Movies: Why are Aussie vacations so darn dangerous?

In a perfect world, Netflix would be able to point you to just about any genre you could think up. No matter how obscure, idiosyncratic, or otherwise uninformative.

For example, one of my co-workers likes watching flicks that feature boarding schools. I don't know why. She didn't go to a boarding school. She doesn't have any kids, let alone any that go to a boarding school. I put it down to her being originally from Massachusetts. But, whatever the reason, she should be able to find movies by asking for "semi-twee boarding school movies." She'd maybe get Dead Poets Society, the History Boys, Cider House Rules, The Emperors Club, and so on. The "semi-twee" would spare her such flicks as Boarding School, the early '80s German sex farce (?), that would come up in a straight out keyword search, but doesn't really have the vaguely gay, emotionally-crippled, school tie aesthetic she's specializing in.

I bring this up because, on this dream Netflix, a search for "monster crocodile flicks based on true stories" would yield you at least two hits: Primeval and Black Water. It's a genre waiting to explode. With a little attention from filmmakers, I think "monster crocodile flicks based on true stories" could be the next "J-horror remakes."

We've already covered Primeval, so today we look at Black Water.

Like the former film, the latter, a small-scale 2008 Aussie creature feature, is based on a true story.

The Real Story

In 2007, an Australian cattle rancher named David George was tossed from his horse. He suffered a blow to the head. In a dazed and semi-concussed state, Georges recovered his horse and mounted up in the hopes that the horse would instinctively ride home.

Instead, the horse lead Georges in an isolated mangrove swamp in the Cape York region. Worse, while staggering about, Georges's horse disturbed a crocodile nest, royally pissing off the resident crocs and their touchy friends.

To escape the enraged lizards, Georges abandoned his horse and quickly scrambled up a mangrove tree. The horse was eaten. The crocs kept Georges treed for an entire week. So he wouldn't fall out of the tree in his weakened state, Georges tied himself to the trunk. Georges later told reporters "Every night I was stalked by two crocs who would sit at the bottom of the tree staring up at me. All I could see was two sets of red eyes below me and all night I had to listen to a big bull croc bellowing a bit further out. I’d yell out at them, ‘I’m not falling out of this tree for you bastards’.”

Eventually, Georges was found and rescued by a helicopter crew who had to drop a rope to him and lift him out of the croc-infested area.

The Film

Despite having a real story as inspiration, Black Water most resembles not the misadventures of David Georges, but rather another recent Aussie flick (itself "based on true story"). Like Wolf Creek, the film follows three young folks on a vacation gone awry. Even the gender mix is the same: two girls, one guy. There's the road movie aspect and the slow-build into that follows our trio through a tourist trap or two. Two of Wolf Creek's minor themes even pop up again: the lush beauty of nature and class of a modern, urban, educated Australia with its much mythologized, wild, primitive fringe. But, instead of a psycho-version of Crocodile Dundee, we get an actual croc filling the role of stalker.

Our film opens with a trio of young vacationers – sisters Grace and Lee, and Grace's boyfriend Adam – saying goodbye to Grace and Lee's mom. We quickly establish that Adam's an office drone, Grace is preggers (but Adam doesn't know), and Lee is the baby of the group. Unlike Wolf Creek, this film doesn't spend a lot of time getting to know these guys. They are meant to be almost generic Everymen and Women. All we need to know about them is that they're essentially nice folks. After a montage scene in a croc farm and a short bar scene in which our heroes decide to take a river tour, we've got our principles in a little motorboat and headed into the mangrove swamp.

Before you can "chunder on a bunyip's budgie smuggler" (as the Australians say), a particularly mean-spirited croc tips over the boat and gobbles-up the guide.

Our lucky threesome scrambles up the nearest mangrove tree. Temporarily safe, the trio assesses their options. They can make a mad lunge for the boat, which floats tantalizingly close to the base of their tree. They can try to use the tangle of mangroves to get free. By hopping from tree to tree, mayhaps they can stay high and dry while reaching terra firma. Or, of course, they can wait for a rescue that may well not be coming. And all the while, as they debate, small splashes and water ripples let them know that the killer croc.

The script is tight and effective. Many Interweb critic-types have opined that the idea of watching three folks get stuck up a tree is tedious. This does the clever script, which makes the most out of a minimal cast and a villain that, Jaws-like, you almost never see, a serious injustice. The characters, while not much deeper than the waist-high swamp water that surrounds them, feel real enough to give the danger their facing some traction. You don't love these poor vacationers, but you don't very well want to see them get torn apart by a crocodile. After a slight drag, necessary to rule out the "let's just sit here" plan, the movie moves on at a nice clip, with our heroes trying outsmart the sinister, seemingly omnipresent croc, or a "pash nut out larrikin" (as the Australians say).

The film looks good. Like Wolf Creek, Black Water is strangely romantic about the natural landscape. The details of the mangrove swamp – from close-ups of its less sinister fauna to cut shots of the way light plays on the swamps inky black water – are loving shot. When I was watching Wolf Creek, I ascribed this to the fact that the filmmaker was a painter prior to picking up the camera. Now I'm thinking that we might be seeing some national tag. Regardless of the origins of this trend, it makes for some odd juxtapositions. Imagine, for example, if somebody shot a Friday the 13th film and was determine to not only kill off campers, but shoot Crystal Lake itself as a beautiful place. It leads to a sort terrible sublime sense of things: nature is overpowering in simultaneously good and bad ways.

The croc, actually played by several different veteran crocodile actors, usually looks great. There's a couple of shots were I think we're dealing with super-imposed images and the result is clunky. I respect the impulse to work with real beasties over CGI or animatronics, but the results occasionally look worse. Gore effects are minimal. For a croc attack pic, it's quite restrained. The film emphasizes tension and suspense over the horror of bloodletting.

In the limited genre of "monster crocodile flicks based on true stories," Black Water towers above the competition. Opening it up to the broader, "alligator/croc rampage" sub-genre and I'd say that Black Water probably ranks in the top ten. As a horror flick in general, I'd say Black Water holds it own. I'd recommend it next time you "come to raw prawn some shonky trackie daks" (as the Australians say).

Books: Ghost on the highway.

The vengeful ghost at the center of Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box isn't the product of a cursed bloodline, a disrespected cemetery, an unfortunately placed Indian burial ground, or any of the many time-tested methods author's deploy for producing spooks. Instead, he's purchased over the Internet. This is, I think, an apt metaphor for Hill's pop culture conscious and leanly modern approach to the age-old traditions of the ghost story: his book is slickly functional, quick, and delivers the goods.

The surly anti-hero of Heart-Shaped Box is Judas Coyne. Judas is a somewhat over-the-hill rock legend. He's living out his post-band years in relative isolation on an upstate New York farm, enjoying the reliable low-yield fame of an icon elder rock statesman and finding physical satisfaction in a steady string of semi-disposable goth nubiles who still seek the orgasmic favors of the failing rock god. His current bedmate is Georgia, a former stripper nearly 30-years Judas's junior. The only other person who shares Judas's bucolic exile is Danny, Judas's sycophantic personal assistant.

One day, Danny receives an unusual email regarding an item up for auction on an eBay-like Internet auction site: a haunted suit. The seller claims that the buyer will get a Western style black suit complete with one ghost. All sales are final. Judas, who collects the creepy detritus of the goth culture that once surrounded him and his band mates (occult books, black magic paraphernalia, a real snuff flick), buys it immediately.

What Judas doesn't know is that the suit is a trap. The suit was sold to him by the sister of a girl named Florida. Florida, nee Anna, was a former groupie who showered Judas with the orgasmic offerings that are the inalienable right of rock stars. When Judas got sick of her mental behavior, he kicked her to the curb and sent her packing. She returned home (to Florida) and, shortly thereafter, killed herself. The sister, vowing revenge, set up Judas to get the ghost. The ghost is the vengeful spirit of Florida's father, a spiritualist and hypnotist who has figured out how to keep his angry soul together after death. Sis and ghost dad have a very personal score to settle with Judas.

After a short build up, Judas's pseudo-family collapses under otherworldly attack and Judas and Georgia hit the road. What follows is a frantic nightmare road-story: Judas and Georgia race to get Florida's sister to call the ghost off, while, relentless and brutal, the ghost of Florida's father gets ever closer.

Hill's debut novel is a shockingly assured performance. His characterizations are economical, but completely effective. Judas is sympathetic, but often a douchebag. Georgia's character starts a cookie-cutter "whore with the heart of gold" stereotype, but is given a depth that makes her something more profound. She reminds me slightly of Angie Dickinson's character Feathers in Hawk's brilliant Rio Bravo: conflicted but strong, good but not innocent. Even bit-part characters, like the brown-nosing Danny, reveal surprising aspects that still feel organic. This attention to detail, the way Hill fleshes out the characters without bogging us down in numbing minutia, is all the more effective for how it weaves into the whole concept of the ghost story. Hill's not so ham-fisted as to make every detail of Judas's backstory relevant to his current conflict, but it is clear that Judas is metaphorically haunted by his past and that his confrontation with the sinister specter that pursues him will also force him to confront how he has contributed to the horror around him.

Hill is a confident storyteller. His pace is quick, but never rushed. He brings a modern and sly sensibility (the characters contact the spirit world through a Oija board and Judas notices that it has "Parker Bros." written on it) to what might, in less competent hands, become a strict exercise in genre-paint-by-numbers. Though he's not reluctant to bring on the gore when he feels it will be effective, Hill gets most of his chills through the skillful creation of surreal imagery. The ghost first appears, for example, as an old man in a dark suit, sitting perfectly still in an antique rocking chair in ill lit hallway of Judas's house. There's no jump-out scares, there's no violent struggle. Just this low key, but clearly out of place figure. Hill remarkably effective with this sort of curious dreadfulness.

The sole complaint I have about the novel has to do with Hill's fidelity to genre trappings. Hill's creativity feels constrained by genre conventions he seems to occasionally go out of his way to honor – as if he didn't want to stray too far off the reservation despite being ready to run. It almost comes too easy to Hill, and as a result, he loses focus and drive near the close. The book ends with some where-are-they-now exposition that almost feels tossed off, as if Hill himself got bored. He doesn't break a sweat and, while you're thoroughly entertained, you feel he could have pushed the envelope. Like Judas's Dodge Charger, it is a nice cruising car, but it's begging to be pushed harder.

But you can't fault a dude for not writing the book he didn't write. As a spookshow thriller, Hill's novel gives all it promises. Heart-Shaped Box, despite its flagging denouement, is a real modern horror classic. It weds old-school horror tropes to a fresh style and makes it look effortless. I can't wait to see what's next.

PS – In accordance with the Joe Hill Review Act of 2006, I am required by law to inform you that Joe Hill is the son of writer Stephen King. So there, I'm compliant.

Music: Songs fit for a King

Here's a curious little tidbit for horror fans. America's top one-man horror franchise empire, Stephen King, wrote up a list of his top 20 favorite songs. Its surprisingly heavy on the country stuff (mostly modern alt-country with a few '70s post-Nashville sound nods), but the list also includes some oddball choices like the Gothic Archies, LCD Soundsystem, and even the '80s hit "Wild Wild West" by the Escape Club. Go fig. Most songs link to audio or video.

So, 20 songs and all you had to do was read one little ol' blog entry. Not a bad way to start your weekend. Enjoy, amigos.

Stuff: Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish Man, and I've gone to his music festival too.

The line-up for the annual Siren Festival, Coney Island's summer music blow-out, has been announced. I bring this up because the festival's new event poster features none other than our beloved Creature from the Black Lagoon!

See him? He's there. Click on the image and you'll find him half-hidden behind the Cyclone. He is, by nature, a timid beast.

Movies: What's opera, D. Argento?

The standout image of Argento's Opera is a particularly nasty torture prop that is, perhaps, the most metaphorically freighted bit of slasher tech since Mark Lewis's camera in Peeping Tom. The image is so powerfully stark, S & M chic, and meta that it appears on nearly every poster and box cover for the flick. If you can't make it out in the image above, the brutally low-fi device works thusly: A piece of masking tape, on which the baddie places several needles, is placed under the eye; the result is that an attempt to close the eye results in the needles jabbing the upper eyelid. As the baddie informs his victim, any effort to close your eyes will result in shredding your eyelid.

Ouch.

(Actually, as shown, I'm pretty sure the device wouldn't work. Fitting it to the bottom eyelid would make the needles spread away from the eye. Fitting it right above the cheekbone makes the needles point toward the eye. This, admittedly, would suck, but it wouldn't jab your eyelids. Plant it on the cheekbone and you could blink without ever coming into contact with the needles. Still, in cinematic torture device design, as in gift giving, it is the thought that counts.)

Lest I be accused of making po-mo viewer-response hay out of this, Argento himself admits that this nastiness was inspired by his relationship to his audiences. Argento claims the idea came fairly late in the process of developing the flick. He was working on the film, knew there would be some over the top scenes, and thought that audience members would want to close their eyes at several points in the film. He imagined placing these needle-eye thingies on audience members to keep them looking. Sadly, the law prevented Argento from actually deploying this cinematic innovation and he was forced to settle for using the concept in a purely fictional context. How one suffers for one's art!

This seems to me to be a very European conceit about violently transgressive flicks and the audience for them. For reasons unclear to me, some Euro directors like to think of their films as endurance tests. Metaphorically, Argento wants to torture his audience. I'm reminded of French director Gaspar Noé, who has claimed that he's made films intended to be "universally despised." Noé, in his pandering art house pseudo-provocation Irréversible, actually included frequencies in the soundtrack meant to induce nausea in the audience. The conceit is that the Euro filmmakers are throwing these art bombs into the thick of bourgeois audiences. These thick head cattle-people will, of course, bellow out their rage at having their sensibilities offended. And the artist then takes this bellowing as proof that he's transcended the Victorian values that, somehow, are believed to still dominate society. The films are a test: if you can't take it, you must be some middle-class philistine who "just doesn't get it." Ultimately, this is, of course, a self-serving delusion. The audiences for these flicks want both the extreme horror and the sense that they've somehow transgressed. Like the directors who make them, the audiences for these films are self-selected viewers who want invest these brutal self-flagellations with a sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They've discovered sensations and meanings beyond the mental confines of the rubes that watch mainstream films. Like a whore hired to smack about her john a bit, these directors offer a sense of violation that is, in fact, simply part of transaction between to mutually serving parties. The people supposedly targeted by these flicks won't watch them. Some folks, I reckon, just won't pay to be abused.

The irony is that I too take the needle to the eye trap as a metaphor for Argento's relationship to the audience. Only, for me, I see it as a curiously apt metaphor for why I keep returning to Argento's flicks when he's been so damningly mediocre so many times. As regular readers know, I feel that Argento flirts dangerously with the not-so-coveted title of "Most Overrated Horror Director." Though there are many folks out there with a far greater knowledge of his work than I, what I've seen is wildly uneven in quality. His love of creating visual effects and his almost stubborn refusal to yield anything to cohesive narrative puts Argento into this place where he's either got to wow you with stylish filmmaking or you immediately notice that the whole flick is a shambling mess. By my reckoning, Argento is operating at a 50% wow-rate.

Fortunately, Opera is in the happy-half of that output. The flick follows a young understudy, prosaically named Betty, who is suddenly thrust into the limelight when the diva of a production of Verdi's Macbeth is injured in an auto accident. The new-found fame comes with a big downside: a murderous stalker with a mysterious connection to the young singer's past. As the stalker's deranged obsession intensifies, he begins bumping off the people close to Betty. In the overly elaborate manner of all filmic serial killers, the stalker like to tie Betty up, apply the previously mentioned eye-needle thingy, and force Betty to watch the deaths of her friends and coworkers. The police prove useless and it is up to Betty and the opera's director – a former horror film director turned stager of operas (a nod to an autobiographical "what if?": Argento almost mounted an opera himself, but the deal fell through) – to uncover and thwart the rampaging psycho. The "mystery" un-unfolds in a typically Argentine manner, which is to say that clues appear and disappear with connection or explanation, nobody does much in the way of actual investigating, and, when enough bodies pile up, the killer reveals all in a ten-second bit of exposition that doesn't make all that much sense.

The make or break in an Argento flick is the look, and Opera has Argento's stylishly overripe fingerprints all over it. The camera swoops, cranes, and twists throughout the flick. Argento punctuates scene with cut shots of characters internal organs – rapidly beating hearts, blood pulsing through veins, and literally thumping brains. Curiously, Argento seems to be under the misconception that the brain, like the heart, beats. Scenes are washed in blues, red, and greens. The sets are lavish. Most of the film takes place in a truly astounding opera house, played by the Parma theater in Italy, and the fashionably appointed and dubiously large apartment of the understudy. (There is, of course, a street shot in which Betty, having survived her first attack, runs through the rain. When in trouble, Argento's women never call the cops or run to a friend's house. They prefer to run through rain-soaked streets until help or more danger finds them.) And the single image of Betty's eye, hungry needles waiting for her to blink, is a mind-haunting image. The soundtrack, while it includes some of the obligatory embarrassing cheese metal, also includes some work from Brian Eno and some interesting scoring by long-time Argento collaborator Claudio Simonetti, former keyboard player for the prog-rock band Goblin. Though not quite as overwhelming as Susperia, Opera is a full offering of Argento's opulently cool filmmaking.

This is a flick for fans of Argento (even fence-sitters like myself), especially his more giallo-centric efforts, to which Opera is an overt throwback. It has all the standard flaws that Argento has, through force of repetition, turned into something like idiosyncratic genre markers. If his lack of narrative logic, disdain for characterization, and soft spot for really bad heavy metal turn you off, you won't find him suddenly reformed here. However, if you dig on his mannered and strangely beautiful approach to horror, Opera's got a lot to like.

Music: Werewolves! Lesbians! Vampires! Nuns! Monday!

A tribute to the trashy and incomprehensible Euro-sleaze subgenre of film horror, the video for the Blues Explosion's (no longer prefacing their collective moniker with the name of front man Jon Spencer) "She Said" is a bizarre mash-up of werewolves, naked nun flesh, and lesbian vampires, all shot in the awkward, cheapo, washed-out style of Jess Franco.

WARNING: This is NOT work safe. If you decide to play it in your cube and are later forced to explain what a group of half-naked nuns were doing writhing across your monitor, you brought the trouble on yourself. Don't tell human resources to call me, 'cause I won't help.



Scare-sounds fans might note that "She Said" is a cut off the Blues Explosion's Plastic Fangs album. Though it isn't really a unified concept album, the cover art and several of the songs have an overt Creepy/EC horror-comic vibe going on. Devotees of musical monstrousness might want to take it home and let it haunt their iPods for a bit.

Stuff: Hot new reason to leave early on a Friday?

Just tell your boss, "Sorry. Had to leave. Gremlin infestation."

Movies: Abortive.

After mainstream reviewers sprained their collective wrists beating off all over the ham-fisted "satire" of the Joe Dante's astoundingly dumb contribution to the first season of Showtime's Masters of Horror series, Homecoming, it was inevitable that the second series would include several stories that pushed what filmmakers believed to be "hot button" issues into the foreground in an effort to garner some love from straight-world reviewers. Dante turned his attention from the Iraq War to the war between the sexes with his The Screwfly Solution. Dario Argento adapted F. Paul Wilson's Pelts into a gory, sleazy, and surreal anti-fur tale. Rob Schmidt went all Schiavo on us and directed Right to Die. Peter Medak did the camp horror revisionist history flick The Washingtonians, in which we find out George Washington was an evangelical cannibal bent on making the early United States a nation of people-eaters (I kid you not). Finally, John Carpenter used an abortion clinic as the backdrop for his Pro-Life.

As a strategy for garnering more mainstream attention, this sudden interest in the political was a complete flop. First, certain issues, such as the abuses of the fur industry, just don't have the media pull of others. Second, Bush hate operates at a uniquely low level of discourse. If you want discuss abortion in a metaphorical way, you're going to find the level of discourse is intense, emotional, and profoundly personal. In contrast, comedians can score zingers on Bush without trying. I recently heard Bill Mahr get yuks from a studio audience simply by observing, "Does anybody listen to this asshole anymore?" Finally, for all its faults, Homecoming was earnest in its political intentions. That didn't make it a better or smarter movie; but it wasn't using the Iraq War as a semi-disposable prop, an attention-getter that honestly didn't impact the movie in any significant way. None of the "political" films in the second season seemed quite so genuine in their convictions. In many cases, such as Pelts, the issue was simply an excuse to thematically unify the mode violence the director wished to visit upon his characters. In other cases, such as Pro-Life, the director's political point of view was muddled or non-existent, leaving viewers confused as to just what the reason for bring up the issue was in the first place.

The irony might be that failing as propaganda made these flicks better as horror films. Pro-Life is a clumsy contribution to the artistic debate surrounding abortion. It is full of stereotypical stock characters, revolves around a concocted moral dilemma that pretty much makes a mockery of the real ethical implications of the pro-choice/pro-life split, and has a taste for gore and over-the-top violence that nakedly reveals the filmmaker's real interest in the story. Still, if you can get over the considerable tackiness factor, you'll find Pro-Life is more entertaining, disgusting, and thrilling than the ideologically-correct dullness of Homecoming.

The story of Pro-Life is an adequately functional graft of Carpenter's beloved siege plot with a post-Roe v. Wade Rosemary's Baby plot. On their way to work, two abortion clinic workers find a panicked girl fleeing unidentified pursuers along a secluded forest road. They take the girl to their clinic only to find out that she is preggers and wants the baby aborted. They also find out that the girl's daddy is a pro-life extremist (played with cool menace by Ron "Hellboy" Pearlman) whose history of threats and violence against the clinic have forced the clinic to put a restraining order on him.

As the plot unfolds, the young woman's baby grows at an alarming rate and the doctors quickly determine that whatever is inside the girl is not human. The girl claims that she was raped by a demon (in her backyard – the devil lives under her old swing set – no foolin') and the "child" is the off-spring of that unholy forced union. Meanwhile, outside, daddy and his sons get armed and decide to lay siege to the clinic. Things get bloody fast, including what might be the most tasteless torture scene I've seen in long time. If you're eating, skip the rest of this paragraph. Ok? Basically, one of the abortionists gets his fetus-vacuum, or whatever it is called, turned on him. But, since the doctor is a guy, Pearlman's character has to cut him a vagina first. Ugh.

Aside from some not-so-special effects and a trippy, but disbelief inducing, flashback demon rape sequence, Pro-Life zips along. The actors handle the material ably, with Pearlman and Bill Dow, a long-time television and film bit-part man who takes on the role of the clinic's chief physician, turning in noteworthy performances. Carpenter has done so many siege flicks that you'd think he'd be phoning them in at this point, but he manages to keep the clinic assault tense and energetic. There are some weird hanging threads in the script. I'm not sure if I was supposed to be making certain assumptions about the fates of certain characters or if the screenwriters just forgot to follow up. Either way, it is only the sort of thing you wonder about after the movie is over.

As a comment on abortion, the film is a mess. The crisis that propels the plot – "What if it's a demon baby?" – is the sort of "What if you kill the next Shakespeare/let the next Hitler live?" sort of thing that only passes for debate on the Internet. Other than serving as a plot point (and it ultimately isn't even that as the demon baby is too far along to abort pretty early in the film) and as a setting, the whole issue of abortion simply isn't all that important to the film. Either out of disinterest or an effort to complicate the issue by having characters come at it from novel perspectives, the film ends up simply burying the abortion issue in irrelevance. It quickly becomes clear that this flick takes place in some other world and the abortion we're discussing is a completely fantastical contrivance. But this is, I think, a good thing. Does anybody really watch an installment of Masters of Horror to help them get a grasp on one of the more contentious political issues of our time? And, if they did, would their point of view be intelligible anyway?

For many viewers the simple fact that it brings up abortion but then takes the whole thing so lightly will push this flick into the realm of the irredeemably tasteless. And there is little reason to argue against this view; the film's accomplishments are so modest and limited as to make arguing for its importance as a statement on abortion impossible. But, looking past the somewhat cringe-inducing attempt at a political subtext, Pro-Life is an entertaining installment the MoH series.