Rare Exports (2010) - Jalmari Helander

finding out the truth about santa claus is a childhood rite of passage from faith and naïveté to a much healthier state of misanthropic skepticism. once we dispense with the lies our parents tell us, we unshackle ourselves from the narratives into which we were unwittingly born and can revel in a more solipsistic human condition. years later, we share self-congratulatory chuckles at christmas parties when we reveal to some n00b that the morbidly obese senior citizen in the red velour tracksuit sporting facial hair from movembers decades past is, in fact, the corporatised creation of coca-cola (nevermind what's mixed in this plastic cup of jack). eventually people we know have children of their own and we're forced to play along as they repeat the process, set their kids up for utter disillusionment with the world, and - worst of all - send us pictures of their offspring getting manhandled by ex-cons in cos-play.

but what if santa was real? better: what if nordic mythology was real, and santa was actually the giant goat-headed devil-spawn of a mightily pissed-off odin who gets his kicks eviscerating the local fauna and boiling the towns-children alive? the standard holiday cinema classics would be replaced with films like rare exports, for one. and well they should! first the scandies saved vampires; now, they've saved christmas. and bless them, every one.

our brave young hero Pietari breaches the borderlands of his village one afternoon and discovers that the one true santa claus has been ice-boxed beneath the breath-taking korvatunturi mountains, and some ill-advised americans are trying to exhume him. Pietari digs out the mythology textbooks, realises santa is not to be fucked with, and alongside his stocking sets a bear-trap with care. one of the traps snares a catatonic old naked dude, some towns-children disappear, and Pietari devises a plan to save christmas, his village, and the world. throw in some pig slaughter, old man junk, and redemption of the father by the son, and you get one of the greatest stories ever told.

rare exports is kinda perfect: beautifully filmed, refreshingly original, and bloody heart-warming - a holiday classic for the whole family. no really, i want to watch this with my parents ... right after it's a wonderful life. it fills christmas with magic again.

Saw: The Franchise (2004-2010)

saw has never been my gig. though i caught the first film in theatre and have a vague recollection of watching the second in someone's basement, i wasn't among the throngs of teenagers at the hallowe'en weekend opening nights because a) i had better things to do with my hallowe'en weekends, and b) i wasn't a teenager. i'm too old for nü horror, and too jaded for a new franchise. while torture porn isn't exactly lost on me (i dug hostel enough to see it twice), the new generation of north american horror seems designed for an impatient audience of ADD delta-betas lacking knowledge of and/or respect for the canon. but as the recent release of saw VII threatens to be its final installment, we figured we'd give the franchise a looksee - you know, just to check out what the kids are watching these days. and though i sat down with fists primed for shaking, turns out this shit ain't bad. it's not good, mind you, but i was entertained enough not to shout at anyone to get the fuck off my lawn.

Part I (2004) - James Wan
my initial interest in the first saw film was somewhat unprecedented for the horror genre: the actors. or rather, one actor in particular: cary elwes. aside from the obvious draw of blood, i watched saw because it starred the *other* man in black. and while he doesn't disappoint, exactly - he's badass, beginning to end (and VII comes full circle) - westley, or dr gordon or whatever, is a bit of a dick who kinda deserves what's coming. this movie has other things i like too, like dioramas, and boobytraps like in the goonies, and people having to saw through their own ankles like in the original mad max. the reasonably predictable ending reveals john kramer as the jigsaw maestro and not-quite-dead guy in the middle, whose backstory and motivations aren't especially interesting. cancer kills. by the end, i have only one unanswered question: is there a movie in which danny glover doesn't play a cop?

Part II (2005) - Darren Lynn Bousman
the second installment opens with a bang, some whimpers, and a lot of screaming. as if the first film's reverse bear trap wasn't terrifying enough, this one has a full face death mask of nails. i call it a pokey. part II stars a lady cop from star trek: nemesis, a poor man's mark wahlberg [cpt rocket: "daisy, you realise that's donnie wahlberg, right?"], and a room full of people i hate so much that the absence of any will to live is rather relieving. all's well that ends unexpectedly well, and i'm in. okay, i'll play this game. next!

Part III (2006) - Darren Lynn Bousman
if i woke up in a hospital stuck with needles and electrodes connected to medical equipment i don't understand even when my brain isn't clouded with coma- and chemical-related confusion, i probably wouldn't just unplug myself to go in search of some answers. replace tubes and wires with hooks and chains, and i guarantee i'm not going anywhere without some serious contemplation and assessment of the situation. evidently saw victims disagree. i'm similarly unnerved by people wearing animal heads, so this recurring pigface thing is terrifying. and in this installment the pigs keep coming, eventually dumping their rancid guts onto people for drowning purposes ... ewww. points for gross creativity. and for frozen icepop tits! but the films are starting to feel like episodes of CSI and the forgiveness narrative tastes like jesus-flavoured kool-aid. moving along.

Part IV (2007) - Darren Lynn Bousman
cpt rocket is already convinced saw is a better franchise than friday the 13th, but i'm a classicist, so i ... wait, was that some dead dude's junk? the full autopsy scene is deliciously graphic, but unfortunately, jigsaw's postmortem dickballs aren't enough to distract me from the franchise's increasingly disturbing humanism (it's no coincidence that its goriest moment isn't a trap, but rather a mundane medical procedure). cherish your life. the premise of part IV is too impassioned for this level of intricate ret-conning and i'm highly irritated by the flashback narrative and fancy editing. inexplicably, the pawns (not the players) in this installment take a turn for the sexually perverse, from kiddie-madam to fat pasty rapist, and the excessive video clips of the hotel sicko's extracurricular activities are upsettingly beside the point (again i wonder at the current trend of incidental sexual violence). i wish sir psycho sexbeast's antics weren't the only scary thing in this flick, but part IV is more confusing than compelling, and the franchise's weakest link.

Part V (2008) - David Hackl
at last, a new direction, and a new director to guide the way. hackl resurrects the dioramas and group dynamism, giving saw the kickstart it needs. part V momentarily returns to franchise badassery and gusto when agent strahm trachs himself - that's hard - but the film looses steam in its vacillation between prisoner dilemma and CSI cop drama, and its tired moralism permeates both: "if we've learned anything it's that human life is sacred and should be cherished." it's starting to grate on my misanthropic nerves. these people are assholes, and aren't worth the redemptive effort. bored now. needs more cowbell, more blood, and more darla.

Part VI (2009) - Kevin Greutert
part VI attempts to correct hackl's directorial weaknesses with a show + tell narrative, but rather than a case of too little too late, it's mostly redundant because this installment is far more linear than its predecessors. the scenario is topical, and everyone's happy to see the "umbrella health" (haha!) insurance brokers struggle to offer up their pound of flesh ... and bone. the tests and contraptions lose their steampunk aesthetic, and are instead reminiscent of a funhouse of horrors. the merry-go-round is particularly ingenious. i am uncertain as to where our sympathies are to lie, however, when the test subject is such a douchebag that we just want him to fail and take everyone else with him.

Part VII (2010) - Kevin Greutert
finally someone sticks it to infidelity! in public, no less! the opening kill is innovative - all bright shiny and new. same goes for the final player: a self-help scam artist no one knows or cares about. so while the franchise has previously toyed with unwinnable games (amanda's tests were designed to fail), we like that this dude loses every round. it's refreshing to watch someone suck at life despite the will to live it. the humanist tub so vehemently thumped throughout the franchise is lessened by the audience's utter lack of engagement with these characters. the series ends with some deep gratification: we finally see the reverse bear trap snap, the man in black returns, and hoffman's game ends where the franchise begins. but why the fuck was this in 3D?

Hausu (1977) - Nobuhiko Obayashi

like lewis carroll's alice's adventures in wonderland, nobuhiko obayashi's hausu is based on the ludicrous daydreams of an ADD girl-child with too much imagination on her hands. we may be made of sugar, spice, and other nice things, but i've often suspected that our insides run on spiders and coal. and apparently i'm not alone: carroll's exploitation of little liddel seduces readers, filmmakers, and the more lewdly speculative members of the literary community; obayashi's "gorgeous" daughter seduces her virgin girlfriends and feeds them to crazy aunt elizabeth báthory and her hungry house on haunted hill.

although this sounds like the perfect recipe for a japanese horrorfest, the film is also composed - and i quote the subtitles directly - of "chocolate, candy, bread, love, and dreams." a gaggle of schoolgirls on summer vacation travel through painted landscapes via happy train and magic bus to a village populated by singing cobblers and other shopkeepers of the musical theatre variety whose jazz-hands fail to point out the dangers that lurk behind the walls of what appears to be the only house in town. everything turns topsy-turvy once the girls go inside: auntie's a nutter, the house is a death-trap, and blanche the cat shoots green laserbeams out of its eyes.

distributor janus films calls hausu "an episode of scooby doo as directed by dario argento." they're not wrong. while the house tries to gobble up the visitors in an effort to feed the starved libido of its owner - jilted of the joys of her wedding night by WWII - the giggling girls get their shit together and go kung-fu nancy drew on its ass. fortunately, their scooby skillz prove little match for the appetites of auntie unhinged. there is no way to describe the mayhem that ensues.

Mac's decapitated head rises up from a well to bite Fantasy's backside, Sweet strips and leaves behind her suspicious-smelling skivvies in a pile of malevolent mattresses, and skeletons dance to a romantic piano number played by Melody's severed fingers while Gorgeous plays dress-up in her dead mother's wedding clothes. "this is ridiculous!" states the Prof, and we can only nod in fourth-wall agreement as the house devours its inhabitants in increasingly surreal scenarios. the promise of rescue is thwarted when the girls' heartthrob teacher, en route to the house, gets into an argument with a watermelon vendor over which is the superior fruit and dissembles into a pile of that which he defends. this shit is, indeed, bananas. b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

the night goes tits up for the girls after this - a point rather aptly driven home with appropriate visual representation. but naked underdeveloped teens is perhaps the least of obayashi's achievements in 1970s film production. his techniques are actually brilliant. clever cuts, soft-focus slo-mo, animation, and avant garde special effects enable obayashi to visually realise the potential of his plot. inside and out, this house is genius.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) - Samuel Bayer

in the eighties, childhood development was synonymous with the cultivation of a particular sensibility accustomed to darkness, depravity, and indelicacy. from the goonies to the garbage pail kids, labyrinth to the lost boys, evil abounded and we young things were acutely aware of what lurked in the shadows or under the stairs. it was height of horror in the youthful imagination and the heyday of the slasher franchise, and yr humble narrator grew up grimly fiendish as a result. though much of my movie time was spent accordingly, i never lived on elm street. little chaingun was a born sceptic; newly human and strangely literal, i hadn't patience for tales of mystics, messiahs, or a man who could kill me in my dreams. freddy krueger wasn't scary, and neither were his movies.

flash forward twenty years: the film industry is flooded with remakes and reboots, michael bay has already exploited the essence of my childhood, i have zero investment in this franchise, and expect nothing from some combination thereof. so while it wasn't exactly difficult not to disappoint me, i was still surprised to find myself not hating every second of the new nightmare.

take, for example, the cast. it's full of people i like: john connor (thomas dekker) from the sarah connor chronicles, father justin (clancy brown) of carnivàle, and even beaver/cassidy (kyle gallner) from veronica mars (you may remember him from such trailers as the haunting in connecticut - that shit's been on every dvd i've rented in the past year). but nevermind all that, freddy krueger is played by fucking rorschach!

jackie earle haley brought residual pedophilia to watchmen, and then brought the watchmen to elm street when he returned to pedophilia. his résumé couldn't be more perfect. freddy krueger was only ever creepy to me as a sexual predator - a far more formidable foe than anything from a dream. michael meyers is a Shape, jason voorhees a retard, both something bordering on evil incarnate in their absence of humanity. freddy, on the other hand, is a bad man with a bad touch, and his lechery is all he has going for him. without it, he's just an ugly edward scissorhands with similarly poor table manners.

unlike its predecessors, this nightmare is aurally stunning. the ambient noise of the boiler room is reminiscent of terminator, the jump rope song (more familiar to me in its adaptation by buffy's "gentlemen") resonates appropriately, and freddy's nails across various chalkboards and other surfaces is successfully unnerving. the soundscape is good enough to compensate for the movie's ridiculous plot-holes, and it renders terrifying what is otherwise largely trite and mundane.

the main problem with the elm street series is that it just isn't scary, and the remake doesn't do much to correct this. the nightmare isn't nightmarish enough - it doesn't live up to its surrealist potential due to utter lack of imagination. that said, there are some random pleasing bits that interrupt the predictability characteristic of the franchise, including the tossing about of some far-too-clothed blonde in a manner worthy of the exorcist (and hence better than the original), her later reappearance as a barbie in a blood-bag, and a rather heavy-handed nod to pulp fiction. oh, and the final shot is rad.

it's almost good enough to make me want to watch the rest of the franchise. almost.

Låt den rätte komma in (2008) - Tomas Alfredson

when vladimir nabokov's lolita was reissued in north america by vintage in 1989, vanity fair declared it "the only convincing love story of our century." they weren't wrong. love has long since gone the way of letters and laudanum because our emotionally bankrupt time lacks the requisite investment and interest. monogamy is the new queer (you heard it here first) and i love yous, if not outright lies we tell each other and ourselves, are confessions wielded like knives to hurt someone or get something we want, which, generally speaking, ain't worth having. so what's more convincing than a bumbling pederast with delusions of agency who throws himself at the feet and the mercy of a sadistic schoolgirl in heart-shaped sunglasses?

i believe in love like i believe in vampires: yearn though i might for sanguine youth and an immortally emo soul, i know it's bullshit beginning to end. let the right one in, however, does an amazing job of momentarily convincing me otherwise. on both counts.

love and vampires are the rightful property of 12-year-old scandies who don't know any better. and while that ignorance is far from bliss - it's fraught with domestic fissure, schoolyard violence, and a ludicrous amount of snow - oskar and eli turn everyday ugliness into such beauty that it's impossible not to believe just a little. and the kids know their canon! these vamps don't sparkle in the sunshine, and whatever thresholds this film otherwise crosses, doorways remain sacred. the gore is gorgeous, the characters compelling, and the story brings even the most cynical of audiences to its cinematic knees. tension and anxiety build while the jaded and logical parts of you that remain unconvinced remind you that this is all just wishful thinking ... the more you believe, the more obvious it becomes that everything is going to end terribly.

hold fast to yr hope.

The Crazies (2010) - Breck Eisner

newton's first law of film: the book is better than the movie. newton's second law of film: the original is better than the remake. as film is closer to grammar than physics, however, it requires exceptions to prove the rules. case in point the first: fightclub. although the film disavows the book's narrative of waste (replacing "i want to have yr abortion" with "i haven't been fucked like that since gradeschool" and ameliorating its bullshit ending with the pixies' "where is my mind"), brad pitt, ed norton, and helena bonham carter get more palahniuk than palahniuk under david fincher's direction in a near-flawless realisation of the book's potential. but i digress. i've never been able to bring myself to sit through the original, but dollars to doughnuts the crazies remake is the ridiculous exception to the second law.

hold on now, youngsters. in my far-from-humble opinion, romero made three movies: he broke cinematic ground with night of the living dead in 1968, and worked his premise through to its logical conclusion in the following decades with dawn of the dead (1978) and day of the dead (1985). anything subsequent to or divergent from his holy dead trilogy ain't worth watching. there. i said it. and if you've seen land of the dead, you know i speak gospel. so while the idea of the crazies was good, its budget was not, and the trailer makes my argument for me, thereby absolving me of having to watch it in order to know the remake is better. but again, i digress.

eisner's crazies is high-tension smalltown bioweapon black ops at its best ... all the stuff that scared you about ET when you were small, but with less sentiment and more explosions. and while the county sheriff and his lady doctor wife aren't quite as compelling as pintsize drew barrymore and the little muppet with a speak&spell, no one wants to see them get poked by crazy people with pitchforks and a hate-on for anyone sane. the infected are a scary bunch of despondent hyaena people whose laughter is as creepy as their deathstares. turns out that smalltown america is terrifying not only when inbred and texan, but also when midwestern and genetically diverse. throw in a military force who flies into town under the shadow of night, drags people from their homes, divides them into camps, and carts them away in cattle trucks, and you've a deeply unsettling zombie holocaust. if the whitecoats ever come to take me away, please god don't let them be backed by men in camo with gasmasks and AKs.

and speaking of holocausts, the lady doctor is somewhat inexplicably pregnant. not pregnant enough to be encumbered by a visible belly, nausea, or any other fetus-related debility, but pointedly pregnant presumably for the purposes of a sympathetic audience. given the relentless action and trauma of the film, however, it makes little sense that she doesn't miscarry. if that's the kind of carwash yr being born into, what multi-celled organism wouldn't mulligan? no one should be afraid of carwashes.

My Bloody Valentine (2009) - Patrick Lussier

normally i don't dig on remakes, but this one earns its stripes, both as an update and as a stand-alone slasher. my bloody valentine version 2.009 is studiously faithful to the original. despite changes to the backstory of harry warden and the valentine's mining massacre, and a somewhat inexplicable inversion of the TJ/tom and axel characters, this story makes as much (if not more) sense than the first, and the spirit remains the same.

while the remake lacks the blood on tits of which i'm so fond, its opening is no less compelling. a scene of severed limbs and hacked up torsos strewn about a hospital cuts quickly to an eyeball on the end of a pickaxe - already awesome, but especially rad in 3D. these kills were designed for the third dimension, as is made particularly apparent when a retired police officer's jaw is impaled and the lower half comes flying at yr face. and while the pickaxe figures most prominently as the weapon of choice, there are a couple nods to the original, including an equally goretastic dryer kill.

unfortunately the fidelity of the remake isn't shared by its characters, who reflect an irritating trend in contemporary media scripting: men are cheating bastards. some truckstop douche with a loose wedding band receives a well-placed pickaxe to the skull after his nauseatingly disrespectful treatment of a ballsy blonde bombshell with a terrific rack. and axel knocks up some teenage twat whose betrayal of the sisterhood is rewarded when her lovefetus gets a pickaxe to its similarly undeveloped brains. axel himself manages to make good with wife sarah, who forgives him his trespasses and loves him 'til the end, despite the fact that she's pined over tom for the past decade - the same love-of-her-life tom she twice leaves for dead. so i stand semi-corrected: everyone's an asshole in this movie.

upon subsequent viewings, the film's foreshadowing of its twist is quite clever. tom's movements mirror those of his harry warden alter-ego without the glaring inconsistencies characteristic of, say, the french. and when everything goes 'splody in the end, i'm not sad about the potential for a sequel, though i prefer to think that tom offs axel and sarah, like, ten minutes later. cuz i hate them.

My Bloody Valentine (1981) - George Mihalka

canada gave birth to the slasher film with black christmas in 1974, but confirmed the strength of the true north's horror lineage seven years later with its sinister second-born, my bloody valentine. the pride and joy of nova scotia is canadiana at its best: maritime accents, lumberjack jackets, and sponsorship from none other than moosehead! from bottles and cans to actual neon signs advertising the fact, the green and gold abounds as these good canadian kids get their eyeballs pickaxed out. this flick has more beer-soused douchebags in plaid jackets and trucker hats than my local taphouse on a tuesday afternoon. no doot aboot it.

so pardon my jingoism when i declare my bloody valentine one of the greatest slasher flicks of all time. there's a reason that one of the greatest bands of all time took its name a couple of years later. the film literally opens with blood on tits (and a pickaxe through them), and the kills only get better. drowning in boiling hotdogs? check. death by nailgun? check. head impaled on a makeshift shower spurting blood and water? check. MBV has some of the most creative kills in the genre - the laundromat scene alone is enough to warrant its legendary status (and the extra spin-cycle footage on the special edition dvd is worth whatever you pay for it).

the characters are ridiculous. teutonic axel loses his girl and his mind in a bad case of stockholm syndrome, taking on the persona of harry warden, the lone survivor of a mining accident who offed axel's dad in a post-traumatic-stress induced fit of vengeance. his rival TJ is the strong, silent type who returns to town to claim his girl after an unexplained absence. their mutual love interest sarah is a girl of classic '70s braless proportions and possessed of a rather remarkable survival instinct. and the poor barmaid harriet gives up her chariot on the dubious promise of ten minutes alone in a mineshaft with some douche who manages to get them doubly screwed. she should've listened to TJ, who knows and recites the rules well: "no women in the mine." but can you blame them? they hail from a mining town called valentine bluffs, where every day is the worst day of the year. i'd happily take a pickaxe to the face too.

the film ends as brilliantly as it begins, with an old-timey bar ballad about the life and times of harry warden and the residents of valentine bluffs. you can practically sing along. and as far as psychokillers go: a nutjob in a gasmask with a pickaxe? yes please. beats that bagheaded retard hands down.