fourfour

This is what I was talking about

Per last post, here's the opening sequence of Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet:

Now that it's on YouTube, someone can rip it off, right? Please? So when they do we can have the satisfaction of, "I know where that's from!"? Please?!

Martyrs

Not to defeat my own purpose, but I'd advise against reading my thoughts about Pascal Laugier's super-horror movie Martyrs if you haven't seen it already. "I would like you to be a virgin," says Laugier in his intro to the film on the just-released DVD, and with good reason. As Bloody Disgusting puts it: "The only negative thing about Laugier's film is that once you see it, you'll never be able to see it for the first time ever again..." Really, if you don't go into this thing as ignorant as possible, you're cheating yourself, and in order to discuss this film, I have to spoil it entirely.

Also, I will fawn all over this movie and I don't want to over-hype it for those who haven't seen it, because you might end up latching onto any of the several reasons to loathe it. Laugier also says in his intro, "Feel very free to hate me. I’m not especially in love with myself, so I would understand."

But really: OH MY GOD.

Let the right one in the remake

I just watched last year's much-hyped Swedish vampire pre-teen drama, Let the Right One In. The biggest impression it left on me is that Mariah Carey better fucking be cast as Eli in the forthcoming English language version. For you see...

 

 

...Mariah, too, is eternally 12.

I thought the movie was cool, but truly overrated. It wasn't all that, and at the same time, too much. The pacing is so deliberate, it feels like the movie is constantly taking a step back to admire itself. It unfolds so slowly that watching it, I felt like it would have taken just as much time to fly to L.A., and observe the action at Les Deux to learn the film's ultimate point: it's all about who you know.

Oh, but the scene below is completely classic. I mean, it's poorly placed in a movie that's so bleak and serious, but in the end, I'd welcome a live action Crazy Cat Lady (hurling felines and all!) even at a funeral.

It's so weird that something so campy could make it into a film that is otherwise so unsmiling, but shit, I'll take camp where I can get it.

Just a suggestion

If you enjoyed Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, a kind of That '70s Show meets The Hills Have Eyes meets the worst case of gonorrhea you've ever heard of in your life, check out Fear(s) of the Dark. It's a black-and-white French anthology of horror-ish animation. It's hit-or-miss as a whole, but Burns' 17-minute segment falls squarely in the former category. To explain it would be to give it all away (it is, after all, a short film), but I can tell you that it's pretty amazing seeing Burns' style translated to a sort of flat 3-D moving image (I think the technique is called cell-shading, and if it's not that, it's very close to that effect). Anyway, this played in, like, a theater in America, and I have no idea if it's coming out on DVD or what. I tried to upload the segment to YouTube, but I guess the subtitle file made my file wonky because it wouldn't convert. It's for the best: it would have gotten taken down and my secondary account would have been deleted. After all, that's what secondary YouTube accounts are for. Or at least, mine is.

Whatever. Fear(s) is available for your viewing ahem nonetheless.

More reasons to watch this (i.e. screen shots) are below, but beware: they're spoilery.

fourfour's 44+ reasons to love 2008 (Part 3 - 24-15)

My heart goes on.

And in other news, beware of exploding bunnies.

Santa issues

When some kid on the bus told a second-grade me that there was no Santa Claus, I refused to believe him. I also refused to believe my father, who backed up the kid's claim later that night. I refused to believe him despite the fact that he was the authority as the stand-in for a fake man who, in turn, was a stand-in for Jesus, I guess? To help kids make sense of the reason everyone puts their lives on hold during the last two weeks of every year? Or something?

I didn't carry resentment after coming to terms with life's evaporating magic, but it might have been my first taste of existential angst. What the fuck was the point of it all if there was no Santa, and what the fuck was the point of the mass deception parents inflict on their children as a matter of culture, I wondered (in probably less wordy, but no less profane terms). The Santa thing still doesn't make sense to me. It seems like something we do to uphold the divide between young and middle years, just for the sake of organizing and having a little less chaos (like magic!) in our lives. Childhood, after all, is a construct, at least if you agree with Neil Postman, and I'm inclined to. I asked the only sister of mine who has a kid if she was going to lie to him about Santa and she said she was, "because it's fun." That seems like as good of a reason as any. If you're too old to play with toys, get a kid and play with them.

Plus, you know, Santa's a symbol of capitalism, and while I enjoy the fruits of the system (until the depression!), celebrating it with a mythological figure is like putting whipped cream on whole milk or using liquid soap to wash your bar of Dial or giving trophies to rich famous people for doing what has caused their fame and fortune. It's just excessive to the point of, well, pointlessness.

Because I feel like Santa Claus and his frigid bitch of a wife need to be taken down a notch or two, I really love Silent Night, Deadly Night, the 1984 slasher flick that finds a dude in a Santa suit on a murderous rampage, caused by an inability to get over his parents' death (at the hands of another dude in a Santa suit). Unpon release, the movie caused outrage in bored mothers across the country, who I guess, under it all, felt like their charade was being threatened? Their protests eventually led to the commercial being yanked from the airwaves and the flick being pulled from theaters. Aligning with their point of view, Siskel and Ebert did a very good job of summing up the ire with their condescending capsule review (complete with "Shame on you"s!) that ran a few weeks after SNDN hit theaters:

I can't figure out what's better: Siskel saying the profits of this movie are "blood money," which probably means one could make a FORTUNE from selling a coat made out of the Easter Bunny (if only we could catch the fucker!) or Ebert's parting morality: "I would like to hear [the creators] explain to their children and their grandchildren that it's only a movie." As if that discussion is so much harder than the "There is no Santa Claus" one! If we didn't lie as a society in the first place, the fucking movie couldn't have been made! Who's unfair?

So yeah, even though Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't particularly smart or clever or overtly deviant from the slasher format (besides the costumes), for its implicit attack on the status quo alone, it's a worthy entry in the genre and fine holiday viewing. It's also scary as hell at some points. When I put in this movie last year late one night, this early scene scared me so much that I had to turn it off and resume watching during the day:

I hate how Grandpa looks at the kid at the 1:15 mark! Even just reviewing it to get that timecode made me shudder. (My pussiness grows by the day, I'm realizing.) I also like how hilarious everything that follows is. Particularly, "Santa Clawwwwsh." This guy is going for Oscar in a movie that cost less than the metal in the statue.

Also, the ending is, in the words of one YouTube poster, EPIC:

Society-skeptical question at its core? Clippable crazy old man? Epic ending? I mean, how more Internet-ready could this thing be? Clearly this shit was ahead of its time. And on a more serious note, this type of wake-up call that questions our values as a whole is good for us, even if we ultimately refuse to accept it. I'd go as far as calling it a gift.

His bigotry is worse than his bite

Racism isn't funny, but Kristy McNichol's substitute-teacher hair is...

...(here's the back view:)...

 

...and reconciling those two truths is what Samuel Fuller's 1981 post-exploitation flick White Dog is all about. Well, it's about that and a white German Shepherd, who seems to have ripped a page from the Marlon Brando school of cotton usage...

 

...but also, and more importantly, who has been trained to attack black people. This nameless dog is anything but an invisible man -- he's the key to curing racism, the pet project of a black animal trainer who uses positive reinforcement as activism. As if the monster-movie-cum-social-commentary weren't enough of a meeting of high and low to make me swoon (and boy, did it!), it's all shrouded in silly b-movieness that makes White Dog compulsively watchable.

Things of that nature, you know?

Criterion just released it on DVD. Ask for it for Christmas and enjoy it by the fireplace that day. Fine family fun!

Some more highlights below the jump...

Threshold reached

I don’t know what’s more insane – that I finally reached the threshold of my tolerance for extreme imagery, or how it happened. I'm shocked at my shock, which is exponentially surprising, as I figured myself desensitized what with the hours I’ve spent watching the basest, incendiary shlock (of the fictitious sort, of course – I’m not speaking of images of real-life death and limbs ‘n things, as I’m not into that). I’ve written several times, in fact, about appreciating extreme horror for being just that. It's not means to getting off, but of appreciating how far out people’s imaginations can go to freak us out. In general, I tend to revel in the extreme.

Maybe I was reveling too hard because I never foresaw a limit to what my imagine could handle. That’s why I became so excited when my sister mentioned Chunk Palahniuk’s Haunted this week, telling me that she read something in it that made her put the book down, and she's never done that before. This particular passage essentially scarred her, as she still has trouble processing it when her mind wanders around to it (you might even say she’s haunted by it, bwah ha ha).

I knew the book had that reputation, and this reminder came a few days before I had to get on the plane that took me back to New York today. I tracked down a Borders, bought it and got ready to be amused at what was going to pass for extreme literature. My smugness soon faded. Fewer than 20 pages into the book, which is kind of a series of short stories woven together in the framework of a novel, Palahniuk unveils “Guts,” an ode to masturbation gone awry. It was all fine for me – the mishaps with carrots, the sounding – until I reached the final act of the story, which details anal prolapse so precisely that it gave me a headache that felt like my intestine was coming out of my ear (add an "R" for empathy). I’d read a few lines, fret and wince, close the book and repeat. I finally got to a certain part that I’ll post in white so you have to highlight it to read it because I don’t want to put you through what I went through: (When the intestine of the “protagonist” is stuck at the bottom of a pool and he has to either detach it or drown, his solution is accompanied by: “If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.”). When I read those lines, I thought, “Oh my god, I might actually throw up just from reading words. Words!”

Or at least, I tried to think it because immediately, the suck-blow airplane drone was filling my ears like never before. “Why is that so loud?” I wondered. "Did the book drop out of my hands?" “Why are my eyes closed?” “Why can’t I open them?” It was then that I realized that I’d passed out. The next realization was that I’m a tremendous pussy. The final realization, as I was coming to, was that my body wasn’t through reacting to this and I had to get in the bathroom, now. I’d always kind of looked at airline barf bags with derision, but now I was clutching mine like the hand of a friend. It was as close to a support system that I had.

I didn’t throw up and I’m lucky enough to be able to fall asleep rather easily, so I put myself down for the remaining two hours I was in the air. Waking up, I still felt nauseated (and I can practically still taste the bile that crept up my throat, even hours later). I called my sister to tell her how vexed I was, and it turns out that “Guts” wasn’t even what disturbed her so deeply. She made it much further, I will not because, and I cannot stress this enough, I am apparently now a huge pussy. My little sister, whom I taunted with A Nightmare on Elm Street when she was, like, 3, is now tougher than I am.

But I’m not alone. In fact, I’m a cliché – the paperback edition of Haunted came published with a new afterward discussing the knack “Guts” has for making people faint. “I’d finish reading the story to the sound of ambulance sirens arriving outside.,” he writes. “If the store had large display windows, I’d finish with the red emergency lights washing across my face. If the store had sharp-edged, hard wooden shelves—even if I warned people about the story’s possible effect—some nights ended with clerks sponging up a puddle of blood below where a head had hit on its way down.” In all, Palahniuk had witnessed 73 people fainting by the time this edition was published in April 2006. Who knows how more have taken the plunge since then?

Palahniuk then writes about the effect of “Guts” speaking directly to the power of his trade. “If you want the freedom to go anywhere, talk about anything, then write books,” he says. I love a man who loves his medium. And even though his writing has irritated me several times in the past, I can’t help but feel kindred as a fellow extremeness enthusiast. The thing is that Palahniuk is triple-X. I thought I was hardcore, but I’m a hard-R at best.

I feel like a failure, and even worse: I feel old.

HalloWEENS

After falling in total love with the vagina dentata-themed Teeth this summer, I felt like there should be a guide to castration in horror movies. It's a subject that pops up a lot and turns the accusations of misogyny regularly lobbed at the genre on their ears bloody stumps. That idea never even made it out of my brain, so I never got around to writing/compiling it. Coincidentally, Tracie has on Street Carnage. I love it when these things work out!

An embarrassment of excess

I love this time of year because I get to say "see saw" a lot, and, whee! See-saws are fun. I say it as in, "I'm going to see Saw tonight," and "Are you going to see Saw?" and "Come on! See Saw with me! Hey, where are you going?" and "See Saw! See Saw! See Saw! Ew! Did you just spit on me?"

And indeed, tonight I will again see Saw, patronizing this ridiculous franchise partly because it's the only one we've got and partly because it's quickly evolving from torture porn to torture camp. The question has gone from, "Will I be scared?" to "Will I be grossed-out?" to "How hard will I laugh?" I don't know if I'm getting sicker or Saw's getting funnier, but the unrelenting graphic autopsy that opened Saw IV had me in stitches because it was just. so. over-the-top.

It's fitting that the marketing of these severely gratuitous movies has been similarly excessive. There's a nine-page thread in the DVDTalk forums devoted to collecting all the different DVD versions of these four movies that have popped up since the original's 2004 release. It is absolutely insane. Here's the collection of a user who goes by xage...

...and these are the Region 1 discs alone! That's over 40 different releases of three fucking movies in four years! Because this picture predates the DVD release of Saw IV.

 

Because, you know, this franchise isn't trashy enough -- it has to be brought to the level of landfill! But but but wait, it gets worse!