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.

Friday the 13th (2009) - Marcus Nispel

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.