Φ φαινόμενoν

Original Nutters

2009-02-17T03:49:00.000-08:00

In this month's Sight and Sound Kim Newman trots out the oft-iterated claim that the slasher sub-genre, that flourished throughout the 1980s, owes its existence to Halloween [1978] and Friday the 13th [1980], as the "founding films" upon which this wonderful, if ultimately diminishing, tradition was built. He then pays lip-service to the chronological priority of Black Christmas [1974] but falls short of ascribing influence. This is a strategic evasion: although effectively (if not exhaustively) a paradigm for the slasher movie, Black Christmas was a modestly budgeted and narrowly distributed Canadian production that made comparatively few inroads into the US market at the time of its release. It grossed only $4,053,000 in the USA in its first 18 months--although it has since acquired a large cult following, many of whom (perhaps mistakenly) believe it to be the prototypical slasher movie.

In any event the case for Black Christmas (as for Halloween and especially Friday the 13th) is moot. As contemporary critical reaction demonstrates, such movies are always already cyclical propositions: posited by, and responding to notions of genre that are both chronic in duration and complex in their points of origin. For the slasher movie, as for any other genre, there is no sine qua non, no single axis from which all of its generic branches and leaves unfold. The origins of these films are rather, to use the Deleuzean framework, rhizomatic: like the neural substrates of their mentally unhinged anti-heroes the points of influence blaze across the synapses in a multi-systemic frenzy of creative (and destructive) productivity. The quest of origins is always illusive, because any single point on its path is simultaneously linked to a range of other such points, themselves analogously linked, and so on and so forth into a potentially infinite sequence.

The notion that Friday the 13th is prototypical is invalid, anyway, on primary grounds. It is

straightforwardly mimetic, and typically exploitative, of Halloween's narrative, and market success. Yet F13's highly influential use of special make-up effects by gore supremo Tom Savini (showing skewered, axed, chopped and stabbed human flesh in Big Close-Up and slow-motion) seems innovative within the genre and links the film to any number of subsequent movies in the slasher tradition. Films like Maniac, The Burning, and The Prowler (all of which feature on Savini's CV) as well as Silent Night, Deadly Night, My Bloody Valentine, and Slumber Party Massacre among many others. However F13 was by no means the first horror (or even slasher) film to employ the strategy of full disclosure.

The Omen, a major motion-picture from as far back as 1976 (albeit a supernatural rather than mundane horror vehicle), was never reticent about staging highly elaborate, and explicitly gruesome special-effects set-pieces. Nearer the knuckle and in the same generic ballpark The Toolbox Murders was a downbeat slasher film that was positively besplattered in blood and was released not only before Friday the 13th, but before Halloween too, hitting theatres in March of 1978, compared with Halloween's release in October of the same year. Of course the list does not end there: Drive-In Massacre (1977), Last House on the Left (1972), Mark of the Devil (1970), and Blood Feast (1963) were among the great many films exploiting explicit blood and violence for sensational effect long before Friday the 13th applied the strategy to the psychoanalytic topoi of the slasher sub-genre.

Briefly put, these memes involve a prologic (or otherwise non-diegetic) traumatic event that resurfaces as a psychopathological serial killing spree acted out by the victim/witness/nemesis some years later. The murders also serve as a narrative superego, serving lethal punishment on adolescent promiscuity, as an expression of the profound sexual turmoil of the mentally deranged antagonist. As such Halloween is one part of a long tradition of thrillers which stretches back to Peeping Tom (May, 1960) and Psycho (June, 1960)--while the traumatic dimension of the narrative also helps to explain why so many of these films are set on contemporary red-letter days: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's day, birthdays, New Years' Eve, Prom Night, or Graduation Day--even Mother's Day, and April Fools' Day have been yoked to this purpose.

Although Halloween's horrific impact is undoubtedly both inspired and amplified by the psychoanalytic resonance of its narrative it is still quite late in crashing the party. In the Italian gialli films of the 60s and 70s the plot-device of trauma, with much cod-Freudian theorising, was repeatedly interwoven with the conventions of mystery narrative and detective fiction, and it is to this tradition at least as much as to Halloween and its forbears in US cinema, that the slasher sub-genre owes its existence. The gialli, in their turn, of course, were derived from a literary tradition of popular (pulp) fiction that were published in Italy with iconic yellow covers (hence the term 'giallo,' meaning 'yellow'). And, again, the whodunnit was already a well-established literary form, long before publishers Mondadori began saturating the marketplace with their sensational and decadent gialli novellas, in the 1920s and 30s.

The origins of the slasher sub-genre are complex, and the origins of those origins even more so. Friday the 13th is a wonderful little movie and an important milestone in the tradition, but it does not lay the foundations. Even Halloween, which in 2006 was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, as a US film that is "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," cannot be considered as the "founding film" in the slasher sub-genre. It is, rather, a significant node in the gradual development of our ideas about genre, which participated in determining a horizon of expectations to which the culture had been accelerating for over a century.*

So, let this be an end to the quest of origins. Let us forswear from the tedious and boneheaded anxiety of influence, from the plebian preoccupation with tradition and the individual talent. None of it gets us anywhere except the everloving, neverending bottom of the bottomless pit. We should take arms in dialectic, makes ourselves giddy on the merry-go-round of the cyclical, seek out and affirm plurality in all its stripes, and resist, repudiate and reject as false all conclusions, terminations and singularities as the unconscionable blind-spots of the unutterably dull.

*All of which, is to take a deliberately simplistic, fiction-centric, account of the origins of these media. The slasher-boom, of course, was multifactorial in origins--and had historical, economic, social and political implications. I will address some of these implications in a future article.

The Children (2008)

2009-01-19T05:55:00.000-08:00

This English reimagining of the 1980 Troma cheapie The Children of Ravensback succeeds where so many recent remakes have failed: in improving on its source material and providing some genuinely nasty shocks and surprises for 21st century horror fans. While other recent regurgitations from the bowels of classic horror—like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen and The Hills Have Eyes—all lost their essential flavour during their unwelcome re-emergence, The Children has a lot more bite and piquancy than the lacklustre and little-known original on which it’s based.

The earlier film works well on its own account, despite an ultra-low budget, and benefits from a delightfully twisted plot-premise that yields some very creepy set-pieces in which the adult townsfolk are forced into violent confrontation with their children: having to hack off the little kids’ hands as they reach out for hugs and cuddles. In the remake the action narrows down to a single household over the Christmas and New Year vacation. This more restricted compass lends the film a far greater degree of narrative integrity and dramatic tension, focussing the structure and action much more tightly than the dawdling, loosely paced story-world of the original.

The familial setting also allows for a more subtle and penetrating analysis of domestic tension itself. This was an implicit dimension of the original story that was never really extrapolated properly, but is developed much more fully here. The sense of sibling rivalry between the two sisters Leah (Rafiella Brooks) and Elaine (Eva Birthistle) is apparent early on. This develops into a welcome vein of black humour that becomes increasingly disturbing as we realise and grow to sympathise with Elaine’s resentment of her sister’s oh-so perfect lifestyle in early retirement at an opulent country mansion, home-schooling her kids and generally doting on them as the perfect mother.

The dialogue fleshing out these characters and their back-story of a traumatic childhood under a bad mother is well-timed and feels intuitive, but in other places the screenplay seems to click and whirr just a little bit too much, and sags slightly under the weight of some mechanical narrative baggage. This feeling is not helped either by some gauche sound-recording, including some appalling ADR during the opening sequence, which unfortunately strikes a false note early on, and so sets an uneven tone for what follows.

This is a shame because in other ways the film is technically excellent. The photography and editing are imaginatively employed to create genuine tension, and the unnerving set-pieces are truly shocking: eliciting many a chorus of groans and exclamations from the Friday night crowd in attendance when I saw this. The set-pieces themselves are a bit hackneyed, but that’s all part of the fun, and director Tom Shankland certainly knows his onions when it comes to horror cinema. He riffs on The Blair Witch Project, The Shining, The Omen, Zombie Flesh Eaters, and Don’t Look Now among others, but does so unobtrusively and with a panache that ensures that The Children at all times remains its own movie.

This is isn’t a film that’s going down in history as an all-time classic, but it’s certainly a successful genre-film and viewed alongside Eden Lake and Dead Man’s Shoes, shows that in the horror genre right now, Britain seems to be leading the way.

Death Game, (1971)

2009-01-12T05:10:00.000-08:00

Peter S. Traynor's Death Game (1977) seems to want to exploit public reaction to the Tate-LaBianca homicides of 1969. Or rather, the “trial of the century” which followed: when Charlie Manson and the “Family” of lissome, mentally deranged young women, who followed in his wake, were made the subject of an 18-month court case.

The plot, or what there is to speak of in the way of a plot, here is pretty simplistic. Late one night two blonde-haired young beauties, all rain-drenched and bedraggled, call at the house of Dr. George Manning. He lets them in to use his phone, little realizing that he is admitting two psychopaths into his home. We learn that it is George's fortieth birthday, but that his wife has had to leave him to take their son to hospital.

The girls, Donna and Jackson find the jacuzzi and after some rather feeble and half-hearted protests by George, soft-focus, extra-marital three-in-a-jacuzzi-sex ensues. Conveniently for the good doctor his conscience only kicks in after a well-earned night's sleep. Realizing he has to get these vixens out of the house he suggests that they might like to think about moving on. The girls, tersely informing him that they are minors, have other ideas. They eat like pigs, raise hell, and generally act like unbridled demented hippy freaks until George, at the end of his patience physically kicks them out and drives them to San Francisco. Where all freaks go to live and die.

Returning home, he discovers that they have beaten him back there and it is then that the real fun and games begin. Things take a nasty turn for the worse when the girls cement their psycho credentials by killing a hapless grocery boy. Their teasing and provocation of George, takes on a progressively darker dimension which culminates in their binding, gagging, and torture of him. The seeming innocence and frolicking antics of these two angelic girls have transformed into the eponymous Death Game.

The liner notes are at pains to point out that this is a “male sex fantasy carried to the point of no return” and whilst this is one way of looking at it, the movie finally relies on a more radically disturbing psychological premise. Trading off the dread most people must have felt upon opening the papers during the Manson trial and discovering that the majority of the murderers implicated were girl-next-door types -the images filtering through, of these pretty and seemingly unassuming girls, so totally at odds with the accusations leveled against them -and indeed, their own bizarre and outspoken ranting- Death Game, perhaps telegraphs and commodifies this horrible feeling of social unmooring, into a kinky exploitation flick.

This is cheap and sleazy shock-cinema, that sadly lacks the courage of its initial convictions. A little more effort spent on script development and this might have worked itself into a gripping and vicious little thriller. Sadly, the scarcity of creative effort that has gone into this movie is evident in almost every frame, and every stilted line of lame-ass dialogue.

The score consists of a single song, and it stinks: a horrendous mockney whine that strikes the middle ground between a number shelved for its sheer dreadfulness by the songwriters for Oliver Twist, and the lamentable mid-sixties output of David Bowie (then Jones). Worse still, we are forced to endure this bloody nonsense for minutes on end as the film struggles desperately to attain ninety minute feature length by inserting yards and yards of totally pointless filler stock. The final insult is a ridiculous and utterly transparently tacked-on “surprise” ending which decentres the moral compass of the entire film.

Cassavettes regular Seymour Cassel, is an incongruous presence in this inane mondo-cheapo vehicle. While, T n' A starlet Colleen Camp and poisoned gnome Sondra Locke play Donna and Jackson, and despite various proclamations of “eroticism” and “tons of nudity” from erstwhile sources, I am here to tell you that any sexiness exuding from these two is with the exception of one scene, entirely implicit. About that scene, even, there is little to get flustered; the cameraman cannot keep still, his lens is all fogged, and the shots continuously dissolve in an endless kaleidoscope of conveniently obscured flesh.

To their credit all three of them seem to be giving the material as much as they can muster, but none of it really rings true: too many people on the crew are just calling it in, and the end result is one sorry-ass and soporific movie to forget about.

Pets (1974)

2008-11-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

Sexploitation super-cutie Candice Rialson makes her starring debut in Pets (1974), a bizarro-world analysis of sexual politics and commodity fetishism. The one saving grace of this mind-melting yawn-o-rama is its constant and salacious gaze upon the captivating Miss Rialson, who cutely pads, purrs and preens her way through this pretentious exploitation pot-boiler, with an alluringly kittenish caprice. The title theme is worked through a clunky three-act structure which sees Bonnie, a foxily voluptuous runaway, (played by Rialson as a streetwise babe in the big bad woods) run up against all manner of freaks and fuck-ups abroad on the California coast.

Bonnie takes up with Pat, a hard-nosed sistah (played by Teri Guzman, whose only other feature was WIP flop Women Unchained – a clue as to why this flopped in the title!) and together they abduct a lecherous old horndog who offers them a ride and then can’t keep his paws off Bonnie’s thighs. He’s tied up, ripped off, and has his pet dog thrown off a cliff. On the plus side, Bonnie fucks his brains out. But she then finds herself getting burned by her erstwhile partner in crime, who tells her that she’s not a real bitch, she’s “just a little pussy!”

A fact realised, to Bonnie’s frustration, in the next vignette as she is taken in as model-muse to a seemingly benevolent artiste, who grooms, feeds and coops her up. Bonnie eventually bores of being kept, and treated like a housecat for the exclusive pleasure of her uptight lesbian lover-patron, Geraldine (played by Joan Blackman of Peyton Place fame). Luckily for Bonnie, a botched burglary offers an opportunity for a night of old-fashioned hetero-thrills. Come the dawn, a chagrined Geri blows the young stud away and so kisses goodbye to a quiet life with Bonnie, who decides it’s time to hit the road again.

In the final section, Victor, a decadent gallerist (played by UFO’s Ed Bishop), shelters Bonnie and also makes her his little pet; but this time for real. It transpires that he has a whole menagerie up in his creepy gothic mansion, and that Bonnie is its latest member. He’s lashed her into submission with his bullwhip and now keeps her caged in his dungeon. She’s trussed up in a cute satin teddy, lounging on chiffon cushions, awaiting the tinkle of her master’s bell to which she dutifully comes running.

Poor pacing bedevils this terrible movie’s attempts at sustaining the momentum of its gripping early scenes. The film just fizzles into tedium, mainly because its star is off-screen for way too much of the final third, but also because the underdeveloped script simply cannot go the distance. Nevertheless, this movie is an absolute must for fans of 70s exploitation for its sensational stylings, kinky scenarios, eerie atmosphere and muddled moral commentary. Although never quite making it as the twisted little puppy that it might have been, this flick is nevertheless a sizzling treat for devotees of the divine Miss Candice Rialson, whose variety of sexy wardrobes (and disrobings), alone make this worth seeing. God rest you Candice. You are much missed.

Why the Hollywood Horrorshow is Flashing Forward to the Past...

2008-10-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

Time for some truly horrifying news from Hollywoodland. Apparently Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes outfit is hashing up another few horror remakes, following up Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Amityville Horror (2005), and The Hitcher (2007), with Friday 13^th (due 2009) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (due 2010), as well as (and I can hardly believe I am typing this) The Birds (due 2009). I have mixed feelings about this. It makes me feel sad and it really irks me too. It’s not so much that there seem to be no sacred cows anymore for the Hollywood machine: it would be naïve to assume that there were ever sacred cows in Hollywood—the movie industry has always been precisely that: an industry, driven by profit, in which the bottom line is the sine qua non—it’s more the wider implications, for culture in general and the health of the horror genre in particular.

When the news came out about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (TCM) remake, it was galling and depressing, to be sure, but the rationale was clear, if a little patronising: an opportunity to revisit a wildly successful, and critically-acclaimed, movie from yesteryear, repackage its concerns for a new generation of movie-lovers and genre-fans who weren’t around to enjoy the original, and then kick back as the filthy great revenue streams come pouring in, hopefully doubling, or tripling, the net profit of the original product.

Producers involved in this process essentially requisition the potential of pre-existing brands, taking out or extending franchise options and setting up shop in already oversaturated territories: most of these films, you’ll notice, were in the first place some of the most lucrative franchises in the business, having already been driven to the hilt in the marketplace:

Amityville : 8 sequels (only 2 in theatres)
TCM: 3 sequels, video-game, comics…
A Nightmare on Elm Street: 8 sequels, a TV show, novels, comics, toys…
Friday 13^th: 10 sequels, a TV show, novels, comics, toys, costumes, etc…

The attraction of these franchises, from a commerical perspective, becomes even clearer once we look at their respective total box-office receipts:

The Amityville Horror	105,299,952
Texas Chainsaw Massacre	164,925,750
Nightmare on Elm Street	307,420,075
Friday 13^th	317,744,054

Ranking among the likes of such other horror cash-cows as Hallowe'en, Child's Play, Psycho, Scream, Saw and the Hannibal Lecter movies, these are some of the most lucrative movie brands around. Yet the fickle public is notoriously hard to please in the long term. Movie-goers, as any fule kno, need endless stimulation in ever-replenishing variety, with the result that these products are, in all cases, susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. For example, let's isolate Friday 13th (as the most successful franchise, this should prove a valuable test-case):

	US box office ($)	Worldwide ($)
Friday 13^th(1980)	39,754,601
Friday 13^thPart 2 (1981)	21,722,776
Friday 13^thPart 3 (1982/3)	36,690,067
The Final Chapter (1984)	32,980,880
A New Beginning (1985)	21,930,418
Jason Lives (1986)	19,472,057
The New Blood (1988)	19,170,001
Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)	14,343,976
Jason Goes to Hell (1993)	15,935,068
Jason X (2002)	13,121,555	16,951,798
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)	82,622,655	114,908,830
Total	317, 744, 054	353,860,472

“Diminishing returns” is not an ambivalent phrase: it betokens both losses at the box-office as well as products provoking increasingly hostile reception. In the life of the Friday 13^th franchise, the tenth sequel had seen the public lose interest in a big way: the movies were by this time realising only a third of their former box-office potential. Negative critical reaction inevitably reflects this narrative of decline too. While the original Friday 13^th has an imdb average rating of 6.2, this plummets to an execrable 3.8 for Jason Takes Manhattan—and this slide is more damning than it seems in that even die-hard fans of the series register low approval ratings for the later movies [67% of all votes ≤ 5], while the average scores for the earlier films (as an aggregate of extremes) are usually rounded down as a result of lower scores from non-fanatics who don’t separate production values from critical value per se; [72.8% of all votes ≥ 6].

The astonishing twist in the tale, is the runaway success, in 2003, of the long-awaited head-to-head between A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees from Friday 13^th. Freddy vs. Jason was a phenomenal worldwide success (this single release taking, on its own, one-third of the entire Friday 13^th franchise’s worldwide box-office to-date) and proved that it was possible to reboot faded horror brands and get them to start pumping out cash once again.

2003 was something of a financier’s annus mirabilis for the horror movie remake. The same year saw the release of the re-made Texas Chainsaw Masscare, and its producers were raking in mountains of dough, as it romped home with over $80,000,000 at the US box-office. As an exemplary litmus test, TCM 2003 was the stuff a money-man’s dreams are made of. While not quite in the same league as multi-billion-dollar blockbuster franchises like Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter, the Texas Chainsaw remake, in its radical reversal of box-office fortune, set a devastating precedent and a completely new model for movie franchise marketing.

The marketing masterstroke behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), consisted in the very paradoxicality of its making something completely new by unapologetically repeating the creation of a product that always already existed as a well-known, indeed in some quarters cherished, part of the cultural fabric. In doing so it generated a new platform of possibilities. It was as if Georg Cantor rose from the dead, specifically to walk into the offices of New Line Cinema and provide them with this new order of infinity. The traditional linear franchise route offered a potentially infinite sequence of sequels:

But if we plot the profitability of the sequels along the y-axis… then we know that due to the law of diminishing returns, we will end up with this commercially unappetising tail-off:

By returning to the original picture to do a RE-MAKE rather than another tedious and lacklustre sequel to what already seems like a faded and tattered brand, the brand itself is made anew in its own image. In marketing terms, the two products act in tandem as co-efficients of the same brand identity. In terms of product potential, multiple new orders of reality are generated at once: the original sequence still exists, (and has been quietly generating a modest revenue stream through TV rights, DVD sales and subsidiary merchandising rights—a revenue stream that is bound to be swollen by the renewed exposure to the hitherto devalued brand in the marketplace) yet a new precedent is established in which remakes of all the original sequels might be carried out. Moreover, and more likely, audiences might expect new sequels or (as has in fact been the case) prequels to the original remake of the original original. Not to mention the opportunity of remaking the remakes, and of course the nuclear option: going right back to the start and remaking the original original, all over again. The potential for profit, now ramifying wildly across and throughout these multiple platforms simultaneously:

It is when this multiverse marketing model is applied to an entire stable of franchises (and all of their incorporated offshoots and subsidiaries), i.e. not only TCM, but also Friday 13^th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Amityville Horror etc. etc. that the opportunities for brand reinvigoration and wealth-creation really start to get dizzying. This isn’t so much cultural cannibalism, as Frankenstein’s monster movie-production, on an industrial scale. On paper it seemed like one of the dumbest ideas ever. In practice it was hugely, incredibly, obscenely successful.

To be continued...

Gomorra (2008) 137mins

2008-10-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

Matteo Garrone's fearsome neo-Realist adaption of Roberto Saviano's incendiary mafia exposé Gomorra is every bit as brutally cold-blooded, in the demands it makes of its viewer, as the violent gangsters which populate its narrative. Crucially, however, this is a film which articulates itself around and against the sordid milieu which it depicts. With unexpected lyricism Gomorrah follows an itinerary of locations that are by turns magnificently blasted, haunted and decaying, occasionally bucolic, at all times powerfully invoking a sense of place.

This is one of those rare movies in which the location itself becomes one of its most poignantly vocal characters. These surprisingly beautiful negative spaces, inhabited and polluted as they are both literally and metaphorically, by such obdurate, callous, relentlessly aggressive thugs, pathetically bespeak the fundamental crisis at the heart of this film and its literary source: that the comorra 's influence is so all-pervasive in extent and so noxious in effect, that it ultimately taints every last network and level of the land. The bleak picture that emerges by the end of the film, is that of ethicality stretched to breaking point, and the shocking realisation that it is no longer money or even territory that is at stake, but identity itself. More depressingly, the impression lingers of a culture that's already way beyond hope of redemption.

Gomorra's widely-(and justly)-féted achievement is its radical deglamourisation of organised criminal gangs. In self-reflexive opposition to the thrilling fictions of the Hollwood mainstream, such as Goodfellas and The Godfather Trilogy, this is a film defrocked of elegant trappings and almost wholly devoid of sympathetic characterisation. In a telling early sequence two ill-fated losers swagger through a half-constructed apartment block screaming, "I'm Tony Montana!"..."The world is ours!"...the vertiginous ascent and conspicuously glamorous excess of the trajectory of Scarface's star-spangled anti-hero simultaneously nourishing the escapist fantasies of these hopeless no-goodniks even as it reminds the viewer of Montana's irremediable vulgarity: a slavering boar in polished patent wingtips. That such an existence represents the promised land for these deluded young men seems doubly-damning by comparison.

Elsewhere, more established mafiosi and younger aspirants preen themselves in beauty parlours and clothing stores respectively, but their chavvy sportswear and ostentatious gold jewellery are a far cry from the immaculate period detailing in the elegant costume and wardrobe work that typifies Hollywood gangster-chic. Gomorra's unremittingly bleak tone of everyday banality evokes with chilling clarity the dour ordinariness of life under the sway of organised crime. The narrative world created here has nothing to do with the tragic grandeur of Scarface or Angels with Dirty Faces, nor the epic myth of origins that was Once Upon a Time in America much less the romantic razzle-dazzle of The Godather: this is a world boiled down and reduced to an extreme of aggression that arises from the pure principle of animal competition. The killings are frequent, sudden, jarring, largely unexplained except from the simple profit motive and barely mourned except through a politically-motivated desire to show strength through bloody revenge—even when such a display is effected through the murder of a single innocent, unarmed and defenseless, woman on her own.

Post-war Italian neorealism focussed on the plight of the working classes, employing non-professional actors and shooting on location to create organic, episodic narratives detailing bathetic and often squalid subject-matter that nevertheless strove to voice the predicaments of the poor and celebrate the unquenchable spirit of the oppressed. Gomorra ticks all but the last of these boxes. With an implacable resistance to sentimentality and romance this movie portrays a world revolving silently upon its axis; increasingly toxic, turning in on and destroying itself not only by means of increasingly lethal ferocity, but also more slowly: as the Neapolitan mafia (the comorra) is implicated in poisoning its own land and people through the corrupt administration of hazardous waste. Quite unlike the biblical Gomorrah, this city is not devastated by a vengeful, purging God, but rather languishes in narcissistic death throes of its own devising.

Gomorra's plaintive cri de coeur is relentlessly subdued by a deadening onslaught of habitual violence, and increasing alienation in a context of progressive moral deterioration. As an elderly mafioso from an earlier time, when even criminals were bound by honour, tries to effect an exit-strategy by negotiating with a rival clan leader his former nemesis tells him, "I won't give you your life...you'll have to buy it." When the value of life itself is reduced solely to the material advantage it might potentially confer, the only way is down ...and out.

Not bothered about your body baby...

2008-10-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

In recent years David Cronenberg has pulled focus on the generic parameters by which he made his name. The science-fiction ‘body-horror’ given lurid and provocative expression in films like Videodrome, The Fly, and eXistenZ, is notably absent from the genre pieces, Spider, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Yet to view the effects-driven set-pieces of the earlier films as ends in themselves risks reading them as a moribund outgrowth of tawdry sensationalism. For Cronenberg, the exploration of the bodily grotesque –from the biological gestation of rage as The Brood, to the mutant gynaecology of Dead Ringers– potentiates analysis of the human predicament. Cronenbergundian bodies are intimately textual, negotiating the space between psychic and somatic experience and in their gestation, or decay, or mutation they shape, determine and perform the great themes of life and death: identity, alienation, desire and transgression.

The Fly proceeds from a self-imposed exile from the human generality that mirrors the gradual disintegration of the corporeal human form and its reintegration into the monstrous hybrid ‘Brundlefly’, appealing to the loss of identity involved in this horrific mutation. The film traces this loss through the pathetic collection of redundant, disembodied anatomical relics –ears, teeth, fingernails, the “Brundle museum of natural history”, and malfunctioning speech-recognition software as physical deformity disables and further alienates this new being from its human origin as a master of technology. In Shivers we experience a similar abhorrence as an individual is confronted by the collapse of individuality itself as the diseased become mindless vectors of an indiscriminate pansexuality. In Naked Lunch a grief-stricken writer dissipates amid the indeterminate Interzone of addiction and misogyny in which “all women are aliens, sent from another planet” and the technology of writing yields to a visceral expression of insectoid sexuality.

The interplay of technology and bodily experience is a recursive theme. In Crash, as Ballard and Catherine fuck on their balcony, the traffic streaming down the freeways in the distance maps the electrical charges streaming through the neural substrate as Catherine murmurs, “maybe the next one, maybe the next one...” The “benevolent psychpathology” these characters pursue, subordinates the bodily self to the power of a master narrative mediated through and patterned by the structures of technology, and yet the sordid realism and pathetic emptiness of the arenas in which these transgressions occur suggest nothing more than the loss of meaning and identity itself as these damaged people sift through the wreckage of their lives. A tone of bathos echoed by the dizzying convolutions of the multiple framing narrative of eXistenZ, in which a reality mediated through organic bodily appendages is perpetually abrogated and redefined as a new and specious version of itself.

With his latest three films, Cronenberg has eschewed the effects-heavy mindshock of his earlier work and yet his visionary imprint is still clearly discernible. In the unreliable narrative of a schizophrenic outsider with a traumatic past (Spider); and in the displaced identity of a family man with A History of Violence; and most pronouncedly in Eastern Promises, in which characters are determined by the ritual obligations inscribed in the flesh of their bodies and a tragic narrative of alienation and abuse persists solely through the fleshly existence of an innocent child, Cronenberg’s fascination with the limits of human experience, and the discursive and experiential potential of the body and the mind continues to find eloquent and intriguing expression.

Here's one from the vaults...

2008-10-08T00:50:00.000-07:00

Long before the perverse pro-feminist excesses of I Spit On Your Grave, Jerry Gross produced the exploitation gem, I Drink Your Blood!. Written and directed by David Durston, and released in 1971, as a cash-in on the then headline-news Manson family trial, this beauty has a few ghastly treats in store for fans of drive-in bloodbaths, guts, gore and tomfoolery.

Synopsis:
The film opens to the wonderfully dated blips and drones of an analog synth, scoring the ancient rites of satanic lore. A live chicken has its neck wrung and its blood is dripped over a naked buxom wench, the ancient rites of Lucifer are intoned by a long-haired hippy who is soon established as the Manson-esque leader of the cult. These shenanigans meanwhile, are overseen by an innocent and quite shocked local girl. As she runs away when she is seen and the hippies give chase. They gain on her and she is abducted for lord knows what debasement and corruption -mercifully this assault is conducted off-screen. In the morning she staggers bloody and dazed back to her sleepy hometown.

Meanwhile the satanic rock n roll group stumble into the very same town, and decide to hole up in an abandoned mansion for a while to raise hell and otherwise get their kicks on route 666. Gramps learns of what has happened to his pretty granddaughter and swiftly marches off, rifle in hand to sort out these amoral cretins. Though when he gets there he is humiliated -in a scene reminiscent of Doc Collingwood’s humiliation at the hands of Krug, albeit less dramatically- by the long haired no-goodnik. The evil hippy takes his glasses and crushes them underfoot, and then they spike him with a whole bunch of acid. Things then take a turn for the insane for poor confused Gramps.

With that his plucky grandson decides to take matters into his own hands. Taking the rifle he goes out into the woods and shoots a rabid dog, he then siphons some of the rabid blood into some homemade meat pies which they then sell to the hippies the following day. By that night the dwindling townsfolk have a house full of rabid, drooling, bloodthirsty, maniacal hippies on their hands. In the traditional zombie vein the rabid loonies infect everyone they devour, causing the mayhem to spread like wildfire.

Review:
In Durston’s film the shadow of it’s predecessor is plain to see, George Romero’s hugely influential Night of the Living Dead, leaves it’s impression on this work as on so many of the films which define this era, yet overall there is an originality to these proceedings that remains refreshingly vital. And if the film is guilty of racism, either by the sheer transparency of tokenism evidenced by the inclusion in the cult’s numbers of no less than four minority groups, or by the loathsome, antagonistic, and destructive behavior this group of miscreants exhibits, it is perhaps unintentionally so. It is my impression that in this movie neither Durston, nor Gross are purveying racism, openly or covertly, as aforementioned the film just feels too dumb to carry a credible political sub text.

However, the topicality of this movie is not limited to the clear references to Charles Manson’s The Family and the Tate-LaBianca homicides of 1969; one may find in the insatiable nymphomaniac hippy-chick, and the havoc she wreaks by her promiscuity, a comment, on the rampant spread of sexually transmitted infections the sexual revolution had helped to precipitate. A wry comment which predates David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within, by a good four years, although needless to say it is explored here in far less depth.

The film features typically inept performances from all of the main players, Bhaskar as the leader of the gang, and his endless enthusiasm, particularly grates. Although Lynn Lowry, who also stars in They Came From Within is enigmatic and alluring, in this she plays a mute psycho hippy chick who later goes on to dismember an old lady’s hand with an electric carving knife!!

However this is not all-too important, because if you are going to seek out a title like ‘I Drink Your Blood’, I’d hazard a guess that you are not expecting great method acting of the Stanislavsky school. Cheap thrills and lots of them are what this film promises, and it sure delivers. This is the cinema of Grand Guignol, a miscellany of all things gruesome, and macabre. The special effects whilst generous in serving up the gore are at times risibly unrealistic -a woefully realized decapitation immediately springs to mind-, and the photography while nicely shot is less than inspiring, but you’ve got to love that concept, and it is precisely the low-key, amateurish realization of that concept which is so charming and funny.

This film is an interesting artifact from a time long gone, the outrageous 70s wardrobes, the funky bass guitar score, it all makes for a nostalgic viewing experience for anyone with fond memories of summer nights spent at the drive-in or your local grind-house. Most of all it is the buoyant irreverence which carries this film, the ‘couldn’t-give-a-damn’ insouciance which makes for such a fun and perversely enjoyable experience. For a horror film it is not really horrific, and many of the laughs it generates are unintentional, but hey the way I see it; if it works it works, and this film works for me. It’s kitsch, it’s trashy, and it has no allusions to grandeur, but that in itself is a rather endearing quality. This film isn’t art, there’s no conflict or sub-text, there’s barely even a plot beyond the one-trick concept but then it has no pretensions to art, it’s a gross-out exploitation flick and it knows it, and just in case you find yourself wandering off there are even helpings of gratuitous female nudity to help sustain your interest.