The Little Mescalito that Couldn't: CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, MAGIC MAGIC

Psychedelic awakening, madness, and tonto re forro puta madre yankee nonsense is afoot in Chile, and a beady-eyed, hawk-nosed, blonde-tousled Michael Cera is there, a-swooping down from El Cóndor Pasa with jellied arms akimbo, fulfilling the soul deadening norteamericano tourist promise even into the ego-dissolving mescaline maw. Luckily the locals are so chill they don't even tell him to go take a flying leap. To these beautiful people, enlightened by socialist higher education and lax taxation, he's just another Yankee, which is to say, accepted by them despite his inability to accept them or himself. Over the course of two 2013 films, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, Cera trips, trails, shoots, swims, jumps, screams, freaks out, titters, ducks, and wakes with his face in the bush, so to speak. Brave, foolhardy, invincible, he's not handsome enough to be Peter Fonda, loco enough to be Dennis Hopper, menacing enough to Bruce Den, or devilish enough to be Jack Nicholson, but he does have a dash of Dern skeeviness, Jack loucheness, Hopper dementia, and Fonda remoteness. Separated like Pyramus and Thisbe only by a lean ridge of a nose they're forever trying to peer around, his beady little eyes are in front so he can judge the distance to his prey, but can he swoop down on the bunny before creeping self-awareness blinds him to everything but his own black hole navel?

It doesn't even matter. Because today we'll be using Dali's paranoic-critical method' to pick at these films paisley scarabs:

According to Dali by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the 'real' world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali's method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. -- Language is a Virus

With Magic Magic especially we can count Sebastián Silva part of the Darionioni Nuovo, which is an emerging international school of filmmakers picking up the breadcrumb trail left by 70s Argento that connects back to 60s Antonioni and Polanski, to 50s Hitchcock, in the process baking up a beast that has Tennessee Williams' sparagmostically flayed wings, Robertson Davies' manticore "tail," and a single-first-person keyhole crystal ball eye passed amongst its three gorgon hydra heads: Berberian Sound Studio, Amer, Scarlet Diva, The Headless Woman are some of the other films that fit this unique niche (a style too paranoid to be acknowledged even by its originators): each young artist devoted in his and her fashion to the paranoid-critical dissolution of sexual mores, the unsettling feeling of conspiracy that comes when the comfort of steady signifier-signified connectedness disappears and the "real" emerges like a strange, rotting fractal fruit that becomes, with a blink of the eye, a rotting parrot corpse.

Magic Magic taps into that Polanski mid-60s rotting-on-the-vine paranoid feminine, finding the dead pigeon under glass on Judy Berlin flatware in a Yellow Wallpapered room surrounded on all sides by Lynchian buzzing, fecund jungles and horny dogs, because while the Crystal Fairy film is, for all its mystic leanings, more or less a conventional 'shitheel learns to respect others' moral tale (Rohmer on Roybal) as well as a very good look at what it's like to have a bad trip where you're so bound up in your own petty thoughts and sexual frustrations that maybe you're depending far too much on the trip to cure all your ills in a single flash. But the San Pedro cactus-derived mescaline (in this case) only forces you to experience the full feedback squall of your own DSB venom --no one surrenders to the mystic without first a great deal of terror as the bearings one has in reality dissolves and the horror, the horror, emerges as the wide-screaming abyss of the impermanent --and the ancient Mayan gods demand full existential dissolution before the rapture comes. The farther we are from this baseline awareness the less 'alive' we feel, so breaking out of the faerie bower has to be that much more violent, until the whole self splinters like a glass goblin back into its red, green, and blue component cables, back into the awareness/terror/impermanence of unprocessed signal.  If you're not ready for that, the Mescaline Gods' mystical awakening is really more of a reverse keelhauling, as your squirmy psyche is lifted out of its comfy depths and exposed to the sun and superegoic jeering in a northerly clockwork motion, and the comfort of the dark murky underside of the ship longed for like a Linus blanket.

Crystal Fairy manages to get this exactly right, but in the process it reminds us that even if we're nowhere near as obnoxious as Cera or Crystal Fairy, compared to the easygoing balanced chill of bros and ladies of South America, we're all hinchapelotas.

At any rate the photography is lovely. By the end we're managing to hallucinate into the beachfront rocks the way Dali used to do along the Costa Brava and if like me you've ever been stuck tripping with the Crystal Fairy type (patchouli, hairiness, den mother need to treat everyone like kindergartners and so naive as to lecture South African black people on Apartheid because she 'once took a class') or the Cera type (can't shut off their motormouth solipsism for five minutes, "I'm getting off are you getting off yet?") you may wince, but at least you know Silva feels your pain. Apparently cast members did ingest the San Pedro cactus being depicted which may explain the lacksy-daisy progression; I can imagine freaking out grandly with a big camera crew following me around as I frolicked on the beach, thinking I was making Citizen Kane but really making Hearts of Age. I would hate to be in that frame of mind and have to play an obnoxious twerp like Cera's comeuppance-craving George "Magnificent" Anderson of a psychedelic seeker just as I would hate to trip with him. Cera handles it all well - but is there really a point? In its way, my problem with Crystal Fairy is the same as with Magnificent Ambersons - a fatal misjudging of audience empathy for a particular actor that makes the film hard to watch, like a big cookie filled with delicious arsenic, but they forgot the sugar so why eat it? I have the same problem with both Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai -- in each case the entire point of both films seems to be to allow Welles the chance to play a larger-than-life egotistical swine but at the last minute he gives the plum role to someone else - and neither Tim Holt or Everett Sloane can fill Welles' mighty big shoes, and isn't that why, unconsciously, he cast them?  

Magic Magic is the better of the films because Cera is only a side player, so his horrible lesion of a self-conscious shitheel matrix doesn't pollute our minds, but rather the mind of Alicia, an American tourist even crazier than Crystal Fairy, but less obnoxious, cuter, played by the great Juno Temple. She's upon a Blanche Dubois-goes-on-a-Repulsion vacation where instead of isolation (with just a dead rabbit and demons in your cozy London flat) it's the lack of privacy that drives her mad. No sooner is Alicia is getting off her flight from L.A., in a foreign country for the very first time to visit her pal Sara (Emily Browning) then she finds only to find a car full of other people, including Sara's boyfriend Augustin (Agustín Silva), his sister Bábara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Cera, the Ugly American, speaking Spanish with ease but still unbearable, picking her up for a spontaneous holiday to some remote island, not the kind of thing an exhausted probably bi-polar L.A. girl getting off a ten-hour flight wants to hear and it gets worse, suddenly Browning's nurturing pal is called away and there's no one to hide behind to avoid Michael Cera, the only one who can talk with her since she speaks no Spanish.

Things go downhill fast, for her, anyway, and we go from feeling her pain to theirs, because sometimes shit be America's fault. She can't blame it all on the bad cell phone reception, fear of water, alienation, insomnia, and being more-or-less a captive audience to any dumb animal that won't stop humping her leg.

I dig it - because I know well the feeling: tired from the trip, staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people up to party all day and all night, at ease in their skins, seeming to be taunt you with their niceness, but sleeping on the couch means you have to get up with the early risers and stay up with the night owls and so the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in and you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse after I'd graduated; they all had cats and I'd be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely depressed and paranoid and didn't even really work. And then the auditory hallucinations: some girl in the kitchen says "can you pass me that Pepsi?" I'd hear it as "you can't sleep with Erich --he has hep-C."  Which I don't!  I totally would have slept with her, too. Bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi. Such great crazy oddness is what Dali's paranoid-criticism is all about. If you cultivate it, seek it out - dive into the madness rather than running from it, then the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared. She's free, hacked clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond time's Ulmer barrier.

But for the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film - then mix them up together in your mind - because the preview makes it seem like a Most Dangerous Game meets Svengali meets Funny Games horror movie but it's more a Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity, a hard thing to pull off really well but Silva pulls it off and the photography by the amazing DP Christopher Doyle only justifies his reputation as a leader in his field with his stunning lenses and uses of color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea) in a way you can imagine the mid-sixties Polanski trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac, would look like if in color. Hell yeah, Polanski and Val Lewton both would love Magic Magic.

Not sure if I'd want to see either film again but I bet I would have been pretty happy on the shoot for these - there's a sense that vacation vision quests on the part of the actors are well incorporated. Then again, all their relaxed and spontaneous but higher educated bonding might have really got on my nerves if I didn't feel their nerves were worse. Vacations tend to fill me with an overall ennui that can't be shaken for several days, so I have to fake it. The addiction to language is like a thin rope hanging over what your ego tells you is a lake of fire but if you let go anyway and just fall down backwards, laughing at your own fear, it's really a warm, amniotic feather bed. Your fears are still waiting at the lip of the pit trying to tell you hey you're burning, get out of there, you'll die, you'll go insane, but you don't have to listen anymore; you can wander away, leave their voices fading in the distance, ignore the urge to run back up and apologize, ignore their tears and screams, and run towards that dizzy high you feel the first nights of waking up somewhere other than your own bed because if you have to go looking farther than your own backyard, well go! 

You can't run but you can hide, from at least the volume of your ego's pleading desperate din - if you couldn't, you'd still be stuck with your very first, second, or third girlfriend, the one who cried and demanded long twisted apologies when you tried to break up with her, and so you stuck around for six more miserable months until finally you let go of the ledge and landed that feather bed pit she'd convinced you was fire --you can still hear her cursing and threats and vile oaths from her window as you make it down to the street, and you're glad you had the good sense to bring your bass  and amp when you ran out of there and back to the party.  

At any rate, producer-star Cera and the writer-director co-star Silva make a good combination, and taken as loose sequels the two films progress almost of a piece, with one casual encounter leading to another, so if the drawback to feeling made up on the spot is not knowing when to end, that's a sacrifice I'm glad Silva and producer-star Cera are willing to make. In playing such a shitheel in these two films (and in This is the End), Cera earns my respect in ways he failed to do as the neurotic Bluth boy-- but at some point you can't just destroy your good graces, it's a movie, after all - we're stuck with you for over an hour. You got to do more than simper and snivel. What would Richard Widmark do? 

I've been the Cera character, desperately hoping a psychedelic trip will bring me out of my self-absorbed shell, wanting to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seems and not being able to get there no matter how high I get. The ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy and through self-expression, or you can have it flayed off you like skin. Drugs don't always work but writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment: Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the special-K I had snorted was working or not, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World; even with all that it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me-- but THEN some people from Britain or Germany or Ibiza or wherever would blow through town. The sun would come out and these cool, beautiful souls would brighten our scene. So it was a double bonus --my roommate would jet off to Ibiza all August leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death and then in September or October, when New York City is the best place to be on Earth, whomever he'd crashed with would come crashing over at our place and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous.

Then they'd be gone again... 

Well, it could have been worse, what if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.  

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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!

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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! 

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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!

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X is for Xanax, that's good enough for X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)

 Nat: Mister Birnam, this is the mornin'...
Don: That's when you need it most, in the morning. Haven't you learned that yet? At night this stuff's just a drink... but in the morning it's medicine! --LOST WEEKEND (1945)

 

Science has proven our sensory organs and neurons capable of far more than the limited strata and spectra of processed information we know as collective reality. Like radios tuned to one station our whole lives, we may want to turn the dial to find other stations, but if we do we're soon deafened and blinded by the holy static. What's worse, we may never find our way back to our clear, normal starting point. To paraphrase William Blake, if the doors of perception were cleansed the world would appear as it really is, infinite... but then after the initial beauty wore off, you better hope the 'finite' illusion comes back quick, or you may wind up strapped to a gurney, screaming your eyes out, begging the nurse for a sweet, sweet Xanax.

You need to be insane and/or holier than hell to live with X-ray eyes. And you need to know that I didn't even have to look up the above quote from LOST WEEKEND, because I know those lines by my drunken black X-ray heart, which makes me uniquely qualified to discuss X... for like Don Birnim in WEEKEND and Dr. Xavier in X (both played by Ray Milland), I see too much, feel too deeply, and sometimes have the power to see through my own eyelids. Anything to numb the mind, to shrink the aperture, is welcome, but it never works for long, leaving me eventually a twitching, hungover mess on fire with thirst and delirium tremens.

1963's X (AKA- THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES) prefigures the psychedelic explosion of 1966-68 by a good four years, putting it way ahead of its time, as if Roger Corman could himself see far into the future. As grumpy as Don Birnam on Yom Kippur, Dr. X is pretty skittish about the experimental eye drops he's invented, which he tries and which enable him to see through everything from women's skirts to, eventually, the chewy tootsie roll center of the universe. The film still blows the mind with its psychedelic metaphors, but is so cheap-looking under Roger Corman's economic hand that it can be hard to tell whether it's a nouvelle vague deconstruction (the French flag colored light bulb/balloons in the photo atop would fit right at home in MADE IN THE USA) or a brilliant metaphysical inquiry into the 'gaze,' buffeted by waves of cheapness.

Then again, there's hot chicks scattered all over, so hey -- just dig that crazy looking girl in the photo below, with that awesome Cyd Charisse-style black gown! Note the swingin' way Milland has with a martini! Oh, he knows his way around a cocktail party.

Attractive Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van Der Vlis, below) is Xavier's love interest, though he doesn't pay her much attention. In fact he tries to hide from her once he's wanted for murder, but she follows him around like that girl with the leopard coat. But hey, give him a break, Nat. Poor Xavier is so busy seeing through things that he can't even sleep! He can see through his own eyelids! It is never dark for such a man. Have you ever woke up and not known whether it's six at night or six in the morning? That's the devil of it, Nat! Without a bottle of Nyquil you're finished! And Nyquil hasn't even been invented in 1963! Why, Why Nat?!

Luckily for every wanted-by-the-cops freak like Dr. X there's a sleazy sideshow barker who'll hide him in a fortune teller costume in exchange for a bottle a day and a place to sleep it off in, and lucky for us that sleazy barker is Don Rickles (below). As with past Corman carny films (remember CARNIVAL ROCK!?), there's very little attempt to convince that the interior threadbare sound stage sets are anything but sketches meant to conjure carnivals only in the very imaginative viewer, but Don Rickles--an AIP regular over at the studio's endless slew of Beach Party films--is a natural impresario of see-throughitiveness.

Diane and Xavier later have to split for the glitzy neon exteriors and the threadbare casino-set interior of Las Vegas, where his see-through card abilities parlay into a small fortune, but 'crowds' are attracted by his luck, leading to casino scrutiny, and Xavier's a surly sod who doesn't take his huge sunglasses off even in the dark of the casino. Ere long a police helicopter is chasing them through the desert. He crashes because he can see through the road; he runs around the desert, and well... I shan't spoil the shock ending... I will say that the low-key, moody Les Baxter score sees it all through passing window of an evening train.

Truth be told, X is a hard film to love; Milland's just not the well-meaning nutcase he was as Don Birnam, but the film is impressive and balls-out original in the way Corman just goes for it, and by it I mean the infinite trip -- pre-2001.

Milland's career was off the rails by the 1960s, due to his own penchant for mood-altering substances... he was taking whatever he could get, even if it meant his head had to be sewn on the the ample frame of sensitive linebacker Rosie Greer (THE THING WITH TWO HEADS) for a post-op recovery shot of Demerol. But even straining to appear less hungover than he was, Milland is never less than compelling and Dr. X as a character benefits from his peevishness.

 The film's Richard Matheson-like script was penned by Ray Russell, whose credits are not otherwise impressive (MR. SARDONICUS? Yeeesh!) and Robert Dillon (FRENCH CONNECTION II). But it's so Matheson-like it compares well with THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN in its gutsy exploration of the yawning abyss of the fourth dimensional existence, or going beyond the illusory atomic structures of our life - leaving sanity behind and having a cameraman brave and cheap enough to keep you in the center frame at all times, and let the subjective universe prove its inherent flimsiness.

"I just do eyes!"

I'll share two personal anecdotes at this juncture:

1) I once had a huge electro-magnetic freakstorm crown chakra lightning strike which enabled me--albeit briefly-- to see the same image with my eyes closed or open (the electric bands behind my eyelids had come into perfect alignment with the 'real' world before me). It was a moment both terrifying, exhilarating, liberating and mercifully brief.

2) I once was talked into taking two when a half would have been too much. I found myself walking down the middle of the street, clutching my hair and screaming and laughing at my own terror at the same time; if you can imagine being on a terrifying rollercoaster plunging straight down, nonstop for hour after hour, getting faster exponentially but never hitting bottom, maybe you can get an inkling. I was hoping a car would run me over and free my twisted soul from its melting shell. I saw through everything and I saw the skin cells flaking off all the bodies of the world; I felt the breathing of every living thing; my breath was the murderous exhaust of cars and my thoughts the howling jackal-like yelps of playing children cutting through the once sacred cake of my mind with their chainsaw joy. With everyone's ape faces dissolving and aging in spiral movements I could barely even dare to look at my shoes.

It took a long time, but in each example of my own experience -- the good and the terrifying-- I got back to normal's soft gray field of blandness blanket. So I can feel Dr. X's pain at never being able to get back to thet. It's the inability to turn it off that makes the schizophrenic seek the shelter of madness, and cigarettes. You can try to get drunk, but your senses are so heightened that even water tastes too strong for your senses. It's Roderick Usher-style morbid acuteness of the senses!

I first saw this film in the early 1970s, with one of my first babysitters, 'Toots,' a blue jean-jacket and straight blonde hair 16-year old runaway from the shelter where my mom volunteered. Ten minutes after mom left, Toots's boyfriend was over, the TV was on, and though they made out between commercials, they snapped back for the film, and between the three of us, me with my mad  nine year-old's crush on her and awe of him, and them just these cool hippie types, THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES became mythic, intense. They explained the best they could what was going on in ways no other parent or babysitter ever had. It stuck with me. It seemed strange, savage, like an episode of BATMAN beamed in from a much more inhospitable, terrifying adult reality. I loved it, but was anxious to retreat to the safety of mom's oblivious tunnel vision.

So in short, X is a film that needs Xanax. It's the raw truth of God's eye staring you down through the center of all things. A Lacanian like Slavoj Zizek could have a field day with it. But it's over, it's gone. The magic and mystique of being able to 'crack it wide open' has been lost in our simulacratic age. No parent in their right mind would let a hippy runaway chick babysit their nine year-old today, or probably even allow them to watch a film like X. Now the TV eye has seen through us, not vice versa, and if anything it is the characters on the TV who will one day squirm in horror at the awful truth when their vision is no longer blocked by the fourth wall and they can finally peer out of their hole in the screen; dodge the swooping bats, look over and see us, our God-like camera lens eye staring mutely back at them through the plasma flatness, and reaching through, choke us with their waterlogged hands. (1)

All fine, all good, until we wake up at Bellevue, surrounded by little turkeys in straw hats, and Bim. His friends call him Bim.

You can call him Bim.

 NOTES:

1. That's totally a reference to THE RING, so for further reading check out my 2005 opus, Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child from Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #3

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