Books: This is monstrous!

Even by the the fairly generous unwritten rules of book marketing, the cover copy - "the original zombie story" and "Before Dracula . . . the first book to set a gothic horror story, featuring people who may or may not be dead, in Transylvania" - on the new translation of Jules Verne's The Castle in Transylvania is going to strike some folks as too much of a bait and switch.

The "zombie story" description is the least defensible: nothing in the book evokes zombies, neither the voodoo classic model nor the post-Romero flesh-eating variety. The comparison to Bram Stoker's classic is true in the details; but this is more a product of its careful categorial delineations than the impression it gives the reader. The book was written before Dracula. It appeared in French five years before Stoker's book was published and was available in English two years after its French publication. The plot does contain many gothic elements: crazed royalty, doomed beauties, rooting castles, obsession, and so on. It involves a member of Transylvanian royalty as the chief villain, and said baron is presumed dead and is thought by the locals to have some supernatural angle. But what it ain't is about is a vampire. Or any supernatural threat, actually. In fact, while there are some superficial echoes, The Castle in Transylvania bears no familial resemblance to Dracula. Readers who pick Castle up looking for the seminal literary zombie tale or a proto-Drac are going to leave feeling cheated.

Instead, Castle belongs more appropriately in a counter-tradition of gothic discontents. Running parallel to the rich gothic tradition, there's a loyal opposition of debunkers, satirists, and Apollonians who have found the genre trappings sorely in need of some deconstruction. Often for these critics, the crimes of the gothic are stylistic; from Austin's Northanger Abbey to Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm, the overripe melodrama and morbid self-seriousness of the genre has provided ample fodder to the parodist. In other cases, it is a conflict of world views. When Verne, a member of this latter tribe of anti-gothic scribes, pits human intellect against superstition and the unknown, he bets on the home team. This isn't to say that he's an optimist, exactly. Verne's most famous creation, the grim anti-colonial superterrorist Nemo, is proof enough that Verne didn't insist on a link between reason and morality. Still, for Verne, the world we know is full enough of possibilities for the sublime and the horrific.

Castle reflects this attitude throughout. The book's plot - the pacing of which perhaps too naked reveals its origins as a magazine series - is broken lopsidedly into two acts. In the first, the locals of a remote Transyvanian mountain village attempt to discover whether or not an infamous mad count, thought long dead, has returned to the ruined titular castle. This first act is full of inexplicable events and the sort of genre monkeyshines one expects from a gothic tale. Though even this is delivered with smirk. Verne's predictions - both the eerily prescient and the wildly off-base - and his intellectual bent are often praised, but his unjustly under-celebrated sly humor is on good display in this stretch, specifically in the characterization of the incompetent, pompous Dr. Patak, the village's inadequate "voice of reason." The second act, which finally introduces the book's real hero, flips the script entirely. Our new protag, Franz, shows up with a sack full of exposition and starts Scooby-Dooing the whole first of the novel. Before the last page is turned, the gothic weirdness of the novel has transformed into a mad science tale involving the slick deployment of imagined ancestors of Twentieth Century mass communications technology.

Verne's style further reflects his anti-gothic bent. The Transylvania of Verne's book isn't the mist-shrouded Western European's nightmare vision of their vaguely pagan, uncanny eastern neighbors. Unlike Stoker, who simply imagined the world he needed, Verne used the real country for his setting. Verne's book is packed with geographical, anthropological, and historical data about Transylvania. Too much maybe. Sometimes you get the sense that Verne never met a bit of research he didn't like. Where Stoker is content to tell you that Transylvania weather is mean, Verne prefers to discuss how various individual mountains in the Carpathians are famed for the curious microclimates they produce, the specifics of which he's happy to share.

As an aside, for a long time, English readers were spared some of the worse excesses of Verne's mania for trivia: translations of Verne intended for the casual reader often simply cut out his data dumps. This heavy-handed editing produced novels that emphasized narrative thrust and minimized world-building. The end result of this is that English-speaking fans of Verne have often missed out on some of the more curious details of Verne's works. For example, Captain Nemo's nationality changes between his first appearance in 20,000 Leagues and his final appearance in Mysterious Island. In the former, he's Polish. In the latter, he's Indian. This bizarro swap rarely features in English-language takes on the captain - usually he's just a generic white dude with no reference to the history given in MI or, as in Moore's League, he's straight out Indian with no explanation as to why he was previously a European. This isn't simply laziness on the part of various adapters: in many English translations, the details that reveal Nemo's identity in 20,000 simply don't show up.

Personally, I enjoyed Castle. Admittedly, I read it under extreme circumstances. My wife bought it for me it amuse me while I was confined to an ER bed with nothing else to entertain me except a television that we couldn't turn up the volume on. But even if you're not in a situation where you can't move because you're IV'ed up and you don't know where your pants are, I think the novel offers several distinct pleasures. First, the habitually detailed prose of Verne, when wed to a gothic framework, ends up suggesting the works of H. P. Lovecraft, with all its fake scholarly tone and strangely purple rigor. Second, Verne's worldview charts an interesting third-way between "uncanny is the bomb" and "but it could happen" theories of horror. Verne's story strips away the fear of the uncanny and replaces it with a sudden encounter with what, in later decades, we'd call television, radio, and recording technologies. That sounds mundane, but that ignores the mind-warping nature of the encounter for those at the collision. When first faced with Philo Farnsworth's plans for a working television system, one of the bankers he approached for for funding blurted out, "This is monstrous!" And it is. Verne takes away the threat of ghosts and demons, and it their place he gives us an image of a unseen master who holds a populace in in thrall through media tech and the constant grooming of their own unquestioned beliefs. Instead of spooks, he gives us the secret history of the Twentieth Century and beyond. And that's pretty scary. Verne was no horror writer, but his valuable contribution to the genre is the observation that an explicable monster is still a monster.

Publishers Melville House and translator Charlotte Mandell have done sci-fi and horror fans a real service in making this odd, neglected back into circulation.

Stuff: The future, only more polite.

An old friend of mine recently shot me an email about a project she's cooking up. I thought I'd let all y'all in on it. Here's the back story from one of her co-conspirators:

I grew up in a house full of old books and mildewed magazines. The entire eastern wall of my childhood bedroom was taken up with with bookshelves to store the collected and forgotten words of my parents. The novels and encyclopediae would hold my interest from time to time; Agatha Christie and J.D. Salinger and Encyclopedia Brittanica 1972. But the true heart of the library was in the magazines. My mother's collection of National Geographic and my father's collections of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction.

In Asimov's autobiography, he describes growing up in the twenties and thirties, reading the pulp science fiction magazines. Over time, he says, the authors published in those pages came to seem as demigods to him. And he realized that what he wanted, more than anything else, was to be a demigod himself. I can't tell you how strongly I empathized with that feeling.
Science fiction was in my bones. I loved everything about it. I couldn't get enough. And, while there was a definite appeal to the majestic films and the grand multi-book series of the genre, it was always clear that the purest distillate of science fiction was to be found in short stories. It is a literary tradition built upon anthologies and magazines.

In college, I maintained subscriptions to On Spec and NFG, the two big Canadian science fiction magazines. Of course, I couldn't afford subscriptions to the American magazines, but I would read them all cover to cover standing in the magazine aisle at the big Bloor Street bookstores. Then NFG stopped publishing and On Spec shrank to a fraction of its former splendour.

And so it came that, last summer, I was lamenting that there was no longer a single Canadian science fiction magazine that qualified as an SFWA-approved market.

Well, Maya Angelou said it best: If you don't like something, change it.

So, I teamed up with my old friends Adam and Helen to see what we could do. We figured out that for just ten grand we could get a new magazine off the ground. And hey, what's ten grand in this era of interwebs and micropayments, right? Seems like a pretty piddling barrier between us and the awesome.

So look, we're not really asking you guys for money. I mean, if you're looking to give, we're not saying no, but we know that most people here are about as skint as we are. Really, what we're hoping is that you'll think this is a pretty great idea and help spread the word to those who might have a penny or two to share.

If that stirred up your love for the old pulps or appealed to you militant Canadian nationalism, check out the kickstarter page for AE and help a brother out. My friend, don't be a hoser.

House of Silent Scream: Crazy in that good way.

Well, Screamers and Screamettes, we've come to the very last installment of this year's Silent Scream Series: The House of Silent Scream. Before getting to the last anniversary post, I just want to thank everybody who participated and everybody who followed along. I've had a great three years doing this blog and that's due in no small part to the readers and writers I've met online. Thank you all.

But enough of that, on to the guest blogger.

Hey, that's no guest blogger! That's my wife!

Booknerd - aka Jessica - runs the much loved Written Nerd lit blog and is co-owner of the soon to open Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene.

And she married me. 'Cause she's nuts.

Ladies and germs, Booknerd . . .

Truth be told, I’m not much of a fan of the horror genre as a whole. I possess one of those imaginations the Victorians worried about when they advised women not to read too many novels. While I love the fantastic in art, and I usually enjoy the emotional rollercoaster a good story puts me through, I’m too prone to post-viewing nightmares to enjoy most films that are particularly grisly, psychologically tortuous, or uncanny – which rules out most of what CRwM writes about here.

The one counterintuitive exception: I kinda love zombie movies. Sean of the Dead viewings in our house are in the multiple dozens, and I even saw Land of the Dead in theaters. Maybe it’s that the violence tends to be pretty cartoony; maybe it’s the seeming manageability of the supernatural threat (especially with slow zombies). Partly, I think, it’s that zombies are kind of like a natural disaster: they don’t have any particular beef with you, they’re not even really malicious, they’re just hungry, and there are lots of them. Fighting them takes more wilderness survival skills (axes, barricades, traps, etc.) than mystic knowledge or sheer screamy stamina.

Really, what I think I love is the idea of what happens after the apocalypse. I’m one of those delusional, naïve people who thinks I’d be one of the survivors, and that the world wiped clean of civilization would offer all kinds of opportunities. No laws, no systems, a small community of people learning how to live all over again. The untended shopping malls full of loot are as delicious as the chance to re-learn how to grow food and protect oneself from predators. The riches of culture free of charge, plus the prospect of a more authentic engagement with the manual-labor stuff of life: it’s a big part of the appeal of films like 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and even Mad Max (which I’ve recently discovered I also kinda love). This is way bigger than zombies: it’s a postmodern yearning for authenticity combined with a consumerist desire for all this stuff. Or just a child’s fantasy of running amuck when authority is gone. The downside is all that death and stuff, but the adventure is worth the ickiness.

The Rene Clair short film The Crazy Ray (alternately titled Paris qui Dort or, my preference, At 3:25) presages the whole post-apocalyptic genre – but does it without the icky consequences, making it possibly the perfect non-horrific horror film. In this end-of-the-world created in a more innocent era, everything turns out okay in the end, but our heroes have in the meantime gotten to enjoy all the heightened dramatic experience and freedom from societal strictures that the apocalypse can offer. It’s an eerie, lovely, funny, original film, and one that I feel must have had some kind of subconscious impact on the imagery of later post-apocalypse films, though none have ever pulled it off so elegantly.

The film, set in the gorgeous Paris of the 1920s, opens with a handsome young guard in the Eiffel Tower. On ending his shift around dawn, he descends to the street to find – everyone is gone. The scenes of an empty Paris are as striking as the empty modern London in the first scenes of 28 Days Later, and must have been just as challenging to film (though in retrospect, it doesn’t quite make sense that there are no vehicles in the street – more on that later.) The young man, increasingly distraught at the lack of Parisians, finally comes across a few folks (a pickpocket, a cop, etc.), but they seem to be in an unusual state of suspended animation (whether asleep, or frozen in time, the film never makes entirely clear, but it’s a Sleeping Beauty’s castle kind of situation).

Finally the young man comes across some other folks in a state of full consciousness. Turns out they just arrived in Paris on the plane from Marseilles, leading them all to conclude that their altitude somehow protected them from the sleeping sickness that has afflicted the city, if not the world. The company includes a cop escorting a bad guy, a “butter and eg man” (a great old slang term for a rich but unsophisticated businessman, the “bridge and tunnel crowd” of his day), and the requisite lovely young lady, among others. They wrack their brains to figure out what has happened, but of course they can’t. So they do what every small band of survivors does in the wake of the apocalypse: they go out to dinner.

In one of the most hilarious and charming set pieces of the film – all the more so because it’s done entirely with body language and gesture – the characters sit down in a restaurant and, with the influx of free champagne from the untended kitchen, become increasingly aware that all rules are off. They dance on tables, they insult the aristocrats sleeping nearby, they dance with the sleeping girls, they pick pockets and take clothes off others’ backs, they laugh and weep. It’s like the mall madness in Romero’s movies, but with a rather Parisian elegance to the debauchery. Finally they stagger out, with the butter-and-egg man attempting to stuff some bills in the pockets of the comatose maitre’d.

When the band of survivors decides to hole up in the Eiffel Tower, just in case the unexplained incident returns, another part of the post-apocalypse story kicks in. There’s only one girl, remember? The male members of our band of outsiders begin to feel unkindly toward each other, as the title cards remind us “The last woman on earth!” But unlike the unpleasant misogyny of the “save the breeders” mentality of 28 Days, or the genuinely uncomfortable sexual tension of other last-girl films I can think of, Rene Clair plays it as a largely comical love octagon. There are moments of real drama when the two youngest suitors grapple on the edge of the tower, with terrifying panoramas of Paris below them, but somehow it all still seems in good fun – the naughty glamour of the weird post-nuclear Ann-Margret lounge number about “thirteen men and I’m the only gal in town”, with a St. Germaine stylishness.

More delightfully transgressive incidents occur; the robber with his skill at lockpicking becomes a valued member of the company, for example, and the butter-and-egg man finds his comatose Paris tart in the arms of another eggman. Eventually, a telephone call leads the company to the source of the apocalypse: a crotchety but not particularly scary scientist, who seems to have produced the eponymous Crazy Ray as an experiment in putting the world to sleep and then forgotten to check on the results. With the help of his daughter, the company manage to convince the old gent that he has to put it right, and some very scientific equations on chalkboards ensue. But fix it he does, and in such a way that the world starts up again at 3:25 AM, just the moment when it went to sleep, so that presumably, no one is the wiser. The film ends with the cop chasing the robber again – all’s right with the world.

I find it interesting that the same scenes and tropes that inform world’s end sagas now are present in Rene Clair’s film, but also that they’re so rarely infused with this amount of cheeky fun. Presumably all the heroes are worried and terrified about the lack of other conscious humans, but in reality it all seems like a bit of a lark. It almost feel s like cheating to get all the post-apocalypse fun without the actual apocalypse – and of course it is cheating. Where were the crashed cars on the streets if everyone fell asleep simultaneously? How could the scientist possibly fail to notice that he’d caused the end of the world? Why didn’t the sleeping people starve to death after sleeping for weeks? But of course, those kinds of logical problems are present in the most deadly serious horror films as well, with results that are often far less enjoyable.

The Crazy Ray is unlike any other film I’ve ever seen, but also seems to inform so many. I’d highly recommend it for fans of the post-apocalyptic genre, for a look at how the world might have ended at 3:25 – not with a bang or a whimper, but with a champagne toast.

Movies: Royale with cheese.

Konnichiha, Screamers and Screamettes!

Today, we're going to discuss Battle Royale 2, the cinematic blunder that put paid to the Battle Royale cross-platform Japanese sci-fi actioner juggernaut with a sizable cult in the States. But, before we get ready to royale, a little backstory . . .

The rise and fall of the Battle Royale franchise, the popular Japanese novel that became the cornerstone of a tiny multimedia fiefdom, is an interesting case study in how a work can shift and adapt as creators and audience members negotiate the essential meanings of a work. What makes Battle Royale so interesting is that, in this case, this mutability turned out to be the franchise's greatest strength and its complete undoing.

The Battle Royale franchise began in 1999 with the novel by Koushun Takami. The novel tracks the violent deconstruction of a class of junior high students caught up in the government's Battle Royale program: a surreal war game (which Japan – now the central nation of the Republic of Greater East Asia – has been running annually since 1947) that pits students against one another in a bloody, fatal combat. The students are armed and dumped on a desert island. They must kill one another until there is only one student left. Failure to follow the rules of the game is punishable by the detonation of a lethal collar each student has been fitted with. If the students fail to kill at least one of their classmates within a 24-hour time period, all the collars explode and everybody dies.

Packed with action, the book is a bizarre and ruthless thrill ride that manages to take time out for a few sex scenes (who wants to die a virgin, right?), some political ranting, and some less-than inspired pop-psychology. It's a bracing read that constantly teeters on the edge of collapsing into utter stupidity. The problems that threaten to undermine the book will last with series in all its incarnations.

First and foremost, the premise, while arresting, becomes unworkable on closer inspection. Why would anybody subject kids to this? The reason given in the book makes no sense. The BR program exists to "teach kids a lesson" about how the government can do whatever it wants to them. That's all good and well except that most of the kids you're teaching this lesson to are dead by the end of the program. Also, as the book makes clear, kids seem to be shocked when they find themselves part of the program. Let's ignore the weirdness of the fact that all children are subject to a death-lottery, but none of them seem to know it. Instead, ponder the futility of this death match in the face of what seems to be the kids' utter ignorance of the BR program. Furthermore, isn't it clear that the lesson that is really being taught is that the government is a bunch of sick bastards and you shouldn't trust them any further than you could throw the Shin Maru Biru? Every time the premise is revisited in later films and sequels, the reason for the BR program will be reworked; and yet, no filmmaker or writer will be able to cook up a notably better reason for the existence of the BR program. It's a deus ex machina: The BR program only really makes sense as an excuse to send a bunch of young children to their violent deaths.

The second major flaw sticks out most glaringly in the book and later manga adaptations, but it clings to the movie adaptations as well: In order to keep the action of the book cracking, Takami had to make his kids hyper-proficient in all manner of militaristic activity. Not only do surprising large percentage of the children in the novel seem suddenly proficient wielding all manner of weaponry, they manage to build explosives, they possess the knowledge to hotwire automobiles, and are otherwise are physically and mentally equipped to engage in full-on action hero daring-do.

These are major sticking points in the novel and it is a measure of the book's pulpy power that it is able to shoulder right past these completely reasonable objections. The stomach-churning spectacle of watching these children have at one another is enough to keep the reader focused. This dynamic will hold true for all later incarnations of the franchise.

Submitted for 1998 literary contest, the novel was ejected due to its controversial content. Released the next year, the book went on to become a sensation. Originally, Takami wrote the novel as an indictment of the youth of Japan. The post-war generations had, he felt, grown progressively softer and softer. The war had given the older generation a distinct sense of Japan's collective destiny and an appreciation of the importance of personal sacrifice. By contrast, Takami found the modern youth of Japan shallow, automaton consumers, with personalities borrowed on loan from cut-rate mass entertainments. Takami wasn't alone in this assessment. Called the "bean sprout generation," the Nipponese analog to our own Generation X was the subject of endless headshaking cultural studies and hysterical op-ed pieces. (Though, honestly, the Japanese didn't know how good they had it: While the 1990s was the nadir of a nation-wide economic crisis brought about by the boomer era corporate class, the Land of the Rising Sun didn't get the double-barrel pointblank blast to the face of the dotcom burst and the po-mo financial shenanigans that adult Gen Xer's aimed at America.)

This cynical take on Japanese youth culture was woven throughout the book. Most of the students are, by design, completely interchangeable. They speak in quotations from pop songs and films and television. Those students that are individuated are, more often than not, sinister. One is a nymphomaniac serial killer. The worst of the students – a brain-damaged sociopath who volunteered to be part of the game – is described as being literally without emotions or reasoning capacity. Even the good students are fairly vacuous. They are less moral beings than beings that happen to have absorbed messages that make them reluctant to kill, second hand pacifists who got their notions of non-violence from PC rock stars.

But, the ultimate meaning of any work depends on the reader as much as the writer. Battle Royale hit Japanese youth culture like a neutron bomb. They read the work as an elaborate metaphor for the crushing standardization crucial to the numbing hive-society of post-war Japan. In the naked social Darwinism of the BR game, Japan's young saw an allegory for the pressures of conformity. Despite his own "get off of my lawn"-ism, Takami and his novel became unlikely icons of a youth culture in revolt. It's scandalous connection to a mass stabbing – a madman wielding a short sword went ape in a crowded Tokyo shopping district credited it as an influence – actually boosted its status, giving it the gravitas that bloodshed instantly, if undeservedly, grants texts. (Remember, Screamers and Screamettes, the words of Oscar Wilde: "Dying for something does not make it true.") Takami quickly realized where his bank was and adapted to the role of youth spokesperson with admirable flexibility. If asked now about his book, he is quick to explain that its satiric target was always the square world of the adults. He's with the kids now.

Strangely, angry youth weren't the only ones who found the book spoke to their anti-authoritarian sensibilities. Kinji Fukasaku, veteran director of the legendary Yakuza Papers series, was reminded of his own war era youth. During the war, Japan would draft entire classes of school children to support the war effort. Fukasaku's class was drafted and put to work in a munitions factory. When that factory was destroyed in an attack, many of the children from Fukasaku's class were killed. For Fukasaku, the premise of the book was barely metaphorical.

Fukasaku's 2000 film Battle Royale is a film that rises above its novelistic source material. Although neither the screenwriters or the director were more able to make the BR Program makes sense than Takami was and their decision to create a more sympathetic teacher character that would connect the death game to the students' past falls flat, they elevated the role of the students and reframed the story to explicitly create a kids-versus-adults tale in which the kids are innocent victims of grotesque adult tyranny. The film is explicit in its pacifist sympathies (though the viewers could be forgiven if they find this philosophical viewpoint hard to swallow when it is served up with such a heaping helping of gory and explosively thrilling violence). References to the most sinister students get blunted. In the novel, for example, one of the students ran a Lolita prostitution and blackmailing racket prior to her selection for the game. In the novel, this same character has sex with several of the males in the class during the game as part of a black widow strategy for offing the better armed, stronger male competition. In the film, her overt sexuality and criminal background are toned down to the point that one really needs to have read the book to pick up on any hint to her past. This softens the students and helps build audience sympathy. The film also cleverly tweaks the rules of the game to add a countdown dynamic to the conflict: In the film, there must be only one student left at the end of three days or everybody dies. These changes make the film both dramatically and thematically stronger.

This first film is, for my money, the high point of the franchise. Despite some awkward CGI blood splatter, the action in the film is grabbing. The teacher subplot is a dead end, by the restrained surrealism of Beat Takeshi's performance as the program director gives his scenes some needed irony. The film's overt sympathy with the children not only give the film a heart, but it allows the director to fashion them into heroes. Finally, this same sympathy takes the books stunted characterizations and reworks it into a often moving representation of young people in the grips of something so large and horrific that their inarticulateness is sign of poignant vulnerability. Battle Royale is a very good film.

Though the film opened to decidedly mixed reviews – including strongly worded attacks from government officials who saw the film in a special screening prior to its release – it made bank and ended up getting nominated for best picture at the Japanese Academy Awards. (It won the JAA Audience Popularity Award, but failed to take home best picture.)

The franchise's next incarnation was a 15 volume manga adaptation. Started in the winter of 2000, the manga was originally conceived as a faithful adaptation of the novel. For example, the sympathetic teacher-figure is replaced by a leering, sadistic creep that is more reminiscent of (though more extreme) the program leader in novel. However, as work progressed, the manga's creative team started taking the work in its own direction. Allegedly, the manga creators' started to roam off the reservation because they "cared for the characters." This popular reading of the manga is supported by the fact that much of the manga is dedicated to fleshing out the backstories of the students, with several volumes-worth of work dedicated to events that occurred before the students were selected for the game. I personally find this reading unconvincing. What is really notable about the manga is how thoroughly it embraces the grotesque and exploitative aspects of the original concept. In the original novel and the film, for example, the fate of the woman who runs the orphanage that is home to two of the students is never discussed. In the manga, she objects to the use of her young charges in the program. For her insolence, the program director rapes her and then has his soldiers kill her. This despite the fact that he snatched the kids on a school trip, so there's no reason whatsoever that he would ever have to confront the woman who runs the orphanage; that he's got the law on his side and can draft whoever he wishes, so her objection is irrelevant; and that presumably nobody wants their kids drafted, but we don't see the program director rape and kill his way through every set of parents involved.

Turning the program director in a clearly insane madman is typical of the "this goes to eleven" approach that appears throughout the manga series. Where the novel treated the students as mini-adults without much interior life and the movie accented their horrible awkward vulnerability, the manga relishes ripping them apart, stripping them of their clothes, and otherwise shoving the taboo breaking nature of the work in front of the reader. In fact, there are several scenes that, given current US laws concerning the illegality of even drawn representations of explicit underage sex, make the book too questionable to risk owning, in my opinion.

(As an aside, another reason not to buy the manga is that Tokyopop, the company responsible for its American publication, took extreme liberties with its translation. Most notably, they used new dialogue to change the BR program from some weird "The Lottery"-ish blood sacrifice to the ever-hungry ghost of Japanese militarism into that lamest of cultural expressions: a reality TV show. Not only does this not work thematically – the idea that all these resources would be squandered on a reality show that also required 40-odd families a year sacrifice their children is the least believable and least resonant motive of all the various motives put forth for the program – but it does not even work on a literal basis as the plot requires that the children not be under constant visual surveillance. The mishandling of Battle Royale, and the subsequent revelation that many other titles were similarly botched, has been a PR fiasco that Tokyopop still has yet to completely live down.)

The manga was the beginning of the end for the Battle Royale franchise. A soulless exercise in shock schlock, it added a strain of pointless extremism to the franchise that poisoned the well and doomed further efforts to make the idea meaningful.

Which brings us to Battle Royale 2: the uneven and unsuccessful 2003 sequel to 2000 film. Humorless, self-important, wrong-headed, self-righteous, and dull, it is hard to think of a sequel that did a greater disservice to the original. Even the full title - Battle Royale 2: Requiem - smacks of the pompous pretension of the flick.

The second BR film opens with an explicit reference to the WTC attacks. After we get some exposition telling us that the survivors of previous BR programs have banded together and formed an anti-adult terror group, we watch them detonate and collapse several skyscrapers in Tokyo.

Then we get a short bit of the daughter of the program director form the original film. Apparently she holds a murderous grudge against the survivors of the first flick, whom she blames for the death of her father. This is, in fact, waste work since, as we'll see later, kids in these flicks are compelled to fight, so it doesn't matter what your motives are. Fight or die: Them's the rules and it doesn't take some tortured past to make these kids go at one another.

The action proper of BR2 starts much like previous film: a bus-load of school kids is shanghaied by the police state government for their death game program. Curiously, like the students of the first film, they seem to be oddly unaware of the BR program despite repeated scenes of media frenzy regarding the winners of the program. If you were a ninth-grader in this alternate history Japan, don't you think you'd avoid bus trips?

"Where's your field trip permission form Tajiri?"

"Oops, forgot it again. Tell you what: You guys should just go without me. I'll just stay here and read about, you know, not being stuck in some hellish hybrid of Sweet Valley High and The Running Man."

"I'm unfamiliar with your pop culture references. They seem uncharacteristic for a male junior high school student from contemporary Japan."

"We don't have junior high school either, teach."

"Touché. Box clever, I see."

Anyway, the panicky students are introduced to a new program director who, sadly, is pulled from the manga instead of a first film. A pill-popping doofus who seems to be doing an impersonation of Jim Carey impersonating an Elvis impersonator, the new director is painfully hard to watch. This new director explains that, under the new BR rules, the captured kids are going to be sent against the terrorist group, called the Wild Sevens after a popular brand of cigarettes. Why send kids? The director explains this by writing the name of every country the United States has bombed in the past 20 years. Waving to this list of American shame, the campy director announces, "Life is not fair." Seriously. That's the reason for the new BR program. We're not going to send highly trained commandos or nuke the terrorist camp from orbit (the only way to be sure, I'm told) because "life is not fair." This will be typical of the film's political insight. Not only does it immediately connect the Lost Boys terror cell to the Al Qaeda group that attacked New York. It will later connect them to the Taliban – the guys who used to whip women in the streets for having the temerity to be literate – and suggest that it is part of what makes them heroic. Anything not American = good. This simplistic moral calculus will reach its nadir when several characters discuss the fact that "that country" (in the future, Japan will talk about America the way people talk about their spouse's exes) is going to Tomahawk missile the island the terrorists live into rubble. They act like this represents some great disaster despite the fact that, by the end of the film, they will all have been responsible for sending more than 40 school children to die on that island. Really, had they just let America blow the island to atoms, they could have spared the entire class. But, hey, whatever, America is the bads.

The new director describes the new rules of the game – basically the same as the old rules with the twist that you're partnered up and if your partner dies than your necklace explodes (again, why does that help the government when it means that every death takes out another of your "troops"?) – and then suits up the kids. The children are sent to the terrorists' island hideout and, in a scene that riffs off of Saving Private Ryan, the kids land in a bloodbath. This moment, a breathless blur of gunfire and horror, is the film's highpoint. It's all downhill from here.

The kids fight one another for 20 minutes or so – really tearing the crap out of one another. The students are overpowered and subdued. Eventually, the surviving students join forces with terrorists. There's a lot of incomprehensible political talk, including several speeches from the leader of the terror group that sound as if some screenwriter just chopped up and recombined political manifestos he pulled off the Internet. There's something almost profound about how little sense these William S. Burroughs-ish speeches make. If it wasn't so clear that the filmmakers genuinely believed that they had something to say, Battle Royale 2 would rank as one of the greatest satires of "social issue" films.

Finally, the government comes to the shocking realization that, perhaps, the best way to deal with a nest of dangerous terrorist is to send in somebody other than a small crew of completely untrained school children. Plan B is, apparently, to flood the island with hundreds of actual soldiers. Why they even had a Plan A is a mystery. To say that this final battle includes an extended Wild Bunch reference is to imply that it is more interesting than it really is. There is a loopy scene in which the disgraced program director suddenly appears on the island in a rugby uniform and blows up. I kid not. I've given you about as much explanation as the film will. If it doesn't make sense now, seeing the flick won't help.

Eventually, perhaps out of boredom, "that country" blows the whole damn island sky high. The end? Not yet. Apparently the island, which was far enough away to rule out a full-scale military invasion, has a tunnel to the mainland. I'm serious. A tunnel under the ocean. An engineering feat that must have rivaled the construction of the Chunnel at the very least. And, natch, the government doesn't know anything about it.

So, several of our heroes escape to Afghanistan where, presumably, they will live happily ever after in utopia that the Taliban created in Afghanistan.

Ugh.

I can see a filmmaker wanting to make a film denouncing the imperial era in which, despite the change in management, we seem to be living. We deserve it. We have behaved and continue to behave like assholes. However, by attempting to rework what was, at its best, a deeply personal mediation on the sins of WWII era Japan into an indictment of US foreign policy, BR2 became a smug and incomprehensible disaster. The final result is less a parable of American abuses of power than a few disorganized jabs at American foreign policy that occur in the proximity of a parable that's been gutted of its moral core. If the manga represented the gleeful dumbing down of the franchise, BR2 gives viewers the sad spectacle of a moronic concept that doesn't know its moronic. Worse yet, it is insufferably dull. Give this one a pass.

(For the completists out there, the manga had a sequel too. In the second series a class of kids is snatched and shoved into the Navy's survival program. The same thing, but with boats. I have not bothered to follow it.)

Movies: It's my flick in a box.

I'm disappointed in The Cube, Vincenzo Natali's 1997 Lifeboat-by-way-of-The Twilight Zone sciffy thriller, and somewhat for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the director, cast, set designers, editors, screenwriters, or anybody else who had anything to do with this film.

My disappointment in this film is partially the fault of a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I'll explain.

Recently, I visited the Met in Manhattan. I had specifically gone to check out Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. That's the big dead shark suspended in the tank of water.

Now even regular readers might not know this about me, but I have the innate sense of direction of a Kalahari Bushman. Unfortunately, the curators at the Met didn't store this thing in Kalahari bush. Rather, it's in an impossible until you stumble over it and it becomes obvious spot in the modern art wing and I was forced to ask directions.

The guard I asked not only told me where I could find it, but then asked if I'd seen The Cube.

I said no.

He said that he'd walk to the shark while he explained why I had to see The Cube.

I told him that I didn't want to inconvenience him.

He said it was no trouble at all.

As we walked, he asked if I was familiar with the Hirst thing with the sheep.

I asked if he meant Away from the Flock.

He said maybe. Is that the one with the dissected sheep?

Yep, I said.

Yeah. Then that one.

Apparently, the guard told me, The Cube features a scene in which a horse gets vivisected into slide sections, à la Hirst's Away from the Flock. Only the horse stays alive and it, like gallops in place and stuff. It's crazy.

I promised him I would check it out.

He took a quick step so he was a little ahead of me and turned to face me. He had a serious, driven look on his face. You need to check it out, he told me. You have to.

I promised and again and began to wonder who you call when security is beginning to freak you out.

As luck would have it, the dead shark was in a room that wasn't in his appointed guard-area and he had to stop. I thanked him and said goodbye. He said goodbye, but then just stood there. He watched me as if he expected me turn and shout out how I'd never watch The Cube. I wasn't interested in his stupid movie. And when I asked about the shark, I had known where it was all along. I was just faking it.

Dude, he shouted. You have to watch it.

I waved half-heartedly back to him. Thanks. I will. Thanks.

When I got home – concerned that the Met may somehow have my home address – I queued The Cube.

The plot of The Cube is pleasingly simple. A group of maybe not so random strangers wakes up inside a maze of cube-shaped rooms, each of which contain six doors, all of which lead to nearly identical cube shaped rooms. Running along the base of each door are three four-digit numbers in a numerical code. In some of the rooms are really nasty traps. Some quick exploration reveals that there is no food or water in the maze, giving those trapped within a practical limit of three days before their situation is resolved for them by biology. Though this only represents an outside limit of human endurance – prior to that, the maze's captives can expect to tire, lose their mental faculties, experience paranoia, and suffer other symptoms that doctors agree generally lead to the rapid escalation of dramatic tension.

Faced with a hopeless situation, our mixed bag of victims start applying Jason Shiga-grade leaps of logical daring-do to puzzle their way out of this endlessly recursive death trap. Along the way, as all good mixed victim groups must, secrets are revealed and Important Social Messages are shared before somebody plays the "Holy Crap, I've Done Gone Crazy" card.

There's one brilliantly innovative thing about The Cube: the Cube itself. Restricted-budget filmmakers should take note of how Natali's concept allowed him to shoot the whole thing on an 18-foot by 18-foot by 18-foot set – meaning he figured out how to make a cheap horror flick that wasn't another tired slasher rehash or zombie pic, both of which are to untalented novice filmmaker what patriotism is to scoundrels. And what a set it is! The mind-numbing effect of the repeated, color-coded cubes give the whole flick an almost hypnotic power.

I say almost because it ultimately isn't enough to completely overwhelm what's wrong with The Cube. In contrast to the innovation shown in the wonderfully absurd and pleasingly minimalist premise, the characters and their dialog-driven development just die (figuratively, though there are more than couple literal ones too) on-screen. I started watching this flick with my wife and she punched clock about 30 minutes in. When I asked what she didn't like, she answered that she knew how the whole thing went: The victims all hate one another more and more and they all die. She didn't need to sit through the whole running time to watch that shopworn scenario play out. While I don't feel quite so strongly about it as she did, she has a point. Though the cast is game, the characters feel predictable. In case you miss it, they're given long-winded speeches on the importance of leadership in crisis situations, the value of empathy, the need for hope and so on. For the film viewer who likes their movie watching experience to be truly hands off, characters even give spot on psychoanalytic readings of other characters. They start as types and then trace development arcs so pat and pre-programmed that, on at least one occasion, I found myself later thinking that a character had done or said something insensible, but something I missed at the time because it was the sort of thing Character Model 943-ST always does or says at that point in the movie. Where the characters do diverge from a standard template, it feels less like an outgrowth of their character and more like a necessity of the film's unique set and the unusual narrative requirements it imposes. Here, more than anywhere else, viewers can see that the only really important character on the screen is the Cube itself.

This clear prioritization of the situation over the character is not, innately, a bad idea. Oldboy's most interest stretch, the first half or so of the flick, is driven by the fact that we know everything about the character's situation, but nothing about the character. Several signature character's from the Eastwood collection exist solely for their situation without feeling clockwork. The Cube just can't make it work. Partially because the film can't decide whether it wants to be a vividly realized nightmare or a grand social statement. It might be possible to be both (I doubt it, but I grant the possibility), but that remains a firmly hypothetical statement.

The unsatisfying lack of explanation regarding the Cube similarly reinforces the feeling that you've got a set in search of a story. In the parlance of amateur film critics, the Cube doesn't give viewers all the answers. What's not so great is that it does give viewers plenty of them, just none of the answers that would improve your viewing experience. For instance, everything you need to know about the characters is handed to you on a silver platter. But, every possible answer about the Cube – the real star – is half-baked and ultimately unsatisfying in frustrating, rather than apatite whetting, way. There are some mysteries that don't have answers, but there are other mysteries that simply don't have any logic. The former can be absurdity or depth. The latter is creative laziness or sloppy thinking. The Cube is firmly the latter. The answer to the Cube's reason for being is the movie itself: Somebody came up with a superneato death trap that was just too spiffy not to put people in. The Cube does have perhaps the most honest tagline in all of film history: "Don't look for a reason. Look for a way out." If I may be so bold, I'll go them one further and suggest you avoid finding a way in.

You know what else the movie lacks?

You've probably figured it out by now.

There's no freakin' Hirst vivisected horsey. It was a lie. A terrible, bold-faced, big-ol', pants en fuego, heartlessly cruel lie.

I'll never trust the guards at the Met again.

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: Trying too hard to prove we're smarter than the dudes who cooked up "Alien vs. Predator."

The idea of a sci-fi monster mash betwixt the acid-blooded aliens of the Aliens franchise and the dreadlocked great invisible hunters of the Predator franchise is one of those seemingly obvious ideas that, in fact, contains a hidden flaw that the finished flick makes obvious.

Two flaws, actually.

First, the franchises are, if you think about it, in two different leagues. Aliens, if you count strictly the canonical flicks, has run through four films. Each flick was helmed by a major directorial talent (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, and the French guy whose name completely escapes me, you know, that guy), each flick featured at least one big name actor, and all of them were major productions. The Predator franchise, however, has spawned only two flicks. The first built around the rock-stupid action character persona of Arnold, the second around the tired Lethal Weapon persona of Glover. Neither had an A-list director at the wheel – the firtst being the product of the workman-like John McTiernan, the second being the work of Stephan Hopkins fresh from Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, his incomprehensible addition to Kruger franchise. In short, as fun as the Predator franchise is, it simply doesn't play in the same league as Aliens. It is somewhat like teaming up Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter with Chucky – sure they're both serial killers from horror movies, but there's a qualitative difference that would make such a team-up more of a joke than a genuine fright fest. In this flick, the aliens felt diminished and wasted because they'd been shoehorned into a lesser product.

Second, the Predator was the star of his franchise. Though Arnie was perhaps one of the most bankable names at the time the first flick was shot, the reason why we still remember Predator was that it took a forgettable, typical Arnold actioner and flipped it. The soldier boys of Predator purposefully seemed like they wandered in from the jungles of any of a hundred 80's shoot 'em ups. It is the presence of the alien game hunter that brings the film to life. The aliens of the Aliens series, however, have always been more like the zombies in Romero's Dead franchise. They are the stars of the flicks, but the real drama comes from watching humans deal with them. They are not, themselves, particularly interesting, from a cinematic point of view. They look cool, but they tend to just hiss and bump into one another and crawl on the walls aimlessly until you give them some astronauts or space marines to chew on. Then they become this force which puts humans under pressure and gives us a classic "trapped and surrounded, will they band together?" plot. The aliens make for good film because of what they make humans do.

AVP, as the cool kids call it, places the aliens and predators front and center, losing what makes the aliens cool and concentrating way more attention to the Predator than it can take. The film is a silly, pointless romp that never gives viewers enough of anything to really make it worth its hour and a half running time.

That said, I'd like to turn my attention to perhaps the best thing one can say about this flick, and that is that the film inspired some truly delightful reviews on Netflix.

The best of which comes from a dude who calls him- or herself "The Astrodart." The Astrodart (like The Cheat, I think you need to include the The whenever you mention The Astrodart) gave the flick one star and then proceeded to provide a series of questions meant, I think, to poke holes in the plot of movie that centers around giant space bugs fighting a race of aliens who, like interstellar gun-nut rednecks, have based their entire culture on recreational hunting. Unfortunately, The Astrodart's efforts are as funny as the movies flaws. The Astrodart begins the "deconstruction" thusly:

Rather than give a straight review of the steaming pile that is "AVP," I'd like to critique the movie by asking several relatively spoilerless questions. Why would there be a whaling station in Antarctica in 1904?

Well, the filmmaker probably thought they could feature an Antarctic whaling station from 1904 in their film because there was a really a whaling station on Antarctica in 1904. Before the creation of factory ships, whalers need Antarctic whaling stations to help process their catches. The first processing station went up in 1904, on Grytviken, South Georgia. Now, to be fair, this isn't something I knew off the top of my head. I had to Google it – but, presumably, anybody who can post a review on Netflix can Google "Antarctica whaling stations" and not begin their clever assault with a utter dud. Astrodart, The, then launches into a series of probing questions:

Why does no one's breath steam in the sub zero temperature of the south pole? Why don't the predators in this film use stealth and intelligence like the other movies? If the predators' weapons are acid proof, why not their armor? Why do the chest burster aliens pop out of people's bodies in a few minutes rather than incubate for a day or two? How do said chest bursters fully mature after another ten minutes or so?

The first one seems fair; though, to me, a question like "how could aliens have evolved in such a manner as to be perfectly adapted to incubate inside what appears to be an infinite number of host species?" seems like a considerably stickier wicket. Or, perhaps, more interesting, "how is it that aliens never have to eat?" They turn many of their victims into egg hosts; but even when they don't, they usually leave their corpses behind or so vastly outnumber potential food species that they'd burn through the population and starve to death. As for why armor would melt, but not weaponry, perhaps they're made of two different materials like, oh, I don't, modern weapons and body armor. Finally, do we have a timetable for alien gestation and development? Is it any less absurd that a creature with an exoskeleton would mature in a day, sans shed shells, than it is that such an animal would be lethal in minutes? Basically, my point is that the whole concept is fairly absurd, so this outrage at perceived plot holes strikes me as bizarre. How you can set your personal absurd-o-meter high enough to accept the aliens and predator species, but still sweat this crap is beyond me.

Still, for all The Astrodart's quirky questions, he or she didn't take the lazy way out. There are several reviews which basically use this construction:

I could systematically dissect this movie and give a detailed breakdown of exactly how awful this movie is, but honestly, it’s just not worth the effort.

This is just a tease! Either unleash critical Hell or don't, but this "I could kill, but you aren't worth my time" thing is lame. How valuable can your damn time be that you're leaving a review of Aliens vs. Predator on Netflix?

I knew this kid when I was young – Richard Fellman – who swore he knew karate, but could never show us anything because he was only supposed to use the deadly art in self-defense. Nobody believed him. He was, in fact, a big lame-o. I have a proposal. From now on, when somebody posts a review where they suggest they could demolish a movie with their keen critical insights, but do not because it would not be worthy of them, we call that "posting a Fellman."

Did people do this before the Internet era, when anybody could instantly preserve their weird hissy-fit for all eternity? I reckon they did.

Lord Waddleneck: Verily, Lady Macbeth claims she knows what 'tis like to nurse a child, but 'tis made clear their marriage is a barren one. Odd's blood! For sooth, such lapses logickal are apt to throw me into a most intemperate rage! And a child born of a section de Caesar is not born of woman? The groundlings may enjoy such contrivances inane . . .

Sir Autumnbottom: By my troth, t'would serve if I did raze this foul drama with mine bodkin sharp wits – but gross combat with one so unfit t'would be unseemly.