fourfour

Weekly reader

My still-new day job (at The Daily) is taking up a lot of the brain space I've devoted to this blog, particularly because I can basically write about whatever I want within pop culture (which is what I've always done here). Since it's sometimes hard to track down stuff from The Daily, I'm going to start to post regular link roundups of some of my stuff. I usually tweet that stuff, but that's so ephemeral, too. The idea of self-promotion has always made me feel ill at ease, but the idea of coming off as less active makes me feel worse. The former wins out.

Here are some things I've written since starting a few weeks ago:

On music

Justin Bieber Under the Mistletoe album review
Bai Ling "Rehab" single review
Mary J. Blige featuring Drake "Mr. Wrong" single review
David Lynch Crazy Clown Time album review

On movies

Paranormal Activity 3 review

On TV

Horror TV essay (Walking Dead, American Horror Story, etc.)
Fairy tale TV essay (Once Upon a Time vs. Grimm)

On books

Chuck Palahniuk video Q&A (this is heavily condensed, which is unfortunate since we talked about Judy Blume, among things that were excised, but whatever -- editing me shorter is best left to others)

I'll do these about once a week. Hope they don't make you puke!

The picture of self-satisfaction

Scream 4 spoilers after the jump. I'm posting this so late, that shouldn't matter, but whatever. Sorry, I mean wh4tever.

Mise en scream: The fourfour guide to single-setting horror

There is great power in constraint, or so I've gathered from a recent rash of horror (and horror-like) movies that confine their characters to a single, often claustrophobic location. The groundwork for this stuff was laid in Hitchcock's Rope and Lifeboat, much like Cannibal Holocaust inspired what would become the subgenre POV horror, and much like An American Family predicted reality TV years and years in advance. (Weirdly enough, the pattern in all three of these pop culture subgenres is that there's an extremely early foundational example, followed by a high-profile update on the form that becomes the most obvious point of reference  -- The Blair Witch Project in the case of POV, The Real World for reality TV and Cast Away for single-setting stuff -- for a movement that emerges still several more years later.)

With Cast Away being an obvious influence and things like Phone Booth and 127 Hours being essential entries in the single-setting subgenre, it's a more fluid form than POV horror. But even if they all don't strictly rely on the conventions of horror, these movies deserve to be grouped together. They inevitably depict nightmare scenarios, for one thing (the difference between a thriller and horror is often just a bit of added politeness on the part of the director). Also, tropes begin to emerge within this subset: the movies typically have short running times (many below clock in under 90 minutes) and almost all feature exceptionally good-looking people, even by Hollywood standards. After all, there's not much else to look at within the confines of single-setting horror. They're just trying to give you your money's worth.

(Note that I'm not including movies like The Amityville Horror, whose single setting of a house affords multiple locations: rooms, the yard, etc. Extreme confinement is key here.)

I thought it'd be fun to examine what I consider to be the main entries in this subgenre,  side-by-side. They present a range of seemingly insurmountable challenges for their characters, but are united by a single cinematic challenge: how to make something that is static in nature still move viewers.

Let's go, Super Bowl!

  

No matter where I end up on Super Bowl Sunday, I'm sure it'll look a lot like the clips above from Joe D'Amato's slasher Absurd (aka Horrible aka Rosso Sangue). In fact, even if I'm in my own living room, not watching the Super Bowl (which I most certainly will be), I'm sure I'll be gushing about the plate of spaghetti I'm eating and grunting and throwing temper tantrums that abate as soon as someone tells me to shut the fuck up. THIS IS HOW PEOPLE LIVE.

Absurd (one of the U.K.'s 39 video nasties) lives up to its name by coincidence -- the plot is a whatever rehash of Halloween, but the script and acting are just ridiculous, and spiced with a liberal amount of out-of-sync dubbing (the cornerstone of great badness). That said, the kid in the video above, Kasimir Berger, delivers my favorite child performance in the history of cinema. Arbitrary and difficult to watch, he has the brat thing down so well. What he lacks in technique, he makes up for in essence. I made a gif of his best scene. It's below. It's kind of large, but so so worth it:

Neglected in '10: Best Worst Movie

For the next several days, I'll be touching on stuff that happened and/or was released last year that I never got around to writing about. We all need ways to make our year-to-year transition easier -- this is mine.

I didn't write about Best Worst Movie last fall when it finally came out on DVD, because here's probably not much more to say about it. It is as acclaimed as Troll 2 is critically reviled (0% on the Tomatometer and holding!). But just try to stop me upon reflection! Much like my favorite movie of '10, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Best Worst Movie is a documentary whose appeal is not limited by its subject -- it is a good movie, period. I'm apathetic about Troll 2 as a film (I've seen better worst movies!), but I'm fascinated with it as a piece of media and a phenomenon. Best Worst Movie documents it as such in more detail than it probably deserves, and is better for it. This is a film about bad movies, in general. It is about those who understand them and those who most certainly don't (one person we meet in the latter category refers to Troll 2 as "cultic"). One of the biggest of several laughs here comes when Troll 2 star George Hardy hosts a screening in his small hometown to people who clearly don't give a shit about garbage cinema. Here's my favorite reaction after the movie is over:

That woman needs to understand that you don't piss on hospitality! Clearly, she's learned nothing.

Happy Halloween (part 2)

 

This is probably stupid but maybe a little scary, and since it is Halloween, I figure what better day is there to try out something stupid or scary. (It's also extremely late, since YouTube took hours to process it. If your Halloween fun has been undermined, blame YouTube.) It's an unaltered video of my window forcing itself closed while screaming and sounding like abstract jazz. I don't know, I thought it was cool (and it really did scare the shit out of me the first time I heard it while I was in another room). Boo!

This at least must be better than Devil

 

The clip above is a bit of so-bad-it's-fantastic transcendence from a Christian propaganda VHS called Demons: True Life Evil Forces. In it, a woman who apparently is disgusted by Buddhism recounts a story she once heard about a "demon" in the apartment that she manages. Reenactments of hearsay are obviously the best reenactments of them all. Anyway, I hate to spoil it for you (no I don't), but it turns out that all it takes to rid the apartment of the demon is telling it, "Jesus...In the name of Jesus, leave!" and then drawing a cross in crayon on a piece of paper and taping it face down on the portal the demon came out of. Yes, it's true: ridding your home of demons is easier than ridding your home of vermin and relatives. It kind of makes me want to get a demon -- if they're that easy to get rid of, I might as well keep one around for a few hours just for the cultural experience. It would, at the very least, make a good blog post, you know?

The middle exorcism

The clip above is one of my favorite things I've seen all week, and certainly the best thing in the film it comes from -- Wes Craven's 1984 TV movie Invitation to Hell. Invitation is a too-terrible-for-Terrible Hunting, Stepford Wives Go to the Country Club affair that stars a foxy Robert Urich, a devilish Susan Lucci, the kid that played Bastian in The NeverEnding Story, and a pre-shoulder padded Joanna Cassidy (aka Right on Top of That Rose from Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead). But it is Soleil Moon Frye, fresh off the first season of Punky Brewster, who steals the show with her turn as a possessed tot. She dismembers this giant bunny doll she carries around for most of the movie (after the audience has gotten attached to it and everything!), shouts things like, "We don't like nice!" and speaks in a devil voice that has only been altered by her (I guess adding an effect like pitching it down would have cost $5 too much?) so that she sounds like the kid who's obsessed with Pee-Wee Herman in Overboard. I didn't see The Last Exorcism, but I doubt that anything in it was as riveting and Punky's internal dance with the devil in these cheap TV movie lights.

Big fins, consider yourselves filled

Because Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is as close to a holy text as I come to having (it is, simply, the standard against which I judge all entertainment), I don’t invoke its name lightly in reference to other works. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D is a direct descendant of Russ Meyer’s “exploitation-horror-camp-musical,” but it shares a similar genre-straddling sensibility and, more importantly, it adroitly balances its disparate elements. What's most reminiscent, though, is not that the horror/sex/comedy/suspense/sci-fi elements work well in tandem with each other -- it's that the whole ridiculous tale of prehistoric carnivorous fish being awakened only to prey on the spring breaking hedonists on Lake Victoria (including soft porn operation headed by Jerry O'Connell's Joe Francis-esque sleazy character) is played with a straight face. (Elisabeth Shue’s character tases fish at one point, since she’s a sheriff and you know how sheriffs love their Tasers!) Meyer famously assured his actors that they were in a serious drama, even after they protested playing such an outrageous script with nary a wink. Here, the pirahanas are the only ones who give indication that they’re in on the joke, mugging directly into the camera as they, for example, chomp on a disembodied human penis, spit it out, and then devour it again.

The girls are fucking hot (do not be surprised if Kelly Brook ends up a superstar as she is clearly a goddes; meanwhile, Elisabeth Shue, bastian of role-selection that she is, has never looked better), the suspense is fucking real (one of the final scenes involves shimmying across a rope that hangs just a few feet above hungry piranhas) and the carnage is fucking disgusting (my three favorite site gags included a girl’s entire face being pulled off as the result of her hair being caught in a boat motor’s, a piranha eating through another’s face from the back so that for a second it looks like she has a pair of fangs and still another’s post-attack body falling apart in the hands of two guys carrying both sides of her body out of the water). Horror-obsessive Aja already showed off his deft skill at referencing in Haute Tension and he does even better here. He casts Richard Dreyfuss as the guy responsible for awakening the piranhas in the opening scene (he’s basically reprising a role, since Jaws , in which he starred, technically awakened its rip-offs including the original Piranha). Christopher Lloyd pops up in a mad-scientist role, his knowledge base traveling further back in time than Dr. Emmett Brown ever had to. There’s a scene, in which a girl trapped in the kitchen of a boat is forced to fend off frisky piranhas with kitchenware (a la Gremlins, directed by Joe Dante, the director of the original Piranha). Maybe the most pointed laugh occurs during the main piranha attack on the partying idiots, who in an attempt to get out of the infested water, climb up on a floating stage, which ends up toppling from a horizontal to completely vertical position, spilling them back into the water Titanic-style. Even the flying-piranha gag of the first film is bestowed an upgraded significance – gravity-defying absurdity gets promoted here.

The 3D element is as over-the-top as the plot and effects – the medium is messiness. This is as close to you’ll come to enjoying someone throwing up in your face and spraying a keg of beer at you. There is an operatic, extended, full-frontal, girl-on-girl underwater scene before the piranhas hit that is as much a tribute to the female form as it is to the pornography that exploits it.  See, Piranha 3D isn’t just trash unto itself, but it's that celebrates, nay worships, trashiness. Hallelujah.

Terrible-hunting: Piranha

Alexandre Aja has big shoes (fins, whatever) to fill this weekend when Piranha 3D arrives in theaters. I am excited because I like watching people struggle in water (on film, at least), but I am also scared (and not in the horror way!) because it couldn't possibly live up to the glorious shittiness of the 1978 2D original (even with the incompetent CGI evident in the Piranha 3D trailer that seems like it's rendered for kitsch factor). Joe Dante's Piranha is an utter gem that embraces its own derivation (it's essentially Jaws with a bunch of tiny monsters instead of one big one) and silliness with a straight face. It's kind of like the cinematic equivalent of a blonde girl who learned how to be a dumb blonde from the dumb blondes that came before her. Instead of a knowing wink, we get razor teeth.