DEVIL

I have been meaning to review this film for a long time.  Another unexpected pleasure. 

I really enjoy it when horror movies rationalize Christianity in a fun-sized thrill-kill neat n' tidy box.  With its elevator music, sterile office building waxed floors, and cityscapes, I was reticent to sit back and take this one in.  It seemed too easy to film.  Like something that could be done in a day at some job site in Philly.  Sometimes cheap equals cheap.  So, yeah, I had my reservations.  

But I persevered. 

Take your average citizens, your average situation, a simple ride to whatever floor in an office building.  Think about how often and absentmindedly we trust ourselves in these enclosed spaces that span hundreds of feet.  Anything could go wrong.  For that short amount of time, think of the freedom temporarily bestowed upon everyone in that steel box.  No rules.  No recourse to the law.  No protection.  

Think of the people we trust on a daily basis in general, and the assumptions we make automatically about strangers.  I love this concept, sort of a recall to the "pod people" idea.  But in a real sense, this is the truth.  We ride on buses with molesters, we sit in restaurants with paranoid schizophrenics, we interact on the street with those who have drawn blood with fists and other implements.  To deny this about the human race is to deny the human race for what it is.

And then we have the real evil, the Devil, that shadowy figure in history, myth, or religion (whichever you prefer) that channels the dark side in all of us.  Christian lore is a treasure trove of excellent horror fodder, The Bible being a great start on blood, guts, and detailed instructions on sacrifice.  The folks in the elevator stand against each other, but really, they stand against what we have deemed the darkest power there is.  I liked the varied personalities of the trapped people, their histories, back stories, and how they unravel as time grows short and the menace becomes more and more apparent.
Because I don't do so well watching stuff about enclosed spaces (partially out of boredom too, no scene change), as per usual I allowed my assumptions to make the judgment call about this film before I let the film speak for itself.  Turns out evil speaks well enough for itself.  Enjoy.

LOVELY MOLLY

 

If I could shorten this review to one word it would be: yum.

 

It occurred to me the other day, in dialog with another movie lover vis-à-vis the ideology and use of gore, that horror movies...or should I say GOOD horror movies...are like PASTA.  Go ahead and scoff at me, it's fine.  But I'm right.  Good horror is like good  pasta.  I shall explain: the componants of horror are varied, but you can reduce it down to two basic pieces that make up all of the horror related across time: substance and gore.  The substance is the plot, characters, mythos, wordplay, and so on - the pasta.  The gore...well, that's the sauce.  Let's face it, in most horror (especially in the olden days) someone gets a'sliced up or eaten or burned at a stake and so on.  A trueborn horror movie has the perfect blend of both substance and gore, pasta and sauce, those timeless ingredients of a masterpiece meal.

 

And oh is "Lovely Molly" a dish.  Directed by Eduardo Sánchez (director/co-writer of Blair Witch...I know, I had my reservations too...Blair Witch was a product of its time and a valiant effort but...kinda overbuzzed for what it was), this film is in my humble opinion exemplary of the expert combination of character acting, mythos, mystery, local color, shock-horror, and that final saucy sauce: blood'n'gutz.  I ended the film sated with the story, and sad that it didn't go on longer, in the same manner that one wishes a good book goodbye like some old friend.  The plot twists in this thing are also bad + ass.

 

Centered on the life of Molly (Gretchen Lodge), a low income mall janitor with a closet full of secrets behind her, the movie begins with the pastoral images of her quaint wedding to her truckdriver husband Tim (Johnny Lewis), attended by a girl we soon discover is her sister Hannah (Alexandra Holden).  Molly and Tim are that "even though we ain't got $" couple, as they move into their new home in a wooded area with quite a bit of land.  I'm not sure where this setting is supposed to be, or if they make references to it in the film, but it reminds me a lot of the poorer rural areas of upstate New York, though that was just how it resonated to me.  Since they do not have adequate funds to purchase their own home, they move into the empty house of Molly's parents, now deceased.  

 

What endeared me to Molly, Tim and Hannah is their struggle and the past darkness that they just don't talk about but still visibly grapple with.  These actors do not appear Hollywoodized.  They do not look like they have personal trainers and eight hours of make-up done just to look like a perfect person pretending to be imperfect.  The genius of these characters is the imperfections are plain, and painful to see. Put simply and without the political correct parlance of our time: they pull off poor people with just enough of a touch of white trash to convince you that they are representative of a huge portion of struggling Americans in the same grim chainsmoking minimum wage fucked up world.

   

That Tim and Molly have this seeming gift of a house should be a helping hand; instead the house is the harbinger of their undoing.  Haunted houses are one thing, but this story is far deeper and more convoluted.  Molly is witness to the flashbacks of her past experiences, many of which were blocked by trauma or child confusion.  This leads her to undergo a transformation into both the stereotypical hysterical female (the woman no one believes until it is too late) AND the evil woman (the woman we blame it all on) and the victim (the woman who must bear the sins of those who came before her).  That Molly combines all of these film/fiction personas is testament to the complexity of her character and the mastery Lodge demonstrates.  Without spoiling, there are several places in this film where I remarked to myself that the scenes must have felt very invasive and self-degradating or maybe even cathartic to execute. All I know is I don't think I could have done them. Lodge can and does.  Give her an award. Give her some good pasta.

 

 

The movie cleverly plays with use and disuse of the video camera, perhaps as a partial callback to the Blair Witch/reality/home movie simulation genre birthed into horror at the turn of the century.  It also cleverly plays with camera angles and sound - particuarly subtle sounds, even more so than other horror movies I have seen using just a touch of some element to cast a shadow here and there.

 

What we ultimately have is the combination of decent into madness and something else, the question that makes every single human being shiver at some point or multiple points in our brief little lives, whether it has to do with daydreams, fears, nightmares, suspicions, rumors, sickness, lies, the past, hallucinations, and so on.  That question: IS IT REAL?  And I think in the case of Lovely Molly, perhaps this question is too easily answered, which would be the one little stick of criticism I would float in here, but it isn't substantial enough to fuck up the movie.  If anything, that the movie does give you is a direction, in my case what I felt was a decisive departure from the camera flitting and somewhat arguable images of Blair Witch.

 

Lastly GORE.  Gore is like cursing or yelling.  Too much of either and people simply do not take you seriously.  Without going into it, the gore in this piece is choreographed with care and precision, and yes oh yes, there IS THAT MOMENT where you want to jump out of your seat and scream "Ohhhhh!  That did NOT just happen!  AND I crapped my pantaloons!"  (disclaimer: I did not just admit to crapping my pants) 

 

Which brings me to what always gets my hairz a'standing on end: mythos.  Molly's folly (teehee) is her exposure to that powerful element found in so many horror movies and is often underused and misused and misunderstood and undeveloped, etc.. In this case it's just elusive and mysterious enough that you want more, but don't feel like you've been cut short an explanation.  You know it: the sinister dark presence.  Hard to do right.  Elusive as fuck.  But when it's done right makes you scared of the ancient things on this earth.  Scared of of the rocks you stand on and the trees behind your house and the darkness at the basement floor.  That's horror people.  You can spin it any way you want it and argue until you are blue in the face that campy stuff is equally wonderful but it is movies like these that burn holes in your brain in the shape of questions marks.  Delicate, but effectual.  Yum.

 

WTF = 27 

W = 8

T = 9

F = 9

 

 

 

LOVE LOVE LOVECRAFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have previously rattled on about how this guy is A 100% ACTUAL MASTER OF HORROR WITHOUT QUESTION, but only in agony at directors making craptastic crapflicks out of his stories.  This review is all about his fiction, which countless other authors and directors have circled around in hopes of raising its darkness from the bottom of the abyss.  You will have to trust me and take the time to read the insanely awesome works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft if you have any faith in any of the other horror stuff I've recommended.  It is not an easy read at first (especially for people who are not very literate  - we don't do much booklearnin' these days wen we gotz the teevee).  I've known several college-educated people who could not really understand his sentences, and while I might say "that's okay, it's just not your style" to help them save face, I will also say to my esteemed readership that this book is not for you if you are not past an 8th grade reading level.  At least.  Ok nuf said.

One vein of thought that I will repeat is that there are not many writers out there who have managed to invent their own mythology.  Lovecraft is one of them.  Ironically, what got me into Lovecraft was the FANTABULOUSLY twisted and kinky conspiracy-theory of all conspiracy-theory books Wilson and Shea: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (also not for the feint of reading comprehension).  I discovered in these two authors' heavily-layered fact-o-fiction the deep lures of many Lovecraft shout-outs, allusions I would later find in countless other books and movies and TV (X-files included, lol).  I now take a huge amount of nerdy amusement in identifying the embedded Lovecraftian images in sci-fi, horror, and fantasy.  After Illuminatus, I had to find out what all the fuss was about this guy, as isolated and tragic in his own way as Poe, and ever-surrounded by the mysticism that he helped create.  

I should say that I'm not a huge Poe fan.  I realize he was one of the greats to the audience that was his audience, and certainly a score for us American writers, but for some reason I never really bought in, much much much as I wanted to.  Possibly because he was one of many blunt instruments used by one or two overpaid officials of the American public school system to ram "culture" into my brain.  While I admit he was dark and creeptastic in his own pre-ghetto Bronx way, I always saw him as a tad bit of a drama queen.  More melodramatic than hardcore, getting his panties all in a bunch because of a metaphorical bird and such.  Yes, I'm dissing The Raven.  I did it. It is rare that I find myself looking to be frightened by metaphorical birds.  I can be saddened by metaphorical birds, but not necessarily frightened, and I guess that is one difference between the whimsical and the absolutely horrifying.  I wanted the nitty gritty details of what exactly scared you shitless, not your description of the conniption you had after being scared shitless.  I thought he'd do much better as a director of macabre theater in 1965 or something, curse my soul for saying it but it's true, as wondrous a wordsmith as he was.  But then came HP, and I was knocked backward and upside the head.    This was something that just felt intrinsically different than any genre of horror I had ever attempted before.  It was like I was finally finding this essential piece of my love of horror fiction that was missing all the while.  This was truly dark, as in dark under thousands of feet of black ocean current, dark as in dark beyond eons of cold glittering stars, dark as in the heavy metal lord of horror.  

WTF = 29
W = 10
T = 9
F = 10 

This was the kind of horror that had me up at night, feeling ill-at-ease.  Written by a guy who died before 1940, his work is still as wild and relevant as it was when it was initially printed in the pulp mags.  The eternal leavings of Lovecraft's self-termed "cosmicism" are items like the Necronomicon, and creatures like Cthulu, Dagon, and the Old Ones, including a language much more metal than Tolkein's elf talk that all those dorks buy rings with the inscriptions and such.  That being said, I have fallen victim personally to Lovecraftian merchandise (though nothing as lame as some locket with something an elf said, I'll give you that at least.)  For some reason I felt while reading all of this crazy stuff, that somehow, Lovecraft was basing his stories on some tangent of reality.  That it could very well be that aliens landed here long before humans ever populated the earth, and that their technology or aims were unimaginable to our feeble linear minds.  

While I continued to tell myself I was just reading epic and hysterically well-worded pulp fiction, I dug up the old X-Files phrase almost immediately, because I found I could not help but apply it to the pilots and scientists in the face of the "At the Mountains of Madness", or the poor fellow in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", or the simple farmers in "The Color Out of Space".  There was nothing else but to admit it to myself loud and clear, assuming that perhaps this was what other writers and directors were feeling when they pulled imagery and relics out of Lovecraft's prose either as a lovingly-made allusion or a half-assed attempt to pass off genius as one's own:

"I want to believe." 

And oh did I ever.  I guess if the slew of other famous names of those who profess him to be a complete genius and an influence to create does not convince you to read this stuff, hopefully my testament that this guy managed to scare the living shit out of me while keeping me interested in not only his twisted, gnarled plots but also his characters will add to the ranks.  You may find at first that, like his drawn influence from Poe, Lovecraft's also a tad bit dramatic too with his lengthy flourish of language and multi-syllabic vocabulary, but when you are standing in the ancient dead hallways of a million-year old cavern built by all-knowing slumbering alien minds creating technology far exceeding anything humans could come close to imagining you just try not to have a panic attack.

As a new reader of Lovecraft stuff, I would start fairly simple.  Had I begun with "At the Mountains of Madness", I might not have gotten far with his work, though that is definitely the place to end it with a bang!  It seems all so archaic at first, like nothing out of the 20th century.  You will stumble at first with his writing style unless you generally read stuff from pre-1900, and this is to be expected I think even from the seasoned reader despite our desires to make others believe our brains comprehend everything instantly.  I'd advise starting with something like "The Colour Out of Space", or even "The Call of Cthulu".  I remember "The Curious Case of Charles Ward" was also one of the early ones I enjoyed.  There are several editions of Lovecraft collected short stories that are great, but I will suggest two sets that I have and quite enjoyed.  

I would suggest starting with this edition titled Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates).  This is a good little stack of Lovecraft stuff and a great way to get started before you go for the extended additions: Omnibus 1-3.  These books are super-chunky with a huge cross-section of Lovecraft's writing, including some of the less-stellar stuff, so you'll more or less have to do some sifting.  I don't care if Joyce Carol Oates or Jesus Christ did the intro for the book - the reason I picked this edition first is because the stories contained are good examples of Lovecrafty goodness.  I generally don't read introductions as a rule unless I'm bored and stuck on a plane with nothing better to do than pick my nose.  And even then, nasal spelunking is usually way better than the contents of most introductory material.  If the author you are reading is THAT good, their work should usually speak for itself and I find biographical stuff online. 

And here be the Omnibusssses.  All told, you have about a year's worth (at least) of screaming space madness the likes of which will creep you out indefinitely.  And while it would most definitely be one hell of an experiment to see what happens to your general mentality and life after one full year of reading nothing except Lovecraft...I probably would not advise it.  You would inevitably fall apart like the author did. 

I actually found that, as much as I loved his writing, I felt always a little sick when I read it.  This is the only stuff that gave my husband nightmares...he's the logical type that doesn't dream.  Possibly because the guy manages such an intense feeling of ominous foreboding that if you're into the stories you can't help but feel kind of ill with this dull kind of constant worry in the back of your mind.  It's maddening after a while and I discovered that what worked for me is to vary what I read and when I have a random rainy day where I can get away with a good hour or two's delve into something epic, I'll grab one of these and see what I find. 

Get into Lovecraft to get in touch with your ageless, slimier self, the part of you that wouldn't mind descending into a thousand-mile-deep oceanic abyss to learn the secrets of the Universe...and possibly be eaten alive by a creature four hundred times your size.  Lovecraft awakens in all of us, through the Cthulu mythos and his other tales, the sense that everything on earth and in the space around us is so much older than we can really fathom.  That we are at the brink of some insanely ageless magical violent and indifferent mystery.  I think what ultimately draws readers into this kind of writing is the realization that we humans know so little of the truth of what makes us sentient beings in what often appears to be endless dead space.  And so we ask: what else is there?

Heavy metal horror...

 

Nerd Alert: bought one of these cuties for my husband.  An adorable fluffy eater of souls :)

And lastly, some old Metallica (before they became a country band)...

ISOLATION

Ay me.  I gotz me this book in good faith but all I gotz in return was some bad religion.  


WTF =  10...eek.
W = 3
T = 4
F = 3


I feel bad about buying Isolation and since this incident have begun a horror book trade with friends and scouring libraries so I don't feel like I'm wasting my funds on something I can borrow for free.  Let's get one thing straight first: I have no problem with this being a Christian fiction book or writer.  As I've said before, the only thing I don't really like is feeling like I'm buying into something smallminded, or that I'm being forced to listen to your shitty didactic ramblings on why your particular god is the only god or the better god, and the only other side of it is heathenism.  You might ask me why I thought The Exorcist was a good movie and the answer is because the exorcism and possession itself was more or less made a spectacle AND I did not feel like I personally was being lectured.  Many authors manage to hold fast to their beliefs and not shove it down the throats of others through their books.  

I had three main problems with this book.  The first was that I had difficulty relating to the characters because I did not like them and I think they were supposed to be liked.  I could not feel for their plight of living off of other people while they converted "the unsaved".  I hate it when this voice arises in me, but I found myself saying, "Sheesh.  Get a real job."  Which is at least a reaction to character, albeit a bad one (hence a 10).  Said family of missionaries has returned to the USA for a several month vacation following their many months "working" to "save" some brown people from Satan and such.  I do not mean to clump all zealots together, and I am not so ignorant as to suppose that many missionaries have not saved the lives of others through medical help, provision of food and clean water, better shelters, education, etc..  While I am very thankful that there are people who care that much, I'm equally annoyed that there are people who believe that in addition to improving the temporal conditions of the less fortunate, they also have to push the heavenly fortitude of their personal savior (whoever that may be - there are zealots in every belief system).  The lives of this particular missionary family abroad were more focused on the conversion factor though there was some mention of more conventional missionary work as well.  The village they were trying to "save" fell victim to a series of strange plagues and possessions (the kind that routinely fall upon people who are fanatics - not people who don't have a concept of the opposing religion).  So, in short, I wouldn't have been too bothered if this family had an untimely meeting with an axe-murderer, tribe of angry badger-men, or battalion of aliens with scalpels.  Not a good way to start a book if you're supposed to like the protagonists.

Father figure has trouble with his super strict faith, mother figure has trouble tolerating her family, and one of the children is basically a crudely-disguised rip-off of Danny Torrance.  Which brings me to section two of why I should not have paid 12 US dollars or whatever for this book: it's more or less The Shining with religious ho-hum and half-explained anti-satanist whatnot instead of a kid who can talk to a wise old chef without saying a word and a father driven insane by lingering evil.  The end of the book contains a whole diatribe about how Stephen King was a role model, etc..  I think it's okay to have role models, but a little strange when I felt like I was reading a less awesome version of Jack Torrance's Overlook adventures.  Thrasher had a goldmine of interesting points to go into as an author: the mysticism and facts behind possession amongst the highly suggestible, the creepy history of the house he chose to describe in such detail only to abandon at the last minute, the unsteady and kind of old-school 50's relationship of the mother and father figures.  There was a lot to work with that went untouched.  But their vacation home being unreachable in a snow-storm coupled with the son's special ability seemed only a dead giveaway.  

Which leaves us at my final qualm: the dead giveaway of the ending.  I don't do spoilers, but I will say that unless you are very inebriated while reading this, are deliberately trying not to read this, or have had a lengthy and painful operation to replace your brains with mashed potatoes, you will see this ending coming from about forty-seven miles away.  You will see it coming from so far away that you will be able to cleanly step out of the path to avoid a prosaic collision likened to when an elderly woman bumps into the salad bar at Wendy's and spills nothing but a few hard-boiled eggs.  If this book were some sort of tongue-in-cheek introspection of itself, I might have been interested.  Instead I was assuming it wouldn't be so obvious, and bewilderingly kept on reading, which only made me more angry when I finished it.  I love Stephen King's old stuff as you know and so far, I've found two authors who I feel were a little too close for comfort for me.  It doesn't astound me so much, because this is after all human behavior: to find someone really awesome and do like the monkeys.  But it's my hope that any author of any caliber would encourage all other writers to do what decent teachers all over the world advise their students to do: be yourself.  Embrace singularity over the conventionality of paint-by-numbers reading because it made millions for that other guy who doesn't even bother to imitate himself anymore.  If you want to yearn after the heyday of Stephen King with a book that at least has the guts to give a shout out to the guy, this text is for you.  If you have read Stephen King and would like to read another author, move on.

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD

It had to be done.  And it was not an easy decision: in prefacing the many zombie movies to come into this collection I had before me several questions.  The first was - do I give my esteemed readership a classic or do I surprise them with something modern and hyper-real?  The answer, searching my ghastly heart of hearts, whispered...no shouted: CLASSIC!

Ah, but then I had to ask further: do I give them what they're expecting...which frankly is Romero?  This is not to say that I will not rant AT LENGTH about Romero's fabulosity and shortcomings at some point in the future.  What it came down to is picking the single zombie movie that had the most impact on me personally, and the answer to that complicated question is:

WTF = 25
W = 9
T = 8
F = 8

Yeah, yeah.  It may not be the scariest zombie movie out there, but in my mind, it's one of the most creative.  Fulci is a pro at this, so there are going to be a lot of readers in my readership that feel differently and that's ok.  Your opinion is valid.  And validly denied.  If I were to recommend a zombie film to someone who never saw a zombie movie before, I would tell them to see this - yes even before Night of the Living Dead - for the sole purpose of seeing zombies in their Italian-American overdubbed heyday.  I'd tell them to see Night...etc. to get the backstory of how it all sort of began, but only after seeing the cheesetastic and somewhat creepy creation of City of the Living Dead.  For the record, this is a decent story with hilariously horrific details.  

I'm talking about religious overtones.  For once, forget the science of zombies.  While (as I have said a'many times before) I quite enjoy it when directors/writers try to provide evidence-backed explanations for extraordinary plots, this is one movie where I kinda like the blurred meaning and the idiocy of the characters.

As is true to most Italian horror movies, the plot is really of no import.  But I'll give you a briefing.  In this case, we begin a creepy macabre priest who commits suicide on hallowed ground, thereby opening a portal to hell.  I love/hate it when that happens.  Sometimes you get an awesome splash of zombies battling humans to the last man.  Other times you get a Republican electoral win.  Saying that I prefer the undead is a blurry statement, so I'll be specific: I prefer the fictional outcomes and this is one film that by far exceeded my expectations.  After the priest hangs himself, you have a seance with a bunch of psychic mediums that gets broken up when Mary Woodhouse (aka Catriona MacColl) has some sort of a seizure and they have to call 9-11.  The paramedics pronounce her dead, and the police think it's a bunch of druggies in their investigation.  A psychic with a low voice and a white-girl-afro (a hilarious product of the 70's that I truly wish would come back into fashion merely so I could laugh at them all over again) claims that this is the end of the world or some psychic blibblab, and we are instantly launched into zombie fun, beginning with...

...Woodhouse's burial.  A snazzy scene.  For some reason or another the poor woman wakes up in her coffin (this is why cremation is kinda preferable to me) and is rescued by the cigar-smoking Christopher George playing Peter Bell.  I have to say that the coffin scene here is not to be beat.  Rather epic in terms of lighting, timing, and dare I say: acting! I'm not sure how little or how much of this film is overdubbed, but the lot of it is self-aware and awesome.  George rescues MacColl and they begin a fun adventure to finding this portal to hell so that they can close it before the apocalypse begins. 

In a fight between Columbo and Christopher George, I'd vote for George any day.  This guy is like a less stylish Lou Reed with a few really bad acting classes.  Just a joyride to watch as he tries to man up to Woodhouse in their quest up the East Coast to the source of the undead scourge.  He manages to smoke cigars for the majority of his speaking roles and to not appear actually affected by the majority of the whole 'rising from the grave' thing as is the trend in Italian zombie movies (until it's too late and such).  Once they make it to the town a whole series of weird happenings has already passed and people are beginning to suspect that something is seriously wrong.  Couples pick the wrong make-out spots.  A poor young girl dies too soon, leaving a little brother looking out the window for her to return.  Suspicious men in provincial bars begin to talk amongst themselves...somewhat Lovecraftian. 

By the time Woodhouse and Bell arrive, it seems already too late.  What follows is a series of powerfully awesome scenes of horror that you will not forget anytime soon.  Not in the sense that they are scary, but only in the sense that they are classic.  And in some cases - even by 1980 - classic rip-off material.  I think this is partially where Fulci rips off Argento (once you see the maggot scene, you might be somewhat reminded of my dear Suspiria).  This is a moment where you're like...uh...are these directors simply putting in flying maggots everywhere because they know people are grossed out by them?  It's definitely not scary, more like one of those TV extravaganzas they have in Latin countries where you have girls in skimpy sequined dresses speaking with lots of rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr's and fruit hats and crappy bands and dudes with false teeth and tuxedos (not much different than MTV, but at least MTV as a bit more tact and by tact I mean less fruit hats and more guys with gold teeth and shitty new pre-teen music releases that nobody over 14 and or over 110 IQ would purchase).  

But...again...I digress!  I will preface my next statement in stating that above all things in the world including pain, bleeding, breaking of bones, bending of ligaments and tendons beyond their natural capacities, etc.., my GREATEST MOST HATED THING IN THE UNIVERSE is puking.  I would rather have someone break my fingers one by one than deal with a stomach virus or food poisoning.  I hate doing it, and I hate hearing it, and MOST OF ALL I hate watching it.  BUT!  This movie quite possibly contains the #1 best and unbeatable puke scene ever.  An unfortunate couple drives up to some make-out spot and starts doing the nasty in the front seat of a car...which I never EVER understood as I do not find gear-shifts or consoles or dashboards, glove compartments and seats designed to fit people as snugly as possible conducive to lasciviousness. I mean, if you're going to drive all the way to some secluded spot, why not bring a sleeping bag or something?  Why get it on in the most uncomfortable way possible?  I do not understand.  But for some reason, it works on film and it always has worked on film, because you can simply stick a camera in the window.

The girl gets the creeps, the undead priest shows his face, and suddenly, slowly, with almost unbelievable ridiculousness, the poor girl voms out her entire internal organ system.  I feel SO SORRY for the actress who had to film this scene.  I'm not sure what they used, sheep or pig or cow or whatever, but I'm QUITE POSITIVE it was not worth whatever she was paid to do it for.  Anyway, because of the unique total grossitude of this one scene, I have to cite it as the most intense internal organ vomming ever to be filmed ever.  To date.  You may not find that an achievement, and to be honest, I'm not sure if I do either, but there you go.  The glorious part of this scene is (for those of you who share my phobia) the that vomming is so absolutely ridiculous and filmed in a horrid piecemeal of cuts where the model obviously had to shove various pieces of raw organs and fake blood in her mouth.  I think finally it got too much for the actress so they put an obvious dummy in her place for when she pukes up her own stomach or her liver or what-have-you.  It's too fake to trip the gag reflex, but too awesome to ignore.  

The remainder of the film is a mix of people teaming up to attempt to understand/counteract the series of evil events that has taken over the small town and its inhabitants.  Naturally the team of pure genius uses the old and unbeatable horror fuck up methodology to deal with said events:

Let's split up!

Aaaaahahahah!!!!!!!  Gets me every time.  Like any non-suicidal group of frightened human beings would EVER use that plan EVER in a situation where dead people were getting out of coffins and eating the living?  Who comes up with this bullshit?  Answer: directors.  On speed perhaps.  And on a small budget.  Further elaboration: because the movie would end too soon if they didn't split up.  Ah.     

But let us not dwell in the nonsensical ridiculousness of this 1980 production of cheesetastical zombificiation.  Instead we should rejoice in the nonsensical ridiculousness of this 1980 production of cheesetastical zombification!!!!!!  This is the timeless rhetoric of horror: whatever you hate about it can also be loved (unlike puking).  While this movie makes little sense in terms of a scientific explanation (biblical being the total opposite of scientific) of the scourge of the undead rising to claim the earth, this is a 93 minute joyride of zombie shenanigans that winds the viewers down and down into the catacombs to the end of the world.

There's something refreshing about zombie movies that does not request but DEMAND that you take them as they are, flawed plots and all.  I suppose that this is ultimately what I love and hate about zombie movies.  They are in various ways true 20th century creations in that they give us big fireworks - displays of blood and gore and maggots and intestine barfing and soundtracks worthy of Wesley Willis - with little explanation other than 'this is a reflection of ourselves!!! oooooo!!!'.  They are often poorly cut, acted, directed, overdubbed, and produced, but they are also often barrels of fun n' gore with a few religious/biological/social undertones here and there.  City of the Living Dead is among said barrels of fun that is not to be read deeply but definitely to be enjoyed as a preface to all that came before and all that followed.  It is what it is!!!
 

GHOST ROAD BLUES

I wanted SO BADLY to like this book.  I wanted to find a new flavor of horror lit in Bram Stoker Award winner Jonathan Maberry, so I stretched and stretched myself to finish this thing in the headstrong hope that there would be some amazing stuff a page-turn away.

Bleh. 

Now I'm mostly angry that:

(1.) I bought this book rather than using the amazingly and saddenly underused resource in America that most people are unaware of known as "The Public Library" and that...

(2.) I forced myself to stick it out to the end rather than obeying my instinct to put the damn thing down as soon as I had the itchy feeling (it's not fungal, don't worry) that I was loitering in an unwelcoming  world of piss poor Stephen King stereotypes.    

I know that this is harsh, but I put time into reading this and feel cheated.  Here's your TMI for the 2010: I even kept it near the toilet when I had a stomach flu in hopes that I could finish it given the reality that I would be spending many hours in the bathroom.  The worst thing is that I feel like Maberry writes like he is on the verge of a major breakthrough into something totally terrifying and genius.  There are points where his language is scathingly original and funny and relevant to the inner monologue of today's 20-40 somethings - and oh how I wanted that momentum to stick through the whole book, but the plot kept getting in the way.  I could not buy in, no matter what angle or position or literary lube I tried.   

WTF = A GENEROUS 11 
W= 4
T = 4
F = 3

I should state that as a reader I'm pretty much an addict trying to get hooked on a new gateway drug.  Most of the time I counteract this behavior by deliberately picking out and looking for well-written (aka Bloodletter-tastic) reviews of books by new people.  I go through author phases where I attempt to read anything and everything an author writes once I've sniffed out something good in their books.  When I bought this book, I was hoping for another authorial revelation, a new world of someone's twisted horror mind that I could sink into on dark and stormy nights.  Alas, I found the plot to be kind of unmemorable though it tried hard to shock me.  I found the characters surprisingly flat given the level of background provided.  And I found almost no real girthy underbelly of thematic horror goodness that he had the opportunity to expose in his semi-bucolic Pennsylvania community.  I know the general area fairly well and a big part of my family lives there - it's fair to say that over the last thirty-fifty years, rural PA has undergone a dramatic transformation in dealing with the industry and population changes, loss of money, etc., and there's a lot of creepy shit he had the opportunity to play with in his little town that I just didn't see. 

This is his first novel, so there's room for improvement.  This is also why when I publish my first novel, it's going to be COMPLETELY ANONYMOUS and probably public domain so when someone rips me a new a-hole while I get my feet wet, I don't have to live it down.  Given my own rippery, I hope that the author takes that voice that I saw in pieces and expands that grasp to really pull in readers on all fronts of the stories he creates.  His potential is visible in this first book, but not altogether reached.
 

ANTICHRIST

I just realized that I've been waiting to review this movie for a long time...

Antichrist is a difficult movie to categorize and in some ways an even more difficult movie to watch.  But it is worth the watch.  Lars von Trier does not explain the movie piece by piece so if you are looking for 'the big idea' (as I often find myself doing), you might be disappointed.  That being said, I hope you can see beyond that to what the film does have to offer.

WTF = 27
W= 9
T = 9
F =9


The story centers around a grieving couple who lost their son - the scenes of his death being the beginning of the movie, shot in black and white slow-motion.  When I first saw the opening sequences, I thought I was going to be watching a modern fart film.  To a degree, this was true - the film is what you could call "artsy"...to an extent - that it's told in four chapters with weird title sequences and dreamy music and sounds.  Also the preview makes it look like an existential art film.  But it wasn't so bad as to give me acid reflux as films and books that get vacu-sucked up their own philosophical anus tend to do.  There was more substance to this story, and the watcher is slammed into that substance as soon as the death scene ends, with the parents following the hearse to the grave site, utterly horrified by the reality that they are burying their infant son.  

The cycles of denial, anger, blame, and so on begin in earnest when Willem Dafoe (the shizzy) protests his wife's (Charlotte Gainsbourg) - and her doctor's -  choice of confinement in a hospital/mental ward based on the belief that he can help her heal better at home.  It appears at this point that the death of their son has driven her batty, but when they return home, her behavior cycles downward from ferocious sex to the beginnings of hurting herself and her husband.  When the first real fits of violence begin, Dafoe's character decides (much like the fabulous decision-maker, Jack Torrance) that it's a great idea to go to the place where his wife feels most afraid and vulnerable to face and confront her fears.  Riiight.  This place, she decides, is a cabin in a forest called "Eden", a place so isolated they have to walk for most of the journey through woods, a place where calling for help would be about as effective as autotune is for Katy Perry.  Dafoe's character, a psychiatrist, pushes the limits of his wife because he believes he has the background and knowledge to be in control, but what they find at the cabin is an indomitable mix of the imaginary and the occult.       

The couple dives further into insanity and it becomes apparent that neither of them are really 'sane'.  I use that word carefully, because I am still not entirely sure what it means and I get pissed when people think they have the absolute definition.  I can only conjecture at best that it resembles getting through life and being able to enjoy it and gradually learning to be yourself without hurting anyone beyond what it takes to make progress (i.e. straining yourself to achieve something or beat a dependence or addiction or negative behavior - no pain no gain = okay vs. chopping family members to pieces, freeze-drying them and eating them for several holiday meals = not okay).  But that's a very loose interpretation.  I do manage not to chop people up, but there are some days when I wonder if a couple of artfully wielded axes in the right hands would not make the world less painfully stupid.  Today on the news I heard that a woman got arrested for dialing 911......... because she got a bad manicure...(please hold for brief screaming fit).  Ahem.  On my off days, I find myself musing: "And why do we need this asshole?"

But I do indeedly digress.  Point being, it is people who drive themselves and each other batshit.  Dafoe and Gainsbourg's characters are isolated into the dim corners of their own headfucks and what is conjured or imagined becomes beautifully/hideously blurred.  The plot contorts into the strange back-story of Gainsbourg and her young son on their trip to the cabin the previous summer to complete her "thesis" on the validity of the witch trail sentences.  While the whole thesis idea annoys me (having done a thesis myself and finding the majority of the topics in process and in nature to be more political and institutional wankery than mindblowing steps forward for mankind) it does frame the following background question nicely: are human beings (more specifically women) evil?  

I dunno.  I often ask...AM I EVIL? 

The setting of Eden and the self-punishing nature of the mourning guilty mother is almost cumbersome with Eve symbolism, but does well at forcing that question on the audience.   I think I lot of people could easily read the film as misogynistic.  I don't think it's necessarily about women-hating, but more along the lines of people hating, since the wife tries to chastise herself and her husband.  I think self-loathing is the most damaging aspect of humanity, yet we all do it to an extent, and the more of ourselves we destroy, the more it affects others around us.  The background is witch trials, but I really felt that the mother and father of the dead child are standing trial.   The 'big idea' I was searching for was: who's the judge?

Nevertheless, the word 'evil' to me is about as ambiguous as the word 'sane'.  I guess that's why I liked this movie so much, not necessarily the search for explanations (which I always do anyway) but reveling in all of the QUESTIONS. Why do we hurt the ones we love?  Is having children selfless or selfish?  (Few ever really own up to it that they should not have had kids, but I see those people all the time).  Is there a God/Devil or Good/Evil or a fine line between Sanity/Insanity?  What is the destructive/creative force behind what this couple is doing to each other?   And to what end?  The ambiguity of these questions measured up to the images von Trier gives us makes for a strange puzzle that I had to revisit.    

The imperfections of this film are many.  One of them is Dafoe's character.  You get a background of Gainsbourg and her psychosis, but all you really get from Dafoe's history (or lack thereof) is that he was often an absentee husband and father and that he takes his work more seriously than he does his family.  Even those bits and pieces come from Gainsbourg's interpretation of him not being there or not wanting to be there.  I also don't have any qualms with nudity, but I got tired of bobbing man ass within the first thirty minutes and tired of genitals altogether by the end of the film.  I'm sure there was a reason for like six bobbing Dafoe ass scenes and seeing Gainsbourg's bush like 47 times, but haven't yet figured that out.  Perhaps something to do with the banality of the body or fleshy sin, but I sense perhaps more to do with film wank.  I got the sense at a few points that this was shock-gore for shock-gore's sake, but then again, measured up to the rest of the movie, there's kind of a place for it.

Lastly but not leastly, this film is VISUALLY GORGEOUS, just so beautifully shot that you could almost call it an exercise in images if there wasn't actual substance to the central characters and their weird history.  The first time I saw this, I was just picking a random movie to watch after a long ass day.  My hubbling joined me, claiming he was about to fall asleep, but would watch a few minutes of whatever weirdness I had found.  We ended up watching the whole thing to the end, eyes peeled, exclaiming "Whoa!" in unison at certain obvious parts, unaware of how late it had gotten until long after the credits rolled.  I think if you're in a critical mood, it is extremely easy to see this movie for what it isn't, but it's also lame if you can't see the movie for just what it is.  For the record, Antichrist is a playfully sadistic experience in the realm of dark ambiguity and conjured horror.  See it.