What horror movie are we today?

Today, we're The Ruins.

The latest issue of Science News magazine kicks off a new story about plant intelligence with some imagery right out of a horror flick:

In a somewhat different world, Consuelo M. De Moraes would be revolutionizing vampire fiction.

Her lab at Penn State University studies predators that entangle prey in a tight embrace, pierce victims’ tissue and suck out nourishment. In the last few years, De Moraes and her colleagues have found that the predators even hunt down prey by scent.

Creepy as her predator, Cuscuta pentagona, is, it is also, frankly, a plant. Better known as five-angled dodder, its orange tentacles bypass the porcelain throats of young women in favor of the slim stems of young tomato plants. De Moraes and other researchers are showing that plants behave and misbehave as dramatically as animals. But there’s still not much hope for a feature-length dodder movie.

“I think most people regard plants as being pretty unresponsive and stuck in one place,” laments ecologist Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis. “Now, animals, they’re interestingbecause they can change and act in response to their environment.”

It’s a dichotomy Karban doesn’t accept for one second. When he and an animal behaviorist recently supervised a grad student, he remembers, “I would constantly want to say, ‘Oh yeah! Yeah! Plants do that too!’” Recent findings on plant capacities, he declares in a 2008 paper in Ecology Letters, reveal “high levels of sophistication previously thought to be within the sole domain of animal behavior.”

Even plants less vampirish than Cuscuta vines forage strategically for their food, and there’s evidence that plants fight each other over resources. In a broad sense of the word, plants communicate — some essentially scream for help. Also, a plant can respond to stimuli depending on its history of previous experiences, a tendency Karban is willing to call a sign of memory.

Movies: Aw, Hell – 3 random observations on "Drag Me to Hell."

1. The Anti-Diary of the Dead

The prodigal son trope one finds in nearly every review of DMtH is a little deceptive. While the film does indeed mark Sam Raimi's return to horror, it oddly implies that he was, before the lure of Hollywood superstardom steered him wrong, predominantly a horror director and that he's been away from the mater genre for long time.

In fact, less than a third of Raimi's directorial efforts have been horror films. The characterization of Raimi as a horror director has more to do with horror fandom's perpetual surly provincialism than any full assessment of Raimi's directorial career. As for Raimi's 40 years of wandering the Hollywood desert, the length of the break between Army of the Dead and DMtH is just a couple years longer than the break between Army and Evil Dead 2. Or the break between ED2 and the original evil dead, for that matter. Raimi just doesn't make many horror movies and he certainly doesn't make them that often.

That said, a comparison between another "return of the master" flick yields some interesting results. Much as Raimi's latest was given a strangely indier-than-thou moral gloss and framed as the director returning to a simpler, purer style of filmmaking, George Romero – perhaps more validly considered a horror master – was thought to have lost his way in the big budget excesses of Land of the Dead, and diary was framed in terms of a sort of aesthetic purification. Both films were linked, either explicitly or implicitly, to the franchises that made the director's names.

But Drag Me to Hell works and Diary of the Dead is a dog. When it came time to see if Romero still had the juice, he came up dry. Raimi, however, took a swing at something easily within his wheelhouse and connected. The difference is, I think, the latter's commitment to making a fun film. An entertaining, if mostly silly and forgettable, spookshow of jump scares and slime FX, Drag never lapses into tedious lecturing or drinks the cool-aid of its own mythology.

2. The First Lynch the Banker Movie of the New Depression

In the early days of Depression 1.0, Hollywood was divided over just how to handle the class distinctions the economic crisis brought into plain sight. Early filmmakers treated it as fodder for comedy. The rich, while foolish, just needed a good Godfrey to straighten them out. As the crisis wore on and then shaded into war, however, the bubble-headed wealthy began to yield way to poisoned-minded, literally twisted predators of the Mr. Potter variety.

Though Raimi claims to have written Drag Me to Hell before the current economic crisis, it is virtually impossible not to see a reflection of our current crisis in the character of Christine Brown, the loan officer who is, in the end, dragged to aigtch eeee double hockey sticks. The plot, for those who have not seen it, involves a loan officer who denies a gypsy woman (who lives in modern Los Angeles) a third extension on her mortgage payment. The gypsy woman falls to her knees, begins kissing the skirt of the loan officer, begs Ms. Brown to reconsider. Christine panics and she calls security. Later that night, the gypsy woman mugs her in the parking garage near the bank and places a curse upon her. Ring-like, Christine will be tormented for three days by a demonic spirit. At the end of the tormenting process, she'll be offed and dragged, well, you know.

Raimi has actually said that he wanted to make sure that Christine's "crime" was disproportionate to the punishment she faced. This was necessary, he claims, in order to ensure viewer sympathy with her.

I believe, however, this doesn't give his character enough credit. Christine's "crime" is not a minor act; it's no crime at all. It isn't, I think, even a moral infraction. Some critics have decided that Christine is an avatar for the wildly irresponsible financial institutions that have led us into the current financial meltdown. This shows both a profoundly limited understanding of the financial monkey business that took place on Wall Street and grotesquely stunted notion of morality. According to the film, the bank's handled the gypsy's mortgage for several years. By defaulting on payments twice and then asking for third extension, it is the gypsy who is acting in bad faith. She was happy to take the bank's money, using her house as collateral. But now that she can't hold up her end of the deal, she wants the bank to essentially give her a free pass. She wants the bank to be okay with unilaterally breaking a contract. Christine suggests to alternatives to the gypsy's financially untenable situation, both of which are rejected by the gypsy out of pride – a pride she then throws away to beg for help, a pride she then accuses Christine of stealing.

In contrast, what was going on in at various banks and other financial institutions was that loan officers, not unlike Christine but on a much larger scale, were bending the loan guidelines to quickly store up the mortgages as assets that could then be used as the basis for derivatives – a sort of pseudo-insurance in which parties essentially make bets on whether or not loans will default. In theory, the bank doesn't want the loan to default, because then they get the loan payments and the derivative payments, without ever having to pay anything out except the original loan. In practice, the short-term gain on derivatives was so attractive that banks rushed to make as many housing loans as they could, taking insane risks on truly bad loans. These bad loans were then packaged up as more derivative fodder. When the crappy loans feel through, not only were the banks out the original loan, but they also had to pay off the derivative bets. These problems were further compounded by what we now understand to be the deliberate falsification of the value of the assets at the base of the derivatives.

If that second part is convoluted, here's the short story: If banks had been rigorous about administering their loans – which includes not giving loans to people who can't afford to pay them back and refusing to carry the burden of potentially toxic assets in the form of shaky loans – then none of this crap would have gone down. If Wall Street had been more like Christine Brown, we wouldn't have the current financial crisis. But Drag Me to Hell touches a populist nerve by showing what Americans have always secretly felt: Debt (if not credit, which we love like crack) is a conspiracy of heartless bankers. We enjoy making beds, but we sure to hate to lie in them.

If the lightly likeable Drag Me to Hell gets a footnote in film history, it might we be as the opening shot in what I can only imagine will be a slowly growing stream on increasingly shrill populist screeds against the evils of banking.

3. The Hollywood Evil Dead

While Drag Me to Hell definitely aspires to the slapstick spirit of Raimi's Evil Dead flicks, there's something bloodless (in a literal and emotional way) about the undertaking. The film feels like Raimi is copying his earlier work. Instead of evoking the spirit of the Evil Dead films, he makes contextless winks and nods to his fanbase. References to cabins in the woods followed with the line "there's trees, you'll love it" are meant as sops to the insider.

This is faded-copy-of-the-original feeling is further reinforced by the PG-13 bloodlessnes of the film. Other than a particularly violent projectile nosebleed, there's not much in this film to remind us of the fact that Raimi once used a literal geyser of blood for a sight gag. Certainly, this isn't to suggest that "real horror needs extreme bloodshed" or some such. Raimi was always more goofy than gory. Rather, I think it is a sign of how happy Raimi is to repackage his old material as mainstream stuff. Raimi's still big on geysers, but now they're CGI'ed puke-goo or a vomited up cat.

Finally, there are the product placements. BMW, iPhones, and even Mrs. Fields Cookies get bizarrely intrusive close ups. Despite the theme of "returning to the purity of horror" theme, it seems Raimi's picked up some particularly unseemly mainstream habits and the return to horror didn't help him shed them.

Art: Straight from the horses mask.

Screamers and Screamettes, I don't know where this mania for gas masks came from, but if you'll humor me, I promise not to indulge more than once a month.

During the joyous rush to unleash chemical hell on to the battlefields of World War I, soldiers on all sides quickly learned that humans weren't the only beasties that needed protection. Enter gas masks for horses and dogs. Gas masks for horses didn't last much longer than the First World War, when horses themselves became less and less important to modern armies (though, as late as 1948, the U.S. Army Officer Corp fielded the U.S. Olympic equstrian team). Dogs, however, remain popular instruments of war and, as you can see, there are many Cold War and later doggie gas mask designs.

Comics: New moon. Go ahead Hachette, sue me.

One of the viral marketing campaigns for now cult fave Idiocracy involved a series of Youtube adds for the fictional power drink Brawndo: the Thirst Mutilator. Brawndo was basically the Gatorade of future. The ads for this drink deliver the ha-has by giving the viewers the sense that the ad's narrator has been told to just keep delivering the message that Brawndo is ninety-million times greater than awesome, but he hasn't been told how long the ad is. Consequently, the dude narrating the ads finds himself repeatedly painted into corners, forced to just keep shoveling on the awesome-sauce reductio ad absurdum.

The fun of Werewolves of the Moon: Versus Vampires follows the same entertainingly desperate logic. Even the title, with it's post-colon promise of vampire conflict, exhibits the same "but wait, there's more" carnival barker commitment to total entertainment: "Werewolves – right? – in space! But, on the moon, so they're always werewolves! But wait! Versus freakin' vampires! That's right!" And then there's the cover that shows a werewolf planting an American flag on the moon's surface, through the body of a vampire. If Michael Bay had made the Underworld movies, one imagines they would have been filled with shots that look like the cover of Werewolves on the Moon.

I can only assume that Dark Horse comics told the creators, Dave Land and the Fillbach Brothers, that they should save the attack by a ghost pirate ship full of zombie T. Rexes for the sequel.

Written with the same light, juvenile, and goofy logic of a contemporary Mad magazine parody, the book starts with a premise not unlike Steve Niles landmark vampire comic 30 Days of Night. In the distant future, a trio of werewolves attack a moon colony. (Whether they thought that it would just be fun to rampage through a closed system of human victims or they believed that being on the moon would up their power levels is unclear – the latter is implied but then dismissed by one of the characters.) Unlike 30 Days however, this story is played for laughs. There werewolves immediately run afoul Moon Base Alpha's tough-as-nails security captain, who locks them in the ship bay with all the passengers they've already bitten and turned into werewolves.

The story gets needlessly complicated when the moon's vampire population – a cult of preening goth hipsters living in caves on the dark side of the moon – decide to get involved. Their leader, the self-aggrandizing Lord Till, thinks the lycanthropic crisis is the perfect time to snatch away his immortal beloved, who is also, somehow, the tough-as-nails security chief.

This all sounds more complicated than it is. The narrative of the book isn't driven by logic so much as it is built out of system of gleefully daffy synecdoches. Being in the story is justification enough for any given element. We all know where we're going – the promised "versus" is on before the last page of the first issue – so as long as everything just tends towards that direction, the story bounces along. This lack of story logic is actually spoofed with in comic. After the first vampire attack, one of the werewolves questions why the vampires would attack them in the first place. He's told that vampires and werewolves are natural enemies, but that explanation is quickly undercut by the confession that said theory was devised when the werewolves thought vampires were fictional monsters and it was mostly said because it sounded awesome to lady werewolves.

The art is suitably cartoonish. The Bros. Fillbach have a good time with the canine expressiveness of their werewolf characters and they're up to the task of actually grounding the story in a sufficiently solid setting to prevent it from losing its way. If I have any complaint about the art, is the lack of "chicken fat." While the writing attempts to work some gag into almost every panel, the art takes a light, but straight forward approach that seem unnecessarily literal. If the backgrounds had been as busy with sight gags as the Mad parody that partially inform this work, it would have given the book a nicely anarchic edge.

Werewolves on the Moon: versus Vampires suffers somewhat from a hefty price tag: three and a half Washingtons. This is no small thing. Something as relentlessly silly as WotM:2V is best served format of the individual issue. Spread across three issues and served in little helpings, the comic never overstays it's welcome. Collected in a trade, the gags will start to grate. That said the $3.50 price tag is going to strike some folks as too much to pay for what is a breezy gag-book.

Stuff: "This lion is getting sleepy," or "The Victorian ancestor of the modern 'reverse cowgirl'."

Though it is now mostly confined the college circuit and rubs shoulders with prop comics and traveling improv groups, there was a time when hypnotism was a big ticket and masters of the mesmeric arts where A-listers.

The ephemera assemblyman blog gathers together an awesome collection of Victorian hypnosis show posters. This including several that were clearly template posters that any hypnotainer could slap his name on.

Some of these template posters (example below) are surreally wonderful. Representing an artist's notion of what a hypnotist might make people do, the suggested kinkiness – from the playful hints of transvestitism and homoerotic behavior to pony-boy D&S play – implies what the really allure of these shows was: the hope that, under the pseudo-scientific guise of a display of "animal magnetism," sexual norms would be flaunted.

Movies: Royale with cheese.

Konnichiha, Screamers and Screamettes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Touché. Box clever, I see."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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

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

Stuff: Ralph Waldo Emerson, vampire slayer?

Though I fear unto death the notion that I may give somebody their next schlocky high concept quality-lit-meets-genre-thrills concept, I have to mention this awesome new-to-me post by Caleb Crain, regular NY Times and The Nation contributor and the brilliant mind behind the exquisite Steamboats Are Ruining Everything Blog.

Combining a strange in curiously succinct entry in Ralph Waldo Emerson's diary with some info from The Encyclopedia of New England, Crain asks: Did Emerson think his first wife was a vampire?

From Crain's post:

New England vampires didn't speak in faux-Hungarian or lurch about, waggling unkempt fingernails. Without using the word "vampire," however, New Englanders did believe that people who died of consumption (i.e., tuberculosis) could suck the life out of those above ground who still loved them, especially those in their own family. To remove the threat, you had to dig up the corpse. You were looking for flesh still on the bones---and blood still in the heart. If you found it, you could turn the body face down and rebury it. Or you could burn the flesh off the skeleton and then re-inter the bones. For good measure, you might also arrange the bones in special patterns. Exhumations and reburials of recent consumption victims happened across small-town New England throughout the nineteenth century; the Encyclopedia of New England lists cases in 1793, 1794, 1796, 1799, 1807, 1810, 1817, 1827, 1830, 1854, 1874, 1889, and 1892, among other years.

Emerson's first wife was Ellen Louis Tucker. Ralph and Ellen were married in 1829. She was 18 years old. They were married for less than two years. In 1931, Ellen died of consumption (the old timey name for TB).

On March 29, 1831, Emerson wrote in his journal the cryptic and brief entry, "I visited Ellen's tomb and opened the coffin".

From Crain's blog again:

Here's my question: Did Emerson fear that his first wife was a vampire? Robert Richardson famously began his biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire with an account of Emerson opening the grave of Ellen Tucker Emerson on 29 March 1832. To Richardson, the act was a sample of Emerson's existential courage; it demonstrated his willingness to see all of life, including death. Richardson noted that the practice wasn't unheard of; Rufus Griswold and James Freeman Clarke also opened their wives' coffins. But the doing of a thing by Rufus Griswold is not much of an extenuation. (I can't quickly lay hands on whether Mrs. Griswold or Mrs. Clarke died of consumption, but if they did, I'm willing to include them too in my speculation.)

In Waldo Emerson: A Biography, Gay Wilson Allen saw the exhumation of the first Mrs. Emerson more darkly: "the act remains so unnatural as to seem almost insane."

…

In several respects, the Emerson case fits the profile. Ellen died of tuberculosis, and at the time that Emerson opened the coffin, his brothers Charles and Edward were endangered by the same disease. Emerson himself suffered greatly in his mourning of Ellen, and might have wondered about her hold on him. I doubt Emerson would have believed simple-mindedly in the New England vampire folklore, but I suspect he was aware of it, and it must have been part of the wider social context for his act.

Crain's question is intriguing. Still, it should be put in context. Weird as it sounds to modern ears, the exhumation of loved ones just to gaze upon them one more time is was not unheard of in the Nineteenth Century. As president, the famously fatalistic Abraham Lincoln had his son William Wallace "Willie" Lincoln exhumed for viewing. Contemporaries thought this was evidence of Lincoln's melancholy and sentimental nature, but they did not think it so odd as to label him crazy. That said, it wasn't like people did this sort of thing every day. It is a frustratingly open question as to just what Emerson was doing.

Music: Gone to seed.

Regular visitors will recall that we've been tracking the music blog Aquarium Drunkard's series on the first four albums of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The last of these posts ends the Cave-a-polooza with a bang. First, we get an excellent reassessment of Cave and Co.'s fourth long-player: Your Funeral . . . My Trial:

Any great artist, from the Beatles to Jean Cocteau, will tell you that the best art begins the moment the artist slackens his grip and allows his creation to breathe on its own—this great mystery of any human creation that Cocteau went so far as to call l’Ange Heurtebise, knowing that “angel” was the only word that could begin to capture the nature of the big indescribable. Some artists think that all art comes from suffering, and that’s exactly half true; what births our greatest sounds is the pains of an artist relinquishing control.

Don’t think Nick Cave didn’t know it in the summer of 1986. Though he humorously titled Kicking Against the Pricks as a finger-flip to rock journalists, it’s not much of a stretch to hear him thrashing about at his own windmills on those early records. Put simply, Your Funeral…My Trial is the sound of one man dropping his sword. It’s a chronicle of giving up—not in the sense of walking away, but the giving up that comes with seeing that he could never control himself, much less his art. And so he stands naked, skinny, head slightly down. But his lips still move. This is a record full of mystery, of unanswered questions, of gazes. This is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ first genuinely Great Record.

But wait, there's more! The review comes with an mp3 of the title track: "Your Funeral . . . My Trial." Now how much would you expect to pay?

Don't answer yet, because there's even more!

Maybe you're new to the whole Cave and Bad Seeds phenom and these articles have got you stoked. Maybe you're and long-time fan of NC&tBS and you're looking for something you haven't already played to death. Whatever you Cave needs, AD has got you covered. Friends, the fine folks at AD also have mp3s of Nick Cave and the Bad Seed live. That's right, their entire October 9, 1986 show: 12 big tracks, including their cover of the Velvet Undergrounds "All Tomorrow's Parties!"

Now how much would expect to pay. For, special friends of ANTSS, we're giving it away. That's right: cheap as free.

Just leave the folks at AD a nice thank you note to let them know you appreciate their good work. It's the right thing to do, and the right way to do it.