[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on!]
Saturday, 23 October, 2004
Monday brings the October issue of SIGHT AND SOUND (latest to America, that is; we still fall a month behind, with the November issue is already out in Britain). Inside is, among other things, an article by David Thomson on Jacques Rivette. The occasion is the release of Rivette's latest film, HISTORIE DE MARIE ET JULIEN, and Thomson, along with Jonathan Rosenbaum at the CHICAGO READER, has always been a vigorous advocate of the French New Wave director. In the course of the essay, Thomson mentions in passing that he has an "internet friend" whom he has never met but corresponds with frequently.
I found this infuriating.
In the old days of snail mail, I wrote the occasional author and sometimes received mail in return (Gore Vidal, William S. Pechter, Andrew Field) though more often not (Peter Green, Michael Thomas, Robin Wood). With the advent of the Internet, finding authors and writing them directly became much easier and potentially rewarding. But unfortunately, writing e-mails tends to be a sloppier enterprise than the agony of handwriting a missive or composing a letter on screen and printing it out, a slow process that allows for reflection, expansion, the tonic improvements of second thoughts. Consequently, the number of people who have actually answered my admittedly sloppy fan-emails is exactly one. How does Thomson's friend rate? What was it about that fan that inspired in Thomson an inclination to listen to him? This guy (if it is a guy; probably not, as the sex identification is carefully elided) is described as a movie mad person on the verge of college. Somehow, this person appeals to Thomson's vanity, and puts him back in the role of tutor, as Thomson was several years ago at Dartmouth. The magic of connection is effable; why does one person penetrate the shield but not others? This makes me sad to contemplate. All I want is to be friends with a really famous person (or at least someone famous to me), in a kind of e-mail version of NOTTING HILL. On the other hand, these people are busy, much busier than me, and probably feel they can only communicate with peers, who understand their issues. For my part, I understand that a movie reviewer, of however modest a position, has some responsibility to the public if he is going to engage in a contentious dialogue about the arts, and so I try and answer (with certain exceptions) every e-mail that comes my way.
Thomson's SIGHT AND SOUND essay is fascinating on other levels as well. For one thing, were it not that the author is DAVID THOMSON, it wouldn't have been published in a publication as august as SIGHT AND SOUND. The piece is rambling, episodic, digressive, personal, and doesn't really even review the Rivette film. A conventionally minded editor would not even consider it in most forums, because it does not adhere to the rules of the "well made essay." Yet I admire this essay because of these qualities. Robin Wood used to complain that the middlebrow critic's fixation on the so-called well-made film prevented public discussion of horror films and the work of Romero, Cohen, Craven and others. These men often toil under low budgets, but because the finished product likes the sheen of a big Hollywood production the mid-brow reviewer dismisses them out of hand, without engaging in the interesting ideas these films debate. Thomson's essay is the critical equivalent. It is structured more like a blog than a classical essay. He digresses to discuss his Internet friend, to lay out the plot for a suspense thriller that came to him the other day, and to quote some pithy remarks by Rivette ("It is normal not to make films" is the best one, annotated by Thomson). At one point he complains that in American films there is a "neurotic reliance on decisiveness," and his essay is, in its form, a subtle counter to that hollow standard. Thomson also describes himself digging through some back issues of the British MOVIE magazine to look up some quotes from Sarris and Astruc, and that made me very nostalgic for that time in the early to late 1960s when writing on film was exploding and it was possible to be the first person to write a book on, say, Val Lewton. Re-reading that stuff today, as I occasionally do, I realize that it often lacks the detail of modern criticism, which enjoys the improved study aids of DVD technology, but that old writing still vibrates with the passion of movie obsession and its practitioners were unafraid to give their opinions and create rankings.
Thomson got some bad press when the latest edition of his BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM came out two years ago. FILM COMMENT attacked it, and Adrian Martin published a devastating critique of the volume in CINEASTE, charging the author with not even liking movies anymore and being unwilling to update his views or confront new films. But the old warhorse is not down. He's rallying, and growing engaged with movies again. I found the digressive and conversational tone of his Rivette piece jam-packed with insight, anger, regret, and opinion. Indeed, I found it rather inspirational.
Monday, 25 October, 2004
The Peter Principle
GARDEN STATE
Peter Saarsgard is rapidly becoming my favorite screen actor and his role in GARDEN STATE is one of the main reasons to see the film.
Another is Natalie Portman as the love interest, although occasionally I found her smile frightening. I know that stars have to have white teeth and big smiles, but hers has become unnerving. Maybe it was the way the film was shot.
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I read a lot of screenplays for a friend of mine who is in the business and one running theme or premise that seems to have dominated screenwriters in the last several years is the Hollywood figure (musician or moviemaker) who is summoned back east (or has a nervous breakdown or loses his job and goes home), and there runs into old high school friends who are stuck in a rut, kindles a romance with a local girl, and seeks (or evades) reconciliation with his family. Usually in these screenplays the main character is a passive fellow buffeted from one sweeping social event to another (wild party, funeral, crime scene). The script tends to view all events through his consciousness, and take his side in all matters, as well as identify with his victimhood. He is the only character not criticized, and he bears the unearned privilege of being at the center of everything even though he is often not the most interesting character in the story.
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Zach Braff's film is a lot like this and I am surprised that it got made, since none of the others of its ilk have. But then, Braff is the star of a sitcom, and also the film has a visual wit than none of the others suggested that they might have.
Still, I was impressed with almost everything in the movie except him and the story. This is petty, but Braff's teeth bugged me in a way that individuating characteristics can on the big screen and not the small one.
Also, he has, or employs, that voice that you hear 20somethings speak in, that gentle tentative questioning voice in which all sentences end on a rising note. It's talk as opera singing, and can be an intricate form of delivery, but the content is never as interesting. I hope he doesn't really talk that way because as an actorial turn it is a good mimicry of a contemporary speech pattern. It's the first time I've heard it in a movie, and you could stick GARDEN STATE in a time capsule as a record of how people talked in the early '00s.
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Sarsgaard (not to be confused with Stellan Skarsgård or Peter Stormare — confusables always come in threes, don't they?) is something of a new William Hurt or John Heard, and not quite a Brad Dourif. He's good looking on screen but also somewhat odd looking, and he doesn't have any parodable "tics" yet (such as Hurt's unexpected pauses, or Pacino's eye-bugging). He plays parts all up and down the social scale, from low lifes in BOYS DON'T CRY and THE SALTON SEA, to elites, such as Chuck Lane in SHATTERED GLASS, in which he was simply brilliant. One of his best and most difficult parts was as a horny computer millionaire in THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, a film that started out being "controversial" thanks to its sexual subject matter, and ended up just ignored. But at the center of the film is yet another well-modulated performance by Sarsgaard. He's back in lowlife action in GARDEN STATE, but it is a well-written and ambiguous part and Sarsgaard manages as usual to make something wonderful out of it.
Wednesday, 27 October, 2004
Now that the World Series is over, I wish to register a few complaints about Fox's blaring coverage of the event. One: While I like the Michael Vartan-looking Joe Buck, and loved the two commercials he was in, the announcers had an inclination to talk about everything else in the world but what was happening on the field. I ended up listening to the radio broadcast with the television muted. Two: There were way too many shots of the fans and their signs or their expressions of grief and dismay. A few are OK, but these shots just took you out of the game and denied you access to what you were presumably viewing the show for, i.e., baseball play. Three: There is seemingly nothing we can do about this but some advertising entity or corporation sponsored every single element of this show. The "medical report" on Sox pitcher Schilling, for example, was "sponsored" by a medical insurance Web site, and yet the contents of said report contained nothing new beyond what they announcers had already said in different contexts; it was really yet another excuse for an ad. Every conceivable particle of "information" and electronic display was "sponsored" and it managed to turn the World Series into a Saturday morning cartoon fest. On the other hand, I thought that Fox's status display across the top of the screen was the most useful variety I'd ever seen. Four: The announcers had a tendency to take the Umpire's side on most calls, and the side of the team that happened to be in the lead at the time. There were some rare and important exceptions to this, however, especially back in the ALCS series. I'd like them to be a bit more independent of received opinion (though Buck did question out loud the Boston strategy of pulling one catcher for another in the line up in game two, after some throat clearing apologies for the temerity of doubting anything anyone did). Five: And finally, Fox tried to cram so many more commercials into the time frame that they came back from commercial often in the middle of the inning half's first pitch, not giving the viewer time to settle in and concentrate. I found this utterly exasperating and took a silent joy in the fact that with the World Series ending after four straight Boston wins, the network is deprived of an additional three games' worth of baseball ad revenue.
Thursday, 25 October, 2004
Factory Made
DIG!
Back when I was a writer at a local "alternative" weekly, I had a nodding acquaintance with Courtney Taylor, then a guitarist with a band called Beauty Stab. I am guessing that working on that band, which broke up sometime around 1989 or so, must have been a disappointing experience for Taylor (the lead singer was an unctuous, preening egomaniac with little to back it up), because later on when he went to form The Dandy Warhols sometime in the early 1990s, he created a business plan in which he wrote all the songs and paid the other band members as employees, creating little doubt as to who was in charge of things. The plan seems to work, and the Dandy Warhols, with its melodic psychedelic Beatles inflected tunes, is a popular band in Europe and many of its songs have popped up in movies.
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Also in the mid-1990s, filmmaker Ondi Timoner formed a partnership with Anton Newcombe to make a movie about his band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, another "psychedelic" band but with a harder edge and more progressive instrumentation. But in the course of making that movie, Newcombe and his band met Taylor and the Dandy Warhols and they all fell in love with each other. Soon the course of the friendship from tight to tense became the subject of the film, and Taylor and his group usurped Newcombe from center place.
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The bands became competitive, and the unstable Newcombe (his mother was combative and his father was an alcoholic who committed suicide during the course of the filmmaking) ranted against his perceived competitors, writing songs against them like in the early days of rap. Meanwhile, the Dandy Warhols got "signed" and they became the toast of Europe. As Newcombe, in the film's narrative, alienated all his band mates and descended into violence and madness, Taylor found success and even created a version of the Warhol factory in Portland, Oregon. If this competition between two musicians sounds a little like Mozart and Salieri, the movie makes it explicit by having one of its characters dress up like Mozart and giggle like Tom Hulce.
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But in reality the conflict feels more like the one between Lennon and McCartney. John Lennon, as you will recall, was the real rebel of the group, the artist, the guy who didn't give a fuck, the one who developed a political conscience. You can imagine Lennon, as Newcombe does in the film, saying that, "The fuckers, the bean counters, the lawyers, all these assholes at every label. Those are the people who wrecked the record business — not Napster, not some college kid downloading shit. The people without vision." Or announcing about himself, "I am not for sale. Nobody says that. I am fucking Love, do you understand what I'm saying?" That is one of his favorite punctuation marks, asking rhetorically, "Do you understand what I'm saying?", the assumption being that no one does. In that last quote, he goes on to say, "Like, the Beatles were for sale. I give it away." He may mean McCartney, the Beatle with the commercial sense, with the knack for happy melodies and the more conventionally minded subject matter. In Newcombe's view, Taylor is the McCartney to Newcombe's Lennon.
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Like the equally excellent CRUMB, DIG! covers some seven years, and so it really gets into the characters. It also has time to show the ups and downs of a band's career, unlike most rock movies that concentrate either on one concert or even one song, or at best a short period of time. And instead of being a bunch of preening, pretentious narcissists, the people in these bands are given rounded portraits, from arguments with band members to fights on stage to busts for drugs (no groupies, though). DIG! should be of interest to budding rock musicians because both Taylor and the record industry types he deals with are brutally frank about how the business works. Despite the great music that gets made, it's still all about appearances. In fact, Taylor says that when he first saw the Massacres he was struck by their great hair and clothes. I can image DIG! being a form of pornography for a certain socioeconomic class with artistic aspirations. These rootless people with retro clothes who never seem to work conventional jobs and whose crash pads are littered with instruments, empty pizza boxes and empty syringes.
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On the other hand, you don't hear any one complete song from any of the bands in the film. For the record, you do hear bits of the following Brian Jonestown Massacre songs: "Super-Sonic," "Who?," "Satellite," "The Devil May Care (Mom & Dad Don't)," "Servo," "B.S.A.," "That Girl Suicide," "Oh Lord," "Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth," "Whoever You Are," "Ballad of Jim Jones," and "Nevertheless." From the Dandy Warhols you hear bits of: "Boys Better," "Everyday Should Be A Holiday," "Hard On For Jesus," "Bohemian Like You," "Ride," "Good Morning," "TV Theme Song," "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth," "Big Indian," "Godless," and "The Last High."
Friday, 29 October, 2004
The DVD Tray of Horror
Each Halloween brings with it the promise of terror. We await the rash of horror DVDs (and theatrical releases) in search of that holiest of grails, the truly frightening movie. But most trekkers down this path have to admit that nothing much scares them anymore, and, looking back, the share of titles that are legitimately frightening (as opposed to occasionally startling thanks to momentary shock effects) are few: PSYCHO, THE EXORCIST, HALLOWEEN, THE HAUNTING, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, a few others. It may be that we don't really want to be scared. After all, a truly frightening movie would be scary in part because it undermined our hold on reality or the rightness of things, and we might evermore afterwards find ourselves changed, and that is both a big responsibility for a filmmaker to bear and something we as viewers might shy away from. PSYCHO undermined our faith in the mind, in the sanctity of the relationship between sons and mothers, and the privacy of showers.
Yet, come to think of it, that film is still enormously popular and psychologically current. Audiences still betray a deep interest in being frightened and exploring the terrains and issues behind the things that frighten us. No, I would blame the filmmakers, who all too often rehash well-worn terror tropes (the hand on the shoulder) and envision horrific concepts that have no inner consistency (THE GRUDGE).
Still hopeful, though, I started accumulating horror DVDs around late august for consolidated review just before Halloween (my favorite day of the year). Chronologically the start with I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (Paramount, 1958, $14.95, Tuesday, September 14), a movie congenitally doomed not to live up to its title.
Like many science fiction films of its time, MONSTER can be interpreted as a metaphor for communist infiltration, as a band of aliens arrive on earth and, in a variation on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, crossed with MARS NEEDS WOMEN, take over the bodies of young men recently married.
The lead alien is played by Tom Tryon, later the horror novelist, and his wife is Gloria Talbott. Tryon looks like a monster already, or at least like John Gavin in PSYCHO. When he says at one point, "I'm not going to do anything," you can believe him. There is lots of day for night shooting in this film (produced and written by Gene Fowler, Jr., an associate of Fritz Lang), and lots of dialogue in place of suspense and suspenseful scene building. It has a modest place in science fiction history but is flat and uncompelling, unlike the enduring BODY SNATCHERS. The disc has no extras.
Because there seem to be no new ideas in the horror genre, the premise of MONSTER is revived 43 years later for DECOYS (Columbia Tristar, 2003, $24.95, Tuesday, September 7), a Canadian horror film with a couple of good twists.
Written and directed by Matthew Hastings, who comes out of television, the film is set in a college campus where two boys slowly suss out the fact that the sorority Heathers (a bunch of Kim Cattrall clones) around them are really aliens. They come from another planet bereft of males, like Canada for the non-stop cold, and have not quite worked out the mating process, leaving in their wake a trail of frozen, foolish corpses.
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Though DECOYS (which enjoys a sequel) has the usual components of a college set horror story, i.e., the handsome kid and his dorky and horny best friend (who looks like a cross between Chris Penn and Elijah Wood,), plus a number of babes in contrast to the down home girl who really loves the hero, the film has one good shock effect (which unnerved me again the second time I saw it) and a nice general twist that I won't spoil here. What I find interesting is that the alien-posing-as-human thing still has currency, but maybe in this case it is a Canadian thing, a symptom of wariness and weariness over American encroachment into Northern cultural life.
The film comes in a nice widescreen transfer (1.78:1, enhanced), and English subtitles, and for supplements has a set of trailers and a making of doc that aired on Canadian television.
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It wouldn't be a Halloween experience with the presence of Christopher Lee, and he appears in THE BLOODY JUDGE (Blue Underground, 1970, $19.95, Tuesday, October 26), a film by the cult director Jesse Franco. In this German-Italian co-production, Lee plays the judge, Lord George Jeffreys, a real guy in the late 1600s and a creature of James II whom the 11th edition of the BRITANNICA calls "the worst example of a period when the administration of justice in England had sunk to the lowest degradation." Franco went on to make at least one more film about Jeffreys, LES DEMONS, and he appears, or the idea of him appears, in other films. In this film he is presented as a witchfinder, using the law to squash enemies and rivals. The raison d'etre of the film is to show various women in states of undress chained to walls and being tortured.
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Lee doesn't do much in the film, beyond sitting behind a bench decreeing death, and a few interior scenes in which he shows his muscle to enemies. BLOODY comes in several versions, and Blue Underground's disc attempts to assemble the most complete one possible, which means raiding a German print that compels this edition to lapse into German occasionally.
Blue Underground also offers an informative making of with interviews featuring Lee and Franco, and several deleted and alternative scenes, plus there are trailers, radio and TV spots, publicity memorabilia, filmographical essays, and a four page insert with a reprint of one of the posters and an essay by Tim Lucas in which he wrestles with the violence of the material without really recommending the film, while also making a case for its resonance with then contemporary politics, youth rebellion and all that. He also tracks through the film's various versions.
Lee teams up with Peter Cushing for the boring THE CREEPING FLESH (Columbia Tristar, 1972, $24.96, Tuesday, June 8) which despite its short running time comprises two or three separate story lines. Directed by Freddy Francis, it has the overlit quality of early '70s horror films and the crazy anything goes narrative.
In the one tangent Cushing is an anthropologist or evolutionary biologist who brings home an antediluvian skeleton which may represent a crucial stage in human development, but which in fact turns out to be Evil when he learns that contact with water makes it grow decrepit flesh and will bring it to life. Meanwhile he has a brother, Lee, who runs the local mental asylum, and is competitive and contemptuous of his sibling, until he stumbles upon the skeletal find. And finally, Cushing has a daughter who misses her distracted and absent minded daddy, but who becomes a wanton killer with the injection of some material from the skeleton.
It's all pretty tedious and disoriented and the disc, which has a widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) and subtitles, contains no other supplements.
Falling into the realm of the horror of personality genre that includes PSYCHO and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (films that may not technically be horror films but rather thrillers), is the inevitably variously titled NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS (Blue Underground, 1975, $19.95, Tuesday, October 26).
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In fact it is an explicit if unofficial remake of last house, set on a train instead of in New York and upstate. Directed by Aldo Lado, it tells of two friends on Christmas school break traveling from the home of one of them, in Germany, to the palatial villa of the other, whose father is an Italian doctor. On the train they are harassed by two reckless and violent drug addicts. The boys hitch up with an upper class yet wanton woman and the three of them trap the girls in a train compartment for a long night of torture. As in LAST HOUSE, the trio end up via circumstances in the home of the doctor, who unearths the fact that the trio have killed his daughter and her friend, and consequently takes out lengthy and bloody revenge.
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There are a few key differences between this film and LAST HOUSE, however. One is that the wanton rich woman more or less escapes punishment, Lado comment on the upper class, or class-based roots of violence. Throughout the film articulate rich people are shown engaging in discussions of violence and its cause, which it is happening just nearby. A nightmare version of GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS and other randy road films by French director Bertrand Blier, it also reminds one of Michael Haneke 's difficult FUNNY GAMES, which tackles a similar theme with the same queasiness.
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NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS is extremely well directed, truly does not endorse the violence but presents it as horrific (in contrast to the personal expression of taste disguised as exploitative pandering in Franco's films), and has an effective harmonica-based score by Morricone. Blue Underground offers up night train with a 15-minute yet comprehensive interview with Lado, along with publicity memorabilia, trailers, and TV and radio spots.
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In an excellent package, the 21-year old CHRISTINE (Columbia Tristar, 1983, $19.95, Tuesday, September 28) comes to DVD, after some impoverished laser disc releases. In my estimation, CHRISTINE is a lesser King adaptation, and though interesting in its tone, not one of my favorite Carpenter films. I think this has to do with the casting. It just isn't tight or right enough. Kevin Bacon was almost going to play the Keith Gordon role, but went to FOOTLOOSE instead. In his place, the young Gordon couldn't quite pull off the tough hood half of his two-part character. When he is driving the evil car around and cursing, he still seems like a nerd. His swearing (as does all the swearing in the film) feels artificial and lame, and the word "shitters" doesn't strike me as a cool term for hoods, but that might be Gordon. The others are just uninteresting in the manner of teen horror films everywhere, one of whom is an unrecognizable Alexandra Paul of BAYWATCH, with a little extra baby fat, now anathema in Hollywood).
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I don't know what the book is like, but the film is a fairy tale about consumerism. It takes the American male's love affair with his car to an extreme, even sexual level. The film might also be something of a dig at Lucas and AMERICAN GRAFFITI. What we do know, confirmed by the start of the audio track here, is that the opening sequence, in which the evil car Christine is assembled (the car being, as Robert Cumbow asserts in his excellent book on Carpenter, another agent of chaos that brings disorder to the universe), is also a response to an old idea of Hitchcock's, in which a corpse impossibly falls out of a car that just went through the assembly line. The whole movie is kind of cumbersome and doesn't have a lot of shocks or horror in it. It's one of those movies in which when a car starts to drive at you, you run down the middle of the street straight ahead of it. Also, despite the fact that there are 20 minutes of deleted scenes on this disc, some of the plot still goes unexplained. How did Gordon's character make this transition from nerd to tough? Why doesn't Paul's character go on dates with anyone, as laboriously set up at the film's start?
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Still, for all that, it is an excellent disc, and very informative to aspiring filmmakers. CHRISTINE comes in adequate transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) with good Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Of special interest is the audio commentary by Carpenter and Gordon. Because Gordon is now a director, Carpenter treats him with some subtlety as a peer, and asks him as many questions as a journalist might. There are also three making of featurettes: "Christine: Fast and Furious," "Christine: Ignition," and "Christine: Finish Line" about 40 minutes in all, and carry on the informative tone of the yak track (although the third featurette here should be the first one). Finally, there are cast and crew bios and trailers for other Columbia films.
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Stephen King has been taking more control over his adaptations in recent years (call it the "Kubrick factor"), with the consequence that they are duller and cruder than ever. STEPHEN KING PRESENTS KINGDOM HOSPITAL: THE ENTIRE SERIES (Columbia Tristar, $49.95, Tuesday, October 12) is the recent mini-series that was supposed to be a whole series, based on Lars Von Trier's KINGDOM, and following its first part fairly closely. It is not scary and has a vulgar sense of humor.
Transposed from Denmark to New England, the mini series features the same relationships and tensions, with the addition of a few new characters, among them a painter who is run down by a van, a stand in for King and what happened to him when he was struck by a car. It's as if King took on this material solely to work out his own demons, and he almost admits so in the audio track for the first episode.
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This is the mini-series that doesn't blend humor or satire with horror very well, that has animals do voice overs, has an obsession with dogs, and shows the artist King stand-in trudging through the basement of the hospital for what seems like hours. In fact, it could literally be hours, it is such a long series. In a two-hour wrap up, the mystery here is explained (unlike in the Von Trier version), and there is happiness for all (the artist comes out of his coma and walks, just like the real King). This ending explanation feels like it comes from somewhere else but I can't put my finger on it; it may be THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, or it might be the recent remake of THE HAUNTING, or a third film that I can almost see in my mind. I just can't remember.
Besides dullness and vulgarity, the series has other problems. Characters disappear for hours at a time. All the women in the show look exactly the same. Medical thriller novelist Richard Dooling also worked on the show, but the film still feels unconvincing from a medical angle, if for no other reason than that it also includes so much psychic and ghostly mumbo-jumbo. Who would have thought that that would have made the science seem bad.
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Coming from seeing the most recent iterations of the Jason Voorhees legend, in which the monster is a relentless force that neither outer space nor Freddy Krueger can stop, it is interesting to circle around and watch the first FRIDAY THE 13TH movie, part of FRIDAY THE 13TH: FROM CRYSTAL LAKE TO MANHATTAN: ULTIMATE EDITION DVD COLLECTION (Paramount, five-disc set, $89.95, Tuesday, October 5). The first thing you realize is that it was from an entirely different tradition than the films that followed it (but then, Freud wasn't a "Freudian"). The first film is more in line with the post-PSYCHO William Castle style thrillers like HOMICIDAL, in which the killer, after a succession of red herrings, turns out to be a crazy lady. Betsy Palmer's mad scene and demise is very much worthy of a Castle film.
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After that, the series modeled itself on HALLOWEEN, and especially the sequels to HALLOWEEN. If that led to a diminution of the suspense, it also caused viewers to turn away from a thorough appreciation of the entire series and not make discriminations among the entries, thus missing that the very best one was No. 4, and not because Jason was especially vicious or imaginative, but because the heroine was the strongest and most interesting.
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For students of the horror film it's great to have the first eight films in one package, even knowing that someday, when the series finally reaches completion with PART 13 that a new package will be released, in a Blu Laser package going for $235 dollars and only affordable by elites living in gated communities that float in the sky. In any case, until then this set provides a mini-retrospective, with a fifth disc that includes a combined making of featurette of all the making ofs; a visual effects doc; a chronicle of the actors in the series; deleted or "softened" scenes; a survey of memorabilia and who has it; and a suite of trailers.
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About the scariest horror imagery these days is associated with the zombie genre and now DAWN OF THE DEAD: ULTIMATE EDITION (Anchor Bay Divimax Series, 1978, $49.98, four discs, released Tuesday, September 7), which was just released back in March of 2004, sees further release as a four-disc set, the March tablet folded into the new set, which gathers together all the extant versions of the film.
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Disc one offers the U.S. Theatrical Version, Disc Two offers the Extended Version It's the version Romero took to the Cannes Film Festival in 1978, and is 12 minutes longer than the Director's cut on disc one. Disc Three offers the exotic European Version reedited by Dario Argento for the Italian market. All three films come in widescreen transfers enhanced for widescreen TVs, and have mono sound tracks along with new D 5.1, DTS 5.1, and Dolby 2.0 sound options. I've already covered disc one and its yak track back in March; as a reminder, it also has two original theatrical trailers, TV spots, radio spots, advertising memorabilia, a Romero bio, and a preview for the comic book. Disc two has an audio commentary by producer Richard P. Rubinstein, interviewed by Perry Martin, which is more business oriented, but still interesting for all that. Also on the disc is the actual real commercial to advertise Monroeville Mall, used in the film. Finally there is a photo gallery, more memorabilia gallery, and production stills. Disc Three gives us an commentary track with the stars, David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross, which makes for a nice reunion. In addition, there are more theatrical trailers, some British TV spots, a lobby card gallery, an Argento filmography, and the press kit.
Finally, disc four has a host of makings ofs: Perry Martin's “The Dead Will Walk” a new doc about the making of the film; “Document of the Dead” documentarian Roy Frumkes making of shot in the mall itself; some home movie footage of the shoot with commentary by zombie extra Rob Langer; and “Monroeville Mall Tour”, with Ken Foree, giving a tour of the mall today for a bunch of rabid fans. All in all this is a remarkable package, a must have set, and one of the best packages that Anchor Bay has yet released.
I thought that colorization was dead, buried next to Ted Turner's hope for the America's Cup, but here is the second colorized old film in a year, THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (Fox, 1968, $14.95, Tuesday, September 7), after REEFER MADNESS, and existing less to make the film palatable to younger viewers weaned on color but to give Mike Nelson a chance to pull a solo MST3K on the film.
Still, the new version gives the viewer a chance to watch and reassess the film, and a new viewing raises a few questions. For example: Why does the zombie grab its face in pain at 18:50? Do the zombies feel pain? Clearly, NIGHT was written before all the intricacies of zombieology were worked out. I also note that in this early Romero film, zombies could run and were called ghouls by those hunting them down. They also had causation: radiation from a returning Venus space probe. The footage at the end of the posse hunting down zombies reminds me of the raid on Burpleson Air Base in DR. STRANGELOVE raid and the emotional meaning of the montage under the credits was later mimicked by a little film with in film in the underrated OUTBREAK.
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But the main selling point of the disc is probably Nelson's commentary track. Never has he needed Servo more. Nelson's track is pretty hit and miss, a little too casual in presentation (there are too many gaps), and misses some obvious gags. Some of the quips are just lame. As the camera tilts down from a tree in the opening graveyard, he says, "The cinematographer got interested in a squirrel here for a minute." Yet later he is funny when he says of the gas pump "appears out of nowhere" that it is an "organically occurring Shell station." Then it starts to alternate bad ("Zombies hate clotheslines" "Pittsburg does require a permit to burn a zombie on your back porch") to kind of good ("It's much more pleasant to beaten to death with a tire iron when you are already dead" "You know, if you were a zombie you'd probably take a lot more chances with your life, you know, go skydiving, visit the seedier parts of town after dark without fear, adjust your snowblower without shutting it off"). Amusingly he calls the ghouls a "murder of zombies," and asks why, if the zombies can eat dead flesh, don't they eat each other? He notes the careers of the stars and that Judith O'Dea's next film after NIGHT was CLAUSTROPHOBIA in 2003: "That puts her at a one film per 35 year clip. Meaning her next film is due out in 2038." He could just as easily said that she makes on film a century. Then he makes the same joke later about one of the other cast members, in between giving various recipes for Zombie cocktails.
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Aside from Nelson, the only other extra is something called "Separated at Death," which likens members of the cast to contemporary stars. The disc also offers the black and white version, but I don't think it is the original B&W, but this digitally colorized version just offered with the color turned off. You can tell by the way the title of the film looks when it rolls up.
Ghost stories seem to be the least popular horror genre of all right now, despite the recent resurgence of remakes and new ghost films such as THE GRUDGE. THE GHOSTS OF EDENDALE (Warner, 2004, $19.95, Tuesday, October 19) is a nice straight to video ghost story shot on video whose tale takes the conceit that all of Hollywood is ruled by the ghosts of dead, unpleasant film people of the past.
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A man and his girlfriend flee the east coast to try Los Angeles and see if they can both make it as writers. They get an incredible deal on a house, that come already furnished, but as they get to know their new neighborhood, in the Silverlake district, the departure of the former tenants seems more and more perplexing. It also turns out that all their neighbors are "industry," and that the area itself is built on the old Tom Mix studio. The heroine, who has psychic incidents in her past, begins to see things (never fully explained), and the hero finds his personality overtaken by one of the ghosts, which leads, a la ROSEMARY'S BABY, to a successful career in movies.
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There are some legitimate shocks in the film, and like many of the new J-horror films bright bland daylight locations are the settings for horror, which can be creepy, but also risks confusing the viewer. For a movie you have probably never heard of, the disc also comes packed, with a commentary track, three making of featurettes, a host of deleted scenes with optional commentary, and the trailer.
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Much more mundane, if slightly effective, is BODY PARTS (Paramount, 1991, $14.95, Tuesday, September 14). This is one of the films by the now notorious Eric Red, who after writing and / or directing a series of horror films usually featuring cars (THE HITCHER, NEAR DARK), in turn plowed his own car, an SUV, into a pool hall near the UCLA campus in the summer of 2000, killing two people, and injuring seven others, after the accident attempting to slash his own throat with a shard of glass. The disc has a nice widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced), three sound options, subtitles, but no other extras.
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The set piece in BODY PARTS consists of a car chase in which a psychiatrist (Jeff Fahey, who really should be in westerns) who has received the arm of an executed convict after he survives an earlier auto accident has that arm handcuffed to the wrist of the evil driver of a different car, both careening down crowded city streets at night. The shrink has learned that other recipients of the convict's transplants have also experienced, as he has, strange dreams and violent impulses. Then someone, for some reason, wants all those body parts back.
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This is extreme, even difficult stuff, focusing on the body and medical intrusions, and you sort of expect the film to be bleaker than it is. Instead the intellectual doctor becomes an action figure and takes down the evil little medial empire oppressing him. Red is, or was, a director whose films are consistent more through the small glossary of their concerns — travel, cars, possession, predatory groups disguised as something else — than through any visual vocabulary, but his at this point truncated career isn't long enough to really evaluate, unlike John Carpenter's.
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Another medical horror film, and one film that I've always wanted to see but never had access to is Georges Franju's EYES WITHOUT A FACE (The Criterion Collection, 1959, $14.95, Tuesday, October 19). It is suppose to be one of the creepiest horror films ever made, and it lived up to its rep. I think few are going to get through the "face lifting" scene, and some may well faint. I wonder what the reaction was when it first screened in Paris in 1959.
Written by VERTIGO's Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac from a novel by Jean Redon, EYES has a plot out of a Mexican horror films. It concerns a
Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) who is trying to restore his daughter's face, wrecked in a car accident. His assistant, Louise (Alida Valli) lures young women to his villa for crude face removals.
Franju started out as an unusually ambiguous documentary filmmaker and one of his early short films is included on the disc. Criterion's EYES comes with an excellent widescreen transfer (1.66:1, enhanced). The documentary is Franju's 1949 22-minute film about slaughterhouses, BLOOD OF THE BEASTS. Franju sits for two short TV interviews, and Boileau and Narcejac are also interviewed. Finally, there is an image gallery, two trailers, and an 12-page insert with essays by novelist Patrick McGrath and film historian David Kalat, chapter titles, cast and crew, and transfer information.
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One of the greatest filmmakers that you may never have heard of is Larry Cohen, who has been working in movies in one capacity or another since the early 1960s, but has writing credits that go back to the late 1940s. Three of his best films are gathered in THE LARRY COHEN COLLECTION: BONE, Q, AND GOD TOLD ME TO (Blue Underground, three-disc set, $39.95, Tuesday, August 26). He invented the show THE INVADERS, the first X-FILES, practically invented the blaxploitation film, and has made at least five masterly horror films.
Q is the best flying Aztec serpent film you will ever see. It's got a great cast that includes David Carradine and Richard Roundtree, and has a star turn by Michael Moriarty as a cheap crook who discovers the Aztec lizard hiding in the top of the Chrysler building and sells the info to the city for a million bucks.
The film shows its oft-times low budget scale, but as mentioned above, one mustn't let the need for a "well made" film interfere with the film's higher concerns, which in this case includes a biting contrast of various hierarchies: Carradine and his co-workers, Moriarty in the scheme of New York crime. The discs in this set all feature good transfers and great extras, most important a colloquy between Cohen and Blue Underground chief William Lustig. Also on hand here is a teaser trailer, memorabilia, a Cohen bio that appears on all three discs, and the film's press kit and various news articles in a CD-ROM format.
The necessity o f taking Cohen seriously as an artist and thinker comes into play with the difficult and fascinating GOD TOLD ME TO. Not only is it a curious and shocking tale, but also its implications, as it blends UFOlogy and religious cults, undermine the foundation of Christianity.
This film, too, has a great cast, starting with Tony Lo Bianco as the cop who learns that there is something special about him, and Richard Lynch as his "brother." Also on hand are Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Sidney, and Deborah Raffin, very sexy still in her gigantic aviator glasses.
This disc has the Cohen bio, another great commentary between Cohen and Lustig, in which Cohen makes an inspirational comment about how movie making changes your sense of time (transcribed below), and the trailer, TV spots, and memorabilia. In the commentary, Cohen hints that there might be a sequel to GOD TOLD ME TO, though that could be a joke. He wants to call it GOD TOLD ME TO 2. I think he is missing an opportunity for a more clever title by not calling it GOD TOLD ME TWICE.
DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From the commentary track on GOD TOLD ME TO: "Sometimes when a day goes by, and nothing happens much, I think of how little can happen in a day, and how much can happen in a day when you are shooting a movie. At the end of a day of filming, you've really accomplished a tremendous amount. That day has been a very important day, because you got something now in the can, that wasn't there before and will always be there forever. And it's just a wonderful feeling to have accomplished something in a day's work. That's the way it works with writing too, if you sit down and write 15, 18, 20 pages in a day, at the end of the week, you really feel like there's been a tremendous achievement. That week has been an important week. But it's amazing how fast a week can go by when you do nothing. It goes by 10 times faster when you do nothing. By working on a picture like this it seems to extend time. It's amazing how long a day was when you're shooting a movie. The day just went on forever. Today, when I'm not doing anything, or just doing menial things, the day seems to be over before it began, with very little to show for it. So, that's one of the great pluses of making movies. That wonderful feeling of achievement when it's over. After 18 days you've got a whole movie in your hands." —Larry Cohen on some of the unexpected virtues of low budget filmmaking, 01:00:40.
Letters
From Thor Klippert:
I edit the EXPLORERS page at Movie Tome and want to thank you for giving EXPLORERS some attention. Now if only Paramount would get in line!
A note on the editorial changes to the film: I haven't seen the disc yet, but judging from your description of the deleted scenes (both were included in the theatrical release) this is the same edit that has always been available on home video, so hanging onto the VHS won't make a difference. Cinemax used to play the theatrical edition, but I don't know if they still do.
Looking back, and comparing the home video edit to my treasured Cinemax tape, I've come to agree with the revisions. Although the deleted sequence fills in a lot of detail, the shock cut to Ben getting punched is more effective. I'd also say Wolfgang's humiliation is too extreme, and the direction of the background extras is distractingly stiff. And as much as I like the image of the Tilt-a-Whirl machine rolling down the hill, it does give the audience time to wonder why the kids couldn't just float it in the force-field.
Incidentally, I have in my possession a one-shot official EXPLORERS movie magazine from the STARLOG-FANGORIA people in 1985 that features a production still from the deleted party scene that I mention on my page, so we know at least part of it was shot. It was never incorporated into any version of the film that I know of.
The penultimate image of the spaceship in the empty classroom was added for the video edition, and that's definitely a keeper.
NEXT TIME: Political films, Guy Maddin's COWARDS, several STAR TREKS and more!
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