchenwald. The majority of Jacobson's investigation focuses on the possibility that this grisly artifact was a product of the Holocaust, but he also investigates the possibility that it might be a native product of New Orleans voodoo culture. From gallery owner and "biological and transgressive" artist - meaning he makes art out of biological matter, including parts of humans left over from medical dissections and autopsies - Andy Antippas, Jacobson learns about the Ekoi, "a warlike culture from Nigeria known for painting large, flowery murals and making giant masks, often from human skin."

Armed with slender lead, Jacobson searches database of the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy Project, which contains digital records of the French slavers that trafficked Africans through the bustling slave auctions of Louisiana from 1719 to 1820. He finds a record of just two Ekoi slaves sold at auction in New Orleans. One, a woman named Felix, was sold for $430 in 1792. The extensive records the French slavers kept contained the following comment on the sale: "Woman is pregnant."

Oddly, the name links with a story Jacobson heard from New Orleans music legend Dr. John. According to the good doctor, a Creole regular at the Saturn bar was a voodoo practitioner of sorts and he was well-known for making masks out of human skin. "Slip them right over your head, " Dr. John tells Jacobson. "Give yourself a whole new face." This strange character's name is, curiously enough, Cheeky Felix.

Could Cheeky Felix be the great-times-ten grandson of the slave woman Felix? Was there some bizarre family tradition of Ekoi flesh-mask making that was passed down from generation to generation for nearly three centuries? Jacobson's curious, if not totally sold, and he attempts to find Cheeky Felix. Dr. John tells him that the Neville brothers - yeah, believe it or not, the Neville "the Meters" brothers - might know where Cheeky Felix is.

This turns out to be a dead end for Jacboson. The Neville brothers are apparently not big flesh-mask types. But Jacobson's interview, in which the brothers Neville discuss New Orleans urban legends and the strange role horror cinema played in segregated New Orleans, leads to a surreal appearance by ANTSS's favorite monster: the Gill-man from the Black Lagoon. Here's Jacobson:

I gave Cyril the short version of the lampshade story and he was interested but again insisted that he had little to add. "Well," he finally allowed, "there was the Gown Man. If our mother wanted to keep us home, she'd tell us about the Gown Man. He was this big white guy in a hospital gown, and he'd snatch you off the street, put you under his arm, and take you over to the dissection room at Tulane University medical school. They'd pull of your skin and you'd get chopped up by medical students, practicing their autopsies."

"They had the Needle Man, too. Supposed to shove a six-inch needle in your eye, suck your brain right out from the socket," Aaron Neville chimed in.

Showtime was approaching and Cyril looked about ready to say good-bye when he said, "There is this one thing. Don't know if it helps you or not, but when we were kids our parents used to send us to this Boy Scout camp y the Lake. We'd play ball and that, but on Wednesdays we went to the movies because that's the day they set aside for black people to go to the movies.

"They always showed these horror movies, like Attack of the Crab People. Creature from the Black Lagoon. The usual shit, trying to scare us, but the movies were so corny, we'd just laugh. Then there was this one time the movie came on and you could tell from the first second this wasn't going to be the same old thing. The film was all messed-up-looking, with these scratches in it. At first you didn't see anything. It looked overexposed. Then you saw these people coming out of what looked like a giant hole. These skinny, skinny people, their eyes sunk deep inside their head. They were wearing what looked like striped pajamas. They showed these dead bodies, stacked up. And right away, I was scared. We were all scared. Because we knew this wasn't something fake. It was real. Remember that Aaron?"

He nodded.

"Then they had these other people, marching by. And I think I saw that thing you're talking about - a lampshade they said was made of human skin. That was really scary."

"You're talking about footage from Buchenwald. The Buchenwald concentration camp," I said.

"Some concentration camp, that was for sure," Cyril answered. "Long as I live I'll never forget those pictures. Give me the chills thinking about it even now. Because there are two things about seeing that movie that have always stayed with me.

"First of all, I couldn't believe white people would do that to other white people. But even more than that was the question about why they picked that particular Wednesday to show that particular movie to us - the kind of message they were trying to send."

Movies: His son killed Hitler.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact.

Sheldon Roth is the father of director and actor Eli Roth. Over at Patheos, an online religious journal, Roth has an interesting post about what it felt like to see his son assassinate Adolf Hitler in the spelling-challenged film Inglourious Basterds.

From the post:

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, Inglourious Basterds. I watched my son, in his character of "The Bear Jew," machine-gun the Fuhrer's face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief, and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

And later:

It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one's life. Feelings are just as much reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real -- they cannot be dismissed because the story is "historically inaccurate."

Quentin Tarantino understood that it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded, and dies a forgotten work. So, where do Inglourious Basterds and my reactions fit into this picture?

At Passover we read of the sages who urge us to tell the tale of the Exodus tirelessly -- one cannot say enough to describe that devastation in the lives of the Hebrews. However, time has laid dust on the tongue's capacity to be fluent in those events. How historically accurate is the story most Jews repeat not once, but twice a year, for some of us even four times, every year of our lives? Reciting the plagues of Egypt is quaintly interesting, but watching Eli turn his armed fury on Hitler in a cinematic oven of burning Nazis is awesome and much closer to my own history.

The Holocaust provides anew an endless capacity to relate Jewish history. I am in my 70s, and all my life I have studied the Holocaust. But I am still startled by the unthought-of newness of stories. I cannot hear enough; it never ends. Inglourious Basterds partakes of the Passover injunction to tell our story. The feelings evoked while watching this film contain our history -- personal and group. The film, though not "factual," represents a psychological reality. This psychological reality is a fact, not empty fantasy. Uncannily, unbidden, a gift-giver, Eli was acting out my dreams, dreams based on my life -- through a film.

Link Proliferation: "Many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore."

Somebody Might Get A Head, But Someone Might Get Hurt

Boston.com interviews Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. Dickey's new book explores the wonderful world of 19th Century psuedoscience and some of phrenologies more lurid aspects.

From the interview:

IDEAS: Whose skulls made for the most inviting targets?

DICKEY: The three categories of individuals who were most interesting for finding out about the human mind were criminals, the insane, and geniuses, in the sense that they represented the extreme versions of the human mind .... It was easy enough to get the heads of criminals and the insane. Nobody wanted these, really. You could go to any asylum cemetery and root around and not be bothered, or hang out at the gallows and scoop up an executed criminal. Those two were pretty easy. Getting the heads of geniuses proved to be considerably more difficult.

IDEAS: Just how common was grave robbing for phrenology?

DICKEY: It was probably not too common, though significant enough to be a recurring theme. I think it was really more the fear that this was happening on a much more widespread basis, especially in Vienna, where phrenology began. Among detractors of phrenologists, there was something close to a panic about people’s heads being stolen from the grave. Franz Joseph Gall, the guy who invented it - he was very clear that he didn’t take heads illegally. He got them all through legitimate means, although he said at one point, “If I had Gabriel’s killing sword, Kant and Goethe would have to watch out.”

How Green Were the Nazis?

If you haven't yet discovered the joys of online book retailers AbeBooks' "Weird Book Room," then you need to check it out.

This weeks selections include such fabulous tomes as How Green Were the Nazis?, The Haunted Vagina, and The Waterless Toilet: Is It Right For You?.

Jung, Man, There's No Need to Be Sad

The NY Times has an interest piece on the publication of Carl Jung's "Red Book": the surreally mystical quest narrative/dream journal/psychadelic puzzle that's been locked away from general public for about a century. From the article:

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

The story includes a beautiful multimedia slideshow of book.

Movies: Over and out.

I have a soft spot for movies that pit their supernatural baddies against members of the armed forces. Properly done, the militarization of the victims of a horror film imparts a sense of genuine conflict. When a bunch of boozed up co-ed nymphomaniac camp counselors find themselves the target of an eight-foot tall semi-undead mass murderer, the action that follows resembles either a ritual sacrifice or the relentless grind of a factory farm meat processing plant. But, replace those teens with a squad of soldiers and you've suddenly got a ball game. The presence of significant levels of firepower, a pre-existing command structure meant to handle decision-making in a crisis, the willingness and capacity to meet violence with violence, training that facilitates teamwork between tactical assets, and an assumed minimal-level of individual competence all suggest that, whatever the flick might throw at them, the soldiers have a real chance at surviving.

Of course, this perception is largely illusory. My wife's mother likes to say, "God never gives you more trouble than you can handle." Horror films work on the opposite premise: The danger you face must always be greater than your capacities. Usually this works through a simple logic of escalation. Evil always rises to the occasion. If you've got a bunch of teens on a summer holiday, then a serial killer will come after them. Replace one of the teens with an ex-cop packing a .44 Magnum and the standard-issue serial killer will upgrade to a tribe of mutant cannibals. Dump the teens, remake the cop into a British soldier, add a half dozen other troopers, and the cannibal tribe will transform into werewolves. And so on and so on until you've got the entire military of a nation on one side and a giant city-stomping monster on the other.

But bigger baddies only get you so far. There's a pragmatic cap on the logic of perpetual escalation. Eventually you end up trafficking in such enormous levels of destruction that it becomes virtually impossible to conceptualize a threat that could withstand the onslaught. One workaround for the escalation problem is to hamstring the troops. You can give them incompetent leadership, place them in a training context that requires they have fake weapons, or cast "weekend warrior" National Guard types as your military personnel. Clever directors can also exploit the martial assumption that superior firepower, expertly applied, is what every situation calls for. Pit the troops against a virus, ghost, psychic phenomena, or other un-shootable thing and you've pretty negated their major advantage. Regardless of how it's done, we know on some essential level that being soldiers won't actually help the film's protags.

Still, the idea that being soldiers should matter is crucial to carrying off a good army versus monster flick. We have to feel that we're watching humanity's last line of defense, the people you'd call to handle this sort of thing, do real battle. If the mechanics of the plot are too naked visible, the actions of the characters take on an insignificance that fails to grab us.

The 2008 mercs versus monsters flick Outpost starts as a serviceable horror/actioner. But the logic behind its villainous otherworldly sci-fi Nazi immortals (not actually "zombies" in any conventional sense of the term, as is often stated) so overwhelms the agency of the soldiers of fortune at the films core that the flick's stripped down structure tips from pleasingly Spartan to smotheringly arbitrary. What starts as tension devolves into a forced march. There's plenty of gunfire, gore, and a rich layer of pulpy technobabble to act as eye glue. But once the audience has grokked that the actions of the protagonists don't have any effect on the plot's direction, the narrow pleasures of the film are undermined by the sneaking suspicion that they're just waiting for the film to run out of bodies.

The film starts with a pleasingly bare bones plot. The representative of a mysterious and unnamed cabal of investors pulls together a seven-man team of mercenaries to retrieve an unidentified item from a long-abandoned World War II Era bunker in an unnamed Eastern European country. This lack of information gives the flick a user-friendly, almost videogame-ish feel that makes up for in narrative efficiency what it lacks in depth. (Some of the deleted scenes available on the DVD include extended sequences that build character backstory and motivation, but director Steve Barker wisely left such distractions on the cutting-room floor).

Shortly after their arrival at the target, the crew is fired upon from dense woods surrounding the bunker. Convinced that they're outgunned, they hunker down. As they explore the bunker, they crew begins to fall prey to a seemingly unstoppable enemy who, despite the mercs best defenses, slips in and out of the bunker, killing with impunity.

In the meantime, their employer reveals that the target of their search is a "unified field generator," a bizarre bit of strangely Buck Rogers-ish tech that sits at the heart of this otherwise straightforward run and gun. Though I recall many Brits bemoaning the historical inaccuracies of American flicks, the backstory regarding the UFG shows that Americans have no monopoly on bad history or science. Attempting to explain the UFG, the employer explains that four forces govern the behavior of matter in the universe. He doesn't say what they are, but so far, so good. He explains that unified field theory explains the link between these forces. Then, he goes of the rails. Basically, in this film, the unified field acts like the "one ring to rule them all" of time and space. With a unifed field – which is less a mathematic explanation of the links between nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism than a new super energy – people could bend the rules that govern physics. We're told that Einstein was working on the unified field until he saw the detonation of the test a-bomb at Los Alamos. Worried about its destructive potential, he stopped working on it. (In fact, Einstein wasn't at the Trinity test, the a-bomb has little to do with unified theory, and the famed physicist never stopped working on unified field theory.)

The Nazis, it turns out, were ahead of the curve on the UFG and used the unified field to experiment on their own troops, turning them into silent, shambling things that can teleport, become solid or immaterial at will, and exist in a sort of timeless neverwhere outside of their bodies (which are piled up, perfectly preserved, in a cell in the bunker).

The rest of the flick follows our ever-dwindling crew as they slowly come to terms with truth about their unbeatable foes and getting soundly thrashed by Nazi ghosts from beyond time and space.

Though somewhat formulaic, the pick gets creativity points for its innovative and quirky monsters. I suspect the repeated use of "zombie" in reviews and commentary about this flick has to do less with intellectual laziness than with the fact that they're virtually impossible to classify using standard horror beast taxonomies. Furthermore, even in its less innovative aspects, the film's shot with a crisp confidence that carries the viewer over the less interesting bits. The acting is well handled, though nobody is given much beyond broad character types to deal with.

Ultimately, the real problem with the flick is that you can practically see the characters' strings being pulled by the director. For all the shouting and firing, characters are powerless to stop what comes their way. This powerlessness drains the fight and kill scenes of their drama and raises questions about the seemingly nonsensical way in which the Nazi unified field ghosts, or NUFGs, behave. (Even the script gives a nod towards this problem by having a character wonder aloud why the seemingly invincible NUFGs are taking so long to kill them all. He receives no explanation.) The end result is a sort of viewer indifference.