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

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Your Clowns Bid You Goodbye: THIS IS THE END, IT'S A DISASTER

A cohesive, 'tight' film, funny even into the maw of Hell, THIS IS THE END (2013) comes long after 12/21/12, late to the apocalypse party, which is of course in character considering the cast of stoner royalty --James Franco and Seth Rogen, still soaring on PINEAPPLE EXPRESS fumes, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Jay Baruchel, Emma Watson, Channing Tatum, and so on--all playing themselves. Unlike 95% of its ilk, END skips the zombies and instead goes full literal-biblical, mixing heavenly ascension, childhood buddy friendships stressed by fame and distance, growth and kindness as essential to survival, an actual bible, LA vs. NYC rivalry, raping demons, ethical dilemmas, and lots of weed. The genius touch is to have them all play themselves (only more so) and they bring a lot of brutal self honesty: Jonah Hill acts like Oscar's A-list sycophant, bandying the word "tight" around and treating resentful New Yorker Jay Baruchel like a special needs child. Jay instead blames his own paralyzing social shyness on LA; Michael Cera snorts coke and bullies groupies in fits of drunken Reptillian overlordsmanship; Daniel McBride ramps up his dirtbag townie craziness; James Franco is a vain but guarded host with a weird bi-curious vibe; Rhianna, Aziz Anzari, and countless others disappear down a giant blast furnace hole in the ground. Being a star guarantees nothing as the flame pit widens and the stars are revealed to be tough and resourceful only via movie magic. While the demons howl outside and devour those unlucky stragglers, these dudes duct tape the cracks in the concrete of Franco's party fortress, pool their booze, and wait for the cable to come back on.

When I was counting days inside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, I used to like to imagine Armageddon as a great excuse to relapse on whiskey, and hoped one day I would get the chance, for whiskey is so so good. But if an alcoholic vows to drink again only when hell froze over, sooner or later he'd drive down into the flames on a stolen Zamboni. That's in the bible... if you know which bible I mean. Still, for some of us, the apocalypse is our last chance to reunite with our deranged lover, whiskey...

In other words, I would be the first to volunteer to leave the compound and forage, because maybe somewhere in the hellish mist of the Hollywood Hills, there might be unbroken bottles of bourbon. That's the comfort for an alcoholic in the apocalypse. No demon can compare with that one, no scare or threat can stay the thirsty drunk. Without that carrot lure I can't see ever stirring from my bunker. But I am alcoholic. I am the thing in the black crib with the upside cross baby mobile in ROSEMARY'S BABY. I am the third heat, the eternal thirst carved large as Asmodeus' initials into the EQUINOX oak tree soul. I guess we all have our reasons for wanting this damned parade to finally end, in a blaze of glory. That's one of mine.

But these guys--Seth Rogen, Franco, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, all playing themselves-- are more grounded than I am... which is odd, considering they don't seem to have girlfriends and the first thing they wish for (outside of weed) is a Back Street Boys reunion. Perhaps that's the secret to success; girls always Yoko up a band sooner or one of you goes to college, or leaves it. I can only imagine what would happen if I never moved to NJ or my buddy's parents didn't get divorced and turn him militant, or if I never became a hippy punk rock boozer. All these things killed our comic book making, super 8mm filming, dungeon and dragons module creating, and selling, and marketing company. Girls were but the coup de grace. 

If I had known nerds would conquer the world, that the "Comic Con" would one day be a prestigious event, I might have never have choked down that first pilfered warm beer at my punker friend's graduation party. I'm funny, too, man. Can't you tell? Why did I give it all up for a life of hipness, boozy abandon, and relationship-attempting? None of the dudes who wind up at Franco's seem to have any long term relationships, or kids, to worry about, and it's damned refreshing. At no point does any character say, "I can't leave without my children!" or "If Kathy's back there, I'm going to get her!" These guys don't give a shit!

The main star of THIS IS THE END though is the raw kinetic energy and flow of weird ideas that doesn't stop, just snakes forward from LAX to chillin' with buds to a party at James Franco's house all the way to....  The big budget CGI in the film isn't used for guns and nonsense. There's only one gun in the whole damned movie. Instead there's great towering demons to rival The Night on Bald Mountain sequence in FANTASIA, and Jonah Hell spewing green bile like a portly Linda Blair, but no monster is quite as scary as Emma Watson with an axe. Or more balls-out-gonzo than McBride gone cannibal - role of the year in the movie of the year.  Like many Piscean artists and writers I've always admired--from a distance--the McBride type. I never invite them to parties but they always show up, draining your bar but bringing you awful weird new drugs like angel dust, Jimson weed, and crank and introducing you to carnivorous whores. You can't get rid of them, so you may as well enjoy their ferocity. When the world ends and the savage reign, we could use a man like Frank Booth again.

I don't want to spoil what may be my favorite movie so far this year, but if you haven't seen it yet, you can still take a page from its bible and start to be nicer to people; even if there is no one true God it couldn't hurt your chances for ascension. I've written extensively on my arcane beliefs regarding soul density, in that the more self-centered and hateful you are, the more dense your soul gets, allowing demons to capture it when you try to ascend; it follows then that the more positive and selfless you are, the lighter and more expanded your soul gets, so demons can't capture it anymore than one can catch smoke in a butterfly net. Just a theory, based on a mix of Thaddeus Golas, Egyptian mythology, and David Icke.

So, yeah, bro, if only life were just buds and booze how simple and joyous but instead how complicated and downer-ish it is to watch dudes from your crew marry and--unless you join their creepy 'we have kids' cult--never be seen again. Maybe that's the real fantasy, that the world will end before maturity's inevitable bro-pocalypse wipes out your network and leaves you alone or a parent. I hear it's just like falling asleep.

And that brings me to the stifled world of the couple's brunch where, if they had girlfriends with bourgeois hipster tastes, the dudes in END would be going on Sunday afternoon instead of to Franco's on Saturday night (or if I was there and it was the 90s, both). I'm of course referring to the 2012 disaster comedy currently streaming on a Netflix near you, IT'S A DISASTER (2012).

David Cross is the stranger being vetted by his internet-met steady Julia Stiles' posse. He moseys around the nice house, drinks some Scotch with the boys, hears how they got problems of their own, blah blah. Suddenly, a neighbor comes in decked out in a hazmat suit. A dirty bomb has gone off downtown, poison gasses everywhere. Commence duct taping! And then the couple who are always super late try to come in, coughing and hacking and begging to be let it in. But the duct tape is on. What do you do?

Damn right.

That kind of satiric moral querying is welcome, and the swinger couple (Rachel Boston and Kevin Brennan) slipping a subtle menage a trois come-on to Cross are hilarious; America Ferrara mixing all the drugs in the house together to create some homemade ecstasy, determined to get super high to face the end, is my hero. While her beau seems to think ranting about conspiracies will turn the deadly real situation abstract enough to deal with, i.e. what you can deconstruct can't kill you, she's doing the right thing, the thing the old black jazz pianist on the cruise ship or Woody Harrelson does in the movie 2012. Overall it's some good ensemble work, giving off the impression these people all know each other and respect one another's comedic rhythms, and if it all seems over before there's any special effects fire and brimstone, well, it makes up with in the kind of inner-hell only the relationship-encumbered truly know.

So what in the end is the right scenario for you? A lot of us were hoping the world would end last December 21st, so we could skip that much-needed root canal, or get out from under our credit card debt. Now here it is a year later and we know we're saddled with seemingly immortal life. So pick your poison and live to die another day: going out with the bros is of course the more fun option than meeting the new girl's posse at a petit-bourgeois couples brunch, because the deeper you look the more you see how hard it is to grow when you can just blame your significant other for holding you back.

Unfortunately real personal growth only seems to come with pain, fear, and trauma. With the boys up in the Hills of THIS IS THE END, though, there's no one else to blame, and so, convexly, no escape from the awfulness of one's own true self.

Oh how time flies / with crystal clear eyes

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Strangers / with wet hair: TREE OF LIFE (2011) and EMA's Past-Life Martyred Saints

There was an annoying commercial awhile ago with a cute 'brother and sister' ordering movie tickets on their cell phone while pretentiously announcing in that Madison Avenue version of Williamsburg Daria hipster flatline voiceover that "images are important to us." Because they're photographers. So they go to a lot of movies together, which is about $25 per film between them, not including popcorn or bedbug removal. If nothing else, THE TREE OF LIFE proves that images are important to Terrence Malick too - he is a cinematographer...

Malick even acknowledges this weakness in a perhaps autobiographical scene where a child or his sibling finds a sheer nightgown in a neighbor's drawer and steals it. One might imagine he does something icky with the garment, but Malick has never cared about sex, onanistic or otherwise. His Texas is not the Texas of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and its coming-of-age deviant cataloging or of GIANT and its lustful Deans. For Malick, women are symbols meant to glisten with beauty, particularly if they have long red hair that looks good in the setting sunlight (Chastain could be Sissy Spacek, after Martin Sheen's been sent up the river of life), and if they're wearing shimmering sheer nightgowns it's so the light can send a lace shadow over the lawn. Malick brooks no pornographic, only the Joycean aesthetic arrest, so the theft of the nightgown is the first guilty moment of a future cinematographer--the 'capturing' of a gorgeous ephemerality-- the nailing of butterflies to celluloid ala Stan Brakhage. But without a film to bury the image in, there's no reliable 'container.' The kid notably tries first to bury the nightgown under some mud (too much like sending it to the editor) then decides to release it into the stream, into the flowing fleetingness; the cinema he can't himself witness without a helicopter shot (and there are many); the night gown so ephemeral the only eye that can possess it is the fleeting eye of the all-seeing viewer, the 'God' eye-view. The little river/stream itself is something like a long band of film, and each nightgown tossed onto the waves is a little baby Moses of possible meaning and interpretation before it goes over the falls only to return in the next full rotation of the astral take-up reels in time for the nine PM showing.

Unrepentantly personal as Malick's TREE is, so inflated yet intimate are its emotions, it may help to be on substances or dealing with a recent or impending death in the family while viewing. My dad is very sick after chemo-therapy, so a combination with that and other things made these tight little catalogs of instances between Brad Pitt and his tykes extra pronounced for me. And I grew up with a younger brother who I felt the need to dominate via fake wrestling and we were into war, and violence. If TREE was about girls growing up, I can imagine being bored. Real bored, or if I didn't have a little brother, bored, real bored.

There's no reason to analyze my deep connection too closely, except that if I made too light of death in past posts, I'm sorry now. Preparing for the possibility (which means also, acknowledging the inevitability) you are going to lose your father is like going off a cliff and realizing you don't even know how deep is the gorge and no one really cares if you scream on the way down. There's no way they can stave your fall, so they won't try. Malick is Christian enough to know that guilt is the quickest route to humility, which is the quickest route to God. I know I wasn't the only one amidst the sacrosanct BAM audience breaking down in free-flowing tears once or twice, but not long into the screening, even at the mighty BAM, cell phone blue lights came on like rows of stars below the screen. For shame!

So it's arty, but is it art? Getting the special effects guy from 2001 and BLADERUNNER (Douglas Turnbull) to work on your big bangs might make you cool but Kubrick and Scott were making science fiction not 'mere' student art film abstraction. Kubrick and Scott were showing what might be, stressing the banal aspects of space travel. Making Texas seem to hurtle through space and turn on an axis is only to reveal that which is already is, to undo the tinny illusion of how we seem to be standing still as we whirl around like a mad spinning top across the infinite playroom floor of space-time. Since you are, then, just revealing the real, why presume you're saying anything other than the trite science bombs of a freshman first-time pot smoker? The image of Sean Penn walking through a mysterious desert door frame is the sort of thing they wince at in hip student film festivals, but it still made me cry, not least of reasons being seeing an A-list thesp like Spicoli really commit to such an old trope. Hasn't everyone who ever visited that splotch of desert shot film of themselves going through that door? Only Sean and Terence have returned, dared to bring their experience and weight back to the idealistic naivete of their BFA years.

Malick's going for 'the big fish' as David Lynch would say, and when an artist goes for the big fish they have to get pretentious as a matter of course, lest their spiritual aims get obscured by plot or drive or other tricks of attention getting, or else become boring like Ozu. But in the end, the little bits of character development undo their own seriousness - Brad Pitt's playing the organ at church is undone by the fact he only plays Bach onscreen and we're not subject to tired hymns sung by dusty congregations in fitful slow starts. This isn't the world we're seeing--or even memory with all its weird time images--but an uneasy combo of both, with a biology textbook and Hallmark birthday card stacked on top. I'm amazed I even remembered the dinosaur name 'Ornitholestes' while watching this -- the word coming to me as if from a lost dream of a five year old who learned to spell dinosaur names before he learned how to tie his shoes but hasn't articulated the word 'ornitholestes' in at least three decades - thanks, TREE!

Jessica Chastain as the mother certainly helps redress this Iron John blood poisoning. She reminds me of a girl I wronged, adding all sorts of psilocybic resonance to her wounded dove close-ups, which are so well shot that you can see the 'signature' stamps of alien DNA in her Celtic pale skin, that fair-haired mossy coastline fairness that if you look closely reveals blue webs of capillaries just below the translucent skin, flushing with blood when hot emotions come across her face.

Another plus is the Texas apocalypse angle, which I've written about as far back as 2007, 'the year of the Texas Apocalypse Cinema,' since then we've also had SOUTHLAND TALES (apocalypse-dependent), and Tarantino's DEATH-PROOF (see: The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier), all of which are Texas-style apocalyptic if you know how to dig. And for THE TREE OF LIFE, you don't need even need a shovel, as meaning is excavated and then spread upon the bread of the earth. And the earth is without crust, as Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, who was the cinemographer, likes it, as noted by co-producer Nicolas Gonda, “Chivo Lubezki is a vital part of Terry’s process.  In a sense he had to be as much a writer as a D.P. because when the two of them are on the set, things can change in the moment.  It’s a dance between the two of them riffing creatively off each other.”

It's certainly interesting to read the accounts of how they came up with the trippy visual effects in the film--pouring milk through funnels--but who came up with the soundtrack? Better they should have gone with the guy who did the amazing score for THERE WILL BE BLOOD, or Wendy Carlos, or The Stooges' "We Will Fall."  You can get by with being spiritual and non-alienating to atheists. But pick a hymn and you pick a fight.



There's other moments here, like when you see Sean Penn wandering through the steel and glass structures where we works, that conjure Antonioni and his captains of industry striding around glass offices with their manly scrolled-up blueprints -- Rod Taylor in ZABRISKIE POINT; Richard Harris and Carlo Chianetti in RED DESERT. In the equations of Malick, God, Mary Jane, and the theater audience are ultimately indistinguishable, so is Malick referencing Antonioni, or just recreating him, ala Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote?

I can't help but feel that Malick's searching through the miasma of time and evolution, in dopey whisper-overs, is not for God, or his true Dad, or Brecht, but for an ideal art film audience, the kind that 'got' Antonioni and didn't fall asleep or walk out halfway through. He wants a human mind's eye gallery for his photographs, which slowly move--ala Bill Viola--so slow down and weep along or kindly check your messages with your hand over the blue screen. Images are important to us. If the film says anything, it may be "I Am a cinematographer. But is this stuff Tarkovsky, Eisenstein? Ain't no Russians, ain't even any atomic age. I was kind of shocked the mushroom cloud wasn't even addressed, when surely the age of atomic anxiety was at least worth mentioning, or television. Can a family really get along on nothing but prayers and piano lessons? No wonder Brad Pitt's cranky! No wonder that poor son is so starved for images he has to steal female undergarments and hold them up to the light. Unlike the rest of us, he didn't grow up bombarded with TV and in-class movies and filmstrips, and comic books. That lack has made him hot for images the way a reformed Mormon is hot for the pleasures of the flesh. If you've ever made it with an ex-Mormon you know what I mean. They take to your body like someone dying of thirst to an ice cold beer. This is how Malick takes to the image --guilelessly and openly.


But even here trouble arises, for that Mormon might then decide she loves you, and here you're just a no-good tomcat on the prowl, hardly worthy and never intending to stay. Now you have to live with the secret guilt of the dirty Mack every time an actress reminds you of her. Malick's image-worship justifies his lack of familiarity with the lure of scopophilia, or the pornographic, so we never get the idea he's had to lay his tomcat cards on the table. As that old SNL Freud sketch put it: "sometimes a banana is just a banana, Anna." Or in this case, a tree is still a tree, a sigh is just a sigh. A fundamental thing that doesn't apply is that omnipotent POV: What 'eye' is watching the earth form from clouds and dust? What viewer can there be who would have such a correct view of the unfolding universe? Before there were eyes to see, this stuff didn't exist at all. What Malick knows and has seen is brilliantly reproduced: a younger child watching the in-fighting of parents well captured from low, cringing camera angles, and in these scenes culled from foggy memory, flashes of stuff we remember from our own childhood are unearthed and dislodged, relentless as the search for lost keys, or remotes, all that sense of 'fleeting' works devastatingly well. But is that 'lost eye' ever addressed?

2001 has reaction shots: we know who's seeing what for the most part. When David Lynch shows us images where no eyes can be, we shudder with uncanny frisson: a traffic light changing from green to red at a deserted night crossroads, a phone ringing and no one answering, or maybe even calling. We get even with Antonioni this sense of scary freedom when no one is around to see what we see, as in the amazing ending of L'ECLISSE. Gaspar Noe shot an entire film like this in ENTER THE VOID. But the frisson of the disembodied spectator is one sense of the scopophilic gaze that Malick hogs for himself. He's already seen 'deeper' into these images than we ever will.

In its way BIRTH (here) said far more on this subject and aped Kubrick slightly better, and even had another translucent redhead in long lysergic close-ups (Nicole Kidman). For the cosmic journey of TREE we see some in utero light shows, some random arrests, a death at the community pool, the telegram of the older son's death (never explained or seen), mourning, early childhood; glimmers of a dad whose misgivings about the fairness of his business leads him to inflict violence on his kids and their ultimate refusal of that violence. After two hours or so, Malick seems to realize he needs to wrap it all up so pulls a Fellini with an ending on the beach that Woody Allen would make a cliche back in the 1970s.

But perhaps your own parents and children are ultimately strangers, and no amount of reconciliation can change the fundamental separateness unless you all meet in jazz heaven. Perhaps we are all unknowable even to ourselves, and the closest thing to paternal union may be acknowledging the sad frailty at the core of our once-invulnerable father - that precious moment, never really explored in this film, where you and your dad get drunk together and he suddenly seems so painfully vulnerable, and he's suddenly just another dude you hang with, more like you than you dared admit before. Or you can turn back through the whiskey mist and see him having wrestled with everything you've wrestled with, made dumb mistakes, but found in you--maybe, if only for a little while--something to be proud of, a one certain time when he could say this I did right, even if shortly thereafter you were busted for pot, or guns, or car theft.

For the last few years I've lived my life according to the myth of A Star is Born, with me the boozy has-been author, my ward the younger ascendant star in blogging. Then, a couple weeks ago, while listening to my iPod on random shuffle and flipping through TV with the sound off, I stumbled onto TCM in the midst of the long scene of James Mason gearing up for his suicide in the George Cukor-directed 1954 version of A STAR IS BORN. Now, I've seen this version only up to the intermission, but I knew, because of the song on the shuffle, "The Grey Ship" by EMA what the long shots of Mason looking out to sea, saying tearful goodbyes to Judy and friends really meant, what was going to happen. As sometimes happens, the editing and beats matched so perfectly that I knew it was a cosmic message as I thought "Look a ghost grey ship is coming my way," And it didn't even have to stop.It just kept on going. My intermission was over, and the long voyage into the infinite was now underway, like back when I stumbled onto FLATLINERS in 1991 (see here)

I've had other weird synchronicity moments but this was another symbolic death, a substitute for an actual death imagined in my chosen Star is Born mythos. Norman Maine did the long swim so I wouldn't have to. Either way, old personal myths are inevitably shed like a snake's old skin, like a snake of life, and you die for real  many many skins down the line - but as TREE shows, your skins come fast... and furious.



I mention this for several reasons, not least is to credit BORN's director Minnelli with achieving in this scene (with EMA's scoring) what it takes TREE over two hours to do -- to see the way cosmic myths descend on us during key moments in our life - and that every moment, in a sense, can be seen in heavenly hindsight as profound, every breath and touch as vast as a 2001 obelisk, and yet a yellow filmy fog descends on this sense of wonder and dread just so we can get on with business and not waste the day away being awed at a sunflower. And if our every action isn't awash in mythic resonance, whose fault is that? It's the fault of the cinematographer, dictating the direction we look, and how long we look there, and when we decide to walk away, and look again, from farther off, until the final screen recedes and the credits rain down from heaven like an unstoppable flood, and the tree of life is buried once again in a flood of flood footage.

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Bright Lights #71 Now Live!

There are two of my latest long pieces in the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal (#71) so do check them out:
Dads of Great Aventure: A Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Cinema's Hyper-Parent

"Nervous producers, it seems, feel obligated to insert moral hand-wringing as if we might just use the fantasy of escape to actually escape, like we're too stupid to remember that the world is, like, important. It's almost in defiance of that phony liberal piousness then, perhaps, that writers add these ambiguous subtexts about this proximal hyper-parenting, much the way snarky Broadway wits would subtextually send up Christian moral hypocrisy in their production code-enforced scripts..."

The Last American Ruffalo: Lisa Cholodenko's Lesbian "Homespun" Family Values

"The heat of genuine subversion may be more destructive than positive, but at least it has heat. It has the guts to trash the existing structure rather than just toying with the idea of moving the furniture, then ostracizing the moving company."

I've only begun to read the rest of it, but it looks like one of the best issues ever! Congrats Gary Morris and company on another swell job! His editor's note mentions Bright Lights got a lot of clandestine Wikileaked angry mail from high up politicians, would-be Eberts, armchair punters, and Ford Beebians (I xxxed out words I found offensive, you can read the full editorial here): 

We had no idea that these writers — who were supposed to be in their cubicles reading old issues of Cahiers du cinema and Positif and diligently revising and updating Sarris's American Cinema categories — were in such a tizzy. Their words were indeed mutinous: "Sarris's 'canon' is more like a xxx gun!'" asserted one. "...xxxx....  "xxxx mise-en-scene!" said a third. Neither directors nor actors were spared. "All directors should be at the nearest xxx getting xxxxxx for the real auteur: the screenwriter!" "Bresson is a boring hack! My xxxx xxxxx could give a better performance than Balthazar!" and "Orson Welles isn't a patch on Ford Beebe's xxx!" (For some reason, the writers seemed particularly obsessed with Ford Beebe, auteur of 1940s and '50s programmers like Bomba and the Hidden City and many others.)

Now, this wikileaked mail is rather horrid, reflecting a lack of understanding about just what 'mise-en-scene' truly is. As for Bresson, I agree, and yet Balthazar is an amazing actor, conveying more 'animal' magnetism with a single dumbstruck glance than Mr. Ed ever could with pages of dialogue. And of course I agree about Ford Beebe. Let's never forget he's the man who gave us the awesome and unforgettable Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe serial, as well as Bela Lugosi's PRC triumph, MONSTRE DE NUIT (1942). Also, he has one of the greatest names in show business history.

I like Joseph Aisenberg's trashing/celebrating of Peter Biskind's STAR, the story Warren Beatty. Aisenberg eloquently sums up Biskind's current solidified association as chronicler of the 1970s New Hollywood decadence, what Eddie Muller is to film noir, or David Skal to classic horror, but on a larger attention-grabbing NY Times book list scale. Aisenberg notes Biskind's book as evincing a kind of semi-intellectual gossip hound: "it's all trashy gossip but kind of, sort of about culture." As someone who can't make it past a paragraph of Biskind's Gods and Monsters without getting irked at his politicized sanctimony (I devoured Bulls, though!), I appreciate Joseph's spot-on analysis

I really want to see CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER before I delve deeper into Sean Nortz's quote-packed pipeful of chrystaline thoughts and pungent, smoky theories on the film, 'Could You Spare me a Nightmare?' How on earth did it fall off the radar!? Vincent Price!! Nortz notes the film's many trashings in the press, and seems determined to salvage it's reputation, and his cursory overview of Price's career and appeal is vividly rendered:

Price's previous roles — in the now-forgotten comedy Service de Luxe (1938), in a forgettable performance as Sir Walter Raleigh in Michael Curtiz's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and as the as the Duke of Clarence Tower of London (1939) — did not serve to highlight either his talents or his latent spectrality (though the latter saw his first bout of intoxication and his first brush with classic literature: it is loosely based on Richard III. Clarence is the one who drowns in a vat of malmsey). 

Drown in a vat of malmsey... death where is thy sting? (to paraphrase William Claude Field's oration in NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK). And I especially like the phrase 'latent spectrality' - good album name! The images in the review however, indicate this title is gray market only, not unlike the substance it depicts. Earth is all about irony. Down with the Draconian/Reptilian overlords that would stop from smoking our way to freedom!!

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Beards of Bleak: THE ROAD (2009) and WINTER'S BONE (2010)

Look at these two fine, bearded gentlemen above: Viggo Mortenson (left), billed only as 'the man' -- a grizzled survivor of an unspecified global holocaust, traveling with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in John Hilcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD; John Hawkes (right) as 'Teardrop'--a grizzled meth head slightly of a mind to protect his niece (Jennifer Lawrence) in Debra Granik's WINTER'S BONE. The two films have much in common: ravaged rural starkness, fatherly anxiety, and man-oh-manly beards pointing and twisting under straight noses. Teardrop and the Man are the cinema's 2009-10 beard combo (1), the best such combo since Moss and Plainview in 2007's THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (another Cormac adaptation), and this time, there's fewer words in the titles, even fewer in the scripts.

There's an awful responsibility that overtakes us, cinema do declare, when raising kids in a land rife with scorched earthiness, meth availability, limb-hacking, and squirrel skinning. Kids in horror and sci fi used to be possessed by demons. In the 1980s it was boys and long-fingered alien pedophiles. Now kids have fallen from their endangered pedestal as darling beacons of Spielbergian light and become luggage, screaming cargo that must be protected from the C.H.U.D.S, hillbilly paranoids, cannibalistic pedophile priests, and zombies. All one really wants to do is shoot, smoke, sniff, and sail away from life's burdens, but they have kids.

BONE is the sleeper indie award winner this year, though first glances might make you sigh a BASTARD OUT OF GEORGIA RULE HOUNDDOG'S SWING BLADE RURAL JUROR poetic realism on the cheap kind of 'here we go again, faux-Faulkner' rote harmonicas and steel guitar indie sigh. But, as I explained to my sentimentalism-wary lady friend when we watched it, even if all the signposts are the same that don't mean it's the same road. That's the mistake that made so many film scholars overlook Douglas Sirk! Underneath all that soap was a very dirty boy. 

I'm sure by now you don't need me to tell you that WINTER'S BONE is beautifully photographed. Every image a full color version of those lovely dust bowl portraits by Dorothea Lange, but in color and thrift shop winter couture, rainspouts, horses, eerie drones and impeccable foley periphery shrub rustling. The story itself is interesting, proving as did in DOMINO and JACKIE BROWN that bail bondsmanship is a fertile, relatively under-explored film subject. Dee (Lawence) has to forfeit her house if her meth cooker dad doesn't show in court so down the trail she treads, to ask tough questions of her hostile, whacked-out kinsfolk. As she's met by slammed doors and threats Dee begins to resemble the Phillip Marlowe of Tobacco Road, bravely digging where no one wants her to dig, taking a beating without flinching, hallucinating under quality pain killers, relentlessly traversing a mise en scene of desolate winter landscapes and druggy evasiveness. The men hide behind smoke and yellowed curtains, guns at the ready, hallucinating police cars in the thumbprints on the windows. Where male detectives in 40s noir found Venus flytrap allure waiting to confuse their senses, Lawrence finds tough, inscrutable men, all relatives to some degree or other, their brains half-fried, violent tempers, coiled postures. If they have information to share, she must suss it out but that takes time and their wives are listening in the next room with a shotgun under their aprons. Her knight errant eventually emerges from Teardrop's twitchy shell, kinda... but drug users are notoriously slippery when it comes to metamorphoses.

'The Man' in THE ROAD, meanwhile, never doubts his princeliness, but he sure doubts the world's. He saves his last bullet to use on his son if they should ever fall into cannibal hands. Several times the kid has the gun pressed up against his head while danger looms, and one can't help but think of John Ford's STAGECOACH climax, with John Carradine's last shot aimed at the 'lady' as the Apaches draw closer. Fear for the virginity of your young 'uns and maidens can make you brave or make you weak and in the final bullet moment it's impossible to tell which is which. It's one thing to be courageous for yourself, another to be courageous with the life of a charge, a child. Viggo refuses to let his son risk his life in order to make friends, thus dragging the 'helicopter parent' principle into the post-apocalypse wasteland.

The main difference between Teardrop and the Man seems to lie in this approach. Still like a cobra, eyes cast low in a thousand yard stare, Teardrop's superiority lies in the cool uncle position. When he finds a stray strand of nurturing in his soul's muddy weave and a banjo is introduced you practically cry to see this man finally engage in something that's not potentially deadly or destructive. At that moment, you know Howard Hawks would have loved him.

So, without a reliable social order in place in either dirty outdoors film, the thematic question seems to be, when is life 'safe' for little children to frolic? Dee proves it never is, so fuck it, frolic anyhow. The Man thinks it will be safe 'later' - so 'the boy' gets carried hither and yon, like America getting the paranoid treatment from a stand-down military, like the boy is George Bush and Viggo is Dick Cheney, creating all sorts of problems with his paranoia and access to the inner ear of power. 

 

As trends in fathering in our modern society make clear, dads don't often feel the need to stick around. What makes Teardrop, in his deep sympathy with the shadows and evils of the world, a better dad than 'the Man'? Teardrop knows how to come at a room full of meth-addled hick gangsters; he knows when to shrink into the shadows and when to refuse to step out the car and put his hands on the hood. He's not afraid of dying and that's what enables him to better help out. Like most of the men in either film he can't wrap his head around a woman un-cowed by the threat of death and physical violence. He has no choice but to be impressed. Viggo's problem is that he doesn't respect bravery, since he has none, and so his son's fearlessness or his wife's (Theron, below, looking straight out of BONE), is dismissed by him as foolhardiness, while he cowers in the shrubs.

I know I'm not alone in being grateful that WINTER'S BONE chooses to forgo the threat of sexual assault that seems to dominate most other hillbilly franchises. We don't get much of it in THE ROAD either, but the threat is always there (along with OS screaming), putting an uneasy Kung Fu grip on your throat. A similar heavy threat hangs all over BONE, but the whole sexual assault as worse than death thing doesn't factor, and I'm glad. As I've written on BL, I think we're reaching an ugly saturation point in that regard: it's become cheap shorthand to get the audience deeply disturbed and emotionally involved, but at what cost?

Another thing I'm glad BONE forgoes is sentimentalizing childhood innocence. Funny how the two things go hand in hand, as if innocence itself was a side effect of corruption rather than vice versa.  Both films examine the nature of emotional involvement, and of parenting and responsibility, and while both films tug at issues of bare life survival vs. the sweet joy of giving up, only BONE knows how to harness the beard, the wild man energy of the masculine.  THE ROAD paves the way, perhaps, in subtextually condemning the conservative 'my family uber alles' ethos, but only BONE takes that message all the way to the bottom of the family swamp, where the wild man lies, and dredges that deep man up.

As Robert Bly once wrote in IRON JOHN:

But going down through the water to touch the wild man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and he seems even more so now, when corporations do so much work to produce the sanitized, hairless shallow man (2)

That's poor Viggo in THE ROAD, a sanitized man, re-bearded, trying to be wild in a wild land, learning the role of the deep, dark masculine and getting it incorrect. No reflection on Viggo, of course, who showed he can bring that shit hardcore in the RINGS and the VIOLENCE. It's more I think the head-on craftsmanshippy approach to the McCarthy novel --it gets it too right, maybe, to work. Teardrop on the other hand is the truly untamed wild man, the kind of guy that creeps you out at first but then somewhere along the way, not sure when, you start to admire him. Isn't that so much better, children, than the other way around? 

NOTES
1. Yeah, THE ROAD came out in 2009, but I didn't see it til last week, so what?
2. Vintage Books, NY, 1990 - Page 6

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DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) Twilight of the Betamax

Halloween is heating up down at Acidemic. As our mangy staff prepares to move to Park Slope Brooklyn before the zombies reach 14th St., now, more than ever, we need to hold onto the classics. If you had to take only one horror DVD with you to your new pad, leaving the rest to fall into the hands of the undead hordes, would there be any other logical choice than DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)?

An artistic peak in the midnight movie genre, it's the crossroads of horror cinema, the end of ends, a work of superb apocalyptic acumen that just gets better and better with repeat viewings. Not only does it metatextually foreshadow the death knell of the small town art houses and drive-ins (where such a film was meant to be be seen), it announces the rise of mall multiplex and the end of 'live' entertainment altogether. 

Zombies have become the cultural touchstone of the 21st century, just as, thanks to expired copyrights, anyone can make a film based on Poe, Shelly or Stoker, or Romero -- anyone with a pint of Ben Nye's mint flavored stage blood can make a movie about the rising of the dead from their graves to eat the flesh of the living. This, as it turns out, is a very good thing. The undead seem to bring out the best in us. They remind us that life is a day-to-day struggle; they force us to remember our countless previous lifetimes as hunted prey-- gazelles, rabbits, little fishes--forever on the run from hungry predators; they force us to confront our mortality by removing "the dubious comforts that a funeral service may provide."

Unlike other threats, such as sharks, the cool thing with zombies is they cannot be escaped --they are the social order with its mask off, as inseparable from our bodies as our own organs. Sooner or later you're bound to slip, get careless, get bitten, die, come back. You can let go of the idea of reaching old age, no worries about retirement, and providing for future generations, and taxes. Freed from the restraints and castrations of the now obliterated social order, citizens are forced to prioritize and move fully into the moment.

We all have that 'desert island disc' fantasy if we're the collector types, and the terrors of the undead help us to 'let go' of our burdensome collections. As I pack box after box of books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, VHS, ETC., for my Brooklyn move, I dream of civilization collapsing so I can just grab my laptop, DAWN and of course, Electric Ladyland, oh wait, and... no way, I need to bring all this... and that.. and then CHOMP you hesitated at the shelf of favorites, and now you are no more.

The opening scene with Gaylen Ross holding her head against a beautiful dark reddish orange soundproofing studio wall carpet (top) is my favorite opening of all horror - she looks like she's wrapped up in a Dario Argento wall blanket, waking up from SUSPIRIA and already thinking about the hands coming out of the wall in Romero's third entry, DAY OF THE DEAD (1984). I love how civilization's collapse is so neatly depicted in the way the TV crew on the local live 'black' talk show she's producing gradually abandon ship and flip off their progressively more annoying and frenzied station manager. I love the way the host tries to accuse the white government representative of racism in association with mandates about disposing of dead bodies. We see all the kernels of what's going to bring us down and its okay because we realize maybe there was no 'us' to begin with. The ones who survive are those who can look out for themselves and maybe the ones around them--those who aren't panicking and acting like brats--and can let go of all the rest of the 'humanitarian' concerns, can abandon all hope of any reliable bastion of military protection, as each sanctuary falls before the name of the town even finishes scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

William S. Burroughs had an analogy for it, that of holding onto the string of a helium balloon that suddenly starts lifting you in the air. Are you the type to let go of the string right away--while it's 'hot' so to speak--or are you the type to instinctively hang on until you're so high up in the air you can no longer let go without falling to your death? Some people can't let go of their identity within the social order, can't drop their whole worldview and social position on a dime and just flee to the hills, and those are the ones that get eaten.  It's all summed up in the way the distraught girlfriend can't accept her man is a zombie (below) during the projects section, even as he's biting her shoulder off. That's America! Its shoulder being chewed off by corporate-controlled government, still munching even as the whole shithouse goes up in oily flames... all right!

When the four essential cast members get off the ground and away, the film becomes a consumerist fantasia, depicting conspicuous consumption not unlike pre-revolutionary France, with the humans standing in as royalty, enjoying all the luxuries suburban America has to offer, while outside, the unwashed (or in this case, undead) masses clamor hungrily at the gates.

While this sociological statement was intentional, the film’s equally trenchant relevance to film history could not have been, for Romero couldn’t have guessed the extent to which secular iconoclasm and religious/cultural disparity (as reflected in the opening SWAT scenes) would be ground down to suburban mush, made tasteless to as not offend the masses’ palate. In other words, movies like DAWN OF THE DEAD would soon no longer be able to operate like carny sideshows, moving from town to town, outside the constraints of standard cinema distribution patterns, unhindered by television's sitcom groupthink censor rulebook, but would now be bound to 'up the ante,' bidden find ever-new way to shock, to cater to the deadening of the senses brought about by the sudden surge of sex and violence coming into the American household with the arrival of cable and home video.

To flashback, 1979 was a time when cities like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia and especially New York City, housed specialty theaters--often full of great old landmark-style 20's art deco theaters gone to crumling, with moldy red velvet curtains, listing balconies, drafts and sticky, warped floors--that would show independently-made genre films. Outside the city limits, the small town residents would flock to the drive ins to see triple bills that might start with something new and studio-backed, then gradually lean back into the really out-there independents. A film like DAWN or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE could play for years this way on a handful of constantly circulating prints, starting as the first film on the bill and gradually working its way back to the third, in a now-tattered version with scenes missing and thick splices.  In their spinning round film cans, the movies rolled across the country, gradually getting chewed up by backwoods projectors.

Nowadays it’s impossible to imagine zombies ever not eating the flesh of the living, yet this trait originated with Romero’s first in the series, shot in areas outside Pittsburgh, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, in 1967. That film put Romero on the map and helped DAWN gain a decent budget, courtesy producer Dario Argento, who was a big fan of the film and used the bundle he made with SUSPIRIA (1977) to back DAWN, even loaning out his SUSPIRIA house band, Goblin, for the score.

But suddenly and significantly, just as NIGHT began it, DAWN came along and symbolically ended it. VCRs and cable TV took over and suddenly you could get "the little somethin' that ya can't get at home" (1)... at home.

Before the VCR/cable revolution, DAWN, which was rated X, had been almost impossible for anyone under 18 to see in the theaters, but two years later and all you needed was your parent's membership card and you were good to go. Parental ratings concerns were shunted aside by the sheer novelty of it all, the mad headlong stampede by teens and adults on all the lurid stuff they never wanted to risk getting their car stolen to see on the big screen in the bad neighborhood crumbling theater. Cannibalism, zombies and violence were suddenly spilling into family living rooms. Frankly, the 1970s permissiveness was still enough in effect that no one thought twice about watching X-rated films with the whole family and if we were traumatized it seemed un-hip to admit it. The first movie I ever rented at 13 or 14 or so: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971, below), it was my first rated X.

I was cured, all right!

 

The problem was, of course, that in the original exploitative use of it all, gore and sex was meant more as an enticement to the theater, a scary sell -- something you'd never seen before and was bound to traumatize the hell out of you -- it took some courage to attend, like going on a roller coaster, or skydiving. And as you weren't able to pause and freeze frame on an exploding head or an alien bursting out of John Hurt's chest, and were out with an audience who were also wincing and gasping it became more frightening each time you remembered it or told your friends about it. Having gone to see CARRIE or SUSPIRIA or THE OMEN was a marker of bravery and we heard willingly of the tale. But with home video, 'forbidden violence' lost a lot of its terrifying mystique and mythological cachet. Now you didn't get to imagine the film in your head while being told the entire story by some kid at recess. Now the kid just tapes it for you, and rather than reeling with a brain ablaze from campfire ghost primordial goosebumps, you came away with a headache from the tracking issues of his second generation dupe.

It was a big fall from innocence, especially if you watched the wrong movie at the wrong time, unaware, unprepared, like I was when I saw the end of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977), one day on cable, thinking it was ANNIE HALL, when it showed up unannounced on the Movie Channel one Sunday afternoon, well, I watched it. By myself. At 13. If you can be molested through the movies, GOODBAR molested me that day. And of course, there's no one to arrest when it's only a movie. And as far as horror films go, GOODBAR has no mythical cachet, no warning for that traumatic, brutal, insane ending. It's too mature, too much a women's lib commentary singles bar adult anti-feminist moralizing-disguised-as-artsy drama picture to ever be considered a horror film. Most of it is a single's bar tale, there's no mention in most descriptions of the horrifying end. In short, its less an initiation into adulthood and more a violation, a rape of the soul which you can't tell anyone about because no one understands and so rather then kick you into adulthood like DAWN might, it freezes you in the amber of final girl sexophobia. The other kids are all going to get killed out there, and you'll be the last one left, clinging to your virginity like a thorny lifejacket. Meanwhile Tom Berenger is still free. But I'm still locked up in the strobe light hell that Richard Brooks and the Movie Channel put me in all those years ago.

 

Cable eventually reigned itself in, realized its soft-focus "aerobics" videos weren't helping anyone get fit, and the video rental outlets became stricter about renting hardcore XXX videos to minors, but before that all was put in place, in the early, early 1980s, things got really, really crazy on the TVs of America. And I can't help feeling this little bloody spike in the average American family's movie diet helped usher in the backlash of the Reagan era. It's as if all America suddenly realized its mid-life crisis manic elation was just a middle-aged country's foolishness, and thusly turned vindictive, disillusioned. We wanted to see all the sex and violence we had been missing, and suddenly we had seen enough, too much, and it kept coming.  It made us laugh at first, but slowly, over time and sequels, chilled us to the core, robbed our innocence and left us depressed and afraid to go outside at night, even to take the trash to the curb. 

We didn't learn the lesson the older countries like France and England had learned, which was that hot sex, gore, nudity and over-the-top violence lose their 'kick' very quickly; some things are better left unseen, imagined, and deferred, because sooner or later the zombie in the mirror beckons, and you start seeing monsters around every corner of your inner city eye. America's obsession with apocalypse is a mid-life crisis: cougars and Humberts desperate to shed their skin and start over, ageless, without all those ungrateful children to worry about, and provide for. Instead of carrying forth our glorious legacy, the little buggers stab moms and moms-to-be with trowels, and write "Piggies" on the wall in their blood, and watch movies like FACES OF DEATH and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. 

So in our haste to feign ambivalence, to ride the coaster of cine-trauma, we allowed our minds to be closed-off, faded, warped and jaded en masse. The country fell into a state of depressed, homogenized ennui. The only cure for this disaffection, naturally, was going to the mall. At least the mall gave you something to do, somewhere to go, and you didn't have to explain why you came there. All that mattered was that you needed... something... anything. Moms got outfits and fabric just to return later, just to have a reason to go back, to get out of the house and exchange a receipt with an information desk worker's sympathetic ear.

Thus it came to pass that 25 years or so later I saw the fourth in Romero's series, LAND OF THE DEAD (2005) at a Myrtle Beach mall multiplex on a rainy Sunday matinee. The theater was about half full, with glazed-eyed popcorn eaters age eight to eighty. When the gore and the ripping and the flesh eating began in earnest onscreen, the families around me flinched here and there, but no one emerged after the film looking shaken to the core. The old man in front of us, for example, was already complaining about missing the start of 60 Minutes as he and his wife shambled slowly toward the Exit. 

Twenty years ago and those same people would have freaked out, thrown up, been refused admittance due to being underage (no one under 18 was admitted to an X like DAWN, or even an X like CLOCKWORK or MIDNIGHT COWBOY). We were scared of even seeing gore, scared of watching bodies being ripped apart. It's not that the films bothered us so much, but we imagined the sick audiences who must 'get off' on them, the guy in a raincoat sitting behind us, staring at the back of our head like its a melon they very much want to explode and we locked our doors tight to keep out the misogynists and monsters who we were sure watched these films all the time and cheering the violation and suffering of women. Anyone who watches such trash and likes it must be evil. And since people liked them enough that so many of these films existed... we needed to hide.
 

If today we seem to be rapidly approaching capitalism’s zero saturation point, if man’s devouring of man seems soon to hand, perhaps we will know exactly whom to blame; and when we’re ready to wreak our vengeance we will all march on foot towards that giant box-like building that has destroyed our once free spirit, sucked every last drop of mystery out of life, made even old-fashioned malls outdated, devoured Main Street and now the world, and so down the endless parking lot plains to Wal-Mart we will shamble to eat the flesh of our oppressors and loot the stereo section for expensive blu-ray players that won't work since the electricity is long gone, the grid destroyed, the banks toppled. Until then, we can watch DAWN OF THE DEAD in any of its myriad fine versions, and see how it all began, in a single shopping mall at the beginning of the end of the world, when a few hearty souls took control, and fought the onslaught of American sameness... and lost. Go now, while you still can. Take only what you can handle, and leave only footprints... and place your shoes, your brains, and your tender, still-beating heart in the trash receptacles at each side of the doorway as you exit the theater. Wait for me on that bench while I return this scarf and then we're going home, to dinner, and Mike Wallace.. on 60 Minutes. And be grateful. There are starving children in India, and even some obese ones from Jersey, and they're right outside the door--clamoring, knocking and moaning like the damned--and asking if you want to come over and play Resident Evil. Don't go. 

NOTES
1) Tom Waits lyric from "Pasties and a G-String" - Small Change (Island Records)

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