A intriguing little tidbit of news from the Hollywood reporter. Take it away, Borys Kit:
Iconoclastic filmmaker Paul Schrader is teaming up with nihilistic author Bret Easton Ellis for the shark-infested psychological horror project Bait.
Schrader, the writer behind Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and the writer-director of American Gigolo, has signed to direct the picture, and will collaborate with Ellis on the latest draft of the script, which follows a young man itching to take his revenge against the wealthy.
The man, who works at a posh beach club, angles his way on to a yacht filled with the obnoxious elite, commandeering it into waters filled with the finned man-eaters.
There's not much more to the article than that. Production's aimed to start this year.
One of the curious things about Jaws is that for all the technical difficulties that plagued the original high-budget Hollywood blockbuster, the film's inspired slews of brilliant backyard D.I.Y. lo-fi remakes and tributes.
Here's a new one: The Bronx's video for the "Knifeman," which features the band, sub-aquatic rock action, and a vicious toy shark.
Cannibals! (And Philosophers!)
The first chapter of An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is available as a free download from Princeton Press. But, be warned, you've got to wade through this sort of jargon.
This history of cannibalism can be reconstructed as three successive stages, part historical and part conceptual. In the first, the cannibal is viewed as a creature from the perspective of natural law. In the second, the cannibal becomes the diabolical retort in which the flux of particles confounds the calculations of theologians and metaphysicians. The third stage is that at which we seem to have arrived today, when the cannibal is a creature of circumstances and education. Natural law, materialism, and anthropological relativism are the three major contexts that impose a division in the history of the cannibal’s passage through thought and which are, in their turn, clarified by his presence.
Nevertheless, the present work is not one that is primarily historical. First of all because it is in no way a history of cannibalistic practices. Of course, the instances of verifiable anthropology have sometimes left their traces in the ideal productions of the philosophers. However, whether cannibals existed or not is a fact of marginal importance. My cannibal is in the first place a scholarly creature, a personage who animates theoretical texts, and only to a lesser extent, if at all, is he a subject for the anthropology of the aberrant.
Robots!
A Swedish newspaper is reporting that "a Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm."
The article summarizes the whole attack:
Public prosecutor Leif Johansson mulled pressing charges against the firm but eventually opted to settle for a fine.
"I've never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this," he told news agency TT.
The incident took place in June 2007 at a factory in Bålsta, north of Stockholm, when the industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.
But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim's head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.
"The man was very lucky. He broke four ribs and came close to losing his life," said Leif Johansson.
The matter was subject to an investigation by both the Swedish Work Environment Authority (Arbetsmiljöverket) and the police.
Bones!
Christine Quigley, mistress of the macabre, has an excellent post featuring shots of this unbelievable, skeleton-filled tomb in Peru.
Notice that each skeleton is topped with two skulls.
Whenever I'm watching a science-runs-amok style horror flick, I'm always baffled that the scientists involved seem completely unaware of, say, the almost two centuries of culture and art that have passed betwixt the publication of Shelley's Frankenstein and now that state, fairly unambiguously, that mad science is almost always a shitty idea. You never see a researcher pause, turn to his lab partners, and say, "Hey, does anybody ever wonder if making these sharks bigger, stronger, smarter, and psychopathic is really a good idea? I mean, sure, everybody needs bigger sharks. That a given. But psychopathic? Does anybody even remember why we decided that? Just seems, you know, ill-advised."
Lab partner: "Wait, are you accusing us of playing God in a dangerously irresponsible way? Are you saying we're like Frankenstein?"
Scientist: "I'm sorry. I'm completely unfamiliar with one of the most common metaphors for the dilemma of scientific ethics in Western culture. Forget I said anything. Let's get back to work. We're burning daylight and these sharks aren't going to make themselves into unstoppable killing machines!"
But, apparently, it isn't a lapse on the part of filmmakers. Mad scientists seem to actually work that way.
Last Wednesday, Short Sharp Science, the blog of New Scientist magazine, reported that the Pentagon has put out a bid request for something they're calling a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System." The short description: they want researchers to develop robots that will hunt down things using the same pack logic that wolves and dogs use.
Currently, remote weapons systems are spiffy and all, but a one-person-per-machine ratio means that you take a soldier off the field for every machine you deploy. What, say the brilliant minds at the Pentagon, if you could tip the ratio? One soldier could control an alpha robot and several other robotic weapons systems would follow its lead the same way pack hunters organize their efforts around an alpha hunter. From Short Sharp Science's post:
What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.
We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.
As if this wasn't Rise-of-the-Machines enough, the phrasing of the request is equally unsettling. The stated function of these robo-packs is to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human." While the language actually means "a test subject who is actively attempting to avoid detection," it is a turn of phrase that makes it sound as if some quisling AI researchers have already decided to welcome our new Skynet-driven overlords.
Lest ANTSS be accused of not going after the low hanging fruit, here's the robo-revolution's version of L'Internationale:
The New York Times reports that Frank Mundus, the famed shark hunter who claimed to be the inspiration for Jaws' Quint, passed away of heart attack in his tropical island home in Hawaii.
From the obit:
Frank Mundus, the hulking Long Island shark fisherman who was widely considered the inspiration for Captain Quint, the steely-eyed, grimly obsessed shark hunter in “Jaws,” died on Wednesday in Honolulu. He was 82 and lived on a small lemon-tree farm in Naalehu, on the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, 2,000 feet above shark level.
Was he really the inspiration for Robert Shaw's unforgettable character?
The legend grew, and in the next few years, he repeatedly took Peter Benchley, who wrote the best seller “Jaws,” out to sea.
Mr. Mundus told a New York Times reporter that Mr. Benchley loved the way he harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track them while they ran to exhaustion.
In 1975, “Jaws” was turned into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, which for years left millions of beachgoers toe-deep in the sand. Robert Shaw played Quint, who exits by sliding feet first into the belly of a monster great white.
Mr. Benchley, who died in 2006, denied that Mr. Mundus had been the inspiration for Quint, whom he described as a composite character.
Clearly irked, Mr. Mundus said: “If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.”
Curiously, the Times fails to mention that Mundus was the subject of two book length profiles: Robert F. Boggs's Monster Man (Mundus's rep for catching monster fish and his well-known advert – which promised charters "Monster Fishing" – earned him the nickname "Monster Man") and the shamefully out-of-print In the Slick of the Cricket by Russell Drumm. The latter is, for my money, one of the finest bits of nature writing in American letters. Mundus's memoirs came out under the title Fifty Years a Hooker. If you go the Amazon page for his book, you can see the short note Frank left there:
Dear Amazon customers,
If you want to find out what kind of a pesty old goat I turned into, buy my book Fifty Years A Hooker
Jaws for Sport, Frank Mundus
Mundus was less than impressed by Spielberg's blockbuster:
“It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen, because too many stupid things happened in it . . . For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts.”
And, finally, the scene that secured Quint's place in the pantheon of Coolest Film Characters of All Freakin' Time:
In keeping with the informal theme of reasons never to visit the developing world, this humble horror blog turns its attention back to Mexico, recently covered as the source of man-eating evil vines. Today we discuss a different, but no less sinister threat: really crappy movies like 1977's Tintorera.
I start this review with some reservation. This flick was so infuriatingly bad that I was unable to finish it and, without sticking through to the very end, I must admit the infinitesimally small possibility that, somehow, in the last 20 odd minutes, the movie completely turns about and becomes a cinematic masterpiece. So, in order to be completely above board, I hereby specify that what follows is not a review of the film Tintorera, but rather a review of the first 60 excruciating minutes of said flick. I cannot, and will not, hold it responsible for whatever happens in the last 20 minutes.
The first 60 minutes of Tintorera focus on a bearded Anglo square who takes doctor-mandated R & R in a Mexican resort. There he crosses paths with a sleazy gigolo. These two briefly squabble over a hot tourista who beds both of them, in sequence not tandem, before conveniently making herself a victim of the titular tiger shark ('tintorera" is Spanish for "stock footage"). The gents, assuming their mutual lady-friend simply left town (one morning, without taking any of her belongings, or checking out of her hotel, like ladies do all the time), become friends and the gigolo starts teaching the square how to bag local trim, where to score weed, and other essential life skills of the late 70s.
All the while, all too infrequent tiger shark attacks "terrorize" the populace. And by terrorize, I mean nobody seems to much notice the suddenly disappearing cast members.
I quit watching when, bored of T & A and pot, the "heroes" of our story go shark hunting. For these scenes, the actors and stunt doubles actually kill several sharks on camera. Mostly its relatively harmless beasties, like lemon sharks and small blues, that fall before the boredom of these mighty hunters. I can put up with a lot of crap in a movie, but the unnecessary killing of animals ain't one of them.
One could argue, on a theoretical level, that life is short and art is long: aestheticized suffering and death gain the victim a sort of immortality as a work of art. But then you would be talking about some imaginary worthwhile flick, 'cause Tintorera qualifies as art only in the sense that it is the intentional byproduct of human interaction with recording devices. Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps the most infamous instance of grindhouse cinema's lack of animal treatment standards, Tintorera lacks the thematic unity or emotional power to even attempt to justify itself (for the record, I think CH fails to justify itself as well, but at least it tries). It is simply easier to kill animals than fake up some effects, so that's what the filmmaker did.
Where it not for it callous disregard for the lives of some truly beautiful animals, this flick would be just another bit of sleazy post-Jaws detritus. But the idea that animals died to make this crap flick happen graduates it to the level of something genuinely depressing.
I have no pets. I own several ties, but rarely have a reason to wear any of them. I sing in the shower but can never remember the words, so I make them up as I go along, and they always end up being songs about showering. I collect slang dictionaries.
