To continue with my post of a couple days ago in which I planned to rank and review all the movies I saw that were released in 2007 (beginning with There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, my two favorites):
3) Sweeney Todd
I hadn't seen, heard, or even really known anything about Sweeney Todd the musical beforehand apart from its major plot point of people getting baked into pies, so I for one am not going to whine about the exclusion of X Song or how Helena Bonham-Carter isn't as a good a singer as Y Actress was. I did, however, grow up with Tim Burton's movies. As mentioned in a previous post, I adored Nightmare Before Christmas back when it was still a darkly-alluring children's movie rather than a neverending franchise of Hot Topic merchandise, and I can't remember how many times I watched Beetlejuice before I was out of elementary school. (I watched Beetlejuice again a few months ago, for the first time in a few years, and for the first time realized how much of it was meant to satirize Manhattan art-world yuppies. Beetlejuice himself also rather reminded me of a particular young man I was in a weird situation with at the time.)
I must say, the working-class mid-19th-century London of Sweeney Todd was an excellent outlet for Burton's hyper-stylized dark, macabre, (fine, I'll say it) gothic aesthetic. Burton even finds opportunities to poke fun at his own image, as when Mrs. Lovett sings of a longing for a nice domestic life with Todd and her streetwise, orphaned bakery assistant and Todd wears the same brooding, haunted expression throughout Lovett's fantasies of a wedding and a jaunt by the seaside. Johnny Depp, by the way, was terrific (as always) in the title role, but then I have an unfortunate weakness for those intense, self-destructive loners in old-fashioned clothes. (Especially if they know about film. But I digress.)
I've heard Sweeney Todd described as a musical for people who aren't necessarily into musicals and I'd have to agree with that. The songs are there to advance, or comment on, the plot and explain what's going on in the characters' heads, which to me are the best uses of songs within musicals (as opposed to moments when songs seem arbitrarily added because the director or author decided, "It's too quiet, let's paste another song here"). I also prefer it when the use of music is either fairly realistic (as in Cabaret, where most of the songs take place onstage since one of the protagonists is, after all, a cabaret singer) or very obviously grounded in a sort of fantasy world (as in Burton's previous Nightmare Before Christmas or, in a different approach, Chicago, where pretty much every song that doesn't take place onstage is a daydream of Roxy Hart's), rather than some quasi-"realistic" scenario in which people just happen to burst into song about nothing. I love Evita, also: yeah, it stars that gifted actress Madonna, but there are so few plain-old spoken lines that it's practically an opera (and most of Madonna's lines are shouted from a balcony, so her melodramatic delivery makes sense).
Did anyone else think Sweeney Todd's daughter was really uncomfortable-looking? She had the face of a child, but the figure of a fine young lady. I mean it was really weird, Humbert Humbert would surely buy this DVD just to watch her scenes and write lyrically convoluted paragraphs about them.
4) Eastern Promises
This might shoot up to #3 if I saw it again, but it's been a few months and right now the DVD is $20 at Target, which is currently too much for my unemployed ass to spend on a single disc. Viggo Mortenson turns in a fine job here as a charismatic Russian mob man who isn't all that he seems: too bad he has to compete with Daniel Day-Lewis in all this year's big film awards.
I definitely liked this better than Cronenberg's previous History of Violence. History was hardly a bad film, but it seemed like a short story where some other movies seem like novels: turns of events where it felt like the real plot was just getting started were actually revealed to be at the climax of the movie. Eastern Promises likewise suffers from Cronenberg's seeming inability, since embarking on more "normal" fare following years of grotesque genius like Videodrome and Dead Ringers, to know when or how to really end a movie.
Ah, yes, and then there's the whole !!ZOMG ARAGORN PEEN!!! thing. Yes, there is frontal male nudity in this, and yes, it's very tastefully and naturally presented: if someone tries to shank you while sitting in a sauna, of course your fucking towel is going to fall off at some point. I only wish more filmmakers had the balls (no pun intended) to show male nudity, and I don't say that out of prurient interest: not to go on a tirade about the Male Gaze, but in most movies, if you see a man's naked ass, it's often an attempt at comedy, whereas a woman's naked ass on film is inherently seen as sexual (unless she's elderly or obese, in which case it's seen as funny because it's not sexy). Real human beings have real naughty bits, so if you're filming a scene in which it would look staged and superfluous not to include nudity, please don't crap out just to protect the poor hetero male viewer's insecurities about his wee willy winkie.
5) Atonement
This won the Best Picture Golden Globe over No Country AND There Will Be Blood? Really? It's one of those movies I described in my last post, that have general critical approval but which I inevitably consider to be good-but-not-great.
This is a rare case where I've actually read the book it was based on long before the film was even made. As such, my perspective is naturally different from someone who came into this movie as a fairly blank slate: I mean, I already knew how it was going to end, and it was interesting to look for characters and scenes I recognized from the novel. Like, there's one character who rapes a pseudo-sophisticated 14-year-old girl while the rest of the family is out searching for her two runaway brothers, and when he's first shown interacting with her, I had to think: "Hey, it's that creepy rapist! Oh, man, why are you talking to her like that? You're a creepy rapist, you creepy rapist."
The plot point this story hinges on is the misidentification of another young man as said creepy rapist. Briony, a 13-year-old girl (whom I thought, also while reading the book, was awfully naive about sex for that age, but hell, maybe it was different in an isolated upper-crust country manor house in the '30s) who aspires to be an author invents her own fanciful, simplified explanations for events earlier in the day involving her college-aged sister and the young man who has, until now, only admired her from afar. Rather than acknowleding that her sister is a grown-ass woman who wants to bang the hot servant boy, she leads herself to believe that saintly Big Sis is being menaced by a sinister "sex maniac." As a writer myself, I've often been familiar with the drive to fictionalize people and events from my own life in order to help myself explain or otherwise deal with them, but all the same, it stays in my head and on the page where it belongs, and would never be presented as truth during a police interrogation. In the end, I don't think Briony genuinely "atoned": while she did finally understand the depth of her actions and wish to atone for them, she seemed to believe that lives ruined by fiction can likewise be mended through fiction, which doesn't seem to indicate she has truly learned very much in that area.
I have to gripe that one of my favorite parts of the book, the section about Robbie's experiences on the French battlefront during WWII, was severely truncated in translation to the screen, and I felt like one didn't get such a poignant picture of the depth of his suffering as a result. I must say, though, that Atonement's director and cinematographer often make death and suffering look absolutely beautiful.
Another small annoyance: can't anyone think of a better way to indicate that it's the same character played by different actresses at different ages than by giving her the exact same haircut at age 13, 18, and 80? Who the hell keeps the same haircut in retirement age that she had in middle school?
That's it for now; reviews of the last five will be posted whenever I feel like it. And will also be generally shorter than these because I saw them longer ago.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Bastard in a basket!
From now on, The Film Vault will be online-only. I don't write for the Independent any more, for the simple reason that I don't go to Purchase any more. I graduated.
I'm currently writing this from the Purchase College library. As of January 7th, I've essentially been homeless: most of my things are in a storage locker in Port Chester while I've been living out of a suitcase and sleeping on friends' spare beds and couches, from Bronxville to Long Island and now back at Purchase since school is in session again. I haven't found a job yet and most landlords are wary of renting rooms to unemployed young people, so it looks like I may be That Guy--the one who's constantly on campus despite no longer being a student--indefinitely.
I actually made a video as my senior project. I've given out over 20 DVDs already and it looks like I may have to burn more copies; the demand was higher than I'd anticipated, considering it's 55 minutes long and not many people have seen my previous video work. The response has by far been favorable over all, with much praise in particular for the editing and cinematography (my default picture here is a still taken from my project). Thus far, I've heard from people who've seen it that it reminds them of such directors as David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and Ingmar Bergman. Eventually, when I have access to editing software again, I'm going to cut it up and post it to YouTube and MySpace. It's good to know I can watch some craptastic film and be able to say, in complete honesty, that I could make a better movie than that, considering I already did.
At some point soon, I'll make a post regarding all the behind-the-scenes bullshit that occurred in the making of my video, which probably won't make much sense or have much interest for random internet people who happen to come across this page with no way to actually watch the video itself (yet). For now, I'll discuss movies other people made in 2007: moving pictures which, unlike mine, were actually released in theatres and made their creators some amount of money.
Yes, it's that old (and by this time, rather belated) cliché of the end-of-the-year movie list. I can't even call it a top ten list because as far as I can recall, I only saw ten movies that came out in 2007: there was a slew of others I wanted to see, but movies are expensive and I preferred to save my pennies for movies I was pretty sure I would definitely like. Almost half of them were screened at Harlan Jacobson's Talk Cinema at Purchase's Performing Arts Center since tickets were only $5 for students. These are ranked in rough order of how much I liked them.
1) There Will Be Blood
Hands-down best movie of 2007.
I was, as always, skeptical when reading the glowing reviews beforehand: even the best movies often have some nagging flaw, or are overhyped into being underwhelming. The only film of P.T. Anderson's I'd seen previously was Punch-Drunk Love, and while I liked it--Adam Sandler's obnoxious man-child persona was transported to some semblance of the real world and naturally came off as psychologically disordered--I didn't equate its director with the production of Great Films. Besides, isn't that title incidentally a quote from one of the Saw movies? I expected it would probably be good, but not that good; very few films are actually that good.
There Will Be Blood is that good.
There's Daniel Day-Lewis's performance: with his oil-encrusted fingers, strong profile, brushlike moustache, and gruff-yet-gentle voice with peculiar and antiquated diction, he actually looks and sounds the way one might imagine of a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector, rather than a 21st-century attempt to imitate a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector. (Think of, say, a movie made in the 1940s about life in the 1890s, how its choice of costumes and sets, its conceptions of beautiful women and handsome men, even the way the actors enunciate their lines, clearly mark it as a product of the 1940s, and how a film made even twenty years later is going to have a radically different aesthetic interpretation of the 1890s that still, nonetheless, marks it as a product of its own era.)
There's Jonny Greenwood's score, especially with the taut, ominous string sections that one might expect from a horror film. I was glad to note the absence of quaint, generic banjo and acoustic guitar music many directors might be tempted to use in scoring a film set on the Western frontier.
There's the cinematography: the burning oil well alone is as beautiful as anything in Herzog's Lessons of Darkness.
And then, of course, there's the plot itself, the Citizen Kane-like story of a man who loses his humanity as he gains power and wealth. His relationship toward his son is clearly loving, yet deeply flawed and refreshingly unsentimentalized; the children in this movie are actually portrayed as human beings with inner lives of their own rather than idealized Darling Little Things for adults (in the film and the audience) to want to protect and coo over. His power struggle with a local adolescent preacher and would-be faith healer--himself a charlatan, albeit an extremely devout one--condemns both the former's sardonic atheism and the latter's smug righteousness and self-assurance without ridiculing the staunchly-believing townspeople (as an atheist myself, it annoys me when films hold black-and-white opinions about religion in either direction). Some people didn't like the ending, but I thought it made sense for his character, an ultimate rejection of everyone and everything who led him to that lonely mansion years ago.
This movie stayed in my head for a long time after I watched it, which happens rarely enough; maybe I'll notice more flaws the next time I see it, but it definitely ranks among my favorites, and not just of 2007. If it doesn't win the Oscar for Best Picture I will be sorely disappointed (though the Oscars don't mean as much as they used to: Crash over Brokeback Mountain?), but a little less so if loses out to:
2) No Country For Old Men
This would be the hands-down best film of 2007 if There Will Be Blood weren't around. The Coens were already among my favorite directors and No Country ranks among their best work, with its quiet-yet-involving and constantly-more-entangled plot that essentially begins with the accidental discovery of drug smugglers' bloody corpses and the briefcase full of money they died trying to obtain. Throughout the movie, many more will die for that wad of cash--like a darker Fargo, with all of its accidental or impulsive murders ending with Steve Buscemi in a wood chipper for "a little bit of money," as Frances McDormand says--through the efforts of the most memorable character, Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, a coldly-charismatic hired killer in a Prince Valiant pageboy.
This ending was more widely reviled than There Will Be Blood's, perceived as a "non-ending"--a woman at the theatre sitting near me was heard to mutter, "Um, okay?" when the credits began to roll--because it doesn't go out with a bang (I mean, aside from all the people who get shot throughout the film) or offer secure Hollywood closure. Yes, just like real life, sometimes the "bad guy" gets away, and sometimes it's after killing a "good guy" or two, and sometimes other "good guys" realize certain truths about human nature that they cannot change.
Okay, I was going to review all ten in one post, but this is getting pretty long and time-consuming and I've got Craigslisting to do. Look for part two, starting with Sweeney Todd, at some point whenever I feel like it.
I'm currently writing this from the Purchase College library. As of January 7th, I've essentially been homeless: most of my things are in a storage locker in Port Chester while I've been living out of a suitcase and sleeping on friends' spare beds and couches, from Bronxville to Long Island and now back at Purchase since school is in session again. I haven't found a job yet and most landlords are wary of renting rooms to unemployed young people, so it looks like I may be That Guy--the one who's constantly on campus despite no longer being a student--indefinitely.
I actually made a video as my senior project. I've given out over 20 DVDs already and it looks like I may have to burn more copies; the demand was higher than I'd anticipated, considering it's 55 minutes long and not many people have seen my previous video work. The response has by far been favorable over all, with much praise in particular for the editing and cinematography (my default picture here is a still taken from my project). Thus far, I've heard from people who've seen it that it reminds them of such directors as David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and Ingmar Bergman. Eventually, when I have access to editing software again, I'm going to cut it up and post it to YouTube and MySpace. It's good to know I can watch some craptastic film and be able to say, in complete honesty, that I could make a better movie than that, considering I already did.
At some point soon, I'll make a post regarding all the behind-the-scenes bullshit that occurred in the making of my video, which probably won't make much sense or have much interest for random internet people who happen to come across this page with no way to actually watch the video itself (yet). For now, I'll discuss movies other people made in 2007: moving pictures which, unlike mine, were actually released in theatres and made their creators some amount of money.
Yes, it's that old (and by this time, rather belated) cliché of the end-of-the-year movie list. I can't even call it a top ten list because as far as I can recall, I only saw ten movies that came out in 2007: there was a slew of others I wanted to see, but movies are expensive and I preferred to save my pennies for movies I was pretty sure I would definitely like. Almost half of them were screened at Harlan Jacobson's Talk Cinema at Purchase's Performing Arts Center since tickets were only $5 for students. These are ranked in rough order of how much I liked them.
1) There Will Be Blood
Hands-down best movie of 2007.
I was, as always, skeptical when reading the glowing reviews beforehand: even the best movies often have some nagging flaw, or are overhyped into being underwhelming. The only film of P.T. Anderson's I'd seen previously was Punch-Drunk Love, and while I liked it--Adam Sandler's obnoxious man-child persona was transported to some semblance of the real world and naturally came off as psychologically disordered--I didn't equate its director with the production of Great Films. Besides, isn't that title incidentally a quote from one of the Saw movies? I expected it would probably be good, but not that good; very few films are actually that good.
There Will Be Blood is that good.
There's Daniel Day-Lewis's performance: with his oil-encrusted fingers, strong profile, brushlike moustache, and gruff-yet-gentle voice with peculiar and antiquated diction, he actually looks and sounds the way one might imagine of a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector, rather than a 21st-century attempt to imitate a turn-of-the-20th-century oil prospector. (Think of, say, a movie made in the 1940s about life in the 1890s, how its choice of costumes and sets, its conceptions of beautiful women and handsome men, even the way the actors enunciate their lines, clearly mark it as a product of the 1940s, and how a film made even twenty years later is going to have a radically different aesthetic interpretation of the 1890s that still, nonetheless, marks it as a product of its own era.)
There's Jonny Greenwood's score, especially with the taut, ominous string sections that one might expect from a horror film. I was glad to note the absence of quaint, generic banjo and acoustic guitar music many directors might be tempted to use in scoring a film set on the Western frontier.
There's the cinematography: the burning oil well alone is as beautiful as anything in Herzog's Lessons of Darkness.
And then, of course, there's the plot itself, the Citizen Kane-like story of a man who loses his humanity as he gains power and wealth. His relationship toward his son is clearly loving, yet deeply flawed and refreshingly unsentimentalized; the children in this movie are actually portrayed as human beings with inner lives of their own rather than idealized Darling Little Things for adults (in the film and the audience) to want to protect and coo over. His power struggle with a local adolescent preacher and would-be faith healer--himself a charlatan, albeit an extremely devout one--condemns both the former's sardonic atheism and the latter's smug righteousness and self-assurance without ridiculing the staunchly-believing townspeople (as an atheist myself, it annoys me when films hold black-and-white opinions about religion in either direction). Some people didn't like the ending, but I thought it made sense for his character, an ultimate rejection of everyone and everything who led him to that lonely mansion years ago.
This movie stayed in my head for a long time after I watched it, which happens rarely enough; maybe I'll notice more flaws the next time I see it, but it definitely ranks among my favorites, and not just of 2007. If it doesn't win the Oscar for Best Picture I will be sorely disappointed (though the Oscars don't mean as much as they used to: Crash over Brokeback Mountain?), but a little less so if loses out to:
2) No Country For Old Men
This would be the hands-down best film of 2007 if There Will Be Blood weren't around. The Coens were already among my favorite directors and No Country ranks among their best work, with its quiet-yet-involving and constantly-more-entangled plot that essentially begins with the accidental discovery of drug smugglers' bloody corpses and the briefcase full of money they died trying to obtain. Throughout the movie, many more will die for that wad of cash--like a darker Fargo, with all of its accidental or impulsive murders ending with Steve Buscemi in a wood chipper for "a little bit of money," as Frances McDormand says--through the efforts of the most memorable character, Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh, a coldly-charismatic hired killer in a Prince Valiant pageboy.
This ending was more widely reviled than There Will Be Blood's, perceived as a "non-ending"--a woman at the theatre sitting near me was heard to mutter, "Um, okay?" when the credits began to roll--because it doesn't go out with a bang (I mean, aside from all the people who get shot throughout the film) or offer secure Hollywood closure. Yes, just like real life, sometimes the "bad guy" gets away, and sometimes it's after killing a "good guy" or two, and sometimes other "good guys" realize certain truths about human nature that they cannot change.
Okay, I was going to review all ten in one post, but this is getting pretty long and time-consuming and I've got Craigslisting to do. Look for part two, starting with Sweeney Todd, at some point whenever I feel like it.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Damn the Man! Edition, part II
(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on November 15th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)
Last week’s Film Vault was part one in a series of two regarding lesser-known anti-authoritarian films, spurred by Purchase’s increasingly and worryingly strict security measures. In that column, I mentioned the V for Vendetta-related graffiti I’d seen outside my apartment on Guy Fawkes Day; well, the day that column came out, I left my apartment and soon came upon another sidewalk-chalk message, saying "Thank you!" to me and the Indy, and simply signed with a V in a circle. It was pretty amusing, albeit kind of stalkerish. On to the movies!
The Ruling Class (1972)
I first became aware of this film around age 15, when sleazy occult-camp industrial act My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult was my favorite band. They’re known for heavily sampling obscure cult and horror films in their music and some of their best-known samples, regarding “the high-voltage messiah” and “the AC-DC god,” came from this movie. For years I only knew of it, vaguely, as some movie about crazy people who think they’re deities, but I didn’t actually see it for myself until about a year ago.
It quickly became one of my all-time favorite films. It’s two and a half hours long, but doesn’t feel its length. I paid $35 for the single-disc Criterion DVD and it was worth every cent. Peter O’Toole was nominated for an Oscar for his leading role as a schizophrenic aristocrat—a role the Academy wouldn’t touch nowadays, as he isn’t redeemed through love of a child or something—yet I’ve only met two people* who have ever seen The Ruling Class, much less even heard of it, without my having shown it to them.
The Ruling Class is essentially an absurdist dark comedy set in an upper-crust Britain largely untarnished by the ‘60s counterculture. It was initially given an X rating in the UK for its overt criticism of the Church and the class system (anyone looking for another reason for that rating will be disappointed as there’s maybe one brief shot of a woman’s bare ass).
When the 13th Earl of Gurney accidentally kills himself during a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation while wearing a military jacket and tutu, his insane son, Jack, is set to inherit his estate, a fact resented by Jack’s uncle, who attempts to get him re-committed. Jack believes himself to be God, advocating love and charity between napping on a big crucifix and initiating most of the film’s random musical numbers. An attempt to “cure” him by exposing him to another madman with a messiah complex only changes the nature of his madness: he’s still insane, and far more destructively so, recasting himself as a smartly-dressed Jack the Ripper figure, but nobody suspects a thing even after he commits a murder because his insanity has taken on a more respectable front.
On first viewing, I was tempted for awhile to see Jack’s insanity as simply misunderstood eccentricity, but the film refuses to hold such a simplistic notion and proves that he is, in fact, batshit crazy. This still doesn’t make the greedy members of his extended family any more sympathetic: between those who want to cure him and those who want him locked up in a madhouse, everyone has their own self-serving agenda, except perhaps for the scene-stealing drunken Marxist butler who stays on in the household despite his substantial inheritance in order to crack jokes at the aristocracy’s expense.
I’m really surprised the blatant satire and rampant absurdism of The Ruling Class haven’t made it a more widely-known cult classic. Any film in which a madman with a Jesus Christ pose grapples with a guy in a gorilla suit really deserves to be.
*--Both of them, I must admit, were young men I had a strong interest in at the time . . . and have since stopped speaking to. Boys who know film will always break your heart, it seems, but I could never force myself to fall for a guy who unironically thinks Dude, Where's My Car? or, I don't know, Big Momma's House is great cinema.
Zardoz (1974)
Have you ever wanted to watch Sean Connery grunting around in a ponytail and bright orange loincloth? No? Well, tell that to the creators of Zardoz, an exercise in how to be pretentious on a budget.
That sense is apparent from the largely-unnecessary first scene, in which a floating man’s head with a painted-on goatee warns the viewer against immortality and acknowledges his status as a fictional character by mentioning that he was created for your amusement: “Is God in show business, too?” (My, how postmodern and thought-provoking!)
It seems “Zardoz” is the name given to a giant, flying stone head that serves as deity to the “Exterminators,” including Sean Connery and his ample chest hair as Zed; these men are given free reign to rape and murder the farming class in order to control the population. Zardoz spits guns out of its mouth—the camera noticeably shakes when struck by some airborne rifles—and imparts words of wisdom to the Exterminators: “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”
Zed stows away inside Zardoz, accidentally killing the man from the first scene and ending up in the Vortex, a New Agey pastoral commune, where he is studied by a group of psychic, leisurely immortals kept alive by a sentient and all-knowing Tabernacle. The immortals have gradually grown impotent due to their inability to procreate: in one amusing sequence, they show Zed footage of women mudwrestling in an attempt to induce a hard-on.
Within the Vortex are a couple of outsider communities. There are the Apathetics, who have become catatonic from sheer ennui; they are later rejuvenated by touching Zed’s sweat, as they surround him, moaning, and begin freely banging one another. Then there are the Renegades, who have been permanently aged as punishment for any minor infraction of the Vortex’s strict status quo—one guy is aged five years for having mean thoughts—and left to shuffle around in a retirement community that resembles a dowdy perennial New Year’s Eve party; they end up running amok through the Vortex, longing for Zed to bring them death.
Zed is discovered to be some sort of genius, although you wouldn’t know it from Connery’s stilted delivery and few expressions beyond stony and bewildered. His bestial, unrestrained nature inspires the lust of many Vortex women, including the one who rallies for his death, who ends up (groan) falling in love with him and leading to a laughably unbelievable, idealistic conclusion.
This film intends to express a Big Important Message against class hierarchy and the “intellectual elite,” championing the Human Experience and “pure emotion,” but it has so much to say and with such underlying earnestness—and a lot of that message is frankly pretty conventional—that it largely comes across as ridiculous. Still, there are some moments of pure audacity that are almost admirable: how often do you see a bunch of tuxedoed senior citizens begging a half-naked man to kill them?
Last week’s Film Vault was part one in a series of two regarding lesser-known anti-authoritarian films, spurred by Purchase’s increasingly and worryingly strict security measures. In that column, I mentioned the V for Vendetta-related graffiti I’d seen outside my apartment on Guy Fawkes Day; well, the day that column came out, I left my apartment and soon came upon another sidewalk-chalk message, saying "Thank you!" to me and the Indy, and simply signed with a V in a circle. It was pretty amusing, albeit kind of stalkerish. On to the movies!
The Ruling Class (1972)
I first became aware of this film around age 15, when sleazy occult-camp industrial act My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult was my favorite band. They’re known for heavily sampling obscure cult and horror films in their music and some of their best-known samples, regarding “the high-voltage messiah” and “the AC-DC god,” came from this movie. For years I only knew of it, vaguely, as some movie about crazy people who think they’re deities, but I didn’t actually see it for myself until about a year ago.
It quickly became one of my all-time favorite films. It’s two and a half hours long, but doesn’t feel its length. I paid $35 for the single-disc Criterion DVD and it was worth every cent. Peter O’Toole was nominated for an Oscar for his leading role as a schizophrenic aristocrat—a role the Academy wouldn’t touch nowadays, as he isn’t redeemed through love of a child or something—yet I’ve only met two people* who have ever seen The Ruling Class, much less even heard of it, without my having shown it to them.
The Ruling Class is essentially an absurdist dark comedy set in an upper-crust Britain largely untarnished by the ‘60s counterculture. It was initially given an X rating in the UK for its overt criticism of the Church and the class system (anyone looking for another reason for that rating will be disappointed as there’s maybe one brief shot of a woman’s bare ass).
When the 13th Earl of Gurney accidentally kills himself during a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation while wearing a military jacket and tutu, his insane son, Jack, is set to inherit his estate, a fact resented by Jack’s uncle, who attempts to get him re-committed. Jack believes himself to be God, advocating love and charity between napping on a big crucifix and initiating most of the film’s random musical numbers. An attempt to “cure” him by exposing him to another madman with a messiah complex only changes the nature of his madness: he’s still insane, and far more destructively so, recasting himself as a smartly-dressed Jack the Ripper figure, but nobody suspects a thing even after he commits a murder because his insanity has taken on a more respectable front.
On first viewing, I was tempted for awhile to see Jack’s insanity as simply misunderstood eccentricity, but the film refuses to hold such a simplistic notion and proves that he is, in fact, batshit crazy. This still doesn’t make the greedy members of his extended family any more sympathetic: between those who want to cure him and those who want him locked up in a madhouse, everyone has their own self-serving agenda, except perhaps for the scene-stealing drunken Marxist butler who stays on in the household despite his substantial inheritance in order to crack jokes at the aristocracy’s expense.
I’m really surprised the blatant satire and rampant absurdism of The Ruling Class haven’t made it a more widely-known cult classic. Any film in which a madman with a Jesus Christ pose grapples with a guy in a gorilla suit really deserves to be.
*--Both of them, I must admit, were young men I had a strong interest in at the time . . . and have since stopped speaking to. Boys who know film will always break your heart, it seems, but I could never force myself to fall for a guy who unironically thinks Dude, Where's My Car? or, I don't know, Big Momma's House is great cinema.
Zardoz (1974)
Have you ever wanted to watch Sean Connery grunting around in a ponytail and bright orange loincloth? No? Well, tell that to the creators of Zardoz, an exercise in how to be pretentious on a budget.
That sense is apparent from the largely-unnecessary first scene, in which a floating man’s head with a painted-on goatee warns the viewer against immortality and acknowledges his status as a fictional character by mentioning that he was created for your amusement: “Is God in show business, too?” (My, how postmodern and thought-provoking!)
It seems “Zardoz” is the name given to a giant, flying stone head that serves as deity to the “Exterminators,” including Sean Connery and his ample chest hair as Zed; these men are given free reign to rape and murder the farming class in order to control the population. Zardoz spits guns out of its mouth—the camera noticeably shakes when struck by some airborne rifles—and imparts words of wisdom to the Exterminators: “The gun is good. The penis is evil.”
Zed stows away inside Zardoz, accidentally killing the man from the first scene and ending up in the Vortex, a New Agey pastoral commune, where he is studied by a group of psychic, leisurely immortals kept alive by a sentient and all-knowing Tabernacle. The immortals have gradually grown impotent due to their inability to procreate: in one amusing sequence, they show Zed footage of women mudwrestling in an attempt to induce a hard-on.
Within the Vortex are a couple of outsider communities. There are the Apathetics, who have become catatonic from sheer ennui; they are later rejuvenated by touching Zed’s sweat, as they surround him, moaning, and begin freely banging one another. Then there are the Renegades, who have been permanently aged as punishment for any minor infraction of the Vortex’s strict status quo—one guy is aged five years for having mean thoughts—and left to shuffle around in a retirement community that resembles a dowdy perennial New Year’s Eve party; they end up running amok through the Vortex, longing for Zed to bring them death.
Zed is discovered to be some sort of genius, although you wouldn’t know it from Connery’s stilted delivery and few expressions beyond stony and bewildered. His bestial, unrestrained nature inspires the lust of many Vortex women, including the one who rallies for his death, who ends up (groan) falling in love with him and leading to a laughably unbelievable, idealistic conclusion.
This film intends to express a Big Important Message against class hierarchy and the “intellectual elite,” championing the Human Experience and “pure emotion,” but it has so much to say and with such underlying earnestness—and a lot of that message is frankly pretty conventional—that it largely comes across as ridiculous. Still, there are some moments of pure audacity that are almost admirable: how often do you see a bunch of tuxedoed senior citizens begging a half-naked man to kill them?
Damn the Man! Edition, part I
(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on November 8th, 2007, in a slightly different form. To put it in context, the administration had recently installed an assload of security cameras around campus, including some outside residential areas, without consulting the students; naturally that inspired a lot of controversy.)
As I stepped out of my apartment on Monday morning, I was confronted with Guy Fawkes-related graffiti winding along the Alumni Village sidewalk, admonishing me to “remember, remember the 5th of November.” (Oh dear. It seems I had forgotten.) On closer inspection, it actually had more to do with V for Vendetta, considering the stylized V scrawled on a manhole cover and the simplified anti-authoritarian slogans like “Do not conform!” that I would have found terribly empowering when I was about 13.
I did see V for Vendetta over the summer. It wasn’t nearly as much of a disappointment as I’d thought it would be, though naturally I thought the graphic novel was better; being a big Hollywood movie, they amped up the crowd-pleasing action and cleaned up, toned down, or entirely cut some of the darker or more risqué elements from the source, like a detective’s use of LSD in an attempt to get inside V’s head and a Night Porter-esque fascist-themed cabaret number. Still, I did enjoy it overall, though you know what really pissed me off? The fact that V’s relationship to Evie, which was that of a father figure in the book, was gradually transformed into that of a boyfriend. I’ll concede that there’s definitely something hot about a mysterious, well-spoken, well-dressed man who knows about art, history, literature, etc.—but it’s V, for fuck’s sake! He wouldn’t have a girlfriend! Can you imagine it?: some chick painting her toenails on the rim of a bathtub in the secret V lair, her hair tucked into a shower cap as she waits for the bleach of her retouched skunk streaks to kick in, shouting, “You weren’t really out blowing up the Old Bailey, you were with that floozy again, weren’tcha?! I swear, you go on and on about Guy Fawkes Day and ya can’t even remember our anniversary!”
Misogyny aside, the aim of that chalk graffiti was clearly to protest Purchase’s increasingly strict security measures of late: “Down with the Purchase police state!” read one slogan, since washed away by rain. I’m hardly a fan myself of those ubiquitous oily black hemispheres clandestinely gawping at you from various ceilings and walls like big dilated toads’ eyes; security cameras were also present throughout the halls of my Midwestern high school, although they went largely unquestioned due to Columbine. This week’s Film Vault, part one of two, brings you some anti-establishment, institution-subverting films that are a bit more under-the-radar and less slogan-inspiring than anything involving the Wachowski brothers.
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)
There’s more to German cinema than History Channel clips of Hitler shouting about things, Uwe Boll’s craptacular video game adaptations, and Killer Condom. Director Werner Herzog made a name for himself depicting unconventional, eccentric, or flat-out crazy protagonists in generally losing struggles with some greater force, such as nature or society; he’s probably best known for his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, though popular audiences would be more familiar with later films like Grizzly Man and this year’s Rescue Dawn.
Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of Herzog’s earliest films and one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot. We’re talking Holy Mountain levels of bizarre. Set in an alternate universe populated entirely by little people, Dwarfs centers around an isolated, unspecified institution—a jail? a school? an insane asylum?—in which the inmates proceed to run amok. They tear down a palm tree, look at porn mags of big people, hotwire a car and leave it running in a circle for the rest of the film, light potted plants on fire with gasoline, murder a pig while others examine a collection of pinned insects wearing wedding costumes, watch a camel shitting, and crucify a monkey, all while speaking German punctuated with demonic high-pitched laughter. Two dwarves, apparently blind, wear blacked-out industrial goggles and must feel their way around with big sticks, which they often just end up whacking things with. Some chickens—an animal Herzog seems oddly obsessed with—live on the premises, one running around with a dead mouse clutched in its beak, another pecking at the remains of a dead hen. Throughout all this, one of the “instructors,” also a dwarf, has locked himself up in his office where he waits in vain for the police, openly mocked by the inmates outdoors and the laughter of one insurgent he has tied to an office chair; eventually he, too, succumbs to madness.
As you might imagine, it’s a pretty polarizing sort of film. Crispin Glover apparently loves it, and I thought it had moments of brilliance, but I can see how people might hate it: there’s no real plot to speak of beyond the basic premise of grotesquely fascinating incidents in a rebellion against authority.
One of the dwarves was injured a couple of times during the shoot, and as Herzog describes in the terrific documentary short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (in which he does just that as the fulfillment of a bet), he promised to jump into a cactus patch if they all stayed out of trouble until filming ended. Even as he explains that some of the cactus needles are still inside his knee years later, he claims with an odd smile that “it’s not self-destructive to jump into a cactus.” This is the same man who, at age 63, was shot with an air rifle during an interview and wanted to continue because “it was not a significant bullet.” If that’s not badass I don’t know what is.
As I stepped out of my apartment on Monday morning, I was confronted with Guy Fawkes-related graffiti winding along the Alumni Village sidewalk, admonishing me to “remember, remember the 5th of November.” (Oh dear. It seems I had forgotten.) On closer inspection, it actually had more to do with V for Vendetta, considering the stylized V scrawled on a manhole cover and the simplified anti-authoritarian slogans like “Do not conform!” that I would have found terribly empowering when I was about 13.
I did see V for Vendetta over the summer. It wasn’t nearly as much of a disappointment as I’d thought it would be, though naturally I thought the graphic novel was better; being a big Hollywood movie, they amped up the crowd-pleasing action and cleaned up, toned down, or entirely cut some of the darker or more risqué elements from the source, like a detective’s use of LSD in an attempt to get inside V’s head and a Night Porter-esque fascist-themed cabaret number. Still, I did enjoy it overall, though you know what really pissed me off? The fact that V’s relationship to Evie, which was that of a father figure in the book, was gradually transformed into that of a boyfriend. I’ll concede that there’s definitely something hot about a mysterious, well-spoken, well-dressed man who knows about art, history, literature, etc.—but it’s V, for fuck’s sake! He wouldn’t have a girlfriend! Can you imagine it?: some chick painting her toenails on the rim of a bathtub in the secret V lair, her hair tucked into a shower cap as she waits for the bleach of her retouched skunk streaks to kick in, shouting, “You weren’t really out blowing up the Old Bailey, you were with that floozy again, weren’tcha?! I swear, you go on and on about Guy Fawkes Day and ya can’t even remember our anniversary!”
Misogyny aside, the aim of that chalk graffiti was clearly to protest Purchase’s increasingly strict security measures of late: “Down with the Purchase police state!” read one slogan, since washed away by rain. I’m hardly a fan myself of those ubiquitous oily black hemispheres clandestinely gawping at you from various ceilings and walls like big dilated toads’ eyes; security cameras were also present throughout the halls of my Midwestern high school, although they went largely unquestioned due to Columbine. This week’s Film Vault, part one of two, brings you some anti-establishment, institution-subverting films that are a bit more under-the-radar and less slogan-inspiring than anything involving the Wachowski brothers.
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)
There’s more to German cinema than History Channel clips of Hitler shouting about things, Uwe Boll’s craptacular video game adaptations, and Killer Condom. Director Werner Herzog made a name for himself depicting unconventional, eccentric, or flat-out crazy protagonists in generally losing struggles with some greater force, such as nature or society; he’s probably best known for his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, though popular audiences would be more familiar with later films like Grizzly Man and this year’s Rescue Dawn.
Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of Herzog’s earliest films and one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot. We’re talking Holy Mountain levels of bizarre. Set in an alternate universe populated entirely by little people, Dwarfs centers around an isolated, unspecified institution—a jail? a school? an insane asylum?—in which the inmates proceed to run amok. They tear down a palm tree, look at porn mags of big people, hotwire a car and leave it running in a circle for the rest of the film, light potted plants on fire with gasoline, murder a pig while others examine a collection of pinned insects wearing wedding costumes, watch a camel shitting, and crucify a monkey, all while speaking German punctuated with demonic high-pitched laughter. Two dwarves, apparently blind, wear blacked-out industrial goggles and must feel their way around with big sticks, which they often just end up whacking things with. Some chickens—an animal Herzog seems oddly obsessed with—live on the premises, one running around with a dead mouse clutched in its beak, another pecking at the remains of a dead hen. Throughout all this, one of the “instructors,” also a dwarf, has locked himself up in his office where he waits in vain for the police, openly mocked by the inmates outdoors and the laughter of one insurgent he has tied to an office chair; eventually he, too, succumbs to madness.
As you might imagine, it’s a pretty polarizing sort of film. Crispin Glover apparently loves it, and I thought it had moments of brilliance, but I can see how people might hate it: there’s no real plot to speak of beyond the basic premise of grotesquely fascinating incidents in a rebellion against authority.
One of the dwarves was injured a couple of times during the shoot, and as Herzog describes in the terrific documentary short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (in which he does just that as the fulfillment of a bet), he promised to jump into a cactus patch if they all stayed out of trouble until filming ended. Even as he explains that some of the cactus needles are still inside his knee years later, he claims with an odd smile that “it’s not self-destructive to jump into a cactus.” This is the same man who, at age 63, was shot with an air rifle during an interview and wanted to continue because “it was not a significant bullet.” If that’s not badass I don’t know what is.
Halloween Special Edition
(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on October 25th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)
There’s a special place in my heart for horror movies, and I don’t mean the standard iconic slasher films in which a couple of teenagers feeling each other up in the back seat of a car get an involuntary lesson in abstinence from an indestructible masked killer. Perhaps the fact that I grew up with a more-or-less steady diet of strange and obscure horror films alongside children’s Disney movies has helped create my warped sensibility. As a kid, I owned nearly every Goosebumps book, one of my all-time favorite TV shows was naturally Are You Afraid of the Dark?—during my Purchase TV internship last semester, I helped bring a couple of seasons back on the air—and I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas back when it was still just a darkly-tinged kids’ film and hadn’t yet become emblazoned on half of a typical mall goth’s wardrobe. It goes without saying that Halloween was my favorite holiday, and in homage to that, I’m offering reviews of some lesser-known horror movies I’m fond of. All of these are available on Netflix.
Gothic (1986)
No, it has nothing to do with those mall goths in their Jack Skellington hoodies. This film is about the purported origins of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Lord Byron’s Swiss manor, with Natasha Richardson as an oddly prudish Mary. Gothic is packed with surreal imagery almost from the start, and a lot of it is apparently based on, or at least loosely inspired by, actual events in the lives of its characters—well, except for the summoning of a genuine demonic figure that leaves ectoplasmic puddles everywhere—making it a great ‘80s horror film for lit and history nerds. Here, Percy Shelley is feverish, paranoid, and hallucinating from an excess of laudanum, and Lord Byron is a cruelly seductive figure who tries to bang everyone in the house, especially Mary’s big-haired and bulging-eyed half-sister, Claire, while under the watch of Dr. Polidori, a leech-loving closet case wracked with Catholic guilt. This is one of my all-time favorite horror movies; I catch some new detail every time I watch it.
Also worth watching: Lair of the White Worm (1988), by Gothic’s director, Ken Russell, whom you might know from Altered States or The Who’s Tommy. I really did grow up with this one around, although that’s pretty strange to me now, considering the hallucinatory sequences of nuns being slaughtered by Roman soldiers wearing dagger-tipped codpieces while a giant snake munches on the crucified Christ. Yes, you read that correctly. One of its stars is a young Hugh Grant, some years before he became known for playing smug, smirking cads who are humanized by a woman’s love, or whatever the typical plotline is: my idea of a chick flick is Secretary, so I’m not exactly an expert in that field.
Crawlspace (1986)
This was my introduction to the wonderful world of Klaus Kinski. I admit I have an unwholesome fondness for horror characters with an intense, creepy-sexy vibe to them—like Dr. Herbert West of Re-Animator or Crispin Glover as the title role in Willard—and Kinski is no exception here, despite the hockey hair and rejected Cosby sweaters. In Crawlspace, he plays the son of a Nazi doctor who has developed his own fondness for euthanasia, particularly involving the young women to whom he rents rooms, and he brings a depth and subtlety to the role that this film frankly doesn’t deserve. This movie basically hates people; among Kinski’s boarders are a gossipy Southern belle who thinks it’s preferable to stick with some asshole than be single and an airheaded, gold-digging soap opera actress who tries to sleep with a wealthy older man who “reminds her of her uncle Morris.” Kinski’s character enjoys breeding rats, writing his memoirs, playing Russian Roulette, spying on his tenants through the air ducts, and conversing with a tongueless woman he keeps in a cage; there’s a wonderfully bizarre sequence in which he inexplicably smears lipstick all over his face to watch old footage of a Nazi rally before going on a killing rampage. Tasteless? You bet!
Also worth watching: The Attic (1980), which is on the reverse side of the Crawlspace DVD (which is now apparently out-of-print and fetching high prices on eBay; lucky I already have a copy!). A stifled librarian resentful of her controlling, egomaniacal invalid father—whom she has frequent fantasies of murdering—still has feelings for the man who left her at the altar almost two decades ago, and both of these factors gradually break down her psychological state. It’s more gentle and less in-your-face than Crawlspace, if that’s your preference in horror.
Waxwork (1988)
Another one I grew up with, this horror-comedy stars a group of wealthy students who attend some nebulous high school/college and are invited to view a wax museum featuring scenes of murders by famous villains from history—and of course, being a horror movie, these “historical figures” are mostly characters from other horror movies. Stepping into the waxwork scenes opens some strange chasm in time and space that brings you face-to-face with the real-life evildoer, and in a few minutes’ time, your friends might remark to each other that the victim in the wax display looks oddly familiar. One of the main “villains” is the Marquis de Sade, a laughably caricatured depiction who dresses like a pirate and bears little resemblance to the actual Marquis beyond being an aristocrat who likes to whip prostitutes. Seriously, de Sade’s “evil” aura is severely negated by the fact that anyone can go to Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of The 120 Days of Sodom. His waxwork scene entrances the quiet Sarah, who is, unusually for a movie virgin, neither a prim prude, a desperate psycho-bitch, nor a stereotypical loser—although she’s hardly the best actress in the world. When each of the waxworks have claimed victims, they all come to life and start wreaking havoc, and the day is improbably saved by a cadre of elderly British men.
Also worth seeing: Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992), which has better production values than the original and ditches the painfully ‘80s synth score. It begins right at the end of Waxwork with a completely different actress playing Sarah, and someone didn’t care much for continuity as she’s obviously wearing a completely different dress and hairstyle. A zombie’s hand from the wax museum has escaped and murdered Sarah’s stepfather, so she and quasi-boyfriend Mark must travel through time to prove her innocence. Featuring cameos from the likes of David Carradine and Bruce Campbell, with a Waxwork II-themed hip-hop song during the end credits.
Troll (1986)
Sonny Bono turns into a forest. No, really. It’s part of an evil troll’s plot to turn all the tenants of a particular apartment into grotesque mythical woodland creatures—and a boy named Harry Potter fights the troll with magic, although I wouldn’t call this a children’s movie. Fun fact: the apartment’s staircase is clearly the same one used in Crawlspace.
Also worth watching: Troll 2 (1990), which has basically nothing to do with the original Troll. It’s also far more infamous, due to its hilariously inept filmmaking. A little boy who tries to save his family from goblin food by standing up and pissing on the table? Sub-porn-quality acting, especially from the teenage big sister? A monstrously-overacting goblin witch who tries to get into a high school boy’s pants by seductively eating an ear of corn? Grandpa’s ghost as a deux ex machina who can temporarily stop time and even bring back Molotov cocktails from the afterlife? It’s all there and more.
There’s a special place in my heart for horror movies, and I don’t mean the standard iconic slasher films in which a couple of teenagers feeling each other up in the back seat of a car get an involuntary lesson in abstinence from an indestructible masked killer. Perhaps the fact that I grew up with a more-or-less steady diet of strange and obscure horror films alongside children’s Disney movies has helped create my warped sensibility. As a kid, I owned nearly every Goosebumps book, one of my all-time favorite TV shows was naturally Are You Afraid of the Dark?—during my Purchase TV internship last semester, I helped bring a couple of seasons back on the air—and I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas back when it was still just a darkly-tinged kids’ film and hadn’t yet become emblazoned on half of a typical mall goth’s wardrobe. It goes without saying that Halloween was my favorite holiday, and in homage to that, I’m offering reviews of some lesser-known horror movies I’m fond of. All of these are available on Netflix.
Gothic (1986)
No, it has nothing to do with those mall goths in their Jack Skellington hoodies. This film is about the purported origins of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Lord Byron’s Swiss manor, with Natasha Richardson as an oddly prudish Mary. Gothic is packed with surreal imagery almost from the start, and a lot of it is apparently based on, or at least loosely inspired by, actual events in the lives of its characters—well, except for the summoning of a genuine demonic figure that leaves ectoplasmic puddles everywhere—making it a great ‘80s horror film for lit and history nerds. Here, Percy Shelley is feverish, paranoid, and hallucinating from an excess of laudanum, and Lord Byron is a cruelly seductive figure who tries to bang everyone in the house, especially Mary’s big-haired and bulging-eyed half-sister, Claire, while under the watch of Dr. Polidori, a leech-loving closet case wracked with Catholic guilt. This is one of my all-time favorite horror movies; I catch some new detail every time I watch it.
Also worth watching: Lair of the White Worm (1988), by Gothic’s director, Ken Russell, whom you might know from Altered States or The Who’s Tommy. I really did grow up with this one around, although that’s pretty strange to me now, considering the hallucinatory sequences of nuns being slaughtered by Roman soldiers wearing dagger-tipped codpieces while a giant snake munches on the crucified Christ. Yes, you read that correctly. One of its stars is a young Hugh Grant, some years before he became known for playing smug, smirking cads who are humanized by a woman’s love, or whatever the typical plotline is: my idea of a chick flick is Secretary, so I’m not exactly an expert in that field.
Crawlspace (1986)
This was my introduction to the wonderful world of Klaus Kinski. I admit I have an unwholesome fondness for horror characters with an intense, creepy-sexy vibe to them—like Dr. Herbert West of Re-Animator or Crispin Glover as the title role in Willard—and Kinski is no exception here, despite the hockey hair and rejected Cosby sweaters. In Crawlspace, he plays the son of a Nazi doctor who has developed his own fondness for euthanasia, particularly involving the young women to whom he rents rooms, and he brings a depth and subtlety to the role that this film frankly doesn’t deserve. This movie basically hates people; among Kinski’s boarders are a gossipy Southern belle who thinks it’s preferable to stick with some asshole than be single and an airheaded, gold-digging soap opera actress who tries to sleep with a wealthy older man who “reminds her of her uncle Morris.” Kinski’s character enjoys breeding rats, writing his memoirs, playing Russian Roulette, spying on his tenants through the air ducts, and conversing with a tongueless woman he keeps in a cage; there’s a wonderfully bizarre sequence in which he inexplicably smears lipstick all over his face to watch old footage of a Nazi rally before going on a killing rampage. Tasteless? You bet!
Also worth watching: The Attic (1980), which is on the reverse side of the Crawlspace DVD (which is now apparently out-of-print and fetching high prices on eBay; lucky I already have a copy!). A stifled librarian resentful of her controlling, egomaniacal invalid father—whom she has frequent fantasies of murdering—still has feelings for the man who left her at the altar almost two decades ago, and both of these factors gradually break down her psychological state. It’s more gentle and less in-your-face than Crawlspace, if that’s your preference in horror.
Waxwork (1988)
Another one I grew up with, this horror-comedy stars a group of wealthy students who attend some nebulous high school/college and are invited to view a wax museum featuring scenes of murders by famous villains from history—and of course, being a horror movie, these “historical figures” are mostly characters from other horror movies. Stepping into the waxwork scenes opens some strange chasm in time and space that brings you face-to-face with the real-life evildoer, and in a few minutes’ time, your friends might remark to each other that the victim in the wax display looks oddly familiar. One of the main “villains” is the Marquis de Sade, a laughably caricatured depiction who dresses like a pirate and bears little resemblance to the actual Marquis beyond being an aristocrat who likes to whip prostitutes. Seriously, de Sade’s “evil” aura is severely negated by the fact that anyone can go to Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of The 120 Days of Sodom. His waxwork scene entrances the quiet Sarah, who is, unusually for a movie virgin, neither a prim prude, a desperate psycho-bitch, nor a stereotypical loser—although she’s hardly the best actress in the world. When each of the waxworks have claimed victims, they all come to life and start wreaking havoc, and the day is improbably saved by a cadre of elderly British men.
Also worth seeing: Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992), which has better production values than the original and ditches the painfully ‘80s synth score. It begins right at the end of Waxwork with a completely different actress playing Sarah, and someone didn’t care much for continuity as she’s obviously wearing a completely different dress and hairstyle. A zombie’s hand from the wax museum has escaped and murdered Sarah’s stepfather, so she and quasi-boyfriend Mark must travel through time to prove her innocence. Featuring cameos from the likes of David Carradine and Bruce Campbell, with a Waxwork II-themed hip-hop song during the end credits.
Troll (1986)
Sonny Bono turns into a forest. No, really. It’s part of an evil troll’s plot to turn all the tenants of a particular apartment into grotesque mythical woodland creatures—and a boy named Harry Potter fights the troll with magic, although I wouldn’t call this a children’s movie. Fun fact: the apartment’s staircase is clearly the same one used in Crawlspace.
Also worth watching: Troll 2 (1990), which has basically nothing to do with the original Troll. It’s also far more infamous, due to its hilariously inept filmmaking. A little boy who tries to save his family from goblin food by standing up and pissing on the table? Sub-porn-quality acting, especially from the teenage big sister? A monstrously-overacting goblin witch who tries to get into a high school boy’s pants by seductively eating an ear of corn? Grandpa’s ghost as a deux ex machina who can temporarily stop time and even bring back Molotov cocktails from the afterlife? It’s all there and more.
Brown Bunny
(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on October 11th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)
This week’s Film Vault will act as a public service announcement of sorts: friends don’t let friends watch bad movies. Now, there’s some variety as to what constitutes a “bad movie.” Some movies are so awful that it makes them unintentionally hilarious; Mystery Science Theater 3000 built an entire TV series around this premise. Some movies simply bore you to sleep with their mediocrity—even literally, like the first couple of times I attempted to watch Glitter. And then there are the movies that fail so spectacularly that their badness actually makes you angry. Gigli and Alone in the Dark are such films. So is Brown Bunny.
I really didn’t expect to loathe Brown Bunny (2003) as much as I do. You probably best know of this movie as the one in which Chloe Sevigny gives actual head on camera. The recipient of said blowjob is Vincent Gallo, who also directed, wrote, and edited this pretentious sack of shit. Actually, Gallo probably would shit in a sack and attempt to sell it for five figures on his website.
Gallo’s character in this film is a professional motorcycle racer and quiet, sensitive fellow, making a misguided attempt to deal with his loneliness by driving to California to visit an ex-girlfriend. On the way, he takes a couple of motorbike rides and almost picks up a couple of random women but doesn’t really do much with them. That’s pretty much the entire movie but for the last few minutes.
It starts off with a lengthy sequence of Gallo riding his bike around a speedway track. This basically sets the tone for the rest of the movie: not because it’s a scene of one man traveling in isolation, but because it’s too goddamned long and nowhere near compelling enough to justify lasting so long. The vast majority of Bunny is composed of shots of the highway taken through Gallo’s bug-splattered windshield, occasionally with his profile or some of his greasy hair in the frame, just so you don’t forget he’s there. I suppose this is all meant to be terribly poignant in an On the Road sort of way, but to me, the promiscuous use of country highways and dingy small-town imagery seems tailor-made to a certain hipster sensibility that has never left New York or LA but is fascinated, however ironically, with depictions of a kitschy and slightly seedy blue-collar Middle America. That would also explain why the washed-out and often slightly-out-of-focus picture quality resembles that of American Apparel ads, which have the aesthetic of amateur porn Polaroids shot in someone’s basement rec room in the ‘70s.
Repetitive road shots aside, this movie is a complete narcissistic fantasy on Gallo’s part. Every female under the age of 60 is portrayed as a meek, vaguely white-trash Lost Soul with a quiet desperation to get into Gallo’s pants, apparently with the underlying hope that this will somehow save her from her miserable life. Gallo shouldn’t flatter himself; I guess some women might find him attractive, but his look is definitely a specialty interest*, and personality-wise, his Mr. Lonely Guy character comes off as a pathetic man-child incapable of dealing with his problems in a mature, responsible manner.
Now, about that blowjob. Chloe Sevigny portrays the fellatious ex-girlfriend, an obnoxiously needy and passive victim-type. The infamous scene, with all the kissing and minor foreplay leading up to it, is (naturally) much too long. It isn’t sexy at all, it’s actually rather uncomfortable to watch. I get that it’s supposed to be uncomfortable and awkward, but really, Gallo could have accomplished this tone without unleashing his beast for the ladies in the audience to swoon over.
Afterwards, it suddenly and bizarrely turns into an anti-drug screed. Gallo pushes Sevigny away from him onto the bed, shoves his still-erect cock back into his jeans, and starts crying. Still weeping, Mr. Sensitive scolds her for her use of pot and alcohol, and for having been gang-raped and taken away in an ambulance while passed out under the influence, all of which he passively watched without doing anything. What a swell guy! The bulk of this movie is so blandly ambiguous that it could have ended in any number of ways, but I had no idea it would turn into a remake of Reefer Madness.
I actually watched Brown Bunny before I ever saw Gallo’s earlier directorial effort, Buffalo ’66, and was pleasantly surprised by the latter film. Gallo’s character in Buffalo ’66 is an openly self-absorbed asshole, but at least we’re given explanations throughout the film for why he’s an asshole, so that we can understand if not exactly sympathize with him—unlike Gallo’s character in Bunny, who is almost a complete blank. Plus, the sad-eyed young waif who falls for Gallo is allotted more of a personality, and a likeable one, than any female in Brown Bunny.
You can watch Brown Bunny on DVD if you’re really that masochistic—I do know a couple of people who have seen it and, astoundingly, don’t think it’s that bad—but for a more entertaining viewing experience, you’re better off locating one of the actual brown bunnies from the woods by the [Purchase College] apartments and parking your ass in front of it for an hour and a half. Or you could just watch Buffalo ’66 instead.
*--Though I must admit, over the last few months I've been attracted to no less than three young men of my acquaintance who bear some vague resemblance to Mr. Gallo--perhaps it's my curse for writing this review?--but Vincent himself just doesn't do it for me.
This week’s Film Vault will act as a public service announcement of sorts: friends don’t let friends watch bad movies. Now, there’s some variety as to what constitutes a “bad movie.” Some movies are so awful that it makes them unintentionally hilarious; Mystery Science Theater 3000 built an entire TV series around this premise. Some movies simply bore you to sleep with their mediocrity—even literally, like the first couple of times I attempted to watch Glitter. And then there are the movies that fail so spectacularly that their badness actually makes you angry. Gigli and Alone in the Dark are such films. So is Brown Bunny.
I really didn’t expect to loathe Brown Bunny (2003) as much as I do. You probably best know of this movie as the one in which Chloe Sevigny gives actual head on camera. The recipient of said blowjob is Vincent Gallo, who also directed, wrote, and edited this pretentious sack of shit. Actually, Gallo probably would shit in a sack and attempt to sell it for five figures on his website.
Gallo’s character in this film is a professional motorcycle racer and quiet, sensitive fellow, making a misguided attempt to deal with his loneliness by driving to California to visit an ex-girlfriend. On the way, he takes a couple of motorbike rides and almost picks up a couple of random women but doesn’t really do much with them. That’s pretty much the entire movie but for the last few minutes.
It starts off with a lengthy sequence of Gallo riding his bike around a speedway track. This basically sets the tone for the rest of the movie: not because it’s a scene of one man traveling in isolation, but because it’s too goddamned long and nowhere near compelling enough to justify lasting so long. The vast majority of Bunny is composed of shots of the highway taken through Gallo’s bug-splattered windshield, occasionally with his profile or some of his greasy hair in the frame, just so you don’t forget he’s there. I suppose this is all meant to be terribly poignant in an On the Road sort of way, but to me, the promiscuous use of country highways and dingy small-town imagery seems tailor-made to a certain hipster sensibility that has never left New York or LA but is fascinated, however ironically, with depictions of a kitschy and slightly seedy blue-collar Middle America. That would also explain why the washed-out and often slightly-out-of-focus picture quality resembles that of American Apparel ads, which have the aesthetic of amateur porn Polaroids shot in someone’s basement rec room in the ‘70s.
Repetitive road shots aside, this movie is a complete narcissistic fantasy on Gallo’s part. Every female under the age of 60 is portrayed as a meek, vaguely white-trash Lost Soul with a quiet desperation to get into Gallo’s pants, apparently with the underlying hope that this will somehow save her from her miserable life. Gallo shouldn’t flatter himself; I guess some women might find him attractive, but his look is definitely a specialty interest*, and personality-wise, his Mr. Lonely Guy character comes off as a pathetic man-child incapable of dealing with his problems in a mature, responsible manner.
Now, about that blowjob. Chloe Sevigny portrays the fellatious ex-girlfriend, an obnoxiously needy and passive victim-type. The infamous scene, with all the kissing and minor foreplay leading up to it, is (naturally) much too long. It isn’t sexy at all, it’s actually rather uncomfortable to watch. I get that it’s supposed to be uncomfortable and awkward, but really, Gallo could have accomplished this tone without unleashing his beast for the ladies in the audience to swoon over.
Afterwards, it suddenly and bizarrely turns into an anti-drug screed. Gallo pushes Sevigny away from him onto the bed, shoves his still-erect cock back into his jeans, and starts crying. Still weeping, Mr. Sensitive scolds her for her use of pot and alcohol, and for having been gang-raped and taken away in an ambulance while passed out under the influence, all of which he passively watched without doing anything. What a swell guy! The bulk of this movie is so blandly ambiguous that it could have ended in any number of ways, but I had no idea it would turn into a remake of Reefer Madness.
I actually watched Brown Bunny before I ever saw Gallo’s earlier directorial effort, Buffalo ’66, and was pleasantly surprised by the latter film. Gallo’s character in Buffalo ’66 is an openly self-absorbed asshole, but at least we’re given explanations throughout the film for why he’s an asshole, so that we can understand if not exactly sympathize with him—unlike Gallo’s character in Bunny, who is almost a complete blank. Plus, the sad-eyed young waif who falls for Gallo is allotted more of a personality, and a likeable one, than any female in Brown Bunny.
You can watch Brown Bunny on DVD if you’re really that masochistic—I do know a couple of people who have seen it and, astoundingly, don’t think it’s that bad—but for a more entertaining viewing experience, you’re better off locating one of the actual brown bunnies from the woods by the [Purchase College] apartments and parking your ass in front of it for an hour and a half. Or you could just watch Buffalo ’66 instead.
*--Though I must admit, over the last few months I've been attracted to no less than three young men of my acquaintance who bear some vague resemblance to Mr. Gallo--perhaps it's my curse for writing this review?--but Vincent himself just doesn't do it for me.
Killer Condom
(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on October 4th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)
Perhaps you’re familiar with Troma Entertainment, purveyors of fine family fare such as Surf Nazis Must Die, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and, of course, Toxic Avenger. But naturally, this company’s humor-tinged shock tactics and gross-out grindhouse aesthetics are not for everyone. Perhaps you’d prefer a kinder, gentler Troma, even a socially conscious Troma. In that case, my friend, Killer Condom is for you.
Killer Condom (1996) is only distributed by Troma, not actually a product of its studios. Condom actually came out of Germany, yet it’s set in New York City with a Sicilian protagonist. This low-budget horror-comedy naturally has something of a hard time hiding its European roots in its satirical depiction of America: at one point, a villainous henchman tries to appear inconspicuous in Manhattan by hiding behind a copy of USA Today, that being the city’s preferred newspaper and all.
The action begins in the discreetly-named “Hotel Quickie,” a rare no-tell hotel that hosts both male and female prostitutes in addition to a drag revue. Thanks to the good ol’ US government’s “safer-sex campaign,” there’s a box of condoms sitting in the lobby. The fact that they’re loose and unwrapped somehow doesn’t bother the clientele, including a sleazebag teacher who hopes to blackmail his obviously-twentysomething teenage student from (groan) Farmville, Oklahoma into fucking her way to graduation. As he slides on the condom, the girl’s eyes widen and her face spatters with blood. A Killer Condom claims its first victim!
With a spate of unexpected cock amputations at the Hotel Quickie, Detective Luigi Mackeroni is put on the case. Luigi is a gruff, hard-boiled cop fond of cigarettes, young men—he informs a homophobic colleague that he likes “firm male asses, not pissflaps”—and reminiscing about his native Sicily. Initially it’s believed the bloody mutilations were caused by prostitutes biting off their clients’ genitals, but it gets personal for Luigi when he decides to do some firsthand investigation with hustler Billy and wakes up in the hospital minus one testicle.
While determined to expose the bizarre truth of the matter and get his would-be lover off the hook for the crime, Luigi’s impressive manhood—“exactly 32 centimeters!”—serves as a powerful lure for both the rampant Killer Condoms and his former fling, Bob, an ex-cop turned transvestite prostitute who essentially stalks Luigi. Bob is a stereotypically awful crossdresser at that, with visible chest hair, five o’clock shadow, and all; he’s also an incredibly obnoxious and generally pointless amalgamation of several minor characters from the original German comic books this movie was based on. At any rate, Luigi’s superiors are loath to believe his story until a conservative political candidate gets his own penis bitten off in front of his mistress: can a man without a phallus be a suitable leader? Oh, the philosophical implications!
Surprisingly for something Troma-related, this movie isn’t all that gory; it’s no cavalcade of severed cock shots. The Killer Condoms themselves, with a leechlike ring of sharp teeth concealed at their opening, actually look more like the rubber nipples of baby bottles, considering their oversized reservoir tips. They emit oddly endearing squeaking noises as they sneak around and strike. Yes, the film does eventually explain where they come from and why they exist: naturally, it’s part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And it ends with a lesson about accepting people’s differences and not being afraid to fall in love. Aw. Stick around during the closing credits for a condom-themed Eurotrash techno song!
Killer Condom is even more fun if you have any knowledge of the German language . . . or the archaic gay “hanky code,” which provides the punchline for a particular scene. How can you see it? Rent the DVD, which is also full of pointless Troma extras.
Perhaps you’re familiar with Troma Entertainment, purveyors of fine family fare such as Surf Nazis Must Die, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and, of course, Toxic Avenger. But naturally, this company’s humor-tinged shock tactics and gross-out grindhouse aesthetics are not for everyone. Perhaps you’d prefer a kinder, gentler Troma, even a socially conscious Troma. In that case, my friend, Killer Condom is for you.
Killer Condom (1996) is only distributed by Troma, not actually a product of its studios. Condom actually came out of Germany, yet it’s set in New York City with a Sicilian protagonist. This low-budget horror-comedy naturally has something of a hard time hiding its European roots in its satirical depiction of America: at one point, a villainous henchman tries to appear inconspicuous in Manhattan by hiding behind a copy of USA Today, that being the city’s preferred newspaper and all.
The action begins in the discreetly-named “Hotel Quickie,” a rare no-tell hotel that hosts both male and female prostitutes in addition to a drag revue. Thanks to the good ol’ US government’s “safer-sex campaign,” there’s a box of condoms sitting in the lobby. The fact that they’re loose and unwrapped somehow doesn’t bother the clientele, including a sleazebag teacher who hopes to blackmail his obviously-twentysomething teenage student from (groan) Farmville, Oklahoma into fucking her way to graduation. As he slides on the condom, the girl’s eyes widen and her face spatters with blood. A Killer Condom claims its first victim!
With a spate of unexpected cock amputations at the Hotel Quickie, Detective Luigi Mackeroni is put on the case. Luigi is a gruff, hard-boiled cop fond of cigarettes, young men—he informs a homophobic colleague that he likes “firm male asses, not pissflaps”—and reminiscing about his native Sicily. Initially it’s believed the bloody mutilations were caused by prostitutes biting off their clients’ genitals, but it gets personal for Luigi when he decides to do some firsthand investigation with hustler Billy and wakes up in the hospital minus one testicle.
While determined to expose the bizarre truth of the matter and get his would-be lover off the hook for the crime, Luigi’s impressive manhood—“exactly 32 centimeters!”—serves as a powerful lure for both the rampant Killer Condoms and his former fling, Bob, an ex-cop turned transvestite prostitute who essentially stalks Luigi. Bob is a stereotypically awful crossdresser at that, with visible chest hair, five o’clock shadow, and all; he’s also an incredibly obnoxious and generally pointless amalgamation of several minor characters from the original German comic books this movie was based on. At any rate, Luigi’s superiors are loath to believe his story until a conservative political candidate gets his own penis bitten off in front of his mistress: can a man without a phallus be a suitable leader? Oh, the philosophical implications!
Surprisingly for something Troma-related, this movie isn’t all that gory; it’s no cavalcade of severed cock shots. The Killer Condoms themselves, with a leechlike ring of sharp teeth concealed at their opening, actually look more like the rubber nipples of baby bottles, considering their oversized reservoir tips. They emit oddly endearing squeaking noises as they sneak around and strike. Yes, the film does eventually explain where they come from and why they exist: naturally, it’s part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And it ends with a lesson about accepting people’s differences and not being afraid to fall in love. Aw. Stick around during the closing credits for a condom-themed Eurotrash techno song!
Killer Condom is even more fun if you have any knowledge of the German language . . . or the archaic gay “hanky code,” which provides the punchline for a particular scene. How can you see it? Rent the DVD, which is also full of pointless Troma extras.
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