Of Pickaxes, Popped Skulls, and Party Tapes Lost to Time...

The only downside of getting back on the writing track is that it definitely takes time away from sitting down and enjoying films as I have become accustomed. Since one is decidedly more beneficial to my health than the other, so be it. I do not need to keep up my ridiculous two-plus films a day pace of the past few years. (On a good open day, I could even get in anywhere from six to nine films, depending on length.)

Yes, it is a new era for me, though really, I have merely reverted back to my ways of the first few years I was in California, when I was actually eager to be here, start over my life, and cut loose with the verbiage. Let's call it a bold new second edition of an old era. However, I am still watching films, just not at the same relentless pace. As proof, here are some capsule reviews and/or personal musings regarding a few that caught my attention recently:

My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009) [non-3D version]
Dir: Patrick Lussier
TC4P Rating: 5/9

I have a nagging suspicion that I have never given the original My Bloody Valentine film from 1981 a truly fair shake. To be honest, it was one of the few of what I would term the "original slasher bunch" that really gave me a good scare, chiefly through use of the creepy mining mask and pickaxe, but I used that knowledge against the film. Instead of embracing it like I normally would when a film delivers on its promise to be bloody and frightening, I stepped away from it, and I am not sure why. Another thing in its favor would be that it had more plot than the normal slasher film did in those days, but again I used this to turn my favor from it. And once again, I am not sure why. Several scenes from the film have always stuck with me, as has its memorable catchphrase said evilly by the trailer announcer as the ad's tension-fraught editing builds to its conclusion: "Take your pick!" Yeah, that was pretty effective.

It was inevitable, of course, that MBV would get remade, and I guess it was equally inevitable, given the eye-popping gore, that it would come out in 3D. I did not see it in the theatre, and so I have only now watched the 2D version of the film, but one thing has not changed in the 28 years between the versions, no matter the number of dimensions: a coal-filthy surplus of plot and characters. This new version is even more overloaded than the first. They seem to have taken the plot of the original, shaken, stirred, and shuffled it around a bit, twisted some details, and then added even more plot on top of it. If you are looking for the definition of "convoluted" to be summed up by a movie, you have it here. Here, having so much story becomes a detriment because most of the main characters are either so monumentally dull-witted or blind to their environment that you can't believe they even made it past third grade.

I need to talk about Jensen Ackles, and I am sure that I am about to infuriate some longtime Supernatural fans with this. I don't get him. Last year, I finally decided to check out Supernatural myself, and waded about chest high into the first season before I had to stop. I know the show, according to what I see online, is supposed to get AH-MA-ZING a few seasons into it, but I need to get past the first season. And one of the things keeping me from doing it is Ackles, whose performance I find understated to the point of being proclaimed one of the living dead. I assume he gets better in later seasons of the show, or maybe the fandom is simply made up of people who like to watch pretty muscle-boys fight monsters. In My Bloody Valentine, he fits the role he is given I suppose, especially since his ability to not impart any believable emotion at all helps to keep viewers guessing as to his guilt or innocence in the murders in this film.

Maybe the film is better in 3-D, as my friend Aaron mentioned to me the other day, and I just need to get the Blu-ray and watch it that way. Maybe I am wrong about Ackles, and I will get to a later season of Supernatural and find that I really like the guy and I just needed to let him grow into that role. I am pretty sure that I need to revisit the original MBV film and give it a grown-up viewing to establish a modern opinion on it. I don't know. Maybe I will do all of these things. Or maybe I will just take my pick.

Pop Skull (2011)
Dir: Adam Wingard
TC4P Rating: 6/9

So, I went bonkers, as I sometimes do, over a movie a couple of years ago called You're Next (and seeing it again recently, justly so). I noted at the time of my initial viewing the name of the director, Adam Wingard, and it wasn't long before I encountered segments he had directed in the anthologies The ABCs of Death, V/H/S, and V/H/S/2. None of these struck me as much as the grim fun I encountered in You're Next, and to be truthful, didn't really strike me as anything special at all in comparison. Earlier this year, at the behest of Aaron, I dove into a recently produced film called The Guest, starring Dan Stevens and Maika Monroe (whom I had was marvelous in It Follows). I went in knowing Wingard was the director, and really hoped it would at least live up to the promise shown in You're Next. Which it did. While I liked The Guest a little less than that film, and a little less than Aaron as well, it was a very enjoyable horror/action effort that manages to both complement many classic '80s action flicks and also raise the genre artistically. (As I write these words, my brain is compelling me to watch the film again right away.)

In my estimation, following the twin successes of You're Next and The Guest, Wingard has become someone worth watching in regards to future productions. But what about his earlier work? Reviewing his filmography, it turns out I had already seen another of his feature films, A Horrible Way to Die, which garnered some praise and citations on the film festival circuit a few years ago. I found the work underwhelming, and definitely not remarkable enough to make me remember the name of either Wingard or the film's screenwriter Simon Barrett. (It turns out I should have, because Barrett was also the clearly talented screenwriter of the other two films.) I recall that I gave Horrible a middle of the road rating (a 5 out of 9), and never made the connection that the same guys made You're Next one year later. I will probably need to revisit Horrible as well.

And now I go back further in time in Wingard's resume to Pop Skull, before Barrett was in the picture putting words down for Adam to turn into crazy pop culture totems. The title Pop Skull is the truest definition for what this tiny budgeted wonder can do to your psyche should you approach it openly. The story of Daniel (played by Lane Hughes), who spends his days in his home popping pill after pill and having increasingly horrific visions, Pop Skull is like a modern version of The Trip, though this one feel so much more real and terrifying than the bullshit hippie fest that Roger Corman and Jack Nicholson (the director and screenwriter, respectively) foisted upon the world. 

Daniel's visions of murder and mayhem could be many things: repressed memories of something monstrous he has already done, psychic projections of something he is going to do in the future, or just complete, drug-addled hallucinations. The biggest problem though are the spirits/ghosts that seem to inhabit his abode, haunt his every move, and won't let him get his wits about himself. Wingard doesn't want to make it easy for you either. The editing here is manic to the point of distraction at times, with the film flitting from style to style, from pill montage to hallucination to memories of a girl with a catnip-for-guys hairstyle and back to more pills so quickly it once again points to the film's title. For a film whose budget has been reported as a mere $2,000 and is, given the setting of a druggie shack, fairly dingy looking, there are some beautiful images to be found in Pop Skull, amongst all of the screaming, sweat, and blood. This may be a cult film of the future.

Blood Cult (1985)
Dir: Christopher Lewis
TC4P Rating: 4/9

I remember running across the VHS box of Blood Cult many a time in the horror sections of my hometown's video stores back in the late '80s. I had memberships at six different stores (and that's not even counting the memberships for renting from the rival grocery stores I frequented, where the horror content tended to be somewhat tamer), and while I was always looking for new titles or something to thrill me, somehow coming across the truly cheesy looking cover of Blood Cult just never got me excited about renting it. And so I passed time and again.

Twenty-five years or so have passed, and I have just watched Blood Cult for the first time. Was I right to skip it? Yeah, it's pretty bad, so my instincts were probably right. Should I still have watched it back then? Yeah, I should have, because for all its badness, it was kind of fun to see it, and the film is also kind of a piece of history. The story behind the film is that the producers wanted to skip theatrical release altogether and just shoot for the profits of putting the film out directly on video. The other thing they did was actually shoot it on video, thereby saving a lot of film costs as well. This was novel for 1985, and Blood Cult often gets attributed as the first of its kind: a film both shot on video and then released and marketed as a straight-to-video title. In fact, they used this status as a selling point for the movie. "Why would you want to watch something on film in a theatre," I can almost hear them say, "when you can watch something with half the quality of a daytime soap -- and with even worse acting -- on video?" Ah, marketers...

There is a campus, showering coeds are being dismembered, and it all could lead to some sort of "blood cult" out in the woods, hence the title. Who is behind the killings? The town sheriff, who looks like how I imagine Roger Ebert's grandfather to have appeared, wants to know, and it is going to take scene after scene of mind-numbing exposition and chats in small town diners to help him figure it out. I will give the film credit for not holding back on the gore. There are extreme closeups of facial disfigurements on victims in dumpsters and a severed, gushing forearm lying in a bloody shower stall. The second victim in the movie gets beaten to death with the decapitated head of the first victim. (I think that is what happened...) Blood Cult goes for the true grue, even if it ends up being sort of dull. It's utter shit, but its wicked little heart is in the right place. I could see this film being pretty fun at a party. And since it is likely that is exactly how I would have employed it had I rented Blood Cult back in the '80s, there is something to be said for that.

The Boogieman's Day Out (and Its Immediate and Future Consequences)

I had meant to spend a lot more time writing this weekend, honest. I had been hoping to carve out a couple of days where I just dig deep into a subject or two and create something at least halfway worthwhile for the Pylon. But, you know how it goes... the Halloween spirit is in the air, Jen suggested that we go see Red (or is it actually RED? It is meant to be an acronym.) after she got off work, and I immediately thought, "I could also go see a horror movie before she gets off work!"

Which is what I did yesterday, and the rest of my weekend plans went to hell. Today I have had no drive to finish my Halloween decorating, carve the pumpkin that has been sitting on my table for over a week, do the dishes, knock out a couple of short pieces for work (we are wrapping up our latest soccer magazine, for which I am the associate editor and main writer), clean up a bit around the apartment... and write. I barely have enough resolve this day to pen these scant few  paragraphs.

I let the pressure of what I planned to have done by this evening get to me, I get despondent, and I just melted into the couch today and watched movie after movie (four and one-half to be exact).  This in itself is ultimately not a bad thing, as I will likely end up writing about many of the films that I have watched today. Rather, I will intend to write about many of these films. This is the problem: my intentions versus my end results. The ratio of post ideas to finished product had actually stayed quite steady through the first three years I wrote on the Pylon. I was a firebrand, and I could not stop myself from writing if I tried. With the reversal of the past two, almost three, years, that ratio has dwindled to near nothingness.

As the Posies sing, "There HAS to be an upside," and there is in this case. My day out set up at least three posts for the coming week. The horror film in which I chose to indulge was Wes Craven's return to horror directing, My Soul to Take, and I had no choice but to see it in 3-D. I also had no choice as it was the only horror film showing at the theatres in Downtown Disney, where I was to meet Jen for Red (RED), so if I wanted to see a horror film on this day out, this was going to be it. Everything about going to this film ending up pissing me off to the extreme, so the only happy result is that I will get to vent on it later this week.

Before the films, though, I visited the Compass Books shop next to the theatres with the intent to grab a couple of horror-related books and toys, and maybe some comic collections if I felt like it. No go on the comics (don't you bring your "graphic novel" talk around here, whiners) -- there was nothing that really grabbed me, but I did pick up a couple of interesting volumes, upon which I will likely expound once I have read through them.

The book that caught my eye yesterday wasn't in the shop when I last visited a few weeks back: Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever by Joe Kane aka The Phantom of the Movies. (Ugh...) I have another book by Kane, The Phantom's Ultimate Video Guide (released in 1989), which for me was neither Ultimate nor much of a Guide, and has been largely used through the years to merely prop up whatever books are on the shelf to the left and right of it. (To be fair, I probably should revisit his Guide, but it truly has held little influence over me since I first bought it.) His Dead book comes with the complete original screenplay by John Russo, and since every party involved with the first great modern zombie flick has bickered over the years about rights and the various myths surrounding the production, I am going to wait until I have read the damned thing until I try and surmise just what Russo's involvement entails.

The other book I grabbed, which did catch my eye on that previous visit, is a sharp, gruesome-looking, glossy product called Horror Movie Freak by Don Sumner. I have already begun perusing this photo-loaded volume, and while I don't wish to spoil that which I am going to write about soon, but I am surprised by how much this book is hacking me off so far. Yeah, for horror fans, who are naturally inclined to emulate the tendencies of ravens, it's bright and shiny and makes you want to grab it in your beak and fly home to devour it. And Sumner does go to great lengths to try to qualm the immediate fears of horror freaks (his term, used endlessly throughout the book) who might be missing some of their favorites from his lists and categories. The problem is their logic for not including certain things and excluding others backtracks on itself time and again. It's nicely put together, though, and real purty for a book chock full of gore. Probably blows up real good, too...

As I said, more on all of this later in the week and beyond as we move closer to Halloween. For now, I am going to back to sulking and fretting in the dark...

Yeah, I Sat Through It Again: A*P*E (1976)

A*P*E (1976)
Director: Paul J. Leder
TC4P Rating: 2/9

"Imagine. Almost 36 feet tall... wow..." - Freighter mate on ship transporting A*P*E across the ocean at start of film.

You are going to run into this film on just about any "So Bad You've Gotta See It!"-type of site or book... and yeah, it is... and yeah, you gotta see it. Its fecundity is only matched by its stupidity, but in its tattered, zipper-up-the-back way, its actually quite clever. But only if director Paul Leder actually meant the film to be this bad. Could there be a chance that this chintzy, decrepit South Korean production is actually the most brilliant spoof in the history of movies? A film that not only mocks giant ape movies and current movie trends, but does it in the way that most common citizens "think" of or expect giant ape movies to be? Is the entire film a complete put on, and to a large degree, a cynical attempt to flip off the audience (which the big simian does at one point, though story-wise, he is actually flipping off the attacking military helicopters) and separate you from your money at the same time?

Hard to tell, but I'm banking on it just being a dumb, bad example of low-budget inept filmmaking. Not just a stumbling attempt to remake King Kong (and definitely tied to the fact that Dino de Laurentiis was legally filming his own remake around the same time for release in the same year), all the while mocking the big guy within the film to show the distance between the two apes, A*P*E also takes aim at a couple of other cultural phenomenons of the 1970s.

In the opening sequence of the film, after the ape (who is never given a proper nickname in the course of its action -- a supreme mistake on the part of Leder -- ALWAYS name your monster...) tears apart the bathtub-grade ocean liner in which he is being transported from his unseen and unremarked upon island home, the ape then immediately, without any buildup or reason, battles a giant shark to the death. Well, it would be "to the death", but the giant shark had clearly been dead long before the cameras started rolling, and the guy in the ape-suit has to do a lot of splashing and thrashing about with the shark's body in the shallow waters in which he is standing to make us believe even for a second that water is still flowing through the shark's gills, thus allowing the fish to breathe. Which the ape-suit actor absolutely fails at accomplishing. But there, in the first two minutes of the movie, Leder has not only invoked the imagery of King Kong in the viewers' minds, but has also included Jaws, of which there was still quite a mania in the media at the time.

The other cultural reference? This is never mentioned -- at least, I have yet to run across it -- but while many sites (including IMDB) note the title as Ape, every video copy I have ever run across (and every film guide as well) has given the film's proper name as A*P*E. Since the film was made (and takes place) in South Korea, to me it seems to be quite obvious that the title is a reference to one of the biggest TV shows of the era (or any era, for that matter): M*A*S*H, the show (and book and movie) with military stars between the letters of its titular acronym and which also took place in Korea. If, indeed, this is intentional and meant subliminally, then it is by far the most subtle thing that Mr. Leder ever attempted in his career.

On top of title concerns and clumsy film mash-ups, Leder also chose to make the film in that cherished format which gets a resurgence now and then, especially when filmmakers are exceedingly desperate for attention: 3-D. Now, I love 3-D, but for much of mankind, it's more the idea of 3-D that is so agreeable, not necessarily the execution. I have yet to see this film in 3-D, but it is easy to see the bits that are supposed to thrill you in this manner. Arrows, helicopters... all manner of effluvia come flying at the screen and are meant to rock you back in your seat.

And speaking of rock... there is the finale of the film where the ape engages the army in a massive battle, and the monstrous ape flings a series of rocks down from his mountaintop stand. Yes, there are visible wires on the rocks as they glide not so smoothly towards the camera, just as there are visible wires on just about every flying thing in this movie. But the beautiful part is that Leder (who also edited the film) uses the exact same gliding rock shot three times in a row! Talk about filmmaking economy! Best of all are the shots of the soldiers walking straight out at the audience, stabbing their rifles in your face over and over again. This makes little sense unless the audience is supposed to have the ape's viewpoint, and if they did, they would be looking down on the soldiers. In other words... brilliance.

I could literally fill this blog for days remarking on the problems with size and scale in this film. Yes, one can imagine he is "almost 36 feet tall... wow...", but not when he is suddenly towering over 20-story tall buildings. But this film is not about such minor concerns. It's about worldly matters and heartfelt emotions. When the ape meets his fate at the hands of the cruel military, the third-rate Fay Wray actress character (played by a pre-Growing Pains Joanna Barnes, known here as "DeVarona") mentions sadly that "It's just too big for a small world like ours."

Instead, I'd like to yet again invoke the words of the freighter mate, who followed up his "wow..." remark with this one of stunned surprise when A*P*E escapes the freighter:

"Oh... shit..."

RTJ