The Exorcist (1973)

Speaking of movies with backlashes, here's another one, although the backlash against this movie is less about commercial hype than it is about political correctness, so let's get this out of the way: yes, The Exorcist is ultimately a movie with a regressive attitude towards gender roles (two priests must do battle against an unruly female) and towards morality (stark medieval good vs. evil).

All that said, The Exorcist still stands for me as one of the all-time great horror movies, simply on the basis of its ability to create tension and scares and on the basis of sheer storytelling. There's hardly a wasted second in William Friedkin's original cut, with a relentless build towards the final showdown between Max Von Sydow and the demon inhabiting Linda Blair; indeed, this movie is a good example of how a focussed, energetic director's work can transcend a mediocre screenplay - just look at the opening sequence, which introduces Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin, a character who will then disappear until the last half hour of the movie. It's a sequence loaded with an overpowering, foreboding mood, but with virtually zero narrative connection, either to the rest of the movie, or really, within itself. But because Friedkin knows what he's doing, the mood and editing propulsiveness carry us through this sequence and into the main body of the movie.

And the performances are almost uniformly great; We all know that Max Von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn are great actors, but where did Jason Miller come from and why wasn't he in more films? And Linda Blair's performance, natural and easy-going as a normal girl, genuinely diabolical when possessed, is easy to attribute to special effects, but has to be seen as one of the best performances by a teenager, ever.

I need to add, however, that the version I watched on Friday night wasn't Friedkin's original director's cut, but the 2000 'special edition' which is basically William Peter Blatty's preferred Producer's Cut, which adds in a bunch of redundantly superimposed demon faces and a dumb 'happy ending' scene at the very end of the movie, among other details. Now, I think William Friedkin has about as much interest in convincing his audience of the existence of demons as Sam Raimi did in Drag Me to Hell; Friedkin's career shows that he's more interested in telling stories for the sake of telling stories. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Blatty actually believed in his own shaggy dog tale, since pretty much every choice in his cut of the movie makes it more strained and pretentious.

9/10

The New Beverly All-Night Horrorthon 2009

God, I love the New Beverly, LA's grungiest non-porn repertory theater. This year, as last year, they showed an all-night horror movie marathon in the lead-up to Halloween and I was there, here's the quick rundown:

Dog Soldiers (2002): I had seen Neil Marshall's directorial debut before on DVD; on a second viewing it's still a pretty kickass action/horror hybrid, but at the same time some of Marshall's inexperience felt more prominent, along with the screenplay's seams. Either way, still a fun, smart little movie. 7/10

The Burning (1981): This should be the title for a horror movie about a skin disease, but it's actually a Friday the 13th clone produced by Harvey Weinstein, and like a lot of other movies from very early in the slasher era, it actually has its own identity and some strong moments. Still, not much to write home about, beyond the presence of Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and (somewhere in there) Holly Hunter. 6/10

The House by the Cemetery (1981): This was when things really kicked in for me because of my love for the films of Lucio Fulci, the weirdest and least rational Italian horror filmmaker of the era. Like all of his movies, this one is loaded full of bizarre images only connected by fleeting dream-logic: mannequins losing their heads and bleeding, little girls appearing out of nowhere to give cryptic warnings, monsters that bleed maggots. Good stuff! The former owner of the titular house was a - get this - Dr. Freudstein. 7/10

At this point, the organizers showed three Tales from the Crypt episodes, and while they were fun, I think it would have made more sense to just show a single episode as a palate-cleanser. Three in a row was a bit much.

Superstition (1982): Probably the weakest movie of the night, and one that didn't actually involve 'superstition' per se but rather the vengeful spirit of a witch haunting a house and causing peoples' heads to wind up in microwaves and saw blades to fly across the room and kill people. I nodded off during the second half of this rather slow-moving movie and missed some of the explanatory stuff, but I don't think I missed much. 4/10

Fight For Your Life (1977): I had also seen this one before at the New Bev, basically a Last House on the Left variant with a vicious white racist (William Sanderson, in a great performance) holding an African-American family hostage and spewing the most amazingly awful torrent of hate-speech at them for an hour and a half. Of course it all ends with the family rising up and striking back at their oppressor. I wonder if, at the New Beverly, there was a single African-American person watching it last night or if it was all complacent white hipsters like myself. 7/10

Galaxy of Terror (1981): Probably not the best idea to put another very slow movie at the very end of the night, and this Alien-ripoff is pretty incomprehensible, but it still has Sid Haig chopping off one of his own arms, Grace Zabriskie captaining a spaceship and somehow ending up barbequed, and an attractive blonde actress basically getting raped and killed by a gigantic maggot. When you can't really tell if what you're watching is actually on the screen or just a product of your own movie-addled mind, you've had a good night. 6/10

Overall, a very fun night, although I wish that the programmers would range out a little further - a slew of '70s-'80s grindhouse movies is fine, but I'd love it if they could mix it up with maybe some '50s Hammer or something modern from France or Japan or maybe something more mainstream and classic in there - tossing in a John Carpenter or Wes Craven film alongside the no-name slashers. Anyway, 52 weeks to Horrorthon 2010!

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964) & This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)

As far as I can tell, Jose Mojica Marins basically pioneered the Latin American horror movie at about the same time that the British, Italians, and Japanese were all launching into the worldwide exploitation market. And like most of those movies, JMM's work is raw, pulpy, and an expression of raw id. Marins' alter-ego, Coffin Joe, is basically the world's worst undertaker, with an ego of colossal, Nietzche-esque proportions and a worldview somewhere between Hitler and Ayn Rand on the subject of the need to extend his bloodline by murdering whatever subhumans will get in his way.

Some critics have had a problem with the politics of Marins' films, and it's not hard to see why, since Coffin Joe (more technically, 'Ze de Caixao') is pretty much the only character in either of the two Marins movies that I've seen, with everybody else basically just showing up to cringe at or be enraged by Coffin Joe's antics.

Yesterday night the Silent Theater showed Marins' first two Coffin Joe pictures. At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul is a fairly modest c-level production elevated, more than anything, by Marins' performance as Joe and his own ability to create mood. The plot is pretty flimsy - Joe wants women to bear him children, and kills a few people when they become obstacles - but it all works with a surprising degree of mood and gore, not to mention some blasphemy; the opening scenes take place on a Friday, and Joe rants about wanting to eat meat, and proceeds to blatantly chew on a leg of lamb while watching the local villagers in a religious procession outside his window, chuckling the whole time.

At Midnight was just the dress rehearsal for This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, a bigger, more violent, more outrageous sequel. Coffin Joe, brought back to life after the events of the previous movie by a retcon line of dialogue, is more intent on ever on his goal of creating a master race with the perfect woman, and basically kidnaps and auditions a group of young ladies for the job. If there's such a thing as tarantula-porn, this movie is it, with spiders crawling all over a gaggle of young women in nighties.

The high point of the movie, though, is a sequence in which Joe find himself transported to Hell, witnessing the torments of the damned in gory full-color. It's a crazy sequence, but it's marred by venturing out of the black and white mood created up to that point - seeing all the crappy papier-mache sets in full color causes them to lose a lot of their charm.

(I have more to say on these films but right now I've gotta go to the New Beverly's 12-hour horrorthon. Until later.)

At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul: 6/10
This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse: 7/10

The Entity (1982)

This one played at the New Beverly about a month ago and I didn't know anything about it except that the premise involves Barbara Hershey getting raped by a ghost. Obviously this was a can't miss premise in the post-Exorcist era even if it sounds utterly ridiculous now. And sure enough, that's what happens, about five times during the course of the movie, each time accompanied by the most awesomely tasteless, throbbing music that you've ever heard in a rape scene in a movie. It's basically loud, insistent porno music, and it returns every time the ghost (or whatever) goes after Hershey.

What's most interesting to me about this movie is that it seems to exhibit cinematic split-personality disorder. On the one hand we have what we see happening to Hershey - she gets slapped and raped by invisible forces, and this is all seen objectively - there's clearly a ghost (or something) attacking her.

At the same time, the movie introduces Ron Silver as her psychiatrist, a sympathetic, rational guy who proceeds to make a very compelling case that Hershey's character is, in fact, nuts - that she's had an unhealthy sex life, that her relationships with men have been unstable, and that the whole thing is a figment of her imagination. This is combined with a number of subtle touches director Sidney J. Furie adds to the movie, constantly bringing in reflections and mirror images (like the above) to suggest that she's doing it to herself - this is all pretty convincing, cinematically, especially given Barbara Hershey's completely committed, nuanced performance...

Except for when the blue lightning bolts attack Hershey's son, or at the end of the movie, when scientists manage to trap and freeze the entity as a giant blob of blue goo. WHUH? I guess the filmmakers thought that making both sides of the debate convincing would be quirky and ambiguous, but...WHUH?

Anyway, Furie's direction is controlled and Hershey gives a very strong performance, so I recommend the movie on those levels, but otherwise it's a lunatic film (which also means I recommend it).

6/10

Octuplets born in Bellflower

This is the best story so far that I've seen about the birth, yesterday, of eight babies to an unidentified mother in a Los Angeles suburb.

When you have that many babies, it should really be labelled as a litter. And there are few things that I would want to label as a 'perversion of science' but along with extreme plastic surgery, this is one of them. There's a reason why some species have large multiple births and humans don't: baby spiders and sea turtles are a lot easier for predators to eat than toddlers, and the human brain requires a lot of protection and attention to develop properly over our protracted childhoods. Having this many babies will almost certainly lower each individual child's health and standard of living for the rest of their lives.

Both of my parents came from large families (7 siblings on Mom's side, 9 or 10 - I forget - on Dad's) but at least those kids weren't getting orthodontics and going through puberty and applying to college all at the exact same time. Since this many births is almost certainly the result of fertility drugs, I can't help but think of it as a selfish decision on the part of the parents.

UPDATE 1/30/09:
It gets worse - this idiot already has six children. Fuck.

Inside (2007)

Picked up and then dumped direct-to-video as a "Dimension EXTREME" title by the Weinstein Company, this French horror movie has gotten a lot of acclaim from reviewers as a modern classic along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween; well, folks, I think it's good but I don't think it's quite that good.

Set on Christmas Eve, Inside gives us the very pregnant Sarah (Allyson Paradis), widowed after a recent car accident, sitting around, glum, waiting to give birth. Her lonely little world is broken up by an anonymous Woman (Beatrice Dalle) who, after a little stalking, moves into home invasion and assault with a pair of scissors to Sarah's navel. From that point it's like Die Hard in the womb, as The Woman announces her intention to steal the baby right from Sarah's still-warm body. A variety of characters who drop by to check on the pregnant Sarah wind up (of course) as statistics until it's only the two women left, destroying each other for survival and motherhood.

Like the other recent French horror movies Haute Tension and Ils (Them), Inside has plenty of suspense, action, and gore, but not a huge amount of substance underlying the carnage. There's some psychologizing, as we learn (SPOILERS!) that The Woman was the driver of the other car that killed Sarah's husband, and lost her own baby in the process, and thus has been waiting patiently until Sarah could come to full term for her revenge. But neither character is really developed beyond their archetypes. I like Inside, but in a lot of ways it feels like an exercise to me - made by filmmakers primarily interested in pushing the envelope of gore and intimate brutality (knife to the face, check; exploding head, check; on-camera Caesarian, check). Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's a little inherently limiting.

Basically, what separates this movie, for me, from the classics mentioned above or similar movies like Basket Case or Audition, is the poetry of horror, the ability to really dig deep into these terrible situations with empathy and emotion and pull resonant imagery out of them. Inside gets partway there but feels too impersonal to me, with a dud of an ending that I saw coming, to be considered a modern classic. Still, for its suspense and the high ugh-factor, it's recommended.

7/10

The Ruins (2008)

Or, "My friends went to Mexico and all I got was this lousy carnivorous plant infection!" It's another tourist-terror movie, but this time instead of the sadistic Europeans of the Hostel movies or the organ-harvesters of Turistas it's a Mayan temple infested with hungry plants, and a group of young American tourists, led by Jena Malone and Jonathan Tucker, stumble into it, only to have the locals box them in, shooting anyone who tries to get away in order to stop the spread of the infection. Assuming that the plant doesn't spread via spores or seeds, it raises the question: why not a fence?

It's a pretty pulpy, straight-forward premise (from the novel by Scott Smith) that leads to a movie that works on a basic, 'what kind of crap is going to happen to happen to these people next?' level, with little space needed for elaboration or explanations. And the movie, directed by Carter Smith, isn't bad, but the filmmakers forgot one crucial element: they forgot to make the movie actually about anything.

Now I'm not asking that the movie layer on an unwanted coat of metaphor or allegory when it works reasonably well as a straight-forward narrative, but even Eli Roth was smart enough to work in a critique of global capitalism into his movies. If you're making a movie about a killer plant infesting a Mayan temple that can mimic the human voice and strip flesh off bones, you need to either add in some thematic resonances, or you need to make it the best, craziest, most suspenseful killer plant movie ever made (I'm calling you out, Day of the Triffids). And unfortunately, The Ruins doesn't do either of those two things and so it floats, unfixed in a larger artistic framework, and only moderately compelling as a roller-coaster ride. Even though there's a fair amount of suspense and the cast is game, it's horror-movie junk food - okay in the moment, totally forgettable afterwards.

6/10

The Fly (1986) & The Fly II (1989)

Until last night, I don't think that I had ever actually sat down and watched David Croneneberg's The Fly from beginning to end. Mostly I've watched chunks of it on cable over the years, so I had seen the whole movie but not in a long time. So watching it to get in the mood for Eastern Promises seemed like a good idea.

The great thing about The Fly is that it isn't really a conventional monster movie. Yes, it has a creature that carries a pretty lady away into the night, but for most of the movie, the horror comes not from being afraid of the creature, but rather from the growing, insidious fear of watching someone we like turning into the creature. Or even more to the heart of the matter, Cronenberg makes us think of that dread that we all have of disease, decrepitude, dissolution. And as a result, the movie transcends the monster movie genre and becomes something closer to pure, classical tragedy.
The simple design helps: there are only three main characters, and almost every scene in the movie is a two-person dialogue scene between some combination of them, making for a very economical setup, with only a couple of scenes of action or gore (although when these happen, Cronenberg lets out all the stops). And it 's all done in such a dry, uninflected manner that the audience is lured in and convinced of the reality of these people in this otherwise crazy situation.

I especially love the key Cronenbergian moments where Jeff Goldblum regards his metamorphosis with a dry disconnection. One is the scene where we see that he's stuck various discarded body parts in his medicine cabinet, calling it the "Brundle Museum of Natural History". Another is the moment where he picks up a donut to eat in front of Geena Davis and vomits on it to begin his new digestion process. He hadn't given it a second thought, but seeing her reaction triggers him to say, apologetically, "That's disgusting." He's gotten used to his new way of doing things.

As for The Fly II, it's a sequel that basically rehashes the plot of the first one, except without much resonance or dramatic integrity but with the addition of a bunch of evil scientists for Eric Stoltz to get revenge against. The only really good or memorable thing about this movie are the scenes of the dank pit in which the scientists keep the freakish mutated results of their flawed teleportation experiments. That's good nightmare fodder. [Update: here's a picture of the freak pit.]

It's also the only movie I can think of where two characters have sex and one of them is five years old.

"The Littlest People" on Discovery Health

I was watching this documentary program on cable while folding laundry, it's about a particular disorder - primordial dwarfism - that results in children that are smaller and frailer than other types of dwarfs, and who typically don't live beyond the age of 30. It's interesting enough hearing stories about growing up different from other kids and how adults with the disorder work to try to boost the self-esteem of young primordial dwarf children.

Then they get to a profile of Danny, the guy in the picture above, and the interviewer talks about how he got to go to homecoming and his romantic life, and then she asks, "How long would you like to live?" And I was staggered at the insensitivity and condescension inherent in that question. How long do you want to live, interview lady? Of course, the guy answers, "Sixty or seventy" because what else is he going to say? "I hope to make it to forty but that's it, because my life is a worthless parody of normalcy"?

And this was in the final cut of the thing. Jeez.