Movies: There goes the neighborhood.

In extra features of the new-ish DVD release Jack Ketchum's Girl Next Door (the attribution added presumably to prevent folks from mistaking this brutal horror flick with the zany semi-raunchy comedy Girl Next Door), one of the screenwriters mentions that it took nine years to get the project to the screen and mentions that, at one point, he assumed the film would simply never get made. It isn't had to imagine why. Though I've never pitched a script before, I can see how this would be a hard sell.

Screenwriter: "Its about a girl who gets sent to live with her aunt after her parents die."
Producer: "Oh, a tragic angle."
Screenwriter: "Yeah. And her sister – she's got a little sister – who is in leg braces. Like polio kids had, you know?"
Producer: "Hmmm."
Screenwriter: "It's set in the '50s. It's all town carnivals and cars with fins and bikes with cards in the spokes. That sort of stuff."
Producer: "Like Wonder Years."
Screenwriter: "Sorta, but even earlier. The years leading up to the Wonder Years."
Producers: "Like Grease."
Screenwriter: "Right, but with younger kids. Think of the little bothers and sisters of the kids in Grease."
Producer: "Alight. I'm with you."
Screenwriter: "So the new girl comes to town and this young kid, our narrator . . ."
Producer: "Our what? You didn't say this was a religious picture!"
Screenwriter: "No. Narrator. The dude the voice over is coming from . . ."
Producer: "Oh, right. I thought you said something else."
Screenwriter: "What did you think I said?"
Producer: "Nothing. Never mind. So this so-called narrator boy . . ."
Screenwriter: "Yeah, so the narra . . . guy who talks to the audience, he falls for the beautiful new girl I town."
Producer: "A love story."
Screenwriter: "Kinda. They catch crayfish together and go to the county fair together."
Producer: "Very sweet. So what happens next?"
Screenwriter: "Next? Oh, the aunt who is taking care of the girl flips out and ties her up in the basement. She and her sons take turns physically abusing her. Eventually other neighborhood children are invited to join in. They cut her and burn her and rape her and stuff."
Producer: "Oh."
Screenwriter: "And she dies."
Pause.
Screenwriter: "Um. The end."

Based on Jack Ketchum's novel of the same name, The Girl Next Door has, joking aside, pretty much the plot I outlined above. After losing their parents in a car accident, tow young girls – Meg and Susan – end up in the care of Aunt Ruth, an embittered widower whose tenuous grasp on sanity in no way improve through the course of the film. Because Ruth's a crazy, her dislike of Meg and Susan quickly devolves into psychological and physical abuse, with then launches off a cliff into Hostel grade tortures. The central character is this drama isn't Meg or Susan, but David, the young neighbor who falls for Meg and ends up becoming a reluctant witness to her slow destruction.

In order to defend themselves from charges of exploitation, the filmmakers repeat, mantra-like, that their film is "based on a true story." The phrase appears in front of the film and is recited again and again in the extra DVD material. Whether being or not being loosely based on a historical crime automatically proofs one against exploitative tendencies is debatable, though one does need to go into that debate here: the film is, in fact, based on a novel that was itself a fictionalization of a true crime. This is a true story in the same way that the movie Psycho was the story of Ed Gein – in as much as it was an adaptation of a fictional work inspired by said murderers real crimes. I don't bring this up because I think it was wrong for artists to fictionalize real-life situations. In fact, the value in Ketchum's original work is that it brings what no documentary, non-fictional treatment can bring to such a subject: it allows the reader to get inside the head of a witness and possible collaborator in order to explore fully the dynamic of authority and its abuses, of leaders and their followers. And it did this so successfully that the quality of the work became its own defense. Ketchum doesn't need to obsessive remind people he's not exploitative because a reading of the book dispels the notion. The film, with its defensive mantra of "this isn't exploitation, it really happened," underscores how little the movie can rely on the same self-evident claim for seriousness.

The movie itself is well made. For a straight to DVD production, the flick is high-gloss. Gregory Wilson directs with a solid confidence that only occasionally strains to add intrusive POV shots that seem to exist solely to remind you a director is around. The plot is an efficient condensation of the novel which leaves most of the major plot points intact and earnestly attempts to get at the moral core of Ketchum's grim book. (Though the character of Aunt Ruth sometimes slips and mentions details that seem to be not from the book, but from the truly life crime on which the book is based. For example, in real-life, the girls' parents were alive and sending money to the women abusing their daughters. Ruth mentions how she's not getting paid enough to watch the girls – a flashpoint in the real case as she started to starve the girls at that point. In the context of the film, however, she's not getting paid anything at all to watch the girls.) Those deviations from the source are almost always smart moves that add value to the story in some way.

The problem with the film is that it ultimately fails to communicate what made the book more than a semi-serious exercise in shock aesthetics. By film uses a narrator as a framing device, but once the viewer is transported to the 1950s, the film becomes takes the sort of third-person objectivity most common to film as part of the nature of the medium. The book told us rather than showed us because the telling was the story. The film can only show us. A cast of stellar performers might have been able to communicate the shades of internal conflict we get in the book, but that's on the abilities of the cast here. No to say that they do a bad job. Meg's got a thankless role, spending most of the film being tortured really restricts what an actress can show, but TV regular Blythe Auffarth does as much as one can with such a role. Soap opera regular Daniel Manche does a praiseworthy job too. But, ultimately, this plot requires A-grade chops to elevate it beyond becoming a numbing endurance test and these kids just aren't that good. I must admit that I'm not sure anybody could have pulled it off. Still, the lack of that interior thought process, the inability to get in the skin of David, makes it too obvious. We see evil and recognize and suffer through it to the end. There's no evolution, no awakening to our understanding. The condensed plot exacerbates this thinness: David realizes almost immediately that this is all crazy and spends very little time wondering what his role in the crisis is. His journey to full morality is shortened to irrelevance for the sake of narrative compactness.

Despite the nastiness of some of the elements in the film, I believe the filmmakers when that claim they didn't set out to make an exploitative horror flick. If Girl Next Door falls into the loose pseudo-genre of torture porn, then it serves as a sort of boundary marker indicating the limit of moral serious one can bring to the mode. If Passolini's Salo is the genre's most stylistically accomplished example, then GND is the genre's most earnest entry. But, just as Salo's technical virtuosity couldn't save it from leveling off into a sort of spectacle of horror, the earnest intentions of the filmmakers get somewhat buried by GND's more hideous excesses.

Movies: Show some skin.

Counting the original short story, Dario Argento's Pelts, one of his contributions to the on-going Showtime Masters of Horror series, is third version of the story I've come across. The second was the comic adaptation of the same that appear in the pages of Doomed (reviewed, precious reader of my heart, in this very blog).

The plot of the original involves a trapper who, while checking his fur traps, comes across several bizarre little animals, the likes of which he's never seen before. Being a trapper, he immediately takes them home and skins them. Problem is that contact with these things brings doom: usually you maul yourself in some horrific and bloody way, but, sometimes, if you get lucky, you might end up getting it in a struggle with somebody close to you and you'll both do each other in. Joy! We watch the furs make their way up the fur trade chain, killing folks all the way, until, finally the furs put paid to a fur coat maker and the woman he wishes was his girlie.

Argento follows this structure loosely – the movie revolves around a collection of cursed pelts – but he expands on nearly every aspect of the story, in most cases expanding on the original in some significant way. First, Argento makes the fur coat maker the central protagonist of the tale and reworks the coat-maker's doomed un-relationship with an ex-model lesbian stripper into the central conflict of the tale. This is a significant shift: in the original, the furrier is just another link in the chain of the curse. This is a smart move. The furrier (played to sleazy perfection by, of all people, Meat Loaf – who I notice is now going by a weird combo of his real name and the nickname his gym coach gave him: "Meat Loaf Aday") is a completely unsympathetic and revolting character, but the focus on him gives the story a dramatic unity. In Argento's version, we get a context for the whole story. The furrier is a small time player in the fashion biz: he gets the second tier materials, works with (this is suggested, but not ever stated) illegal labor, and has no real hope of being anything else than a bottom feeder in industry. To make things worse, he's obsessed with a stripper with lesbian tendencies who seems to enjoy taunting him. A more out of luck loser, it is hard to imagine. Argento spends quite a few feet establishing that this guy is looking for a break, and is undeserving of one, before he introduces the pelts.

The second major derivation has to do with the pelts themselves. Instead of making them the skins of some unknown animal, the pelts are raccoon pelts. The raccoon pelts are linked to some strange ruins and a country-witch character that serves to provide exposition. On one hand, this does explain why the pelts are cursed. Unfortunately, it also causes the careful watcher to ask just what ancient city of Native Americans is supposed to exist in Washington state. It's an explanation that opens up more answers that it settles. But this is a minor misstep.

Overall, Argento's gives the Masters of Horror a genuine shot in the arm. It is a violent, dark, and trashy bit of work, but it so vibrates with energy and life that it captures the attention of the viewer and holds it as surely as the steel jaws of a raccoon trap. Pelts is the blackest, most bloody installment of the Masters series I've seen, but it never seems pointless or pandering. I must admit that I'm mixed on Argento, but this one is a solid work – one that follows Jenifer, another win – and makes Argento's contributions to the series well worth the attention of any horror fan.

Comics: The more the merrier.

Wanted to hip any Screamers or Screamettes who dig their scares in sequential panel format that there are two recent horror comic anthologies worth checking out: Completely Doomed from IDW and Viper Comics' Sasquatch.

Completely Doomed gathers original comic stories from the first four issues of IDW's regular horror anthology Doomed. If you haven't picked it up yet, Doomed is classic horror-antho comics done right. The stories are all adaptations of classic pulp short stories from Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, David J. Schow, and F. Paul Wilson. Thirteen different artists, including the legendary Ted McKeever, contribute a wealth of styles to Doomed's lovely black and white pages. In its original format, you also get interviews with the original authors, reviews of movies and books, prose fiction, and a wonderful EC style host: Ms. Doomed, an eye-patch wearing hottie who divides her time between vamping it up for goth-cake pin-ups and insulting the readers. The original issues of the series are published in a luxurious 8½ by 11 trim size that gives them the feel of an up-market magazine. Painted covers by Jeremy Geddes and Ashley Wood also contribute to the sense that you're getting quality product. And the insides don't disappoint. The stories, including one Eisner nominated short piece, almost always hit. They do tend towards the "twist" ending, though this seems more like a nod to pulp classicism than a tired cliché. The fact that they always revisit the same four authors could have undermined the series; instead, it helps give the series a unified feel that, given the variety of art styles used, could have felt too dispersed. The art, like the stories, is almost always top notch. It runs the gambit from hyper-stylized cartooning to naturalistic illustration. The more extreme styles can sometimes get too abstract for their own good, but the stories are tight and short enough that no style is given the time to overstay its welcome.

The collection, Completely Doomed, gathers together only the comic stories. Gone are the reviews, the prose, and Ms. Doomed is relegated to a tiny handful of semi-random appearances. Though it is a shame that we lose the charmingly abrasive Ms. Doomed, you can't argue with the decision to cut the rest of the stuff. The reviews and interviews are welcome breaks in the original magazines, but none of them are worth collecting for what might be a second read. The collection understands that it is the comic horror stories that we've paid our money to read. The reproductions are crisp and faithful to the originals. My only objection is that the collection shrinks the pages down to a less magazine-like 6 and some change by 10 inch format. The art doesn't seem to suffer any for the change in trim size, by the over-large pages were something that made the series fun. The collection also includes a cover gallery all the alternate covers for all four issues.

I've you've been following the series, there's nothing new in Completely Doomed. The more book-like format will hold up to repeated readings better than the original magazines, but it is debatable whether or not that's worth the 20 buck asking price. For those who will be approaching the series new, this is the perfect intro to an excellent collection of horror comics.

Viper Comics' Sasquatch is an original anthology "presented" (I'm not sure what that entails for a comic book) by Josh Howard, the man behind Viper's most popular horror title: Dead @ 17. I must admit that I've always steered clear of Viper Comics' titles. They seem to have a sort of pseudo-manga house style of art that I, unfairly, equate with a sort of vapid kids' play sort of work. This anthology, along with the non-horror themed sci-fi Western mash-up Daisy Kutter: The Last Train, forced me to re-evaluate my dismissive attitude. Sasquatch contains nearly 300 pages of comic fun. Dozens of artists tackle Bigfoot, the Yeti, Sasquatch, or whatever else you want to call him. The stories cover the spectrum, from straight-up horror to surreal humor to kid-friendly adventure. The art is as wildly varied as the writing. Some stories do fall flat, like presenter Howard's short of a Bigfoot soldier dispatched to kill Osama bin Laden, which is neither cathartic or satiric and verges on the embarrassing. These duds, however, are the exception. For every miss, there are four solid hits and, with that ratio, the over all collection is a quick, fun read.

I have only one complaint about Viper's book: the $25 buck asking price is a bit steep for a comic that I don't think has much re-read value. I had a good time working through Sasquatch, but nothing in it rises to the level of classic and I can't see many folks shelling out 25 Washingtons for such ephemeral pleasures. Then again, maybe I'm just a cheap bastard.