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Reply to BBT...
2003-05-05 08:02:50
Uh....no...not that I can think of...
"Soccer-socked?" Dang, I need to start writing shorter posts. I'm not even sure which part you're referring to.
*sheepish grin* -
Razza frazzin' journal wordlimit....
2003-05-04 23:22:40
What follows could only be called one long torment. Of the characters, definitely, and possibly of the audience. The kiddies all wake up to their own private terror chambers. Jerk wakes up in Baby’s room, duct-taped to a chair where we get to watch her partially scalp him when he answers movie trivia wrong. (Heaven help me if “Baby” doesn’t have the most hideously annoying horse-laugh I’ve ever been subjected to.) The un-attached girl wakes up to find herself dressed as “Dorothy” from the Wizard of Oz, and tied to a bed in Tiny’s room. (Ruh roh Raggy!) Fortunately, the burn victim is the most ambivalent about torturing their guests to death, leading to a (failed) escape attempt and the only two funny bits in the film. The male half of the couple woke up earlier, and we get a nice long flashback of the “artist” brother sawing through his arm with a hacksaw while Baby went to work on his face with a straightrazor. (Always antique straightrazors. Huh. Some sorta iconic tradition, I guess.) It has all the charm of a grainy snuff video. The end result is a taxidermy conglomeration of him and crocodile that’s then put on display for his girlfriend, also a guest of the artist.
Round about now, I was reminded of something Johnen Vasquez proposed in an issue of Squee. He had this idea for the greatest horror film of all time. It starts out just like Jurassic park. In the first scene, the tyrannosaurus sneaks up and snatches one of the kids in its mouth. Slowly it begins to chew. It keeps chewing and chewing and chewing. All the while, for some miraculous reason, the kid stays alive, screaming out in pain and pleading for death. Blood is pouring everywhere, organs spilling out and drizzling down the side of the beastie’s jaw, but still the kid screams. About now, the audience discovers that the theater doors are locked. This is the only event in the movie, and the movie is eighteen hours long.
That, on a lesser scale, was my impression of this film. Long scenes of torture broken up by occasional intrusions of plot or continuity, but never with a chance of there not being more torture later. OH! And there are other victims in the house! The radio constantly spouts about seven cheerleaders gone missing. One’s found propped up and dismembered in the toolshed. One is tied to Baby’s bed with another of her swiftly rotting teammates. Three were being “educated” by the attic-artist earlier in the film. The last one is found by the police when they recover our victims’ car in a vacant lot. She’s dead in the trunk with something (forget what) carved into her flank.
(Oh, the flick isn’t really misogynistic. It’s just sociopathic.)
The police? Oh yeah! Halfway through the flick, one of the kid’s dads comes looking for them, along with a police chief and snotty deputy. Capt. Spaulding points them in the right direction, but it’s all for naught, because the hillbilly family outwits them by shooting them all multiple times. (In tune with the Tyrannosaurus-theme, the attic-artist holds the last cop at gunpoint in an utterly silent, 8-minute pan scene that had the audience shouting “just DO IT already!” before blowing his head off.) The artist later skins “daddy” to wear it like a suit and further torment his daughter.
See, the problem is, this isn’t really a horror film at this point. It’s more like gore-porn. Rob Zombie isn’t trying to scare us here, he’s trying to disgust and offend us. Trying to mess with our heads. There’s little artistry in just filming the sickest things you can think of. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, but even taking that into account, the scatterbrained manner of the film’s assembly means it’s not even pulled off very well. The next bit actually deviates a little, and starts heading back towards the realm of more standard horror.
We finally leave the Tyrannosaurus-torment on Halloween night when the remaining three roadtrippers, dressed in bunny suits, are led out to an old mine shaft with a coffin suspended over it. One of the girls (the jealous one) breaks free and goes running off, only to find a field of gravemarkers. (Oh THERE’s the “thousand corpses”.) Baby runs her to ground and kills her with a switchblade and her own take on the “Katsumi laugh”. (You know, Baby really belongs more in “Natural Born Killers” than in this film. Or not on film at all.) The other two are locked into the coffin and lowered into the mine, suspended about a foot above the water table. The hillbillies lower down a tape recorder of strange chanting, and......
HOLY CRAP! ZOMBIES! Fifteen minutes from the end of the film and the zombies finally show up! Where the hell have you guys been?
Zombies pour in and tear the coffin apart. Really one of the few cool scenes in this film. They leave the girl, but abscond with Jerk. The last girl now wanders a series of strange tunnels and passageways. Two odd zombie-things show up and repossess her bunny outfit. (Leaving her the Dorothy outfit.) Following a tunnel reminiscent of the Capuchin tombs, she comes to...well...Dr. Satan’s waiting room. Distended, altered critters abound, and she spots the Jerk undergoing brain surgery under the Dr.’s strut-reinforced insect-like arms.
See, at this point, you’ve forgotten all about Dr. Satan, didn’t you? So had I. The way this is all structured, I think we’re supposed to assume that Dr. Satan is somehow behind, or prompting, or something all of these killings. Like the patriarch of the family. But it’s certainly not very well explained. Unfortunately for the girl, the actual patriarch of the family shows up. The one who tried to burn down the house? Apparently he’s some kind of zombie/fleshly construct of the Dr.’s now, as he comes after her armed with an axe and the determination of a sloth. She runs. A cave-in stops daddy. Perhaps the best scene of the flick is when she pulls herself up out of the ground into the Nov. 1st sunlight.
Stumbling to the road, she’s picked up by Capt. Spaulding who says he’ll take her to a doctor. Anyone want to guess who’s hiding in the backseat? *Sigh*.
This film is a mess. That’s not to say it won’t attain cult status. Its director alone is enough to attain that. But “cult” isn’t the same as “good.” The flick does “look” good, in that you can’t tell there was a couple of years delay between filmings. It could also be seen as a more “real” portrayal of serial killers. Purely whacked people locking up strangers and torturing them to death is more along the lines of the sort of thing that really happens, if, perhaps, not to this degree. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, though. You want real, you watch the nightly news. At it’s best, this film was designed to test the audience’s tolerance for torture. (It’s actually kinda low on gore.) Whether you want to actually watch such a thing is up to you. Character-wise, the film is a brick wall. Bunch o’ characters are created at the start, and no one is really changed by the end...unless “being dead” is a personality change. The rest of the time they’re either screaming in pain, fear, or pleading for their lives. In writing, the story is just flat pointless. A bare skeleton (stranded motorists tormented by family, dropped into Dr. Satan’s underground lair) of a plot leaving the moment to moment stuff there as an excuse for more random horror scenes. You should also note the self-parody nature of the film. A lot of horror films do this semi-effectually. Here is just falls flat for lack of context and the obvious “pause for effect.” They’re all wearing novelty T-shirts for heaven’s sake! “Cheap-ass Halloween costume” was probably the worst. The Munsters, etc.
Now, it’s probable that, with a really good crowd, this could be an enjoyable film. You’ve got to be really rowdy to get through the torture scenes and be able to laugh them off, or you’ll start taking them seriously, and it’ll all start making you angry. If you’re in a theater where 90% of the audience is shouting at the screen, you might enjoy it. My theater only had two or three hecklers on opening night, and Netherworld (a local haunted house group) was there in full costume. (I think the best part of the film was near the beginning when the Netherworlders were making grabs at latecomers looking for seats. More screams and shrieks than anytime else.) I even talked to them after the flick and several told me that they didn’t really consider the film scary. I was with a group that seemed to be enjoying itself, so I didn’t press the matter any, not wanting to harsh their buzz, but I got the feeling that a lot of the audience were putting on falsly-happy faces to hide their disappointment with the indy-film they’d been telling everyone would rock.
In the end, I think Rob Zombie had a firm idea of what he didn’t want to make, but didn’t spend enough time figuring out what he did....or at least settling on one coherent idea. Too severe a film to even really “like for its badness.”
Nrg. Guess I’m gonna review X2 some other time. It’s too damn late to start another review now. Especially considering it’s the one I wanna take some time o
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"Why are all the idiots on my team?"
2003-05-04 23:21:28
So where the hell have I been for the last month?
Don’t ask.
Not because it was especially bad, just that it was a whole sequence of too much work, too many friends in need, or nasty coincidences that’ve kept me from updating. I could go through it in detail, but frankly it was just a lot more of the usual, and it’d be even more boring for me to relate than for you to read (except for the weekend where I managed to be just slightly too late to get anything done at all. THAT was just infuriating.) (It also made me miss Jingorocon. Gahhh...)
Although I have to admit that it was a little disappointing that none of my friends (readers) dropped a note wondering what was up. A week, OK. Two, maybe. Three and I hope at least someone wonders why I’ve dropped off the face of the earth. One of these days I’ll starve to death after being buried beneath mount DVD because no one thinks to wonder whether I’m OK. They’ll find my corpse mummified a million years from now buried beneath the strange silver disks that must have been used for currency by the people of my time. Obviously a wealthy prince entombed with his riches. Then one of my so-called friends will wander forward in their cyborg body and go..”Hmmmm……I could swear I knew him from somewhere….Hmmm……..OH! Hey look! ‘Night of the Living Dead 3!’ Who would keep that crap?”
Anyway, as I’ve no real desire to go over the events of my unremarkable life for the past few weeks, I’ll jump right into something that’s been worrying me.
My temper. Online.
This really is weird. I’ve never really had a problem with it until very recently, but the issues of the current day seem to have polarized me rather severely, against my own instincts and specific effort to the contrary. I’d haul the sound-proof room out again, but frankly it doesn’t really apply, since it’s my attitude, and not the issues themselves I’m gonna talk about. As I’ve said earlier, I supported the war in Iraq for humanitarian reasons, and I’ve yet to be convinced that, in the overall balance, the actions of the US have not resulted in a massive net good. Despite my dire predictions to the contrary, my declaration of this in a previous note have not lead any of my friends to run screaming from my company, nor attempt to pillory me or (in the case of extreme distance) burn my image in effigy. (Likely due to the fact that my image is very difficult to find online...keeps those nasty houngans away.) This is reassuring, but not, I’m starting to feel, entirely justified.
The problem is in online confrontations. The shit is flying pretty fast and furious recently in nearly every corner of the net, and rather evenly from both sides. The AWA message board actually had to ban someone, a long-time friend of the con, when he got exceedingly….overemphatic with his displeasure in those who would disagree with him. I missed that particular fallout, as I sensed the conversation turning particularly nasty and stopped reading it. But it serves as a strong indicator of the sort of incident I keep encountering. And it’s pissing me the fuck off.
But that’s not really important. Anger is fine, and I rarely type when pissed, so it hasn’t really gotten me in any trouble. What is important, is that I seem to be polarizing severely in response to this trend. Excellent example. Dave (of the Merrill clan) and I disagree rather profoundly on several points of politics. Many others we are in perfect accord (or differ only in degree). Every once in a long while we’d get into it on the AWA message board, but the discussion was always civil and, especially for the internet, remarkably well reasoned (IMHO). Recently, however, he’s started posting more frequently in his lj (or more frequently in the public sections….he might post regularly in the friends-only sector, but I wouldn’t know) and what has he been posting? Mostly links to anti-Bush articles, anti-Republican or conservative articles, or excerpts pieces of the sort of one-sided humor that pretty much dominates in political circles. Most recently, it was “Bush’s Resume” that went down the list of ….welll….here:
“Accomplishments as president:
Attacked and took over two countries.
Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.”
This pissed me the fuck off. It’s utterly one-sided, phrased with vocabulary to maximize venom, and plainly cares little for dissenting opinions or even logic behind the events listed. You know what pisses me off even more than that?
The fact that it pissed me off.
It’s a frickin’ JOKE. HUMOR. I shouldn’t be getting worked up about this! Hell, I don’t even particularly LIKE president Bush. He’s done a lot of things, some of them very recently, with which I strongly disagree. I wince every time he’s mentioned God on TV, since it offends my basic “separation of church and state” principle (and I’m a faithful Christian, if not a faithful churchgoer). I violently HATE the Patriot act, I don’t understand economics enough to really have an opinion on them, and I think he should have brought our strongest allies more to the forefront of the events at hand. I do support him on the biggest issue of the day, and on a number of other, smaller issues. Hell, I’m not even a real Republican, and the fact that I devote most of my livejournal to crappy horror films about Satanism, the walking dead, and the skinny teenage girls who end up kicking their collective asses should tell you what I think of moral ideals and viewpoints typically regarded as conservative. (I’d call myself “anti-idiotarian” but that’s a bit insulting) This sort of thing never really ever got to me before, and I’m having trouble figuring out why.
I think it’s at least partially to do with the fact that I’ve never really stood squarely behind a political party on any issue before. I could stand behind an idea, but standing behind a person or group of people….well….you start spotting flaws. You still support the idea, and the stance on the idea, and the methodology going towards the idea, but you start to get the feeling that this guy standing in front of you, the one who is proposing the idea you support, is a fucking idiot. I’m not really talking about Bush in particular here, I’m talking about just about any politician.
My problem is that there really hasn’t been any opportunity to state “I stand behind this idea, as distinct from this party/man etc. I am in support of this one particular political approach/ideal, but that says nothing about my opinion of this man beyond that.” Arguments on the web just don’t work that way. Hell, arguments anywhere don’t work that way.
Well, no. That’s not true. It works perfectly for the other side. Someone who stands in opposition of a particular ideal has a wide open field for himself. If you hate an idea, and all you say is that you object to it, then you could be objecting to any number of specific details, for whatever reasons. The guy standing next to you could be objecting for any number of other reasons. If you support an idea, it is assumed that you support every aspect of it, and if the opponents are proven correct on any individual point, you must either repel the invaders with a well reasoned addendum, entirely addressing the intrusion of nasty fact into your little ideal, or abandon your position to join up with those opposed. There’s no leader to find fault with (unless one is nominated, or self appoints to represent the objection), no single monolithic objection whose flaws must be ferreted out, but a multitude of thousands of angles, any one of which, when proven correct, undermines the entire idea. Thus these battles are never David vs. Goliath, it’s Gulliver vs. the Lilliputians. Every line and knot needs to be untied one at a time, but the stupid little people are tying the knots faster than any individual can untie them.
A mob is never in favor of anything. They only know what they are collectively against. This alone is a powerful uniting force.
This would make a great platitude to end on, but truth be told I was trying to head somewhere with this, and have become completely lost in my own diatribe. *Sigh*
I SHOULDN’T be getting pissed by little sniping attacks from the opposition. So long as I’ve considered the central point of their objection and can resolve it in my own mind, I should be satisfied with continuing my support. I’m getting really fucking sick of the Lilliputians sticking me in the shin with a sewing needle, though. Every attack on my position feels like an attack on me, and the factor that most don’t even want to discuss it is pissing me off.
The self-doubt isn’t helping much either. I readily admit that the news sources I visit are biased. If there’s anything that we’ve learned from this war, it’s that ALL news sources are biased…it’s just that once you know the bias, you can get a better view of what exactly IS going on. The news reports are reading like night vs. day at the moment, and no one in this country can be absolutely sure which is closer to the truth. Sure the facts are there, but they’re all anecdotes. US soldiers killed 15 people during a protest. One side says it was a terrible tragedy prompted by the soldiers taking fire from the crowd. Another says that it shows the inherent carelessness and recklessness of US troops. Another says it’s an attempt to cow the Iraqi public into falling into line. The Arab press says that the soldiers fired first. My outlook means I hope the first story is the most accurate…but there’s so many others with so many different versions. Regardless, I shouldn’t feel this worrisome self-doubt. Not because my position is unassailable, but because I don’t really matter. I mean, my opinion isn’t going to affect the course of the war (now, reconstruction) in Iraq except in the exclusion of my face in a protest. I’ve no personal stake in this issue, beyond my own egotistical desire to be proven right and not feel like a fool for having been wrong, and looking carefully around, I can’t help but see HOW MANY IDIOTS are on this side with me. Or the TYPE of idiots.
Actually, the idiots are one of the reasons I generally prefer the conservative side of the argument. Let me explain: I’m also something of a moderate supporter of the second amendment (my political opinions started with concern for the maintenance of the first amendment, and I’m working my way down from there… : ) ) from the idealistic structure that we would rather risk the mis-use of a right rather than take it away. Following a few second-amendment links, I wandered upon an essay that spoke to me rather profoundly. Back in December it built itself up a bit of noise in the blogosphere.
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000218.html#000218
(Don’t go if you disagree and are looking for a debate. It’s more of a “preaching to the choir sort of post. Besides, it’s not the point I’m working at.)
Anyway, I liked it enough that I started reading down through the comments below it, of which there were a thousand or so. (It was a blood night, and I was up working all night anyway.) The first two hundred or so were comments of adoration (not surprising, considering the forum it was posted in) with an occasional “you’re so stupid” blanket rebuttal thrown in every 40 or so posts. Round ‘about comment # 200 or so, someone else showed up. He liked the essay, but took issue with a tiny comment in one corner of it, the comment that the writer had never owned a gun.
The poster, an “Angel Shamaya” said that, while he appreciated Mr. Whittle’s essay, he could not regard seriously any second amendment advocate who did not own a gun. This produced a rather taken-aback response from several posters, asking him exactly what he meant. The conversation went back and forth for a bit, and then started getting really weird. Shamaya recommended that Mr. Whittle purchase a gun would give him a feeling of “completion…of truly being a man.” You could just feel the eyebrows going up across the internet. The conversation wandered further afield, and then Mr. Shamaya burst out with “Abraham Lincon was the worst traitor this country ever knew.”
Yeah.
Suddenly, it all became clear. “Oh” I said to myself. “So YOU’RE the one they all hate.” Standing before me (as it were) was the reactionary, extremist, wildly deluded conservative that the opposition saw when they looked at the pro-gun lobby. I’d never actually met anyone like him before, and here he stood supporting something that I supported. Just to such an extremist degree as to be worse than the alternative. Further down the comments section Mr. Shamaya began asserting that the US was already at war with itself because of robberies, home invasions, kidnapping, etc. That every US citizen should be armed, or considered a traitor. I swear, I think he was always about three steps away from the words “race war.” The man was a frickin’ loon. But he was EASY to spot as such. In my experience, there’s moderate or borderline conservatives, and there’s the loony extreme, with a wide gulf between. The liberal side (again from my experience) is more of a continuum from borderline to extremist. It makes it harder to sort out the loons and know whose version of the story to trust. By way of example, consider the number of conservatives who would trust a report from the KKK, and how many liberals would trust a report from Greenpeace. To some degree, it’s a matter of trust for the “side” in general. (Has anyone ever fact-checked “the Truth.com?”)
Hokay, now I’m just talking outta my ass. I can’t do an unbiased perspective, so I’ll just stop.
Instead, I will mention one other thing I did this past month. I visited my old alma mater, Emory U. I had to pick up a bunch (a BUNCH) of papers from the health library there over several days, so I spent the time before and after touring the campus a bit. And I was reminded of where my crappy eating habits came from.
I wanted lunch. So I stopped by Cappuccino Joe’s, the local coffee house that I never ate at much because it was so expensive. ‘Cept it was closed. Didn’t open on Sunday until 4:30. So I went to the DUC (Dobbs University Center). ‘Cept they’d stopped serving lunch, and were only serving “light lunch” whatever the hell that meant. So I went to Cox. They had a cafeteria, crappy pizza place, Burger King express, and abbreviated Chick Fil ‘A. I wanted the cafeteria line, but after waiting around for five minutes, I determined that there was no one actually back there to serve me. So I had to go for the fast food places. Mmmm Mmmm. Apathy baked into every bite. You could taste the full and total not-caring-ness in the preparation of the burgers, something commented upon repeatedly in my undergraduate days.
After several hours in the Health library, I left to go to Capp Joe’s. (Actually, it was the next day, when I had to come back ‘cause they closed early, but let’s not get lost in the details.) There I got screwed $9.50 for a sandwich, fries and a coffee. They got the order wrong, when the right one came it tasted awful, and I ended up choking it down and feeling vaguely ill afterwards. All in all, it was a remarkably nostalgic trip.
I’m not kidding when I say I got my phenomenally bad eating habits from being simply unable to find a place to eat at regular intervals on Emory campus. Cox was the only place open most of the time, and their food was absolutely awful. Weekends were the worst. By coincidence of bad timing I would often go as much as two days without eating, a habit that astounded my roommates. “Oh hell. I forgot to eat today. Or yesterday. Dammit, I wondered why I had such a headache.”
Nuff of me, on to the reviews.
Y’all are gonna love this. I take a break at the first sign that my reviews might actually be helpful to people. So, in addition to a (probably brief) review of another flick from Jimmy’s pack o’ ten, I’ve got reviews of two films I actually saw in the theaters that have rotated out by now.
(Oh yeah. I forgot to mention. Jimmy bought something. ANOTHER ten-pack DVD set. You realize what this means. I have to kill him before he does it again....)
First up, we’ve got the provocatively titled “Kiss me Kill me” from the last DVD set. (I think this is number eight of ten). Be careful when looking this one up, apparently it’s a popular title to use as an alternate when bringing a foreign film over to the US. You’re looking for the one from 1973 originally titled “Baba Yaga.”
I should mention that this one won me over pretty damn quick in the start. Each of these DVDs are fairly cheaply produced. No extras, but a good quality copy, with few errors that can’t be attributed to the original film stock. The only real addition is the title screen, a modified still from the film with the option “Play” as your only choice and the same “generic spooky background music” playing for every DVD. “Kiss me Kill me” had a woman in a sort of fantasy-cowgirl outfit (yeah, you know the one...vest with no shirt, chaps, gunbelt, etc.). Hey, everyone’s got weaknesses, and this was one appealing young woman.
Also threw me off, though, as I was expecting a Spaghetti-western style horror. Turns out the outfit was only peripherally related, but I’ll come to that.
Of particular interest this time around was the film integration of another artform into the flick.
Comics.
Now this marked the flick as profoundly European. (Flick’s another Italian job.) Comics fans all over the US are always clamoring that “in Europe, they take comics seriously....everyone reads them.” (Anime fans are the same way about anime and the Japanese.) Now, I can state pretty readily that, the few times I’ve been to Europe, comics did have more of a presence in popular culture...by the tiniest of degrees. You’d find a few more hardback graphic novels in the oversized book sections of the bookstore. Occasionally you’d see someone reading a bound comic on the bus. Tintin, or Asterix, or something like that. But it’s hardly the ubiquitous degree that the fanboys claim. On the other hand, reading a comic didn’t mark you as a geek. They were (from my limited experience) regarded as a brainless diversion much of the time. Crappy romance (or horror) novel equivalent.
This casual attitude sorta preludes the appearance of comics in this flick. See, the movie isn’t about comics. They don’t figure into the plotline at all. What they are, is a cheap, flashy, artsy little sidetrack. Transitions via black-and-white comic panels take us to the next scene. They get integrated into a dream sequence not as a physical object (although the actors leaf through a few hardbound books of newsprint comic art in a scene or two) but just as a continuation of the storytelling. They’re also fairly tawdry. I think European comics at the time (1973)were starting to make waves internationally in the adult market...but I was hardly around to know. It was kinda neat, casually inserted, and little attention paid to it, but a nice touch nonetheless. In style, the comic panels looked a bit like a less polished Milo Manara...fewer rounded lines, a little more scratchy style.
Anyway, on to the plot. Surprisingly enough, it has one. This is surprising, because everything about the flick screams “sexploitation”...and “European sexploitation” at that, which, everyone knows, is the “best” kind, since they tend to go a lot farther towards porn than American sexploitation flicks. We get a shot of bare breasts within the first five minutes at a distinctly “arty” party in the vein (but more toned-down) of Andy Warhol’s famed bashes. There, we are introduced to Valentina Roselli (Isabelle De Funes...told you it was Italian) our...well, if not heroine, then central cast member. (There seems to be some narrative conflict in sexploitation-horror flicks like this. The hero, the man who charges in to the rescue, is almost ancillary to the plot. An undeveloped set-piece necessary to concluding the story, but the real star is the “helpless” damsel in distress, who gets most of the good scenes, character development, and usually needs to be “saved from herself” at the end. It’s like horror flicks where the monster is the real center of cool, but has to be defeated somehow, and the good guys are all whining campers, or some such.) I was relieved to see right off that this flick wasn’t going to be as profoundly misogynistic as the previous Italian flicks seemed to be. Valentina is a smart, pretty photographer who works mostly with erotic subject matter, but she’s an entirely independent woman. We’re first introduced to her as she coyly rebuffs a “suitor for the night” and elects to walk home by herself. Think of that! A pretty girl in Italian horror who DOESN’T have sex at the drop of a hat! Refreshing! Revealing! We wish to know more!
As she walks home, she is nearly run down by an automobile, which accidentally strikes a stray dog, killing it. The car stops, and the driver, an older woman, steps out to apologize. The two women speak briefly for a moment, just long enough to establish the long, lingering sexual tension that provides motivation for the rest of the film. The driver is played by Carroll Baker, who’s been in a HELL of a lot of films, ranging from “The Big Country” to “The Game” and “Kindergarden Cop” and she introduces herself to Valentina as....get this ....”Baba Yaga.”
Whoa.
I’ve talked about the legend of Baba Yaga here before, so I’ll just say that she’s pretty much the fairy-tale template of an Eastern European-Russian “witch.” It’s like introducing yourself as “Vlad Tepisch.” A little looking around tells me that the original title of this flick was just “Baba Yaga” which would’ve meant nothing to an American audience.
So here we get a critical linking. Witchery with the “lesbian menace,” and the Bohemian lifestyle of all these “artists.” As absurd as it may sound today, there was a time (in the US at least) where people were trying to draw lines from the newly emergent hedonism attached to pop and abstract art culture, through sexual experimentation, out the other end to occult practices and damnation. (Care to guess where these ideas originated? Some sectors of church thought seemed to believe that, if lesbianism and occult practices weren’t inextricably linked, they were at least highly complimentary. Chalk that up next to the absurd concept that feminism was inherently anti-religious, and you might see where these thoughts lead.) Very Jack Chickian...just look at the “Dark Dungeon” comic tract, where a girl is invited to play in a D&D game with a group of four women and one man (????). After the game, they engage in lesbian sex (whoa! Sign me up!) and then move on to the devil worship. In a nutshell, THAT’S why your great aunt thinks that your role-playing-games are Satanic. Sad, really.
At any rate, Valentina goes home, where we enter into the weirdest part of the film. Someone’s “art” gland went into overtime as we enter into a dream sequence. The dream sequences have absolutely nothing to do with the film. Well, OK, they hint at menace towards our damsel, but other than that, nothing. This one involves Valentina in a bathing suit being paraded around by SS troops on a beach in front of a Nazi official calmly petting a cat Blofeld-style. (Donald Pleasance had one hell of a grip on that cat in the end of “You Only Live Twice.”) She disrobes further (remember...sexploitation flick) falls into a grave, and wakes up, wondering...just like the rest of us...what the hell that was all about. In a later sequence we get “topless Nazi boxing” and “girl walking out to sea.”
Then....more nudity! Warming up to the film here...
Valentina is a glamour photographer, and we get to watch several of her shoots as the film progresses. We get a REAL good look at several of her models, and at her stylish apartment (littered with photo books, the hardcover comics I mentioned, the world’s most annoying phone, and Lichtenstein prints plastering the walls. For heaven’s sake, she keeps a light meter clipped on her garter.)
Mrs. Yaga shows up at Valentina’s to establish more sexual tension (and Pink Panther-style jazz background) by....uh....”handling” her camera. Afterwards, the camera starts “acting up.” While out with her boyfriend (the “hero,” with whom she has several political debates, a tooled indication of her intelligence) a click from her camera makes everyone else’s stop working. Another click makes one of her models faint. A third drops a protestor in the street.
Under the alibi of looking for new and interesting shoots, Valentina pays Mrs. Yaga a visit. She lives in a dank old mansion lushly carpeted, but falling apart and filling up with junk. Like in the Far Side cartoon, there’s a bottomless pit in the middle of the living room (she really should put up a guardrail) and an attic full of junk Valentina takes some pictures, then starts poking around in the attic, turning up a bondage Barbie. (No subtlety here!) A crude little doll wrapped up in a BDS&M harness. She also finds a pair of leather opera gloves and....uh....”entertains” herself for a while with them. When Mrs. Yaga finds Valentina...enjoying...herself, she makes a gift of the doll “Annette.”
Back at her apartment, Annette does her best Chucky impression, and pulls herself outta the trash a few times when no one is looking. During a “scandalous” black-on-white photo shoot (oooh...blacksploitation and sexploitation...”Scream Blackula Scream” eat your heart out.), there’s a blackout, during which the doll apparently took a stab at one of the models with a hatpin. We know this, because one of Valentina’s high-speed cameras was going with the proper filters, revealing that Annette is pretty hot in flesh and blood. Half-nude women trying to kill one another. It doesn’t get any more sexploitive than this? Just wait. The stab-ee eventually dies.
Valentina’s boyfriend is finally told about all the weirdness. He’s a film director, making ends meet by shooting commercials. (The only sample we get of his work is for a detergent commercial, where the spokesman “Captain White” hunts down and kills a black man by dumping soap on him. Wow. Just wow. File that under “things that will never fly again.”) He takes her to the movies to see the original “The Golem,” thereby breaking the MST3K rule that you should never put a good movie in your bad movie, even if it is public domain.
Round about now, the “artsy” aspects of the film had become overwhelming. It was like being bludgeoned with an easel. WE GET IT. YOU ARE MUCH COOLER AND ANGSTIER AND ARTSIER THAN ALL THOSE OTHER TALENTLESS FILMS. NOW CUT IT OUT. More meaningless dream sequences, comic flashes, and Annette getting up and walking bare-breasted outta the apartment. (It’s also apparent that no one in Italy ever locks their doors...) Valentia goes back to Mrs. Yaga’s to try and figure this all out, but changes her mind and, trance-like, opts instead for a lengthy...uh...discipline...session at the hands of Annette. Yes, that means everything it implies. For quite a while. It’s not like you could ignore all the nudity up to this point, but here it basically devolves into a fetish BDS&M film, Valentina submitting willingly to everything Annette can come up with. (They never really go beyond the level of “fetish film” to out-and-out girl-on-girl porn, but you can see it from here.) Meanwhile, Valentina’s boyfriend must play the killjoy and show up to “save” her. Showing up at the gate to Yaga’s mansion, he discovers that his silly little European matchbox car couldn’t ever batter down the gate, so he has to climb clumsily over it. He stops Annette through the clever ruse of clubbing her with a stick. Valentina stops Yaga by tripping her into the bottomless hole in the living room. (Told you there shoulda been railings.) The magic gone, the police naturally show up.
So what’s the verdict? Umm. Well, for a horror flick, there’s too much sex. For a sex flick, there’s too much plot. It’s really an odd combo, and the overall impression is that someone took a fetishists’ wet dream and built a weird little story around it. (Not as much of a wet dream as “The Cell,” but then, what is?) There isn’t as much honest-to God sex as, say, “Incubus,” but there’s more than enough nudity and “erotica” to mean a 60% shorter film on Fox. Despite that, there’s actually some clever stuff going on in here. The camera was a neat idea, carried off rather well. The flick is much less woman-hating than most Italian slashers, and since the title was changed, it wasn’t immediately evident where the story was going. The comics transitions were nice. Still, this is much less a “if you don’t mind the nudity” and more of a “if you like the erotica” film, as it’s pretty much fully integrated into the film. Like a murder mystery at a Playboy mansion shoot, prudes need not apply. There’s not enough here to like outside of that. Also, people susceptible to pompous art overdose should approach cautiously.
Next up, we’re thirty years later, and regressed to a much younger child. I bring you Stephen King’s “If-you-bring-a-child-to-this-movie-you-will-never-get-him-potty-trained.”
I’ll start right off with the verdict on this one, ‘cause I feel I should warn people what’s coming up. Especially Kusoyaro, since he said he liked it so much.
I did not like Dreamcatcher. In my opinion, it was a net loss. But I’m biased.
I call it a net loss, but that’s not really true. See, I didn’t pay to see this flick. Or rather I paid the wrong people. I went to see Dreamcatcher on the day that Spirited Away came out in theaters after the Oscars award. I wanted to help add to the film’s take, and do my own little part to try and bring Disney to their senses about US distribution of Miazaki’s films, but I’d already seen it. Twice. The two days beforehand. At a showing in the GA tech theaters, where they wouldn’t have “counted.” (Also, once again at the Tara, and once again on a bootleg copy.) So I really didn’t want to watch it again. Thus, I paid for a ticket for Spirited Away, and went to see Dreamcatcher instead. Yeah, yeah, technically illegal, but a technique suggested by no less a luminary than Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo on MST3K) for the boosting of independent film sales. Gonna go see that blockbuster flick for the third time ‘cause there’s yet ANOTHER group of friends who haven’t seen it yet? Toss a few dollars by the way of that indy film from the new studio that can’t afford a lot of TV ads. Send some money to that rare documentary flick that makes it into general release. If millions of people were to do this, it would be a disaster. Julia Roberts might have to sell one of her houses. But if a few hundred did it, what’s the harm?
‘Course that’s kinda hypocritical of me, since Disney was on the receiving end, and Dark Castle (a studio I normally like) on the loosing, but everyone here are anime fans, and they know how the mechanics work in this case.
Outta curiosity, I stuck my head into Spirited Away on my way in. Fairly promising, about 2-3 dozen people. ‘Course, by now you all know how well the returns turned out (ie, not well enough).
One question before I start. Who brings a baby to a Stephen King flick? Stupid crying rugrat shouldn’t a’ been in here at all.
So, when I went to the film, I had high hopes. What I’d seen in the previews was very promising and mysterious. First off, the flick is named “Dreamcatcher.” Which tells us nothing. Then random bits of preview. People in a hunting lodge, watching wildlife streaming by in droves. A corpse, waist deep in the snow, sitting in the middle of the road. Wooooo. I’m not kidding, I thought this was a great setup. Could go anywhere from there. Problem was, it went down the path of least resistance.
We’re introduced to a couple of the main characters before we go “into the woods.” They’re fairly interesting, but an alarm went off in my head almost immediately. See, they’re all psychic. One’s a psychiatrist who’s exceptionally good at “reading” his patients, and the other has a little dowsing trick for finding lost keys. (Doesn’t get him many dates, though, as it tends to freak out the girls.) Anyway, one of these friends is downtown at night, and he sees someone he recognizes across the street from him. Trusting a gesture from the hospital-robed man, he strides right into the street....and is instantly ploughed into by a truck. He survives, but with a bad limp.
Why the alarm bells? Stephen King has a problem. A psychic problem. The man is obsessed with psychics. This, in and of itself, is no problem. Lotsa good horror stories revolve around psychics (Cronenburg’s “Scanners” for one). King’s problem is he loves inserting psychics where it isn’t necessary. It complicates and dilutes otherwise good stories. Oh, he’s used them to good effect in the past (“The Shining” both in text and film were brilliant, “Carrie” was great because the psychic WAS the story), but several times I’ve seen otherwise good stories of his ruined via the forced introduction of a psychic. It’s a McGuffin for when he writes himself into a corner. Take the ending of “Needful Things” where a small town cop defeats the Devil with animate shadow puppets and an honest-to-God snake in a peanut brittle can that comes to life. Many times it’s just flat not necessary. It’s come to the point that you are unable to spot the “things” really going on in the world if you aren’t a psychic. A good concept, but one that is stretched really thin when spread out through so many books. Here we had the introduction of Psychics in the first ten minutes of the film, with no apparent connection to anything I’d seen in the preview. I was worried.
Next, these four old friends congregate in a hunting lodge. It’s the middle of winter with about eight-eleven inches of snow on the ground, and they’re all men, so of course the talk turns to (stereo)“typical guy things.” Like, for instance, fart jokes. And how they’re always “hard.” (Generic background banter drifts weirdly so that King can demonstrate he knows what the word “priapetic” means. I know what it means because it’s a side effect of a specific, very painful, microvascular occlusion in sickle cell anemia.) The key to understanding this film is realizing that no one in it has progressed mentally beyond the age of twelve. It, like about 40% of all King’s stories, is a coming-of-age story, even if everyone in it is over thirty.
We spend a good deal of time listening to this pre-teen banter and a few subjects of conversation come up that are so specifically mentioned, they stand out in a “notice me” manner. First is constant mention of “Duddits,” an apparently absent member of their troop, and the guy in the hospital gown that the truck-interceptor saw. Mention is made of their psychic powers, and how it was Duddits that taught/gave it to them (very nebulous thus far). Finally, they talk at length about their “mental storehouses,” mental constructs they each have where they store and file all their memories away for safekeeping.
This was all very weird, and not at all what I was looking forward too, so I was relieved when they broke up the night long dick-waving to actually go out hunting. Two of ‘em left for town to get more beer for the NEXT session. And the other two went out hunting.
The hunters quickly encounter the first spooky bit. A man, apparently lost for days in the woods, stumbles upon their cabin calling for help. He’s got preliminary frostbite and a nasty red rash climbing up the side of his face. He’s also enormously bloated, and, when the two psychics help him inside, they discover another symptom. He belches and farts a lot! Adding enormously to the humor and sophistication of the group, he fits right in, and the two psychics give him a bed, and then start opening all the windows. As they do so, they see a regular flood of wildlife going by the window. Mountain lions, bears, rabbits, birds, many bearing signs of the rash afflicting their flatulent houseguest. Really, don’t get me wrong, as much as I poke at the main characters and King’s tendancies, I rather liked the film up to this point. Spooky and mysterious, no real sign of the cause or the reason behind the events.
Meanwhile, the two others are on their way back from town, but wreck their truck when they veer to avoid a woman in a parka sitting in the middle of the road. (Spilling the beer! Precious beer!) Once they recover, they discover to the delight of the scriptwriters that she is similarly in need of a massive dose of Gas-X. They build a campfire, prop up the nearly catatonic woman, and the non-alcoholic starts trudging the miles up the road towards the cabin for help. The alcoholic dowser breaks open the bottles and goes to town.
Now we’re off, into the breach. Or out of it, as it were. Back at the cabin, our two psychics see some helicopters going by and attempt to signal them for a medivac. They receive, instead, a notice that the area is under quarantine, and they aren’t to move. Going inside, they discover that their flatulent friend has moved from the bed to take up residence in the bathroom. More worrisome, however, is the large red bloodstain he left on the covers. In the words of Squee...”Gasp! Dookie blood!” In fact, there’s a blood trail. (Want an even more disgusting perspective? The hideous odor was likely the signature of putrefaction. What they were smelling and laughingly joking at was the scent of a perforated intestine rotting and quickly falling apart inside the man’s gut. All together now....EWWWWWWW,)
Forced to break down a door slick with dookie blood, they find their visitor on the can, shat to death. Tumbling off the can we get a quick shot of his ruined sphincter (hey, I draw attention to it because the film did. Once again...ewwwwwww.) and discover that he left a last load for us in the can.
And this one’s alive.
Despite the all-male cast, they decide that this is one good time to leave the lid down, and one of them sits on it (to keep the critter in) while the other runs for duct tape. Long scene short, the man on the can makes a bad choice and gets hisself munched by something that looks like a cross between a foot-long turd and a phallus. (Eeeeeewwwwwwww.) The critter splits open like a hot-dog bun for about four inches down the front underside, revealing rows of teeth like a lamprey, and it’s rear end unsheathes three hooked grapplers like (please excuse the lack of the appropriate metaphor, this review is graphic enough already) Two menacing eyes and a body consistency like a slug complete the picture.
I was with them up to here. I said to myself, “this could be a good picture, so long as they don’t go down that route. That would just be a cop-out.”
Well, the other guy gets back with the duct tape too late, Mr. Shit-slug crawls out, and we meet the daddy.....
It’s an alien.
Fuck.
I frickin’ HATE aliens in horror flicks. The entirety of many horror films is confrontation with something inexplicable, then gradual discovery of the menace until it’s explained. More often than not, though, “it’s an alien” suffices for all the explanation they plan on giving you. “Why did the children of this town disappear, only to reappear with strange brandings?” “It was aliens.” “What happened to all these cows?” “It was aliens.” “What’s with the ass-related obsession in this film?” “They’re aliens.” Most of the time it’s just assumed that the motivations for alien actions are either self-evident, or meant to forever be unexplainable to mankind. So they never bother TELLING US ANYTHING. They could add anything they liked to the alien’s actions in this film, and just explain it by saying “because they’re aliens.” “Each victim demonstrated extreme flatulence, signs of a red rash, explosive diarrhea, and were MISSING THEIR LEFT EYE.” “Why the eye thing?” “Because they were ALIENS. They needed to do it. Duh.” (As with everything, there are exceptions. Alien was a great horror flick, as it examined the alien in a cause-effect manner, working it out slowly, rather than just taking a list of characteristics and attributing it all to “being an alien.”)
The alien then breaks down in to a red fog and pours into the remaining psychic.
Back at the campfire, drunken asshole is talking a blue streak at the catatonic woman. It’s then that the last “Stephen King” bell is rung, ‘cause he starts relating his childhood.
Suddenly, we’re in “IT”.
Every group of King “childhood friends” gets together the same way. There’s the group that all grew up together, and then there’s the outsider that they happen upon when he’s being bullied and, through their combined efforts, save him. Thus is their friendship forged through standing up to the high-school quarterback. Unfortunately, here, due to the length of the film, we’re not really allowed the necessary time to develop the characters, but instead we get long monologue segments clumsily cobbled together in a vain attempt to summarize each character or important point as we come to them. This really is badly written, and every event feels hurried. Actually, what it feels like is really good, really well written important scenes from the book trimmed down almost to incoherence. It’s here we find out that “Duddits” is a childhood friend from a local “retard school” who the kids rescued from bullies trying to make him eat dog shit. (What is WITH the anal focus of this flick?) Duddits speaks weirdly and with a pronounced lisp, saying things that seem nonsensical, but later turn out to be highly significant. This is a nice trick in text, where one can flip back and check it out, but in film it just doesn’t translate. It’s another McGuffin. Duddits also has extraordinary dowsing and precognitive abilities, and other psychic feats that he teaches to the kids. As kids, they all chip in to make the film’s namesake in what I’m certain is a solidly central point in the book, but in the film it feels ancillary...or badly explained at best. (I’m guessing the finger-twirl dowsing trick they all use gets tied into the shape of the dreamcatcher.)
When we return to campfire asshole, his ward has had a similar ass-plosion, unbeknownst to his drunk self, and the alien turd attempts to bite his dick off while he’s taking a piss. He has to burn it off. (Oh THANK YOU Stephen King.) Yup, everything in this film is aimed between the waist and the knees. (You know...that really doesn’t make much sense. One of the other newborn critters snapped through three fingers in a single bite, but this one’s having trouble with a....”soft tissue organ”? Musta been the runt of the litter.)
Back at the cabin, the dust-infused psychic absconds with a snowmobile and begins heading south. All the while, the psychic is conversing with the alien (the alien has an outrAGEous English accent) that has possessed him. In a particularly clever portrayal, the conversation takes place inside that mental construct “warehouse” they were talking about before. It’s structured like an antique circular records room, and the great sperm-shaped alien is milling about in there looking for information that’ll help him. The psychic’s mind is holed up in a side office where he’s safe with his most prized memories (including everything about Duddits) but is unable to stop anything going on outside. The spore-filled psychic stops off at the campfire to visit with the dickless asshole, who is forced to use the dowsing trick for him, then gets done away with.
Remember everything I told you I hated about alien flicks? Well, there’s more. The army shows up. NOW we’re in “ID4”. Suddenly the plot is summed up uber-quick when our remaining psychic is rounded up with the surrounding populace. Everyone is infected by the rash ( from the cabin we find out it’s a growth, not a response to the ass-huggers), which we’re told is called “The Ripley” after Sigourney’s character. (Heh. Cute.) Anyway, it turns out that this is pretty much old hat. Aliens have been landing on earth for 20 years, trying to infect the populace at large, but the army’s been hunting them down and killing them via a “scorched earth” policy.
We learn this from a big action/CGI scene where they blow the crap out of the crashed alien ship that started all this. (Why is it that aliens can navigate the interstellar spaces, but can’t avoid hitting a planet?) It’s told to us by the headliner of the film, Morgan Freeman, who, for some reason, has eyebrows done up to challenge Don King’s hair. Seriously, what the hell is going on with those eyebrows? They’re like three inches tall!
I really don’t know what went wrong with Morgan Freeman in this film. I know he’s a better actor than this. His performance here is just pathetic. He gets a long string of monolouge lines at his first appearance that establish, in rapid-fire, badly-telegraphed sequence A) He’s a badass, B) he’s experienced C) he’s set in his ways D) he doesn’t like people questioning his authority E) he likes John Wayne F) his new recruit trusts him implicitly and G) he doesn’t like anyone else getting a word in edgewise and H) they call the little aliens “shitweasles” and “assblasters”, which effectively sucks the scary right out of them.. Blerg. Coredump ‘cause the film’s too short.
Basically, from this point on, it’s the X-Files. (imdb defined it as an Action / Horror / Sci-Fi / Drama / Fantasy / Thriller / War ) Complete shift in film style. Freeman, it turns out, is a bit too intent on killing anyone affected by the Ripley. His second-in-command is convinced by the psychic to turn over command to another general, and then sneaks out of camp with the psychic to go hunt down the spore-riddled friend. Freeman turns rouge to get revenge on his second in command, turns in a fake-out performance to his superior that wouldn’t fool ANYONE, and takes off after them in a helicopter. Alien works out that someone has prepared the psychics for his arrival, and heads towards a major water supply to contaminate the US with its wiggly offspring. (Alien offspring progression: eggs, Little tadpoles, ass-blasters which lay the eggs, fully grown and spore-form.) Remaining psychic gets a “call” from his possessed friend installed deep in his mental warehouse (funniest part of the film...ruined if I explain it). On the way to the final confrontation, the psychic picks up.....Duddits!
Duddits, it turns out, is dying of....well, something that uses chemo, ‘cause he’s bald and anemic. Worst of all, he’s Donnie Wahlberg, the New Kid on the Block. Poor guy, as if being born retarded wasn’t bad enough. (And it appears to be genuine retardation. He’s really too social to be autistic or another developmental disability and as severely disabled as he is.)
So it all comes down to a faceoff at the dam between...well...everyone. The second in command and the first in command, the final psychic and his friend, the monsterous, ogre-sized head alien (how did all that fit inside one guy?) and the anemic, bald, Scooby-doo lunchbox toting Duddits. Fortunately, Duddits turns out to be an alien too, and they explode in an act of mutual discorporation. (Alien meets anti-alien.)
Summary? Screwy, hole filled concept. (Duddit’s is an alien...but despite living for twenty years on Earth he’s less able to live among us than the newly-introduced aliens. If he coulda’ predicted everything, couldn’t he have arranged a better situation than letting it get down to the wire like that? Hell, just plant a remote bomb in the foundation of that wheelhouse with a twenty-year timer?) Bad writing (script, not book. Can’t speak for the book) made many of the characters sound like they were reading off the back of a rental case. Aliens as a cop out, not once, but twice. (Had Duddits been something other than an alien, it woulda been cool.) King’s pet psychics. Below-average CGI. Badly developed, and almost entirely unnecessary “childhood events” angle that had little to offer beyond what King has used it for so many times before. The denoument of “planning everything out in advance” was pretty clever. (Too elaborate to detail, but everything Duddits did as a child led up to the final battle.) Shift from horror to X-files episode midway through. Morgan Freeman acting badly. Segments of the story that could have been cut out completely with little loss and for considerable tightening of the concept. It’s possible that the film is a lot better from having read the book, but frankly, I don’t see how. Other than a joke or two, and the nice (if utterly disgusting) suspense from 20 to 70 minutes in, and some of the tricks the head alien uses on his trip southward, I can’t recommend this film. Not terrible, just not good enough to justify the time. But, again, I’m biased.
Now, the point where I really coulda’ helped y’all.
Rob Zombie has succeeded in making a film-length music video with very little music. His horror flick, “The house of a thousand corpses” has been a fandom rumor for over five years now. The underground buildup has been fermenting so long that by the time I actually went to see it, I felt like I was going to see an old Frank Castle production. (The theater showman who pulled stunts like selling “fright insurance” in the lobby.) Reportedly disgusted by the frivolous, pop-culture makeover that mainstream horror has undergone in the hands of the “Scream” franchise and teeny-bopper crap like “I no longer really care what you were up to last summer” Rob Zombie vowed that he was gonna make a horror film to guide us all back on the right path. Drag horror off the red carpet, away from doe-eyed starlets fitting a ghost story into their 90210 worlds and back into the gutter of muck, mud, gore, and unknowns where all the great revolutions in horror have come from. To some degree, he’s right. Flicks like “Scream” “IKWYDLS” “Valentine” et. al burned through their innovative potential damn quick. The plot twists had all been done before, and they were pretty much rehashes of older, lower-budget concepts. Going for the “cat in the closet” jumpy-startle horror, or the “please don’t find my hiding place” horror instead of trying something a little more in depth is fairly typical of the no-risk-taking-when-there’s-a-lot-of-money-at-stake mentality. More looming and nebulous, more inventive, insightful...something beyond the standard “Ten Little Indians” whittling-down of the cast. Influential, inventive creations for horror seem to spring forth in inverse relation to their cost (The Blair Witch Project, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or have to be imported (The Ring). On the other hand, the irony of his project is that we were inundated with “18-36” slasher flicks because of Scream when he started to make his movie, but the flick lost funding and milled about for years while he tried to find more producers. Now that he’s found the money to finish it, all the targets of his ire have evaporated (excepting maybe “Final Destination 2”), and the original titans of gore (Jason, Michael Meyers, Freddy Krueger) have been resurrected.
Does this de-legitimize the film? Maybe a little. But still! Come on! It’s ROB ZOMBIE for cryin’ out loud! This product just has “cult hit” written all over it! With his position as a rock-horror icon, how could he miss?
Where do I start?
Well, first off, it’s the genre. I was kinda hoping for a zombie flick. I mean, it’s Rob Zombie’s “House of a Thousand Corpses” right? That’s about as certain you can get without putting “zombie” in the title. Well, it’s not. Not really.
It’s hillbilly horror.
Oh dear lord.
Imagine, if you will, a cross between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance. Got your attention? Good. Now, it’s not as bad as it sounds...yet. This alone isn’t enough to sink the film. TTCM was, and is, a somewhat clumsy classic that established an entire sub-genre. Deliverance...well, it was certainly influential at least. See, no one really knew what to expect from this flick. It could go in just about any direction, any mood, any subject. Slasher gore, budget-Hitchcock suspense, psychedelic-arty, who knows? When the only other work you’ve seen by a guy is his music videos, what are you going to derive your expectations from?
Well, the whole mood is set for us right at the start. We see a black-and-white TV ad for “Captain Spaulding’s House of Horrors and gift shop with complimentary fried chicken,”
And then move on to the decrepit structure itself, a modified gas-station and mini-museum with a falling-apart clapboard ride next door. The owner, a bald, bearded man in smeared greasepaint (Captain Spaulding is a clown. The character is always either in full greasepaint, or has just wiped it off, leaving him pale. He’s never in outfit, though, opting for novelty T-shirts instead.) is deep in discussion with the janitor over the various merits of trading porn with “retards” when two badly masked men burst in. (One in ski-mask, one in a children’s monkey mask.) They try, unsuccessfully, to hold the place up. The Clown responds to their demands with a string of obscenity. “Fuck your sister! Fuck your momma! Fuck your grandmomma!” The janitor recognizes one of the gunmen and begins taunting him with an obscene rhyme. Suddenly, another, shorter man in an enormous mask bursts in screaming and hatchets one of the gunmen with an axe. Pulling off the enormous mask reveals what I can only call “whitebread degeneracy,” a lumpy, stocky, malformed whitebread backwoods wonder. Capt. Spaulding pulls out a revolver and blows the other gunman away. Placing an enormous clown shoe on the chest of the hatcheted gunman, he signs the fellow off with “But, most importantly, Fuck YOU.”
Well. I STILL have no idea what to expect. Uber-violence, OK. More casual profanity in the first three minutes than in most whole films, OK. But what KIND of movie is it? Still pitch black out there. Hell, just look at Capt. Spaulding. The name “Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer” was Groucho Marx’s character from “Animal Crackers” (I think). The actor is Sid Haig, whose resume needs to be seen to be believed. (http://us.imdb.com/Name?Haig,%20Sid Jackie Brown? The original Foxy Brown? Boris and Natasha? DAMN.)
The title sequence that follows is pure Rob Zombie. Low-budged Rock Horror video stock, and suddenly we’re in every horror flick ever made. A group of four college-age kids on a cross-country road trip. They stop off at Capt. Spaulding’s just as it starts getting dark and are enthralled (well, the two guys are) by the kitschy grotesquery Capt. Spaulding’s set up in his mini-museum. (HEY! I own that little clown bank! It’s still at home sitting on my old dresser! Push down on the lever, and it eats the coin in its hand.) After some prodding, the guys convince the girls to go on the adjacent ride, a carnival ride/tour so primitive that the cart they’re in has to be pushed. Spaulding narrates their ride, which, surprisingly enough, is mostly true. They pass a display on Ed Gein, the necrophiliac who served as a model for Norman Bates and the family from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Another display is on Albert Fish, a noted child murderer, cannibal, and masochist of almost unbelievable degree. Then there’s Mr. Quail, or “Dr. Satan,” the fictional display and, at first, apparent centerpiece of the film. Dr. Satan is a figure of local legend, a Mengele-like surgeon whose horrible experiments prompted the locals to lynch him and hang him from the old oak tree. Of course, the next morning, the body was gone!
(Whoop, never introduced our victims. The four kids are 1) Jerk, 2&3) Couple w/ jealous girlfriend and 4) lone girl. Moving along...) Jerk, worked up by the ride that everyone else though was pretty lame, convinces the troupe to go find the ol’ hangin’ tree. They get directions from Capt. Spaulding, and head out just as the rain starts (naturally). Then they pick up a hitchhiker. Then the car breaks down. (Piling on the clichés a bit thick there Rob? No matter, it works thus far.) There’s a bit of run-around with the hitchhiker taking one of them to go get a towtruck, but eventually everyone ends up at the hitcher’s spooky old house(TM) while the...remarkably helpful...family members set about fixing their car for them.
So we get to meet the whole family. The family’s pretty...disparate. Frankly, it looks like some kind of cosplay conglomeration of characters. Utterly random character concepts all thrown in together. We’ve gotten enough spooky “knowing glances” for the audience to realize that the family is horror central for the flick, so we all know they’re planning something evil, (Oh yeah, there’s also these scratchy, off-color film stocks inserted randomly into earlier segments where some of the characters explain why they kill people. And the brother up in the attic tormenting battered and bleeding girls tied to chairs...but that could mean anything...) but the group is just all over the place. The hitcher is a sorta “country valley-girl” with a bubbleheaded, gum-smackin’ attitude to go with her cowboy hat and low-riding jeans. (The actress is Sheri Moon, apparently she tagged along from all of Rob Zombie’s music videos.) The grandfather is a gizzled old man who sits and deludedly watches “The Munsters” on TV, hurling insults at the characters. The mother is a nervous, kind of vacant buxom vamp dolled up in black lace (and a fairly famous B-movie actress, Jeanne Carmen). The three brothers are, A) the delusional religious/political balding taxidermist in the attic, B) the enormous WWF-stature tow-truck driver in a bearskin, and C) the burn victim named “Tiny.” See what I mean? It’s like everyone was told to show up in their best “scary hick” outfits, and they wrote script segments based on the outfits. Random plot threads and events all over the place, and nearly none of them are followed. The burn victim, we’re told, was burned when their father went crazy and tried to burn down the house. That’s the last we learn of it. At dinner, everyone is required to wear masks while eating dessert, since it’s the night before Halloween. And that’s the last we hear of it. After that, it’s SHOWTIME! Everyone’s suddenly at a makeshift stage in the back, where grandpa goes into an obscene standup routine, and “Baby” (the hitcher) puts on a mask, a gold leotard, and mimes along to a Betty Boop record.
OK, what exactly is going on here? On any level? OK, I’ll allow that the rapidly increasing weirdness of the events might be considered unsettling. Like being pulled into participating in a backwoods Christmas pagent where you discover the script has a few fairly important alterations. Like being offered a strangely-unidentifiable meal by warm, hospitable strangers, but still, these events are just frickin’ odd. Dumb odd. “Come see our vaudeville show?” What? Are they carny folk? It feels like Mr. Zombie had ideas for scenes, many going in completely different directions, and he just decided to stitch them all together as best he could. There’s very little interconnection, rhyme or reason between scenes. There’s no central theme, and no driving force. Hell, Grandpa is hardly in the rest of the film. He practically vanishes.
It just gets more nonsensical from here. Our gold-leotard Betty Boop comes on a little strong to the attached roadtripper, and his girlfriend nearly slugs her. Fortunately, their car is fixed, and they start driving away. However, they get to the yard’s gate, and the driver has to get out to unlock it in the driving rain. Three of the spooky scarecrows propped up in the area get off their supports and attack. It turns out to be the three brothers, strangely absent from the Vaudville routine. Everyone is beaten unconscious and dragged back to the house.
OK, why? What was the point of that? If they wanted ‘em, they could have beaten them up in the house. Or drugged their food. Or knocked ‘em out one at a time when they were separated earlier. Hell, they wouldn’t have had to fix the tire then. Instead, they distract the kids and set up an elaborate ambush after A) letting the kids go B) fixing their car and C) standing in the rain for fifteen minutes, only to have to D) drag the bodies back to the house anyway. “Cause they enjoy it” is the only excuse I can think of, a more likely one being “Cause we filmed the capture scene before we wrote all the preceeding scenes at the house.”
What follows could only be called one -
The talented Mr. Ripley vs. the Incredible Mr. Limpet.
2003-03-31 09:42:41
(Weird the things that pop into my head on occasion…)
(Oh, and anyone who plays FPS with me needs to go here: http://www.eightland.com/snipe.html)
So, last time I brought you heavy subjects mixed in with the trivial comings and goings of my own boring little life. To make up for harshin’ everyone’s high, this time I’ll just deliver a bunch of reviews and cut into the backlog here. I should warn you, though, that I just had three mini chili-cheese dogs from Krystal for dinner, so this entry might be abbreviated with little warning. No signs of danger yet….
I’ve been truckin’ along on the box set still (although I’ve restricted myself to borrowing a single DVD (two movies) at a time from Jimmy’s supply), but I’m gonna start off with something that finally worked it’s way onto HBO last night, mostly ‘cause it’s the most recent and fresh in my head. Only problem is that I’ve been denied my source material.
See, the movie is “From Hell.” I kind of wanted to catch this one in the theaters, but I didn’t get around to it for a few weeks, and then I got bad reviews back from my friends on it, and then it disappeared from the cinema.
So, what, exactly, is coming from Hell?
Letters.
The title of this film is actually phenomenally clever. “From Hell” was first an enormous project assembled by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell whereby the entire story of Jack the Ripper was told in comic book format. Alan Moore plunged into this project so deeply, you can almost see him delving over reams of paper, covered in ink up to his elbows like the blood on a surgeon’s smock. See, what he did is one of the most comprehensive studies of Jack the Ripper that I’ve ever encountered. (Although, admittedly, I’m no scholar of the subject.) Once he had every fact, every police report, every detail about the lives of each individual person ever involved in the case, he delved into it again…into the myth that has sprung up. Into the piles upon piles of theories, mysticism of the age, and even ghost stories told a hundred years after the events, and again worked them all together into a cohesive whole. Then he went, one last time, plunging himself up to the armpits into this project, and invented a single story wherein to tie it all together.
So he solved the Jack the Ripper murders? Of course not. Don’t be stupid. What he did do, is write an enormous tome of historical fiction that followed all the known facts, and sewed it together so brilliantly it presents an entertaining “maybe.” A “maybe” that had been told before in the annals of detection, but one marvelously crafted, unlike most other stories of the Ripper that have come up over time.
See, I’ve always had a problem with Jack the Ripper. He’s sort of the legend who was never there. Jack the Ripper is a figure of such mythic quality, that he’s almost entirely impossible to define. Nothing that could be imagined would match the enormity of the legend without somehow trivializing it. To postulate, as is often done in horror fiction, that he was a vampire stalking the streets is too pedestrian to consider. Making him a monster or an alien or a daemon of some sort robs the concept of it’s horror, because, at it’s core, these things really happened and the horror comes from realizing that this was another human being who was somehow capable of such unimaginable acts with cool, quick precision and such strange purpose. And yet, to call him “just a serial killer” denies the legend its strength as well. He only killed five people in the end (there’s a postulate about a sixth, but most concede the MO was too different) which places him far down the ladder by modern standards (or even the standards of his time…there were elderly women who killed as many men as he did prostitutes). Jack is…Jack. There’s never really been a equivalent in all the time that has passed for the scope and size of the legend that arose out of Whitechapel in 1888. Try to visualize what you think he looked like in your head. There’s the popularized view. A gentleman in shadow with a tall top-hat, a cane in one hand, and a long Victorian-era surgical knife glinting in the other. A cloak that obscures his frame….but what else? Is even that an appropriate silhouette? Try to look at his face. Is it the serene look of a man going about horrific work with a workaday expression? The lust-filled drool of the most sadistic pervert ever known in anticipation of another conquest? The foam-flecked, red-eyed gape of a crazed maniac? Which is most frightening? Of the hundreds of letters that came into the police station during and after the killings, all supposedly sent by Jack the Ripper, only two are believed to have actually been from him. (The first, mostly because he sent it with a package containing half a kidney he took from one of the victims, and the second through matching to the first.) In that letter (uh…I think…I’m having trouble tracking down the original source), he said that “One day, men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century.” Now that we’ve made it out the other end, we can look back and see that his words were remarkably prophetic. In what other way could a single man have rung in the unimaginable slaughter and horror of the first and second world wars. The starvation and experimentation that killed most of Europe’s Jews. The death of hundreds of thousands of men in the No-Man’s Land between trenches. To be followed by the depression that drove most of the western world into the slums that Jack stalked. Even escaping from that, we found ourselves trapped in the unrelenting suspense of the cold war, and the capacity for death unimagined until then.
The truth is that the fact Jack was never caught is the most essential aspect of the legend. He forever remains the one who did it and slipped away, committed crimes so heinous that we still wonder at them over a hundred and fifteen years later, and then vanished like he’d never been there at all. That’s the problem with all the Ripper stories and variants out there. At their most essential core, they have to break the legend to tell their story.
Alan Moore is the only person I’ve encountered who could tell the story, and break the legend in such a way that it still held most of its wonder…most of it’s mystery.
And then Hollywood had to come in and fuck it up.
This review is going to be especially difficult, because my father is borrowing my copy of the collected “From Hell” right now, and the story is so enormous and elaborate that I’m likely to remember it wrong. Plus, most of the facts I know about the Ripper case comes from the 42 (Fourty TWO!) pages of endnotes at the back of the “From Hell” book, four columns per page, 8-point type. (Moore was damn thorough.) In order to do this properly, I’m going to have to do a bunch of jumping between A) the actual facts concerning the murders in Whitechapel, B) the story Alan Moore wrote and Eddie Cambell drew, and C) the movie. I’m probably going to fuck it up, but here we go anyway.
The first big difference is the fact that Moore’s story isn’t a “whodunit.” Frankly, it couldn’t have been. The motivations behind Jack are so elaborate and convoluted that they couldn’t have been “suddenly revealed” without handing out everyone a scorecard at the end of the story. In the graphic novel, played out in Eddie Campbell’s signature “Ink-scratchboard” style (not literally, but the book is entirely black on white with an occasional splash of red, and the characters are drawn with a scratchy, minimalist style that looks like a reverse-scratchboard) we see the entire story through Jack’s eyes, and the eyes of Detective Abberline. We know by the second chapter who Jack is, which makes the story all the more horrific, since we see the killings as he sees them, with his reasoning and motivation.
For the Hollywood version, they tossed out everything except Abberline’s perspective, and they messed with that royally as well, making Jack’s identity a mystery, and pretty much screw it up exactly how I said, with the ending being nearly incomprehensible for those not familiar with the story.
Do NOT read the following if you ever have any intention of reading this most excellent Graphic Novel, or if you want to preserve even the small element of surprise that isn’t overtaken by confusion by the end of the film.
_____________________________________________
In Moore’s story, Jack the Ripper was Dr. William Gull, a head physician to the queen. Fairly early in his career, he became inducted into the elite secret society of the “Freemasons” an organization made of a select few highly educated and influential men that holds sacred certain esoteric secret ceremonies whose meaning has been called everything from silly to satanic. The Masons remain an institution today, (the highest levels are admitted to the “shrine”…and are thus “shriners.”) although apparently greatly altered from their heyday wherein they were suspected to be the controlling influence behind shifts in the market, determining promotion and advancement, and even shifting the course of international politics through the weight of their membership. (So great was their apparent control over world events and the respect they fostered from leaders of industry and business, that another organization, the “Illuminati” was formed by Albrecht WeiBhaupt in the mid-1800’s in Germany with the sole intent of infiltrating and controlling the Masons the way the Masons “controlled the world.” It’s apparently died out long ago, though.)
The events in Whitechapel (again, in Moore’s story) began with an unfortunate affair between the afflicted prince Edward and a prostitute in Whitechapel that resulted in a baby. The real disaster was that A) Edward was seeing the girl under an assumed identity, B) While under the assumed identity, he MARRIED the girl…a Catholic…in a Catholic church. And C) the child, born of a Catholic marriage, was an heir to the throne of ANGLICAN England. To say that this wouldn’t do was putting it mildly. In the eyes of the Anglican church it was an offense as unforgivable as it was irrevocable, since the Anglican church was where the English throne gained it’s “divine right” to rule. A child born of a Catholic marriage would tear the country apart on both a theological and secular level. (Anti-Catholic sentiment at the time was right up there with Anti-Semitism.) Better that everyone concerned disappear and pretend it never happened. Problem is, the prostitutes, four friends of the unfortunate girl, couldn’t forget it. The local thugs had set up a protection racket and were leaning on all the whores in the area for an unreasonable amount of money, plus, they were looking for someone to make an example of. The girls decided the only way they could raise the money for the thugs would be to use what they knew about Prince Edward’s scandal to blackmail some cash from the crown, threatening to go to the tabloids with what they knew. Queen Victoria, caught in the difficult position of being unable to act against the whores for fear they’d squeal the story to the police, and unwilling to let the honor of the Empire rest in the hands of four Whitechapel streetwalkers, turned to the Masons for aid in cleaning up the mess her son had gotten into. The Masons, in turn, went to Dr. Gull.
Dr. Gull, however, saw in this an opportunity greater than the elimination of a threat to the crown. See, he’d suffered a stroke a few years prior, and witnessed a vision of the great tripartite God revered by the Freemasons. From that time, he had become something of a mystic…but not as they’re commonly understood today. The damage to his brain had inspired him to…create something through this job. Any attempt to describe exactly what Dr. Gull was doing through his actions as Jack the Ripper would be a clumsy imitation on my part. It has to do with mysticism as it was conceived of in the Victorian era, channeled somewhat oddly into the modern day. Gull has what could be called “religious experiences” during the killings, as he tracks each girl down and does away with them. (There was one girl who was a mistake, #3, the victim who only had her throat cut.) The climax of Moore’s story comes as Gull works on Mary Kelly, the fifth victim. Gull’s work on her takes the entire twelfth chapter of the book, and is remarkable for its craftsmanship, as Gull drifts through delusions and visions while he works. At the end of it, the brutality of the killings so offends both the Queen, who will no longer hear any excuses, and the Masons, who hold their own trial of Gull. Detective Aberlain, meanwhile, works diligently at his own policework, and slowly manages to put the entire picture together when he befriends Mary Kelly. Aberlain is distraught by Kelly’s death, but finally catches Gull purely by accident when a fraudulent psychic, angered by a backhanded comment from the doctor, leads Detective Aberlain to Gull’s house as a petty revenge. Everyone is astonished when Gull confesses. The Masons move to protect their society and whisk Gull away as an invalid (he had another stroke shortly thereafter) through their political pressuring, and the crown covers up everything that remains. Aberlain retires to the coast. There’s a final, truly strange sequence in the book that ties all of the mysticism together with the legends and ghost stories about Jack, when Gull dies and ascends. Again, any attempt to describe it would ruin it.
So, how much of this is true? Surprisingly, a bit more than you’d think. Prince Edward’s scandal was entirely fictitious, although his demeanor was…a little weird…to say the least. There have been a number of occult theories about Jack in the past, based on a few elements of utter WEIRDNESS surrounding individual murders. Most surprising, though, is the fact that a psychic did, in fact, lead police to the front door of an upscale Dr.’s house, saying that his powers had led him to Jack the Ripper. Little else is known, but the home was in Dr. Gull’s neighborhood, the records specifically mention the individual being a reputable, aged surgeon, and the Dr. was held for questioning by the authorities for a time. Everything else, especially Aberlain’s uh…”friendship” with Mary Kelly is entirely invented, but the details of the killings and the events surrounding them have been followed meticulously. The stuff concerning the Masons? Uh…well, apparently there’ve been a few “tell all” books published from which Moore got most of his info on the ceremonies and mysticism surrounding the Masons. Several of their “secret ceremonies” have been widely published enough that an interested researcher could find bits and pieces of it easily…the problem is that the slant imbued on this info almost entirely obscures it. People who would reveal Masonic secrets are almost always people with an axe to grind against the organization, and thus show them in the worst possible light. Satanic, conspiratorial, whatever you like. The biggest mystery, in my mind, is whether the society maintains their somewhat odd traditions because they legitimately believe in them or out of a quaint respect for antiquity. Sort of a “Lodge of the Water Buffalo” for the rich and elite.
So, how does the movie version measure up? Well, to be honest, I liked the graphic novel way too much to be satisfied by any movie adaptation. For one thing, the physical length of the book precludes condensation into a 2-hour movie. The graphic novel really does take its time and cover EVERYTHING, every theory, every nuance, every day-to-day step of the Whitechapel investigation. Further, Eddie Cambell takes his sweet time through each page of the story. Just walking down the street could last a page or so, but it all serves in the pacing of the story.
Anyway, if I could just pull the absent tome of newsprint from my hands here, I could start telling you about the movie. We start off with Johnny Depp as Detective Aberlain (but then, you already knew that), doping himself up in an opium den. (The tarry little ball he sets a-smoldering is opium in a pipe.) See, in the movie version, Aberlain isn’t an excellent detective faced with a near insoluble case, he’s a stoned psychic investigator who gets premonitions of the killings before they happen in a very David-Lynchian dream sequence. He spends a good bit of his time smoking opium, drinking Laudaninum (a solution of opium extract), and absinthe (neurotoxic mild hallucinogenic alcoholic drink). This just started off on the wrong foot for me. In theory, all that was done is a combination of the Detective Aberlain and the psychic who eventually led him to Dr. Gull, but if you think about it, it’s actually rather an insult to characterize the detective who had to handle the Ripper case as an opium-fiend who depended on visions to catch the crooks rather than a highly intelligent detective using deductive reasoning. This is a real person we're talking about here. To put it directly, it’s like having James Bond shoot up before going on a mission. (Yeah, yeah, Sherlock Holmes…whatever.) Further, it’s pointed out that Aberlain is one of “those” detectives, the Fox Mulder of the bobbies, who gets called in for his keen insight into the weird and esoteric crimes. Great. Next we’ll find out that Jack is an alien.
(Aside…that is the only time I’ve ever seen anyone light the sugar cube on fire when drinking Absinthe. Look, you put the Absinthe in the glass, then you pour water over the sugar cube, then remove the rest of the cube, and drink the mixture. If you’re gonna just dump the cube in the glass, there’s no point to the Absinthe spoon, and you’re not gonna throw the cube away if you drip Laudanum on it AFTER you poured the water. Someone just got silly there. Not a real good idea to mix opium and fermented wormwood anyway.)
Fortunately, all of this was completely cancelled out by the appearance of Peter Godly, the Detective’s right hand man, and the guy who rousts him outta his stupor in the opium den. See, the actor who plays Peter is Robbie Coltrane. You most likely know him as Hagrid from the Harry Potter films, but to me he’ll always be “Cracker,” a criminal profiler from PBS’s “Mystery” series, and a favorite of my mom’s in that program. He played a sort of “Spider Jerusalem of Scotland Yard” in “Cracker,” busting up a gambler’s anonymous meeting with an impromptu game of war and describing in quite visceral detail the motivation for a young “Bonnie and Clyde” couple of thrill-killers. Coltrane is back in his element with this flick, playing a copper once again, and a good foil to Depp’s Aberlain, who drifts through most of the film in a stoned Keanu-like haze, coming out only once or twice to assult his superior officer.
By the first few minutes, I began to get a feel for the way the film would be shown. Rather than go for the slow, elaborate deepening of the London shadows into the hellish world of Jack, they’d drop us into an almost surreal hyperbole of the dark, dank, grimy alleys of a “Dark City” or even “Neverwhere” inspired version of London. It’s really a nice effect, although hardly documentary. Perhaps the best effects of all occur early on in the film when the cameraman catches a blazing sunset reflecting and searing throughout the black silhouette of London bridges, buildings, and coachmen. At that point, it truly does look like a London “From Hell,” the sky ablaze and everything burned black as soot. Unfortunately, especially for something with as complex a plot as this, we start loosing story time and structure to this artistry. Everything starts moving too fast…you’d never guess that ten weeks went by between the first and final killing.
Dr. Aberlain is brought in to investigate the first victim, Martha Taban. Jack killed her, and then, as the mortician put it, “removed her livelihood.” (Memory failing me a bit…can’t say if that’s true or not.) (Important note, all of the butchery Jack did was done posthumously. The women were killed by slitting their throats with a phenomenally sharp blade, after which they either bled to death or suffocated on their blood. Jack may not have been a sadist, but more of a necrophiliac.) I won’t go through all the steps of the investigation, as it really wouldn’t serve any purpose, but I will touch on some of the odder points.
Most of the motivation for Jack remains in place, with a few key alterations. Most prominently, the prostitutes do not attempt to blackmail the crown, but were, in fact, witnesses to the Catholic marriage ceremony, and are thus being eliminated to prevent them from talking, even though they don’t realize they know anything.
In an attempt to address the scope and breadth of the source book in exploring the other “possible suspects,” the film starts jumping around a bit to apparently unrelated scenes. In one, we get to see a trepanny lobotomy carried out on the prince's "wife", presumably to shut her up. In another, Aberlain’s boss suggests the possibility of a “red Indian” from the visiting “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” as a suspect. Several times the thought that it might be a butcher is brought up. (The “Leather Apron” leading to this theory was a tabloid rumor that ran unchecked among the populace…as well as mixing with anti-Semitic sentiment of the time to target Hasidic Jewish butchers.) In fact, there seemed to be an effort, mostly during Aberlain’s report to his boss, to fill up the dialogue with as many racist insults as physically possible. Bit of an overkill, actually. Ended up sounding like forced period language rather than naturally flowing colloquialisms. They must have been attempting to gain some academy acclaim by introducing controversy. (The irony of having to insert controversy into a film about Jack the Ripper is laughably absurd.)
At another point, we’re introduced to John Merrick, who plays a bit part in the Graphic Novel. John Merrick is better known as “The Elephant Man,” a man suffering from an exceedingly pronounced form of elephentitus, enormous uncontrolled bony growths on his skeleton warping and distorting his entire frame, from which he derived a livelihood and unusual degree of celebrity in Victorian England, displaying his affliction first in sideshows and then for medical examination under sponsorship of the Royal Acadamy. In the novel, Moore gets the timeline just about right (by the Whitechapel killings, Merrick had been touring for quite a while, not “weeks”), and postulates that Dr. Gull, being a famed physician, would likely have attended to the famous Elephant Man in his duties for the crown. Later on, Dr. Gull works Merrick into his insane mysticism, having his carriage drive by the Royal Gardens late at night when Merrick is out, so that he and his first victim might follow the Indian tradition of “appealing to Ganesha (the Indian elephant-headed God)” at the start of such a marvelous and ambitious undertaking. This all dovetails nicely into the novel as a kind of “well imagine that!” for the period. In the film? Merrick is put on display in a society gathering, and Aberlain snuck in. There’s no reason for Merrick’s presence, and it’s never explained away, because it couldn’t have been…again…without a scorecard.
Any rate, while hunting a surgeon down to help him in his case, Aberlain encounters Dr. William Gull, who, as those of us who have read the graphic novel know, is the real Jack. During the interview, Dr. Gull proposes a “Listen knife” as the likely implement of death. (A blade named after a field surgeon who had to perform amputations rapidly with little anesthetic.) This really is the most likely tool used by the actual Jack, or possibly a fish-boning knife of similar dimensions. Further, the fact that a grape-stem was found near one of the bodies (possibly two…memory failing) is a recorded fact in the case, although the emphasis on them in the film is vastly over-exaggerated. (Yeah, they were expensive, but they weren’t friggin’ jewels. They could be bought for a rather exorbitant cost at a regular fruit stand.)
By now, we’ve gotten to the second killing, Annie, and the arrangement of coins at the victim’s feet in a pentagram begins to suggest occultic motivations to Aberlain. This is another “weird but true” factor in the case that has puzzled and intrigued investigators for the past hundred and fifteen years.
One of the more excellent bits from the book comes up now, and is unfortunately fumbled by the film. It’s the first letter. In the book, Gull dictates the letter to his coachman, Nedley. Asking Nedly how one begins a letter of this sort, Nedly responds “Dear sir..” “No no, Nedly. You begin with the address. ‘From Hell.’” This was the actual return address that Jack the Ripper put on the letter he sent along with half a kidney from the second victim, and it’s a hella cool thing to title both the film and the book, for those half dozen of us out there who saw it and got it on the first try. In the film? Well, the scene is sorta there, although he’s not dictating a letter, he’s just lecturing Nedley, trying to stiffen his resolve. This kinda ignores the phenomenal media effect Jack participated in. The letters that the police got from hundreds of people claiming to be Jack was unprecedented in scale, and led to controversial theoretical ramblings on the adoration of the public for such an obvious monster. Much of the newspaper scooping and speculation on the killings form an essential part of how the events were seen by the world at large, and it’s a shame the film had to drop it so completely.
Now we start to deviate wildly. The film sticks in an involvement by the “Special Branch” of the government…sorta the Secret Service and a proto-Scotland yard. Aberlain suspects that they’re hiding something, and breaks into their records. Jack the Ripper, meet Mission Impossible. *Groan.* Apparently there just wasn’t enough intrigue built into Jack’s story to keep the scriptwriters busy. Hell, Cracker even provides us with an exploding barrel as a distraction. Can’t have a blockbuster without any explosions. This entire plot thread was invented for the film. (IIRC.) Oh joy, we also get a bit of indignant social commentary inserted via Heather Grahm, acting in the part of Mary Kelly and representing the dignity of Victorian-era whores everywhere. (Something this Rollergirl isn’t entirely unfamiliar with.) The romance that springs up between her and Depp was in Moore’s story, but was entirely his invention as a plot device. Nonetheless, the film pulls it so far to the forefront that Grahm gets second billing. What about Ian Holm? The guy who frickin’ PLAYS JACK? He’s down in the small print with the soundtrack.
Anyway, my pissyness aside, Aberlain unearths most of the story when Mary Kelly recognizes a portrait of Prince Edward in a gallery. (Storyline completely off the tracks here…and never really gets completely back on.) Then we wander off into some truly incomprehensible scenes unless you have at least some familiarity with Masonic ritual as we visit the conferences of this secret society. Jack catches and kills one of the girls, and then manages a second later that night. (In actuality, it’s almost certain that the third victim was a mistake or an interruption of some sort. The prostitute had just hours earlier been released from the police station where she’d been held in the drunk tank, and had given an assumed name to the officer when she was arrested. The name? Mary Kelly. (IIRC…really straining here.)) Number three only had a slit throat, and nothing else. Number four, though, received a more thorough going-over. In the most thoroughly inexplicable detail of all the killings, a message was left with the fourth body. Chalked onto a wall above the body, in neat, tidy handwriting, was the message “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing.” What the hell that means has never been figured out. The weird spelling “Juwes” is the source of most of the connections that have been drawn to Masonic influence in the killings, but only through esoteric reference to the origin myths of the society. There’s no photographic record of the writing, because an officer on the scene ordered it be washed away before the crime scene photographer got there.
Depp, having assembled everything, goes to confront Dr. Gull. Finally, we get some honestly good acting. And it’s not an easy part, either. Ian Holm, who everyone now knows as Bilbo Baggins, manages a nice sort of passively-defiant speech in the face of Depp’s confrontation, but Depp gets conked on the head by a special service agent who’s assisting the good doctor, and whisked off into an action movie.
Everyone get ready. There’s a high-speed CARRIAGE RIDE through the streets of London, resulting in a great sparky wrek-up that Depp crawls out of. Just like “Speed” at about 1/4 rate.
Finally we come to Mary Kelly. What the film does at this point is inexcusable.
It saves her.
Mary Kelly does not die in this film. Instead, she decides, on the spur of the moment, to go back to Ireland. Instead, a French whore who had been sleeping with Mary (believe it or not…not added for titlation. There’s evidence that two of the girls had been sleeping with other women in their “off the clock” free time, mostly seen through complaints by her neighbors.) gets the axe instead. This is simply ridiculous. For one thing, their hair wasn’t even the same color. In quick summary, so I can get back to the ranting, Aberlain, knowing that he is being watched, cannot contact Kelly and tell her how he loves her, because the agents of the crown would correct their mistake, so he is forced to close the case and let the Masons take care of Gull, which they do through their own trial and end up lobotomizing him. So we end with a bittersweet happy ending. And all they had to do was totally screw up both Moore’s story and the original facts of the case.
Now, the real reason that saving Mary Kelly is such an absurd move for the film to take is because Mary Kelly is the reason we remember Jack at all. There had been killings before. The thugs and the toughs that ran the protection rackets were especially fond of disfiguring prostitutes to make their point. True, Jack’s work was far and above them in scope and skill, but not so far as to generate the legend we now have. Mary Kelly, however, was different. For one thing, it was the only time that Jack invaded a private apartment to do his work. This afforded him privacy and time he’d never had before.
When her body was found, the policeman on duty described her as being “in pieces.” That really doesn’t do it justice.
The things that were done to Mary Kelly do not bear repeating in these pages.
It is without question that they could not have shown this scene in full for the film. Most astonishingly, however, is the fact that it IS shown, in its entirety, in the Graphic novel. It consumes an entire chapter. During Dr. Gull’s work in the 12th chapter, he has a series of revelations, prophetic visions, and flashbacks. It all works remarkably well in a completely surreal manner, and actually acts as the defining point in Moore’s take on the legend, which, again, I’m not skilled enough to try and do by memory.
It also forms the primary reason for seeing the film. Terribly truncated though it is, Ian Holm turns in the only really good performance of the film as he is beleaguered and beset by the visions while he works on Kelly. (The body of Kelly is shown for exactly one frame in the film, everything with Ian Holm is shot up from the body, towards his face.) He lectures to an invisible classroom of surgeons on the properties and mechanics of the human heart as he frees Kelly’s from her. Holm then places the heart in a teakettle and swings it out over the hearth fire. When it bubbles over and explodes the scene actually feels like a small glimpse into true Hell, instead of absurd or laughable as it must sound from my description. The difference is Holm’s intensity, and the way his eyes become almost all pupil while he works. (The heart of Mary Kelly was never found. Moore theorized that Jack incinerated it in the hearth, where the fire had been stoked to the point that the teapot hanging over it melted into a lump of metal by the time the police found the scene.) Really, I thought I was going to be disappointed overall with this film, but this final bit actually made the mediocrity of the rest bearable. This is a film with only one gem of extraordinary worth embedded deep within the final fifteen minutes, but it is quite a gem.
So is “From Hell” worth seeing? Hrm. If you are a lot quicker on your synapses than I am, and think you can both handle and appreciate the conspiracy spelled out at the end, then it leans just slightly into the plus side. If you’ve read the graphic novel and don’t come to the theater expecting anything remarkable, it’s worth it just for the “final interaction” between Dr. Gull and Mary Kelly. In fact, since you’ve already read the story, you only really have to watch that bit to get all the good out. Fans of Johnny Depp aren’t going to care one way or another if it’s a good film, though he kinda sleepwalks through a lot of this one. All in all, an average film, pretty artsy, with a real gem in the end.
Next up? Why yes, another review, even after that monster.
This time it’s another from the ten film box set. This one’s another Italian slasher flick called “Pieces” from ’82. (Actually faux-Italian…as it’s Spanish-made) It’s a little odd, because the tropes and patterns here are so similar to other Italian horror flicks I’ve caught a hold of, I’m starting to see massive conformity across the entirety of Europe’s genre. More likely we’re dealing with a Dario Argento imitator, although a slightly lower budget, and not quite as artistic a director. (For one thing, there’s no “death by modern art” in this flick.) I’ll hit on the similarities as we go through.
We start off fourty years ago with the single most terrifying prospect in the whole world for young boys. That of your mother walking in on you masturbating. ‘Cept it isn’t magazines in this case. Young boy is assembling a pornographic jigsaw puzzle. (Something that, in itself, strikes me as remarkably European…although it could just be a fad that came and went through the US too.) Mom walks in and throws a fit, overturning the kid’s room in search for more dirty pictures and swearing to burn the lot. The kid, frustrated at this coitus interruptus, apparently gets the oedipal structure backwards and does his best Lizzy Borden impression. Which we get to watch in detail. Afterwards, he runs off and grabs the rest of his father’s tool kit and puts his long days in Shop class to good use. Then he finishes up the jigsaw puzzle, spattered with his mother’s blood. When the cops come a-calling (summoned by a neighbor who says she knows that the Father of the family is “away in Europe”.....wait....isn’t this Europe? Then why is everyone so badly dubbed?) the kid hides in the closet, and claims that he hid there when “a drifter came in and did this.” The kid turns in an oscar performance, and his mom’s head backs him up when they find her in the other closet. Freud woulda had fun with this kid.
Right around this point, it should be fairly evident what kind of flick we’ve got on our hands, if the title didn’t spell it out sufficiently for us. It’s another grand guignol “yellow cinema” Italian flick. (They’re called “yellow” because cheap paperback “penny dreadfuls” of the era in Italy were typically published with yellow covers.) We’re looking at gore, gore, more gore, and lots of screaming, helpless women. Uh. This is actually perpetuating an uncomfortable feeling I got with the Dario Argento flicks that I borrowed from Mike and Shelly a while back, that the Italian horror films of this era really are violently misogynistic. I know that the PC-intensive right-thinking groups out there would like us to believe that of the entire genre of horror, but this is the first time I’ve encountered an entire sub-genre that seems honestly obsessed with knocking around, emperiling, and cutting up women exclusively, almost to an erotic degree. Unlike the classic American slashers, there’s no “final girl” here, the one who gets away and manages to defeat the villain all on her own when everyone else has been slaughtered. (The “final girl,” it’s usually said, shows up first in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”) There doesn’t even appear to be a possibility of that here. Women have to be rescued by men, if they’re lucky enough to have developed a personality worth saving. I’ll hit most of the points of honest sadism and let y’all judge for yourself.
The flick now jumps ahead 40 years. Presumably the kid got off scot-free from his matricide and is now planning to start again, for we see a pair of gloved hands fish out that old puzzle-box, still smeared with the dried blood of 40 years ago. (Gloved hands of the killer seen working at the plans for his next spree = very Dario Argento.) The hands also sort through a bunch of photograps of young women with “Xs” across them, and what looks to be the mother’s clothing, post killing. We then flash to a young co-ed out skateboarding around campus to HORRIBLE low budget music. She says hi to everyone, generally acts like a ditz, and then runs straight into a six-foot mirror being moved across the sidewalk in classic vaudevillian routine. See, the kid’s mother broke a mirror during her tantrum. I guess it’s some kind of trigger…although the film never bothers to actually draw some sort of connection between the killer-to-come and the girl’s smashing into the mirror. It’s just sort of an event left hanging out there for no reason at all.
The gloves, cheating horribly by keeping blocks of puzzle pieces together, fish out the head of the nude in the puzzle already fully assembled, and moments later we get the first killing, accomplished rather cleverly by sneaking up on a pretty young student with a RUNNING CHAINSAW and decapitating her…her head bouncing off like a volleyball while her body twitches and fountains out blood. Never let it be said this flick doesn’t get started in a hurry.
A couple of cops show up to investigate the murder (the head, naturally, hasn’t been found) and they start with the headmaster, Prof. Brown of the Anatomy Department, and a groundskeeper. More than anything, this flick is starting to look like “Catholic Schoolgirls in Trouble,” as the girls gather in the halls and gossip about sex on a waterbed, tease the Anatomy teacher about where the “pectorals” are, and are constantly dragging any available male “member” off to a private liason. In other words, college kids fuck like bunnies, which tells me that either this flick wasn’t made by people who have been through college, or I’ve been picking all the wrong schools.
Now that the gloved hands have a firm grip on a head, they attach a few more pieces to the puzzle, moving down the figure’s anatomy. (Sort of an inverse Dr. Frankenfurter? Making the perfect woman in just seven days?) The next young co-ed who isn’t appreciated by our killer for her mind, sets up a naked liaison with her boyfriend in the darkened school pool. Naturally, Romeo doesn’t get the message until late, and she has to suffer the indignity of death by poolskimmer. Well, nearly-drowning by poolskimmer, followed by death by pruning. (She gets de-limbed with a chainsaw…get it? Not a big enough budget to see this one all the way through, but we do get a look inside the killer’s meat locker.) The first one on the scene is the huge drooling idiot of a gardner who’s dumb enough to pick up the chainsaw left behind and get himself framed, but smart enough to realize it right before the cops bust in, and toss half of them into the pool.
The cops, deciding that, if there’s one thing this film is missing it’s nubile young women in trouble, assign an undercover policewoman to the job. She befriends one of the suspects, the boyfriend who didn’t show up till it was too late (and Screech, star of “Saved by the Bell”), and promptly begins exposing him to danger. Only problem is…the undercover policewoman is a world famous tennis champ! Oh, those nutty policewomen.
For the arms we get a couple of long peeks through the killer’s stalker-cam and panting peep-show cam as he scopes out an aerobics dance class (dancing, naturally, to horrible early 80’s synth-pop). Call me crazy, but I would’ve thought you’d want the dancer for her legs… Eh. To each their own. We finally get more of a look at the killer, and, sure enough, he’s wearing the Argento uniform of long trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat. He also manages the deft feat of sneaking a chainsaw onto an elevator by HIDING IT BEHIND HIS BACK. This guy should be a magician. He seems to be pretty good at making things disappear. (He also appears to buy chainsaws in bulk…) Anyway, the young lady looses any prospect of playing the piano professionally, but the killer doesn’t finish her off, just leaves her there, bleeding to death in the elevator. (Arms tumbling all over the floor.) She lives all of 30 seconds, long enough to be declared “still alive”…then she dies, imparting us with nothing. (See what I mean? That just seems unusually sadistic, even for a slasher flick.)
Meanwhile, the undercover policewoman makes herself useful by being jumped in the dark by a crazy, homeless Jackie Chan. (Which turns out to be a false alarm…just the Kung Fu teacher. Uh…yeah. Whatever.) This leads to a long, mysterious scene in the dark, where people in dark clothing do mysterious, unseen things in the dark, mysterious night.
Yeah. Can’t see a fucking thing. There was a white skirt wandering around in the darkness, but I have no idea who it was, what she was doing there, if anyone was following her, or where the hell she was. She ends up stabbed to death on a waterbed, though, so I must’ve missed SOMETHING. That part is a little better lit, and we get all the shrieking detail as she’s repeatedly stabbed and, worst of all, the waterbed gets punctured. (The killer manages to stab her through the base of her skull and out through the mouth, which is a pretty difficult cut, I can tell you…) I can’t for the life of me figure out what she was grabbed for. Torso was grabbed last time. Legs come right after, which means it was probably....oh ick. This guy is micromanaging a bit more than I thought. One of the few remaining girls at this school (who still haven’t been told anything by the faculty despite the fact they must’ve noticed four classmates going missing) takes a shower in disgust at this development, but doesn’t get the timing right for her next scene, and only gets half dressed. Thus we get a lot of bouncy-topless fleeing from the chainsaw man. Particular attention is paid to the point where the young girl looses bladder control, and we get a good long look at her corpse (after she lost a few inches from her waistline) propped up in the corner of a restroom stall. (Hello....poster-child for misogyny in horror films.) The under cover cop uses her amazing deductive abilities to stand outside and scream “bastard” at the top of her lungs. Meanwhile, Mr. Gloves tries his mom’s shoes on the feet of his conglomerate, coagulating corpse.
Long story short (too late!) it turns out the one with a piece-wise Oedipus complex is the dean. The undercover cop goes to speak with him, and he drugs her coffee with a paralyzing drug so he can dice her up while still alive. (Presumeably for spackle to shore up the leaky bits.) Yeah, the women in this film can’t do anything right. Fortunately, all the cops show up while the good professor is still putting down plastic on the furniture, and rescue the girl (after dropping her immobile body rather unceremoniously) by blowing the dean’s head off. Screech then discovers the conglomerate corpse the Scooby-Doo way, by leaning on a wall and having a NUDE CORPSE FLY OUT AT HIM. Apparently she’s been out of cold storage for a while, as the limbs are all turning black and curling at the seams, desiccated, dead tissue peeling off the face, etc.
Then, of course, everything gets mopped up, the cops send the silly policewoman home, and bag the piecewise corpse, leaving everyone to go home and resume their everyday lives. Except, of course, for the part where the corpse’s arm SPRINGS OUT FROM BENEATH THE TARP AND GRABS SCREECH BY THE CROTCH. Blood-soaked jeans and lots of really high-pitched screaming.
What the hell was I supposed to make of that? Is this some kind of clever comment on the misogyny of the film, or just a further sadistic perversion? I’m betting on the latter, although I’m not really sure I want to know.
And finally, the third review. Yep, one more. Mostly because it’s been waiting two weeks, and was a really dull one besides. There’s one more, as I snuck into a showing of Stephen King’s “Dreamcatchers” today, but that would take too long tonight, and I’m already tired. Besides, that first review took a lot longer than I thought it would.
Hopefully, this’ll be a short review, ‘cause I really don’t want to break the wordlimit just for these three reviews. The third flick is a 1977 piece, also from the “Fright Night” box-set, entitled “Good Against Evil.” No, not “G v E,” that was the short lived TV series. This was a short-lived pilot. We start off with a typical 70’s horror theme, pregnancy. I blame Rosemary’s Baby, although I’ve never actually seen it. We get all the typical stuff. Black cat following around, mysterious, drugged, forced delivery in a mostly deserted hospital, surrounded by nuns. The mother, trying at first to find her child, decides to flee instead, but is startled by a cat’s shadow into an Exorcist-tumble down a flight of stone steps. Exit mom.
The child is taken by spooky paternal figure and, in the presence of a large group of followers, offers her up to an idol of satan.
*Yawn*
Oh, sorry. You know a good way to tell if you’re dealing with people who’ve done their homework? If their pentacle is UPSIDE DOWN or not. The five-pointed star has a long history entirely independent of the Christian religion. It dates back to secret societies of philosophers and intellectuals in ancient Greece, and possibly further. Why? Because it’s a clever little self-perpetuating geometrical figure. If you draw a perfect pentagram (by the up, down, left corner, horizontal, right corner sequence) it forms an equilateral five-sided figure inside. Connect each interior point to every other interior point, and it creates another pentagram with another five-sided shape inside, only upside-down. Repeat ad-infinitum. This perpetuation of geometrical figures was illustrative of some philosophical principles of the ancient Greeks, so they adopted it as a secret signal of membership in the group. Christianity came along much later and adopted it as well. (It may have come through Jewish tradition, but I would be completely guessing to say it was.) Unless I’m very badly mistaken, the five-pointed star inside a circle (pentacle) is symbolic of Mary Magdalene. When ONE of the points is UP. Satanism is a remarkably unimaginative occult religion, and merely inverts the symbology of Christianity. Upside-down cross, upside down penacle (TWO points up…also evocative of the horned, bearded visage of the devil), black mass with all the colors reversed, bible verses recited backwards. Pretty predictably boring, really. There’s revisionist theory that adds to this, but it’s still pretty much just an inversion. The Pentacle is sort of a special case, since the single-point-up version is often used in magical literature as a protective ward. That’s because it’s supposed to be calling on God’s power to keep evil contained. You wouldn’t call on the Devil’s power to keep a daemon from ripping your spine out…the Devil would be notoriously wishy-washy about keeping his own pets at bay.
Anyway, this group manages to get the pentacle wrong-end-up throughout the whole movie. I supposed I should have expected as much. They also used the Vulcan “live long and prosper” devil hand-sign, instead of the much more popular and “with it” version used by metal rockers. Then again, this is ’77. And this is one of the many “Satanist” genre of horror flicks that bloomed around then. Eh. We join the child as a grown up woman (of course) working in a dressmaker’s shop. While she’s working, someone manages to smack into her car with his van. Turns out it’s this show’s hero, who managed to sneak onto the set despite being an actor named “Dack Rambo.” (Hank Slagjaw! Beef Thunderhips! Big McLargehuge!...sorry, MST3K flashback.) He apologizes profusely to the young spawn of Satan, manages to get her car fixed in about an hour, and then starts nagging her for a date. She rebuffs him five or six times, but finally relents. As stupid as it might sound, this is actually rather well written, cheesy but enjoyable flirting. Dinner, boating, picknick, and the classic shouting from rooftops, and horseback riding, etc. etc. Then, of course, the trouble starts. We learn that the young woman (Elyssa Davalos, Nikki Carpenter from MacGyver) has lead a totally charmed life, funded through college on a scholarship, sponsored by a mysterious patron, and that all her former boyfriends croaked on her before the relationship could get serious. Of course, this is the cult’s doing. It turns out that they’re planning on using her as the bride of the daemon Astaroth (bet you thought the Soul Caliber character just had a made up name, huh? Check here: http://www.deliriumsrealm.com/delirium/mythology/astaroth1.asp ), and for that, it’s gotta be the old non-committed virgin pathway again.
Well, the old black magic goes into action once again, when, during the mentioned horse-riding, Rambo’s horse is attacked by a Jaguar who wasn’t payed enough to actually appear on-screen. The woman’s secret escort, a cult member who’s been keeping an eye on them, rushes out to help the girl, and gets his head trampled by the panicked stallion. (The horse, not our hero.) This shows terrible coordination on the part of the devil. The girl gives the old-fashioned “I’m no good for you” speech while getting undressed, in the tub, and back out again in about 45 seconds. He talks her out of it, and they start looking for a church to get married in. Unfortunately, the altar is consumed by cold and darkness at the would-be-bride’s approach…generally regarded as bad luck for any wedding. The priest at the chapel sends away for an expert on daemonology, showing that he actually read the script for that day and was trying to avert his later, off-screen death.
Jessica (the girl)’s old boss gets a visit from a very displeased head evil priest, who kills her for her incompetence (at keeping men away from the girl) by having stagehands throw a lot of cats at her from off-screen. Then he goes and hypnotizes Jessica into moving out and flying to New Orleans. (Naturally… they start in San Fran because of all the sinful secularism and allowance of all the…you know…”gay” people, then we fly off to the big easy ‘cause everyone and their mother practices the satanic voodoo. Typical 70's logic.) There’s a problem, though. Though he can make Jessica forget Rambo, Rambo’s love for her is blocking the spells they need for Astaroth to impregnate her. So they decide to posess the daughter of his ex to distract him from finding Jessica. The logic here is a bit puzzling, but the child draws a bunch of symbols while in a coma…which get published in the newspaper…which are identical to the symbols that Rambo sees…when he finds his priest dead and the alter desecrated. Long shot, but he goes anyway and is surprised to find that the girl’s mother is.....KIM KATRELL! Wow! An actual star I recognized! The exorcism expert sent for previously shows up mysteriously in Kim’s house (honey? Something you wanna tell me?) and performs a budget exorcism on the little girl, climaxing with a Frank Drevin-style fight with a pillow.
Then the movie ends.
‘THE HELL? Nothing is resolved. In the end, Rambo and the exorcist drive off into the sunset in search of Jessica. I guessed at the time, and I now know, that this was actually just the pilot for a series that never got made. Kind of an inverse Highway to Heaven with a wandering priest.
So is this flick worth hunting down? HELL NO. It commits the worst sin a horror flick can. It’s BORING. And, except for the fact that it all ends unresolved, it’s PREDICTABLE. Be glad they never made a series out of it. Little gems of MST3K like this could only come out in box sets, because no one would ever pay for them otherwise. It hearkens back to the days of the 1970’s where evil was ever sinister and dumb.
That’s all sports fans. Now I sleep.
- Hitori 2003-03-23 23:52:32 I know everyone here hopes for the best.
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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