Milla Jovovich: God's Own Avatar (+ Laymen's Guide to the Resident Evil Series)

No modern actress has spent more time running in slow motion while firing two guns at the camera than Milla Jovovich, which considering her start as a neo-hippie musician with an album and small part in Dazed and Confused (1993), reflects cosmic levels of disillusionment. And I love her, from a safe distance. She's the female post-modern Brundlefly (i.e. Jeff Goldblum) slowly dissolving into CGI replication, from hauntingly gravitas-endowed folkie to warrior queen of the Uncanny Valley -- fighting for her last shreds of un-pixelated humanity with a world-weary sequel-after-sequel determination.

I didn't seek them out, but the first four Resident Evil films have been all over Syfy lately, usually on Saturday afternoons, and I've secretly enjoyed them in a half-asleep lollygag. Repeat viewings don't make the films exactly get better, but nor do they get any worse and sometimes not getting worse over time is better than being good in the first place. Having the violence spread between an array of intercut commercials is awesome too -- nothing beats seeing corrupt corporate goons machine gunning civilians smash cut to the new Mitsubishi Turbo. The pulse of the afternoon advertising blocs entrains to the throbbing din of Milla's battles, creating a symphony of post-modernist random meaning generation.


Mee-la YO-vo-vitch as her name is pronounced, plays a character with many clones and lives enough for an afternoon of multiple person play, and considering the amount of blue screen this poor woman has to slog through, that Mee-la keeps it all real and engaging remains quite a feat, especially considering English is not her first language, or French either; she was born in the Ukraine, wherefrom a genetically superior breed of humans seems to flow, like a 'wirgin spreeng.'

I still listen to her The Divine Comedy a 1994 album equal parts Kate Bush, Arthurian bard, Nordic alien-hybrid, and Jane Birkin, and purer than a crystalline decanter full of airy Scotch, but it came out ten years ago. Does she even have time to pick up a guitar now, with so much zombie blood on her hands? I wish she would. The zombies have suffered enough, and my heart has too -- it needs her swoosh of a voice and tick-tock through the medieval graveyard tromp pop to swain and swillow through the once more wood.

She gave us only one other musical document, from the previous year -- the moments when she quietly plays and sings at a party and tries to light a joint and misses by a few inches to hilarious effect in Dazed and Confused (1993). That lighter may have missed the target but even with this small mostly dialogue-free part she established herself idelibly as one of those hauntingly perfect hippie-style goddesses that stir feelings deeper and more ancient than mere attraction, closer to the vicinity of chaste courtly love where the main desire is to be her champion in a joust. The film didn't need her to be great, but with her it was able to break through, like a midnight sun, and it was a great echo of similar moments in films like Marianne Faitfhfull's a capella cafe "As Tears Go By" in Godard's Made in USA (1966).

Bigger movies beckoned, as they will when beautiful, talented, otherworldly girls present themselves and talented Frenchmen take notice there muse hath come. First there was Luc Besson, commencing with The Fifth Element (1997) to weave Milla into existence from a chunk of raw material of 'the perfect being' and allowing her to speak her own (self-invented) bizarre language. She made a great savior of the universe, we therein wanted her to save us, and so felt guilty and caught when she found our dirty little genocides on the historical microfiche she scanned. People mainly remember the crazy orange hair and Gautier white tape suit, but she was never objectified in it - she was more Pris than Rachel, and Besson clearly felt that same courtly joust vibe we did and it carried over to Bruce Willis' cubicle-dwelling cab driver.

In Luc and Milla's next film together, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), she continued the savior angle and evinced great androgynous schizophrenia, so nuts you can feel some old testy-mental god rattling her inner ear with shouted orders like an impatient, sugar-addled schoolboy. I know the feeling --every three years I become a supernaturally enlightened Buddhist monk crazy man: power flows through me and all is love and holy light--and how difficult it is to slow down for the normal unconscious and asleep people, to not give away money and possessions to the first needy homeless man along the road. Milla gamely and bravely lets that same level of crazy flash across her beautiful features. She takes it all very seriously, which annoyed blind-to-their-own-sexist double standard critics, but for Milla seriously never means placid or lady-like; she encourages us to wonder if maybe France was saved by the novelty of her madness. The French, unlike Americans, have a great sense of humor when it comes to their own mortality, and they worship gamins in a way America still hasn't grown up enough to understand.

Many critics felt that this was Milla's vanity project, that she had Besson wrapped around her finger and that she was out of her depth and Besson was letting her get away with it. But that's crap, my brothers. Besson and Jovovich both make it eternally theirs and, again, there was the sense that she was perfect for the role because of her courtly chaste love-inspiring beauty and grace. Messenger was the culmination of a slow build of global devotion. We were ready to storm castles in her name. On the other hand, the film couldn't help being a solid downer, with Milla being sold out by the dauphin in the name of diplomacy and caution and everyone in the French and English armies look so alike it's hard to know who to root for. A third is that Milla plays Joan as such a schizophrenic, replete with eye twitches and brown outs, making it hard to know whether to root for her after awhile. But her notion of God is so like an alien abductior that it's all looney tunes enough to make one wonder why Besson felt the need to show court scheming and intrigue behind her back at all. Why not just stick with what she sees and feels, so that the arrest seems to come out of nowhere? The court stuff is well-photographed super snooze compared to Milla's wild jerky eyes and the awesome grey mud.

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts such as yours truly love to contend that benevolent Nordic aliens and fifth dimensional projections from Arcturus have intervened at key moments in our history in order to keep the spirit of a free democracy alive. A Nordic 'angel' appeared to Washington at Valley Forge to convince him to keep going, and Joan's spirit guide/life coach might well be the same Nordic angel. Recent theories on 'star children' as a newly emerging race of genius ESP children sent here to lead us into a brighter tomorrow might actually play out if one such star child kept her ESP brilliance into adulthood, and was charismatic and enough of an innate showman to genuinely lead an army to victory. I already know her initials: MJ

The idea of Milla as someone to fight for in a gallant Arthurian way (rather than as some obtainable 'prize') has continued into a long and financially lucrative collaboration with current husband, director Paul W.S. Anderson. So while we're here, let's take a gander at the entirety of the RES series, bearing in mind the importance of rock bottom expectations and intercut car commercials:

Resident Evil (2002)
** 

Before it devolves into tedious first person zombie shoot-em-up this first film offers an elaborate set-up that promises better things: the Umbrella underground facility; the uncertain allegiance of the 'Red Queen' and her gassing all the employees; Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up in a bath tub with amnesia with a "property of Umbrella Corp." stamp on the inside of her wedding band; the impeccable Michelle Rodriguez as a SWAT team member; the laser grid, etc. Then it becomes the same old zombie schtick that was already old by 2002. Director W.S. Anderson seems so hung up on perfecting Milla's slow mo kicks at mid-air pouncing zombie dogs that he forgets any kind of narrative momentum. If her kiss with Michelle Rodriguez had gone on for a few seconds longer, that film might even be a classic, instead it's like wasting a sunny day watching someone else play a video game.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
**1/2

Bonus points for picking up right where the last film left off, with the zombie plague spreading all through Raccoon City and for turning one of Alice's buddies into a giant killing machine programmed to keep the peace. There's a fascinating moment where this shambling freak massacres a whole SWAT team surrounding a strutting black dude (Mike Epps) who isn't even scratched because (as we learn from the monster's video game-like monitors) he's unarmed and hence deemed a civilian, a wry statement right up there with the one in Angels and Demons, of how carrying a gun is much more likely to get you killed than save your life. The cast here includes Jared Harris, late of Mad Men, as a doctor who has a cure and will help our locked-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-gate heroes escape (these including cop hottie in black boots Jill Valentine played grandly by Sienna Guillory [below]) if they find his daughter (Sophie Vavasseur) who's the source model for the Red Queen hologram. So there's more shit going on here than just a people trapped inside a multi-layered / many screened computer game.

Some of the big money from the first film's box office shows up in large scale scenes along the wall built to keep Raccoon City's contagion from spreading and there's some natty wall-climbing CGI demons, a motorcycle through a stained glass window, and a big final brawl between Umbrella's top two killing machines, nice troop helicopters, and an interestingly Teutonic corporate villain (Thomas Kretschmann). Anderson seems to figure out some of his own weaknesses and gives up trying to be the action movie Kubrick and the film opens up a result. Never underestimate breathing room.

Ultraviolet (2006) - *

Then, in between Resident Evil films, this...  The feeling of flop sweat pervades, with nary a single interesting fight or character or uncliche'd moment and every actor glazed over with enough slick CGI 'make-up' to cause viewers to wonder why they bothered with actors at all. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, a good-looking dude who clearly has some mojo magic that convinces money to throw itself at him (he also wrote the dismal Salt and wrote and directed the dismal remake of Total Recall), more than anything this film, along with the equally abysmal Charlize Theron movie version of Æon Flux from the year before, seem meant almost to make W.S. Anderson look like Walter Hill by comparison, and Elektra with Jennifer Garner seem a modern marvel. 

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) - ***

The contagion has spread all across the world by this installment - and Alice rides across the Road Warrior-inflected deserts of the American southwest in search of answers before coming to the rescue of a band of hearty young survivors (including Ali Larter) when they're attacked by a murder of zombie crows, a powerful bizarre moment that reminded me of big splash pages 80s John Byrne/Chris Clarendon X-Men. Meanwhile a crazy industrial scientist spies on her from satellites and prepares his own magic invulnerable monster formula. It ends on a pretty wild cloning note, to become the best in the series up to that point, perhaps because it's directed by Russell Mulcahy, an Aussie behind such 'hits' as Highlander and The Shadow but way more grounded and skilled as a storyteller and director of actors than Anderson. Bonus points for a joint lit in a very moving moment by a SWAT survivor from the previous installment (Oded Ferhr) whose dimly smug smile annoyed me in the previous film but is finally put to good use in his moment of stoner triumph. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) - ***1/2

The series was on a roll now and even Anderson steps up to the plate, as if inspired by the lurch forward in quality delivered by Mulcahy in the previous installment; it's inspiring to watch a director like PWSA slowly learn from his mistakes and criticism to deliver sequentially better work. It's a great mix of elements that adds up to much more than the usual slow-mo 3-D shoot-outs and zombie storms. Anderson delivers: a weird aircraft carrier finale involving monsters and freezer tubes; a hundred Alice clone attack on a Japanese corporation; a crash landing on a roof reminiscent of Escape from New York; cool trilobite-style gem-studded mind control devices; a gigantic axe-wielding monster, and detailed attention to continuing human story lines from the past films. It all adds up to the best entry in the series.

By now, though, after eight years of playing Alice for her husband, and having born unto him a child, Milla actually looks older and wearier than she did in the previous entry. Less and less are the CGI airbrushes able to disguise her slightly curled down nose, weakening chin, crow's feet. I mean this only as a high compliment. The younger girls here are airbrushed to near Maxim levels, as part of Umbrella-Disney Corps continued process of filling in the Uncanny Valley with a billion CGI-make-up smoothings.

I give Afterlife high marks because it seems at times made by a John Carpenter fan, from the ominous simplicity of some parts of the score to the idea of trying to escape from both a prison and a city rolled into one place: San Francisco. At one point I swear I could hear Kurt Russell hissing "Maggie, he's dead, come on." The 'under siege' zombie narrative, with a ragtag dwindling group of survivors dealing with an external threat, however, has become the most inescapable story of horror, with the ultimate deadly serious and self-important Walking Dead series being the official last nail in the empty coffin. The arc of banding together with fellow survivors after the apocalypse is comforting to fantasy-retreated loners and if Anderson doesn't quite get to the realization of Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (i.e. such a fantasy is the gateway to fascism) at least he's really run with the whole insidious corporation angle. If you think I'm off the mark here, see if you can get a few minutes into Ultraviolet and Afterlife will seem like Citizen Kane.

Resident Evil - Retribution (2012)

***1/2

As with all the installments, it continues immediately where it left off from the first, backwards in slow motion across the under-attack aircraft carrier until Alice wakes up from falling overboard and into a suburban idyll mirroring the one at the start of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. Herein Alice is married to Oded Ferhr and they have a deaf child, and slowly realizing it's all part of a weird sprawling simulation-lab underwater lair. Explaining too much of the plot loosens it's 'anything can happen in billionaire corporate black box research' vibe, so I'll say no more except to recommend you see it alone, without your judgmental friends or lovers around. The story line manages the return of all Alice's allies from past films: Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez and the always vaguely familiar Boris Kodjoe not to mention the bad guy from the previous film is now on her side and sends super spy Ada Wong (Binging Li) to her rescue. There are new monsters and old and I appreciate that Anderson has the good taste to make the simulations real, rather than just some Matrix or Sucker Punch bit of nullification. Even Milla seems reborn, though I'm not crazy about the leather bustle. Is Anderson abusing her like Welles did Hayworth for some imagined transgression? It just doesn't look comfortable, or particularly practical.

A bit like the Underworld series, there's a sense that the filmmakers are like hey, whatever we do the critics are gonna hate it but the fans are gonna see it over and over - so let's please the fans. Thus artists who began as tired hacks become, in a sense, transformed through a decade of experience, benefitting from the rare opportunity of getting to work again and again with their same people, and not stagnating or phoning it in or overthinking it. And I love that the big final battle is almost all women on both sides, and yet it never feels like some sexy catfight but a genuine dangerous showdown. Keep up the good work, ladies!

Milla's done other stuff, some of which I've written about:

The Fourth Kind (2009)

*

Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable." (full piece here)

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

***1/2

I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of TURISTAS! (more)

Faces in the Crowd (2011)

***

Milla witnesses a murder from the infamous 'melancholy slasher,' gets knocked out, and wakes up with face blindness; her husband is soon being played by an array of different actors, changing with each shot; her clique of cool girl friends don't change much (and one of them,Valentina Vargas, steals all her scenes as a lady so badass she says of one night stands: "when you wake up and don't know for a minute where you are or who is sleeping next to you - I live for that!") but half the time Milla doesn't even see herself in the mirror, and when you're as hot as Milla that's tragic, but even scarier is that if the murderer came into her house and said he was her husband she wouldn't even know he wasn't. And Milla expertly evokes that horror, showing the end result of a life in films that has not been joyous. She's fought and dealt with horrors for quite awhile. She's scrappy, but by now hasn't she paid her dues? Dear God, please give your favorite avatar a nice warm rom-com break, and a chance at another album.


And if you do nod lissen... den to hell with you!

Read More

Tripping to Tortura: IN A WORLD, ADULT WORLD (2013)

Two worth-your-time 2013 films with similar themes, color schemed posters and even titles, recently made themselves, like whores, available at home: IN A WORLD is a semi-autobiographical female voiceover artist trying to make it in a deep-voiced man's game tale, written and directed by and starring Children's Hospital hottie Lake Bell; ADULT WORLD stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a Syracuse University undergraduate poet who finally realizes she's not 'too good' for her job at an adult bookstore and is written and directed by men (a detail I will be addressing) and bearing a tacky tag line (make it out in above poster if you want, but I warned you). Both 'girl' characters start their films living with their parents, rent-free, and the films chronicle their respective launches into the real 'adult' world, reaching down for the big brass rings, stooping to conquer, and finding help along the way, mostly from sensitive boys and/or male mentors, like whores craving pimp slaps.

Why do I mention one film is made by a woman about a woman, and the other is about a girl made by men? I happen to be a pretentious Syracuse English major / poet who applied at one of the city's many local XXX bookstores ("the endless trains of the faithless" - spouts Robin Williams on the TV commercial playing behind me, advertising the Chevy Silverado, "Find new roads!") so I see deeplier (!) than most to this story so I can swear in court that Amy's adventures in that accursed city may look right (the film was shot there) but just don't add up. She says she's an over-achiever with a straight-A average and is a virgin, yet she is also hot, and yet she wants to be a furious poet?And she's an idiot! She lets her car get stolen and then admits she has no theft insurance because she spent the money her dad gave her on SASEs, confident of her imminent fame as a poet, which in itself is very suspicious for a supposedly straight-A student, this being the age when most submissions are done via e-mail. Alas, a great many people are willing to believe real life girls living alone for the first time are idiots like this, ala Juno and Frances Ha! --neither I've been able to see more than five minutes of at a time due to their complete cluelessness. (1)

But Amy is just the sort of girl a sexual anxiety-prone male closet-macho writer would imagine, i.e. one who needs a man who's good at organizing, so said writer can toddle in her wake making exasperated sighs and treating her like a child. That's fine if you're not trying to show someone adapting to the real adult word, the reality of which is that there is no earthly or celestial way a girl as hot as Amy wouldn't get published, laid, and invited to endless readings, even if she shouts her stanzas like a sorority pledge on her third Molson.

Although it's never clear if Amy's in school or out of it, she latches randomly (by finding his book in someone's car) onto a disillusioned middle aged semi-success poetry teacher mentor in his -nth mid-life crisis named 'Rat' (John Cusack). This clown does his own sewing, wears a ski cap indoors, and uses the word 'cray' (for crazy), but Cusack is a pro, and clearly had some input into his character. He takes a page from the Bill Murray playbook and modulates his usual cool aloof warmth to include a complete ambivalence towards towards nearly everything including his own sexual desires. The pleased smile that comes across his face after Amy trashes his apartment has few equals, you have to go back to the 1982 Betty Blue to find another guy as laid back.

And yet he can't even be bothered to take her virginity, even as a favor to her. Jean-Hughes Anglade would never stoop to such petty morality! He'd sleep with Amy even knowing it would destroy her respect for him and lead to blackballing and hushed whispers in the dean's council. He would do it because Amy needs disillusionment and to fathom that sex needn't be earth-shaking to count as experience--all good lessons that a truly good mentor wouldn't refuse. To paraphrase Wilde, the only thing to do with a cute student protege is make love to her if she's beautiful, and to someone else if she's plain.

At least that element of ADULT is not overly cliche. But alas, there's a tall drag queen who lets Amy crash at her squat, and teaches her how to smoke weed and dance. Thank GOD she also doesn't get AIDS halfway through and give Amy a parting monologue about reaching for the sky. Even worse is that Amy gets a job at a homey mom and pop XXX-rated video store (an idea lifted from an old Mr. Show sketch) here she falls for the cute stockboy (Evan Peters) and lets the sort of bait-and-switch sordidness occupy the poster and tag line without adding up to anything truly subversive.  If XXX store had at least one sleazy element the comedy might have had some bite. If there were rats in the squat, or she had to step over junkies to get up the stairs... something! Adult World, yeah RIGHT.

I applied for a clerk job at a XXX store when I was studying up in Syracuse and let me tell you, it was not a mom and pop operation. I remember filling out my application and talking to the fat suspicious owner who loomed down at me from the tall counter, while what sounded like a woman reaching a lengthy orgasm or else being tortured with hot coals echoed from the back room. I knew I would go insane having to listen to that all day so I began to not try and seem reliable. "Ever take a polly?" he asked. He meant polygraph test, to assess whether or not I had stolen from past jobs. I told him I would try anything once, but I think he could see I was turning pale after only ten minutes of listening to those shrill, echoing moans. He probably had applicants stand there talking as long as possible, to see if they could hack the toxic vibes and nonstop moaning from the peep booths for more than ten minutes (there's no such booths in this mom and pop place, don't worry, honey). See, Adult World? That idea could have been a movie, call it "Ever take a Poly?" but every edge set up for cutting latent baby teeth in Adult World comes to us already sanded possibly through rewrites and second-hand sanitization: Cusack's mentor won't seduce her; the adult bookstore is really just a sweet homey place where everybody knows your name; the drag queen bestie (Armando Riesco) is just a droll nurturer ala John Lithgow in World According to Garp; the cute stock boy supports her and straightens her out as needed, patiently waiting to bust his move until at least an hour of running time and 'growth' has elapsed.

I like a lot of things about Adult World, but it makes me miss another film, Art School Confidential, which is unofficially set at Pratt, where I reside now. Think Jim Broadbent or John Malkovich in that movie would have been so rude as to refuse m'lady's request for de-virginizing? The very idea of refusing such a hottie is hateful to Americans!

That's not a problem for Carol (Lake Bell ) in In a World. She goes right after fellow Children's Hospital star, Ken Marino, a successful voiceover artist who her father (Fred Melamed) has taken as a protege in some twisted effort to have a son (his only other child is played by the always amazing Michaela Watkins). Ms. Bell has always been my Children's Hospital favorite and here she ably carries the film in the tricky role of being both a success and a little disorganized, struggling to make it AND making, and getting by with a little help from her friends, and dealing with a dad who doesn't understand why he so desperately wants to keep her from being a success. Dimitri Martin is nice guy sound engineer who helps her get breaks but is too shy to bust a move -though he in turn is helped by an actually cool lesbian wingman, and when Carol does get a break it's from a woman producer (Geena Davis) who has her own problems with sexism.

Many comedies featuring ditzy women have been made as well as about ball-busting career gals, vain actresses, and doting moms, all idling around until some pasteurized thirtysomething hunk with soft eyes materializes in the midst of a shopping cart collision. But In a World moves forward three squares, to capture the awkward phase past the 'ditzy klutz in search of a man' phase, to chronicle the 'what goes on between the lucky break and established success' period. Every time Carol woke up I was worried she had slept through some big gig, because I've been conditioned to believe that if a film shows a woman waking up alone on the day of a big career-making event, she will wake up late and have missed her chance. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but I think it's interesting that I assumed she would.

Much as In a World seems remarkably astute in these areas, Adult World never feels quite real, quite set on a tone or era or even able to depict Syracuse as it really is: Amy's apartment is way too clean; there isn't adequate representation of how everything gets crusted over with salt, or the way frozen slush rises up in a dirty brown wave at passing cars, etc.  I did respect that her walls just had a Sylvia Plath poster above a mattress on the floor and she was half-trying to commit suicide (very Syracuse), and I like Emma Roberts overall and she's game to go the distance here, but she's still coming into her own as an actress of real gravitas --even when smashing Cusack's guitar she seems like she's just trying on emotions. Of course at that age all poets are too young to realize they can't bum-rush greatness, so she's either she's an amazing actress or else just perfectly imperfect. Her dad is Eric Roberts! Julia Roberts is her aunt. See, that kind of thing would be cool to see in a movie. Why not play herself?

It's that sense of playing herself that makes Bell score so much more points de la resonance. She takes risks and shows us things that might make her friends and employers mad if they think the characters are based on them. Of course In a World has problems too: Carol must be making money, so why she can't afford her own rent in a place as cheap as L.A.? She winds up getting a windfall of work, which is exciting, but a subplot with her sister cheating on her husband with a handsome Irishman doesn't really add up to much compared to the riveting central drama of the father screwing over his own daughter, who in turn is screwing the guy the father's screwing her over for. But half-baked side plots are not something to holler over, and the bitchy voiceover artist party at Ken Marino's house is worth any price of admission alone.

The ominous Hall of Languages at SU

Moving back to the idea of men (and women) being uncomfortable with movies where women move ahead without men approving and helping them (a theme central perhaps to the strange hostility towards the movie Scarlet Diva -- see "Her Body, Her Ashtray"). The year was 1987: I scored big at a Syracuse poetry reading, won acclaim and the plum spot opening for Allen Ginsberg when he came to town. Unfortunately circumstance were everything. For my big debut I had been drinking sangria with a lovely girl who had been letting me do all the talking - everyone before me at the reading was nervous and wobbly but I was a huge smash. I decided to always be drinking before readings from then on. In hindsight I realized it was the flirting.

But for Ginsberg, a semester later, I had drunk way too much trying to get that magic back, and now I had a legit girlfriend, no more flirting so I was nervous, the auditorium was packed, and I drank too much and couldn't get a buzz. My hand still shook holding the paper. I didn't stick around to go to the diner with Mr. Ginsberg after the show, as I had been invited to, citing my then-sick girlfriend as an excuse. I bravely ran away / away.

Flash forward: I didn't just leave it at not getting the XXX job. I also tried my hand at an erotic novel, figuring money might be found there (as Amy finds in Adult World). Mine chronicled a disturbing vision I had the year before at a Rochester Dead Show, tripping and having a major 'too many people' bad one, of a gigantic carnival of S&M torture, where people huffed laughing gas while chained naked to a merry go round in the middle of an array of robot whipping arms.

A housemate had an old LP called Tortura inherited from a crazy uncle -- and it was a very disturbing thing to listen to--mostly just the sound of whip cracks and impassioned screaming and moaning-- while tripping your face off, and it probably effected that vision. It was hilarious too, but on acid took its toll, and since we always had guests who wanted to hear it and we were always on acid, it seemed like whole cycles of death and rebirth and endless torturing jail sentences of moments passing and time stopping for this deeply-felt soul torture, and that I had been tortured in the past and would be in the future, and the album just ripped open soul scars I'd had far longer than my current incarnation. That uncle also had a lot of Zappa, and "The Torture Never Stops" was also in rotation, and seemed to be confirmation and extension of the grim existential cruelty that the LSD-enhanced Tortura, an apt summation of the painful truth behind 20th century first world existence's curtain of blasé painless decency. My opus, Shroomsadoplasticism, was, never finished, and typed on a manual typewriter, so there's only one original - with the first and last ten pages long ago fell away... and now the pages are even out of order... so symbolic, man... hell, I'm not even sure I still have those soul scars.

A few years later I realized I'd never be a real poet anymore than a real erotic novelist, because I couldn't get into Hart Crane or Marianne Moore --trying to understand their poetry was worse than tripping to Tortura. I did a bunch of open mic nights over the years but all that came of it was that the long-haired hippy freak M.C. of the event stole my girlfriend. I soon realized I just could not endure the terrible onslaught of bad poets SHOUTING / in this same /STYLE / every other  / WORD / of their / POEM. I'd really hoped Roberts' Amy was going to rant her poetry in that style. I'd be TALKING and THINKING in that STYLE for DAYS afterwards. Didn't Emma Roberts even GO to a POE-etry reading to reSEARCH how to SLAM like a BAD poet?

Then in 1996 I lucked into voiceovers, mentored by a cool older lady from an ad agency that shall go nameless. Then I was told I needed to join AFTRA to do any more. I joined - then they told me they weren't using AFTRA people, because of the strike. I was on the road again... (my demo reel here).

A few years earlier, in 1994, after I'd been graduated and loose in the uncaring world for five years, (working as a freelance direct mail copywriter), I read that our beloved poetry teacher Stephen Dobyns was suspended from Syracuse for using 'salty' language in the classroom. His suspension was picked up in the NY Times as the exhibit A of the new PC fascism taking over college campuses everywhere:

No one suggests that he offered to trade good grades for sex. He is not accused of sleeping with or propositioning students -- one says he tried to kiss her at a drunken party -- or of the focused protracted hectoring we might call "harassment." The allegations all concern language: specifically, what the committee calls "salty language" used outside the classroom at graduate-student parties. They involve attempts to be funny, and to provoke. There was one cruel sexual remark about a professor who wasn't present, and the suggestion that another might benefit from a "salty" term for a satisfactory sexual encounter.

Is this sexual harassment? Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation." "Hostile" and "intimidation" are subjectively defined, as they were by the student who testified (hilariously, I thought, though, again, no one seemed to notice) that he felt intimidated by my friend's use of a "salty" phrase. He felt he was being asked to condone a locker-room atmosphere that might offend the women present.
There was much talk of protecting women from blunt mentions of sex. And the young women who testified were in obvious need of protection. They gulped, trembled and wept, describing how my friend yelled at them in class or failed to encourage their work. Victorian damsels in distress, they used 19th-century language: they had been "shattered" by his rude, "brutish" behavior. After testifying, they seemed radiant, exalted, a state of being that, like so much else, recalled "The Crucible," which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the Army-McCarthy hearings. --11/26/95 

My fellow students from his class, Abbe and Laurie wrote a letter to the Times citing as an example of Dobyns' scathing honesty all three of us remember: there was a seething frat boy in class whose poetry was so seething with misogynistic sexual frustration that even though there was nothing sexual per se in it, just the phrase "huffing and puffing to her house on his Huffy Spitfire" brought waves of douche chill torture to our liberal arts cores.

"What do you think," Dobyns asked, "should we try to help this poem or just take it out into the hall and shoot it?"

With that phrase we loved him. Out of politeness we refrained from applauding but most of us laughed. He didn't need guide rails from some PC Volturi to uncover a misogynist frat boy when he heard one. Times were different and poetry, at least in his class, still had a violent, dangerous edge. We went to learn poetry not to have our hands held on the road to incompetency's supportive slaughterhouse. Tall, cold, like a Howard Hawks and Max Von Sydow mixture but with no accent or drawl, he taught us Chekov in a measured way that showed us one might be both masculine and sensitive, serious but with a self-effacing deadpan humor, quiet but with the kind of deadshot aim that means you don't need to waste words (or bullets), and an inflexible personal code that meant tolerance for everything but unconscious misogyny and mediocrity.

This Adult World, then reflects a PC dead zone of safety bars and bloodless ambivalence; even discovering promisingly sordid or 'authentic' real world experiences -- squatter drag queens, XXX video stores, older poet mentors living alone and with darting eyes -- leads Amy no closer to the disgust, disillusionment, the soul scars, she needs. Some PC chaperone herald gets there first, shaving it all down from an R to a PG-13 like a furious Olympic curler. The drag queen doesn't even smoke pot in a joint -- it's bad for the lungs! --but uses a vaporizer - and has to let us know that it's medical. The XXX video store is just a friendly family of genial eccentrics, they all but sing "Lean on Me" in perfect harmony to encourage Amy to run after Evan Peters as he saunters off into the midnight rain to catch a flight. And a guy named Rat refuses to take advantage of a willing, hottie protege as if his name meant nothing whatsoever. This the Adult World ain't! 

In a World by contrast is blissfully long past this kind of naïveté. Carol uses sex and the lack thereof with an adult's savvy of the world, knowing how sex changes things for the good and bad every single time; her scatterbrained aspects feel real - she still makes it to her big jobs, she knows how to not mess up good things, and to mess up the already bad because who gives a fuck? Best of all she's a real artist, fascinated with accents and determined to master them and to capture real dialogue and the naturalism of speech. Take the above scene for example - her sister's tearing her heart out like here is some big cry into your ice cream and talk about boys moment, and Bell is quietly pressing play on her recorder to capture her sister's emotional tonality for future use in voiceover and dialect coach work. That's the real trick to becoming a success, not to keep your eye on the big prize but on each successive small one and to never put boys over art, or even the craving for success and fatherly approval over it either, and not to succeed from sheer neediness but because artistic interests and career goals have coalesced and nothing can stop she who is already arrived. 

Cusack says as much in Adult World, but it's one thing to have an older man explain it to a young girl and another to see a girl just fucking doing it for herself with men telling her nothing of any value whatsoever. Cusack even tells Amy to make mistakes, to 'fail better' but the film overall fails failing. There's something a little off about a joint written by a boy about a girl taking life lessons from another boy, and then not even following that advice, delivering a stale set of characters that only the strong acting of the players can freshen (unless you find the nurturing gay male bestie of the frazzled heroine thing still subversive). If not well, PC chaperones can clean up 42nd Street all they want, can ban smoking and nanny state a poet's life into irrelevance, but in the real adult the torture never stops. Suicide isn't just a joke, it's a real option many take. If Adult World Amy ever wants to really want to find out what that sort of true life experience is, what true poetry is, she'd best make some genuinely bad decisions, fast, like suffering through the voiceover of Prozac Nation, listening to Tortura on acid, or dying accidentally of autoerotic asphyxiation (as out guitarist did, two weeks before the Lockerbie bombing!). Finding a career writing erotica before you even lose your virginity doesn't really count as truth, he said, knowing of what he speaks, gesturing vaguely at the 'world' from the vantage point of his filth-encrusted podium of flies (all green and buzzlin'), rose thorn whip welts, funerals, and whores! (my voiceover demo reel here --interested parties contact erichk9@aol.com -- and weep). 

NOTES:

1. Strangely enough, those two films are highly praised yet I can't stand them, but I love Jennifer's Body, Margot at the Wedding, and The Squid and the Whale

Read More

Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

 

 BAD DREAMS

1988 - directed by Andrew Fleming - ***

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street box office receipts and said me too, even going so far as to cast the same final girl of Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital. Instead of a Freddie there's Harris, a scarred cult leader played by real life burn victim Richard Lynch. In the 70s prologue he coaxes his hippie flock, "Unity Field" to burn themselves alive in order to unify their souls. Rubin is the only survivor, pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. When she awakens its 13 years later and she's stuck in a mental ward and, in the 80s. Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs is the strange, handsome shrink who brings her to group therapy in order to introduce us to a rapidly bumped-off set of characters. A stressed Rubin sees Harris before each murder. The unified soul thing apparently worked, and he's recruiting new acolytes from the therapy group, but try explaining that to hospital staff, and cops who just think they all committed suicide 'cuz they're crazy.

The creepiest aspect here is surely Richard Lynch as the cult leader. It looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times which seems wise considering the amount of flame he's exposed to (and his real life burns). This Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell actor makes a greet creepy villain, but he's not a convincing cult leader. Look at that picture above, would you want to follow him? A cult leader needs to be seductive as well as creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine a more nuanced cobra-hypnotic figure of menace like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside (the heavy over on the Shout blu-ray companion film Visiting Hours) in the role. No offense to Lynch meant. Maybe I'm jealous because I've always felt I'd make a great cult leader, and my dad was always urging it on me, saying that's where the real money is. In other words, I want my own Unified Field!

The rest of the cast is also very good in that 80s teen horror sort of way. Sharp-eyed punk rock fans will feel strangely drawn to Susan Barnes (Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, Repo Man) and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to his amok basement leaping high in the air and punching out light bulbs. As Pauline Kael might say, he all but smashes his way through a hole in the picture. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve and the Shout blu-ray reveals how good the DP is at capturing the glisten in her eyes So yeah, it grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do with its incomparable pedigree: Gale Ann Terminator Hurd produced, and Andrew The Craft Fleming directed.

THE ROOST

2005 - directed by Ti West - ***

Ti West's first film, hampered only by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness, The Roost is a surprisingly engaging work of horror retro minimalism. Even the carload of mumblecore hipsters are bearable, thanks to their low-key dialogue delivery, their voices low so as not to disrupt our fading attention span. Taking mid shortcut along a mysterious road on their way to a wedding, a bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a Plan Nine budget. Which means of course that I loved it.

The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of great newcomer Vanessa Horneff) It's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work, doing as little as possible: his minimalist tendencies are so poetically integrated he can confidently throw most of the usual horror symbols and dross away and rewrite some of what does. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, are presented completely out of context (we have no idea whose opening the door or from whose perspective is watching the door open) and for some reason is scary because we don't even know who's opening the door or who's not answering it. He also makes great use of tick-tock momentum, 16mm grain, droning ambient score, remote location (the same barn used in Marnie!), diegetic (headlights, porch, dashboard) light that makes the swallowing all-consuming darkness of a lonely rural shortcut palpable, and when the score's not overburdened with overdone cello music there's great, Avant Carpenter atonal drones. That doesn't sound like much on 'paper' but it's all the spookier for being so 'found art.' Too bad there's dull stretches of horror host filler with Tom Noonan underplaying to the point of sad distraction. If nothing else, it contextualizes the inner film proper, adding a whole new chill by association.

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

1990 - Directed by John Harrison - **1/2

Michael "Ajax" Remar is a struggling artist whose life is spared by an inner city gargoyle and falls for Rae Dawn Chong on the same night and has never seen Kwaidan (1964), so never puts two and two together; a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encounter a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story); Deborah Harryis a Hansel-baking Martha Stewart in the framing device; David Johansen is a cat assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey (the unforgettable old don in Prizzi's Honor) in a segment conceived by Stephen King and scripted by George Romero. It all comes together to no avail in this odd horror anthology.

I've never been a fan of horror anthologies (except Kwaidan), too many get hung up on the tired old EC supernatural comeuppance bit and I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet. Haha! The script's loaded with that kind of thing, but there's so many essential cult actor favorites (I always imagine how great James Remar would have been in The Terminator) and future stars that it's still essential viewing, even if only while drunk, half-asleep, stoned out of your gourd, and/or in a half-distracted haze.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

1995 - dir. the Wheat Brothers - ***

At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance.' Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out a snickering jock to teach his class about fear. Said jock is pissed (literally) and later breaks in to the teacher's house to kill him. But Zada's upstairs conducting a ghost story round robin with some of his cutest student because hey, it's a dark and stormy night. And hey, one of the students is a psychic who senses something wicked's coming up from the basement...

I dug the middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack a riveting centerpiece. Most critics prefer the final story, wherein a stalker goes after a celebrity's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. Make sure you stick around for the bizarre conclusion of Ramy Zada's framing device round robin, wherein a burnt skeleton chases the psychic girl with an axe through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator.  It's all just more proof that less is more when it comes to horror: Darkside (above)has the money but can't venture out of its predictable DC Comics House of Mystery vibe, while After Midnight quits all sense of consensual reality, throws its meager budget at the screen as a distraction and lunges straight for the nightmare logic jugular.

DAMNATION ALLEY

1977 - Directed by Jack Smight - ** 

(for male viewers who were kids in the 70s - ****)

Not an easy film to love but, for some of us, loving Damnation Alley is a challenge that beckons like Everest. We really want, even need, to love it, but the film goes out of its way to suck. Still, if you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland, chances are you longed to take that climb, to escape your parents in that cool armored cruiser (above) and set out across a nuclear landscape populated by almost nothing except giant scorpions, massive deluges of not-quite-giant man-eating ants, psychotic rednecks, and cool shit to jump over on the attached motor bike. After the bombs fall there shall be no driving or drinking ages, no need for money, no homework, and no girls gumming up the works (if there is a girl let her be an easygoing French Hawksian rather than a bossy, overprotective Fordian). It's a boy's life fantasy of being taught to fire rooftop rocket launchers as soon as you're old enough to see over the steering column.

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful bit irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading Boy's Life magazine at a cub scouts meeting before going out back to light fireworks and shoot bb guns. George Peppard is the 'dad' character - identifiable via his terrible fake mustache; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl and lets you ride his cool motorbike; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) picked up in a deserted sand-swept ant-infested Vegas; Paul Winfield is the black guy, eaten early as was, and sadly still is, the custom.

The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by-the-book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest; no women or bleeding hearts, no morality or ethics or drama. A few years go by and a chain reaction at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, as well as trimming the survivors down to a handful, who take to the road in two big armored party vans (the budget only allows for one, so we seldom see them together without a mirror).

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s or ever - mostly driving through psychedelic electric storms, a strange flood (luckily these vehicles float, too) and across endless deserts. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley.

I almost never find anything disparaging to say about Shout Factory, who have been cleaning up and releasing to blu-ray a vast host of sci fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The blu-ray of Damnation Alley is amazing overall, with groovy deep blacks. But some of the outdoor scenes don't stack up to the Amazon streaming instant video version, wherein the sky is a sark almost psychedelic green-blue. In the Shout version the sky has been cleaned up to a 'normal' sickly pale normal sky color that's just not as cool. Did the restorers think the intense colors of the original sky (and the action all blurry like your looking through seriously dark shades) was some kind of mistake? Did they not get that the world is over and the outdoors is fucked?

Otherwise I can't complain; and having it on blu-ray is a 70s boyhood dream come true for a once-lost generation.

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout blu-ray

Read More

Frozen Terror! COLD PREY, WIND CHILL, DEAD OF WINTER (AKA LOST SIGNAL), DEVIL'S PASS, COLD PREY 2

It's always nice to ride out the brutal chills of February with horror films more frozen than oneself. I'm writing this during the Winter Olympics and watching people shooting and skiing and luging and getting massive air on snowboarding can leave one feeling inordinately guilty for being so lazy and warm, but watching winter strand poor folks in the middle of nowhere, leading to the collapse of objective reality and fights for survival that for all you know may be already lost, that's cool. Go figure.

Here are four solid examples I've seen this week, some of which via streaming. So make sure the flask on the collar of your St. Bernard is filled with good brandy, board up and insulate the windows, keep the heater on and keep the generator close --so no thing or person can cut the power.

Of course there's already some classics of this genre which have the gold now and forever. The Thing 1951, The Thing 1982, The Thing 2011 (here). And there's also a recent Netflix stream favorite, Pontypool (my praiseful review here). But why stop there - the cold night beckons.

COLD PREY

2006 - ***

Viktoria Winge (above) is a gorgeous Nordic alien hybrid gone snowboarding way off the Norwegian grid with a group of friends, but when one breaks his leg so they seek shelter at an abandoned ski lodge. But hey, it's not totally abandoned. And the generator still works. Cold Prey isn't ashamed of its generic slasher roots, and indeed builds up from the premise with measured quality, wit, and great moody dark cinematography that studiously avoids the usual dripping industrial torture basement look of so many similar 'wayfarers stranded in a remote killer's lair' horrors. There's even some cozy ambience in the beginning, some tick-tock momentum, as the kids take over the ski lodge lounge area, helping themselves to the booze on the mantle, starting a fire, goofing around but not in annoying American sneering perv kind of way. The film keeps unleashing ghoulish little surprises, the acting is solid through and through (characters interact and play off each other's dynamics very well) and the climactic battle way out in the middle of the frozen emptiness is unique and totally chilling. In Norwegian with English subtitles, not that you really need them. There's apparently a solid sequel that picks up where this leaves off (like Halloween II) and then a third that totally sucks (like Halloween VI).

WIND CHILL

2007 - **1/4

Emily Blunt plays a character few films realize exists: the old-before-their-time hottie who's gotten away with being 'difficult' for so long (if the girl is hot, dudes will put up anything) she doesn't know how to stop. Now she has become so used to being alone she barely knows how to make a friend. I've been her friend, girls like that, one is even in one of my own movies! I can say that because I know she'll never read this, just like Blunt's character wouldn't. She's impervious to threat, she thinks, even accepting a ride from a creepy freshman (Ashton Holmes) home to Delaware for the holidays. Director Gregory Jacobs' film might have been creepy enough just from Ashton Holmes slowly revealing he doesn't actually live anywhere near where he's taking her, and the whole ride share thing is a ploy to meet her, but that gradually fades away once they're stuck in a weird ghost time loop on a lonesome side road, visited by an array of ghosts, including a scary psycho cop played in a way that sticks with you by Martin Donovan.

 Snowman skull subliminal!

Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, there seems to have been some original intention to make this a creepy two hander with a stalker and an antisocial narcissist, but along the way a bunch of ghosts and a complete disconnection from reality overkills it. We can dig the way the collapse of the social sphere and disorienting symbolic structure can make one privy to the tricks of ghosts as long as there's some awesome twist or gotcha moment to snap all the disparate elements into place. There isn't, but at least Blunt gets a chance to carry a film. The journey is supposed to be through Pennsylvania, a very creepy place, but was actually shot in Canada, where life is cheap! 

-------

DEAD OF WINTER

 (AKA LOST SIGNAL)

2007 - ***1/2

Driving at night in wintery weather when you're tripping way too hard is a very nerve-wracking and bizarre experience, especially wearing smudgy glasses. For one thing, your 3-D space is way off so the road feels like it's just a 2-D postcard in your lap and the frost on the edges of your windshield seems to extend before you like a tunnel of ice.When the traffic lights change your heart jumps in your throat as the newly arrived colors prism through the salty windshield in extreme primary and secondary color blasts that come out of nowhere, like UFOs. Taking place over one long New Years night, the film follows a young couple (Al Santos and Sandra McCoy) who do some shots they don't know are spiked with LSD at a New Years party, before splitting and having the drugs hit on the drive home. From there they get lost and wind up either killing or be killed-ing. This doesn't make too much sense as the couple does lines of coke at the party, so they should at least know they're high on something when they start hallucinating strange pursuers on the drive home (one never knows all the shit they cut coke with, such as meth, PCP, aspirin, or B-12, so has to be prepared), instead of abandoning their car and getting lost in the woods. But are they crazy or is someone really out to get them? Kudos to the film that for a fair chunk we cannot tell.

I like to think that if director Brian McNamara had the budget he could have created some nice effects in that vein. And I hiss like a rabid snake at this film's detractors, who clearly have never been lost in the woods at night, or taken too much LSD or become convinced that their girlfriend is trying to kill them, or been feeling the pressure from ghost bathroom attendants to 'correct' his naughty wife and child. I also know the feeling of seeing a face -- usually a townie with a thousand yard stare -- who always seems to be watching from behind some partition at the party and he represents your death, your psychopomp, and no one else can see him (you think). He's just a quiet dude at the party, he wishes! When you finally go up to confront him he turns out to be a mix of shadow and a macrame owl on the basement wall. Now you get scared because you don't know where your death went, he's not in your sights. You turn to the 1.75 of Old Granddad to wipe the electric madness from you with a soft black cloth, and if you're me, what do you put on the VCR to come down with once you finally get that car home? That's right. Pre-code Betty Boop cartoons.  and The Cocaanuts (1929). Train of thought, reverse!

Good as it all is, McNamara should have checked imdb before naming his film, there's about eighty movies called Dead of Winter. Lost Signal is a pretty weak title, too. May I suggest Acid Snow? Or Ice Tripping?

Another problem is how constant cutting back and forth to the toasty police station and various phone calls amidst law enforcement saps the trippy momentum (it would have been great if we never saw who was on the other line, and had the lady cop just shows up out of the darkness), and yet this is all apparently based on a true story, with recorded 911 calls to prove it! Hell, I believe it. The woods are mysterious, dark and deep, and anyone who's been to them at night, on psychedelics (or a spooked kid), knows how their ancient magic can bend reality and expose deep archetypal roots too vivid and real for normal adult daytime senses to decode (and, if their senses can't decode it, they tend to block it out as unimportant, even violently suppress those whose senses aren't so hindered). The hallucinations here are much less elaborate here than, say, the top shelf 'becoming-animal' visions of Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) but it tries, and that's what counts. Even without CGI or LSD, Dead of Winter allows us to can see what schizophrenics, animals, and psychic mediums see all the time, the fifth dimensional vortex intelligences of the woods, and how the trees are in on it. Which came first, the ghost or our ability to finally see it?! The only answer isn't.

The low budget is no problem in that regard and in its small way Winter is a sleeper little icicle of modernist ambiguity which anyone whose every been lost for hours whilst a mere block from their apartment or who appreciates the great works of modernist 'collapse of objective reality' ambiguity like The Shining or Antonioni's Red Desert, will understand what director Brian McNamara and writers Robert Egan and Graham Silver are aiming for. These cats clearly know the full range of horrors that LSD in a receptive mind can create out of the winter sights and sounds, and having gone to college (and all that entails) up in wintry Syracuse I can authenticate their every last impression. Your mileage may vary but the world can't wait all day for you to catch up and Dead is, at least for a decent chunk, a great entry in the modernist alienation collapse-of-the-symbolic horror genre, and one of those few and rare mysteries wherein we can't tell whether or not the protagonist/s (and by extension the viewer) are being fucked with by external (ghosts - gaslighting spouses, tree spirits) or internal (latent psychosis, LSD, cabin fever) forces --and if quantum physics tells us anything it's that there is no difference.

 COLD PREY 2

2008 - ***1/2

The first was so good I had to go back for seconds, especially after learning that the sequel picks up right where the last one left off, ala Halloween 2, covering similar 'later that night' and following the final girl to the local hospital territory. Character development is solid, actors likable (no vile cliche like H2's sleaze bag goomba EMT), and the vibe and beautiful cinematography from the first film carry over flawlessly. The action takes its sweet time regrouping, chronicling the interaction of a sleepy little hospital in the process of closing, but there's a good sense of tick-tock momentum, and a vivid sense of the vast emptiness of Norwegian mountain regions. Those of us who have misgivings about the medical community's insistence on saving the lives of even psychopathic killers will be very pleased at the comeuppance rewarded the unexamined practice, and the crazy loner sociopath Viking murderer figure is a nice representation of the bloody past of the Norwegian people, rising up into the country's current sleepy socialized medication and education and uniform fraternal sophistication to smite the complacent youths. And it's pretty gratifying to see our heroine finally wise up and go all Ripley in Aliens. Nordics rock -- if you have any doubt about the Nordic awesomeness, just look at the high scoring teams of the Olympics -- Norway, especially. And then check out the whole issue of Acidemic devoted to their grace and hotness -- issue #7 - The Nordics. 

  DEVIL'S PASS

2013 - ***

Renny Harlin is back, his ear low to the ground, like an Indian! Has there been a director who's both made and lost so much money so fast? Now he's playing it a little wiser, ala recent work by De Palma, slim in budget, returning to an off-the-cuff approachwith no chance for budgetary bloating. Devil's Pass (written by Vikram Weet) is definitely lean and mean as a result, with a plot that combines elements of many other films including The Blair Witch Project melded to the very real mystery of the the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident. And there's rounds of wodka shots!

That's a good beginning but the thing about a great mystery like Dyatlov is that any 'answer' formulated in a fiction film is going to be a let-down. Harlin manages to keep the cameras whiplash-free and to ensure there's always some new layer to penetrate, and the acting is pretty top flight, especially Holly Goss in the "I gave you back the map" Heather role (she's brave, resourceful, and up for whatever). But Harlin never lets the inhospitable barren winterscape tear the fabric of objective social reality, and so the paralyzing fear associated with being unmoored from the symbolic order vanishes with the first explanatory note. In the future, Harlin, don't let the symbolic or explanatory contextualize the mystery! The refusal to commit to a set point of view about what's going on is part of what made Blair Witch and The Shining work so well. Explain it all with scrapbooks and old photos and the unknowable vanishes. If you can't handle the impossibility of objective truth you should never have looked farther than your own backyard, and certainly not ventured into the white abyss... that's for trippers with balls of ice!

Read More