Hausu is an exercise in awesome, a queen of kitsch foriegn cinema. I first saw this in a movie theater, so I got to experience the film in its full beautiful colorful glory.
Basic premise is the main character is a young girl grapples with the loss of her mother, the addition of her new stepmother, and decides to go with her schoolmates on a summer trip to her distant aunt's house. What these girls do not know about the aunt and her home is what makes the story.
But I think what makes the movie is the fucking hilarious characters like some real-time Sailor Moon (on acid) meets Abbot and Costello (on acid). *
*Note: unfortunately, whilst I have never actually done acid, I like to speculate that this movie is exactly what it would be like. What this also translates to is: I have a lot of trouble imagining that sober people created this film. But maybe that's just me.
Case in point severed head of girl biting the ass of other girl at random point in the film which will be explained during the film but not really.
This is the beauty of some films...many of them foreign because we Americans like to have everything tidily explained n wrapped up. Maybe that's a mean generalization, but maybe my generalization is true. This isn't artful, gorgeous hole-in-the-story ambiguity we get in movies like 'Antichrist', but it is a horror movie that is all about going along for the ride and enjoying the trip...whatever it is you are tripping on be it your own unique brain chemistry or a can of rubber cement.
I would recommend this movie as a must see even though I'm not planning on giving it a super high score. The plot is really dumb, not gonna lie. The characters are a step above mental retardation. And I imagine the effect was more scooby-doo than fear-inducing. But there you have it, in spite of my well-crafted scoring system, we have a kick ass movie that everyone who enjoys the variations of the field of horror films should SEEEEE!
It's visually gorgeous, ridiculously funny, a self-parody probably (?) The music is laughable with it's own flare of late seventies ballad gold embedded in parts of the film. The characters are cartoons, and if you can deal with that and not expect depth or explanations of what you are seeing, this movie may also earn its place as one of your own favorite horror flicks. Think of it as a cross between scooby doo, a bubble gum commercial, and an art film.
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)...
For a very long time, I have longed to rid myself of the addiction to reading Stephen King novels. But we have history, Mr. King and I. The first non-girl lit books I ever read were his horror novels. I was eight when I started. For me, horror novels symbolized my departure from reading what authority figures (aka Elementary school teachers librarians and my mom - ever hopeful that I'd grow up to be a graceful swan in a family of carnivorous Italian-Germans, eh...her intentions were good at least) told me to read. With a little covert saving and spending on my part, I could finally put down Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Gone With the Wind, and (urgg) Nancy Drew for good and move on having learned that if girls could be writers, plantation owners and detectives, they could bloody well also read horror fiction.
This was long ago, when I was in fourth or fifth grade, back when the internet was considered by suburban luddites as a ridiculous ephemeral phase of technology that noveau-riche and tacky families added to jack up their phone bills and flaunt to their co-workers. Little did they know how much the invention would take hold. Little did I know, huddling under the flashlight in my bedroom reading about ghosts, vampires, monsters, etc.. how much of an impact this one writer would have on me - as is the case with so many other readers.
Not my tat. But not bad choice.
All I knew was that I was not allowed to stay up to watch Stephen King movies and that aunts, uncles, older cousins, and schoolmates with more lenient parents had read his books and were delightfully frightened by the stories contained. I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be up at night with the covers pulled up to my chin. So I saved my meager allowance of like five dollars a week to purchase several used copies of his books.
When my mom finally realized I was more of a horror fiend than a women's empowerment book fanatic, it was she who bought me my first tattered copy of The Gunslinger from a 'throw out' pile of library books she raided. Though she still does not know it, this was one of her greatest gifts to me. Though I have read books by hundreds of authors and in just about every genre, the number one repeated name on my bookshelf is still Stephen King. There's just no way around it. Sometimes people are dumb lemmings, but sometimes the majority sees something awesome, and that this is the case with King's best work, I have no doubt.
Years later, I would be humiliated by my senior year AP English teacher in high school, who told me (in front of the class) when I requested a paper topic on the literary and commercial phenomenon of Stephen King, that I should pick "a real writer" as opposed to "trash". Had I known that I could get away with telling a teacher to go fuck himself without significant damage to my chances of getting a decent college scholarship, I would've relished in the deed, but my respect for people in positions of 'responsible adult' still had a strong a grip on me. Perhaps it was for the best that I did not, or else I would not have developed such a comfortably-seething hatred for the honored realms of lit crit's adherence to viewing books on the limited scale of a few scholars and philosophers rather than admitting that everyone has an opinion, and that a huge amount of those opinions have the capacity to be real and right. My opinion then and now is that King is both a departure from the classics and a classic.
That I was barred from writing anything academic about King did not deter me from continuing to plow though his novels. If anything, it only sped up the process. Being told not to do something is modus operandi enough for the adolescent mind. Plus, I had just finished The Gunslinger the year before and was already drawn in to Roland's cause.
In choosing which King book to write about first, I had a hard time. There are just so many other books that he wrote that are more directly categorized as straight horror (Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, Pet Semetary, Needful Things, IT, etc.) that The Dark Tower by comparison seems to fall more into the lines of Fantasy. But I have to beg to differ on that one. It definitely is a Fantasy novel series, but underneath it all, each book is guided by that otherworldly horror tone that King manages to place in an Americana layman's voice with ease. When it comes down to why I like King's stuff, it's not only the stories he tells but his writer's voice. Once you've enjoyed one of his books, the rest are not only tales of terror, but sources of comfort, like settling down to being told a story by your favorite uncle or something, the one who the whole family regards as a bit of a rebel and a dreamer. There's familiarity and continuity in almost all of his books that keeps us reading...and buying...;)
The Dark Tower series begins with the epic The Gunslinger, of which I would advise readers to purchase the original cut version rather than the later version released. The cut version actually struck me as more sparse and epic - more holes for the reader to fill in with their own imaginations. It opens with a sentence I will never forget: "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." At the time I was more terrified that I would be reading some country western novel and that I would suffer through three hundred odd pages of "draw yer gun, ya dirty dawg" and "who stole my cattle?!". That fear quickly transformed into an affinity for stoic Roland, for the question of life itself, the nature of all of the realms of the universe, of ghosts and vampires and worlds laid to radioactive waste, and speaking demons and oracles.
Roland is on a quest for all answers, joined by a group of oddly-met friends in a world (or many worlds) dominated by the chaos of life and the neverending power struggles of those living life. Yeah, it sounds familiar. A bazillion other fantasy writers have gone there. But there's something special about this otherworldly set. The series is seven novels long, and some of the set are more engrossing than others. Along those same lines, some characters are more captivating than others. Like most series fiction, it has its ups and downs, but King himself sees these novels as a huge chunk of his life's work, written over the course of 30(?) some-odd years. As an author, he's notorious for plugging his other books - there are direct links to 'Salem's Lot, IT, Insomnia, The Stand, and probably a buttload more that I am not remembering in the thousands of pages. I've heard it called King's "uber-novel", one long narrative that links together other pieces of his life's work. My suggestion would be to either read these books first and then read the other major books, OR (this might be more fun), read the others first, then start the series because you'll recognize the links more clearly.
Evenually, Roland meets a young, displaced boy named Jake in an abandoned waystation. The kid has no idea where he is or how he got there. A city kid with a mind full of ideas and nobody to entertain them. I love Jake. He's a kid who is not afraid to ask questions, but at the same time feels awkward and jaded at a young age. The kind every teacher worthy of the title wants in their classroom. I felt linked to this kid because I was also always a nerd (though I kicked boys' asses if they called me that to my face, so there's a tad bit of a difference there), and I never quite fit in with the popularity-hound crowd, though I was voted "class clown" once, or the athlete crowd even when I was on varsity, and so on. Jake is good at what he does but feels completely unappreciated. In Roland's world, he finds his purpose, discovers it was always there but always unseen. These characters make a good duo as they travel together to where the desert ends and the perilous mountains begin. It is from Jake that we eventually get one of the famous quotes from the series (99% of which come from the first book): "Go then, there are other worlds than these." As early as the first book, there is this sort of fantasy version of quantum physics. The possibility of many existences happening simultaneously where all possibilities exhaust themselves.
Likewise, the Man in Black is an equally, if not more alluring a character, always messing with Roland's mind; the reader never knows how much he is leading Roland on, or how much of what he says is truth.
The book and the series continue forward (and backward) in the directions of good and evil and god and the devil and everything in between. King is a bit Christian-y at times, but it doesn't get too preachy, and I'm fine with that - I'm not a Christian, but I respect everyone's point of view so long as they are not trying to convince me I'm a heathen (I already know that). Some of my friends who have read the series are disappointed by it. They either don't like some of the characters, or the occasional religious undertones, or the ending, etc.. While many of them have good points to the series' downsides, what kept me reading was the journey of it all, the voice, and the most of all the questions.
Over the course of the series, you can't help but bond with some of these characters and their relentless quest through time and space. At least I couldn't help it. We are introduced to heroin addicts and split personalities, vampire hunters, soothsayers, witches, peasants with pitchforks, and the Crimson King himself (perhaps a shout-out to the beloved King Crimson?). What I loved about these books was that I did not want them to end. This is a rarity for me. I'm one of those sadists who forces herself to finish books that are lagging, boring, full of plotholes, full of shit, etc.. because I feel that I am disrespecting the author by putting the book down and judging it without seeing the whole scope of the thing. In my recent years, I've slowly developed some ability to say "this is shit!" and put it down, but not entirely...I still have a stack of books on my nightstand that are buried under books I want to read - a stack of books I feel guilty for not finishing. I know. I'm a dork.
BUT! When I find a book or series of books that motivates me to stay stuck in that world, to get hooked, I am appreciative. This set is grounded in fantasy, but I argue that fantasy and horror are husband and wife. They both ask the same "what if...?" questions. The both posit the same outlandish situations. The differences between them are primarily tonal, but both push the buttons of life and death, time and space, and The Dark Tower is exemplary of that marriage.
This review must be written before Ron Howard goes and makes a movie out of it all so more Americans can be convinced that they don't need to read anything and people in general can continue to get dumber. Why did you sell the rights, Stephen? Did you need another marble indoor pool or something? Ok, yeah, it might be great like Kubrick's The Shining, (but you yourself had some major issues with that and then ended up okay-ing a made-for-tv movie as if it would somehow rectify the situation). Kubrick's version was pretty awesome-o, I'll give him that (even though Nicholson was as batshit in the beginning of the film as the end - was that one of your complaints too?) I guess it had to happen and here's hoping it will rock as much as some of the other King books sold into celluloid.
I will also note that the books have been made into graphic novels as well...HOT FRIGGIN DAMN can we knock it off with the marketing? While the images in the graphic novel are kinda kickass.......Can't a book just be a book? I have tried to get into them but find that watching the images and dialog bubbles corrupts my initial vision of the series, which I prefer to keep thankyouverymuch. The magic of the original books in this set is exactly that: writer's voice and description met with reader's vision. No amount of illustration and CGI can make up for that in books like these.
I suppose it's about marketing. How else would people remember a writer's name? But the originality of that first awesome journey across the desert and through the mountains blew me away - and that was a tattered, dogeared yellowed and musty used book - THE BEST KIND!!!! From said tattered dogeared yellowed musty used book sprang these messed up and broken worlds that are not quite ours, but have pieces of our world hanging around, like "Hey Jude" playing in a piano bar of a desolate badlands town
Read these books because they are a colorful and weird journey, not because you expect Roland to do what you want him to do. Read these books if you like anything King has done (at least the early novels). Read these books if you like being sucked into a comfortable yet on-the-edge without being some wanky and heinously over-detailed alternate reality. Read these books if you can handle some level of cheesiness for the sake of an earnest yummy yarn. They are the the biggest lump in the life's work of one of the world's bestselling authors and while I think a lot of bestselling authors are full of shit, this is not so with King, who wrote through childhood and tough jobs and poverty and parenting and still makes sense. It is a rarity for me to sink inside a book, or for a book to make me cry or feel anything semblant of real concern for a character. But Roland and his wonder-horror journey won me over.
WTF = 28 W=10 T= 9 F= 9
Stephen King gives advice to those who want to be writers...
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?
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.
Timeless wisdom from the world of 1978 made-for-TV ... "I wonder why they didn't want us to wear any clothes beneath this?"
I stumbled upon "The Initiation of Sarah" whilst trawling netflix in hopes that I could either bore or laugh myself to sleep. Mission accomplished on both counts. BUT! Before I closed my laptop to pass out, I discovered that this Carrie cash-in was not a complete waste of time (after all, I folded laundry and did my nails while I watched it).
You could say I was lured in by Shelley Winters' ceremonial initiation garb - out of curiosity as to why she signed on for this made-for-TV creation ($?). You could also say I was baffled by the Dallas side-character count here. Morgan Fairchild, most likely freshly kicked off Southfork by Pamela and looking for some sorority action. Also, Morgan Brittany plays Sarah's sister. Ironically, Fairchild also appears in the remake of this film, made in 2006, the year Winters died. So, yeah, you could say I was intrigued by the cast list. You could also say I had just polished off half a bottle of Guenoc after work and lacked the motor skills and drive to move on to something that is not a shining example of the 70's in all of its retarded glory.
That being said, let us look on the bright side! This film is a shining example of the 70's in all of its retarded glory! An excellent specimen in slapstick piano-dropping, poo-slinging horror with all of the graceful tact of a tampon commercial. It is the story of two sisters - one of them being an easily-manipulated social butterfly - the other, an anti-social (also easily-manipulated) slightly disturbed telekinetic. A match made on ABC Family. Our two lovely sisters make their way to Waltham College, where they will be pledging various sororities in hopes of not living in the dorms and gaining social status through effectively buying their friends. This movie was filmed way back when sororities and frats still thought they were cool. Sarah and Patty check out the string of sororities in hopes of getting into their mother's sorority as "legacies", but Jennifer Lawrence does not like Sarah as a potential pledge, and wishes to separate Patty from her sister as a kind of power play.
I can't help it that Morgan Fairchild reminds me for some reason of every female gym teacher I have ever had: all she needs is a bright neon track suit made out of that swishy stuff. Her voice even sounds like my gym teachers (except for the one who had a tracheotomy). I realized about halfway through the movie that I was waiting in anticipation for a speech on why being able to do 75 sit-ups and the mile-run is important. Needless to say, I do not find spray-on hair and constantly thick make-up particularly attractive - in fact, it was kind of the scariest part of this movie watching Fairchild come out of the water looking like her face was re-touched again underwater. It's like her face has been spray-painted on in every television episode, movie, or picture I have ever seen of her. In this sense, however, she makes an awesome sorority super-villian. This is definitely her best role.
So poor Sarah gets blackballed by Jennifer Lawrence and crew, and she's stuck pledging Pi Epsilon Delta. PED is lauded as "Pigs, Elephants, and Dogs!" by Jennifer and friends at Alpha Nu Sigma - a sorority that needs an Upsilon stuck in there somewhere (har har). Sarah makes many fun friends at PED - a sorority that would've actually been fun with a bong in its living room, but had to settle instead for the illusory Mrs. Hunter (Shelley Winters) - not too bad a trade if only Hunter wasn't a crazed occultist. And so, with the two sisters pulled apart and divided against each other, the unspoken rivalry between ANS and PED reignites. Sarah becomes the target of Jennifer's bullying, and Sarah unwittingly fights back by using her 'gift' of telekinesis, which the PED house mother quickly enlists as a weapon to win the age-old sorority war of who gets to host the lamest tailgate parties.
Sandwiched between the kitschy exterior and the dark evil poo-slinging heart of this piece is the heartfelt anti-bullying message, a bit of fluffy PSA: "Don't bully the weird girl or you'll end up telekinetically cut to pieces." In some ways, this is the only really disturbing part of the movie, the only actual horror - that this kind of bullying actually really actually for real happens to real people in the real world by people as actually stupid as the character Fairchild plays. Actually. I don't think there is anyone I know who went to high school or college and did not experience some level of idiot human cruelty, poking fun at people who are different and the like. Nowadays we have kids bullying each other and being asswipes online (a la Jessie Slaughter), and the occasional suicide with facebook or myspace 'friends' bullying others. While this movie predates the technological aspect of bullying, it's not hard to imagine what it looked like before you could write some horrific message troll-style on someone's fb page. Sarah is first separated from her sister by birth and then separated from her sister by popularity contest. If everyone in this movie didn't look like they were over 30 and the dialog was not so fabulously trite, I'd have felt bad for these "kids" too.
But it was also a tad hard to relate...I grew up in a different time and place, where college kids in sororities and fraternities were for the most part looked down upon as the desperate sort of people who needed to be associated with a letter in order to score friends, an outdated and asinine form of name-dropping. There were still lots of them, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't the majority anymore, and the decision not to pledge was not met with scorn or early retirement to the chess club (chess rocks anyway). So I didn't really relate to the girls' initial need to pledge, but I was kind of happy that this movie (though dumb as a bag o' hammers dialog/plot/character-depth-wise) was at least smart enough to make that statement as early as 1978 that this sort of nonsense was nonsense.
I will also say that if you have trudged through the first hour of this, you might as well stay for the chuckles of the actual initiation scenes - priceless. I'm not sure who wrote Shelley Winters' particular dialog in these scenes, but I plan on using them to break up a wedding at some point. She is about as profane as Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and equally as dark and mysterious in her den mother from hell act.
If anything, call it an amusing 96 minutes of semi-drunken social commentary and obligatory shower-scalding, a jolly peek into the world of dumb American collegiates, pursuing higher education and learning nothing.
WTF= 15 W= 6 T= 5 F= 4
The first scenes with music anyone would want to drown to...
OMG OMG OMG: THE SHELLEY WINTERS POSEIDON ADVENTURE DOLL!!!!!!!!! (beats the SHIT out of Barbie)
Dario Argento's "Suspiria" is the 70's gem of Italian horror movies, if not the greatest Italian horror movie of its time. This movie realizes what I love about so-bad-its-good horror. You do not watch Suspiria in search of mind-bending ingenious plot twists or incredibly deep character studies. There are very few horror movies that truly master that delicate balance without going overboard. Fortunately, "overboard" is this particular movie's mantra. In tackling the witch genre, Suspiria stands out as a lovingly-made horror trip.
Total Score: 22/30 W= 6 T= 8 F= 8
Within the first minute of the film, it's obvious that Argento thought about the images, particularly color and form, that the viewer sees. Nothing is blandly lit, nothing looks too realistic. The set design is pure eye candy. The colors are bright and primary, often lavished in gold or lined in black, from garish velvet wallpapers to extremely fake stained glass. It's meant to be an experience in another highly superficial world. The lighting is as doused in reds and blues and greens as a psychotropic trip. The soundtrack of the film, done by The Goblins (a band influenced by the mighty King Crimson) was oddly recorded in one night at the behest of Argento himself. Though cheesy at points, I think it is true to the kind of thrown-together sparkle that is pervasive throughout the film.
Like a posh Italian designer, style is Argento's primary concern, and possibly he focused so hard on how things would look, that he focused less on how things would make sense - hence not a perfect rating. But there is a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor to the piece, particularly in some of the non-eye-candy or boob-shot characters (you know, the ones who got hired because they actually know how to act?). Watch the face of Miss Tanner for one. There are moments where the characters, scene, and music sweat delerium and panic, almost like you're drunk and lost somewhere without any idea of how to get home. At some points, it is gore-tastic; at others, you ask yourself why Argento didn't put in just a little extra time to thicken the plot. But it is what it is (a classic 70's horror piece), and should not be missed. Argento may not be creating the great horror mystery of the century: but he is having fun. This is his best film.
Jessica Harper leads as Suzy Bannion, an American dance student beginning her short-lived learning experience at the mysterious Tanz Academy in Germany (formerly a dance /occult studies school). She discovers as soon as she leaves the airport that this journey is ill-fated, and the strange mishaps add up to her consequent discovery of a coven of malevolent witches who eliminate anyone in their way. At one point, the question is posited: "What does it mean to be a witch?"
Suzy is denied entry into the academy on the night of her arrival, as a nameless girl runs from the front door, through the forest, and into the first gore scene in the apartment of a friend. This scene sticks with you throughout the movie, because it sets the tone for the way Argento kills off his ladies - he's gotten a lot of criticism that these are misogynistic portrayals of girl slaughter but I'll let you decide for yourself. The girl ends up stabbed in her beating heart, thrown through a stained glass skylight (simultaneously impaling her friend in the entry hall with shards of glass), and hung by a cord just a few feet from the floor.
When Suzy makes it to the academy the next day, the vice-directress of the the school (played by Joan Bennett in her final role) greets her with a dark stare, obviously annoyed by her attempts to volunteer information to the police about seeing the girl who was expelled from the academy the night before for "improper conduct". Likewise, the ultra-severe lead instructor, Miss Tanner, played by Alida Valli (once dubbed "the next Garbo" in her screen beauty youth), quickly engages Suzy in a kind of strange competition, forcing Suzy to dance after she has been zapped by a foul spell in the hallway of the school. There is an "old vs. young" component to this movie. Suzy quickly falls into the "malefic" control of the aged school staff.
Bannion befriends one girl at the academy, Sara, a doomed friend of the expelled victim. She tries to make friends with the intimidatingly sexy (in a viper kind of way) "Olga", played by Barbara Magnolfi, but soon discovers that Olga is willing to sell Suzy out without a second thought. Hearing Sara's theories of witchcraft, torture, and manipulation on the part of the school staff, Suzy gradually wises up to the process of elimination dominating the school, supposedly under the command of the ever-absent "Directress". Suzy must ultimately go head to head with these creatures in order to escape with her life.
On the witty end of the production, there is some sense to its message of the consumptive vices of black magic (in testament to horror as opposed to stuff Wiccans might take offense to) with the spotlight on the evil nature of this particular coven, headed by the lead-witch "Directress", Helena Marcus. Argento's direction does achieve the presence and influence of the coven and its values, knitted deeply in the often catty and vicious torture that women in competition inflict upon each other. Being a dance academy, you get the picture that these (mostly female) students are not summer camp buddies. They are focused on their careers and monetary gain after their training at Tanz, as seen in the cruel behavior of Olga, and the other students who seem only to see Suzy when she is in trouble or hurt.
There is a keen sense of manipulation, of people quick to take offense, the coveting of money and wealth at the expense of others, of punishment for those who do not conform, and in this way you sympathize with the heroine's plight. As mentioned, there is also the "old vs. young" rift as a power struggle. Suzy's stubbornness with the Vice-Directress over her lodging quickly results in punishment in my favorite scene of the movie. As she walks down the hallway to the studio, a strange unsmiling scullery maid polishing silverware shines a glaring bauble directly in Suzy's eyes, briefly blinding her and rendering her too dizzy and nauseous to function in class. Tanner goads her further, half-laughing, and she collapses, manipulated into staying permanently at the school on a 'special diet' of wine that makes her too sleepy to think.
As I said, it's not without its humor too. Though I'm not sure if it was intentional, my favorite line in the movie is delivered by the cursed blind piano player when Miss fires him for the misbehavior of his terrified and provoked dog. As Tanner throws his jacket and cane to the floor for him to pick up without help, he turns to her screaming: "You Beeeeeeeeeeeeetch!" (My brother and I often use this quote to each other, it never fails to rustle up laughter once you see this scene and makes for a great prank phone call).
This movie has duality to the point that when you finish it, it is very hard to decide if you have seen something wonderful or hysterically awful. On the one hand, there is bad overdubbing, flimsy acting, choppy scene cutting (beware the shortened versions of this film!!!), low grade cheap-o scare tactics (aka worms, bats, blood so unreal ketchup looks scarier), and an ending that feels somewhat rushed and thrown together that is the plight of so many horror movies. On the other hand, there is the mysticism of the coven, the unwritten rules of the dance school, the lurid and seductive set and (sometimes) gore, and the ultimate fate of Suzy, the innocent abroad.
That this movie is being remade apparently with Natalie Portman disturbs me a little (mini gag). I believe this movie could be well made, but it's tricky business capturing the magic that this particular film has in connection with the time it was made AND nailing Bannion's kind of dumb/helpful innocence... although it might be fun if Portman plays the role of Sara - something a little more insidious perhaps.
See Suspiria because of what it is: a strange, colorful, and playfully ridiculous trip. I think the ill-fated Sara put it best: "It all seems so absurd, so fantastic." And indeed, it is.
