Somebody Help Me (2007)

Corey
January 23, 2008
Posted by
corey@evilontwolegs.com

corey’s review…

code black entertainment was kind enough to invite evilontwolegs to a screening of (and additionally supply dvd copies of) the recently released slasher somebody help me. reviews of the low-budget thriller have ranged from oddly fervid (slasherpool) to aggressively hateful (the vault of horror). part for the reason for such varied opinions is that while this is billed as a slasher film, i’m not sure the traditional slasher film audience is who it was intended for. director chris stokes is better known for you got served and his entry into the house party franchise, and this film targets the same general audience as his previous efforts, which is not typical horror aficionados. i saw this film at a screening held by a local hip-hop station and the audience really seemed to respond to the film which left me feeling that while this film may not be my cup of tea, that may just be because it wasn’t really intended to be. however, this blog is intended for horror connoisseurs and regardless of precise target demographics, somebody help me is a slasher film. thus is through the rather critical prism of slasher film history that i’ll be watching and judging it.

somebody help me opens with a flashback to 3 years ago where we see several girls in dog kennels crying as their tormentor stomps around menacingly. at least i think that’s what was going on since the scene is really just a grainy mixture of blacks and greys which luckily quickly gives way to a long kubrick-ian helicopter shot of the forest laid behind the opening credits. imagine the helicopter shot leading to the hotel from the shining… only add in a bunch of annoying flash frames, mtv hip-hoppy film speed changes and bad music.

as the credits draw to a close we’re introduced to our main characters, 2 young couples heading into the woods for a weekend birthday party. they seem a little anxious about leaving the city, but seem to settle in nicely once they arrive at “uncle charlie’s” cabin.



the two male characters head into town to pick up party supplies, where they meet sheriff bob. the sheriff seems to be giving them a hard time until he asks where they’re staying. “my uncle charles bronson’s cabin, sir.” wtf? i spent the next hour and a half of the movie waiting for this… unfortunately the uncle never makes an appearance. perhaps they’re saving that for somebody help me too?

stocked up with chips and beer, the party planners head back to the bronson estate. in addition to the two original couples, the party has grown to include three white couples. with the aid of balloons and nausea-inducing pop music, our ten party goers proceed to execute the lamest birthday party ever attended by people over the age of eleven.



as the party is winding down, two of our newly introduced couples decide to wander off into the woods with no blankets to have sex. the rest of the party heads to bed, where charles bronson’s nephew subsequently is terrified by a nightmare about a little girl on a swing set.



the next morning the six non-forest wanderers wake to find the two couples that slipped off into the woods never returned. they discuss calling the police, but doing that would end in the uncle being notified and they’d rather that not happen. instead they decide to search the woods aimlessly, and it seems that daylight lasts less than an hour in these mountains as they quickly need to resort to using flashlights in their search despite having started as soon as they woke.

the remaining white guy says that they should split up to cover more ground and to call each other if they find anything. since you can’t make a horror movie anymore without removing cell phones from the equation, he’s promptly informed “you know we ain’t got no service up in these woods!” still, split up they do and almost immediately the last white couple vanishes.

the two remaining couples discuss whether to call the police again and eventually decide to do so. throughout all of this the film has been peppering in a few jump scares, all of which are pretty much derivations of the following. music builds, music builds, music builds, music climaxes as we see the killer walk by in the background of the shot. this staple of horror films happens again and again in the film, but there’s something a bit off about it. below is an example…



the killer walks from screen right to screen left just as the music hit occurs. this is fine… but what is the killer doing? normally in this type of shot he’d be stalking the victim we see in the foreground or something to that effect… in most of these shots he just seems to be on his way somewhere like he’d just jumped up to grab a soda from the fridge and was heading back to the sofa.

anyway, now that sheriff bob has been notified, we occasionally cut to see what our killer is up to. it seems he’s locked all the missing kids in dog kennels…



and has begun torturing them, a la hostel.



the movie follows a definite ‘whodunnit’ structure, systematically pointing fingers at the town kook, the sheriff, the deputy and anyone else who happens to wander in front of the camera. when stalking, the killer is shown wearing a clear plastic mask that hides his identity. the problem with all this is that right from the beginning we’re shown torture scenes where the killer is clearly visible with only a surgical mask covering his mouth. the only conclusion i can draw from this is that these torture scenes were added after-the-fact, much in the same way captivity had all the gratuitous violence added after bombing overseas. i rarely use this term, but the violence here is gratuitous, serving no purpose and even detracting from the story. as the plot unfolds we learn the killer is a plastic surgeon gone bonkers who likes to perform a little unnecessary cosmetic surgery on unwilling victims from time to time. how exactly does scalping, removing fingernails, plucking out eyes or ripping out teeth fit into this? in one case the killer removes someone’s ear which seems in keeping with his specialty… but in every other case it seems it’d have been better to make the villain an evil dentist, psychotic hair stylist, depraved optometrist or deranged manicurist.



in predictable fashion, the police don’t really believe what our four heroes have to say. back at the station, sheriff bob is trying to decide when to start muttering “damn punk kids” to himself when his deputy comes up with something. “hey, sheriff… you don’t think this has anything to do with those other college kids that went missing exactly three years ago tonight?” sheriff bob’s reply? “deputy, how many times do i have to tell you… you mention that again, i’ll have you badge.”

wait, what? lose your job for mentioning highly relevant information in a respectful and courteous tone?

by this time the two remaining boys have let their girlfriends get abducted when they decided to go do some hardy boys sleuthin’ and left the girls back at the house. the two boys decide to do the only reasonable thing… since they’ve had no luck finding their friends or significant others and the police aren’t helping as much as they’d like, they decide to pack up all of their belongings and drive several hours back to “the city” to get help.



but wouldn’t you know it… “that sonofabitch cut the wires.” with no usable mode of transportation due to untimely wire cutting, they decide to walk to the police station. on the way there, a white guy stops and asks if they’d like a ride. a white guy in rural america stopping in the middle of the night to offer two black guys carrying a baseball bat a ride? you just know this guy is trouble. well, since the boys haven’t seen the torture scenes, they don’t realize this is the killer and so they hop in the car. the good samaritan tells them that he’ll take them to his place instead of the police station because the sheriff is already there checking something out. they completely buy this and wait patiently on the couch while the killer “goes to get the sheriff” who he says must be in the john.

next comes the movie’s most ridiculous moment, and that’s saying something. one of the boys goes to use the phone but it shoots a bit of cgi smoke in his face and he begins to get all wobbly as though he were about to say “goodness gracious, i think i’ve got the vapors” (see below). i’d like to think that the killer has his whole house rigged this way and frequently knocks himself out cold by accident reaching for a pepsi in the fridge or trying to switch his tv from dvd to xbox.



now all alone, charles bronson’s nephew runs into the little blond girl from his dream who helps him avoid capture and says she’ll help rescue his friends. several times during all of this our heroes stab or bludgeon the killer who, of course, appears dead. each and every time they do this they drop their weapons and turn their back on the killer. i understand this has been a staple of this type of film since halloween… but no one’s really used it more than once in a non-ironic fashion since the 1980s.



after one of these “oh, we killed him so now we’re safe” moments, the little girl leads our hero to the dog kennels to rescue those of his friends still alive. this is my favorite moment in the movie as our hero does the unimaginable and “forgets the keys.” the music swells as one of the caged girls screams “oh hell no, you did not..” and continues to build as the little girl pauses dramatically before she reveals where the keys are. “they’re in his pocket.” the music crescendos in a ludicrous fashion as the caged girl begins screaming, “WHOSE POCKET? WHOSE POCKET!?!”

i’m sure you can predict what happens next. they get the keys and then there’s a few more instances of hitting, stabbing or tripping the killer and everyone erroneously assuming he’s dead. before the whole thing draws to a close there’s a lot more over-the-top music cues, heavy-handed editing and idiotic behavior like people screaming up the stairs at the top of their lungs that everyone needs to be quiet because the killer might hear them. at the end our two black couples have survived largely unscathed and the killer has been shot dead. OR SO THEY ASSUMED. we’re left with the deputy informing our heroes that they only found a blood trail, but that it’ll be ok because (and i quote) “we put out a full investigation. he’s not getting away.” just as the credits are about to roll, we see the killer (in a new set of clothes and not obviously bleeding, bruised or, as one might assume, dead) and the little girl in a car slipping past the “full investigation” (aka, road block), and getting away.





so ends somebody help me, leaving a lot of room for a sequel and a lot of confusion in its wake. here are a few of my thoughts…

it’s been formulaic for decades to kill the token black guy first in the horror genre, so perhaps this film is attempting to make a statement by turning that on its head. within the film, only white characters are killed or tortured and at the end it appears that of our 10 party-goers, only the black characters have survived. however, if you watch closely at least one of the white characters was still alive in the cages, but he is conspicuously missing from the group of huddled survivors in the film’s final moments (i’ve read that you can see this missing character being wheeled out on gurney in a deleted scene, but that only makes his exclusion from the final cut odder). lines like “that’s white people for ya” following that same character’s decision to split up during their earlier search make the intent of all this seems unlikely to be a study of racial relations in the slasher genre. even if it is, then it’s sloppily executed and completely ineffective.

this is a flawed film from beginning to end, but the film’s biggest and least forgivable flaw is that it simply has no heart… you get no sense that there was any joy involved in its crafting. usually with films of this type you can tell that the filmmakers truly have affection for the genre and had fun making it, regardless of the quality of the final product. that is not the case here. i get the feeling the only reason this was a slasher film is because that’s the only genre the director could get enough money together to make and he’d have been much happier using this same cast to make something a little closer to his heart. it’s obvious stokes has seen films from the genre as he steals from them unabashedly, but it feels as though he took a weekend crash course in slasher films and didn’t realize that a lot of the elements he was borrowing became cliché and ineffective long ago. repeating the “stab the killer, drop your knife, only to have the killer rise again” gag no less than four times with little to no changes is inexcusable. blanketing every scene in slowly building suspense music that attempts to startle the audience every time a curtain flutters or a tree branch snaps quickly becomes dull and desensitizing.

ultimately the film just collapses under its own weight, illogically combining classic slasher conventions with confusingly supernatural elements. it’s unclear where this little girl came from or how she entered our character’s dreams… just as you begin to assume she’s a ghost, the film seems to say that she’s perfectly tangible and never resolves this issue. the killer is a plastic surgeon gone mad, but follows few of the behaviors that would seem to dictate and instead seems to just run around changing clothes every few minutes, driving his car aimlessly, torturing people for no rational (or even psychotically irrational) reason and rigging his appliances as aerosol poison dispensers. if the intent was to serve as an introduction to slasher films for an audience that may have never ventured into that genre otherwise, the filmmakers may well have succeeded in their goal. but for horror fans, this is just another boring hour and a half that attempts to cash in on the creativity of other films while offering nothing new itself.

if you wish to judge for yourself, you can purchase the dvd or see the trailer at code black entertainment’s product page for the film.




Jon’s Review…

Somebody Help Me features R&B performers Marques Houston and Omarian Grandberry and is written and directed by their music producer and burgeoning entertainment mogul Christopher B. Stokes, whose film credits also include You Got Served and House Party 4: Down to the Last Minute. Somebody Help Me is largely a vehicle for the very popular and talented Houston and Grandberry, and I’m sure that their large numbers of fans will guarantee at least some success for this film, even though the script consists almost entirely of broadly sketched horror film clichés: a remote cabin in the woods, a clash between urban and rural cultures, a demented killer who’s also a tightly kept local secret, and an annoying but benevolent ghost-like child. Ultimately, none of this works and the film sputters to a nearly incomprehensible conclusion.

To be fair, there are a few interesting touches in this film, such as the fact that it initially bends over backwards to deflect stereotypes. I was expecting the local sheriff of the town where Houston and Grandberry are partying with their friends to be yet another rustic hillbilly. However, for the first part of the film Sheriff Bob seems professional and actually concerned for the young people vacationing in his town. Grandberry, especially, seems intent on resisting stereotyping by being deliberately polite at every turn, even when he feels that Sheriff Bob is doing nothing to find his missing friends. It’s as if he’s trying to say that he may be urban, and things might be turning violent around him, but he’s not going to play the role of thug. He’s always a gentleman. And I like his character very much. It’s all the more disappointing when the film then proceeds to indulge in one cliché after another.

Some of these clichés were so problematic that they derail the film and make it difficult to watch, especially the bits that borrow too heavily from recent shock films such as Hostel and Wolf Creek. I was not insulted by the scenes of torture and brutality in either of those films. They were difficult to watch, but also complex and a necessary part of the films. The torture scenes in Somebody Help Me, all of which were conducted by a baffling plastic surgeon turned killer, weren’t nearly as gruesome or as fearlessly realistic as either Hostel or Wolf Creek, but the sheer arbitrariness of them were exploitative in the worst kind of way. They weren’t necessarily excessive or voyeuristic, but were pointless and included only because other recent horror successes have featured such scenes. In truth, this was the first time I’ve ever been insulted by horror film violence.

It’s not that I can’t forgive a cliché or two. I can even enjoy clichés when they’re part of a well-made and otherwise well-written film. For instance, 28 Days Later is yet another apocalyptic zombie film with a dash of anti-establishment rhetoric. I’ve seen that premise dozens of times, and yet 28 Days Later manages to pull it off due to the sheer force of the director’s sincerity and skill. It’s not just the clichés in Somebody Help Me that make it a mess of a film by the its conclusion. Nor is it a matter of bad acting, as Houston and Grandberry are often charming and believable, despite the film. And Stokes is a capable enough director, but I suspect that he simply does not care enough about this material, and the result is a technically mediocre film with too many gratuitous sequences and a final lack of sincerity. For instance, the showdown between Houston and the killer loses whatever meager vitality the script might have lent it because it is simply too long, too drawn out, and much of it feels like filler. “Somebody Help Me Find My Keys” may have been a better fitting title as the film borders on parody at one point when Houston must once again battle the killer at length because he can’t find the keys to cages where his friends are being kept. Also, throughout the film, Houston inexplicably refers to his uncle “Charles Bronson.” He and the sheriff even have a long conversation about what a great guy Charles Bronson is. I have to believe that this was an intentional attempt at humor of some sort. The entire film would have been saved for me if a pistol-toting Charles Bronson lookalike would have made a surprise appearance as Houston’s uncle. But, alas, there were no such gems to be found. This film begs to go in the direction of parody, and I wish Stokes would have let it, but he insists on trudging the film forward to what he assumes a horror film should be. It’s a dry, boring endeavor, and based on the strangely humorless gag-reel that accompanies the DVD of Somebody Help Me, nobody on the set ever had fun making this film. I don’t doubt the talent of everyone involved in this project, and they might make a quick buck or two from it, but as a fan of horror films, I hope they never try it again.

Jon’s Review of Suspiria (1977)

Jon
January 14, 2008
Posted by
jon@evilontwolegs.com

Note: This entry was written for the Final Girl film club.
See more reviews of Suspiria there, courtesy of Stacie’s Final Girl blog.

The plot of Suspiria can be effectively summarized by the title of my favorite Warren Zevon song – “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.” Of course, by “bad luck,” I mean a series of mysterious, stylized murders, a nasty infestation of maggots, demonic forces, and an evil coven of witches. As the young ballet dancer Suzy Banyon discovers after arriving at a prestigious dancing school, there’s much more to be nervous about other than performing perfect glissades and pirouettes. This particular school is the secret lair of Levana, a centuries old witch who Banyon must eventually confront before she is either murdered or driven insane.

I’ll admit that until watching Suspiria last week, I was familiar with Dario Argento only through his work for Showtime’s Masters of Horror television series (both of his installments make my list of favorite MOH episodes, which you can read here). Of course, I’ve always heard of Argento’s work in giallo and Italian horror, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that Suspiria has very little in common with his episodes for MOH. The plot of Suspiria is intriguing enough, and it’s the first in a trilogy that explores the schemes of the ancient “Three Mothers,” a group of evil witches who are trying to manipulate the course of global events. All of this is interesting, but it’s also rather inconsequential, and I do not mean this as a criticism. Suspiria could just as easily take place in a fencing, gardening, or grammar school and not lose any of its meaning or impact. What makes this film so eerie, so unsettling, and so brilliant has very little to do with plot and everything to do with aesthetics.

For instance, the set design is simply stunning with its Caligari-style expressionist angles, carefully chosen color schemes, and moody film-noir lighting.

Watching Suspiria is a lot like watching a series of paintings, but the film is much more than a superfluous sequence of pretty imagery. The effect is central to the overall impact and meaning of the film in that Banyon’s entire surroundings are menacing and seemingly impossible to escape, even to the degree that what should be an innocuous conversation with her classmate is rendered claustrophobic and uncomfortable. Throughout the film, Banyon seems on the verge of being utterly absorbed and driven insane by her strange surroundings and its secret threat.

Argento masterfully adds to the film’s overwhelming, supernatural ambiance by carefully orchestrating every possible camera angle, every detail, and every sound. His special effects are not designed to render the film’s horrific death scenes in any sort of realistic fashion, but to give the film an uncanny, dreamlike emphasis. For instance, one of Banyon’s classmates escapes from her attacker through a tiny window, only to fall into a vat of barbed wire.

It didn’t bother me one bit that this is an impossible if not highly impractical method for murdering anyone. Nor did it bother me one bit that the barbed wire is so obviously fake. Argento isn’t interested in realism here, but in creating a particular tactile, visual, and even auditory sensory experience. The entire barbed wire sequence reminds me of Bunuel and Dali’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. And thanks in part to the soundtrack by The Goblins with its creepy, primitive drumming, it becomes all the more clear as the film progresses that we’re no longer in an actual dancing school or even in the realm of the logical, but rather a bizarre, ritualized space that stuns the senses. In that regard, Argento’s technique reminds me of classical opera, that other Italian art form that also emphasizes turbulent, but beautiful excess.

Even though Argento’s brand of horror emphasizes visual design and aesthetic over realism, this does not mean that Suspiria is not a horrifying film. In fact, it features one of the most truly disturbing scenes I’ve seen in a very long time. Daniel, the school’s blind piano player, is fired after his seeing-eye dog is accused of harming an instructor’s young nephew (who’s all the more creepy for looking exactly like the weird kid on the labels of Dutch Boy paint cans). Of course, the witches in charge of the school aren’t satisfied with simply firing Daniel. In a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, Daniel finds himself with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide as he’s stalked by an invisible force.

The fact that the imminent attack finally comes from his own dog is surprising and upsetting. It’s also unsettling that he’s pillared between what looks like two classical museums, which are easily recognizable icons of Western civilization, as if to suggest that no safe havens exist from these demonic forces. Much of this film is viscerally frightening in this way, even though nothing in it is as realistic or brutal as the recent trend of American gore-fests such as Wolf Creek, the Saw films, and Hostel parts one and two. I love those films as much as any horror fan, but I have to admit that I find Suspiria to be a refreshing tonic to the recent American-style realism.

Corey’s 11 Favorite Werewolves

Corey
January 11, 2008
Posted by
corey@evilontwolegs.com
*click images to enlarge*
*click text links for images*

of all the classic movie monsters, i’ve always felt the werewolf to be the least well represented in modern cinema. while abundant, the visual representations of lycanthropes in movies have usually left me disappointed. they’re either not monstrous enough (wolf), too cgi’d (van helsing, cursed), or just too damn silly (silver bullet, big bad wolf, werewolf, etc.). there are a few exceptions however, so below you will find my 11 personal favorite werewolves. this is not a list of my favorite werewolf films… it’s a list of my favorite visual representations of the monster itself. therefore, some good werewolf movies didn’t make this list since they contained a mediocre creature and some not-so-great films are on the list solely due to their quality lycanthrope design. i’m no authority on the genre, so please leave a comment if a particularly interesting werewolf instance seems to be missing; it’s exclusion is likely because i just haven’t seen it yet.



11. the nightmare before christmas

it was going to be a top 10 list, then i remembered this guy. the wolfman look (human physique, clothes, bipedal) almost always looks silly, but when rendered in clay it really works and comes far closer to being scary than most live-action wolfmen. in burton’s masterpiece the wolfman barely gets any screen time, but he’s always been one of my favorite characters in the film… and right now i’m wondering why i don’t have an action figure of the little guy.





10. waxwork

waxwork is one of those rare franchises where the sequel is actually superior to the original. however, this little horror/teen comedy combo still has a lot going for it. the werewolf sequence in the film is only about 5 minutes long, but i always found it memorable because it showcases john rhys-davies, the guy who played bobby on twin peaks and a kick-ass monster. the scene is a perfect mix of comedy and grotesque horror that the rest of the film rarely lives up to. the werewolf itself isn’t particularly unique and often appears a bit rubbery, but there’s just something about it i like. perhaps its the menace it shows as it towers over the other characters or the attitude it shows when it brushes off its shoulder after getting hit with a chair… but most likely it’s because i always have to audibly say “ooooh! damn!” when it rips that guy in half (see below).





9. harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban

in the third harry potter movie we meet the first werewolf in the series, professor lupin (you could argue that sirius black, who can transform into a dog, might qualify but my girlfriend informs me that you would be wrong). the irony of a guy named lupin getting bit by a werewolf seems lost on the other characters, but i suppose ‘professor wolfmanlonchaneylunarhairgrowth’ might have been a bit too on the nose.

some have criticized the wolf design as being too lanky and i’ve even seen it compared to a elongated chihuahua, but i find lupin rather unique and beautiful among lycanthropes. there’s something gothic and sad about his look and body movements, and while he’s not the most terrifying of monsters, he’s certainly a fastincating and tragic take on the werewolf legend.





8. thriller

it speaks to the quality of this video that no matter what depths michael jackson sinks to, thriller remains one of the greatest music videos ever made. featuring the team of director john landis and fx master rick baker (both fresh off american werewolf), it’s no surprise the werewolf/zombie designs are amazing even 25 years later. the transformation sequence is legitimately scary and the resulting monster is surprisingly effective given the letter jacket wearing wolfman design highly reminiscent of michael landon’s creature form from i was a teenage werewolf.





7. fright night

oh, how i love fright night. i love roddy mcdowall as the vampire killer, peter vincent… but nothing can top the scene-chewing performance by evil ed (played by future gay porn star, stephen geoffreys).

“oh, you’re so COOL, brewster.”

now some may challenge my assertion that evil ed is a werewolf because the movie is obviously about vampires and ed clearly is one. he was bitten by the disco-loving dracula-esque metrosexual vampire, jerry dandridge… crosses hurt him… and he calls himself a vampire. however, he does have the ability to turn into a wolf and goes through a rather dramatic de-transformation scene from his wolf form. i don’t know if that qualifies him as a traditional, lunar scheduled, died-in-the-wool werewolf… but, as they say, it’s good enough for government work. regardless of what you call it, i love the look of the monster as ed is dying and i wish we could have seen more of that creature in the film.





6. bad moon

it’s been a long time since i’ve seen bad moon, but what i remember is that the story was pretty good and the werewolf was great. i prefer quadraped wolf designs, but those are rare and bad moon uses the common bipedal design to great effect. the wolf is big, scary, physical (not cgi except briefly during the morph sequence below) and it has a really really big mouth. the film itself was also obviously made by dog lovers (like me) since we get lots of dog vs werewolf battles where the dog puts up a good fight and isn’t just a snaugage on legs (see next film).





5. ginger snaps

ginger snaps is probably my second favorite werewolf film due to its metaphoric storytelling, engaging actors and unique monster design. the story does seem to have something against dogs though as more canines are killed in the film than anything else and none seem remotely capable of standing up to a werewolf. the film itself is a coming-of-age story dealing with femininity, puberty and social pressures told through the prism of a classic monster movie (the sequel follows a similar trend but instead uses the werewolf legend as a metaphor for addiction). the character of ginger may be cuter in human form than the other werewolves on this list (mostly due to her innate talent at not being a hairy, sweaty man or michael jackson), but as a wolf she’s terrifying. the creature is a quadraped, bizarrely hairless and almost albino looking; all of which is a refreshing change from the typical brown hairball look we’re used to.





4. dog soldiers

unlike most movies dealing with werewolves, this one delivers exactly what you want. the premise is ‘soldiers vs. werewolves’ and you get that and so much more. action, laughs and scares are all delivered at a feverish pace… and the lycanthropes look great on top of all that. again the monsters are bipedal, but it works here since, despite being monstrous and bloodthirsty, the creatures seem to be as intelligent as the soldiers they’re fighting. the movie itself is surprisingly good, remarkably well-executed and incredibly british. it leaves you wanting more but thankfully there’s a sequel (dog soldiers: fresh meat) currently in the works…





3. the company of wolves

this is another one i haven’t seen in years but remember liking quite a bit. the surreal fairy-tale mood may not appeal to all, but this film has the best transformation sequences from any film i’ve seen. in one the wolf literally crawls out of the mouth of its human form while in another (shown below), the creature rips off its human skin and then changes form with all of its bones, sinew and muscle tissue showing. rewatching that scene, its actually better than i remember and its definitely something i plan on netflixing up soon to see again in its entirety.





2. the howling

despite numerous sequels and imitations, the original the howling still contains the best instance of the bipedal werewolf. this isn’t surprising given it lists both rick baker and rob bottin in the effects credits and its directed by joe dante. the transformation scene is (in my opinion) superior to the one shown in next film on our list, although that’s probably contrary to popular opinion. the werewolves themselves are ferocious and possess a certain demonic presence (with the exception of the yorkshire terrier version from the film’s final moments). it’s worth noting that the film’s sequels contain some of the worst instances of werewolf designs, particularly the bigfoot looking wolfman from part 2 and bizarre marsupial and nun versions from part 3.





1. an american werewolf in london

ah… an american werewolf in london. my favorite werewolf and my favorite werewolf movie. john landis’ unprecedented combination of horror and comedy likely shocked audiences expecting something in the same tone as animal house… but after growing a cult following once released on vhs, few horror fans can hide their affection for this film now. rick baker’s monster design is, in my mind, the perfect werewolf. far closer to wolf than man, it runs on all fours and seems to lack any human compassion or reasoning ability, instead relying on pure instinct and an insatiable appetite. the much-discussed transformation sequence is startling and brilliant, but i must admit to occasionally finding it a bit silly (particularly when david is lying on his back, covered in fur everywhere except his face, looking more like a brown teletubby than anything else), but once the wolf features begin showing in his face it drops any comic effect. the kills are bloody and the monster itself is the scariest animal monster i’ve ever seen. if hell needed a guard dog, this is what it would look like. i only wish the technology had existed to see the monster more mobile, but the quick cuts to close-ups of its face and upper torso are effective regardless. its a shame the sequel abandoned this design and went for something more traditional and far less effective.





Honorable Mention:


“give me a keg of beer… and these.”


Jon’s 10 Favorite Vampires

Jon
December 25, 2007
Posted by
jon@evilontwolegs.com
*click images to enlarge*

10. Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula (from Dracula, 1931, directed by Todd Browning)

While I haven’t listed my favorite vampires in any particular order, I couldn’t possibly begin any such list without first paying tribute to Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Count Dracula in Browning’s monumental 1931 film. Browning’s version isn’t necessarily the most faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, but it’s one of the most influential, largely due to Lugosi’s performance. His version of the count is dripping with aristocratic masculinity and is adorned with the now famous foppish cape and phallocentric fangs. Lugosi’s hypnotic, ballet-like movements are still strangely alluring and fiendish, and a testament to the uncanny and the animal sexuality buried beneath repressed Victorian society, which Stoker explores in his novel. Of course, Lugosi’s performance will later inform, if not directly inspire, countless vampires from the Hammer films of the 1950s, to Anne Rice’s Lestat, to Gary Oldman’s portrayal of the Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.



9. Max Schreck as Count Orlock (from Nosferatu, 1922, directed by F.W. Murnau)

I like to think of Murnau’s Nosferatu and Browning’s Dracula as companion pieces. Browning’s film is the more definitive film version of Stoker’s novel, but in some ways Murnau’s version is truer to the original. Murnau never obtained permission to adapt Stoker’s novel, so the names and locations have been changed, but the plot is basically the same. Murnau departs from Browning’s film, however, in that his version of the vampire, Count Orlock, as brilliantly played by Max Schreck, is far more fiendish and infernal than Lugosi’s version. Drawing upon the more monstrous aspects of Stoker’s novel, Orlock is more likely to simply rip out his victim’s throat than seduce. Orlock, in other words, is more devil than dandy. Orlock’s portrayal of the count has been nearly as influential as Lugosi’s. For example, films that emphasize the more monstrous aspects of the vampire and use the creature to build a sense of atmospheric dread, including Salem’s Lot and Carl Dreyer’s 1930 Vampyr, are indebted to Nosferatu. Likewise, the “the Master,” the vampiric antagonist from the first season of the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is visually derivative of Orlock’s pale, sickly skin, bat-like ears, and eerily long fingers.



8. Vampirella (created by Forrest J. Ackerman for the 1969 debut issue of the comic book Vampirella)

Ok, I should probably apologize for this one, but I simply can’t help myself. Vampirella is a guilty pleasure. And besides, I’ll wager that while she’s not nearly as influential as the previous vampires from this list, this little vamp from the planet Draculon has still had no small degree of influence. Clad in her iconic red bikini and go-go boots, Vampirella is a comic-book heroine created on the stiletto heels of the 1960s sexual revolution by Forrest J. Ackerman with artists Frank Frazetta and Tom Sutton. Vampirella is emblematic of both sexual empowerment and also shameless exploitation. She has little to do with either Stoker’s novel or the older, folk-based myths of vampirism. Instead, she’s a blend of sci-fi and fantasy action, sex appeal, and lots of kick-ass attitude. Sci-fi vampire action films such as Underworld and the Blade trilogy are in her debt, along with countless b-grade films featuring blood-sucking seductresses.



7. Marilyn Chambers as Rose (from Rabid, 1977, directed by David Cronenberg)

Rose is not a traditional vampire. But, then again, Cronenberg is not a traditional director. Rose, played by the pornstar Marilyn Chambers, is critically injured in a motorcycle accident. After a radical procedure involving experimental tissue transplants, she develops a hunger for human blood and grows a fang-like stinger under her armpit that she uses to feed on victims who afterward turn into rabid, diseased zombies. I know what you’re thinking. This is a ridiculous premise. Well, I can’t argue with that. You’re also probably thinking that this sounds more like a zombie film than a vampire film. That’s true enough, but then again Murnau’s vampire did not turn his victims into other vampires. Instead, Count Orlock brought disease and pestilence into each unsuspecting community he infiltrated. Cronenberg’s plot is perhaps needlessly strange and grotesque, but he is drawing upon the fact that vampirism has always been used as a metaphor for disease, especially of the venereal variety. In fact, Bram Stoker suffered from syphilis when he wrote Dracula, and sexually transmitted diseases and prostitution were embarrassing epidemics in his Victorian England. Add a little folklore, plus an interest in the newly developing science of psychology, the phonograph, and other technologies that seemingly transcend the human body, and you have all the ingredients for Stoker’s novel. Likewise, Cronenberg’s films always tend explore the strange and unsettling ways in which human bodies are hybrid engines of flesh, disease and machinery. In Rabid, Cronenberg is simply exaggerating a latent aspect of the vampire myth: human sexuality, with its potential convergences of flesh, disease and invasion, is both pleasurable and frightening. While I don’t think Coppola had Rabid in mind when he directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he nevertheless makes a similarly explicit connection between vampirism, technology, and venereal disease.



6. Bill Paxton as Severen (from Near Dark, 1987, directed by Kathryn Bigelow)

Vampires have traditionally been used as social metaphors. The vampire myth has been used to explore a decadent aristocracy that feeds upon its subjects, the infernal and devilish aspects of humanity, sexual repression or hostility, and countless other social ills. In Near Dark, the vampires are a violent family of misfit outsiders who cruise, booze, and kill their way through America’s heartland. After being bitten by one of the more placid members of the vampire gang, the doe-eyed Caleb Colton must choose between his mundane, small-town life and his vampire-girlfriend’s savage but libertine lifestyle. The vampires, in other words, represent the lure of sex, drugs, and gang violence. This was something of a national obsession in the “just say no” 80s, as evident in the host of other vampire films with similar social commentary, namely The Lost Boys, The Hunger, and, with much more camp and parody, Fright Night. Near Dark has an impressive ensemble cast, including Lance Henriksen (Pumpkinhead), Jenette Goldstein (Aliens), and Adrian Pasdar (Heroes). It also features the best bar scene in all of vampire film history. Everything about the scene is brilliant, from the irresistible turn-the-tables-on-the-bar-thugs dynamic, to the over-the-top violence, to the funky bar top dancing. If this weren’t enough, the entire scene is punctuated by some really great rock-n-roll gems from the 80s, including John Parr’s “Naughty, Naughty” and The Cramps’ “Fever.”



5. Kiefer Sutherland as David (from The Lost Boys, 1987, directed by Joel Schumaker)

In my opinion, The Lost Boys is terrific, but not quite as good as Near Dark. It’s a bit cutesier and less visceral than Near Dark, even though it has a similar tone and theme. However, Sutherland is impressive as David the vampire, a literal bad boy from hell who symbolizes rebellion, a youth culture gone wild, and old-fashioned rock and roll fun. Michael is the new kid in town, played by Jason Patrick, and is bitten by Star, a member of David’s vampire gang. The two fall in love and Michael must therefore choose between a life of violence and indulgent excess or the quiet and boring middle class life being offered by his grandfather and mom. As other 80s films such as Once Bitten and Vamp attest, it just ain’t easy being a teenager in love, especially if you’re in a vampire film. All of the actors in The Lost Boys are first-rate, but I think the indefatigable Frog brothers, played by Corey Feldman and Jason Newlander, are the real heart and soul of this movie. I’m always charmed by their inept, homemade crossbows, super soakers full of holy water, and steel-jawed, deadpan assurance that comic books might just save your life. This film is also a chance to see the Corey’s Haim and Feldman together in their prime before they both became rather sad has-beens. As with Near Dark, this film also features a truly fantastic soundtrack with songs by INXS, Lou Gramm, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Roger Daltry. Gramm’s “Lost in the Shadows” sends me happily back to the 80s every time I hear it.



4. Chris Sarandon as Jerry Dandridge (from Fright Night, 1985, directed by Joel Schumaker)

Jerry Dandridge is one silky-smooth vampire. He doesn’t sneak or creep into a room; this vampire virtually sambas his way to his victim’s throat like an undead Ricardo Montalban. The 80s were a golden age of vampire films and Fright Night, like Near Dark and The Lost Boys, explores the darker aspects of the Reagan era. But this time the societal problem is not gang violence or drugs, but the dangers of disco dancing. Young Charley Brewster, played by William Ragsdale, learns how dangerous disco can be when he loses his girlfriend to the evil Jerry Dandridge after his impressive nightclub performance. But when not charming the pants off helpless girls on the dance floor, Dandridge does manage to be a respectably formidable vampire, and Sarandon plays the part with an appropriate amount of aggression, sex appeal, and camp. Stephen Geoffrey, however, nearly steals the movie with his performance as “Evil” Ed Thompson, the misunderstood and wonderfully weird sidekick to Brewster. Roddy McDowall is also impressive as Peter Vincent, a washed up actor and host of the eponymously named television show Fright Night. Vincent is a tribute to Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and the golden age of vampire films. In fact, the entire dynamic and tone of the film is such that you’ll find it utterly irresistible if you’re like me and spent your Saturday nights as an adolescent staying up way too late watching vampire movies.



3. Catherine Deneuve as Miriam Blaylock (from The Hunger, 1983, directed by Tony Scott)

The plot of The Hunger involves a bizarre love triangle, perverse sexual appetite, and more disco dancing. Apparently, being bitten by a vampire in the 80s meant catching a nasty case of boogie fever. In The Hunger, the vampiress Miriam prowls the Manhattan club scene in search of prey, promising them an eternity of beauty, sex, and a goth-glam lifestyle in New York’s seedy but fashionable circles. But there’s a catch. The party never ends only for Miriam, as her victims eventually wither into grotesque, corpse-like figures doomed to spend eternity in perpetual old age. As with all vampire films in the 80s, The Hunger is a cautionary tale against indulgence and excess, but it is also notable for placing less emphasis on blood and gore and instead harking back to moodier, more expressionistic vampire films such as Dreyer’s Vampyr and Murnau’s Nosferatu. The Hunger also features Susan Sarandon and David Bowie, plus a great soundtrack that includes the classic goth-anthem “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus.



2. Viktor Verzhbitsky as Zavulon (from Dnevnoi Dozor, aka Day Watch, 2006, directed by Timur Bekmambetov)

Day Watch is the American title for the second installment in the Russian film trilogy based on the novels by Sergey Lukyanenko. The films involve the epic struggle between two groups of magical beings–the Day Watch and the Night Watch–who must maintain a balance between their two forces or the world will be destroyed in typical apocalyptic fashion. I’m sure that purists or hardcore fans of the film will tell me that Zavulon, the enigmatic leader of the Day Watch, is not a proper vampire. But, then again, there’s really no such thing as a proper vampire. They’re all loosely based on diverse folklore, fiction, and fantasy. Besides, Zavulon is undead, he commands an army of traditional vampires, and he’s got spooky and sinister powers. That’s close enough in my book. These films are a sensation in Russia, but are also gaining a much-deserved international audience. I especially admire the purity these films bring to the vampire tradition. They feature good (day) versus evil (night) with a necessary balance between them, as represented by the hazy, twilight middle ground between them called “the gloom” from which both groups draw their power. One could easily read this as a political metaphor for a post-Soviet Russia lost in a cultural mire as it tries to reestablish its direction and role in the world. But perhaps it’s best to simply approach the films as an entertaining, open-ended, and well-crafted allegory for the opposing forces that animate the human condition.



1. Salma Hayek as Santanico Pandemonium (from From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996, directed by Robert Rodriguez)

I’ll admit that aside from Salma Hayek, I didn’t care much for From Dusk Till Dawn the first time I saw it. The plot is a mess, the dialogue is often clichéd, and the vampires quickly become cartoonish. But something prompted me to try it again and I realized that this was more than a humble vampire flick. From Dusk Till Dawn is part of a revolution in film-making that had been in the works since the early 90s. Tarantino and Rodriguez took art house cinema away from the stiff pretenses of high brow culture and retrofitted it back to the seedier, more fluid aspects of the low brow. It’s not surprising that Rodriguez would recruit a horde of beer-drinking, strip-teasing, hell-raising vampires to help him do so. After all, vampires originate in folk tales and peasant culture, but their myth and imagery can be shaped to suit countless ends. They’re perfect for the screen in this regard. Tarantino, who co-wrote From Dusk Till Dawn, employs this to explore the hybrid nature of the medium he and Rodriguez so very much love. This film is part buddy movie, part action film, part vampire flick, with heavy doses of b-grade exploitation and camp thrown in as well. It makes for a fun mixture. And Salma Hayek is smoking hot. But she’s more than mere eye-candy. The fact that she turns so quickly from sultry vixen to demonic beast attests to the strange attraction that vampires have for those of us who love them. They represent our darkest fears of the monstrous, but also our deepest fantasies about having the power to do what we want, as well as being rendered powerless by something so exotic. Vampires, in other words, are the perfect cinematic vehicles because they represent all of those liberated, seductive, grotesque, and secretly attractive aspects of ourselves that we love to see on screen.



DVD Commentary Tracks That Don’t Suck

Corey
December 14, 2007
Posted by
corey@evilontwolegs.com

i love dvd commentaries. my decision to buy a dvd is often based simply on whether there’s a commentary track… largely because even if the film sucks (as most of the ones i buy do), the commentary might still be interesting. in fact, the worse the movie the better as there’s few things better than hearing filmmakers discuss the process of making a truly horrible film. hearing william friedkin babble on about the exorcist might be educational in some respects, but mostly it’s just sleep-inducing. hearing what made someone think that making rock-n-roll nightmare was a good idea or who was sleeping with who on the set of jeepers creepers 2… now that’s fascinating. in order to maximize the utility of your netflix queue, i offer the following suggestions for those seeking worthwhile horror dvd commentaries.



the thing

this was the first dvd i ever bought and (with the exception of an evil dead commentary bizarrely released on vhs), the first commentary track i ever heard. it remains one of my favorites, and not just for nostalgic reasons. john carpenter’s films vary in quality, but his enthusiasm for the creative process is infectious regardless of the film. here he’s joined with his obviously close friend kurt russell. when speaking about the film they discuss how difficult it was obtaining beer at the set, how far wilford brimley was from those quaker oats commercials and ask difficult questions about the film’s premise (e.g., would a person taken over by ‘the thing’ know it?). most often though they roam off topic and seem to forget where they are, going so far as to start discussing how their kid’s little league teams are doing before realizing that this really isn’t a private conversation. what results is a candid, funny and honest commentary track by two close friends for one of the greatest horror/sci-fi films ever.




return of the living dead 3

this under-appreciated zombie version of romeo & juliet actually has two tracks (one with the director, one with the lead actress and effects guy), but the one worth listening to is the latter featuring actress mindy clarke and special effects supervisor tom rainone. they’re both lively and entertaining people and their stories are funny, but the interplay between them is the highlight of the track. its obvious tom is flirting with mindy heavily and attempting to impress her with arcane knowledge of military trucks and weaponry. his flirting gets worse as time goes on as he seems to have a flask of ‘jack daniels’ with him and mindy’s remarks mentioning her husband/children seem to go unnoticed. its never enough to halt the conversation or make mindy overly uncomfortable, but its quite enjoyable to witness never-the-less.




sleepaway camp

this film is often remembered for its unexpected revealing of the killer and unrealistic death sequences. the commentary features the director, leading actress felissa rose (14 years old during the film, 36 during the commentary), and the webmaster of the sleepaway camp fansite. the latter’s love for the film is apparent, and he does a good job of mediating the commentary without stepping all over it. interesting bits include hearing felissa discuss her experiences as a teenager on a movie set and the crush she had on her co-star (and the drama that subsequently ensued).




bare wench 2: book of babes

jim wynorski is one of my favorite directors for two reasons — first, he makes horrible horror films with an unabashed love of the genre and no apparent desire to move beyond ultra low-budget restraints. second, he almost always does a commentary track. this particular one also features nikki fritz, and jim spends a ridiculous amount of time discussing her newly purchased breasts (i.e., “nikki fritz and her brand new…”). his films may be self indulgent and lacking in craftmanship, but its obvious from every frame that all he cares about is having fun while making them while turning a small profit. if you want to learn about making modern low-budget exploitation flicks… this isn’t a horrible place to start.




cheerleader massacre

another jim wynorski jiggle-fest. here the commentary features jim and actress gigi erneta. jim says he wanted to make a slasher film like it was 1982 again… unfortunately, i’m not sure he really remembers what those films were like. friday the 13th didn’t have a lot of breasts covered in chocolate syrup as far as i remember. it also didn’t have a laughable CGI decapitation… but this film gives you both. one of the more interesting tidbits of behind-the-scenes gossip is jim discovering ½ way through shooting that one of the leads was a hardcore porn star. there’s also quite a few times when jim lets people’s real names slip who clearly didn’t wish to be mentioned. the film is entertaining despite failing to emulate the tone of a traditional slasher and, truth be told, i’m not convinced that was ever really the goal anyway.




house of the dead

oh, uwe boll, how i love you. this was my first boll picture, and it won’t be my last. his complete incompetence is impossible to turn away from and, like ed wood jr. before him, he possesses that rate talent of making something so bad it’s good. in this track he rambles on about what kind of coffee he likes and embarrasses his fellow commentators with personal stories such as mentioning that one of the actors (present in the commentary) hooked up with and was subsequently dumped by one of the actresses in the movie. hearing uwe defend his use of crappy, lo-res dreamcast video game footage in a feature length film alone is worth owning this disc, but producer mark altman (‘free enterprise’) also does a separate track. mark is far more intelligent than the german director, and this track is actually rather enlightening. both tracks should be commended for being one of the rare times where people actually say what they think. it’s obvious mark isn’t very fond of how the film turned out and uwe doesn’t pull any punches when discussing his critics or defending his own creative vision.




urban legend

urban legend is one of the better slasher films cranked out after scream hit it big, but it never quite lives up to the quality of its premise. still, the commentary is definitely worth a listen. the cast and crew obviously know exactly what they were making and had a lot of fun doing it. expect to hear many self-deprecating observations about how ludicrous some of the plot holes and situations are… such as the red herring involving someone wearing a snow parka to an indoor swimming pool.




resident evil

ah… i saved the best for last. for some reason this track just never gets old. paul anderson (director), jeremy bolt (producer), milla jovovich (star) and michelle rodriguez (co-star) make for an interesting combo of unintentional wackiness and sexual tension. paul’s ego fills up the room, as does jeremy’s obvious infatuation with the two women in his proximity. the primary fun comes from milla and michelle, however. you get the distinct impression these are 12 year old girls trapped in 25 year old bodies. milla makes quite a few fart jokes, but it turns out she’s far and away the more intelligent of the two females. two sections of the commentary featuring michelle require special attention.

1. at one point michelle mentions a crematorium. quickly realizing that michelle isn’t entirely sure what that is, milla tells her that it’s the place where you make milk. michelle completely believes this and continues… then you can hear milla giggling and say “oh my god” to the males in the room while michelle finishes with her story, oblivious.

2. michelle decides to get intellectual and goes on a diatribe about what this movie is “really about.” it’s not a “zombie movie” she says… it’s actually clearly about 3 things… the dangers of genealogy, biohazardous research and metamorphoses. i have no idea what any of that means in terms of this movie… but i’m pretty sure resident evil had more to do with zombies than medical waste, caterpillars or how dangerous looking into your family tree can be.


The Mist

Corey
December 7, 2007
Posted by
corey@evilontwolegs.com

“the long walk” is my favorite stephen king story, but “the mist” is a close second. so i was prepped and ready to hate the film version when i went to see it this weekend. surprisingly, my preparation was in vain. king translates well to the screen only rarely, but i’m glad this is one of those times. the script is tight and remains focused where it should — as a study of fear and how easily society can break down. the monsters are largely effective, and a few are exactly what i had always imagined them to be. the acting was great (the character of ollie in particular).

there’s a lot of talk about the ending, which i won’t blatantly spoil here. my feelings on the film’s final moments are complicated, but here’s what i believe the theme of it is — at the end, a person walks into the mist to face the scariest thing imaginable. however, what comes for them is so much worse than anything they could have imagined. when i think of it like that, i appreciate it more… and despite king’s approval of the new ending, part of me still misses the ambiguous ending of the original story. if anyone else has seen it… what’d you think?

The Mist (2007)

Review of THE HAND (1981)

Corey
December 4, 2007
Posted by
corey@evilontwolegs.com

note: this article was written for the final girl film club. see more reviews of “the hand” there… as well as all the other fantabulous-ness that is stacie’s final girl blog.

corey’s review…

sometimes you know what kind of movie you’re about to watch just from the title. this is particularly true of two word, two syllable titles that begin with “the.” the blob, the stuff, the thing, the fog, etc. this month’s filim club entry, the hand, is no exception. however, my faith in this rule was shaken when i saw oliver stone’s name in the credits as the screenwriter and director. wouldn’t it be just like stone to name a movie the hand, open with lots of close-ups of a man’s fingers and gold ring… and then make the film actually be about a killer foot? alas, oliver had nothing quite so clever in mind and, as expected, this does end up being a film largely about a disembodied hand with a nasty temper.

the movie’s tagline?
It lives. It crawls. And suddenly, it kills.

the imdb summary:
Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine) is a comic book artist who loses his right hand in a car accident. The hand was not found at the scene of the accident, but it soon returns by itself to follow Jon around, and murder those who anger him.

i can see why (given her profession in the comic industry) stacie chose this film for the final girl film club and, at first glance, this seems like its going to be a really groovy horror film about a killer hand. as the film progresses though, it becomes clear that there is a disconnect between what the film is and what it wants to be. given this is early in stone’s career, it seems he lacked the creative control he would eventually gain over his own films. here its obvious he was contracted to make a horror film about a killer hand… but it doesn’t feel like oliver really likes horror all that much and has little fun with the premise. instead he spends far too much time on marital disputes, dream sequences and homages to other psychological thrillers with far more substance (polanski’s repulsion and the tenant being primary influences).

not that making this a psychological thriller is necessarily a bad thing. a film about a man who loses his hand and then transfers all his anger and repressed emotions into the murderous appendage is a fascinating idea and is ultimately what this film becomes. the problem is that the film fails at the most basic element of what would make such a story work — it doesn’t make you afraid of the hand. any film called the hand should either contain (or lead the audience to believe it contains) a killer hand. and while you do occasionally see a murderous hand, from the very beginning it’s clear that the killer appendage is only in jon’s imagination. this leaves little ambiguity in the story and little to be frightened of… what we’re left watching is an hour and a half of a man going crazy until he resorts to violence. the reasons for his insanity don’t even seem to correlate all that heavily with the loss of his hand, as it seems he would have gone just as crazy whether he lost it or not because the precipitating event seems to be losing his wife — not his hand. for the story to really work as a horror film, it’d need to be unclear whether the hand was real or imaginary… and then perhaps reveal which it was at the end after leading the audience to believe the opposite. as it stands, the first time you see jon beginning to think his hand is running around by itself, you instantly know he’s nuts — and all that’s left is over an hour of watching him confirm it.

that isn’t to say there isn’t anything good here. the acting is great (no one can sell getting choked by a rubber hand like michael caine), the metaphoric imagery is often intriguing (e.g., when jon’ first puts on his prosthetic hand/glove, it clenches in a vice-like manner, indicating jon’s hidden emotions), and a lot of the shots of the imaginary hand are well-done and quite a few were later stolen for use in such killer-hand classics as evil dead 2 and waxworks 2. seeing the procedures and steps one goes through after suffering such a loss is interesting and the characters are well-written… but this isn’t enough to save it from becoming dull and predictable, particularly in the final act. this is topped off with a ridiculous finale where we see jon in a psychological laboratory (complete with scalp electrodes) being talked to by a rather sadistic psychiatrist (who, if you look closely, appears to keep cases of popov vodka in the patient testing room). predictably, the hand goes after another victim and the film closes on a 70s era television freeze-frame of michael caine looking nuts… which is something we knew all along and hardly need driven into our minds by a frozen image.

perhaps its just me or my expectations… maybe i just wanted a campy killer hand movie and thus couldn’t properly appreciate what i was given. i dunno. i do think this film would have fared better if it’d just embraced its premise and become a true horror film… or if it’d abandoned that idea altogether and gone the straight psychological thriller route. as it is, it’s a weird hybrid that combines the least effective aspects of both genres into a very ambitious, but ultimately ineffective film.

The Hand (1981)

below i’ve included the scene where michael caine actually loses the hand in question. it’s actually quite gory, which is out-of-character for the rest of the film… but the improbability and over-the-top bloodiness of it actually make this the film’s best scene.




jon’s review…

Don’t let the fact that Oliver Stone directed The Hand fool you. This film does not explore the horrors of Vietnam, the inhumanity of the military industrial complex, nor the conspiracies within American media and politics. The Hand, which Stone directed early in his career, departs from his standard fare and instead explores such rich philosophical concepts as the relation between mind and body and the nature of human will.

Michael Cain delivers a truly brilliant performance as John Landsdale, a successful comic book artist whose artistic ambitions and stormy disposition have left him estranged from his wife. However, his ambitions are frustrated and his career is derailed when he loses his right hand in a horrific car accident, which sends him on a psychological downward spiral reminiscent of both The Shining and Psycho.

There is, of course, a long-standing literary and cinematic tradition of the severed hand motif. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus , the venerable bard has one of the play’s central characters appear on stage with her severed hands in her mouth. In what might be a prototype for modern zombie films, Shakespeare wants to impress upon his audience that death and tragedy have a macabre way re-animating in the imagination and on the stage. In The Evil Dead II, Ash famously engages in an epic battle with his own severed and demonically possessed hand.

What all such motifs tend to have in common is the link between hands and human will. In Stone’s The Hand, all of John’s ambitions as well as insecurities take on a symbolic life of their own as he imagines that his hand carries out his deepest, most depraved desires. Part of the film’s fun is the way that it sometimes playfully suggests that the hand is, in fact, an Adam’s Family style monster, but never truly departs from the idea that it’s all part of John’s complex psychosis. The film is also impressive in the way it always avoids degrading into outright parody and camp. In fact, the film is often an intimate portrait of grief, loss, and the fragile line between our bodies and our identity. This is especially moving when John searches for his missing hand while worrying that it’s already decayed to mere bone. This film will disappoint if you’re expecting b-move camp, blood and gore, or typical Oliver Stone paranoia. Instead, this film is an intelligent, if sometimes overly ponderous, meditation on our deepest human frailties.

The Hand (1981)

Top Ten Reasons Why Horror Fans Should Be Poetry Fans

Jon
November 26, 2007
Posted by
jon@evilontwolegs.com

I’ll admit that I love poetry every bit as much as I love horror films. In fact, I’ll argue that real poetry is less about the touchy-feely pleasures of sunshine, fields of golden barley, and lovely trees than it is a harrowing exploration and expression of the complexities of the human condition. While it’s true that most poets choose not to write explicitly about zombies and flesh-eating blobs from beyond the stars, they do sometimes use language, imagery, and metaphors surprisingly similar to horror films in order to explore the darker side of the human experience. To prove to you that poetry is not for the faint of heart, I offer the following list of poems that I think fans of horror films ought to know and love.



10. “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917) by Wilfred Owen

…If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Wilfred Owen was only twenty-four when he wrote his most famous poem, which he based on his first-hand experiences with chemical warfare during Word War I. As evident in the closing section of the poem above, his imagery is brilliant and still shocking. Special effect artists could do a lot worse than this poem as a manual for how to make a believable zombie. In fact, when I visualize this poem, I imagine George Romero’s zombie series, but there are plenty of other monsters in this poem, including devils, witches, and madmen.” All of it points to the ugly truth that war is the ultimate act of horror and produces hordes of the living dead even as it produces heroes. It’s no coincidence that some of the best practitioners in the horror genre have either experienced war firsthand (e.g., Tom Savini) or were significantly impacted by it during their formative years (e.g., George Romero). In fact, nearly every zombie movie I can think of has at least a tangential link between zombie-hood and the politics of our modern industrial military complex. If “Dulce et Decorum Est” weren’t horrifying enough without its graphic and relentless imagery, it’s worth noting that Owen died in battle just after he wrote it, and one year before the war ended.




9. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) by Randall Jarrell

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.


This little five-line poem is probably the most widely anthologized piece from this countdown. As with Owen, Jarrell writes from first-hand experience. He served in the air force during Word War II, and his poems also pulse with the same visceral and haunting imagery as Owen’s. Jarrell’s imagery is particularly monstrous in its combination of initial tenderness and then sudden inhumanity. The speaker begins in simple animal existence, then transforms into little more than a state apparatus, and then reverts back again to a more grotesque form of flesh and bone. The way the speaker is so bluntly and so thoroughly reduced to either raw flesh or indifferent machine is reminiscent of Cronenburg. Films such as The Fly illustrate that technology can provide some promise of transcendence, but never beyond the confines of the physical animal in us all. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” likewise depicts the grisly way in which technology, especially during war, becomes a perverse nightmare when it replaces our better, more humane natures. Jarrell survived the war, but was never the same. He had a brilliant career as a writer and teacher, but he suffered from lifelong depression and died under mysterious circumstances by apparently walking into oncoming traffic in Chapel Hill, NC.




8. “Jerusalem” (1804) by William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.


William Blake was better known in his own day for the brilliant artwork that accompanied his poetry. In fact, one can really think of Blake as being an early manifestation of the graphic novelist. His most famous illustration, “The Great Red Dragon,” was made even more famous by its use in Brett Ratner’s 2002 Red Dragon, the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Blake’s “Jerusalem” was written on the heels of the French Revolution and has been performed numerous times as an anti-fascist anthem by musicians such as Billy Bragg. Like Bragg, Blake was intimately involved in revolutionary politics, the energies of which he marshaled toward a bitter indictment of his own England. In “Jerusalem,” Blake offers a harrowing prophetic warning against what he takes to be England’s crass imperialism and brutal industrialization (the “dark satanic mills”), which have endangered the English spirit. His vision is equal parts righteous indignation, divine prophecy, and proto-Marxist politics. It’s not that far from the sort of nightmarish, dystopian vision that one finds in such films as City of Men and 28 Days Later in which a beleaguered human spirit must claw and fight its way against the horrors of tyranny and political oppression.




7. “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1799) by William Wordsworth

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.


This short, eight line poem has been traditionally used by young literary critics to sharpen their analytical teeth. In that regard, it serves the same purpose that Hamlet does for budding actors. Wordsworth was a contemporary of Blake and one of the founders of the English Romantic movement. He is often thought of as being the kinder, gentler member of that particular group, which also includes Blake, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Coleridge. Wordsworth is famous for poems that explore the promise of transcendence amid lost innocence, although this poem is altogether different. Written after the heartbreaking death of his young daughter Lucy, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal” works, also like Hamlet, as a bitter gravestone epitaph and meditation on death. The “she” of the poem returns to “nature” after her death, but it offers no solace. Nature is instead a cold, indifferent force that renders us helpless as much in life as in death by turning us into mute, powerless apparitions. The entire poem has the eerie feel of a ghost story, as if to say that our dead are well beyond our reach, but they won’t quite leave us. They no longer move with us, but are instead moved as lifeless things and “rolled” by the earth’s indifferent course, along with the equally inanimate rocks, stones, and trees. A similar sense of utter futility and dread operates in such films as Ringu and Ju-on: The Grudge .




6. “The Second Coming” (1910) by William Butler Yeats

…Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Screenwriters invariably steal from the language of “Second Coming” any time they need a serial killer to sound both cryptic and scary. For instance, Chris Carter stole freely from this poem in writing his largely underrated show Millennium. This shouldn’t be surprising as Yeats, like Blake, was thoroughly steeped in apocalyptic fin-de-siecle prophesy. But he was also involved in the bitter political struggle for Irish independence. Yeats’s “Second Coming” imagines a world seemingly beyond redeeming. Politics have failed to save his Ireland, an aristocratic spirit has failed to lead the masses, and art has failed to inspire humanity, all of which leaves one last option. The loosely biblical “second coming” does not herald peace, love, and understanding, but a cosmic-scale ass kicking. This poem has the same other-worldy, esoteric menace that you’ll find in such films as Stuart Gordon’s Dagon, which also depicts a monster that slithers its way toward a final reckoning with human kind. Modern pundits have taken to using “The Second Coming” to talk about the concept of blowback – the idea that we reap what we sow, and that our current mess in Iraq is the result of historic problems with our foreign relations. That’s a smart way to think about the poem. But I like to think of Yeat’s “rough beast” as part Damian, part Cthulhu, and part Godzilla.




5. “Howl” (1955) by Allan Ginsberg

…What sphinx of cement and aluminum
bashed open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!
Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under the stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch!
Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless!
Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison!
Moloch the crossbone
soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!
Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war!…


Before Ginsberg became the grandfather guru of the 1960s counterculture revolution, he helped define the 1950s beat generation. In the midst of the 1950s culture of conformity and blissful suburban normalcy, Ginsberg offered this brilliant, rambling, blood curdling, prophetic, and brutally honest assessment of the freaks, psychotics, geniuses, poets, and artistic outsiders that operated within the fringes of American culture. Ginsberg is heavily indebted to Blake and presents a harrowing vision in part two of “Howl” in which American culture sacrifices its brightest and most creative minds to the industrial, materialist, soulless demon Molloch. Ginsberg takes the name “Moloch” from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, but I think the raw, animal, and sometimes aggressive energy of his poem with its mystic overtones is perhaps better embodied in such films as Wolfen and The Howling. Ginsberg’s poem is something that you don’t read softly and quietly. This poem wants you to listen to your inner beast and defiantly scream the poem aloud to the next full moon.




4. “The Flowers of Evil” (1857) by Charles Baudelaire

…If poison, arson, sex, narcotics, knives
have not yet ruined us and stitched their quick,
loud patterns on the canvas of our lives,
it is because our souls are still too sick.
Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice,
gorillas and tarantulas that suck
and snatch and scratch and defecate and fuck
in the disorderly circus of our vice,
there’s one more ugly and abortive birth.
It makes no gestures, never beats its breast,
yet it would murder for a moment’s rest,
and willingly annihilate the earth.
It is BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.
You know it well, my Reader. This obscene
beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine–
It is you, hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!


Romantic poets drew their energies from divine nature; Victorian poets drew their energies from the refinements of culture; Charles Baudelaire drew his energies from the urban gutter. Baudelaire’s profound influence on literature, art, and modern culture cannot be overstated. Every would-be rebel outsider-artist from Patti Smith to Jim Morrison to hordes of high-school goth kids are in his direct debt. His poems have the attitude of a defunct and reckless aristocrat who’s gone slumming for the night. As the twentieth century approached, Baudelaire argued that culture needed to at long last modernize. Victorian-era culture had produced thoroughly industrialized masses that were, in his assessment, too banal, too bourgeois, and too boring. If art were too matter again and show some real signs of life, then its subject matter needed to free itself from polite society and its language needed to free itself from stifling conventions. The filth, energy, and excitement of the modern world inspired Baudelaire to daringly draw upon the more obscene and infernal aspects of the urban landscapes around him as a new model for poetry. And, in an even more striking gesture, he dares his reader not to enjoy it. The introduction to Baudelaire’s opus, The Flowers of Evil, is called “To the Reader,” and in its conclusion, quoted above, the lurid and voyeuristic detachment that permeates Baudelaire’s work is suddenly and thrillingly cast upon the reader. Reading his work reminds us that poetry need not be the stuff of boring classrooms, but a fearless and shameless art that turns our most obscene vices into the guilty pleasures of spectacle. If you’ve ever caught yourself in your weaker and perhaps more honest moments enjoying such exploitation films as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust or Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! then you just might have Baudelaire to thank for it.




3. “Daddy” (1963) by Sylvia Plath


…If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two–
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.


Written just before Plath committed suicide, “Daddy” belongs to the confessionalist school of poetry that dominated the 1960s with its interest in self-empowerment, self-expression, and self-liberation. While confessionalist poets sometimes border on so much narcissistic navel-gazing, Plath avoids mere solipsism by welding her fearless introspections with larger cultural myths. “Daddy” derives much its power from the fact that it’s Plath’s personal act of psychic exorcism from her oppressively patriarchal influences, but it’s presented in terms that are as familiar and public as they are horrifying. For instance, in the poem’s conclusion her complex relationship with her tyrannical father and equally problematic husband is rendered in terms of a classic vampire story. Both of them continue to haunt her and hold her in their sway, even after her father has died and after she’s left her husband. Film critics invariably point out that the venerable Count Dracula is traditionally presented as fiendish, aristocratic, overly-sexualized and dripping with masculinity. Vampires, in other words, attract even as they repulse, and Plath knows that these sort of complex, deep-seated psychic apparitions can only be exorcised with an old-fashioned, metaphoric stake through their heart.




2. “Pike” (1958) by Ted Hughes

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds…


Hughes is supposedly the “vampire who said he was you” in Plath’s poem “Daddy.” While it’s risky to extrapolate too much biographical information from works of literature, both Plath’s “Daddy” and Hughes’ own poem “Pike” attest to the fact that Hughes was no stranger to the more infernal aspects of human culture and psychology. After World War Two, British poetry evolved into two distinct camps. Poets such as Philip Larkin developed a stoic and empirically based poetry that attempted to avoid glamour, violence, and other excesses they associated with the spectacle of war. Poets such as Hughes and Plath, too their art in the opposite direction, used poetry to stare down the apocalyptic tendencies in the human condition and confront the roots of our aggression and violence. The pikes in Hughes’ poem are metaphors for the vestigal, brutish impulses found within the depths of British history and the human psychology. The fact that Hughes’ encounters them while fishing in a pond next to a monastery is a reminder that no matter what refinements or religions our culture may produce, there are monsters beneath its surface. What makes this poem so horrifying is that Hughes insistence that such monsters won’t stay submerged. His “Pike” is either a miniature version of Jaws, but with a more subtle and eerie menace, or a singular version of Piranha, but with far less parody and camp.




1. “Annabel Lee” (1849) by Edgar Allan Poe

…For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.


Poe is arguably one of the most recognizable and widely read American writers, yet, ironically, in his own day he was famous in France and largely ignored by the American public. This is perhaps due to the distaste for the macabre and the creepy in mainstream American culture, but also because the French recognized that beneath the stories of ravens and madmen, Poe’s best work was an avant-garde critique of middle-class, bougeiouse society and an example of the decadent, liberated symboliste literature practiced by such French poets as Baudelaire. Poe’s most interesting work, like that of the French symbolist tradition, is much more than a scary story or simple narrative. The language of “Annabel Lee” is elusive, evocative, and suggests far more than it denotates. The poem seems to provocatively shimmer somewhere between the angelic and the devilish, the sacred and the profane. Poe’s “Raven” was a strong contender for this spot in my countdown, but I think that “Annabel Lee” is more indicative of Poe’s conflicting impulses, which eventually defined the predominate literary aesthetic of his day. The strange mixture of sensuality and morbidity and the fact that the speaker doesn’t let a little thing like death prevent him from enjoying his beloved is reminiscent of Re-Animator and the thousands of Hollywood ghost films that trail behind Poe’s long shadow.

Clive Barker’s Jericho

Corey
November 26, 2007
Posted by
corey@evilontwolegs.com

i really don’t understand why clive barker’s jericho is getting such diverse reviews. just look at the score differences at the following sites:

gamepro [9/10]
gameinformer [6/10]
1up [3/10]

one site rates it just one step below perfect while another condemns it as barely a step above the “pit of legendary awfulness?” zero punctuation’s video review even goes so far as to call it a “spunk-flavored lollipop.” colorful imagery aside, i simply can’t agree — clive barker’s jericho, while not perfect, is one of the better xbox 360 games — especially for horror fans.

years ago, clive barker’s undying was a creepy and impressive shooter, so when i first heard of jericho i was hopeful it’d live up to its predecessor. i must admit that after playing the first hour or so of the game, my impression was largely negative. this eventually changed further into the game for a number of reasons, but i think the negative reviews the game is getting are largely a result of several misconceptions. so instead of just reviewing the game, i’d like to critique a few of these preconceived notions.

the first is the expectation that because this game has clive barker’s name on it, it must be scary. after all — stephen king once called barker “the future of horror” and undying was a pretty scary game. while jericho certainly has an abundance of horrific elements, it is not particularly scary. and it doesn’t try to be. this isn’t a silent hill game aimed at scaring the player through slow building tension and generalized creepiness. this is a game you should put in when you’re thinking:

“you know what i wanna do tonite? i really wanna decapitate and/or explode a bunch of weird-ass monsters, some of whom wear their intestines on their head as a hat.”
the monsters themselves may be scary looking (see below) and are largely cut from the same visual cloth as the cenobites, but this game doesn’t really have a lot of “boo!” moments or scripted events meant to scare like those used so often in the resident evil series. this is an action game, and anyone expecting anything else will be disappointed.

another reason i think people are initially unimpressed with the game is that its most unique and fun feature is not initially available. you’re a member of a seven person team in the game and (spoiler alert) early on in the game you die. from that point on you are able to ‘possess’ the other six members of your team, but until that point (which is several levels in) the game seems rather unremarkable. yes, the creatures and levels are intriguing… but until you gain access to all the weapons and magical abilities of your team, i can see why someone would be unimpressed. unfortunately, it’s a necessary evil due to the story structure and (more importantly) the fact that the player needs to be comfortable with the core mechanics of the game before being eased into the squad functionality.

to the left you can see the members of your cyber-goth goof ball squad. each goof ball has a primary and secondary weapon, many with different options and ammo types. weapons range from sniper rifles to katanas to heavy machine guns. on top of that, each member has unique magical abilities. my favorites include ghost bullet (where you can pilot a bullet, hitting up to three targets) and reality hacking which slows down time, but the longer its used the more distorted reality becomes.

in most games you are stuck with a single character and even those that allow you to customize your character usually force you to pick one path and stick to it. apart from jericho, few games easily allow you to switch between completely different play styles at the press of a button. for example, i found myself most often using the uber-gothy sniper chick (ironically named ‘black’) and following behind my team, picking off enemies at a distance. but when i would tire of this, i could easily switch to the katana carrying, asian stereotype ninja girl, the dumb really big guy with the really big gun and a demon hand or any of the four other characters and experience the game in a vastly different way.

some reviews complain about the lack of cohesion between the levels, the linearity of the environments and the enemy spawn locations. i think these cease to be issues when you realize this game, while certainly using the control scheme of a game like halo, actually has a lot in common with rail shooters like house of the dead. there are no pickups or hidden items in this game, so you are not inclined to search every nook and cranny of the levels. you’re to get from point a to point b, killing everything in your way, and that’s it. you start with all the weapons you’ll ever have and you don’t even need to pick up ammunition… in a rather cool explanation for a simple time-saving game design decision, the reality-bending girl occasionally reaches back into time and retrieves the ammo you’ve already used, replenishing your weapons when you run low. while this may be disappointing if you’re expecting a more complicated experience, i actually found it refreshing to have no inventory management, item pickups or maps to deal with, leaving me able to focus on the shooting and problem solving.

the game also features “mini-games,” which some reviews have criticized. occasionally an enemy will grab hold of you and buttons begin appearing on the screen which have to be pressed quickly in order to block the monster’s attack. this same mechanic is also used when attempting certain feats, such as trying to scale a crumbling wall. i don’t understand the complaints about this aspect of the game, as i didn’t find them to be particularly difficult or tedious and quite enjoyed them. my favorite of these interactions is used when your forced to pull a ‘father karras’ on a particularly nasty nazi she-demon-thing (left) and a wrong key press leads to her biting off one of your fingers. this scene also features some of the strongest writing as the demon spews forth an impressive array of profanity, insults and secrets about the characters in an effort to shake them up. my first try, i actually missed a button press during the exorcism because of something she said, so i guess her plan actually works.

some reviews also complain about the game’s story, dialogue and characters. the story of the game is ridiculous, but since when is that a problem in video games? logic or realism has never been a big part of video game premises… unless you know a lot of plumbers that encounter killer turtles or magical mushrooms. the dialogue in jericho is often groan-worthy and so over-the-top as to border on self-parody, but this is the video game equivalent of a grindhouse action/zombie picture… its writing should reflect that. i mean, the characters are dressed in black leather from head to toe,one has a demonic spirit permanently attached to his hand inside a metal case and two of the female members appeared in playboy this month. does anyone really think this game is taking itself all that seriously? ultimately, i found myself interested in the story and the characters despite their lack of realism, much in the same way i cared about el wray and cherry darling in planet terror. realism isn’t a prerequisite for entertainment or empathy. i can honestly say i grew attached to a few of the squad members by the end of the game and was actually invested in their eventual fate and interested in their background — which is more than i can say for most other fps i’ve played (including half-life which, while well written, leaves the primary character completely mute and almost devoid of any background at all).

clive barker’s jericho is a simple, straight-forward fps with a really unique squad mechanic and beautiful art direction. the enemies are grotesque in typical clive barker fashion and the boss battles are well done. there are a few odd design choices along the way (e.g., the pillbox scene mentioned in zero punctuation’s review) and the load times are a bit excessive, but i found neither of these things particularly frustrating. the stack of games i own that i’ve finished is much smaller than those that i haven’t, as most can’t hold my attention long enough to get all the way through them. this one… i played through on normal and then replayed all the way through again on hard. it’s not going to win game of the year, but it certainly deserves more praise than it’s getting… and really — how bad can a game that turns exorcism into a rhythm game be?



ps. i’ve included my xbox live profile below, so feel free to add me as a friend or make fun of my gamer score. if you do the former, please drop me a message as well…

Jon Finally Sees Grindhouse

Jon
November 19, 2007
Posted by
jon@evilontwolegs.com
Grindhouse: Planet Terror (2007)

I finally watched both installments of Grindhouse over the weekend. I really didn’t know what to expect, as I’d heard both good and bad reviews, plus the film bombed at the box office. Rodriguez’s Planet Terror is not only a carefully studied homage to the golden age of exploitative horror before the gloss of cgi effects and big budgets, it’s also the most fun I’ve had watching a DVD in a very long time. Of course, the double feature Grindhouse is in part an experiment to see if the look and feel of exploitation film from decades past can be recreated. Planet Terror comes complete with a fake trailer and a wonderfully nostalgic, low-budget bumper. The film even has a grainy look to it, with built-in missing frames. All of this makes you feel as if you’re watching an authentic b-grade film in some small, dirty theater on a lazy Saturday afternoon, and I loved every minute of it. But this film is much more than an experiment. Rodriguez proves that b-grade filmmaking is an art form in its own right. His soundtrack is compelling, the film’s pacing is nearly perfect, and the acting is brilliant. Rose McGowan is especially fun to watch in her role of the iconic hooker with a heart of gold, and Freddy Rodriguez is equally impressive as El Wray (whose name is a nod to Rodriguez’s From Dusk to Dawn). We all know that zombies can be used as metaphors for consumerism, apathy, man’s inhumanity to man, the effects of war, and every societal ill you can think of. But let’s face it, the idea of a zombie film as social criticism gets rather silly after awhile. If you really want to provide trenchant social criticism, there are more sophisticated and cogent metaphors you could use other than zombies. There are obligatory gestures in this film that link the zombies with the evils of the military industrial complex, but, thankfully, Rodriguez doesn’t indulge in this metaphor and instead keeps his thrills transparent and cheap: simple sex appeal, lots of blood and gore, and abstract conflicts between good and evil. Rodriguez is the sort of director that instinctively knows this formula works and that it’s one of the reasons we go to movies in the first place.
Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007)

Death Proof proves that Tarantino has an impeccable ear for music and a good eye for casting. Not only does Tarantino have what must be the world’s largest record collection, he has also mastered the art of choosing a soundtrack that builds mood and atmosphere, while also defining his characters. I suppose it’s a cheap trick, but watching characters on screen listening to their favorite music is infectious, especially when the music is so rare and idiosyncratic. Tarantino knew what he was doing when he cast the then down-on-his-luck actor John Travolta as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. It was equally surprising to see Kurt Russell as the grizzled, out-of-work stuntman turned serial killer, but his performance was flawless. Tarantino has obvious gifts as a film maker, and his films are consistently accomplished, but he’s sometimes too clever and too indulgent for his own good. For instance, the snappy dialogue in Pulp Fiction was necessary in defining the ironically charming and laid-back relationship between Vincent and Jules. In Death Proof the barrage of one-liners and studied cool gets a bit annoying. Every syllable the characters utter is chosen for maximum attitude and hip-ness, and I caught myself thinking about how tiresome it would be to be stuck in a car with them. I do love the way Tarantino turns the tables in the second half of the film. Stuntman Mike is emblematic of a past age of filmmaking, and he’s having his revenge against the modern world as much as the scantily clad vixens that no longer find him sexy. While the characters in the first half are all relatively easy prey, the characters in the second half work in the film industry and transform themselves on-screen into the she-devils from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It’s as if Stuntman Mike becomes trapped in his own nightmarish movie. I enjoy this sort of meta-cinema, and Tarantino is very good at it, but by now he’s worn it all a bit thin. He manages to keep the meta-cinema subtle in Jackie Brown while still having fun with it. But in Death Proof he gets sidetracked too many times by his own artistry. It’s as if Tarantino has fallen so deeply in love with film and his film-making that he over-indulges. Planet Terror never tries to be anything other than a grindhouse film, and this makes it thoroughly successful, while Tarantino can’t help but make a Tarantino film. However, by the end of Death Proof, he seems to remember the task at hand. The ending is fast-paced, gut-wrenching, and, lucky for us, Tarantino gets out of the way long enough to let it actually work.