s c r e w b a l l i n g

Pieces (1982) - Juan Piquer Simón

2011-02-19T02:50:00.010-07:00

"You don't have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre!" Co-written by the late great Joe D'amato, author of such hits as 1980's Black Orgasm and '79's Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue, and not to mention the director of the infamous Porno Holocaust, Pieces is predictably trashy. But oh, 'tis a veritable Rembrandt of trash!

Pieces opens in 1942 (or rather, an alternate 1942 reality in which Boston is located in Spain, and you can bitch about the Patriots over touch-tone phones) with an uptight mom walking in on her young son putting together a puzzle ... a filthy, dirty, naked lady puzzle! She understandably goes batshit crazy (slow-mo mirror-smashin' crazy) and starts tearing the kid's room apart in a blind filth search. The boy can only see this getting worse through puberty and does his mom the favour of axing her face in half. And that's just the intro!

Pieces is great because it throws one big horror film cliché out the window: instead of giving us a smart, innocent, likable heroine to survive through the chainsaw madness, we get Kendall, an all around dumbass and against-all-odds campus stud. He inexplicably goes from number one suspect to honourary police officer, and still finds time to nail every campus cutie who crosses his path. One of them even promises to try to contain her pleasure by offering to gag herself, (though truthfully we kinda want to do it for her). Kendall becomes the right-hand man of detective Christopher George, the go-to guy for campus history and information, and bodyguard of the pro-tennis-playing undercover policewoman who happens to be George's future wife IRL. But don't let our hatred for the casanova-cum-cop mislead you, gentle readers: by our troth, this film is near-flawless in its executions.

While Pieces is trash from beginning to end, its kills are among the best in the business. The film opens with axe murder, progresses through chainsaw dismemberments, and throws in various kills of opportunity and plenty of blood on tits (our favourite!). Though one college co-ed claims "the most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed," stabbing an annoying journalist on one comes a close second. Perhaps most brilliantly, the film ends with a Frankenstein of decomposing lady parts who robs Kendall of his manhood. Yes.

The kills more than compensate for all the nonsense that falls between. And just when things start to drag, there's some hilarious racism in the form of a kung-fu professor (Daisy: "what was his thesis?") attacking the lady cop, who later delivers an oscar-winning cry of fear and frustration: "Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!"

No doubt you are wondering where you can find this horrortastic cinematic gem. Look no further than the screen before you: Pieces is available in its entirety on YouTube.

It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE (2007) - Crispin Hellion Glover

2011-01-15T02:36:00.001-07:00

crispin glover is an extremely high-functioning insane person. what distinguishes him from those merely skinning dipping in the cross-contaminated gene pools of bleeding hearts and artists and hollywood eccentrics is a conceptual drive stuck deliberately in neutral. this is not to say his projects don't go anywhere; rather, their momentum and direction are neither guided nor overdetermined. concept is both the means and the ends, and the concepts are - in a word - fucked. we love crispin glover because he's the arch wizard of screwball. everything he produces is perfectly consistent within his own conceptual paradigm, and if nothing else, the worlds he creates make sane people really uncomfortable (we are, after all, speaking of the mind that brought us "clowny clown clown"). so where talent does what it can, genius does what it must, and crispin hellion glover is a rare genius indeed.

fortunately for us, madhattery loves company. instead of retreating into the intricacies of his own brains, glover seeks out other screwballs with whom to make movies ... screwballs like steven c stewart. steven c stewart was a man with talent, frustration, and severe cerebral palsy whose rapunzel fetish and deep-seated misogyny came to a head in the original script for it is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. under glover's production, direction, and proceeds from charlie's angels, stewart plays the satanic hero-villain in his own made-for-tv after-school-special pornographic horrorshow.

to say it is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE is difficult to watch misrepresents not only the film, but also notions of both difficulty and watching. wheelchairs, murder, and necrophilia aside, the film challenges the gaze because it forces audiences with even the most indelicate of sensibilities to spend 74 minutes looking at that from which we are socialised to avert our eyes. watching actors engage with and respond normally to someone both physically and verbally inarticulate bothers us. the sexual expression of people with disabilities makes us laugh. and frankly, we don't know what to do with a retarded serial killer with a semi-flaccid penis who flops around atop hot, naked, dead girls. but when he runs over the neck of one with his wheelchair, we know we've got our money's worth.

Rare Exports (2010) - Jalmari Helander

2010-12-12T20:23:00.011-07:00

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)

2010-11-14T00:25:00.006-07:00

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

2010-05-17T02:18:00.014-06:00

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

2010-05-07T12:39:00.010-06:00

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

2010-04-10T13:47:00.011-06:00

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

2010-02-24T16:26:00.015-07:00

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

2010-02-14T23:47:00.005-07:00

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

2010-02-14T23:30:00.009-07:00

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.

Friday the 13th (2009) - Marcus Nispel

2009-07-25T23:52:00.012-06:00

Friday the 13th: Part XI? Part XII? personally, i like Jason Π, because aesthetically it fits somewhere between parts III and IV. but i'm wrong, because it's not a fucking jason movie.

jason voorhees is not a hostage-taking international crimin-allstar with OCD; he's an angry retarded person with mommy issues fuelled by frustration and unmitigated violence. he's a shitty popcorn version of michael meyers, stomping around in the slasher spotlight instead of slinking through the shadows that came to define a genre ... not a Shape, but still a force with which to be reckoned. whether a retard, zombie, mutant, or psychotic simpleton in a hockey mask, jason's mindless, unrelenting killer instinct is iconic, which makes this film's jason straight-up blasphemous. granted, he's always had a penchant for pretty girls complicated by a raging hate-on for teen sex and drug use, but jason doesn't stalk and kidnap people - he kills them and throws them out of windows. and he sure as hell doesn't have a paramilitary bunker rigged with perimeter breach notifications. maybe if he did the rest of the series would be rewatchable.

so why are we defending a franchise we like to hate so hard? because it's a vacuous pop-cultural appropriation of both my childhood and my twenties. the reboot takes all of the superficial trappings of the '80s slasher and resequences them for an aught audience with open wallets for clever mash-ups of their gradeschool and college grad steez. fuck you michael bay - you know your target market.

the aforementioned throwback to parts III and IV stands. goodlooking outsider is in search of his missing hot sister, encounters hostility from the locals, douchebaggery from his peers. sex, drugs, murder, and mayhem ensue. too bad the best part of the movie is over before the opening credits begin. it's 1980, mrs voorhees lacks a head, and a group of jackasses and cockteases with plastic tits go camping at crystal lake. the kills that follow are fantastic! girl strapped into a sleepingbag strung up over the campfire? yes please! flash forward to present day, run opening credits, and prepare to be bored for the next hour and a half. but keep an eye open for the various shoutouts to previous films strewn about the bunker set: the wheelchair from part II, the RV from part VI ... jason's black ops crime lab apparently doubles as a murder museum where he hoards souveniers from earlier killing sprees.

in a complete departure from franchise form, this installment demands character investment, but unfortunately, it's entirely without return. it stars the biggest douche in the universe, and you spend the entire time waiting for him to get his just desserts, but instead he gets to fuck this girl with the most amazing tits i've ever seen on film while his super cute girlfriend whines at him outside the door. she's stupid, so you kinda want her to die too, and while no one wants to see such magnificent breasts go to waste, the other girl's clearly a manipulative whore who deserves whatever's coming. but somewhere along the line crystal lake went to whitecastle and picked up an asian stoner kid who's so fucking awesome you just want him to turn his bong into some kind of psycho-killer escape pod, but alas, everyone dies horribly predictable deaths.

then there's the soundtrack. 'tis a blessing, perhaps, not to have to sit through another manfredini masturbatory opus. that shit is awful, but it's also classic, and i'm a classicist. props for night ranger's "sister christian" (next year's "don't stop believin'" - just wait for it), but stars? really? these douches don't listen to arts & crafts.

and while the ending, of course, leaves plenty of room for a revamped sequel, by this time we've had more than enough. bye-bye camp crystal lake, we're heading back to haddonfield. with a stopover in texas.

Friday the 13th: The Franchise (1980-2009)

2009-05-10T18:58:00.011-06:00

i grew up on slasher flicks, and this is the series on which i cut my cinematic teeth. memoirs of a misspent youth aside, suffice to say that not a calendar friday the 13th passed without me and a handful of reluctant friends commemorating the event with a jason marathon. nostalgia being what it is, my heart has always belonged to jason voorhees. i count myself among the camp crystal lake alumni, and as such, everything i know about horror films begins and ends at the bottom of that lake. too bad that’s where most of it belongs. i've always suspected i wasted my childhood; upon rewatching this franchise - film by film, start to finish, in preparation for this year's installment - now i'm certain.

while friday the 13th established most of the rules for the modern slasher film, the series provides almost none of the content. it lacks the genuine terror of the halloween movies, the grittiness of the texas chainsaw massacres, the ingenuity of the various holiday slashers (black christmas, my bloody valentine, april fool's day, etc), and the gender-bending bizarreness of the sleepaway camp films. even the nightmare on elm street series, which i scorned as a child for being too unrealistic to be properly frightening, is at least uncanny at its core. though one of the quintessential slasher franchises, friday the 13th lacks something fundamental to the genre: horror. the plot is repetitively predictable; the characters are neither compelling enough to save nor obnoxious enough to need killing; the kills themselves are tragically short on blood; the nudity is lacklustre; manfredini's grandiose score serves as a didactic laugh-track (especially when compared with carpenter's minimalist yet terrifying halloween theme); and both the writing and acting are abysmal, even by '80s horror film standards. i'm sorry, but this shit is borderline unwatchable.

which isn't to say there aren't moments of gratification. there's something awesome about watching someone get tossed out a window and land in a shower of glass in every film (by part IV we were cheering out loud), and it's amusing to observe the static equilibrium of the chuck taylors worn by nearly every character from the '50s through '90s. and there’s a reason that this series became the gold standard for the rules of the slasher universe: watching teenagers get hacked apart with a machete for using illicit drugs and engaging in premarital sex is satisfying on a very basic north american puritanical level. it's admittedly kinda fun that even fri-13 virgins are able to discern who will live and who will die within moments of being introduced to a character. and though no actor’s reappearance is as anticipated as jamie lee curtis's in the halloween movies, it’s nice to see a familiar face distorted in agonizing pain. there are even a couple of kills for which yr thankful - the classic decapitation scene from the original film being the most memorable - and some (though not enough) sexy violence of the blood on tits variety. but mostly, these movies are really really bad. and they just get progressively worse.

Part I (1980) - Sean S Cunningham
the film's opening kills start the franchise appropriately with its 1950s origin story: two horny teens are so busy trying to get out of their white chucks and into one another's camp-issued shorts that they don't notice a psycho-killer come at them with a knife ... not unlike when they failed to notice a retarded kid drowning in the lake. flash forward to 1979, where the shorts are shorter but the teens just as horny. audiences are initially pretty stoked when annoying annie gets a knife to the throat, but things are pretty tame until brenda gets axed and her corpse tossed through a window, and bill turns up riddled with arrows after an ill-advised check on the archery range. our first fri-13 heroine, alice two-shoes, goes head to head with that vindictive bitch mrs. voorhees and eventually cuts off her head with a machete, which becomes jason's weapon of choice for the rest of the series. it's up for debate whether the best thing about the original camp slasher is mrs. v's slow-motion decapitation, or that it features kevin bacon in his first ever film role. kevin fucking bacon.
body count: 9

Part II (1981) - Steve Miner
... in which jason is a bagheaded retard. alice two-shoes is ice-picked at the opening credits and replaced with ginny, who's cute as a button and sharp as a tack. and despite the burlap sack over his head, jason proves a formidable foe who kills without regard for race, creed, gender, or physical ability. even the dude in the wheelchair gets it ... in the face! the deaths in part II get points for effort - killing two kids with one stab is both efficient and entertaining - but the film nevertheless lacks sufficient amounts of blood. ginny uses her child psychology skillz (this smarty-pants goes to college) to momentarily outwit jason at the alter of his dead mother's severed head and stab him with the machete, which buys her enough time to run for the fucking hills. but her brains are clearly damanged and she hangs around long enough to get attacked once more when jason jumps at her through a window. ginny wakes up in an ambulance wondering where her boyfriend's at, which is funny because so were the film's producers. john furey bailed before the film wrapped.
bodycount: 11 (12 if you count furey's disappearance)

Part III (1982) - Steve Miner
this installment was intended to end the series, as evidenced by its complete lack of anything worth watching until the last half hour of the movie. it takes place in a barn instead of at camp, which is bullshit. it also features a leather- and bandana-clad multi-racial biker gang that terrorizes the town and irreparably damages the annoying fat kid's self-esteem. and despite jason's evolving creativity when it comes to offing promiscuous teens - the shower kill is a dude, someone is knifed through the underside of a hammock, another dude gets a well-deserved machete to the balls for thinking walking on his hands down a hallway is a good method of personal transportation - the only moment of real consequence in this film is when jason finally finds the signature hockey mask. there's also a strategically placed self-referential copy of the savini issue of fangoria, which is nice for those of us nerdy enough to notice. oh, and it was released in 3D, making the scene in which jason squeezes a kid's head until one of his eyeballs pops out a lot more awesome than it has any right to be.
bodycount: 13

The Final Chapter (1984) - Joseph Zito
if only it were true! the final chapter is the best fri-13 by far. how could it not be? it stars corey feldman and crispin glover! (and you thought kevin bacon was as good as it could get). crispin glover's character jimmy is creepy in that way only crispin glover can't help but be. he spends the majority of his screen-time agonizing over the probability he's a "dead fuck," which, you know, becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. after jimmy manages to seduce one of the twins with his amazing dance prowess, he receives a corkscrew to the hand and a machete to the face. part IV reminds us that in order to stay alive in the slasher universe, thou shalt not: fornicate (you might get a spear-gun to the balls); consume illicit substances (especially whilst watching olde tyme pornography); venture forth into strange lands to investigate mysterious noises (even if yr armed); or be fat (as evidenced by the overweight hitch-hiker's devastatingly horrific "squeezed banana" death). however, all of this is largely beside the point, because the point of part IV is corey fucking feldman. though tommy's obviously not the strongest kid in the sandbox - he's too attached to various apron strings and the weird-ass horror masks he makes in his spare time to play sports or talk to girls - this kid is hardcore! he plays little brother for most of the film, then goes apeshit at the end and delivers his sister from jason by repeatedly stabbing him with a machete while screaming "DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!" like a 9-year-old freaking out on refined sugar and angel dust. the demonic look in his eye at the end of the movie suggests an imminent case of stockholm syndrome and the inevitability of yet another sequel.
bodycount: 13

A New Beginning (1985) - Danny Steinmann
part V was a bad idea, start to finish. it's so awful jason isn't even in it. a new beginning starts several years after its prequel with tommy, not yet recovered from the childhood trauma of having his family attacked by a psycho-killer in a hockey mask, living in a half-way house for troubled teens. the killing begins, and each of the kids at the half-way house is offed less creatively than the last. we're so bored that the highlight of the movie is when yet another annoying fat kid, this one addicted to chocolate bars, gets axed for being annoying, fat, and full of chocolate. oddly, while the kills are sleep-inducing at best, the cast of peripheral characters in part V are somewhat more entertaining than in the previous films. there's a spunky black kid who has an awesome older brother who lives in a van with his superfreak girlfriend and gets killed in an outhouse made of tin after he gives his brother a burrito, and a very angry hillbilly woman whose son gets decapitated riding around on his dirtbike while she's making some kind of shitty stew. but this break in style does nothing to revive the franchise, nor does it make the film's 92-minute runtime anything more than a waste of time. and much to everyone's total lack of surprise, the reason this movie's so boring is because the psycho-killer in the hockey mask isn't jason! (which we all knew already because jason's mask has red detailing and this one has blue). and it isn't tommy either, which is stupid because why else would you bother to bring back the character? instead, this snooze-fest of a massacre is brought to us by some townie paramedic who happens to be the father of the fat kid whose death is the only thing worth watching in this whole film.
bodycount: 19 (+3 in a dream/hallucination sequence)

Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) - Tom McLoughlin
jason is restored to action when his rotting corpse is exhumed by tommy (that's right, they bring him back for a third time, and he's played by yet another actor because continuity of character matters to tom mcloughlin about as much as continuity of plot), who stabs jason through the chest with a section of wrought-iron fence, which serves as a well-placed conductor for some well-timed lightening. now jason's a zombie. worst. ret-con. ever. tommy is put in jail for being a crazy person and is mercilessly tormented by the sherriff's cocktease daughter, who for some reason is all hot for tommy's stories about "camp blood." jason gets up to his regular antics (including slaughtering a group of business douches on some team-building paintball retreat), mayhem ensues, and the movie ends in a ring of fire with jason in chains at the bottom of the lake. next movie plz.
bodycount: 17

Part VII: The New Blood (1988) - John Carl Buechler
finally we have kane hodder playing jason. things are looking up, right? not so much. our heroine tina is a talented young woman with latent telekenetic powers that only manifest themselves when the men in her life are being assholes. the first time it happened, she accidentally on purpose killed her alcoholic abusive father, and now she's being provoked and exploited by her evil shrink, who secludes her in a cabin at crystal lake - the site of her father's death - in order to "study" her powers. in a moment of panic, tina's telekenesis breaks the chains that restrain jason, thereby loosing him on the entire camp. part VII might have been more aptly subtitled "jason vs carrie," and if the writers had developed that plotline more fully, perhaps this movie would have been watchable. but it wasn't, they didn't, and them's the breaks for diligent audiences like ourselves. so instead we sit through another hour of painfully awful acting and dialogue punctuated intermittently with laughable kills. no one but us is taking this seriously anymore. none of this movie matters until jason and tina-carrie go head to head, then it's retard strengh vs teen-angst-fuelled telekenesis. tina goes all dark phoenix and throws everything she's got at jason, including vines, tree-roots, the entire floor of a house ... she even manages to raise her dead father from the bottom of the lake (cpt rocket finds this satisfying because he hates these movies and at this point he can at least pretend he's watching x-men). her super-powers are of course no match for jason, but tina's zombie dad comes to the rescue and drags him back into the lake. seriously.
bodycount: 16 (+1 in a dream)

Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) - Rob Hedden
lightening strikes again! or power lines, in this case ... power lines that happen to be attached to jason's body at the bottom of crystal lake. zombified once more, jason wakes up and utters his first ever non-grunt sound: he laughs. evilly. underwater. and just when audiences were starting to think that retard strength and apparent immortality weren't enough, sorcerer jason casts the rarely used "land be gone" spell to alter geography so he can catch a boat from crystal lake to new york. despite its amazing travel capabilities, however, this boat just doesn't cut it for jason. he has standards, after all. so he takes a good hard look at another motherfucking boat and jumps ship to ruin the graduation party of a bunch of coked-out teens from jersey. this is cpt rocket's favourite film in the series cuz he's hard for this girl in a leather jacket who plays a shitty guitar solo in the engine room of the boat like she's in the crow or whatever. dead bodies abound so the kids abandon ship and escape to new york city in a lifeboat, while jason swims alongside like he's a fucking dolphin. once they hit shore, the kids are immediately mugged, and some girl gets drugged by thugs. jason is apparently intimidated by the big apple, cuz he ignores everyone from nyc and only chases the kids from jersey. one douche tries to channel cassius clay and attempts to punch jason to death by hitting the only armoured part of his body approximately 70 times (cpt rocket counted). jason gets as bored as we are and punches him back, which decapitates the dude and sends his head flying into an open dumpster. in a moment of unprecedented premeditation, jason then locates and climbs into the dumpster so he can retrieve the head and carry it around for a while until he has the opportunity to put it in the front seat of a police car to scare the shit out of the kids who get into it. jason hits times square and kicks a ghetto blaster, which understandably pisses off the gang to whom it belongs and they're all switchblades and tough words until jason pulls off his mask as if to say "dudes, i'm from jersey. and mentally challenged." so the gang backs off because they don't kill retards, or ugly people. then toxic waste turns jason into a child and he's left for dead in the sewer. i'm not even kidding.
bodycount: 25

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) - Adam Marcus
(produced by Sean S Cunningham)
the final friday? would that it were. everyone in this movie is stupid. someone actually checks a pulse for breathing, presumably because that's way more accurate than checking the respiratory system for a heartbeat. (why are we still watching these?) jason, once more an adult, gets blown up, and the coroner attending him consumes his still-beating heart, thus contracting the psycho-killer cannibal-possession virus. the tent-scene - in which a generously endowed young woman is delivered from her ineffectual attempts to orgasm by repeatedly impaling herself on her less-than-enthusiastic lover when jason slices her stem to stern with a machete - is the best kill since mrs. voorhees lost her head. and if we are to believe the visual shoutout to the necronomicon from evil dead, this jason lives in the same neighbourhood as ash williams. and speaking of badass motherfuckers, enter creighton duke, whose main interests in life involve breaking fingers and hoarding information about jason voorhees. jason has become more calculating, or at least less retarded - he shaves some cop's face before turning the blades on him (cpt rocket thinks this is probably because jason hates moustaches because mrs. voorhees married some douche who had one who used to beat him a lot when he was a kid or something, but really he's trying to make this movie more interesting than it actually is). but it must have something to do with family, because apparently jason had a sister who wasn't retarded and she had a daughter who had a daughter who is somehow the last zion or whatever and must be protected by spells or enchanted machetes or some other nonsense completely unrelated to everything else in the jasonverse. jason gets fucked up and somehow turns into a worm-fetus, so he crawls into his dead sister's vag in order to become jason proper again, but with a gross melty body. then the movie turns into an '80s fantasy metal music video when an enchanted dagger transforms into a magic jewelled sword that happens to be the only thing able to kill jason, for reals this time. jason gets stabbed through the heart and sucked into the netherworld, leaving behind only his hockey mask. but then - *gasp* - freddy krueger's hand grabs hold of it and brings it back into hell so we can all hold our breath for 11 years hoping that movie never gets made.
bodycount: 22 on-screen, plus at least 6 implied

Jason X (2001) - James Issac
aka: jason in space. this movie is even billed as both horror and science fiction. anyway, it's 2010 and jason is no longer in hell because he's been captured by the government and cryogenically frozen because the aforementioned retard-strength and apparent immortality make execution impossible. flash forward to 2455, when a team of researchers discover the body and think that bringing jason back to their spacecraft and thawing him is a really good idea. nanotech solves the problem of regeneration and turns jason into a robozombie programmed to hate everything. he wakes up and immediately kills a sexy intern by sticking her head in cryogenic fluid and smashing it on a table. best kill ever. jason then runs around the ship killing everyone else he runs into until the researchers try to trap him in the holodeck by simulating a lakeside camp for horny teens circa 1980, but he knows fake tits when he sees them so he kills a bunch of real people instead ... by hurling the ship into a spacestation. kay-em 14, the requisite hot robot girl of any sci-fi worth its salt, goes all matrix on jason's ass and hurts him real good, but then he's revived by a broken computer. one survivor finds his balls and tries to destroy jason forever by riding his full-metal-body through space on a suicide mission into earth 2. however, jason's body fails to incinerate on his fall through the atmosphere, and he lands ... in a lake ... by two horny teenagers.
bodycount: 21 on-screen (including the suicide), over 200 credited, plus a spacestation

Freddy vs Jason (2003) - Ronny Yu
(produced by Sean S Cunningham)
who the fuck thought this was a good idea? no one, for a long time (development was, well, hell), but after 11 years we all knew we had it coming. mostly this is a nightmare film, and cpt rocket and i both hate freddy so hard we're sympathetic to jason and spend the whole movie waiting for him to lay the smack down. the film begins with freddy raising jason from the hell whence he put him so as to get back at the kids who are no longer afraid of bad dreams. these kids are so not afraid of anything anymore that they throw a rave in a local cornfield, where jason gets his frag on and kills the shit out of a bunch of them. now they're scared again, and wow, do we not care. a weird date-rape dream-sequence thing happens where freddy, jason, and some teenaged douche fight over who gets to fuck/kill an unconscious girl full of ghb. i hate everything right now and for the rest of the movie until the kids get smart and arrange for a showdown. they work some dream-mojo and head to crystal lake, where freddy and jason finally go at it and jason cuts off freddy's hand and impales him with it ftw.
freddy's bodycount: 1
jason's bodycount: 24 (if you count freddy)

Friday the 13th (2009) - Marcus Nispel
(produced by Michael Bay)
not a fucking jason movie. detailed assessment of the reboot's trespasses against the franchise forthcoming.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974) - Bo Arne Vibenius

2009-05-03T03:03:00.007-06:00

Swedish rape revenge at its best. I'm starting to worry that this blog is becoming a little too focused on the genre. If you are going to watch this flick, watch it in poorly dubbed English and preferably in the harder-to-find porno cut. Also titled They Call Her One-Eye, this is for the most part on the satisfying side of the rape revenge genre.

Thriller gets going in the classiest of ways: child molestation. Kind of. In a touch of artfulness, the girl is picked up by a grody old old man, who then starts spewing black bile from his grody old mouth. Awesome, right? The poor little girl, Frigga, grows up mute, traumatized, but loved by her simple farming parents who send her to the big city for a special doctor's appointment. Of course, she misses the bus and accepts a ride from a pimp-like dude in a sports car, just driving around the countryside all pimp-like. You know where this is going. After a light dinner and tons of booze, Frigga wakes up the prisoner of The Douchiest Man in Sweden. Now addicted to heroin (natch), young simple Frigga is forced into a life of prostitution, where she is awarded a "fix" for good behaviour. Mmm....total trash!

Thriller gets its points by never backing down. The film is extreme for its time, but this shit stands up 35 years later. Watching Frigga try to escape in vain while her pimp slowly drives behind her until she just passes out is some hard shit. The real cadaver used for the eye gouging. The ridiculously unnecessary hardcore fuck scenes (and accompanying money shot). The gross dude in the tiger underpants. Terrifying. Fuck it, let's have her own parents commit suicide. Scenes of Frigga slowly and silently planning her revenge against not only her pimp but her johns as well build slowly to the end we all know is coming. Her interactions with her instructors offer a welcome break from the black hole that is her life. Action sequences are all slow-mo, I suspect to cover the poor choreography as much as for any stylistic purpose. But it works. This little girl is gonna kill both hired thugs AND cops? In a warehouse fight?! Fucking slo-mo that shit and I will believe it.

The film builds to one of the most satisfying final kills I've ever seen. Frigga isn't blinded by rage, but cold and calculated, exact. It's a bit chilling and so perfect. Thriller is far from a perfect film, however. At times, it's laughably bad. I mean, she gets a day off every week to do whatever she wants? How about gun lessons? Driving lessons? Fucking martial arts lessons? OKAY. And she doesn't bail because of the heroin? Like you can't find that shit elsewhere? Fucking eye patches that match different outfits? I love it, though. I love it all. A million fucking points.

Last House on the Left (1972) – Wes Craven (directorial debut!)

2009-04-29T15:55:00.010-06:00

the rape revenge genre, at least in its contemporary manifestation, is, in a word, problematic. generic conventions demand that the rape revenge film simultaneously construct and conflate binaries, titillate as it offends, and – if it is to work as anything more than a pornographic version of a snuff film – balance sexual sensitivities with indelicate sensibilities. it straddles more than fences. and unlike other horror genres (where catharsis is deliberately deferred or withheld), or more mundane or unceremonious representations of sexual violence (which are too often merely incidental or spectacular), the success of the rape revenge film is contingent on payoff. the ends must justify the means.

craven’s first crack at the horror whip seems to work, for the most part. however, watching last house on the left outside the context of the 1970s sexploitation thriller is disconcerting on a somewhat metacinematic level; i don’t know if it translates. the scenes of sexual violence are difficult to watch, but not for the reasons they should be. the actual violence of the rape scene is oddly subdued and detached. the viewer, the characters, and even the victim herself are indifferent to what’s happening, which defamiliarizes both the violence and the sex. i’m more disturbed by sadie, the female accomplice who is obviously aroused by her partner’s sexual violation of another woman despite (inexplicably) having command of the vocabulary of a 1970s second wave feminist, than i am by the violence itself. this is no day of the woman; the revenge is familial rather than gendered.

fortunately, the revenge is as well-executed as it is earned, which solidifies last house on the left’s place in this peculiar canon. the father’s nearly psychotic rage at his daughter’s violation satisfies the audience’s thirst for blood, but it is the other parent who exceeds expectation. any mother with the wherewithal to fellate her daughter’s rapist so as to castrate the sick bastard as agonizingly as possible is a mother whose love knows no bounds. kudos, mrs. collingwood. i kinda wish you were my mom.

Eden Lake (2008) - James Watkins

2009-03-21T16:19:00.010-06:00

children are evil. straight up. william golding knew it when he stranded a bunch of british tweens on an island in lord of the flies; yukio mishima knew it when he imagined the "absolute dispassion" of a gang of nihilist japanese middle school students in the sailor who fell from grace with the sea; you knew it when you pretended to be sick so you could stay home from elementary school the day the class bully threatened to kick yr ass.

miscreant youth are ubiquitous in both fantasy and reality, which doesn't make for an especially original premise for a 2008 horror flick. given its already rich cinematic history - from children of the corn in the '80s to as recent as ils/them - kids gone bad seems rather generic fodder for the horror canon. and yet somehow, this film makes it all seem terrifyingly new.

eden lake is relentless. the siege laid by the teenaged fallout of a jilted generation against a plucky young english couple is agonizingly protracted and utterly without reprieve. you hold yr breath waiting for the tension to dissipate so you can return to normal respiratory function, but every moment of peace is snatched away by these sick bastards in children's clothing. and while yr praying for everyone to die just so it can be over, the film withholds even that catharsis. it just. doesn't. stop. children of the corn warns us that the amish believe we don't inherit the land from our ancestors but borrow it from our children, and maybe they wanted it back. eden lake is far more bleak: these kids just want to have friends.

Teeth (2007) - Mitchell Lichtenstein

2009-02-09T03:25:00.006-07:00

across most cultures, vaginas tend to get a bad rap. they're unclean, obscene, vulgar, venomous, lecherous, and seductive. cautionary tales abound detailing the specific and general perils that await the men who are forever trying to get in and out of them; they're eaten, castrated, or otherwise dismembered and/or killed upon every attempt. "here be dragons," all the anatomical maps read. as such, the vagina dentata mythos doesn't really have a hallowed place in feminist history. castration anxiety, devouring mothers, and the woman scorn'd were not of woman born, but rather shaped by man, who - poor deer, frozen in headlights - found himself paralised at the sight of female genitalia. he stared into the abyss, and it stared back at him. then it bit his fucking head off.

so while not exactly a feminist narrative, teeth reclaims the vagina dentata myth just as the rape revenge genre reappropriates sexual violence ... which is to say that neither quite gets it right, but both do interesting things with what they have. teeth tells the story of a girl whose nightmarish sexual awakening becomes a will to power, and she wields it mercilessly. the Y chromosome's uppence definitely comes - painfully so. and good on 'er! especially since, like most rape revenge films, the most upsetting thing about teeth is that there isn't a decent dude in the entire movie.*

the film also does a really good job of taking the piss out of those holier-than-thou promise-ring douches we hated in highschool cuz we were breaking curfew to have awkward car sex while the sun shone out of their asses. at least most of them are single parents now.

* with the technical exception of her father, but i have reservations about that.

Gutterballs (2008) - Ryan Nicholson

2009-02-04T21:19:00.019-07:00

Gutterballs....Gutterballs....I don't know what to say. When we popped the disc in the first thing we saw was a notice that all actors were 18 or over at the time of filming.
"Uh, did we rent porno?"
Turns out we didn't, but instead were watching a horror movie with a porn aesthetic. Poor sound, poor dialogue, and piss poor performances are the stand-out elements on display here.

Opening with a particularly difficult to watch gang rape scene wherein a girl at one point is fucked with a bowling pin, the movie really has nowhere to go but up. The rapists themselves are stereotypical popped-collar variety douches whose dialogue sounds improvised at best. The audience (Me, as daisy literally willed herself into unconsciousness to avoid the rest of the film) is really looking forward to some bowling pin related rape-revenge head smashing, but Gutterballs throws the typical horror formula right out the window and lets the masked madman kill everyone BUT the rapists until the very end, forcing the audience to put up with line after line of forced 'fucks' for most of the 90-minute runtime. If there was even one likable character that I could get behind I could overlook a lot of garbage, but alas, no dice.

As for the positives, I'm sure if the movie didn't have a 15 minute rape scene as its opening I probably would have enjoyed the admittedly inventive kills a lot more. The 69 kill (seriously, and it's fucking awesome), death by bowling pin fellatio, death by ball waxer...the bowling alley is used to its full kill potential and the gore is fantastic. I've never seen a dick cut in half before and I hope I don't have to again for some time.

Gutterballs doesn't shoot any higher than the title suggests, so if you're looking for a mouthful of sleeze n' cheeze, this one's for you.

Kichiku (1997) - Kazuyoshi Kumakiri

2009-01-30T19:51:00.004-07:00

kumakiri was a third-year college student when he set out to make the most violent film in contemporary japanese cinema - a not-unambitious project, given that success would mean producing the most violent film, well, ever. and A+ for effort! kumakiri succeeds magna cum laude. born from a long-established tradition of unrelenting violence in the vein of miike, suzuki, etc, kichiku doesn't so much kick things up a notch as shotgun blast them apart. this is the most fucked-up film i have ever seen.

kichiku is the japanese cannibal holocaust, but perhaps more so. the black-flag characters are about as endearing as the cast of documentary film-makers in CH, and their political project equally admirable. and while i grant that kichiku lacks scenes of actual animal slaughter, there is something deeply nihilistic about this film that CH only irresponsibly gestures towards. it's not just that the cultural narrative to which kichiku belongs is unfamiliar, and thus more upsetting to little white canadian girls (as is the case with most tokyo shock and japanese cult cinema) - there are no fucking rules, dude. so yr left flailing, clawing at yr eyes just waiting for it to be over. but in a good way.

interestingly, kichiku contains the only moment in film my life would be better for having not seen.

Porno Holocaust (1981) - Joe D'Amato

2009-01-22T00:46:00.001-07:00

in the early nineteen eighties the sex film industry, still reeling from its explosive 'seventies, was rife with cocaine and body hair. women were muffed, men were moustached, and everyone was balls deep in blow. pornography was in its heyday: black or white, dude or lady, solo or sex party - the "anything goes" attitude made for seemingly endless possibilities in the land of the lewd. all this is true of porno holocaust, but mere sexploitation was not enough for auteurs like joe d'amato. he had a vision, and it was bloody. bloody awful.

unfortunately, the preferred bodily fluid of this film remains true to porn form, leaving it somewhat lacking in the horror department. the "plot" attempting to link its various sexcapades is reminiscent of the creature features of prior decades, but without twists, turns, or even a decent kill scene. with underwhelming orgasms as the film's only attempt to climax, it leaves cult movie fans awkwardly unsatisfied.

bottom line: too much porno, not enough holocaust.