Rewatched Candyman this afternoon. I can't imagine anybody needs a review of this film, so I'll jump straight to my random thought: No flick less justly categorized as a "slasher" than Candyman.
The Clive Barker sourced fright flick, lensed by Bernard Rose, was partially a victim of timing. Film critics, especially the collective pro-am that dominates the dialogue regarding horror films, trade heavily on taxonomic and genealogical observation (both of which speak to core competency: a bent towards the trivial and citizenship status in a large, clannish interpretive community), a strategy that leaves them constantly reaching for existing interpretive models and repeatedly cramming new works into the intellectual boilerplate of previous films. When Candyman appeared in 1992, surrounded by the rotting odds and sods of the long since creatively bankrupt "slasher" moment in American horror cinema, the slasher subgenre was the Procrustean bed the fright fancy chose to stretch the film across. To this day, Candyman is widely considered a slasher: the horror-centric Bloody Disgusting site and the post-Whedon "geek culture" list-and-link-dump UGO site both list the titular baddie in their "Top N Slashers" lists.
To be fair, they're not alone. When composer Philip Glass, who gave the film its revisionists gothic organ and chorus score, saw the finished product, he was so repulsed that he withheld the release of the soundtrack recording for nearly a decade. He had scored the film thinking he was contributing to an artsy indie flick. He felt betrayed by the director. The derogatory Glass used to describe Candyman was "slasher flick."
Either as a slam or critical observation, the label of slasher doesn't fit Candyman. Instead, what Rose delivered was curiously retro gothic tale that owes more to classic Universal monster flicks than it does cynical slaughters of the 1980s.
Candyman himself belongs the odd tradition of monstrous nobility that descends straight from Lugosi's Dracula. Displaying some typically Barkerish traits, Todd's Candyman is a cursed decadent, an envoy from some place beyond our understanding of good and evil, a Romantic and aristocratic character who, it is revealed, is something of a vampiric psychic tyrant, kept somehow in unlife by the fearful worship of the downtrodden residents of Cabini-Green, Candyman's urban Transylvania populated by updated peasants.
The plot has a love-beyond-death seduction angle utterly foreign to the golden age slasher. In fact, the plot somewhat mirrors the plot of Coppola's Dracula relaunch - which emphasized the "weird love story" that was mostly marketing BS in the original film - that appeared the same year.
The film's first coda, with Candyman dropping what's essentially a "we belong dead" line as he and his bride are trapped in a giant bonfire, evokes the two Whale-directed Frankenstein films. We even get angry "villagers" with torches!
Candyman's charms have been buried too long under the misconception that it was just the weirdo entry in the slasher flood. The misappropriation of the flick by subgenre partisans has obscured what it really was: a genuinely interesting effort at updating classic gothic tropes for a modern, urban context. I would argue that the flick wasn't completely successful, but I believe the fusion of an intellectual, urban sensibility with deeply felt traditional gothic themes prefigured quite a bit of the "New Weird" aesthetic of urban fantasy. As source of future inspiration, it languishes in a genre ghetto it doesn't belong in.
I wonder too if we shouldn't credit the film with being an early innovator in the lavish squalor aesthetic that became the signature style of some many modern horror flicks after Fincher perfected it in Se7en. John Doe's nameless city could easily contain this imagined version of Cabrini-Green and you feel like you wouldn't be surprised if Virginia Madsen's Helen came across Jigsaw's bathroom-of-death in some less used section of the project.
I've got just over 20 responses in comment form and in emails. Thanks everybody who has responded so far.
For those who haven't yet responded, what are you waiting for? A written invitation?
Well, okay then.
Dear blog reader,
You are cordially invited to participate in the Great Slasher Research Project of 2010. Step 1 of the two step project involves crowd sourcing a working definition of the a slasher film. To help, leave a comment, either here or in the original post, that lists (in no particular order) the elements you believe make a film a slasher film. Don't worry about the answers of others - in fact, don't even read the other responses until you've contributed your own. And don't spend to much time crafting the perfect response. We're looking for a list like so:
1. Something something 2. Things 3. Stuff that is there 4. Nothing that shouldn't be there 5. You know
On the 20th, I'll quit taking suggestions and present those elements on which their was the greatest consensus.
In order to explain why Daniel Maze's 2009 neo-slasher Cornered! (aspirational exclamation point his, not mine) is even worth writing about, I have to spoil the flick. The "serial killer targeting bodega employees" logline is, in and of itself, worth a chuckle; but the odd idea of a bondage mask wearing slasher dispatching cornershop employees isn't the real reason to watch the film. Honestly, the reason to queue up this odd duck horror disk on your Netflix account is because it features - and here comes the spoilation - Steve Guttenberg as a psycho slasher.
I shit you not. For reals.
If you've been possessed of a burning desire to see Mahoney bury a meat cleaver halfway through some whore's neck, this is the cinematic experience you've been waiting for.
And, for the record, the "whore" thing isn't me passing judgment on the lifestyle choices of a character of the presumed personal life of an actress. In said film, the be-cleaved is a semi-freelance sex industry worker.
Now that we've covered those details, I'm not sure what, exactly, there is to still say about Cornered!. And, yes, I'm going to add the exclamation mark to the title every time it shows up. You can't see it, but I'm actually doing jazz hands every time the title appears in my review. 'Cause any film can be ho, hum . . . Cornered, I guess, but this is Cornered!, F**k Yeah!: the movie so unjustifiably self-satisfied that it deserves to be a Tumblr blog!
It would be easy to spend the rest of the review scoring cheapo zingers off this flick which is, regardless of anything I might say after this sentence, not a very good film. Instead, I'd like to point out a couple of aspects of the film that worked for me.
First, our victim collection is a nice departure from the stereotypical gaggle of teens. Admittedly, it staggers belief that a run down cornershop that - as far as we see - has no customers would employ enough people to make up a slasher fodder cluster (SFC). Still the SFC is made up of a nice platter of urban wreckage types and, for the most part, the actors bringing these dead-end types to life all acquit themselves honorably. Special props to Peter Story who has the thankless task of animating the donut-addicted Donny: a character who is constantly on the verge of becoming a hero, but repeatedly retreats into cowardice and uselessness. Donny doesn't discover his hidden resourcefulness until everybody else is pretty much dog food and his personal survival in on the line. His utter incapacity and pointlessness makes him something like the opposite of the mostly mythological final girl and Story, Maze, and Co. deserve credit for denying themselves the easy route of sudden and senseless heroism.
Second, there's a nice magical realism element involving James Duval's kickin' cold turkey junkie character, Jimmy, and a tribe of sinister, seemingly intelligent cockroaches. This running bit gives us many of the film's most pleasing moments.
And third - freakin' Steve Guttenberg as a slasher.
The intersection of sex, violence, and gender is something of a black hole for critics of the slasher flick: an infinitely dense conceptual point that, sooner or later, exerts a pull on whatever is said about the subgenre. You don't have to look further than the "final girl" concept - minted in 1992, this much criticized idea remains the chief currency of slasher debates - to see all these obsessions at play. However, the final girl concept, and nearly all other criticism of the subgenre, is maddeningly vague. Opponents of the concept have pointed out that you can only apply the archetype after abstracting the films it purportedly described to the point of absurdity. Others question the mechanics of identification at the idea's core: the final girl seems to assume that everybody in the audience reacts the same to a film, switching allegiances at all the right points, all in psychic lockstep with their fellow film-goers.
This vagueness hold true for several other much-discussed aspects of the subgenre. The often invoked, rarely described "formula" that slashers purportedly follow is another example. Ask people for a rundown of the formula and you'll get something that almost never applies fully to any given film in your subset. Lone killer? Not Texas Chainsaw. Minority victims go first? Doesn't hold for Nightmare on Elm Street. Lone female survivor? More often not the case. I await the day when somebody does the basic work of actually trying to define and apply the formula to see if this bit of horror-fan folklore actually holds true.
Researcher Andrew Welsh surveyed 50 different slasher flicks, from the subgenre's start to modern iterations, in order to discover gender-based variations in depictions of violence and sex. His conclusion:
Findings suggested that there are several significant gender differences in the nature of violent presentations found in slasher films. In general, female characters were more likely to be victims of less serious and graphic forms of violence, but were also significantly more likely to be victimized in scenes involving a concomitant presentation of sex and violence.
Specifically, male characters were most often the victims of extreme violence. However, the duration of the violence shown was shorter than the duration of violence in similar scenes involving female victims. Slasher cinema likes getting rid of its men fast and messy, but it likes to linger on female suffering. Slasher cinema also tends to juxtapose these images of female suffering with sexual imagery. This rarely ever happens to men in the subgenre.
Recently, in a series of posts about surviving the traps of the Saw franchise, I tossed out the theory that the best way to survive a slasher attack would be, despite the injunctions of many a horror blogger, to split up.
Here's the idea: If you are being targeted by a slasher, you and the rest of your party should book it in opposite directions as fast as you can and continue running until you are either killed, escape the slasher's sphere of influence, or find genuine help (like, say, you reach an Air Force base willing to scramble Apache helicopters to aid you). I hypothesized that, with such a strategy, the killer would easily get one or two victims; but the longer the game went on, the less likely he would be to snag another victim. As time progresses, the distance between targets increases and the knowledge the killer possesses about the location of future victims decreases. At some point, the killer is dealing with steadily expanding distances and he's essentially guessing about where he needs to go.
It sounds good on paper, but the persistence of received wisdom - "Don't split up!" - made me doubt. So, I decided to simulate the problem with a pencil and paper thought experiment.
Though we are all throughly aware that "assumptions" make an ass out of "you" and "umptions," we need to make a few before we can test any theory. Here's what I assumed.
Assumption 1: The slasher is reasonably human-like. First, strategy of any sort only matters against somebody who exists in time and space. Call it the Freddy Axiom. What's the point of running away from Freddy? He'll just pop out of the wall ahead of you or turn the floor into a giant sweater-wearing snake or something. There's really only one way to beat Freddy and that's to be a person the screenwriters have decided should live. For the purposes our experiment, the killer must move through space and eat up time with his actions.
Assumption 2: The slasher isn't psychic, but neither are the victims. The slasher is limited in its knowledge of the its surroundings and won't magically know exactly where it's victims are. Slashers, like any predator, have to find their victims. When they can see or hear them, this isn't a problem; but there's an operational limit involved here and, after that, they're essentially on random. This also means that the slasher won't get inexplicably delayed fighting some co-ed who has suddenly discovered that she can throw sofas at a dude using just the power of her mind.
Assumption 3: All things being equal . . . Because I'm doing this simulation with paper and pencil, we've got to keep it stupid enough for me to actually handle. We're going to assume average speeds. We'll admit that there would be differences in routes and whatnot that would introduce constant variations in speed. But I'm not smart enough to simulate that. We're also going to assume an average kill time. Sure, sometimes Jason just buries an axe in a girl's skull and calls it a day. But, when he's feeling his oats, Jason sometimes ties somebody shut into their sleeping bag and hoists the whole shebang over a tree branch in order to position the victim over campfire. Instead of selecting all the varying kill times, we're going to say that it all comes out in the wash and standardize his kill delay.
Assumption 4: There's splitting up and then there's splitting up. For our purposes, splitting up means putting an ever increasing distance between you and the other members of your party. Dividing into three groups to explore a creepy farmhouse isn't splitting up.
To test the theory, me and my cubical-mate created a little game. It works like this. There are 8 potential victims and 1 slasher. Everybody starts at a central point. The game goes in turns. Victims always move first. In a turn, each character can move their full movement allowance - measured by an arbitrary unit of length we very scientifically called "a unit." Potential victims always just book it the hell out of there, moving in a straight line away from the central point. They fan out at 45 degree angles. The slasher is free to move in any direction. If the slasher contacts any potential victim, they are removed from play - but killing them takes up the slasher's next turn. Play continues until all players are dead or they have moved 10 units away from the slasher. At that point, the slasher "loses sight" of the players and the slasher's motions become randomized. In theory, the slasher could still catch somebody, but in practice the chances of that happening are minimal (it never happened in any of our games).
We played three variations of the game: Game 1 featured a killer and victims of equal speed, Game 2 featured a killer that was slightly faster than the victims, and Game 3 featured a killer who was twice as fast as his victims.
Despite the popularity of the plodding slasher, we played no games in which the killer was slower than the victims because it became very clear that, according to the game model, a slow and steady killer catches neither diddly nor squat. So, we've learned our first lesson. Wannabe slashers take note: Go fast or go home.
Game results:
Game 1 - The killer takes a victim in Turn 1. And that's it. The killer takes off after his next victim, which he always stays a little more than one unit behind. The other victims begin to disappear off his radar by Turn 6. Curiously, the game - according the the strict construction of the rules - never officially ends because the killer never loses sight of that poor potential second victim. Like Sidney Prescott, Not-Victim-2 is cursed to be pursued for the rest of the franchise.
Game 2 - In the game we ran, the killer moved one and one half units to every unit his potential victims did. As in the slower game, a victim dies right-off in Turn 1. The killer gets another victim in Turn 5, but victims start falling off the radar in the same turn. The killer gets a third victim in turn 13. The killer takes a final victim in Turn 26. At that point the remaining four players have escaped.
Game 3 - In the last game, our killer hauled ass. He could move two units to every one unit the potential victims could move. As in Games 1 and 2, somebody bites it right off. The second victim falls in Turn 3. People start dropping off the killer's radar by the Turn 5. The third victim goes in Turn 7 and the fourth in Turn 13, but by that time everybody else has dropped of the radar.
Conclusions: Splitting up - defined as getting as far from one another as possible as quickly as possible - saves half the party even when the killer is considerably faster than the victims. In fact, after running the game three times, we estimate that even the fastest killer could get no more than five victims. The rest would inevitably fall off the radar and escape.
Admittedly, this is all pretty abstract. We didn't figure in the obligatory twisted ankle, the presence of a second killer, or late-franchise supernatural shark-jumping elements. Still, I think it points to the fact that the conventional wisdom is wrong. How do you survive a slasher flick? Split up!
"Intern Katy" at Jezebel gives this all the intro it needs.
An all-male creative team in Switzerland have created this vampire-themed ad for o.b.
Thanks to Heather for the tip.
"Demonic Interference Can Be Ruled Out."
The typically cocky New Scientist rules out "demonic interference" as the cause of an outbreak of grisi siknis, or "crazy sickness" in Nicaragua.
From the article Q&A with Elie Karam of St George Hospital University Medical Centre in Beirut, Lebanon, who studied an outbreak of mass hysteria in Lebanon during 2004:
What are the typical symptoms?
The first group can be summarised as anxiety symptoms: tremors, shaking, difficulty breathing and feelings of suffocation. The second type is referred to as a dissociative symptom: the person does not recognise where he or she is, seems to be in a trance, looks as if they are in a daze, etc.
Younger individuals, and females, are more likely to be affected.
So far only 43 cases are documented. Karam went on to discuss treatment and community response issues.
Is there a cure?
Not as such. Symptoms always abate within a few weeks. Reassuring the community to reduce fear is key, as is keeping publicity and media attention to a minimum.
The photo above is actually from a 2003 outbreak in Nicaragua that spread through a documented 60 victims. Pole Position
Mihir Kumar was celebrating the Holi festival in Ranchi, India, when the accident occured.
He slipped off the roof of his family home and landed on a five foot-long iron rod that was left standing on a building site.
The pole punched through his rib cage and came out the other side.
His father said Mihir "endured terrible pain".
He was rushed to hospital where he underwent three-hour surgery at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences to remove the rod.
He is now recovering in hospital.
Dr Sandeep Agarwal, one of the three surgeons to operate on the boy, said he had miraculously escaped major internal injuries. What Slashers Owe Torture Porn
The Atlantic has a puff piece on the slasher revival that contains an interesting claim about the role of Saw and Hostel in the revival of the slasher.
Saw and Hostel succeeded, above all, because they are serious slasher flicks. The extremity of their goriness reclaimed the splatter death from mainstream movies (where it’s become unremarkable to see a man fed screaming to a propeller, or run through with a drill bit). And the immersive nastiness of their aesthetic—decayed bathrooms, foul workshops, seeping industrial spaces, blades blotched with rust—distilled the slasher-flick elixir: atmosphere. No franchise thrives without it. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had it: a choking, sunstruck intimacy, with madness pulsing in the eyeballs. Halloween was suburban-autumnal, a minor rhapsody of long shots and breezy streets and scuttling leaves, the whole effect tingling like wind chimes inside the empty psychosis of the slasher Michael Myers. Friday the 13th was strictly B-movie in its technique, but it succeeded in perforating an American idyll: summer camp was never the same after those nice guitar-strumming sing-along kids got slashed in their lakeside cabins.
Where the torture porn flicks adaptations in a Curtesian sense?
It's Alive! And Worth a Fortune!
Above is the "most valuable poster in the world." It's the Frankenstein six-sheet (nearly 7 x 7 feet). As far as anybody knows, there's only one in existence. It's currently the property of a New York. It hasn't been appraised in some time, but estimates put the value at more than $600,000. That sounds low to me as the highest earning one-sheet, for Universal's original The Mummy, fetched a little more than $535,000 at auction.
The Guardian has an article on the work of one Dr. Sarah Hainsworth, of the Space research Centre of the University of Leicester: the Fredrick Winslow Taylor of the slasher world. The good doctor is studying just how sharp (and sharpish) things poke through the human body. From the article:
Dr Sarah Hainsworth is an engineer who, for the past few years, has been investigating the sharpness of knives - and not just knives, but screwdrivers, scissors and even ballpoint pens. Any implement, in fact, that has featured as a murder weapon. "If you give somebody a knife and ask them if it's sharp, how do you measure that? How do you quantify sharpness?" Hainsworth asks. "I suppose that's what we've been trying to do."
The cutlery industry has measured the effectiveness of the slicing edges of blades designed for chopping up vegetables or carving meat, and how best to maintain that sharpness, she says. "But what nobody has really done is to investigate the sharpness of points." They certainly have now. Hainsworth sometimes spends whole afternoons dropping knives from various heights on to foam or legs of pork - a close substitute for human skin - and recording the results in finest detail.
Hainsworth found herself in this curious specialization after she was approached by a solicitor who thought that data on the amount of force his client used in a stabbing might influence sentencing; a perp who used less force, the thinking went, was not trying to hurt somebody as badly as somebody who went all crazy with the stabby stab. For those of the slasher-fan persuasion, however, the results are essentially a close-up, slow-mo take on the work on your favorite villains.
Using high-speed video film, they have gained a better understanding of the "mechanism" by which blades penetrate skin. This shows that there are a number of stages. At first contact the skin deflects around the knife tip. At a critical stress level the knife penetrates the skin. After penetration the sharpness of both tip and blade are important in determining how much further the knife goes in.
Stress is an engineering term expressed as force, measured in Newtons divided by area, Hainsworth explains. The force required to stab a person with a sharp knife is less than you might expect, she says. "Often, once the point has gone through the skin, the force required to go further is even less."
. . .
Other factors come into play in a stabbing, for instance the angle of strike and the width of blade. In further research, Hainsworth will replicate knife attacks using an accelerometer, a device that records the rapid changes in force used.
In her experience, the kitchen knife is the weapon most commonly used in murders. In recent years, more and more of these have been made with sharper tips - not necessary for the slicing and peeling most are designed for. Hainsworth suspects this is because people buying knives are often seen to check out the tip on their thumb rather then the long edge, and manufacturers have noticed this tendency.
Being neither a fan of the original series nor having any real interest in the relaunch, I'm somewhat surprised at how interesting I've founding the critical reactions to the new film.
Perhaps the strangest phenomenon spawned by the Friday the 13th remilkshake is, unlike the treatment of the original, this flick has entered the pop culture sphere with a resounding shrug from the non-horror world. To the world outside of the horror blog pro-am circuit, Friday is just another flick breezing through the multiplex. Compared to the moral outrage, protests, and (mostly in Europe) occasional censorship that slashers met on their first outing, this relaunch might as well be a movie featuring a lovable cast of computer generated puppies and kitties for all anybody seems to give a crap. Citizens groups used the opening date as a chance to time-shift their Valentine's plans to a night when more tables would be available; mainstream reviewers saw the whole thing as little more than a laughable excuse to business expense a box of Milk Duds; and nary a peep was heard from the pre-Millennial horror set, as they were to busy trying to figure out them new fangled ticket kiosk machines to register their normal apocalyptic note about how nothing worthy has happened in the genre since Mountaintop Motel Massacre.
The result of the widespread "sure, whatever" feeling is that, long after the hoi polloi have gone back to less embarrassing pursuits and the Plat Dunes professionals have returned to their meeting rooms to spec out the Roman numeral bearing offspring (Friday the 13th Part II: Jason is Our 401K), the only ones left to energetically debate the alleged merits of this flick are the long-time fanboys and -girls. For outsiders, it all gets a bit esoteric. If you weren't born between 1965 and 1975, then the debates about the relative merits of the new F13 have something of the flavor of theoretical schismatic communist politics: While the various folks involved seem to be able to get wound up about the distinction between Mao-leaning neo-Council Communism verses a retro-flavor militarist post-Hoxhaist Trotskyism, it all sounds the same to un-indoctrinated. Still, if you're willing to grant that the various folks involved are, in fact, seeing distinctions that, to your eye – untrained as it is by the fact that you've seen and enjoyed movies made after the Reagan/Bush years – are imperceptible, then there's still a strange fascination is watching the family fight.
Not unlike the Shiite/Sunni split in Iraq, one side's got the numbers while the other has years of practical experience. The vast majority of the slasher fancy has decided that, somehow, the new F13 doesn't measure up. While this seems to be the majority viewpoint, such critics are in a pretty tenuous place. After all, it isn't like we're evaluating a remake of Citizen Kane here. A lo-fi giallo rip-off, the F13 franchise has been corny for longer than its been worthy. To suddenly evoke considerations of quality seems like you're moving the goal posts.
In opposition to these nay-sayers, we've got a hardy minority who, even though they are outnumbered, have the great advantage of historical continuity. They're in the position of defending the indefensible, which has been the default position of the F13 fancy for nearly 20 years now. While apostates struggle to suddenly apply some sort of critical criteria to their once thought-proof pet franchise, the defenders can rely on years of experience dismissing the notion that films should aspire to quality. The F13 Tories can comfortably announce, "What were you expecting? It's a Friday flick – we don't do plot, or characterization, or drama, or sequence of events, or cause and effect, or main idea and supporting detail. It's this utter lack of concern for anything resembling filmmaking that equals fun." And then, if they're feeling their critical edge-on, they might add, "What happened to you guys? You used to be cool."
Even stranger, nobody seems to be really defending the quality of the film. What's at stake seems to be whether or not your allowed to demand quality in the first place.
This debate actually touches on a problem central to modern aesthetic theory. John Ruskin identified it as the "Chuck Berry Eats Poop Problem."
A little history. In Prisoner of X, a hilariously foul memoir of working two decades for Hustler, Allan MacDonell identifies one of his less savory tasks: watching, validating, and then negotiating the price for stolen celebrity sex tapes. This was back in the day before the miracle of the Interwebs basically automated the gig. Sometimes, on good days, there was a Rabelaisian carnivalesque aspect to the gig. There's something irresistibly funny about the idea of Ted Turner, Hanoi Jane, and an unidentified third party making the beast with three backs – especially when Jane is wearing some prodigious hardware and gets a bit Operation Barrel Roll on the Teddy Boy's rough road. Mostly, however, the content of these tapes and amateur loops was simply sad: the sordid kinks of legends already pickled in the formaldehyde of pop's collective conscious, old gods nearly gone who were still getting their dirty kicks while the world measured them out for a memorial plaque at the appropriate Hall of Fame. Such is the case with Chuck Berry.
MacDonell had the displeasure of negotiating for a tape that showed the man who wrote "Sweet Little Sixteen" eating fecal matter fresh from the backdoor of several anonymous partners. I know it's hard to believe the man who was caught video taping the WC-using patrons of his unfortunately named Southern Air restaurant could be a bit pervy when came to subject of bodily waste, but there it is.
But here's were Chuck Berry's predilections enter the realm of aesthetic philosophy. According to the source of the tape, Berry wasn't just some opportunistic poop-eater. Berry was a connoisseur de merde. Like all discerning aficionados of disreputable pleasures, regardless of the genre of kick, he developed an otaku-like passion for crap. He established a private ranking of his favorite providers, a sort of excremental Tête de Cuvée list. He would have his grand cru producers pinch off a loaf in white Styrofoam containers, neatly organized and labeled, for later consumption. In short, he became the Robert Parker of shit.
The "Chuck Berry Eats Poop Problem" is, thus, a two part dealie. Part Dealie the One: It is possible to apply the methods, mentality, and obsessive passion of the connoisseur to anything. And, Part Dealie the Two: Doing so doesn't mean your not still just talking about shit.
I have yet to see the new film. After dragging my horror wingman Dave through I can't think how many torture porn, man-eating plant, and similarly dubious horror experiences, I think I owe him this one; we're probably going to catch it this weekend. That said, I'm going to have to say that logic pretty much demands you side with the Tories on this one. The Friday flicks have, for that vast majority of the series, been Berry-chow. The first flick, with its effective use of a crisp and minimal visual style and its clever narrative structure (the girl who gets all the "clues" is essentially in a subplot that never fully links to the main story), is about as fine a piece of genre hackwork as you could ask for. The second film, which takes a welcome turn towards the grotesque, wasn't bad either. But, after that, the Friday franchise becomes, for non-devotees, a monotonous blur – excepting game efforts to go-wacky and set Jason's shenanigans in Manhattan (a sad bait and switch, unfortunately) and space. Too much a product of their time, the F13's cynical morality – in the 1980s, if you said that one's amoral sexual choices justly lead to a horrible death, you were either a teenager discussing slasher flicks or, sadly, the President of the United States talking about something else – their sub-music-video grade depth, and their lack of any sort of passion for quality hasn't allowed them to age well.
Given this, the loyalists are right to ask, "You had a lamprey-like lip lock on P. Doonie's dump door – what the hell did you think was on the menu?"
Not that the splitters don't have reasons. Among the most common are the film makes no sense (a opposed to the rigorous logic that was the hallmark of the series prior – e.g., Jason being alive in the first place), that the new Jason acts out of character (there's apparently something about Jason, some aspect of his nature invisible to the average viewer, that would prevent him from, say, using a bow and arrow to kill somebody), and that there aren't enough nods to the fans (despite the whole movie being fan service since Scream's Ghostface Killer is the slasher anybody under 30 grew up with).
That said, isn't it a bit of a pyrrhic victory? When "Your problem is that you've forgotten how to enjoy eating shit" is the strongest defense that can be mustered for a flick, it's hard to get excited.
But, since 2009 marks the semi-official "Return of Fun Horror" – meaning we've got remakes, relauches, and formula fodder coming out the wazoo, metaphorically – there's not much to do but kneel down and put on a bib.
B-Sol of VoH, nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in the list making business, has posted a ranking of the best foreign horror flicks of all time.
Here's the bottom 10. The number one is a bit of a truly unexpected upset.
10. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – Germany 11. Audition (1999) – Japan 12. The Host (2006) – South Korea 13. Zombi 2 (1979) – Italy 14. Dead Alive (1992) – New Zealand 15. Ringu (1998) – Japan 16. Inside (2007) – France 17. [REC] (2007) – Spain 18. Shaun of the Dead (2004) – United Kingdom 19. Wolf Creek (2005) – Australia 20. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – United Kingdom Not even a nice place to visit
Foreign Policy follows up with a completely different kind of list. Here's the worst prisons in the world, including Israel's Camp 1391, the officially non-existent "Gitmo" of Israel, and Equatorial Guinea's Black Beach prison, where, according to Amnesty International, incarceration is essentially "a slow, lingering death sentence."
Oddly, one of the worst prisons in the world can be found in Paris. Here's FP's description of France's La Santé prison: a little slice of Hell nestled right in the City of Lights.
The last remaining prison in Paris -- it's located near the Montparnasse area -- was established in 1867 and has housed everyone from surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire to legendary assassin Carlos the Jackal. The prison's name, which means "health," might seem ironic considering the conditions inside. Mattresses are infested with lice, and because prisoners are only allowed two cold showers per week, skin diseases are common. Overcrowded cells, rat infestations, rape, and the humiliation of prisoners' families were also common.
In 1999 there were 124 suicide attempts in La Santé, almost five times as many as in California's entire prison system during the same period. These facts only became available in 2000 when the head surgeon of the prison, Véronique Vasseur, published a bestselling book chronicling abuses in the prison. The book caused an uproar and a celebrity campaign to improve prisons throughout France, but little in the way of progress. France's prison conditions were condemned by the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the country's own minister of justice in 2008.
Satan is real
The music blog Aquarium Drunkard had is offering a free mp3 of the Louvin Brothers' famous tune "Satan is Real," from the cult album of the same name. From AD's intro:
The Louvin Brothers’ album Satan Is Real is without a doubt the Rosetta stone of fire and brimstone country gospel. Released in 1960, wrapped up in quite possibly the greatest iconic album cover of all time, the LP pulled no punches.
I like that polyester look
This has crap all to do with horror, but since we're talking music, the 20th anniversary (yes, you're that old) remastered edition of the Beastie Boy's Paul's Boutique is now available for listening enjoyment. And that's awesome.
Here's the video for "Hey Ladies."
Grandpa Jason walkers his way back to Crystal Lake
“There’s a tremendous benefit to staying in the same genre and producing movies for the same amount of money over and over,” said Mr. Fuller, “because you really learn who your key players are and how best to work with them.”
"Over and over" indeed.
Recently, a reviewer praising the My Bloody Valentine remake ended his positive review with the line: "Sure more can always be asked for, but more shouldn’t be expected." That should become the official tagline of the slasher film revival.
All praise to Doug Savage, artist behind the Savage Chickens web comic.
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.
