CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (Deodato, 1980)

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is the first film that I have been unable to finish watching. I had, of course, heard a lot about it. It's supposed to be the most banned, most violent film ever committed to film. The catch is that the more egrarious violence is made against animals. A real, living turtle is beheaded, then ripped apart and eaten. A muskrat is knifed. A monkey gets decapitation. A snake is stamped and has its head cut off. Naturally, how you feel about hunting and killing animals might color your view. But several things can't be argued: the animals were eaten after they were killed. Second, the animals were real and had no choice as to whether or not they participated in the film. Animals are not rational creatures, so they cannot possibly make the choice to be murdered on screen. Does the absence of logic make killing OK? If so, what if one were to film the murder of a retarded child, or a person in a coma? These people are incapable of making rational decisions, just like a monkey. Does that make it OK to film them and make money off of their exploitation? Furthermore, are you (am I?) a hypocrite for eating meat and having no problem with it whatsoever? (The answer, of course, is yes, I am a hypocrite, and I'm only offended by the killing of animals when I am forced to see where my food comes from.)

The mere fact that these questions can be drawn from a horror film proves that there is a point, there is meaning behind the violence. I am perfectly willing to admit that. What I cannot do is sift through the footage, objectively, and attempt to attach said meaning to it. I have found the limits of what I can watch. One one hand, this is comforting to me. On the other hand, the image of a turtle being mudered is etched on my mind forever now. I have never been affected by a film like I have been by CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.

Look: when I was six or so, my family raised rabbits. They had baby rabbits. My friend and I were playing with the baby rabbits in the backyard one day, and we were having them run through a tube from one end to the other. In my naivete, I picked up the tube with a rabbit inside of it, and ended up breaking the bunny's neck. I killed it. I didn't even really have any concept of death up until then. I stared at the rabbit and understand that it did not exist anymore, that there was no life in it and that that was because of me. I've had a moral objection to killing ever since then. I was a vegetarian for several years during college. I eat meat again, now, and I have a guilty conscience because of it. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, in other words, made me think about things that I would prefer not to think about.

Halloween night is always kind of a letdown. When you're a kid, you've still got the actual trick or treating to look forward to. But when you grow up, you don't have a single thing to look forward to, unless you're going to a Halloween party, and who's going to have a Halloween party on a Tuesday night? (In 2008, though, watch out!) I went to the bar for a bit with my girlfriend and met a few friends, had a couple of "spooky" drinks, and then got some burgers. Later, we'll fall asleep watching HALLOWEEN on AMC for the third time this month. As a child, I used to make haunted houses with my friends. Never content to just take the kids through the basement and stick their hands in cold spaghetti, we'd have Slayer tapes blasting in my friend Jeremy's basement, and we'd have them go through the entire house. One of my friends had a demon mask with a tongue sticking out, and so we included a scene with two male monsters making out on a table, in order to educate the kids on the fact that homosexuality is genetic and even occurs in monsters. We also got one skinny kid to hide behind a refrigerator and shake it from side to side, screaming. The effect was that there was someone trapped inside, shrieking to be left out. The highlight was a little kid's dad freaking out and ordering us to "TURN THE LIGHTS ON, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!"

I have decided that next year, I will make a haunted house with some friends. Why should the 10 year olds have all the fun on October 31? I still feel sick when thinking about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, and I imagine I'll continue to feel sick about it for the foreseeable future. That comforts me, and I am now ready for October to be over. I've watched enough horror flicks for one month. BORAT should be a good palate cleanser.

TWO EVIL EYES (Argento/Romero, 1990)

Was driving home the other day and I realized that I hadn't watched or reviewed a single Romero film for this project. Odd, as he's my favorite horror director, and maybe my favorite director in general.

This is a two piece (is anthology the correct term if there's only two parts?) film with one part directed by George A. Romero and one half directed by Dario Argento. Both were taken from Poe short stories. The Romero part ("The Facts of the Case of Mr. Valdemar") was pretty much just there, more like an extended TALES FROM THE CRYPT episode than a Romero social parable. There's a cheating wife waiting to collect the fat inheritance check from her soon-to-dead-husband. Hubby gets hypnotized and when he dies, he's still under. Dude never knows he's dead or something, and soon the wife hears thumps coming from the freezer they stashed him in. Hijinks go down, and, like a TALES episode, everyone ends up dead.

Argento's half, "The Black Cat", is pretty great, though. Harvey Keitel is in it, giving a fine paranoid, manic performance as a crime scene photographer whose girlfriend finds a black cat which Keitel is convinced is about to kill him. Classic Argento psychlogical terror here, with great stylish camera movements and Keitel actually strangling a cat on camera. Later, he tries to lynch the cat with an electrical cord. Things go totally WICKER MAN for a bit, and there's also a Tom Atkins cameo. Great, forgotten film that more people should make an effort to track down.

(Bonus: my copy was an old VHS rental, with a trailer for SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER before it. Looks pretty horrible, but it does include the line from a narrator stating, "Nothing can stop a scanner. Except for perhaps another scanner." It probably doesn't read correctly, but when it's delivered in The Movie Guy Voice, it's pretty absurd. This makes me realize that I didn't include any Cronenberg in the project. Always next year, amiright?

KINDRED SPIRITS: Patton Oswalt's blog

Hey, so apparently Patton Oswalt is going the exact same thing as I am, except with short stories. Check out his myspace blog for an entire month's worth of ruminations on macabre little ditties from Richard Matheson, Lovecraft, and the like. Actually, check out his blog in general, as Patton is amazingly funny. (NOTE: you may need to register for myspace to read it, I'm not sure. I don't recommend registering for myspace to anyone, but if you're dead-set on reading it, then you might not have a choice. Whatevs.)

DEMONS (Bava, 1985)

I don't know, guys. It's hard for me to even write seriously about this one. Obviously, it's set in Berlin in the mid-80s for a reason, but I'm just still disgusted by it and while watching it, my skin was crawling and whatever subtext was there was just too obscure and deep for me to get to.

I think I'll get it a Joe Bob Briggs treatment, and be done with it.

One naked breast. 26 dead bodies. Two lynchings. 11 decapitations. Eyeball popping. One motorcycle attack scene. Two transformation scenes, one which sees a girl's teeth falling out and being replaced by fans, and another in which a demon claws its way out of a girl's back. Gratuitous Go West. Gratuitous Motley Crue. Gratuitous on-screen cocaine use (out of a Coke can, too!). Nipple tweaking via razor blade. Helicoptor fu. Kitana blade fu. Nostradamus fu. Drive-in Hall of Fame award for Bettina Ciampolini for saying "Hey hot dog, next time let's rip off a Ferrari, this heap's got no class", and Bobby Rhodes for saying "We got to stop it I tell you, we got to stop the movie!". Travis says check it out.

IT'S ALIVE (Cohen, 1974)

Perhaps I should preface this review by proclaiming my eternal hatred for kids. I find them petulant and spoiled and hopelessly self-centered, and one of the primary causes for the complete boring direction the country has taken in recent years. We spent our time worrying about the children, taking toys off the markets and putting warning labels on cigarettes and CDs. Our culture is awash in the fear of sexual predators, school violence, and teenage pregnancy, and so the government is more than happy to seize control away from us (us, all of us rational, thinking human begins, fully capable of making our own choices), all in the name of making things safer for kids.

Fuck kids, and fuck the suffocating, anti-freedom landscape they've helped to develop.

Now then. Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE starts off as a delicious deconstruction of the American family and, while it veers off the tracks towards the end and we get a Changed Husband Who Realizes The Importance Of The Family Bond, we also get to see the post partum mother and a baby killing adults with razor sharp teeth and claws. Children are something to be feared. This is completely different from the usual portrait of the child in the American picture. Horror films have always been among the most daring in terms of presenting terrifying little kids to us (from THE OMEN to THE RING), but IT'S ALIVE for a short while seems as if it's going to be one of the few to take that extra little step and Kill The Kid. The Davis baby ultimately survived for a couple more sequels, but things get truly dark for a while and it seems as if we're going to have the father murder his own son. It doesn't quite turn out that way, but the fact that Cohen is willing to almost go there is respectable, if not ultimately disappointing and a cop-out.

There are references to toxins and pollutants mutating the Davis family baby, but it's not really an environmentalist film. What IT'S ALIVE is is a meditation on the nature of evil and what role the creators have in the development of our society's monsters. Is it the parent's fault that their kid came out of the womb a demonic killing machine? If not, then who else? After all, the baby is nothing more than sheer instinct, completely devoid of societal conditioning. If we're never told what's right and what's wrong, how can we be expected to know the difference? Society and commerce is more than ready to hold the baby accountable for his crimes, condemning it to death and ordering its destruction so that it won't affect the sales of the drugs that the mother took that perhaps lead to its monstrous state. The father of the freak takes it upon himself to slay the monster, referencing Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN and slapping around his disrespectful wife.

Again, IT'S ALIVE in the end has a daring father fighting to save his deformed, mutant child (called a "retard" at one point in a gloriously un-PC moment), but we realize that it is futile and pointless. Even if it lives for the sequel, does anyone remember IT LIVES AGAIN?

SAW (Wan, 2004)

The SAW franchise is something that I initially resisted. From what I could tell, the choppy, MTV-inspired music video editing was overly-stylish and juvenile. The fact that its chief audience was mindless teenagers didn't help matters. But in 2005, there was not a lot of horror fare to choose from when October rolled around. Brandie and I actually went to see THE FOG in theatres, simply because it was the only genre picture in cinemas at the time. So SAW II seemed like a godsend, something that wasn't PG-13 and would be a good October Movie. I wasn't expecting much, but SAW II was far from a watered-down sequel set to cash in on the success of the original. The violence was gritty and realistic, just like my favorite horror films. I enjoyed it, despite the fact that the flashy cuts and generally bad acting took me out of it at some points. SAW II is a rare case of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The film fearlessly threw a helpless ex-heroin addict into a bit of syringes; amazing, I thought, and not at all what I was expecting. Graphic and grim in tone, SAW II was a pleasure.

It took me a whole year to get around to the original. I watched the uncut special edition. Since I never saw SAW in cinemas, I can't say what was cut for the theatrical release, but there is some truly explicit imagery which, according to director James Wan, was not supposed to be there at first. It seems as if the initial aim of the film was to be a "psychological thriller" along the lines of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS or SEVEN. It's always nice to see young directors ditch that slightly-pretentious, high-faluting room and just make a straight up nihilistic horror film. This of course also refers to people like Michael Heneke, who make horror films that ultimately seek to mock the genre and the audience. The label "thriller" is just a respectable way of saying "horror movie", and in the mid-90s, essentially killed the horror picture. SCREAM changed all that, of course, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, James Wan, Leigh Wannell, and Darren Lynn Bousman are not afraid of getting blood on their hands and they're not afraid of making dark, horrific films where everyone dies. This is a good thing for the genre.

Yes, I tried my hardest to fight against the SAW series for a while, and now I have no memory of why I even bothered. They're all realistic and gory, and the original helped kick off the American return to the grindhouse aesthetic. (Although I'd like to think that HIGH TENSION, released in France in 2003, truly signalled the return, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES unfortunately probably had just as much a direct influence, as well as THE TEXAS CHAINSAW remake (again, unfortunately).) Most of the reviews of the original that I read referenced SEVEN, making it seem like just another simple rip-off of that much-imitated Fincher film, but SAW is a lot more visceral than SEVEN. Also, despite some half-baked philosophical concepts running throughout about how people don't appreciate being alive, SAW never seems to take itself as seriously as SEVEN did. The trite FIGHT CLUBisms get old after a while, but I suppose a serial killer with an idealogy behind what he's doing is scarier than someone like Jason Vorhees or Fred Krueger, who are just unexamined, undead, killing-machine monsters.

Graphic violence and gore abound, and SAW definitely fullfills the first rule of the drive-in, which is, again, Anyone Can Die At Any Time. The SAW pictures are exercises in hysteria and bloody murder, and while the first one never achieves the pure nihilistic vision of the sequel, the sheer audacity and mayhem is ultimately satisfying. It's probably pointless to even place something this repulsive in a larger context, but fuck it, that's what I'm here for. It's impossible to watch something like SAW (or HOSTEL or THE DEVIL'S REJECTS or any of the other Splat Pack pics) and not see it as a reaction against the new puritianism. Our scripture-quoting, gun-slinging President isn't that far from one of Garth Ennis' homocidial creations, but what's always been scariest about him, to me anyway, is his undying, unblinking, unwavering devotion to the Guy On The Cross. While I don't doubt that many within his inner circle snicker at the cow-eyed masses, looking into Bush's stupid, stupid eyes, you cannot help but realize that he believes all this. I wouldn't be so offended by the notion of Christianity (indeed, I'd think them all mindless and boringly irrelevant) except that their primary religious text is being used to guide public policy. It's not just tits on television and the censorship of movies, it's also homosexual marriage and the right to abortion and contraceptives.

The SAW films stand in direct opposition to all of the ideas that Christianity (and, in turn, our Christian leadership) holds dear. And the fact that people are going in droves to see them is heartening and (I hope I hopeihope) a sign of a general turning away from the new puritanism. Long live the SAW. Can't wait for the third one.

CARRIE (De Palma, 1976)

Nothing sums up my memories of high school better than Brian De Palma's landmark from 1976. OK, so I wasn't tormented endlessly like Carrie. And I never had pig's blood dumped on me. I did, however, have a horrible religious upbringing that still sticks with me to this day, and I was taunted by my peers, and I felt awkward in my own skin and I did theatre and felt uncomfortable around people in general but girls especially. I am not here to ask your pity. Oh, quite the opposite, I am here to stand triumphant and proud of the fact that I survived without going Columbine.

OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. I could've had it worse. But there still was a select group of people who seemed to take great pleasure in making me miserable. And I still spent most of my time with people that I haven't seen since graduation and have no desire whatsoever to see at this point. High school was a terrible time, and it was probably a terrible time for everyone. I've seen some people since graduation, and they seem OK, but I can count on one hand the number of people that I hang out with that I knew in high school (can count them on two fingers, actually). And truth be told, watching Carrie burn down her senior prom gives me chills and only makes me wish I could go back in order to do the same thing.

Listen. I had a rough day today. I spend my day talking to mentally ill people who have been conditioned by psychiatrists to believe that they are helpless and genetically flawed, with the only solution medication. I have to try to convince these people that they are not flawed, that they're functioning human beings and they can do things for themselves. Some people are not so easily convinced. Today I seemed to have a high number who were not easily convinced at all. So it was a long day, and all I wanted to do all day long was come home, draw the shades, drink rum straight out the bottle, and watch high school kids get burnt alive. And so that's what I did.

What's my favorite moment of it all? I think it's Carrie and Tommy dancing at the prom. I went to three proms, truth be told. My first was in tenth grade, and I'd been in a car accident the weekend before and fucked up my leg. I sat at the table all night and stared at other people having fun. My second year I spent with the girl I was head over heels in love with. I felt socially awkward and fought the urge to simply run out of the place all night. My senior prom, I went with a girl I sort of had a crush on but who had already given her heart to god. I was also dating the girl I took to prom the year before, but we'd only gotten together like a week before prom and I'd asked the girl I went with like months before, so I spent the night trying to balance out the girl I was dating and the girl I initially asked to prom. Who hated each other, by the way. They were three uniquely horrible nights.

Again, I'm exaggerating.

CARRIE, at its core, is a story about what happens when you deny your basic human nature. Carrie has spent her entire life trying to fight her sexuality, trying to keep the blood from flowing, trying to keep things with her mother nice and quiet. But then the blood does flow, and it doesn't stop until the end, baby. Because that's what repression brings about. Explosions and fire and the death of all of your classmates. I am drunk. What a great fucking movie.

KINDRED SPIRITS: The Onion AV Club

Two similiar type things on the Onion AV Club site this week (and one final thought):

01. HORROR FILMS FOR LEFT WINGERS / HORROR FILMS FOR RIGHT WINGERS is a pretty good read. Some if it seems pretty easy (HOMECOMING, LAND OF THE DEAD, AMERICAN PSYCHO, THEY LIVE) but their inclusion of EYES WITHOUT A FACE is killer, and I've got to hand it to them for nailing that piece of shit, Pat Robertson-ghostwritten EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. But, a bone (no pun intended) to pick: LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Uh, guys? Craven's classic was penned as a reaction to the Viet Nam War and, at its base, is really an indictment of the death penalty, where the punishers become the punished, and when the police burst in at the end of the film and the vengeful dad is swinging around a chainsaw, they can't tell who are the killers and who are the parents of the murdered girl. The point is, violence begat violence, and violence leads to more violence, and what difference does it make when you've got blood on your hands (and on the walls and your mouth and etc.).

02. CROSSTALK: THE STATE OF HORROR CINEMA is pretty good when Scott Tobias is writing, not so much when Noel Murray comes in. This is mostly due to the fact that Murray seems to put himself (or herself, I'm not sure) above the genre at all times and seems actually quite repelled by it. Which is fine. But why not track down another horror-loving writer to provide commentary? Or maybe the reason is to provide balance to the argument? Whatever; I still think that Murray comes across as condescending and not at all a fan of the genre.

03. BOOK REVIEW: WORLD WAR Z: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR. I'm only like halfway through the book, but so far, it rules, and Brooks is our literary zombie savior. But does reviewer Keith Phibbs have any sense of zombie history whatsoever? "It's far more affecting than anything involving zombies really has any right to be"? "It feels like the right book for the times, and that's the eeriest detail of all"? Of all monsters to peg as socially irrelevant, zombies are probably the last ones you'd want to choose...

DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (Gordon, 2005)

Stuart Gordon, for a long while, has been one of my favorite directors in the whole splatter subgenre. I've never seen CASTLE FREAK or DOLLS and I've not yet gotten around to seeing EDMOND (though, let's face it, Mamet + William H. Macy + the guy behind RE-ANIMATOR = $$), but based upon DAGON, RE-ANIMATOR, and FROM BEYOND alone, Gordon is still a true legend and hero of the genre. He's a low budget maestro, a veteran of the theatre, and perhaps the greatest the genre has ever seen at making the macabre and horrific into something far more significant than one would ever think possible. His general theme of sex and death being linked may seem like old hat given the slasher sub-genre's existence, but anyone who's seen the "head" scene from RE-ANIMATOR has surely seen this old cliche given new life.

DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE, though, is clearly a mis-step and mediocre, at best. The effort is there, but, again, due to time and monetary constraints, nothing is as fully fleshed out as it could possibly be. Ideas are hinted at but never expanded or built upon. The performances are good and all, but there's no Jeffrey Combs (or acceptable fascimiles) to truly stand out. Perhaps most disappointingly, there is no delicious subtext to dig into, none of Gordon's usual close study of human nature and tragedy, and how we ridiculously react to these horrible things that happen in our lives.

I still hold out hope for HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR, which, mark my words, is going to be his return to form. Dennis Paoli script, William H. Macy playing the President, Herbert West as evil political advisor, GEORGE FN WENDT; this is going to rule.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (Harron, 2000)

I didn't like AMERICAN PSYCHO when I first saw it, upon its video release. I think maybe I was still a bit too young and didn't really understand what it was going for. Which is strange, as at the time that I saw it, I was going through a total Marxist phase, power to the people and such, and was in an AP American History class where I openly mocked neocon classmates and called them Nazis. Why didn't AMERICAN PSYCHO resonate on a deeper level with me?

It's not like it's subtle or anything (though I did just catch the "Just say no" part for the first time upon this viewing). The social commentary is basically the equivilant of a sledgehammer (or an axe) (or a chainsaw). Bateman dances, fucks, snorts, murders, and lies his way through the full 90 minutes, ensuring that each and every second is filled with action of some type. It's all so over the top that you would think it's impossible to hold a grudge.

But a lot of people don't care for AMERICAN PSYCHO, which I guess I can understand. It paints in broad, damning colors, it's got bright pop music used ironically (and effectively), and it's got Jared Leto in it. There's a lot not to like here. But like it I do, just the same, and truly, I like it more because of all of these things. Leto gets axed in the head, the soundtrack is garish and horrible (excepting New Order, natch), and every male character is portrayed as sexist, racist, homophobic, Republican, and white. There is no room for the other here, but that's the point, obviously.

And that's the thing. Everything about AMERICAN PSYCHO is so obvious and superficial, it's hard to believe that there's anything working underneath. Even the subtext is plain spoken. Just the same, I think that there is a real undercurrent of pain and isolation. One review of the novel noted that all of Bateman's murders are attempts to connect to something real and geniune, outside of his plastic, material existence. That never really comes through in the film, but I think that there is a real attempt on Bateman's part to attain something abstract or intangible. The fact that he takes mercy on his secretary on their "date" is proof that there is something else to him, that Bateman is more than just pure instinct and animalistic rage. It's a single, fleeting moment, but it's there just the same.

Other than that, Bateman is a monster, a funny and realistic monster (which is, of course, the best kind). AMERICAN PSYCHO is a horror film, a fact which I've neglected up until this point, and it's a very good one at that. There are moments of intense violence and bright red gore (though nowhere near the level of the book's descriptions), and in one scene, Bateman even watches THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (for inspiration?). He's clearly a fan of the genre, and every fan of the genre should be a fan of AMERICAN PSYCHO. Great flick.

FUNNY GAMES (Heneke, 1997)

I guess I'm taking a bit of liberty by placing this in the horror genre, and Michael Heneke would probably grimace at being included, but what the hell, UHM and DC are both covering news of the remake, so I'm throwing it in here and writing about it. It raises questions that no other movie I've watched this month has, and really, it's a meta-horror film, examining the genre and toying with our expectations and notions about horror. The things that occur are horrible and I wouldn't with them on my worst enemy, and it meets Joe Bob Briggs' first rule of the drive-in (anyone can die at any time), so that's good enough for me.

Sort of MAN BITES DOG by way of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, FUNNY GAMES is a story about a middle class family who gets tortured by two psychotic equally-as-middle-class prep school kids. There isn't much of a plot but a lot of people talking politely about horrific things. There is a ten minute unbroken shot in which nothing happens except we see a couple go through the stages of grieving and then break into hysterics. There is sudden, shocking violence that knocks you backwards by the sheer audacity of it all. This is all just another way of saying it's a Michael Heneke film.

As always, Heneke is dealing with the affluent in his film, but unlike most of his other work, there is no representation of the lower class for the upper one to exploit. Rather, all of the characters are portrayed as polite and courteous to each other, except for when they're shooting and stabbing and putting pillow cases over the heads of the children.

The Heneke backlash is in full effect, but the only directors worth watching are those that can polarize audiences. People call FUNNY GAMES genius or they call it complete and utter bullshit. That simply means it's interesting and worthy of discussing. I'm somewhere in between these two extremes. The commentary-within-the-film felt gimmicky and cringe-worthy, with characters talking directly to the camera (ie, the audience, ie, YOU), but I can respect its intent. By having the killer speak with the audience, he's implementing the viewer in the atrocities that are occuring on the screen. On an interview on the DVD, Heneke claims that the viewer does this every time he watches "this type of film" except for (wait for it) something like FUNNY GAMES, which he identifies as "self-reflexive".

So. FUNNY GAMES is a reaction to, say, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, where you're meant to cheer violence against the killers. But because FUNNY GAMES is sooo post-modern, it's exempted and somehow above the genre.

I like Heneke, I really do. I saw CACHE in the theatre this past winter and thought it was truly the best fucking movie I saw all year long. But he needs to fess up to what he's making: high brow exploitation flicks. When he cuts off a chicken's head in CACHE, how different is that from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST? Heneke makes the argument that these animals die each and every single day, and people only bother to be offended by it when they're forced to see it. I can dig that. But he would also classify CACHE as something totally different than the average exploitation picture.

Fuck it, Heneke goes further than the average genre flick and he knows it. To a grindhouse fan, FUNNY GAMES becomes a satire on that sub-genre, but most people haven't seen MISS .45 and thus, can't really put FUNNY GAMES into that context. In my opinion, Heneke isn't even commenting on the horror genre, but rather the typical Hollywood action film. In that vein, I applaud Heneke for having the courage to KILL THE KID, which is somewhere that Hollywood usually won't go, unless there is a slow-killing disease involved or the child has somehow touched the life of others and they'll never forget him. Of course, I'm above all that and can appreciate it as a social comment, but then, I'm just a lot more educated than you, aren't I?

Fuck all that nonsense. FUNNY GAMES is a horror film, through and thought, plain and simple. It's as intense and terrifying as LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which is all that I ask from my shock flicks. Heneke is perhaps elevating himself a bit above the genre and taking an ironic look at it, but what the fuck, horror could probably use that, especially when we all spend so much time tracking down obscure torture-and-rape-fests filmed in Uganda in 1979 by the little-known Bronx director Joey Ferrera that features an on-screen ejaculation in the eye of the female victim who ends up castrating one hundred men with a straight razor that they initially used to rape her. FUNNY GAMES makes the violence count, and it makes the violence hurt. It also reflects back at the viewer exactly what you're watching, and forces you to confront how you feel about it. I'm perfectly OK with cheering the death of a guy who has just murdered a little kid, but Heneke wants us to realize that we did actually just cheer for the death of a character. Where you stand politically on the death penalty probably colors this, but still, the intent is honorable.

More than that, though, FUNNY GAMES forces one to think about what we're looking for in the horror genre. What does one gain from watching two girls get raped and murdered in the woods? I've spent a long time asking myself that. Is it mere entertainment? Can we distances ourselves intellectually from it and place it into some sort of larger cultural context or make them socially relevant (which, of course, is the entire purpose of this blog)? For now, I need a palate cleanser, so I'm going to go put on STELLA. I've had enough horror for one day.

(ADDENDUM: how about Hollywood casting? I know they've got Naomi Watts locked in, but I think Paul Rudd would make a great Paul, and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be great as Peter. Throw another bankable face in the husband role (Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Leo, what difference does it make?) and get a kid whose parents are willing to let him get slapped around on-screen, and I'd shell out $20 for it in the theatre. I really can't believe that both FUNNY GAMES and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT are both being remade in the same year. This is going to be the watershed moment for the horror redux craze, I think. Will the world shell out $100 mill to see Jessica Beil made to piss her low-rise jeans? Stay tuned.)

HALLOWEEN (Carpenter, 1978)

Perhaps the ultimate October Movie, John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN is stylish and cool and scary all at the same time. There has been a body of literature written about the film over the years, ranging from its influence on the slasher sub-genre to its treatment of female sexuality to its impact on the independent film in Hollywood. I'm not going to pretend that I can bring something new to the table. I'd much rather shed new light on something like MANIAC than try to present an original thought on something like HALLOWEEN.

Two things, though:

01. I'm really excited about Rob Zombie's remake, though I'm sure I didn't come across as too glowing in my review of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. I think that REJECTS proved Zombie can make a good film, and I went as Captain Spaulding to a couple of Halloween parties this past weekend (visual proof!), and I think he can bring something really fresh to the basic concept of the story.

02. One thing I only caught onto recently, despite having seen this film probably twenty times, at least, is the way that Carpenter portrays suburban life. I think my absolute favorite moment is Laurie running to her neighbor's front door and banging on it, pleading for help. The porch light switches on, someone is home and hears her, but then it flips off, and the door never opens. Carpenter is saying something with images here, much like the way the tree-lined streets cast ominous shadows, or how a jack o' lantern sitting on a porch seems creepy. HALLOWEEN is Americana turned blackly sinister, layers of the suburbs peeled back to reveal something creepy and crawly sliding around underneath. Teenagers fuck while their parents are out of the house and murders happen in living rooms and garages. These symbols of prosperity and safety turn out to be the things that trap us, in the end. We'll discuss this more in our next entry...

THE DEVIL'S REJECTS (Zombie, 2005)

Much has been written about what a visceral film THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is, but upon my initial viewing of it in a movie theatre in July 2006, the only emotional reaction I had was that of disappointment. I had seen HIGH TENSION in a theatre with my girlfriend only a month or so before, and that French film had left me shocked and numb, thrilled and disgusted. LAND OF THE DEAD had followed shorly thereafter, and while it was no DAWN OF THE DEAD, it was Romero's most political and (possibly) gory film to date and had been satisfying to be sure. It seemed like the Summer of Grind for a short little while, and REJECTS, from all I'd read, was only going to expand upon that. Reviews claimed it was hard to watch at times, that the violence was gritty and realistic, and that there were no heroes, only those with the least blood on their hands.

REJECTS was all of these things, but just not to the degree that I would have liked. Hardened viewers have seen all of the film's tricks in the past, and done better, too. I came out feeling gilted and let down. Where were the limit-pushing scenes? Yes, REJECTS has the hotel room sequence, which is scary and effective, but if you've seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, then you've seen it before, where it was scarier and more effective. I saw it with a large group of friends, and my girlfriend and I seemed to be the only ones who enjoyed it. I felt the desire to defend it later on that night to my friends, placing it into a larger cultural context and explaining the pedigree of films like this. It's a very different type of horror film, especially to those used to long lines of FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels and WHITE NOISE. I tried my hardest to argue in favor of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS because, deep down, I still wanted to love it. But I didn't, and wouldn't, for a couple more months.

I got it on DVD and re-watched it, and immediately I picked up on things that I missed the first time. I spent the entire first viewing waiting for the film to go further, to make me uncomfortable and queasy, but that never happened. But in November, in my bedroom, watching the film alone, it was a different experience. I was able to enjoy it. Listening to the commentary track, one can plainly see Zombie is a smart guy who knows cinema and what he's doing. I enjoyed THE DEVIL'S REJECTS the second time around, when there were no expectations to be met and I could view it on its own terms, rather than mine.

I've had a weird relationship with this film, but now I think it's one of the finest horror films of the 00s (incidently, how do you say that? The Aughts? The Oh-Ohs? The Double Zeroes? They all sound like 1977 UK punk band names.). I can appreciate it with a degree of distance, rather than as THE MOST EXXXXTREME FILM YOU'LL EVER SEE! Zombie has created characters that are funny and likeable and ruthless serial killers, and you're left to process how you feel about that. The violence is intense and realistic, and the soundtrack is great. The opening sequence, set to "Midnight Rider" is terrific and a wonderful mood-setter. Ken Foree, Michael Berryman, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, PJ Soles, Priscilla Barnes, Danny Trejo, DDP, Brian Posehn, and Ginger Lynn Allen all have roles, giving fans of trash culture the chance to play Spot the Cult Figure.

But ultimately, that's what bothers me about THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. Not so much the star-borrowing, but the references to the past films of the genre. It's obvious that Zombie has a deep affection for the grindhouse drive-in classics of the past, but right now, everyone else does, too. Grind is the flavor of the month (SAW I, II, and III, THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake, HIGH TENSION, WOLF CREEK, HOSTEL, the new TEXAS CHAINSAW pictures, the upcoming TURISTAS and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake) and REJECTS, in the end, just feels like another 70s influenced horror flick. This is not a slight against the film, but rather the oversaturation of the grindhouse aesthetic at this point in time. If this were released in 2001, then it would feel revolutionary and classic. I still recommend it and love it, but I think that it's just a victim of circumstance.

THE HITCHER (Harmon, 1986)

This is another one of my favorites. THE HITCHER is an exercise in restraint and nuance, rarities indeed in the context of the horror genre, which usually strives to show more More MORE of the gore and sex and everything else, too, really. Relationships and motives are not fully explained, nor do they need to be. Truth be told, it's much scarier to consider that the horrible things that happen in the film were done for no reason at all, that there was no prime motivator or psychiatric illness at work.

The story is pretty simple. A young guy, Jim, driving a car cross country to California for a car transporting service picks up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a serial killer. The Hitcher, who says his name is John Ryder, then proceeds to keep popping up, even though Jim kicks him out of the car and thinks he ditches him. The Hitcher proceeds to make life for Jim miserable in some pretty inventive ways. Along the way, basically an entire police force gets murdered, a helicoptor wrecks in the desert, Jim nearly eats a human finger, a woman is quartered via 18 wheeler, a gas station explodes, Jim gets framed for Ryder's crimes, a day-trippin family gets butchered, and Ryder says stuff like "I cut off his legs. And his arms. And his head."

It's a true drive-in classic, and Rutger Hauer is simply amazing as the cooly psychotic Ryder. The story is sort of a mash-up between that other masterpiece of drive-in sleaze, DUEL, and Americonic urban legends about hitchhikers and the long, wide open road. It's a good mash-up, though, more Girl Talk than Jay-Zeezer, and most of it's thanks to Hauer, who is icy and extremely crazy at the same time and makes it all work due to some type of unspoken bond between Jim and Ryder. "Why are you doing this?" asks Jim, and Ryder replies, "Because I want you to stop me." What's that mean?

Further, what's it mean when Hauer places coins in Jim's eyes when they're seated together at a diner? What's it mean when Jim takes Ryder's hand and holds him for a few seconds? What's Ryder mean when he says, "You're smart kid. Figure it out." Jim never does, and neither does the audience, but that's what makes it all so damned good. You don't know what to make of the seeming father-son relationship that seems to exist between Driver and Hitcher. Is it a psychic bond? Does Ryder want Jim to take over for him (doubtful, in light of the fact that THE HITCHER 2 starred Jake Busey; ugh)? Is it a homoerotic relationship? THE HITCHER doesn't want us to know, not for sure, and this nagging insistence on providing no closure is ultimately so very satisfying.

THE HITCHER is a restrained exploration into growth from innocence to maturity, with Ryder guiding Jim through a nasty little baptism by fire, until he reaches the point when he can "stop" Ryder. The climax is blood-on-the-windsheild good, with Ryder carrying out righteous vengence against Ryder. All very Biblical cool. When it's all said and done, we know just as little as we did when Jim said, "My mother told me never to do this" and picked up a hitchhiker against his better judgement. But isn't that how it always ends.

AUDITION (Miike, 1999)

Takashi Miike is a genius. I find this point not even open to debate. Anyone who attempts to tell me otherwise will be met only with ridicule and disdain. AUDITION, to me, is his crowning moment (though I've seen only a smattering of the, what, 150 movies he made in the past 10 or so years). It's a complete and utter masterpiece, a twisted little social satire that never gets explicit in its message, instead piling on creepy visuals and layering subtext on top of deep undertones. His disciples, like Eli Roth, could learn a lot from the subtely of this picture. I realize that "subtle" isn't one word you'd usually think of to describe Miike's work, which is typically filled with gore and rape and the most disturbing imagery you'll ever see, but AUDITION is truly a work of gentle beauty and tense wonder.

Things begin innocently enough, with a story that seems jacked from a Tom Hanks vehicle. Shigeharu is a widower who gets tired of being alone. His movie producer friend encourages him to hold a fake audition and pick from all of the girls who try out for the lead. It's here that Shigeharu meets Asami, an injured ballet dancer who mystifies him. Things get strange after that, but I won't spoil what happens for anyone who's never seen it. I typically don't give a fuck for spoilers, but this is one time I'll make an exception.

OK, so I'll give a little, teensy bit away. AUDITION is a play on the horror film, wherein the Last Girl is actually a Last Guy, and the slasher is a girl. But it needs to be considered outside of the horror context, as well. It is set in Japan, land of arranged marriages and entrenched female deferrence. Shigeharu is quietly approached by several women, including his maid and his secretary (both in positions of servitude to him) and one of whom we later he actually did sleep with. He seems to ignore these women serving traditional roles, lamenting the loss of all the "nice" girls. He is drawn in by Asami, the ballet dancer (again, tradition), who is quiet and somewhat distant from him.

AUDITION also deals with loneliness. "All of Japan is lonely," one character says near the beginning, and Miike certainly makes it seem that way. Humans try to connect, but as one of the film's central themes indicates, you can never really know anyone. If you think you do, then you don't, plain and simple. Asami and Shigeharu are both profoundly lonely, but Asami feels she truly has no one, whereas Shigeharu has his son, the memory of his wife, his friends, his business associates. Relationships are ultimately about power; who holds it and who wants it. AUDITION plays out that power struggle in rich, lurid detail, culminating in one of the great ending sequences of our time. A classic of the 90s and the horror genre in general. Recommend it to anyone who says they hate horror. They'll either love it and buy you a drink in Miike's honor, or they'll never speak to you again. Either way, you win.

THE RETURN OF THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Henkel, 1994)

This writer viewed the film with my buddy, Phil, who had heard about it on the TCM e! TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY. I'd had my copy for around a year now and wanted to finally get around to watching it. I'd read a lot about the sequel (which is, really, more of a remake), some good, some bad. But absolutely nothing could've prepared me for what followed. TCM4 is an absolute clusterfuck of a film, filled with some of the most inane dialogue delivered by some of the worst actors ever in a horror film. That's saying something, too. Several of the performances are so wooden and stilted that I had to believe they were purposefully terrible.

Henkel is a good writer, I think, but this thing was just a mess. He tries to link together conspiracy theories into the CHAIN SAW legacy, and it just ends up falling flat on its own face. McConaughey was just so over the top as to be unbelievable, and I hate Zelweger, so there wasn't much here to enjoy. A lot of reviews I've read on IMDb focus on Leatherface's cross-dressing, but they seem to forget that he's dressed like a woman in the original, too.

Is this a spoof? It's not smart enough to be considered satire. Henkel tries to link together literary references and governmental conspiracies, but ultimately, it's incoherent and absurd. Not that these are necessarily bad things, but you get the sense they weren't intended to turn out that way. I've read the film is a victim of editing, so I'll reserve total judgement. I will say that there are laughs to be had from the film; they're just not intentional. Unless they were.

THE VANISHING (Sluzier, 1988)

A man and his wife go on a driving holiday and stop at a rest stop. The woman goes into the store and gets some beer. The man stays at the car. The woman never comes out. The man spends three years searching for her and one day, the kidnapper contacts him and tells him he can show him what he did to her. What would you do? Is the searching more important than the actual truth, the knowledge of what happened? Or would you lose something when the search ended? THE VANISHING takes these fairly essential questions and plays them out in the form of an epic French horror film. It is French, which means that people say things like "The loneliness was unbearable" but, no shit, this is a seriously wonderful film that everyone should see.

THE VANISHING has, simply put, the greatest twist ending and one of the greatest sequences in all of horror history. I won't give it away for anyone who's never seen it, because the effect works best when you have no clue what's coming. Suffice it to say, the man's going to end up wishing he didn't know what happened. The ending is nasty and sad and beautiful, all at once.

But, again, the real beauty lies in the getting there. THE VANISHING gives away the identity of the kidnapper within the first ten minutes of the film. The question, then, isn't whodunit, but whydhedoit? Isn't that so much more interesting, anyway? The plot folds out and unpeels itself slowly, revealing rich layers typically not explored within the horror genre. There is no gore, no rape, no monsters and no explosions. There is simply the dark heart of man, the knowledge that we are all capable of good and evil, amazing highs and debilitating lows.

Sluzier's characters spend their lives attempting to find truth or perfection, and by the end, they both realize that neither is worthwhile, that truth is void and trying to find it is pointless. In the end, all there is is vast emptiness and darkness, and all the knowledge in the world can't change that.

2001 MANIACS (Sullivan, 2005)

On one of the DVD's special features, director slash co-writer Tim Sullivan claims, "2001 MANIACS is not a subtle film." That is an understatement, and calling it an understatement is probably another understatement. In one scene, a black character is killed by a cotton press. A gay character is rammed through the rectum with a spear that ends up coming out his mouth. Sheep are fucked. Cousins kiss. There are tits and S&M and disembodied limbs and oh so many decapitated heads. And it's all so gloriously over-the-top and campy that it never offends but, instead, entertains. It also all tends to blur together into one big sight gag after a while. But if the thing is going to blur together, better it blurs into a big red blob as opposed to a big gray one, correct? After all, anything worth doing is worth over-doing.

Eli Roth produced, so you know you're going to get the goods in terms of kill scenes. But Roth being attached means that he also brings his brand of superficial social conscience. It's a throwback to 80s pictures, with too much sex and gore and decadence and stupid fucking college kids being stupid fucking college kids, but like HOSTEL, it also tries its hand at social commentary. It almost seems as if guys like Roth and Sullivan feel the need to prove they spent as much time growing up with Romero and Carpenter as they did with Jason and Freddy. Also like HOSTEL, the subtext is so under-developed that it ends up just falling flat and feeling meaningless, tacked on.

The story is pretty simple: some partying kids from the North take a detour on their way to Daytona Beach and end up in Pleasant Valley, Georgia, just in time for the annual Blood and Guts Jubilee. They hang out and fuck some locals for a while before meeting their grisly ends. There's a twist at the end but it doesn't feel jolting or shocking, but just sort of natural. Robert Englund stars, and holds together, the whole thing as the wonderfully-animated, yet never cartoonish, Mayor Buckman. It's pretty amazing to watch this back-to-back with EATEN ALIVE and see the same guy, thirty years apart, turning in two different performances. He is so much better in MANIACS than EATEN ALIVE, and it's easy to see why he's so beloved within the genre. He clearly holds a deep affection for horror and its pictures, and he's a boon to the entire community.

I could now take time to complain about the continued Puritanesque equation of teenage sex with death that lives on strong in the horroe genre. I could, if I wasn't all-too-glad to see the fratboys beheaded, castrated, and violently dissolved via acid bong. I just finished my undergrad, which means I spent the last four years with these fucking idiots. Stuff like HOSTEL and 2001 MANIACS ends up being cathartic. So what if I spent all four of my Spring Breaks toiling away at a gas station? I could've been in Georgia being brutally murdered and eaten by a town full of Confederate zombies. See? I was right all along.

EATEN ALIVE (Hooper, 1977)

EATEN ALIVE doesn't seem to get a lot of love, or, for that matter, print. I found my copy (which seems to not be the uncut version, from what I've read) at BLOBFEST 2005 from a vendor on the street, and I'd never even heard of it before, which is odd, considering it was Hooper's follow up to CHAIN SAW and that Robert Englund plays a major role almost ten years before NIGHTMARE made him a genre legend.

But maybe the reason that no one ever talks about EATEN ALIVE is that it just sort of is silly and not really very good. This is in spite of the wonderful Neville Brand turn as a tortured WWII vet-cum-hotel-owner who freaks out and starts feeding people to his aligator that he swears is really a crocodile. It's set in Louisiana's swamps and features Hooper's stock characters: terrifying rednecks who do wretched things to The Other. The Other in EATEN ALIVE is a bunch of people from the Big City coming into the backwoods and meeting their fate. The city people are portrayed as neurotic pill poppers, and their doom is assured. They exist for no reason but to meet their end and, in several cases, survive, surely only to become even more neurotic in the aftermath. Sound familiar?

EATEN ALIVE is a whole lot like TEXAS CHAIN SAW, but where as SAW was essentially asexual (aside from Leatherface's gender-bending), EATEN ALIVE is crawling with horrific sexual violence right from the opening shots (don't miss Englund's opening line which Tarantino pilfered for KILL BILL VOL. 1, too). It's sort of the evolution of Hooper's realistic brand of ultraviolence, as he branches out and discovers that the implied threat of rape is probably the scariest thing you can commit to film. There are several really effective sequences in EATEN ALIVE; not quite at the level of the bad trip that CHAIN SAW is, but they are still grisly and unrelenting. Hooper really lets the weirdness run rampant, though, as Neville mumbles and stumbles his way through several creepy monologues where you can barely make out what he's saying. It's a good case of Hooper burying the vocals low in the mix and Neville just looking like a fucking psychopath.

But that's essentially what EATEN ALIVE is good for, a snapshot of Hooper's development as a filmmaker. It's not nearly as good as CHAIN SAW and is in no way essential. It's for completists, those who wish to see where Hooper started and where he went after his first feature became the drive-in legend that it was. If you're a fan of his work, then by all means, track it down, but if you're faced with the choice between EATEN ALIVE or THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, well, you know who you're picking.

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (Wood, 1959)

So somehow I went to see GWAR and only got one splotch of the good red stuff on me. What the fuck is up with that. But regardless, it was a great night, all set to a mixtape including "The Number of the Beast", "Friday the 13th Part 2" by Frightmare, and "Thriller". I got extremely drunk in the car ride there and when we stopped on the PA turnpike for an ATM tap, I drank a shot of Cabo Wabo in a turnpike stall. While in there, I discovered that some dastardly kids had taped a Chick Tract up in the stall, so I ripped it off and then proceeded to tear hate literature down from the rest of the stall doors. The enterprising little bastards thought they covered the entire truckstop, but I showed them, didn't I? There was a group standing outside around a couple of vans who had the awkward teenaged boringness that suggested they were a youth group going on a retreat for the weekend, so we theorized that it was them who put the tracts up. We drove by them blasting "Angel of Death" and Brossman screeched like a banshee into the night air. Anyway, the Red Chord fucking blazed. Third time seeing them live and fuckin' A they rule. GWAR of course brought down the house by beheading George Bush and doing all sorts of unspeakable acts upon that stage. Municipal Waste we missed.

Oh, but the movie. We hit the bar when we got home and did a bunch of shots, then hung out with some cats for a while before heading home. Brandie and I watched this drunk on Rob Zombie's TCM underground thing, which was actually really cool. Anytime you get Roger Corman and Sid Haig on TV talking about campy horror flicks is a good time. PLAN 9 I have on DVD but watching it on a late night shlock show seemed like the best way to experience it for the first time. But like I said...really, really fucking drunk. I seem to remember something about vampires from outer space? There were swaying tombstones, too, right? And Bela Lugosi is replaced mid-scene and you're not supposed to notice or something. Again, really drunk. But something tells me that a sober viewing of this wouldn't be much more coherent than the hazy one I had, huh?

You know, Ed Wood was deliciously inept as a filmmaker, but there is a campy energy and fucking fun in his pictures that's oh-so-absent in modern horror cinema. The differences between Uwe Boll and Ed Wood are: one, that Wood worked on shoestring budgets and had to use imagination to create his pictures, whereas Boll scams government funding and has modern effects to fall back on; and, more importantly, two, that Wood's films have a completely fun nature alive inside of them, whereas Boll indulges in non-sense like boxing net geek critics and saying things like his next movie (gasp, not a video game adaptation) will redefine the horror genre in terms of extreme gore. Yes, that sentence did just have both a colon and a semi-colon in it.

The point is, the world (not just the horror world, but the World world) needs more Ed Woods and less Uwe Bolls.

(Real analysis tomorrow, I promise. I need something meaty to sink my teeth into. It'll be fun.)

GGGWWWAAARRR

No movie tonight, because we're all off to see the Red Chord, Municipal Waste, and mfin GWAR. I'll post pictures of what my white t-shirt looks like, though.

CHOCOLATE (Garris, 2005)

Not sure how I feel about Garris overall, but I actually thought this was pretty good and creepy. Henry Thomas (who apparently was the main kid from ET? WTF.) plays Jamie, a thirtysomething whose wife ditches him, taking the kid and leaving him in a big, empty apartment. He's depressed and doesn't go out much. Things get weird when he starts having visions of a beautiful young girl, Catherine, who is in danger and does some pretty stupid stuff. In a BEING JOHN MALKOVICH moment, he actually enters her body and sees what she sees, feels what she feels.

The joke of sorts is on him. Jamie thinks his life is empty and the only way to provide any meaning is by finding this girl, helping her get out of trouble, saving her. In the process, maybe she'll save him. It is a naive and stupid thing, of course, but Jamie is also slowly losing his mind. It's an interesting story, and I appreciate the double entrende there (whereas Jamie is empty, Catherine is full, what with having two people inside of her, ha ha ha), but ultimately, there just isn't that much there.

As is the problem with all of the MASTERS OF HORROR episodes, it could've benefitted from another half hour of exploration. Characters ultimately feel truncated and not as fleshed out as they otherwise could. Garris gets points for effort and for bringing the MASTERS series to the air, though.

CANDYMAN (Rose, 1992)

CANDYMAN draws a line from slavery to modern segregation-via-public housing, and it's fucking great. Jan Harold Brunvald, believed to be the father of the term "urban legend", claims that these largely-orally communicated stories that we whisper around campfires have no basis in fact, but rather speak to our deep-seeded, collective fears about the Other. Writer-director Bernard Rose re-works a Clive Barker short story into a sort of dark American history, dealing with a murdered young black man (a former slave) who lives on in infamy, stalking those who dare to gaze into a mirror and say his name five times. Candyman is a story told to keep children from wandering into public bathrooms alone, to keep the babysitter from having her boyfriend over when the kids go to bed. In content and imagery, it seems to be a synthesis of "the Hook" and the "Bloody Mary" urban legends, which I'm sure we're all familiar with by this point. But the Candyman legend is original and written just for the film. In this sense, the filmmakers have attempted to create an entirely new urban legend.

And, best of all, it worked. Clive Barker has a commentary on the DVD and he talks about how people have approached him about the roots of the Candyman legend and how they heard a similar story ages ago. Barker created the legend just for the story.

Back to Grunvald (who Barker claims was the inspiration for the initial short story, "The Hidden"). CANDYMAN follows his logic; urban legends are really a literary manifestation of our unconscious fears and prejudices, a public purging of our darkest thoughts and biases. Rose, with this film, takes this to its extreme end, re-writing the history of the United States (based around the slave trade) and painting the entire country as completely and utterly racist and hateful. It's powerful stuff.

But there's plenty beyond subtext. There is some truly great gore to behold, and the image of bees swarming out of Tony Todd's mouth is going to stick with me for a long time, not to mention the sound of them crushing when his lips meet Helen's. Philip fucking Glass did the soundtrack, and it's great. I realize that this was pretty much disjointed and rambling, but I'll make it up to you in the future. Promise. CANDYMAN is a keeper, though.

HOSTEL (Roth, 2005)

I like Eli Roth. As part of the whole Internet horror-geek group, this tends to alienate a lot of people. There is a whole, big sub-set of people who tend to hate Roth for any number of reasons. I suspect that a relatively high number stems from the fact that 'net geeks tend to be incredibly bitter, spiteful people, and to some degree, they envy Roth's success and fee,l that given his same circumstances, they could create better films than he does. There are also plenty of valid complaints, dealing with his tendency to completely lift (read: rip off) from some of his idols (Raimi, Miike, Hooper, et al). Most of the people who hate Roth for this reason also hate Quentin Tarantino, so the fact that they're friends (and that Tarantino co-executive produced HOSTEL, Roth's second film) doesn't do much to detract from their outright hatred of Roth.

But I like Eli Roth. I think his films are funny and cool and if he's a rip off hack, so what? Rob Zombie rips off the same people, to the same degree as Roth, and he encounters only a fraction of the criticism that Roth does. (I am speaking, again, of criticism from the Internet horror geek population, not from, you know, actual movie critics, who tend to sort of brush off both Roth and Zombie.) In the end, Roth is not as untalented as many think. What he's doing is derivative and unoriginal, but so many people who keep on crying out for "originality" in the horror genre forget that the genre, from 80s slashers to the current crop of re-makes to endless lines of sequels to shameless direct-to-video ripoffs, is ultmiately one of imitation. Roth is recontextualizing archetypes of horror cinema's past and making something new.

But this is all meaningless. Most people had decided they hated HOSTEL before they even saw it (if they bothered to see it at all), based solely on their dislike for Roth's first film, and, to an even greater degree, their dislike of Roth himself, as a person. And here I've spent two paragraphs talking about the guy and not talking about HOSTEL. What a hyopcrite I am, huh?

If CABIN FEVER was Roth doing Raimi and Peter Jackson, then HOSTEL is a mash-up of 70s grindhouse pictures and the artsploitation of Takashi Miike, in particular AUDITION. Like that (vastly superior) other film, HOSTEL is comprised largely of two parts: an opening half of seeming normalcy, and then a closing second half of mayhem and debauchery. As far as stories go, HOSTEL is really quite fun. Some retarded fratboys party their way across through Ansterdam and end up in Slovakia on a tip from an acquaitance who informs them that the girls there are desperate and horny. They crash at a hostel and meet some girls, who end up drugging them and selling them off to a company that allows traveling businessmen the chance to torture a real human being, for a price. One, an utterly unlikeable lout named Paxton, survives and extracts some revenge on the Dutch businessman who killed his (possibly gay?) friend, Josh. The possibly gay Josh sub-plot is interesting but ultimately meaningless, never paid off in any identifiable way. Not that it has to be, but it seemed like Roth hinting at a subtext and, in the end, doing nothing with it.

The entire film is like that. Homophobia and a sense of American entitlement run rampant and Roth makes a pretense of examining the issues, but seems content to leave them just hinted at. Maybe we should be content as an audience. Most critics, after all, focused on the violence and depravity on screen and ignored the social aspects, despite that fact that in interviews, Roth attempted to put HOSTEL into a political context, implying that people need a violent release in order to shelter themselves from the reality of having a fucking religious nut in the White House, but George Kaltsounakis deftly illulstrated the ways that Roth really just reinforces the current cultural climate with his picture. He raises some valid points, especially in his implication that by killing off Josh and allowing Paxton to live, he is making a comment on sexuality and a certain kind of attitude. While Josh wants to be a writer, Paxton wants to go to law school. Roth claims that he wanted the audience to identify with Josh, the sensitive guy, and then be shooken up and alone when he ends up being killed and we're left just with the brute, Paxton. But by allowing Paxton to survive the ordeal, Roth is commenting on the differences between these two guys and passing judgement on the two characters. I've never seen nor heard him comment on that point.

Something else that is interesting are the parallels that exist between the college kids and the rich businessmen who wind up paying to end their lives. Both come to Europe seeking depravity and thrills that they can't find (legally) in America. Rick Hoffman portrays an American businessman who claims that he has had his kill of women and drugs, and now the only thing that excites him is murder, the killing of another person. Roth seems to imply that Paxton, who came to Ansterdam for stories of fucking and pot, will one day end up coming back looking for debauchery and only finding pleasure in torture. It's an audacious comment, perhaps the film's most compelling. This too, of course, has largely been ignored by the critics.

Horror fans and Ebert alike focused on the gore and violence, and that's understandable. Perhaps it's even fitting, when you consider the half-baked arguments and observations that Roth makes. The torture sequences are immediate and end up being the only thing that anyone is going to be talking about. To anyone who's seen ICHI THE KILLER or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, the violence will be pretty rote, aside from a particularly nasty scene involving a pair of scissors and a Japanese girl's eyeball. A sampling of the Rotten Tomatoes page for HOSTEL reveals critic's preoccupation: "Silly, blood nonsense..." "...unnecessary, unjustified exploitation of gore..." "...a reined in gorefest for afficionados of torture..." The most unintentionally hilarious is Tim Cogshell from Box Office magazine, who states "Is there a point? No. Will you like it? Perhaps, but if you do...you should see someone about that." By "see someone" I would assume he refers to seeking psychiatric help, which is just a silly suggestion, even if he meant it in jest. But his statement that there is no point, that HOSTEL is meaningless and devoid of value, is lazy and speaks to a general negligence of the horror genre by the critical elite. Fuck 'em, and fuck the Roth haters, too. Bring on HOSTEL: PART II.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (Wright, 2004)

SHAUN OF THE DEAD is an interesting take on one of the classic monster themes: change. And more exactly, the fear that always comes with it. Vampires, zombies, werewolves; these archetypes all address our natural aversion to evolution, to shaking up our daily routines. Oftentimes, these fears are examined through the alteration of a loved one. When you're bitten by a werewolf, you've got to deal with it. But how does one cope with the change of a loved one? NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is great with this type of stuff; all of Romero's stuff is, really. It's one of the themes he dealt with best. For as much as people talk about Romero's social commentary, he was also really good at interpersonal relationships, and the ways that changing into one of the undead lead to a shift in one's lifestyle.

SHAUN takes this theme to its logical end, and speaks to what it is we're all really afraid of: losing those we love and never having told them how we feel. Shaun is a slacker (good-natured and harmless, to be sure, but a slacker just the same) whose general contentment to coast through life starts to cause problems in his relationship with Liz. They've been dating for three years, but she's never met his mom, they don't spend enough time together, and she's upset that he's still stuck in the same dead end job he was for however many years he's been stuck at the same dead end job. Shaun, of course, has become accustomed to these day-to-day happenings. Comfort is the word, and the trouble. Our boy Shaun wants to change, he really does, and he wants to take Liz out to a nice restaurant, but in the end, the pub at the corner is what he knows, what he's used to, and where he would rather spend his time. SHAUN OF THE DEAD is very much a picture about longing to live and not being sure how to do it. This is portrayed quite literally by the zombies who have been rising up from the grave, but also by Shaun, staring dumbfounded into the camera at the film's opening. There's life in there, somewhere. He just isn't quite sure what to do with it.

The answer is provided when his life, and the lives of everyone he holds dear, are put into danger. It is a comment on humanity that it takes disaster to shake us up and make us realize that most days, we stumble through life half-awake and don't truly appreciate everything that is afforded us. He blows things with Liz because he forgets to make a dinner reservation at that upscale Italian joint, Fulci's (get it?), but only realizes his mistake when it's too late. This is indicative of his attitude towards the larger world around him. Shaun sees the chance to change his life by becoming a hero, not at all unlike Ash in THE EVIL DEAD, an average appliance salesman turned zombie-slaying machine. The zombie apocalypse provdes advantageous to Shaun, who can finally attach some type of meaning to his life. And with this mindset, he does do some rather mature things. He stands up to, and subsequently grows closer to, his stepfather. He shoots his re-animated mother. His best friend sacrifices his life for him. And then he and Liz prepare to take their own lives when things get too bleak. SHAUN's British humor always retains a blackened tint that is missing from most American comedies, but the film's final moments do seem as if they're going to be excessively dark.

And then the military rushes in and saves the day. Bit of a copout, but what can you do...

In the aftermath of their rescue, Shaun and Liz return to how their lives largely were before the zombie outbreak, but they do seem happier now. Therein lies the joke, which is also played out by the constant bickering among our band of zombie hunters. Life's small things don't stop in the face of tragedy. Relationship problems still exist when the zombies attack, and pretending they don't doesn't make them go away. The final gag is that in spite of how much both Liz and Shaun have changed, at the end, they're right back where they started. Disasters alter nothing, and when they're over with, we don't learn some greater truth about ourselves and humanity. We go right back to playing video games. I don't think it's being unrealistic to say that Liz is compromising, but perhaps the point is that sometimes, compromise is OK, too. After all, change is scary, right?

PHANTASM (Coscarelli, 1979)

I think what I liked most about this one was the sense of wonder and almost childlike nature of what happened. Despite some horrific things occuring, there is the sense of it being a fairy tale, something like a modern fable. After all, the Grimm tales were rather grisly, no? And of course I realize that post-LADY IN THE WATER it's pretty damaging to refer to a horror flick as a "modern fairy tale" but PHANTASM never devolves into cheesy platitudes or easily-digested "life lessons". Rather, PHANTASM seems to indicate that the world is a scary, fascinating place where things are never what they seem, and are usually worse off than you think.

PHANTASM doesn't shirk away from death or sex (or, its horror film representatives, Gore and Tits), rather presenting them as natural parts of life. And especially adolescence. That horrible, horrible time when zits erupt, embarassing erections present themselves in geometry, and you're forced to cope with it in whatever way you can, is presented in vivid, detailed color in PHANTASM. It's really a coming-of-age tale, about a boy dealing with the death of friends and family, which, when coupled with the usual, general malaise of one's teens, would most likely be unbearable.

When the gore comes, it is unexpected and bright, goopy stuff that doesn't look real, but works in spite of it, due to the dreamlike nature of the entire film. The ending is logical and the twist never seems to detract from what came before; rather, it is natural and right. M. Night Shamawhatever could learn a lot from Coscerelli.

Brief again, and I apologize. It's been a long day. Never did see the new TEXAS CHAINSAW prequel, but next, it's SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Best horror film of the 00s? Maybe...

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (Miner, 1981)

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about stereotypes is that they're often based in truth. The thing about all Jewish people being made of money and nose? Totally true. On a different note, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 single-handedly proves every single cliche about the horror genre (or, more correctly, the slasher sub-genre) correct. There is really a token black guy. There is really one KOOKY guy who plays pranks and does funny voices throughout. There is really a guy in a wheelchair for no reason whatsoever. The people who get naked, or at least sneak into a cabin to fuck, do get punished for their sins. And it's all really, really bad.

F13P2 opens with the Last Girl from the first FRIDAY picture getting an ice pick to the temple. Amazingly, there is actually a sort of interesting, long, unbroken, steadicam shot in the opening sequence. That's about the highlight of the film's stylish flourishes, however. The rest is all just utterly rote 80s slasher trash. The Oedipal undertones of other slasher pictures, such as SLEEPAWAY CAMP and MANIAC, are present here, but unlike in those two others, are not explored in any interesting or meaningful way. I still have a soft spot for the first FRIDAY film, and I love FREDDY VS. JASON with a passion, but aside from those, there are simply no good FRIDAY movies. Amazing, considering how long the franchise thrived for.

At the same time, I can't discount the movies entirely. Sure, its sexual politics are more Falwell than I'd like, and there really is just simple, mindless violence at the core of all of the films. But c'mon. Everyone enjoys sitting in a dark room, with a bowel of popcorn, watching stupid teenagers have horrible things done to them. Anyone who says otherwise is probably a terrorist, or a liar. Or a lying terrorist. The first FRIDAY film I ever saw was JASON TAKES MANHATTEN, and I was probably around ten or so, and it was on TV, but I was still enthralled at the mayhem and the sex and the wonder of it all. Of course, revisiting the series years later reveals the niave nature of my initial thoughts, but just the same, there is still fun to be found in these movies.

I'm not even going to attempt to give this one a serious treatment. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 is something that you've either seen time and time again, or you're just not going to like it at all. I doubt there are very many people seeing the movies for the first time at this point. I realize this makes for two rather droll reviews in a row (one of which was written while I was drunk, in my own defense), but I'll make up for it next time. TCM: THE BEGINNING tonight!

976-EVIL (Englund, 1989)

Maybe it's just the liquor talking, but the film overall was a letdown. Around the time that put-upon teenagetrs started summoning the devil and making pentagrams with salt, I was all "YES AWESOME!" but the ending was a total bummer. I wanted Satan to wipe out the entire town, not get stopped by the rebellious teemager's cousin. First drunk thinig I've written on the internet ever but I'm still going to remember to justify the text.

MANIAC (Lustig, 1980)

The mother/son relationship has been plundered many times within the horror genre (see: PSYCHO, PIECES, FRIDAY THE 13TH). MANIAC is not the best of these, but it's also certainly not the worst. Frank Spinell portrays the perpetually-sweaty, probably-schizophrenic Frank Zito, a NY mama's boy whose childhood traumas at the hands of his neglectful mother lead him to see her everywhere, long after she's dead. Every woman on the street is his mother. Supermarkets, parks, hospitals; she's everywhere.

Freud's comments about there being six people in the bedroom comes to mind. Frank's fractured relationships with women stems from being locked in the closet while his mother goes out night after night, selling her body, selling the love that Frank should receive, free of charge.

Now, there's not really much interesting in this so far. Family relationships have been explored in many more subtle, innovative ways in the medium of film. Also as a slasher picture, it's pretty much just standard fare. Where MANIAC begins to differentiate itself is in its portrayal of women. Frank cuts them up, then removes their scalps, taking the hair back to his apartment and putting them on mannequins. These lifesize dolls sit around his apartment and he converses with them, screams at them, weeps with them. The mannequins become a sort of surrogate mothers, ones that will never leave him, never question him, never beat or insult or leave him. He is in a state of arrested development, and so, of course, are the women in his life. Outside of his fantasy world, he is emotionally stunted and barely able to keep it together. His relationship with a woman named Anna, an artist, is entirely on Frank's terms. In one scene, he phones her and asks if she would like to go to a movie. She says of course she would. "Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?" he asks. "I can be ready in ten" is her answer, implying that she has nothing better to do except wait for Frank's calls and be seen on his arm, in spite of the fact that she is a young, beautiful artist whose stock is rapidly rising. Like in TAXI DRIVER (which, along with THE DRILLER KILLER and PSYCHO are obvious reference points for MANIAC), it is only a question of how long until Frank screws up his relationship with Anna, and the answer is, not very long at all.

The women who he victimizes are the stereotypical slasher victims: female, young, pretty, and truly, wholly, stupid. Their vapidity in this picture is stunning, and it leads me to believe that it was also intentional. Is MANIAC a comment on the place of women in the horror picture? Quiet, stupid, existing only as a receptacle for either rage, lust, or some horrible combination of the two?

The ending seems to indicate so. Frank lies in bed, weeping, alone, having alienated the only woman that he seemed to make some kind of emotional connection with (aside from, naturally, mommy dearest). The mannequins begin to move from their places, taking up weapons and moving in on Frank, who stares, mouth agape, in horror. They then proceed to pop his head from his shoulders (in a great fucking effects sequence from Tom Savini, who earlier creates perhaps the greatest exploding head shot in horror history). It is here that MANIAC's comment becomes clear. Frank, dripping wet and looking like the retarded post-op siamese twin of Jon Lovitz, seems to believe that women exist only to serve and protect him, and he spends his adult life trying to replace the mother he never had, or who, at least, never loved him. Women, of course, are not so easily boxed, and react in kind, ripping off the greasy cranium of the male oppressor, who would have them remain in the apartment forever, never speaking or moving except to satisify his needs, and leaving him for dead.

Pretty heady stuff.

*Rimshot!*

BAD TASTE (Jackson, 1987)

Peter Jackson is the king of splatterhouse horror comedies. Not Sam Raimi, not RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, not Stuart Gordon, not even Tobe Hooper. Jackson is responsible for three of the most hysterical, horrifying freakouts ever committed to film, in BAD TASTE, MEET THE FEEBLES, and, of course, DEAD ALIVE, the last of which may just be the greatest horror film of the 80s.

BAD TASTE is pretty damn great in its own right, too, though. It's a masterpiece of shlock cinema, the type of thing that Joe Bob Briggs would show if MONSTERVISION was still on the air. (Although Rob Zombie's TCM thing sounds like fun.) Like DEAD ALIVE, there are parts that make me physically ill to view, and there are parts where I laugh so hard that my eyes burn and I can't speak. Jackson is a master at balancing the laughs with some flat out disgusting imagery, which, of course, also draw laughs.

The story is, simply put, ridiculous. A team of government officials stumble across an alien plot to wipe out the human race and use the flesh and blood for their intergalactic fast food chain. The joke, of course, is that humans are the outer space version of McDonald's, an inexpensive, half-cooked substitute for something fulfilling and traditional.

But the commentary never gets any deeper than that. No, if you want social relevance, rent DAY OF THE DEAD. If you want gruesome, chainsaw-wielding, bowel-clenching, acid-soaked fun, then BAD TASTE is where you want to be.

INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD (Coscarelli, 2005)

Sat and watched TV tonight; nothing else for it when they're practically showing your backyard on CNN. Glenn Beck went on TV tonight and talked about the "culture of death", how we're raising our children on violent video games and movies and not spending enough time eating dinner together, as families. Glenn is a fucking douchebag and if you've never seen his show, count yourself lucky. He randomly removes and replaces his eyeglasses on a whim, and it's every bit as annoying as it sounds. He's also careful to distinguish between "us" and "them"; he believes that he is a private citizen, rather than a nationally-known radio and television pundit, and he makes sure to rage against "the media" like he's not just another part of it. Nancy Grace does the same thing, masquerading as a defender of our nation's children, and at the same time, flashing their lifeless images on your screen with "serious" music playing over top so that you're sure what you're watching is Important, and in no way exploitation.

Glenn Beck was on TV tongiht talking about the Amish and how this school shooting incident is going to make them pull even further back from the sins of modern society. Anyone who lives close to Lancaster County, of course, realizes what utter bullshit this is. Glenn's never heard of the rampant accusations of incest, rape, and in-breeding among the Amish, apparently. To pretend that somewhere in central Pennsylvania there exists a haven of pure sinlessness, untouched by the evils of man, is ridiculous. Of course, he rolled out a child psychiatrist, the type of person he'd usually dismiss as a quack, except, naturally, in this instance, when the child psychiatrist agreed with Glenn. Yes, violence in the media creates violence in real life, and if we all only sat down to meals together and held hands and taught our kids the difference between reality and fantasy, we wouldn't have any more school shootings. It doesn't take any one party too long to latch onto other's tragedy and promote their own agenda, does it? The Christians only needed one day before they rolled Michael W. fucking Smith into Lancaster to play at their candlelight vigils and pretend that this is really about them.

After a night of watching this trash dressed up as serious journalism, I was in the mood for a nasty little movie, something that made no pretenses of being significant and instead was honest enough to wallow, nay, revel, in its own utter filth. MANIAC, I thought, would do the trick, but the VHS is lost somewhere to eternity. (Or the closet in Brandie's room.) INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD, however, was right out in the open, sitting on top of my television set. This was the first MASTERS OF HORROR episode that aired, and from the four that I have on DVD, I'm really saddened that I don't have Showtime right now. The second season is kicking off soon and if it's anything like the ones I've watched, it should be a fun time.

INCIDENT was made by Don Coscarelli (BUBBA HO-TEP, PHANTASM, the upcoming BUBBA NOSFERATU) and goddamn, did it ever hit the spot. It's really your rather basic slasher/survival horror story, told with every intercut flashbacks. A lady driving on a (you guessed it) mountain road runs off the side and crashes. She is then chased by a strange, enormous forest creature with a pretty bitchin' knife. The flashbacks concern her relationship with her survivalist husband, who eventually becomes emotionally and physically abusive. The film, by the end, becomes a sort of feminist fable, and, indeed, a comment on the slasher sub-genre in general, especially TEXAS CHAIN SAW. Coscerelli works from a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, he of BUBBA HO-TEP and Jonah Hex fame, and Landsdale and Coscerelli end up on an extremely entertaining commentary track together. Lansdale says he wanted to create a slasher story that didn't include a helpless female victim, and so INCIDENT was born. By the end of the picture, everyone's got blood on their hands, including the stereotypical female survival (an archetype that Joe Bob Briggs refers to as the "Last Girl"). But the difference between INCIDENT and CHAIN SAW is that in INCIDENT, the Last Girl doesn't just survive, she wins. I don't want to give too much away, but the difference here is vital and clear and if you're at all interested in this, you should track down the DVD.

Like with CIGARETTE BURNS, Coscerelli would've benefitted from a bigger budget and a longer shooting schedule, but part of the appeal of these episodes is that they're all sort of low budget cool. They end up looking great but the special effects can get sort of cheesy at times (through no fault of the always amazing Greg Nicotero) and characterization can be sacrificed for time reasons. But when I watched INCIDENT a second time, with the commentary track on, the rather expedited character arch of the Last Girl makes sense. It's the kind of picture that grows with a second viewing, where every single image takes on a greater signicifance the second time through. Great stuff. Travis says check it out.

CIGARETTE BURNS (Carpenter, 2005)

Maybe you've got to be a film snob to truly appreciate CIGARETTE BURNS. After all, the acting is pretty bad. The story itself gets kind of hokey at times. The gore towards the end is so over the top so as to be almost entirely ridiculous. But despite all these things (because of them?) I loved this hour long MASTERS OF HORROR episode.

The plot is actually pretty interesting. An arthouse owner, Kirby, who specializes in locating rare prints is called in by a rich film collector to track down a lost gem, LE FIN ABSOLUE DU MONDE, a French film screened only once. That one viewing threw the crowd into a murderous riot. The closer that Kirby gets to the film, the weirder things get. Toss in some rather pointless side plots involving lost girlfriends and gun-toting dads, and some near-slapstick gore, and you've got a Carpenter film that doesn't feel like a Carpenter film at all, really. It does contain his trademark spot-on pacing, managing a bit of a character arch in a half-hour episode, but you can definitely feel the confines of the made-for-TV context. LA doesn't look like LA. Europe doesn't look like Europe. Character development is truncated for the sake of time constraints. The film is shot through with a general sense of being rushed.

But the film does raise some interesting questions and will probably be endearing to anyone who's ever spent an evening watching something that sickens them. CIGARETTE BURNS becomes a comment on horror cinema, particularly the horror cinema of MS. 45, Takashi Miike, and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. What draws people in to these pictures? What is their appeal? Prurient interest? Maybe. We all love a car wreck. Speaking personally, horror can become somewhat of an addiction. It can lead you to seeking out more and more extreme pictures, images that become increasingly more disturbing, disgusting, and, indelible. Speaking personally, I know my own thresholds and I know that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT made me hate humanity, but I could not look away. Kirby's quest becomes the viewer's quest, or, at least, the near-snuff horror viewer's quest. CIGARETTE BURNS itself contains one truly cringe-worthy moment that had me wincing. But then again, my threshold isn't all that high.

What is the end result of watching something like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (or, to bring it back around, LE FIN ABSOLUE DU MONDE)? Is some greater truth revealed? Is there any justification for stuff like this existing when in real life motherfuckers are shooting up Amish schoolhouses ten minutes from my home? Are you enriched in any way? Am I going to be a better person at the end of 31 days of horror movies? Answers to follow, possibly.