Video Updates

The Telephone Game (2011)

2012-05-08T20:17:00.001-05:00

In the history of film criticism, gallons of ink have been spilled over auteur theory, but without the funds, clout, and sheer force of dickish will that enables James Cameron to perfectly translate the little picture shows in his skull into 48fps 3D multiplex fodder, low budget filmmakers must endlessly sacrifice chunks of their vision on the altar of practicality. (Unless those visions conveniently spring forth from a Mumblecore id.) The various actors and crew-members involved in a production all leave fingerprints on the piece, too, leaving many a would be auteur wondering if how much of the final product truly belongs to them. The fictional playwright and director from Minnesota indie The Telephone Game spends much of the movie losing control over the creative concepts crystalized in his head as they spill forth into a production, while the film itself muddies the question of its own authorship via a script improvised by the actors.

Directed by Jason Schumacher, The Telephone Game has an organic, mockumentary feel, despite at no time being billed as such. In a traditional movie, scenes are assembled from the best versions of their constituent parts based on an overarching structure, while their improvised doppelgangers are instead grown in long takes. Fruitful exchanges and choice lines of dialog are seeded into subsequent attempts until either the director is satisfied with the result, or the harsh realities of low budget scheduling come crashing down. The resulting footage is then woven together in much the same way as a non-fiction work. Narrative, theme, character; all the elements that a traditional film would establish in the writing and production phases are instead teased out of the raw dailies. In fact, the main difference between 'documentary style' post production and the real thing is that the editor of fiction is never hamstrung by the ethical concerns that arise when truth and style fail to sync up.

Milwaukee experimental filmmaker and rapper Wes Tank stars as Marco DeGarr, the pretentious writer and director of "The Invisible Ropes," an impenetrable slice of community theater about monkeys and diamonds against a dystopian fantasy backdrop. (The play was actually written, in a possible nod to the Ouroboros of life imitating art, by the actor.) His main foils are theater owner and voice of practicality Irene Ilsely (KariAnn Craig) and leading lady Zelphia Anzhelina (Haley Chamberlain), with whom Marco makes an immediate connection. This connection forms the closest thing The Telephone Game has to a traditional plot, though it refuses to ever slide into melodrama.

Meanwhile, a fantastic menagerie of cast and crew-members provide background action and mini-arcs that constantly threaten to upstage the movie itself. Reluctant understudy Benjo (Alex Barbatsis) schemes to usurp the lead after Marco gives it to himself in a fit of subconscious narcissism, while Lizbeth (Alisa Mattson) plays the Lady Macbeth on his shoulder. The comic relief is rounded out by the magic obsessed Chip (Eddie Chamberlain) and roly poly stage manager Buzz (Jesse Frankson) who steals every scene he's in, whether or not he has a line. (Seriously, if it was illegal to steal scenes, they'd give him the gas chamber for this movie.)

Following "The Invisible Ropes" from casting to performance provides most the film's structure, but still doesn't quite qualify as the plot. The (movie's) audience is too removed from the chain linked fences, elaborate headdresses, dancing monkeys, and Jupiterian ice cream of the metafictional text to have much investment in its successful production. (Even the world surrounding the theater is vague; the telephones are all rotary and bow ties are worn without irony.) Conflict is instead distilled from Marco's less than stable antics. He is already prone to bizarre non-sequiturs when explaining his vision at the movie's start, and his cast's incessant clamoring for direction weighs only grinds him down further. Lacking skills in performing distracting jigs like the tormented director in Fellini's 8½ (one of many influences from classic European cinema on The Telephone Game) and distracted by a blossoming relationship with his leading lady, Marco's interior condition quickly deteriorates. In an unexpected turn, he goes completely fugue state (complete with some Fear and Loathing-esque camera wackiness) before the end of the first act. Once the delusions of killer bees subside, he returns to a production that is nigh ready to move on without him and therefore hostile to the new pages of script with which he wants to reclaim his decaying personal vision.

An improvised script inevitably constrains the director's control over his narrative, even though he is on set directing the chaos toward specific goals. (As well as calling the shots in the editing bay.) And while an improv based set would obviously create some cinematographic challenges, the director can still put a much more personal stamp on the visuals. The Telephone Game might be a microbudget indie struggling for attention in a veritable sea of contemporaries, (one of the major drawbacks to video's democratization of feature narrative making: a low signal-to-noise ratio that makes it nigh impossible for anyone to get audiences' attention) but it's already got a Best Cinematography award from the Minneapolis Underground Film Fest (aka MUFF--I know, right?) for its quality emulation of monochromatic celluloid on HD video. The high contrast black & white imagery further muddies the narrative's temporal waters, while giving cinematographer Kipp Zavada plenty of leeway for creating a filmic look. Plus, many of the cheesy looking post production effects that modern editing software provides can be revelatory (or at least not as cheesy) when applied to greyscale footage. When leading lady Zelphia performs a heartfelt song about stardust for Marco and the cast midway through the movie, the darkness behind her fills with particle effects that would likely be laughable in color, but instead suggest 2001's 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' sequence reimagined by Guy Maddin.

Making any movie, especially an indie on a minimal budget, can often be like sacrificing your children. ("Murder your darlings," they say.) Explosions, make up effects, dance numbers, and even whole characters must be aborted to keep finances in the black, until the auteur's grand designs are so diluted that he might as well give 'unfortunate circumstances' a writing credit. The Telephone Game may not have had outsized ambitions from inception, but like a cancer ridden Lex Luthor, it knows how to turn its weaknesses into strengths.

[Full Disclosure: in case you didn't figure it out, I am personally acquainted with the filmmakers, and even have a single shot cameo in the film. (All scenes where I open my yapper were tragically left on the cutting room floor.)]

Another Amazing SuperCut!

2011-06-10T08:16:00.005-05:00

Someone managed to find and string together almost 8 solid minutes of "You don't get it, do you?"s

Note: Before you panic about Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (one of my all time favorites) being in there, the scene is Jeremy Irons running lines with his actor girlfriend. Meta bad writing.

The Source

Rapture Ready Playlist

2011-05-21T16:05:00.000-05:00

If you're looking for tunes to spin for the apocalypse (any minute now, right?) look no further. I've had this ready for years.

1. It's Not The End Of The World? - Super Furry Animals
2. Bad Moon Rising - CCR
3. Set the World Afire - Megadeath
4. Come, Let Us Go Back To God - The Soul Stirrers
5. The End of the World - Skeeter Davis
6. Sky Starts Falling - Doves
7. Dear Miami - Roisin Murphy
8. I Wish We'd All Been Ready - Larry Norman
9. Its The End Of The World As We Know It - REM
10. John The Revelator - Depeche Mode
11. The Man Comes Around - Johnny Cash
12. London Calling - The Clash
13. Tow at a Time - Guster
14. The Prophet's Song - Queen
15. King of the World - Steely Dan
16. Eve of Destruction - Barry McGuire
17. In the Year 2525 - Zager & Evans
18. The Earth Died Screaming - Tom Waits

2011-03-29T13:39:00.003-05:00

I didn't mean to turn you on

2011-01-19T09:30:00.001-06:00

Consider your mind blown.

Coming Soon: In Clamatore

2010-05-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

Anyone in the Twin Cities this July 31st should swing by the Red Eye Theater for the premiere of Wes Tank's In Clamatore. I don't have much info to share, but judging from the trailer and what I know about Mr. Tank, it is a safe bet that it will be Tarkovskian.

It's a bit of a shame that it had to be shot on video, as the images practically cry out to be chemically burned into celluloid, but this is the world in which we are all now stuck. High Def makes for a decent simulacrum when the footage is sufficiently textured, so make sure to check out the trailer on YouTube HD if you've got the screen real estate.

Coming Soon: The Human Centipede

2010-04-05T16:45:00.007-05:00

It's debatable whether Hollywood's resurgent obsession with the third dimension is a step forwards or backwards for the art of cinema, but it certainly gives us younger folk a glimpse of the gimmicky showmanship that often defined the medium in years past. The silent era spawned largely from the vaudeville stage, with films frequently screened along with more traditional live entertainment. The fledgling format's novelty and purely visual nature made spectacle the order of the day; a natural fit for the vaudevillian circuit. Story and drama eventually took over as the medium ascended to the upper echelons of cultural importance, but spectacle not only remained an important feature, it returned with a vengeance whenever television threatened to topple the silver screen.

Some of the resulting innovations have transcended the pejorative 'gimmick' to become important facets of cinema. Wide aspect ratios are taken for granted in this time of 16:9 HDTVs, but originated with non-standard formats like Cinemascope that were originally implemented by competitive theater operators looking to out do each other as well drag customer eyeballs away from the Radiation King in their living rooms.

Few other cinematic gimmicks were as classy or successful as Cinemascope, but they definitely added a cheesy, carnival like atmosphere of spectacle. The undisputed king of such contrivances was William Castle, director of House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, and Mr. Sardonicus. To add some extra zazz to the scary bits of his films, he would set up elaborate contraptions in select theaters. Haunted Hill famously had a fake skeleton fly over audiences' heads at certain times, and The Tingler boasted electrified seats scattered randomly through the theater. Other films would have 'nurses' on hand to treat fear induced heart attacks, or micro-intermissions before the climax so that anyone too scared could leave and get a full refund (also a public shaming for their cowardice).

While modern moviegoers are a little too sophisticated (cynical?) to be taken in by plastic skeletons or hollow boasts of death by fright, such practices have fortunately not faded entirely away. The director of Indian horror film, Phoonk 2 (Electric Boogaloo?), recently offered $10,000 to anyone brave enough to watch the movie alone in an empty theater. Plus, as mentioned above, Hollywood is making pretty much anything that it can think of into a 3D movie these days. (I miss the '80s, where you could apparently only use the process on the third film in a franchise.)

Sadly, the director of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) has not announced any sort of free vomit bag promotion at theatrical screenings of his film, but after coming up with such an outlandish and disturbing premise, everything else (likely including the film itself) will have to play second fiddle. Watch the trailer below:

Is it a spoiler to show that the centipede is completed at some point in the movie? It will surely steal some of the suspense from the cat and mouse games between the crazy German surgeon and his nubile victims, but it would be a far greater crime for us to sit through a mediocre horror/suspense film called The Human Centipede about a mad scientist trying to create said human centipede without actually having any human centipede action. I'm not buying a $10 ticket to The Human Centipede to see people narrowly escape being turned into a human centipede. The rest of the film is just (for lack of a better term) foreplay. To use another example for context: does anyone go see Friday the 13th movies to see a bunch of people narrowly escape getting murdered by Jason Vorhees? No. So let's not pretend that we're going to The Human Centipede to see if the characters manage to escape when we really just want to know what happens when the middle one has to go [insert bodily function here].

Also, you all have to go see it so the director can make The Human Centipede (Full Sequence) which may have up to a dozen(!) poor bastards sewn together.

Update (2/9): To clear up some confusion that this rambling, barely coherent post has induced in some of you, I consider the centipede itself to be the movie's gimmick. It's a premise so unique and outlandish that I have absolutely no problem with the construction of an entire movie (maybe two) around it. Plus there is the carnival freakshow aspect to it. Anyways, I don't have to explain myself to the likes of you.

Salvation! (1987)

2010-03-03T19:26:00.000-06:00

Nearly two decades before they would go on to menace each other in the tense first act of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen and Stephen McHattie could be found menacing each other in the somewhat less tense Salvation!, a long forgotten satire of televangelism from the deepest bowels of the MTV generation. Needless to say, it failed to rocket either of them to superstardom.

Stuck in an extra crappy section of Staten Island, Viggo plays a motorcycle riding thug and recently laid off factory worker. He trudges home to his vacuous, proselytizing wife (played by LA punk rocker and real life Mrs. Viggo*, Exene Cervenka) and her preening sister. In her few moments of lucidity while being mesmerized by televangelism, she insists that the 'family' will be perfectly fine.

And he sayeth "Five Dollar Footlong" Amen.

McHattie, whose recent performance in Pontypool has revealed him as one of cinema's most shamefully underutilized assets, plays the shady cathode-ray preacher with a penchant for booze and pornography. His fire and brimstone tirades are easily the film's strongest feature, which is a good thing considering how much of the runtime they fill. Most of the first 'act' is simply him on TV juxtaposed with Viggo's dysfunctional family bickering. It's as though the movie had a narrator that got religion right before shooting and decided to run with it.

[Insert 'Married with Children' and/or Ghostbusters 2 joke here]

It's almost always a bad omen for a movie's pacing when it feels the need to punctuate itself with title cards. (Things that are acceptable: "Tuesday", "Berlin, 1943", "28 Days Later", and anything from The Shining.) Salvation! is broken up into sections with names like 'dream' and 'nightmare', but the chapter names do little to alleviate the mental whiplash induced by such radical shifts in plot and tone. After the first section, wherein Viggo hollers at his wife, loses his job, and hollers at his wife some more, the film shifts to the seedy reverend, who practices his next sermon before being interrupted by Viggo's hot sister-in-law, who is stuck in the rain with a non-functioning car. She quickly seduces him, despite his suspicion that it is a blackmail scheme. Then the movie devolves into an erotic music video. Eventually, as the reverend fantasizes about a bizarre, semi-wholesome life with the little tart, she starts lip syncing to the soundtrack and it becomes explicitly a music video.

A really messed up music video, too.

Viggo finally shows up to shake the cobwebs off the daydreaming film's narrative; he's got some sort of extortion scheme underway, though he might just be jealous of McHattie getting action with his wife's very covetable sister. Things almost coalesce into a semi-coherent cat & mouse thriller, only it turns out that Viggo's plan is to force his wife into the reverend's show and take half the profits. (It's a lot like my elaborate ruse to kidnap and torture Ted Danson so that he and my dad could be squash partners.) Despite its painfully obvious brilliance, the scheme is ultimately thwarted by McHattie's second escape through a bathroom window onto his giant, neon lawn-cross. Too bad they weren't prepared for him to try the exact same thing again.

The reverend successfully escapes, only to get picked up as a hitchhiker by the very woman Viggo was attempting to foist on him.

*Title card: "Salvation"*

The 'plan' is successful and everybody is all friendly and in cahoots now! What the hell was the last forty-five minutes for? Why didn't they just send her to talk to him in the first place? Why is the movie essentially starting the plot over with less than 15 minutes left? What trick could it possibly have up its sleeve to wrap up all the loose ends that only just now appeared? (Spoiler alert: it has no trick.)

Rather than answer those questions, the third act is cool with being a confusing blur. Making sense is for square movies, Salvation! just wants to get itself over with so it can go back to smoking weed and spinning Joy Division albums. So it has Viggo and his cronies pick up groupies for the good reverend. Then they all play poker. Some fat-cat at a pool party suggests the reverend has a future in politics. The team argues over how to stay organized while raiding viewer donations from the mail bag. "Postcards on the floor; envelopes on the desk!" All while his new co-host picks up the religious monologue slack.

The reverend and Viggo's now ex-wife ultimately squeeze him and their other co-conspirators out of the scheme, but cannot agree on how to split up their profits. She suddenly reverses her characterization and cunningly suggests giving the disputed monies to a homeless shelter. (So her almost instantaneous corruption also made her smart?) He changes the subject by proclaiming "showtime". There is one more brief televised sermon, a Christian rock music video, and the movie ends.

That's it. McHattie gives one last speech, perfectly mimicking a fraying televangelist while saying absolutely nothing of real relevance to the gossamer wisps of storyline floating around. Also, in the context of a spiritual experience, he mentions having 'intercourse' with his new sidekick; an out of place line that rips itself away from the surrounding speech to make you momentarily wonder if perhaps the movie is smarter than you are giving it credit for. At least until you see the midget devil in the final scene.

With the glaring exception of an ending, Salvation! contains within itself all the individual components of a movie, but they never unite into anything even remotely resembling a plot. There are characters. Those characters speak dialog and have dramatic conflicts. Those conflicts even elicit faint implications of character growth. The problem is that the film has absolutely no idea how much time to spend on a particular scene, or how that scene should flow into and impact the scenes that follow. As Homer Simpson once said, "It's just a bunch of stuff that happened." Crucial moments are glossed over or skipped entirely, while endless minutes are spent on Viggo riding his motorcycle across Staten Island. (The least friendly place in America!) The third act might as well just be the cliff notes of an entirely different movie.

Lay the blame at the feet of writer/director Beth B, who apparently is far more at home in the world of music videos than feature films. It looks like a movie, it sounds like a movie, but it certainly doesn't flow like a movie. On the bright side, Ms. B's MTV skill-set gives the film interesting (but thoroughly dated) production design and music. New Order practically scored the thing, with the gaps filled in by a variety of mid-'80s post-punk. (Most of it written by either Arthur Baker or the director herself.) Clearly the best track is "You Can't Blackmail Jesus", an alt-country gospel sung by McHattie himself. That alone makes the movie better than Valentines Day or The Rats.

During nighttime scenes at the reverend's mansion (probably %50 of the film) the lighting alternates between electric blues and violets, and would probably be impressive looking outside the confines of a two decade old VHS tape. Otherwise it just looks like electric Smurfs are being tossed violently at the camera in every shot. Like every other aspect of the film, the cinematography can only hint at the theoretical existence of an awesome film that came very close to being made.

Salvation! certainly did one thing right (besides McHattie's phantom country music career) and that was creating a perfect storm of cinematic irrelevance. Certainly the post-punks and proto-goths of the middle 1980s were itching to knock the self righteous would-be censors of the 'religious right' down a couple of pegs, and the film's portrayal of a hypocritical televangelist who pockets his flock's money while watching porn seems to have at least shocked and appalled most of the people who have bothered to post "user reviews" of it online. The problem was that reality came along and stole the film's thunder. In the wake of the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, the idea of a corrupt preacher of the cathode ray tube became passé. By 1990 people practically expected them to drop like flies out of grace, and today the fallen televangelist character has long passed beyond cliché into archetype. It's awfully hard to knock someone down a peg when they've already gotten drunk, passed out, and fallen completely off the pegboard (or wherever else these metaphorical pegs may be inserted). So after going out of its way to make numerous and powerful enemies, the film's satire ends up getting undercut by current events. Combine that with the fact that it's an incoherent mess, and you've got a powerful recipe for being stuck on VHS well into the 21st century and beyond.

I'm sure it's scant consolation to Beth B's abortive career in feature length narrative cinema, but her combination of un~~wieldy~~conventional filmmaking, a quality '80s soundtrack, and a cast that was literally decades ahead of its time has rendered the film irresistible to weirdos like me who buy VHS tapes off of eBay purely because they are covered by a veil of obscurity as intriguing as it is absolute.

*They once made a baby and have long since split up.

Put this Guy in Charge of the Internet

2010-02-09T12:49:00.001-06:00

Seriously, I nominate this "richfofo" person for president of cyberspace. Sure he mainly seems to blog about reality TV and various other Slut related clap-trap, but these exhaustive montages of annoying horror-movie clichés are pure gold.

No technology has turned horror/thriller screenwriting on its head more than the cellular phone. Now that nearly every warm body in the first world has a portable means of contacting the authorities, your average psycho slasher has to adapt by killing much faster (and ending the movie too soon) or risk a humiliating slaughter fail (also ending the movie too soon). Surly this means a dramatic rethinking of horror screenwriting tropes, correct?

Wrong. It just means that every movie needs a painfully forced bit of expository dialog to remove the devices' corrosive effect on the narrative. Without further ado, here is nearly all of them:

Free slasher movie idea: The Faraday Cage - A deranged technophile kidnaps people who use their cellphones for evil purposes (taking calls during movies, texting while driving, general techno-rudeness) and traps them in a Saw-esque dungeon where cellular signals can't penetrate. Murder ensues. Problem solved.

Next up, goddamn mirror scares (and their bastard children, mirror scare fake-outs):

Hopefully we'll get to see "Blurry things running in front of the camera while a violinist has a seizure" next.

If that's not enough for "president of the internet," this person also posts a ridiculous number of videos about his weird looking cat. As we all know, the internet is made of cats.

Special Bonus! A perfect montage explanation of why I think Reality TV is the devil:

Oh boy! Shallow people acting like they think shallow people should act when cameras are around! How is that 'reality' and how is that entertaining in the least? I would rather watch a feature film that I hate than five minutes of this inexplicably popular sham that won't fucking die.

Also, this blog isn't dead... it's just resting. I'm attempting to actually write the book I've had kicking around my skull for the last three years, and Video Updates, which was originally created as a way to keep exercising the prose muscles whenever the fiction muse abandoned me, sort of took over for a while. Unfortunately, I lack the talent and discipline to maintain two simultaneous writing projects and a day job, so something is always going to get the short end of the stick.

Still, there are so many Videos to be Updated: Syngenor, Hausu, Razorback, Dead End Drive-In, Save the Green Planet, The Stone Tape, Death Bed, etc. Hell, I could spill forth another couple thousand words on Pontypool alone. So fear not, densins of the giant cyber-chasm that I scream my nonsense into, updates will continue to trickle out while I pretend to be a big boy writer. And someday, when I'm rich and famous or at least completely unemployable, Video Updates will be restored to its former glory* and then some.

Also, there will probably be more video game related content in the near future, but that still has the word "video" in it, so if you don't like it you can cram it with walnuts.

*Former glory may only exist in the author's mind. Your results may vary.

Quixotic Blu-Rays

2010-01-08T11:00:00.001-06:00

Movies that deserve the HD treatment they will most likely never get:

1. Kontroll

This spectacular Hungarian film about subway ticket inspectors is most notable for launching the lackluster Hollywood career of Nimród Antal, director of Vacancy, Armored, and the upcoming Predators. (I admit to not seeing any of those, but the reviews and trailers scream 'Meh' to me at the top of their metaphoric lungs.) Kontroll itself is a bit of a mixed bag of indie cinema tropes (quirky characters, fugue state twists, and a 'meet-cute' wearing a bear costume) but its kinetic, textured visuals and impressive subterranean setting, which remain impressive on the poorly mastered DVD we're currently stuck with, could blow some serious minds.

I'm still kicking myself for missing my chance to see this on the big screen. A blu-ray would go a long ways toward consoling me.

2. Stalker

One of my all time favorite films of all time, Stalker is a languorous science fiction epic by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It's a possibly allegorical tale of three men, Writer, Professor, and Stalker, who venture into a forbidden wasteland called the Zone to retrieve a possibly extraterrestrial wish granting artifact. A story of the fantastic, warped by the director into something more concerned with mankind's battered spirit than aliens or ray guns, it is nevertheless filled to the brim with striking visuals and authentically gritty locales.

Unfortunately, the film has yet to even see an adequate DVD release. For now we must settle for a murky picture inexplicably split over two out of print discs. (One dual layer, one single... why?) The only thing it really has going for it (aside from being the only game in town) is the shockingly adequate, if not entirely faithful, 5.1 surround sound mix.

I bug the Criterion Collection on a regular basis about the film, but it's likely that the distribution rights pose a problem. (They've managed to release a handful of his other films--Ivan's Childhood, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev--so there is hope for at least some HD action.)

3. Kairo

My all time favorite J-horror, Kairo is yet another film rich in gritty detail and elaborately decaying industrial backdrops. It's even been described as 'Tarkovskian,' which is a non-pejorative way to say "glacially paced" or "slow as hell." Just don't fall asleep to the film, as I have done (same for Stalker--a great movie for naps, seriously) because the score will wake you back up for some hardcore existential dread. Hell is full, and the dead are invading our world through electrical and information networks to show us just how sad and alone we are in this universe. The only recourse is to run like hell and seal them off with red duct tape. (Then you can never, ever, ever go back there, BTW.)

If I may rant and swear for a minute, WHY THE FUCK is there a fucking HD DVD (I noticed this before the format died--yes I've got a player--shut up) and two sequels for the godawful US remake, but no known plans for an HD treatment of the original? If they release the remake on blu before the original, I'm going to ultra-plotz and take all of you with me.

4. Begotten

Long before he sold out with the mediocre Suspect Zero, E Elias Merhige was a promising experimental filmmaker sweating over the meticulous photographic techniques in his silent, black & white epic of human suffering, Begotten. I've yet to see the whole thing, because the DVD is so out of print that it currently goes for $90(!) on Amazon. Furthermore, what little I have seen could only hint at the wonders of a theatrical or HD screening.

When mastering a home video copy of a true film, studios have an irritating 'baby with the bathwater' tendency to clean up the print with digital noise reduction. Limited use of DNR is a cost effective way to clean up the most distracting bits of dust and dirt, but many disc authorers use it as a crutch, reducing the image's total detail, eliminating all that delicious film grain, and basically destroying the entire point of high definition mastering.

The wild, organic nature to film grain (an artifact of its chemical nature) is far more pleasing to the eye than its digital equivalent (pixels, boo!) so while HD and its big brothers 2K and 4K are finally shrinking their pixels even smaller than the grains of 35mm film emulsion, the texture of those grains is still an integral element to the format and should be preserved in digital duplication whenever possible.

This most apparent in Begotten. So much time and effort went into the film's processing and optical printing that it is starting to creep into the world of animation. When poorly mastered or shown in an inadequate format, all that grain and contrast is lost in the murk. When the texture is almost more important than the image itself, and you eliminate the texture, all you have left is a shitty, blurry picture.

Sometimes high-def is the only way to properly see a film, but if no one can do so, then there ends up being little demand for a high-def release. It's a negative feedback loop of cinematic under appreciation.

5. The Best of Classic Experimental Cinema

See the last sentence above. Most experimental films are almost completely lost to SD video, and are definitely lost to YouTube. A collection of the greats on HD would be the closest most of us could get to seeing 'Mothlight' or 'Serene Velocity' in the proper celluloid setting.

Evilspeak (1981)

2009-12-16T22:19:00.000-06:00

One word: Synergy.

Evilspeak boasts not the yawn inducing synergy of starting a pizza joint next to a dive bar in your local cracked-out strip mall, but the infinitely more awesome (though slightly less plausible) combination of the Apple II and Satan. Each were powerful tools circa 1981, but it clearly took a genius intellect to discover how much more they could do when combined. Just imagine what Satan could do for spreadsheet efficiency; reach six hundred and sixty six rows and columns, and the client's face literally melts.

In the film, it takes the brilliant mind and immense forehead of a young Clint Howard to combine Satan's peanut butter with the chocolate of 1mghz processing power and monochrome screens. (Of course, as we learned from Jumping Jack Flash, Apple II screens can easily do full color when imbued with the power of Johnathan Pryce.) Playing the unfortunately named Stanley Coopersmith, Clint is a hapless orphan with a charity scholarship to a prestigious military academy. He's crap at sports, has 24/7 pit stains, and is a constant target for Bubba, the school's resident bully and future bumbling neighbor on 'That '70s Show.' (For more disturbingly young Don Stark action, check out Switchblade Sisters.) His already miserable existence gets significantly worse when he's put on punishment detail and forced to clean out the dilapidated chapel basement with a surly, gin-soaked caretaker.It is while digging around in this ancient detritus that Coopersmith discovers the mystical spellbook and diary of arch-satanist Bull from 'Night Court.' Fascinated but lacking fluency in Latin, he squirrels it away to translate later. In a stroke of luck, the computer lab has some handy-dandy Latin to English software. A hobby born of curiosity at first, it becomes a dangerous obsession as the translated text ultimately turns the computer into a digital Necronomicon. Somehow the text coalesces into Satanic software (I knew there was something fishy about BASIC) and begins demanding various sacrificial items: unholy water, consecrated host (that's Jesus Crackers™ for those of you born secular), and blood. The water is found in a conveniently labeled jar on a nearby shelf, some host is procured from the chapel above, but blood will require more than a simple fetch quest to obtain. This leaves the newly possessed Apple with nothing to do but loop the film's tagline over and over: "Data Incomplete - Blood Required."The rest of the film is essentially one long justification of Clint Howard's inevitable conjuring of dark forces. Aside from a subplot revolving around the headmaster's inexplicably hot secretary and her repeated attempts to steal the jeweled pentagram off of the Satanic tome, every scene exists only to show either that everyone is mean to Clint Howard or that he clearly has nothing to lose by invoking the dark powers of Bull from 'Night Court.' After finding a stray puppy, he starts hiding it in his lair under the chapel, unable to bring himself to sacrifice it to his new hobby. When Bubba eventually breaks in with a throng of drunken bullies, they get caught a peer pressure feedback loop that results in him stabbing the puppy and draining its blood.The malevolent software is not impressed with the bully's drink sodden sacrifice, but instead of a runtime error or kernel protection fault, it simply clarifies the recipe:Finally confident that it has made its point, the movie at last gets down to business; the business of Clint Howard massacring his tormentors. He acquires human blood by hurling the headmaster, who was in the process of discovering his devilish deeds, onto a spiked chandelier of evil. (Quite an athletic feat for a nerd such as Stanley Coopersmith.) With the ritual complete and a dead puppy to avenge, Bull from 'Night Court' imbues Stanley with the demonic power to smite his enemies (who conveniently happen to represent the religious order that long ago foiled Bull's plans).At this point, the movie gets sort of awesome. Stanley emerges from his lair under the chapel with a giant sword, crazy hair, and the ability to levitate, wild boars run amok, and the nails fly out of the hands of a giant stone crucifix, firmly embedding themselves in the priest's skull. It's all very violent and sacrilegious, but the best part is how Clint Howard's demon sword doesn't chop or slice things so much as magically convert them into rubber sacks of meat that explode all over the place.
Despite it's winning premise, Evilspeak (or should that be EvilSpeak... or Evil's Peak... or EvilSpeak & Spell) sulked in obscurity for many years. Due to the film being branded a 'Video Nasty' in the UK, it fell prey to that country's censorious witch hunt of the early '80s. After the moral panic caused by Abel Ferarra's Driller Killer and the exploding home video market, the Brits were jonesing to protect their children, and the best way to do that seemed to be by banning the hell out of a bunch of violent (and usually terrible) VHS tapes.
The film was completely banned in England, and then only released with severe edits to all the good bits. Many of these cuts were made to other countries' releases as well, and despite the 'uncut' version eventually released in 1999, there are supposedly still some boobs and blood missing from the secretary's shower scene and subsequent death by wild boar. On top of that, several gore shots have clearly been recovered from sub-par sources. The professor's improbable death by hanging spike in particular contained a shot that looked to be taken from a VHS bootleg then chopped to fit the original aspect ratio.
While censorship is nothing new for the world of cinema (nor is it going anywhere in the near future) it seems more than a little bizarre from a 21st century perspective that anyone anywhere would get their judgmental panties in a bunch over a movie in which Clint Howard uses an Apple II to summon a demonic Bull from 'Night Court' in order to get revenge on Don Stark. The fact that people took the movie serious enough to ban it just boggles the mind.

The Chaos Experiment (2009)

2009-12-09T12:37:00.000-06:00

Video Updates would like to welcome filmmaker extrodinare and newest contributor, Greyduck.

Whereas terminal disease guy in the Saw movies traps his victims in elaborate torture devices to make them value their lives, James Pettis (Val Kilmer) traps his victims his victims in a sauna to make them feel like what global warming might be like someday.

His 6 victims (who include Eric Roberts and Patrick Muldoon) introduce themselves in one of the most pretentious, of many pretentious sequences, showing them through a dense yellow filter, in split screens that dissolve over more shots, that dissolve over even more shots. Needless to say, this overwhelming presentation doesn’t really leave us caring much about the characters or their fate. There’s angry Brooklyn guy, slightly older sagely guy, other guy, shy girl, seemingly normal girl, and skanky girl who walks around with her top off, while “Bolero” by Ravel booms on the soundtrack. Yes, we get it. It’s very warm in there.

We find out they’re all in the sauna as some part of dating service, although none of them seem particularly interested in making a good first impression.

Meanwhile...

Pettis goes to some talk to a guy with the press and a police detective about his little scheme with the people in the sauna, who will eventually be slowly steam baked to death and he explains he will only let them go if the paper publishes his findings on global warming, which of course will be unbearable in 2012. So Val is playing so sort of evil, insane Al Gore.

The folks in the sauna bicker. Val as Pettis continues to ramble, and the movie randomly cuts to shots of him alone on a spinning carousel, starring off blankly. I think this is supposed to re-iterate the fact that he’s crazy with a capitol C.
Here’s where I take an extended phone call from a friend I haven’t heard from a while. I come back to find that not much has changed, and Val has gone from crazy to insane, or insanely constipated, judging by the way he’s biting his lip and twitching.

I’ve got to say, Val in this movie is just terrible, mostly due to the poor writing and directing, which is unfortunate, since he’s great in “The Doors”, a favorite film of my teen years, And I’m sure he’ll be good in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans (although, movie titles should never have semicolons in them... ever) Steam Experiment was certainly directed by no Werner Herzog, but by Philepp Martinez, who’s previous works include a Jean-Claude Van Damne movie, which is always a bad sign.

I digress. Anyway -SPOILERS ahead. Very lame ones.

Nails shoot through the door to the sauna, the people in the sauna get freaked out, and become more angry (hot under the collar, if they were wearing collars), and as Pettis’ theorized, begin to fight amongst each other. Shy girl slits her own throat, other die due to barely motivated quarrels, somebody gets a nail gun to the head. It's a whole-lotta chaos going on.

As Pettis continues to look more constipated and ramble on, the detective decides he’s just totally bananas and the “Steam Experiment” is just something he made up in his head to get attention and the people in it don’t actually exist. Exit detective.

The twist isn’t that they are all in his head, (for that movie, see Identity AKA “The 3”) the twist, I guess, is that Pettis’s mental ward doctor guy is also sorta crazy and is in on the experiment. He’s the the one who shot the nails through the door with a nail gun. Seemingly-normal-girl survives the experiment and we find out that she is the psychologist’s wife. Why did she participate? We’re not entirely sure. Why did his doctor help set up the experiment? We don't know. Pettis goes back to the the mental institution and lies around looking beardy. Is he crazy? Cut to him spinning around on a carousel again by himself... OK, yep = crazy, in case we forgot.

Roll credits.
I'm not really sure what the film was trying to say. Probably check the history of any dating service you sign up for, and don’t let them convince you to start your date with a bunch of strangers in a creepy sauna.

More Killer Crude: "Oceansize"

2009-12-09T11:50:00.007-06:00

Just in time for Copenhagen, another Killer Mutant Petroleum Monster has reared its hydrocarbon head. It's big, gooey, pissed off, and can be found in this outstanding CG short:

Oceansize

Great atmosphere and visuals aside, what the heck is going on? Is the oil monster defending itself from the rig? Does it not want to be pumped out of the ocean and converted to Hummer fuel? Why is the platform being operated by a hippy with incredibly long dreadlocks? Yes, the dirty and dreadlocked can frequently be found near oil rigs, but it is usually in the context of being led away in handcuffs.

Cult Film Shirts: Video Updates Approved

2009-11-12T13:30:00.003-06:00

Truly there is no better way to let your geek flag fly than with a nerdy T-shirt. Sure you could get a semi-functional VU meter shirt from Think Geek or wear anything seen on the chest of the Irish guy from "The IT Crowd," but wouldn't you rather dress like a rabid consumer of obscure trash cinema?

Yes now you too can dress just like the proprietor of this website... or at least dress like he would if he wasn't a cheap bastard that just spent all his money on Demon's Souls and a capped-rail picket fence for the Video Updates Small Dog Squad.

Vestron Video from Horrorshirts

A venerable distributor of VHS tapes during the format's '80s heyday, the Vestron Video logo and/or corporate influence can be found on many of the films discussed here at Video Updates,
including Slaughter High, Class of 1999, and Chopping Mall (under their "Lightning Video" subsidiary), as well as a whole host of genre favorites. Re-Animator, An American Werewolf in London, and Ghoulies just to name a few of the literally hundreds of movies they distributed. (They are also sadly responsible for the creation of Dirty Dancing and Earth Girls Are Easy.)

Cannon Films from Mondo Tees

Another relic of the golden age of analog video tapes, Cannon Films is the company to praise/blame for things like Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (seriously), Delta Force, and Death Wish parts 2 through 4. Amongst the action films and generic '80s filler, they also produced or distributed a host of horror and sci-fi films, including Tobi Hooper's underrated Lifeforce (which coincidentally was distributed by Vestron in some markets). None of their videos have currently been "Updated," but reviews on The Apple, Invasion USA, and possibly Ninja 3: The Domination are on the calender.

Plus, how many defunct production companies have fansites?

Hausu Cat from the Criterion Store

What the shit? This glorious affront to eyeballs everywhere is the latest gear from the venerated art-house distributor The Criterion Collection. It seems their theatrical arm, Janus Films, has gotten its mitts on the obscure Japanese slice of crazy known as Hausu (House) and has been showing it theatrically. (Fingers crossed for a DVD in the near future.) I caught it at the Oak Street a few weeks ago and was surprised at how little of the story I missed while watching my shitty, subtitle free bootleg.

Following a group of Japanese schoolgirls all named after their dominant personality trait and their misadventures in a kitty-cat controlled haunted house, it's an intensely strange, sumptuously photographed, and irrepressibly goofy little horror film that will leave you scratching your head and grinning like an idiot. It makes The Happiness of the Katakuris look like Picnic at Hanging Rock. Full review early next week.

Note: Any of these shirts would make an excellent X-mas gift for that special nerdy someone in your life. Hint hint, readers who I share DNA or alma maters with. (Probably most of you.)

Star Wars "Uncut"

2009-11-11T18:00:00.004-06:00

Slowly but surely the internet is inching towards some kind of singularity in which literally any bizarre, bat-shit insane idea you can come up with is not just a reality, but is already old news. I'm not just talking about crazy porn either. Case in point, someone not only came up with the head scratching idea to crowdsource an amateur shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Attack of the Colons that changes cast, director, camera, style, and quality every 15 seconds, but he's already got his mad dream well under way. The movie has been chopped up into 472 chunks that anyone (this means you) can sign up to recreate. There are only 46 segments left, and it has proved so popular that they're allowing multiple entries per clip. (Sorry, people who made theirs unwatchably terrible.)

All you need are some goofy props, video equipment, and some random hobos to fill in for Stormtroopers. Here's a couple clips that your's truly helped out with:

Scene 117

Scene 283

In case you haven't guessed, that's me overdoing my underacting as old Ben Kenobi, and also me playing Chewbacca underneath a Cowardly Lion mane and Dr. Zaius mask. (I totally made the sounds myself, honest.)

Chewbacca is a deep thinker.

Alert! Imminent LA Screening of The Telephone Book

2009-11-04T23:10:00.012-06:00

Holy Crap! It looks like I was the last to find out, but there is a screening of The Telephone Book at the Egyptian Theater tomorrow (Nov. 5th)! Apparently they've unearthed a 35mm print of this extremely rare, long forgotten masterpiece of the psychotic erotic. (or is that vice versa?) On top of that, they've got a Q&A with director Nelson Lyon!!!

Plus there are boobies!

For those of you who aren't familiar with the film, this detailed write up from a few months ago is a good place to start. The tagline pretty much says it all, but the end result is so brain meltingly insane that it has to be seen to be believed.

I'm stuck half a continent away so if any of you are going to catch this possibly once in a lifetime screening, please drop a comment with your thoughts/impressions.

Click here for an article about the screening by producer Merv Bloch.

And another in the LA Times.

Cronenberg in Context: The Fly (1986)

2009-11-04T17:18:00.004-06:00

Giant oil drums of ink have already been spilled in tribute to The Fly, David Cronenberg's most commercially and critically successful film, and since it is yet another of his works that I currently don't have a copy of (Damn you, '06 Chaska DVD thieves!) I'll do little here but scratch the surface.

Originally a short story published in Playboy, The Fly was quickly adapted into a 1958 Vincent Price film, and has since spiraled outward into a massive, loosely connected franchise. As of 2009 there have been two sequels, one remake (which we are discussing today), one sequel to said remake, an operatic adaptation of the remake, a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment, and a possible remake of the remake. (That is a lot of houseflies getting trapped in teleportation devices; perhaps these scientists need to keep their labs tidier.)

For Cronenberg's career, the film was a watershed moment in several ways. As mentioned above, it ended up being his biggest hit by a wide margin, becoming the world's first (and probably only) mainstream body-horror film. The academy award winning makeup effects involved in the tragic hero's gruesome metamorphosis (often described a brutal metaphor for the aging process) horrified and resonated with audiences, while the doomed romance and melodramatic love triangle at the heart of the film gave it an emotional heft rarely found in horror or sci-fi. In fact, the quality of Cronenberg's writing and directing of actors in The Fly signals the beginning of the end for those of us who have mixed feelings about the auteur's transformation into a high caliber, genre-free filmmaker. With the notable exception of eXistenZ, all of his post-Fly movies have drifted away from gross out effects and outlandish premises and toward straight, character driven thrillers. They're still as violent and disturbing for the most part, but the body-horror themes have been internalized by the various tortured, psychologically damaged protagonists.

If Cronenberg's films are looked at as a ven-diagram or continuum between his fleshy, venereal horror shows and dark, cerebral character studies, The Fly will always end up at dead center. The perfect balance of gore and character makes it his most perfect film, even if it only ends up as #4 on my personal list of favorites. (In case you're wondering, it goes: Videodrome, Dead Ringers, eXistenZ, The Fly.)

More Reasons The Fly is Awesome:

Pacing: Cronenberg's films can never be criticized for being overlong. Unlike many of the self indulgent filmmakers currently pumping out 3+ hour epics, he has skills with the editing blade to rival even pre-Gladiator Ridley Scott. The Fly begins practically in media res, with Jeff Goldblum and Gena Davis hitting it off at a party before going back to his place for a telepod demonstration. No time is wasted setting the characters up beforehand, and every scene has a clear purpose. (It helps that their are no added subplots beyond Goldblum's transformation and the central romance.) In fact, considering the quality of the writing, acting, and special effects, it could even be argued that the film is too short.

Stathis Borans: Played by the chronically underemployed John Getz of Blood Simple 'fame,' Stathis is a sleazy, '80s corporate villain type and the third prong in the film's love triangle. With a bushy rapist beard and hair as slick as his demeanor, the dude spends 75% of the movie radiating intense douchebag vibes. However, thanks to Getz's performance, there are subtle hints of vulnerability sandwiched between his smug cigar chomping and pompous theatrics. By the third act, the audience can almost believe that his despondent ex-girlfriend would look to him for help in her time of need. He even gets to save the day in the end, though at a gruesome personal cost.

It's amazing how much sympathy (read: any whatsoever) the film manages to find for such an unlikable character. Despite limited screen time in a relatively short film, he goes from 1980s cinema archetype to three dimensional character. In the end, he's arguably the film's most interesting character. Cronenberg even admits as such in the DVD commentary track (recommended BTW), and laments his choice to not develop him further. (Perhaps the 2007 opera version rectified this.)

Music: Yet another reason it isn't surprising that there is a Fly opera; the Howard Shore composed score can only be described with hyperbolic language like 'epic' and 'intense.' It's heavy, orchestral, and manages to highlight the characters' intense, borderline melodramatic emotional arcs without sending the whole ordeal passed that thin, hazy line separating good drama from "over the top." Here's the main theme:

No Neo-Luddism: Unlike most 'science gone wrong' movies (including the original 1958 film), The Fly does not blame science itself for the protagonist's fateful predicament. He gets drunk and teleports himself without proper precautions after his girlfriend disappears on him for the evening to meet with her ex-boyfriend. No one tries to make a case that the telepods are too dangerous or that he tried to play god; emotion and strong drink simply made him sloppy.

Buff Jeff Goldblum in tiny underwear: I mean... if you're in to that sort of thing... which I'm not... not that there is anything wrong with that.

Mini Review: Population 436 (2006)

2009-11-02T19:50:00.002-06:00

Three word review: Population Shit Sandwich

In all seriousness, the movie is pretty terrible. I decided to watch it on a Netflix Instant whim, and while it wasn't bad enough to get uncerimoniously turned off (a nice benefit of instant viewing), I in no way recommend or endorse seeing it.

The premise is tantilizing in its vagueness: a census worker investigates a remote hamlet that's population has remained at the exact same number for a century. A good writer could take that sentence and go nearly anywhere with it. The problem is that Population 436 (spoiler alert) takes it somewhere in the general vicinity of nowhere. The town ends up being a rather benign religious cult that assigns special theological importance on the number 436 and strictly maintains its population at that number. Unexplained supernatural forces make sure that women always go into labor whenever someone is about to kick the bucket. Those same forces supposedly also prevent anyone who spends the night in town from ever leaving. When someone new arrives from the outside world, however, the supernatural takes a bit of a vacation, leaving the townspeople to choose who to kill Lottery style.The above description actually makes the film sound significantly more awesome than it is. For the most part, nothing happens. The census worker, played by the always adequate Jeremy Sisto, spends most of the film wandering about town, getting weirded out by the townspeople, and otherwise laboring through a rip off of The Wicker Man nearly as bad as that film's infamous remake. (And that one at least has Nick Cage randomly beating the shit out of women.)

Just swap Cage for Sisto, and 'punching' for 'talking'.

Often misclassified as a horror film, Population 436 is better described as a 'tragic bro-mance' between Sisto and the #1 reason why I should have been smart enough to not watch the film: Fred Durst. That's right, the Limp Biskit frontman and proud illiterate has a full on supporting role as the town's simpering vagina of a sheriff's deputy. (I actually had to double check which character he played on IMDB, as it turns out I don't recognize the dude without his trademark baseball cap and douche goatee. In all honesty, he's not that bad of an actor.) The two men become fast friends over some back-forty target practice. (The audience knows this because Durst awkwardly proclaims it after they spend less than a day together.) Of course, Sisto has to go and totally ruin things by scoring with the town's single hot chick, who the terminally shy Durst happens to be pining for. Their afternoon long friendship shattered, Durst almost gives in to the town elders' wish for him to take Sisto out, but their man-crush is too strong and he ultimately lets the outsider go at the film's comically overwrought emotional climax.

I wish I could quit you.

So our hero rescues the town's lone sane person (a little girl) and rides off into the sunset. Right? Who cares that absolutely nothing gets explained or resolved? Actually, an anti-climax isn't enough for Population 436, it boasts an anti-deus ex machina (diablous ex machina? crepusculum plaga ex machina?) where the strange green filtered dream the protagonist has been having turns out to be a prophetic vision of objects in his escape vehicle. These objects then distract him from the giant oncoming truck.

Damn it! Fred Durst didn't even die! That was the only way I rationalized watching a film with him in it: "It's a horror film, so he'll probably die. Seeing Fred Durst die should make up for having to see Fred Durst act."

Movies to watch instead of Population 436:

Hot Fuzz

The Wicker Man

Children of the Corn

The Wicker Man again

The Wicker Man remake

C.H.U.D.

Return of Alice Teaser

2009-11-02T11:24:00.002-06:00

The sequel to American McGee's Alice, a third person horror-action game based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, just got a new name (Return of Alice), a vague release timeframe (2011), and a teaser trailer:

UPDATE 11/4: Oh snap! It's not quite a hoax, but it's not quite official either. It turns out the above video exists in a quantum state of truthiness. According to Mr. McGee himself, the teaser was done by a fan and in no way represents... anything at all. No word on whether or not the title or release timeline are in any way accurate.

Cronenberg in Context: The Brood (1979)

2009-10-28T20:05:00.001-05:00

While not perfect, The Brood is Cronenberg's finest pre-Videodrome work, and can probably be thought of as his most generally 'Cronenbergian.' It has the human body being altered through the power of the mind, creepy reproductive/sexual undertones, and Robert Silverman. Partially inspired by the director's own brutal custody battle, the film tells the story of a family torn asunder by its emotionally unstable matriarch, who has been whisked away by a radical psychotherapist who is more interested in using her to advance his research than actually curing her.

That research is in Psychoplasmics, the study of effects on the body caused by emotional states. In typical Cronenberg fashion, a minor character (a police psychologist in this case) inadvertently explains the film's premise long before the audience has enough information to realize it. Referring to the protagonist's young daughter, who has just been traumatized by the brutal slaying of her grandmother, he proclaims "These things tend to express themselves one way or another. I've seen five year olds ... with ulcers as bad as any middle aged business man." By itself the sentence is fairly innocuous, but the film surrounding it expands that premise to the point of having a woman asexually produce creepy mutant babies via her severe rage problems. Like Videodrome and the motif of harmful sensation, The Brood takes a common sense idea, that emotional stress can cause a physical reaction, and stretches it deep into speculative fiction territory.Since I've previously rambled about the film, here are some bullet point reasons for you to add it to your Netflix queue:

The late, great Oliver Reed: England's heaviest drinking thespian plays the ethically challenged super-psychiatrist responsible for Psychoplasmics. For the most part it's a soft spoken role couched in rationality and passive-aggressive therapist talk, but he really takes off during the roll playing sessions involved in his radical treatments. The film begins with him and a simpering patient demonstrating Psychoplasmics for an audience in a manner strongly reminiscent of Kabuki theater. (A style Cronenberg would later explore in his adaptation of M. Butterfly.) With accelerating anger, Reed plays the role of the patient's father, emasculating and humiliating him until the rage manifests as gross boils all over the man's body.Plus, we get to see exactly how many children it would take to down the famously pugnacious actor:The Kindergarten Beatdown: In the second most shocking scene in the film, a kindergarten teacher with the absolute worst haircut late '70s Canada has to offer gets singled out by a pair of snowsuit clad broodlings when their "mother" begins to see the woman as a rival for her ex-husband's affections. Passing for kids at a distance they easily sneak into the classroom and arm themselves with little wooden hammers. They then proceed to beat the teacher to death (not an easy task, considering their size and weapon choice) in front of all her students. Some of the kids' "traumatized" faces are absolutely priceless. (Imagine the therapy bills. Yikes)The Laid Back Canadian Police: Not only does the sudden appearance of brutal midget murderers get no reaction from the cops other than "We weren't looking for anything that small," but the coroner explains the inner workings of a dead broodling with the calm demeanor of someone who autopsies previously unknown species of mutant children all the time. They even let the civilian protagonist sit in on the affair."Oh look, some sort of grotesque midget monster with no belly button and a life sustaining nutrient pouch to make up for the lack of a digestive system. That's probably the scientific discovery of the decade, if not century. I'd better calmly explain it to the son in law of the people it murdered instead of frantically calling National Geographic or the Weekly World News. Man, I'm hungry. I wonder what's on TV right now?"

The Terrible Day-for-Night: The Psychoplasmics research center is a fascinating slice of Canadian modernist architecture and is an easily readable location in the film. However, many scenes there take place at night, and without a massive budget for lighting, the film needed a way to show the building's distinctive silhouette for nighttime establishing shots. This is the result:The dusk photography and gradated blue filter makes for a nice try, but nothing can hide the fact that the shot breaks a cardinal day-for-night rule: never show the sky. It's a dead giveaway that you're using photographic trickery. (For some truly excellent, albeit CG assisted day-for-night see 28 Weeks Later.)

Note to Minnesota folk: don't forget to check out the last Cronenberg screening at the Trylon Microcinema this weekend. It's The Fly!

Cronenberg in Context: Scanners (1981)

2009-10-22T12:34:00.002-05:00

My apologies for the lack of stills in this post, but it turns out I don't actually have a copy of the film sitting around. It was stolen along with a bunch of other DVDs and Gamecube games a few years ago, and I guess I never got around to replacing it.

As a rung on the ladder of David Cronenberg's progression as a filmmaker, Scanners was both a big step up and a bit of an odd duck. It was his first big hit since the now practically forgotten Shivers, the very first publicly funded Canadian film to make a profit, and kick-started his '80s genre glory days. Also, thanks to one memorably gruesome shot, the film arguably has the biggest cultural footprint of his entire oeuvre. On the other hand it is literally his only film (ignoring the non-genre, tax shelter funded, race car oddity, Fast Company) without any sort of creepy psycho-sexual themes. There is nary a stomach vagina or scene of implied spine-hole fucking in sight; not even disturbingly intense marital sex.

Basically, Scanners is a breezy corporate espionage thriller with some Cronenbergian window dressing. Canadian Neo-Expressionist painter Stephen Lack (as in Lack-ing thespian talents, yuk-yuk) plays Cameron Vale, a remarkably well groomed hobo doomed to a life of misery by his uncontrollable ability to "scan" the thoughts of others. He is brought under the tutelage of Patrick McGoohan (the esteemed #6 and all around badass) to control his powers for use in combating evil scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside, also pretty badass). Mysteries are solved, double crosses are uncovered, and secret labs are repeatedly snuck into.It's all pretty standard spy stuff, only with a psi-twist that, while common today (especially in video games), was relatively unexplored at the time. Cronenberg's interest in the mind's fictional (unless you're a new-age weirdo) power over the body and physical world fits neatly within the film's sci-fi secret agent framework, but the film would have probably been long forgotten if not for the director's trademark use of unpleasant viscera. Scanners don't just passively read thoughts, they physically affect nervous systems, and with enough power, they can overwhelm a victim with enough intensity to detonate his or her skull.

Yup, this is essentially the shot that put Cronenberg on the map. People may not remember much about the film's lose storytelling or its lead's somnambulant performance, but they sure as hell remember "when that dude's head exploded." It's just one of the many ways the film makes the idea of people killing with their minds visually interesting, and it is excellent cultural shorthand for painful headaches and wishing ill towards your boss/spouse/annoying guy on the bus. Personally, whenever I'm stuck in a long boring meeting I make a concerted effort to mentally explode the head of whoever is currently talking. It's never going to happen, but at least I look like I'm paying attention.

Even though Scanners is an extremely important film in Cronenberg's history, it's still probably his worst film. (That's assuming you ignore Fast Company and grade his early works on a curve.) The ideas are there, but the story is oddly paced and completely free of emotional gravity. The script, which had to be completed over the course of filming due to draconian scheduling, takes some of the blame, but the majority is shouldered by poor Stephen Lack. He manages to pull off the various pained expressions and intense staring required of his psychic character, but nearly every time he opens his mouth it's an embarrassment. Yes, his character is supposed to have a "poorly developed sense of self" due to the lifetime of listening to other's thoughts in place of his own, but for the most part he doesn't seem to be trying for Keanu Reeves in A Scanner Darkly style introversion. When he proclaims "You murdered the future!" to his arch-enemy/long lost brother in the climactic scene, there is a clear attempt at angry inflection, even though it ends up being spread arbitrarily throughout the line. Also, in one of Lack's rare performances outside of Scanners, a brief cameo in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, he is just as cringeworthy. Clearly the dude just can't read dialog to save his life, but at least he can do this:

Melora Takes a Chance on Don't Mess with the Zohan

2009-10-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

It was there on Watch it Now of Netflix. In the comedy section. Adam Sandler from my fond media memories of his Saturday Night Live start and then solo career putting his comedy songs and bits on a cassette tape, which I listened to in my car. He appeared in movies then: Big Daddy, Waterboy, Little Nikki (also on Watch it Now). But also in great movies, like The Wedding Singer, and Punch Drunk Love where you got to see his more dramatic side. Playing the outcast. And we mustn't forget, the action/cop movie I think he did...or was that someone else. (I think you are thinking of Bulletproof with Sandler and a Wayans brother. It has one funny joke about farm animals peeing on people, but otherwise is a blight upon cinemadom - Knarf)

Anyhoo here are reasons I'm currently enjoying Zohan:

It takes place in another country in the beginning. It's always good to get out of your comfort zone in movies. We are in modern Israel, a land of sunshine, tan people, and hairy men. Adam Sandler fits right in. He's in shape, for Adam, and who doesn't like to see fit people? We get a full dose of Adam Sandler humor in this flick. (That's going in the "pro" column? Seriously? - K) They bring in the desire to be a hairdresser right away and I immediately thought of a recent movie I watched, Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I liked that movie and I think I'll like this movie too. I love the Israeli food and drink products he's constantly advertising. John Tuturro of great movies like The Big Lebowski is a wonderful villain character.

Act II: New York City. Love to see Chris Rock. His antics that people usually love in his country are not well received. Israeli stereo store in New York City. Very stereotypical. Haggling. Insulting? Good music. Constant Hummus eating. Every time I get turned off by the visual, there's a good song on. So gross! And then he fucks his clients. And then C&C Music Factory makes it okay. Let's hump our customers. I like that this movie makes me a little uncomfortable.

Message Recieved: I learned softball when I first moved here. When you're arab, it helps to fit in. And now, it's a Romeo and Juliet type movie. And we get really tense and then we settle our differences with a speech about how everyone thinks they're the same in America so it doesn't matter. Now for some sweet blowing up of stuff and butt kicking. To save the day we must make a Isreali/Palistinian magic vocal sound which hasn't been made in 2000 years. And Woa, there is a really fat Bruce Valance in a really short cut away. They make a giant arab friendly indoor mall. Oh now its the first floor of Mall of America Kiosks. Smulchy ending. How Jewish.

Knarf's Take: For a blonde haired, blue-eyed German, Melora sure likes the Jews a whole lot. (Especially Mel Brooks.) Also, I think she is rebelling against me for all the "rape" movies she's been subjected to over the years. (In my defense, Straw Dogs is really good, and I Stand Alone only has statutory rape in it. Everything else is just brutal violence against women.)

World's Best VHS Cover: Scanner Cop

2009-10-19T22:20:00.004-05:00

Does this look like the dude from Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! to anyone else? He comes from a 1994 spinoff of the sequels to David Cronenberg's Scanners.

This is why we hold onto our intellectual property rights for dear life, kiddies. Also, I desperately have to see this movie now.

Slaughter High (1986)

2009-10-18T17:45:00.004-05:00

This month in the Final Girl Film Club is Slaughter High. Click here for many more amusing deconstructions and disembowelments of the film.

If you accept the endemic flaws of the '80s slasher film as tropes holding the sub-genre together rather than artifacts of a creatively bankrupt outgrowth of mercenary-capitalist film making sensibilities, then Slaughter High is the greatest slasher film ever made. From the excruciatingly obnoxious characters to the paper thin plot held together by little more than frayed rubber bands and children's letters to Santa, the film takes every irritating slasher cliché and cranks the intensity to eleven before ripping the dials off.

It begins with a painfully overlong flashback sequence setting up the killer's origin. Marty is a pathetic chemistry nerd with huge glasses and a boner for Carol, one of the ten other students who are ever seen in their creepy, asylum themed school after the film's opening credits. Unfortunately for him, all ten appear to belong to the same giant clique, which happens to have an official policy of nerd abuse. With promises of naked tits and awesome sex, she cruelly lures him into the ladies locker room for an April Fool's prank. The token black janitor spots the shenanigans through a conveniently unglazed square of window and gets the school's (apparently) single teacher, an ineffectual Phy-Ed coach, to break it up, but not before they videotape the poor dweeb nekkid, poke him with a javelin, trick him into grabbing an electrified towel rack, and do a lot of general point-and-laugh action. (Though they might just be amazed by his magic pants that disappear between shots without being removed.) Needless to say, the prank climaxes with a swirlie.For humiliating and endangering the life of poor Marty, they are sentenced to a few afternoons of push ups and cardio. Since their increased exercise is obviously the nerd's fault, they naturally have to take revenge. This takes the form of a toxin laced joint that, using their preternatural insights into human behavior, they know he will light up in the chemistry lab while working on his big new project. See, this tainted marijuana is merely the distraction for the main revenge event: putting an unknown powdery substance into Marty's dangerous acid filled science beaker.It probably would have been good enough to simply ruin the experiment's final results, but the powder somehow makes the beaker explode once Marty returns to it. (With the crackerjack timing involved in this prank, these bullies should seriously consider careers in international espionage.) This creates a chain reaction of the absolute last things you want happening in a chemistry lab. First the Bunsen burner explodes, engulfing the edges of the screen in flames. Then the giant, precariously balanced bottle of nitric acid falls off its rickety shelf and flings its entire contents directly at Marty's face.The explosion attracts everyone's attention, but they arrive only to see Marty burned alive and wheeled away by paramedics. Carol leans over to apologize only to get strangled. It turns out to all be a traumatic nightmare of hers, and the movie proper can begin. (Only a quarter of the way through its runtime, no less.) Thanks to some excruciatingly wooden acting, we learn that it's class reunion time, one of the gals is going to be late arriving, and the weather is going to be rainy.

The movie then has to reacquaint us with its long separated cast of annoying characters who were all just on screen a few moments prior. They arrive at their creepy, isolated high school to find it locked up and in a state of even more advanced disrepair than when they attended as suspiciously old looking high school students. This doesn't seem to really alarm anyone, but then, neither does the fact that no one has shown up except those involved in a certain nerd's humiliation and mutilation. Nor is anyone concerned about the April 1st date, which is the anniversary of their fateful prank and Marty's birthday. They eventually tire of standing around pretending to have American accents and break into the school to explore.After about a billion prank based fake scares, the stumble onto the reunion site: a room decked out with food, liquor, and all their old lockers. Every locker has something personal that went missing in high school, except for a single extra one, which turns out to be Marty's. Somehow, absolutely none of this raises any red flags for anyone. They discuss the little nerd's fate, make jokes, and get super duper high, but no one bothers to ponder their situation's sinister implications.A couple of the guys run into the old janitor and give him a beer, but since the dude is black and this is a slasher film, he gets killed almost immediately afterwards by a man in a joker mask. The same joker mask worn by the lead prankster on Marty's fateful day.Now that everyone is nicely shnockered and the movie is half over, people can finally start dying. And considering the awful chunks of human waste they are, it can't start soon enough. Seriously. Look what they did to poor Marty's picture:It's bad enough that they are too stupid to see the clear intent of this evening, but now they're mocking the wounds of their tragic victim and soon to be slaughterer. A slaughterer who has calculated their behavior with the same inhuman precision that they once used on him. You see, he apparently knew exactly which beers they drunken revelers would start shotgunning (PBR, natch) and filled the cans with a special expanding science brew so devious that it neither causes the beer can to explode nor warns the victim with a noxious flavor. (In all honesty, I probably wouldn't be able to tell PBR from fizzy green science juice either.) One burst stomach later, the killing finally starts in earnest.

You seriously didn't notice that going down?

Oh what easy pickings these kids provide, too. One gal, after being sprayed with blood by the gutsplosion, has the completely sane and rational idea to separate herself from the group and draw a nice hot bath. Even ignoring the strange existence of a bathtub with working hot water in an abandoned high school, what could possibly motivate someone whose friend was just murdered by a psychopath who is almost certainly in the same building to get totally naked and take a fucking bath all by herself. Does she have some kind of OCD cleanliness thing?Since the killer is practically precognitive, he had already made plans for someone to hop in the tub and rigged it to start filling with acid after a couple minutes. Not just any acid, either. This stuff can apparently convert an entire bathtub of water into extremely potent flesh dissolver almost instantly. Which I guess makes it similar to ice-nine or Buck Fever Reliever, and also means that Marty certainly would have won his chemistry prize if he hadn't been horribly disfigured.

The bath-termath.

The girl who was going to be late eventually shows up, people wander about endlessly in the dark, someone finds a giant picture of Marty that hands keep erupting from, and everyone generally gets picked off one by one. The gearhead tries to rig up a lawn tractor to smash down the locked gates, but no one bothers to stand guard while he works underneath lawnmower blades. Meanwhile, his horny wife goes off to score with one of the other guys.Once it's down to the last three victims, they finally do the sensible thing and hole up in a room with a javelin as a weapon. Unfortunately, they all eventually pass out and end up sleeping in until passed 11am. (slackers) Refreshed and reinvigorated with stupid, they split up again until there is only Carol as the 'final girl.'Whoo-boy, what a final chase it is, too. The filmmakers take every opportunity to show off their steadycam technology as she runs desperately through the halls to try and run out the clock. It seems that April Fools Day only lasts until noon (huh?) and since "Marty's stuck to the rules so far" (what?) he should let anyone who survives into the PM on the 2nd go free. (Really?) What set of rules exactly is she referring to? Sure it is clearly an elaborate revenge plot of Marty's on a specific, important date, and yes, some of the characters have died in manners related to things they did to Marty in the beginning, (acid, electrocution, nudity, lawnmowers... wait, nevermind) but Carol has no more reason to assume that the killer is following any special set of rules than she does assuming that the killing will end at noon.

This was a High School?

Okay, it has been brought to my attention that "April Fool's Day" does indeed technically end at noon in the UK, but since the movie has just spent an hour and a half desperately pretending it is taking place in the US despite all the poorly disguised accents, I'm still calling 'bullshit'. Also, the jokes may end at noon, but I have found nothing saying that they begin the night before. Either it goes all day or you have a six hour prank window; anything else is cheating.Carol hides in the girl's locker room, but the toilet starts to fill with blood, so she goes back into the halls to get chased some more. Then some more. Then a pause to let the camera guy catch up. Then she circles back around through the same exact hallways. When Marty shows himself, she easily batters his nerdy frame with a bat, but then leaves the bat right next to him as she runs away. He attacks again and she throws him out a window, before ineffectually tossing a javelin at him so he can use it later. This is the movie in a nutshell, an incredibly stupid protagonist doing absolutely everything she can to offer her life up to the killer, who is too frail to be any sort of physical threat to her. Oh yeah, then she hides in the girl's locker room again. Why on Earth would she assume he is not going to look for her at the site of her betrayal and his humiliation... twice?Despite his ineffectiveness, the writers clearly couldn't think of a way for someone so stupid to actually get away, so she eventually does get her ass stabbed with a javelin. Now that Marty has revealed and avenged himself the movie should be over, but instead it starts getting weird. About two seconds after finishing his last victim off, he starts hearing creepy, wailing voices. The voices of his recent victims to be precise. They have come back from the dead with a fog machine to bully him supernaturally. Poor kid just can't catch a break.Only it's all a fever dream of the still bandaged, still hospitalized Marty. That's right kids, it's all a dream. A doctor shows up to check on him, but now he's switched places with the nurse and back to killing mode. Then he starts ripping of his own face. The End?Okay, so none of the film's three different endings makes much of any sense, but neither did anything that came before. Slasher films aren't known for their quality writing, but usually the actions performed within have at least some basis in traditional human behavior. The writers of Slaughter High appear to be so disconnected from how people think and act that it would not be surprising if they turned out to be extraterrestrials or a computer matrix. (Considering the strange, forced accents of many of the actors, I'm leaning toward the alien theory.) Despite the fact that the creepy, clearly abandoned school is locked up tight and may as well be covered in neon signs proclaiming "unpleasant death inside" none of the characters show even the faintest signs of suspicion until the first actual death, after which they proceed to split up, run around, and generally do whatever they can to get killed. On the other hand, if Marty wanted to lead his victims into believing that this was a genuine reunion and not a death trap, why would he keep the place locked up with no indication of what he had set up inside? (Though it does seem to magically unlock itself every once and a while.) Why would he wait until the night of his revenge to kill the janitor? How come the janitor never noticed him moving lockers around and bringing in so much booze? The only possible explanations are that the filmmakers were using the "it's all a dream" excuse to do whatever they wanted, or that they were simply too lazy and stupid to bother caring if anything made even a tiny flicker of sense.While Slaughter High is certainly a decent movie for drinking heavily and marveling at the balls to the wall idiocy, you're time would probably be better served by watching the nearly identical and vastly superior April Fool's Day, which coincidentally came out at almost the exact same time. (SH was originally titled April Fool's Day, but wisely decided to differentiate itself by tricking movie rental patrons into thinking it was a high school slasher film and not just a bunch of annoying people alone in a creepy old building.) If you do decide to brave the horrors, take special note of the ultra synthy Harry Manfredini score and enjoy the murky cinematography. Just to give you a taste, here is a digitally enhanced still of some douchebag crawling through the woods:If any of you out there are experts in the field of illicit substances, is this even remotely close to how one should smoke a joint?

Cronenberg in Context: Videodrome (1983)

2009-10-15T12:53:00.000-05:00

The following post contains spoilers, but probably won't make any damn sense if you haven't seen the movie anyway.

This may come as a shock to you, but I loves me some Videodrome. It is probably my all time favorite movie, and it certainly had a massive influence on the disheveled 16 year old version of me who picked up its sun bleached plastic case at a rapidly decaying Mr. Movies. Despite the existence of a most excellent Criterion Collection release, this is arguably the best way to experience Videodrome for the first time. The film practically craves the blurry texture and fuzzy tracking problems of a long neglected analog video tape. It certainly goes out of its way to work the medium's technical, physical, and cultural artifacts into the mise en scène.As a bona fide high school AV nerd spending as much time as possible with the half broken, second hand video production equipment, I was also essentially Videodrome's ideal viewer. The great rack-mount towers of oscilloscopes, VTRs, and broadcasting equipment fascinated me with its clunky DIY aesthetics and odd juxtaposition (sometimes simultaneously) of the advanced and the antiquated. I was completely taken by the film's zeitgeist, so the occasional nudity and infamous bizarro-gore were merely the icing on the cake.This analog-philia, combined with the weirdly artificial grime of the Toronto back alleys in which much of the film takes place (it's like no one has cleaned in decades, but no one has been littering either) gives the film a subtle vibe of alternate reality. I like to call it "tubepunk" or "analog-punk," because while it is obsessed with the ramifications of advancing technology, the real world has long ago surpassed it in ways it only dimly perceived. One character gives a fairly accurate prediction of 'user names' and the Internet's egocentric pseudo-anonymity, while another decries the socially destructive effects of media over-stimulation, a laughably quaint idea coming out of 1983. On the other hand, it is too obsessed with looking forward and too subtly different from the '80s as we knew them to ever truly feel like the past. The result is a fascinating world that is sadly unique to the film that spawned it. (Hence my clamoring for a video game sequel, and decrying of a "modern" remake.)For Cronenberg's career, Videodrome marks a clear turning point in his slow evolution from high concept horror auteur to a more mature director of cerebral thrillers. It's also arguably his first truly good film, unmarred by the weak performances that periodically raise their heads in his earlier work (I'm looking at you, dude from Scanners), and completely saturated with dark subtext. Films like Scanners and The Brood obviously had a lot of ideas and certainly revolve around his favored themes, (the power of the mind over the physical world, gooey abjections of the human form) but Videodrome takes these ideas and runs with them.One theme, further explored in the film eXistenZ, is the traumatic effect of exposure to alternate layers of reality. When protagonist Max Renn (James Woods) is exposed to the Videodrome signal, he begins having hallucinations so vivid that they cannot be distinguished from reality. Another character, Professor Brian O'Blivion, suffers from a Videodrome induced brain tumor (similar to the emotion fueled cellular carnosity in The Brood) that he postulates is actually a new organ with the ability (purpose?) to create an even closer relationship between the mind and the cathode ray tube. "Television is the retina of the mind's eye," he frequently proclaims, possibly meaning that Renn's hallucinatory experiences with the Videodrome show and signal are the result of his consciousness being extended into the television program. Once the boundaries between meatspace and the 'video' world are totally blurred, it becomes impossible for Renn and, by extension, the audience to tell exactly how real the events on screen are, and how characters untainted by the signal are perceiving the events.
For instance, Max gets a crazy mutant gun hand, but when he is brainwashed into murdering his unaffected business associates he merely shoots them with a totally normal weapon. This gives the impression that his fleshy new powers only exist within his Videodrome fugue state. (Perhaps other victims of the signal could also see them.) However this is later contradicted by an unaffected character getting his hand mutated into a flesh grenade, which background extras react in horror to, after sticking it into Renn's stomach vagina along with a mind controlling video tape. What exactly were these unaffected characters witnessing and what are the ramifications for the seperation between the real hallucinatory worlds.

The film gives no easy answer to the above question, which merely scratching the surface of possible textual analysis. There are many more interesting questions about perception, censorship, the motif of harmful sensation, the social effects of violent and pornographic media, and our relationship with media in general. Max has a career as a small time cable pornography provider eager to break the next taboo. There are repercussions of the Videodrome signal's increased effectiveness under sexually violent imagery, as well as the hints of vast, moralistic, right wing conspiracies. There's enough to chew on in this 89 minute film to write a whole book. In fact someone did! (Which I confess I have yet to read.)Videodrome: way more than "that movie where James Woods has a stomach vagina," (though it certainly is that too) or a Family Guy joke about nudity. Buy it, steal it, Netflix it. If you are in Minnesota, the Trylon Microcinema just had a showing and will be doing more Cronenberg movies through the end of October. I'll be attempting to catch all of them, so drop me a comment if you're going as well.

"It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous."