Movies: As far as Mr. Sullivan is concerned, the whole "y'all got bigger penises" thing is all the reparations anybody has got a right to expect.

An unnecessary sequel to an uncelebrated remake of pretty trashy film, 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams marks a step back for a young director who has yet to take any appreciable steps forward.

I have a soft spot for this flick's grandpappy. I'll honestly admit that Two Thousand Maniacs! (Lewis's punctuation, not mine) provides a completely unjust and tawdry revanchist thrill to what little Dixie pride I might have, but that is not the film's chief claim on my nostalgia. Rather, my predominant attitude towards horror as a genre was formed by Lewis's cheapee little splatfest.

First, as a child of the slasher besotted 1980s, horror's dreariest era, I was pleasantly shocked by Herschell Gordon Lewis's general disdain for his supposed protagonists and his blithe willingness to off them mercilessly. Compared to the jump-scare-to-the-kill spasms of slasher flicks, character's in TTM! suffered fates worse than death and then died. Watching, one got the sense that the survivors got out not because they were privileged - like the schematic final girls of slasher cinema - but rather because Lewis's cruelty, like that of cat, is bounded only by his ability to get bored easily. It was as if he'd simply had his fill of blood (or run out of money to buy more red paint), announced the martini shot, let his remaining near-victims go free, and called it a day. Whether this was a genuine insight into the narrative strategies Lewis was trying to employ or not, it left me with an exhilarating, teasing sense of horror cinema as something that was played without a net. To this day, if I can tell in the first reel who makes it to the last reel, I feel played for a sucker through the rest of the flick.

The second, and perhaps weirder legacy, has to do with a single scene in Lewis's original. In the 1964 flick, one of the victims gets placed in a wooden barrel and sealed in. Then long metal nails are driven into the sides of the barrels. Finally, the barrel is rolled down a hill. At the bottom of the hill, the barrel is opened to reveal that the nails have done their fatal work and the victim is a bloody mess. The redneck cannibals go wild! Ever since I saw that scene, I've been obsessed with the idea that there's got to be some way to survive this trap. I haven't fully figured it out yet. I'm convinced that a person desperate enough to survive could, in fact, push against the sides of the barrel and brace themselves throughout the ride. This would send nails into your back, which admitted would suck a billion kind of ways. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be fatal. In fact, it may just be what saves you, as being impaled from the start might help you from bouncing around the inside of the barrel. The problem is, as I see it, even if you survive the ride down, you've ended up at the bottom of the hill severely injured and surrounded by a mob of pissed-off ghouls. That's the sticking point: how to get out of the barrel and use the lead you've gained by rolling down the hill to your advantage. I'm still working on that part. Anyway, the important thing is that it started in me an obsession with watching films with an eye towards thinking, "How would I get out of that?" This isn't your standard "victims are stupid" stuff - on the contrary, perhaps my least favorite aspect of slasher cinema is its cynical formula that dooms certain characters from the start, essentially robbing characters of the opportunity to genuinely fight to live - but rather a fascination with what humans could do if facing impossible odds.

The two things are connected, of course: to get the sense that you're able to battle against the odds, one has to get the sense that there are still odds. A cinema without a safety net is the only cinema in which you can feel people are really struggling and the outcome is always in doubt. And that, oddly, is perhaps my criteria for what makes good horror, though I know it's inadequate to solving genre disputes or helping folks bash Twilight: a good horror film pits humans against the most extreme consequence, without the consolation of a predetermined end.

Oh, here I've rambled on and not discussed 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. Though, honestly, I'm okay with that.

Movies: Bird is the word.

When I first moved to New York City, I thought the Town That Never Weeps would be filled with hidden pockets of eccentric coolness. You know, tiny little restaurants ain't nobody heard of, bars that only a select group of regulars frequent, small parks forgotten by the baby-stroller pushing hordes and radio-blasting juvies – places to discover for yourself. It did take long to realize that, for the most part, the city is pretty frontier-less. Especially in the age of blogs and user-driven regional web sites, no patch of land remains unexplored, reviewed, and assigned a one- to five-star rating.

There are exceptions, sure. But they're few and far between. There was the old dive bar Siberia, for example. This place was well-known, but I found that very few of the many of the folks who had heard of the joint had ever actually visited. It was genuine hole being situated as it was in a subway stop – the 51st station on what was the old 1 and 9 line. Not that Siberia was the world's greatest bar or anything. It was actually pretty scruffy. The ambiance was heavily Gitmo, the furniture looked like it had been thrown on the street and the street threw it right back, the beer selection was strictly utilitarian, and the bathrooms were so ill-lit that you were forced to make a choice: either pee in the dark with the door closed for privacy or leave the door wide open so you could actually aim. I should add that both bathrooms had several fist sized holes in the wall, entry points for things that lived behind the walls of 51st Street stop. If you were gutsy enough to pee in the dark, you'd get treated to the sound of things creeping out of their lair to see what you were and to guess at whether or not you were edible.

Despite how dismal the joint could be, it attracted loyalists. Some of the regulars were simply maintenance alcoholics from the office building above the station. They were grabbing a bit of Dutch courage to steel themselves for the transition between grinding work drudgery and soul-destroying suburban home hell. But, aside from the chemically dependent boozers, there were people that could have easily gone anywhere and chose to be in the dungeon-like Siberia,

I can't speak for everybody, but part of the charm of the place for me was that it was a find. It was exactly that sort of word-of-mouth hideaway that rewarded a the adventurous with a story; it was in and of itself a prize for folks who would go a little out of their way for something unique or unusual.

I bring this up because genre entertainment often plays the same game: you think you're going to run into diamonds in the rough all over the place. You imagine that you'll stumble across that curious flick or forgotten book or what-have-you. The truth is that the field as a whole seems heavily weighted towards junk and what isn't crappola is usually thoroughly documented, reviewed, and rated.

So, imagine my surprise when, reading the reviews of horror-blogger Mermaid Heather (see sidebar), she gave a five-out-of-five review to a flick I've never heard of before. This lady has reviewed what must amount to a couple hundred flicks by now, and you can count the number of fives she's give on your fingers. And here's a complete unknown grabbing a five. Was this one of those elusive gems? A genuine find?

The flick in question is the somewhat cryptically titled 2004 film Dead Birds: a semi-Lovecraftian dark house horror set in the latter years of the Civil War. The movie begins with a bloody bank robbery. The perpetrators – a group of Confederate deserters, a freedman, and a nurse – take their loot and head of to a plantation their leader knows to be deserted. On finding their way to the old house, the gang finds themselves dragged in the supernatural carnage left there when the mansion's previous owner accidentally-on-purpose tore open a hole between this universe and the next, letting all sorts of otherworldly nastiness pour through. Ultimately, the flicks boils down to a simple main conflict: can this armed gang keep their crap together long enough to make it through a single night on the plantation?

I was not disappointed by Dead Birds (the title, according to the director, refers to a dead bird that appears in the yard of the plantation, evidence that suggests nothing can survive the curse of the plantation). The first feature-length flicker from director Alex Turner (son of famed jazz album cover photographer Pete Turner) plays like the work of comfortably established director. It looks polished, achieves a level of tension that threatens to leave the viewer physically spent at times, and is confident enough with its elliptical plot that it makes demands of it viewers without lapsing into lazy storytelling or easy explanations. Shot on location at an actual decaying plantation house, Turner and his crew make the most of the dim period lighting, achieving some set-ups that would be the envy of directors working with much bigger budgets.

There are some flaws in the flick. The period setting is essential to the story, which makes the occasional anachronisms all the more jarring – apparently the nurse in this gang has figured out the importance of sterilization well in advance of the rest of the medical establishment. Also, despite a pretty nifty creature design, the CGI effects distance the viewer rather than pull them in.

These don't take away from the fact DB is a genuinely good flick. I'm somewhat baffled as to how this movie didn’t garner more attention on its initial release. With so much substandard junk littering the low-budget field, DB stands head-and-shoulders above most of its b-flick kin. The flick is the most promising debut I've seen in awhile and well worth checking out.

As an aside, the film also got me thinking about how odd it is that slavery doesn't play a significant role in the collective imagination of horror cinema. Our various modern wars, from WW I to the current war, have given us all manner of monstrosity. The various nightmares of the Western expansion have resurfaced in the form of cannibal flicks, sundry Native American tropes (from wendigos to that ever-popular cause of trouble: the Indian burial ground), and even camp mash-ups (see Billy the Kid versus Dracula). The Civil War makes its appearance, but most often in the form of weird Southern revenge flicks like 2,000 Maniacs and it re-makes and their sequels. Even the American Revolution has given us a single well-known icon: the Headless Horseman.

But slavery – a 400-year-old display of horror and human cruelty played out on an unimaginable scale – seems to have inspired very little in the way of horror flicks. Slavery played minor part in the Candyman franchise and I can think of minor a reference to it in I Walked with a Zombie, but otherwise it seems remarkably absent as a topic in horror cinema. This strikes me as curious. Horror often finds its greatest traction in the stresses and anxieties of a culture and I submit to you that the legacy of slavery remains one of the greatest sources of anxiety in our culture. Even from a strictly thematic standpoint, you'd think it would come up more. One of the most shopworn narrative devices in horror cinema is that the deeply wronged seek revenge in horrific ways. What group of people were ever so deeply wronged as the victims of slavery? And yet, even in Dead Birds, the fact that our ill-fated plantation owning necromancer owned slaves is a fairly minor plot point. He's cursed not by the fact that he systematically visited the results of the one of most brutal system of de-humanization ever devised upon a group of innocents, but by the considerably more spookshow idea that he dabbled forbidden magic – the latter apparently being the more sinister crime.

Perhaps the issue's too sensitive even for horror folk to touch. Perhaps people are afraid to drive off white audiences. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it seems like a conspicuous absence.

Movies: Wax philosophical.

To consider the 2005 remake of House of Wax, the second remake of the 1933 Michael Curtiz thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum, is to give it too much credit. The film is a standard issue youth-slaughter picture that is only redeemed by its climactic finale which takes place in what might be the most elaborately designed and surreal set to grace a contemporary horror flick. The plot, which has only a loose connection to the two previous incarnations of the flick, involves a group young folks who, on their way to a college football game, end up lost in a town where a pair of crazed brothers have trapped passersby and turned them into wax statues. The kids, including the dramatically inert Paris Hilton, are picked off one by one, until only a brother/sister duo remain to fight off the mad wax sculptors. This final showdown occurs in the titular House of Wax, an art deco influenced wax museum that is (in the film's least likely conceit – which is saying something for a flick about dudes who get their kicks making wax statues out of folks) made out of wax. As psychos and victims face off, a raging fire slowly melts the museum around them. The effect is notably original and remarkably pleasing, but I doubt many viewers will find it redeems the otherwise by-the-numbers lead up.

What I found most interesting about this flick is its membership in an odd little subgenre of flick that posits the existence of time-capsule towns, isolated from the rest of the world and preserved, throughout the South. Think of them as "Hee-Haw" versions of Doyle's Lost World.

I'm just thinking out loud here, so forgive me if I ramble.

The origins of this idea – the town trapped in amber – aren't, it seems to me, distinctly Southern. The archetype for it is, I suspect, the fictional town of Germelshausen, the creation of German novelist Friedrich Gerstäcker. His cursed village was later re-imagined as a Scottish village 1947 stage musical by Alan Jay Lerner (lingering anti-German sentiment from WWII necessitated the cultural reworking).

In the multiverse of horror flicks, these retrograde hamlets can be found dotting the globe – from the pagan worshipping island community of Summersisle of The Wicker Man to the perpetually-dawn-of-the-Cold-War era mining community of mutants in The Hills Have Eyes. Still, it seems like the South gets more than their fare share. The most famous horror example is, perhaps, Pleasant Valley, the cannibalistic Brigadoon of Herschell Gordon Lewis's Two Thousand Maniacs (revisited in the 2005 remake). In that flick, a South Carolina town decimated by Union soldiers in the War of Northern Aggression returns semi-regularly to trap lost tourists and turn them into barbeque. Despite several glaring anachronisms, we're supposed to understand that Pleasant Valley is stuck somewhere in is pre-destruction antebellum days.

Ambrose, the Louisiana (played gamely by Gold Coast, Australia) town in the most recent House of Wax, is also a fatal tourist trap, though the aim of our villains is primarily artistic rather than gustatory. Unlike Pleasant Valley, Ambrose seems to have frozen sometime in the 1960s: the movie theater perpetually shows 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. There are anachronistic cars parked all over town, but I think we're supposed to understand that the vehicles belong to the crazed brothers' many victims.

In a more artsy and pretentious, if no less weird and disturbing, vein, Lars von Trier's 2005 Manderlay involves a Southern plantation that, somehow, has managed to keep the institution of slavery running for another 70 years.

Interestingly, the fictional time capsule towns of the South are not always presented as horrific death traps or politically incorrect backwaters. Tim Burton's 2003 Big Fish features Specter, a fictional Alabama town that is stuck eternally in an idealized and perfect 30's/40's To Kill a Mockingbird era of the South.

I'm not quite sure why the South seems like such rich soil for time capsule towns. I would say that it has to do with the South's constant mythologizing of its own past, but the fact that, of the four movies mentioned, none of the directors is a Southerner (a Pennsylvanian, a Californian, and two Europeans) suggests it is not a regionally specific quirk. Perhaps it is a reflection of the economic status of the South – after more than a century of New South boosterism, the landscape of rural Dixie is still dotted with Depression era structures, Eisenhower era vehicles, and, unfortunately, the occasional Jefferson Davis era mentality. Again, though, the fact that at least on of these films was shot in Australia, on a set more influenced by urban art deco design, suggests it's got little to do with actual conditions in the South.

I don't have any real conclusions here. Just an observation on something I find curious.