LOVING THE ALIEN: WHEN A CLASSIC REALLY IS A CLASSIC

Ellen Ripley, Warrant Officer of the Nostromo, Admiral of the USS Ownage

Monday night, I was watching basketball—as I do—and one of the weirdest fucking things I've ever seen happened. Stephen A. Smith is an ESPN personality whose presentational style can best be described thusly: If you were jackhammering without earplugs at a My Bloody Valentine concert while fighter jets flew continuously overhead, you'd have to tell Stephen A. to shut the fuck up so you can concentrate. He doesn't do play-by-play, so when he was suddenly shouting at me during a commercial break I was like “GAAAHH” for a second and dropped my remote control. When my composure returned, I realized Stephen A. was talking about Prometheus. And that was a sign that Prometheus hype had gotten out of fucking control. As I'm a man of taste and discretion, I'd gotten my big preparatory geek-out ritual out of the way earlier that day, taking in Alien at Lincoln Center, as part of their pre-Prometheus whole-career Ridley Scott retrospective.

Whether or not Prometheus is any good is something I'll be finding out at some point within the week, but what is certain is that holy balls Alien rules all the ass there is. Its place in history is massive: one of the best science-fiction movies ever made and one of the best horror movies ever made, not to mention one of the best, if not the best, genre hybrids. It established Ridley Scott as a commercially viable feature director (his first feature, The Duellists, was gorgeous and awesome, though nowhere near the hit Alien was). And it gave us Sigourney Weaver (pictured above), and Ellen Ripley, without whom cinema would be lesser.

The thing about movies like that, though, is that every so often critics need to check in with them to make sure they're still all that. Someone I respect greatly recently revisited Bonnie & Clyde (a massively important movie, historically) for the first time in forever and it didn't go so well for him; I like the movie, but can see where parts of it could be jarring. No picture should be an unquestioned classic. Go into Citizen Kane questioning whether it's Citizen Kane. I mean, the answer is invariably yes, because it holds up under even the most powerful scrutiny, but still. It's Citizen Kane because it's motherfucking Citizen Kane, not because it's some special snowflake. Same with Alien. I didn't go in looking to find fault with it, obviously, but I went in ready to scrutinize it as a movie. And I did. And it still fucking ruled.

From a strictly experiential perspective, watching it on 35mm film as opposed to a cleaned-up digital version added to the grittiness of the movie and the rough-around-the-edges scruffballs that make up the crew of the Nostromo. The print was perfectly fine, and seemed like a well-maintained old one (I should be clear: I'm so warped by digital projection and DVDs my ability to accurately assess a print ain't what it once was). The apparent age and lived-in quality of the print only added to the experience.

As for the movie itself, I mean, what can you say. The production design is exquisite even at its most grotesque and decaying, equal parts standard 70s SF (the computer room brings to mind Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, the suspended animation couches Kubrick's 2001, which managed to be 70s SF in the 60s because Stanley Kubrick don't give a fuck what year it is motherfucker) and the groundbreaking, visually pessimistic futurism, all darkness and water dripping from the ceiling with big swinging chains and everything looking all fucked up like a bunch of roughneck sailors have had the run of the place, which is exactly the case.

The camerawork is a lot more flexible than a lot of later-period Ridley Scott, where the compositions are polished and relatively static, even if the colors and subjects within them are gorgeously lush. DP Derek Vanlint's camera actually moves quite a bit in Alien, all to excellent effect, either building tension to the point where you just want to fucking scream, or, toward the end, mirroring the agitation of the ever-dwindling crew.

What I noticed more than anything else this time through is the sound. Ho boy is sound used to great effect in Alien. The pitch of the blips and beeps from the computer and equipment is just so that each one of them is alarming. The score agitates, rather than soothes. The sounds of the ship and the odd non-diegetic cue give the Nostromo a heartbeat, which is sometimes a character's, but really the audience's: it's a nervous speed. Added with the other technical elements, we're already about to fucking lose our shit and we haven't even gotten up to the alien yet.

Before we do, it's important to note that when your premise, at its most basic, is “a bunch of people trapped in an enclosed space with a relentless, voracious alien,” if we don't give a shit about the people we ain't got a movie. The emotional core of Alien is its cast, which is absolutely spectacular. H.R. Giger's creature design is awesome and everything, and the technique is nonpareil, but the fact that this terrifying monster with acid for blood is fucking up people we care about is what elevates Alien from “merely” a technical masterpiece to “holy balls this is amazing” all-time classic status. Due to the logistics of its setting—a spaceship in the middle of space, that lands on an uninhabited planetoid and then takes off back into space—only seven human beings appear in the movie (not counting the Alien, who at the end was played by an actor in costume, and the cat, who was played by a cat, oh, yeah, and one humanoid, too), so there's no extras or anything, just principal cast.

The thing that's great about the cast is that they seem like grown-ass adults, primarily because they all are. Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton were already well into their 40s at least, John Hurt was just about to turn 40, and the younguns, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney, were both around 30. They really make the characters seem like a bunch of people who've spent way too much time with just each other for company. They bitch about money, being under-appreciated, and the shitty food just like real workers. The two women, who statistically you'd think would be a natural pair of friends, especially around all these rough-and-tumble dudes, clearly loathe each other, but not in the contrived screenwriter-y kind of sexist way it's usually done, rather in a way that comes out of really good acting based in real human interaction. Especially with a genre piece that's as far out as Alien is in terms of real-life experience—a spaceship that, judging by what's said about distance traveled and time, must not be bound by Einsteinian relativity, not to mention the fact that they run into a fuckin alien with acid for blood—it's essential to ground things as much in reality as possible. That way, whether or not you're sitting there thinking “whoa, this is excellent, organic, naturalistic acting” (if you're a doofball egghead like me) or thinking at all, the emotional impact, the thing that transcends respect for a movie and becomes love, is achieved.

And yes, to paraphrase David Bowie, I love the Alien. It's the rare picture that is enriched by its scores of imitators; watching movies that tried to replicate Alien and then watching Alien again only serves as a reminder of “oh, yeah, this is how you do that well.” Getting back to the above discussion of historicity, Alien is Alien because it's Alien, not because people say it is. If that one sequence where we cut from the dummy severed head to [name of actor redacted] playing his final, harrowing scene talking in hushed awe about the structural perfection of the Alien, and then back to the dummy severed head is jarring because the dummy severed head isn't [redacted], you know what? Fuck it. Some of the effects look like they were made 30+ years ago because they were made 30+ years ago. This is the way of the world. The movie still fucking rules. It's still scary as hell. All other SF, horror, and SF/horror pictures must genuflect. Prometheus got one big spacesuit to fill.

AT TRIBECA: EDDIE, THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL

Dylan Smith as the title character

Taste in comedy is one of the most subjective things there is, right up there with music and the way one takes one's eggs (Douglas Adams was right, everybody in the fucking universe takes their eggs differently, it's uncanny). Some people like goofy comedy, some like fart jokes, some repartee, some odd people even find bald men smashing watermelons with hammers funny. Me? I like all the aforementioned except the watermelon business, even though I'll concede it a point or two on pure strangeness. But one particular thing I love is really, really dark deadpan shit deriving from and intertwined with graphic violence. Another particular thing I love is lots and lots of levels and meta out the fuckin wazoo. A third, truly special thing I find hilarious, are titles that are both elaborately on-the-nose and insane. That last is a bit of a stretch intended as a segue into the glorious, sublime fact that there is a movie that exists in the world that people can go see called Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal.

The title was what initially intrigued me. Then I saw this enthusiastic recommendation. And I thought, hey, what the fuck. What's the worst that can happen? Even if it sucks it'll be over in an hour twenty. So I decided to give it a whirl. And oh boy oh boy lemme tell ya. This picture's fucking great. It's funny, it's dark, it's fucking fucked the fuck up (in the best sense of that exalted designation), and it's kind of a brutal “stop frontin, you know this is pretty much the way it is” critique of the “tortured artist” mythos that hits the center of the bulls-eye.

Our protagonist is a Danish painter named Lars Olafssen who, in the midst of a creative dry spell, takes a teaching gig way out in the middle of goddamn nowhere in rural Canada. On the way out there, he hits a deer with his car, a situation he deals with in a way that is . . . well . . . kind of strange. His fellow art school teachers welcome him with varying degrees of warmth, and almost immediately Lars is warned about a student named Eddie, a fairly innocuous looking dude (apart from being a mute) whom they let sit in provided he doesn't disturb anyone. Lars hits it off with Eddie, who comes to live with Lars in his house.

In fairly short order, Lars comes to discover that Eddie has a nocturnal routine you can probably guess from looking at the title of the movie: left unchecked, Eddie walks in his sleep and eats people. Lars is a little nonplussed (I mean, dude, somnambu-cannibalism is some ya-don't-see-that-every-day shit if ever there was such a thing) but he soon finds that Eddie's wanderings and snacking is inspiring him to paint for the first time in ten years. And because he wants to keep painting, Eddie has to keep eating people.

And yeah, all this insanity is really fuckin funny. Thure Lindhart is equally adept at playing Lars as endearingly alien, weirdly creepy, and someone who is his art, in a terrific lead performance. Dylan Smith has an even steeper difficulty curve as Eddie, not overdoing the simpleton aspect of his waking repose or the mania of his tormented, ravenous sleep, and making us care about Eddie even when he's gnawing on someone's neck before they're dead. Stephen McHattie shows up in a smallish role as the craven representation of art as commerce and, as the devil always does, has all the best lines. (Ed. Note: he doesn't play the literal devil, he's just a guy. Gotta clarify with a picture this strange.)

Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal works as a horror comedy even if it isn't exactly that thing, primarily because its setting, atmosphere and tone are so utterly fucking weird. The violence is kind of matter of fact, and only one person seems to really give a shit that Eddie's running around eating people. Everyone else is far more concerned with Lars and his art: no atrocity so great that it cannot be swept under the rug in the interests of A Great Man engaged in the process of making Great Art. The movie makes something of a point of never showing the audience any of Lars' paintings that everyone oohs and ahhs over, nor the sculpture his “love interest” shows him. The concern here is more with the artist and the way people enable artistic turpitude. The picture's conclusion ties that point up nicely, in both form and content; if it's a smidge too neat, that's a minor quibble.

The important point is, holy shit this movie's good. If you've been waiting for a movie about a Danish painter in rural Canada whose roommate eats people—and I know you have—you're going to want to check this one out, and keep an eye on writer-director Boris Rodriguez, because this cat knows how to make movies.

"BACK OFF, MAN, I'M A SCIENTIST": THE ENDURING APPEAL OF GHOSTBUSTERS

I'll spare you the details, but I had the kind of day Wednesday that makes one go, “fuck it, Ghostbusters is on Instant. This is what's required.” You've all been there. Maybe it's a different movie, but the stars aligned just so where I was like, “I need to fucking watch Ghostbusters right now.” There was a bit of a delay between the decision and actually being able to start watching, which of course meant I had time to wonder if it would hold up. It's been a while since I actually watched it—the last time I saw it, in 2009, is inadmissible, as it was at about two in the morning under extremely do-not-operate-heavy-machinery circumstances—and so the possibility that the experiential memories of the movie may have outweighed its actual quality had to be taken into consideration.

Because I have many happy memories of watching Ghostbusters. The first time in the theaters I don't remember so well (I was 5, I think) but I remember liking it enough that I was very excited when my elementary school got a 16mm print and made kids get permission notes from their parents to watch it after school; as not everyone's parents signed off, I was one of the “cool” kids—a fleeting pleasure in 2nd grade, believe—which only added to the enjoyment. Then there was that most recent time, whose aforementioned inadmissibility is in large part due to the thing I remember most about that viewing was successfully blowing pot smoke rings during the scene where Sigourney Weaver's levitating in that off-the-shoulder red thing (pot smoke is difficult to blow rings with, due to its texture, which is why I was so proud). Still, fun as all that is, it still begs the question: is Ghostbusters still awesome?

It is with great pleasure that I report back that the answer to that urgent and essential question is: of course Ghostbusters is still awesome, what the fuck did you think? One of the great things about having grown up with Ghostbusters is that all the parts that I dug when I was young—Bill Murray being Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis being co-gods of all nerds, Sigourney, the ghosts sliming everything, “Yes, it's true, that man has no dick,” and all that—are still great. Even better than that, though, is that all kinds of little details that flew right over my head as a kid (or stoned to the point of mental regression) landed perfectly as an adult.

The thing about being the age that I am (born in 1978) is that I was around for all of the 1980s, in all that decade's loud, ridiculous, head-up-its-ass splendor. For most of it, though, I wasn't in a terribly culturally aware place (to put it mildly; I didn't start reading the paper on a daily basis until the '88 presidential election, and even then stuff went over my head, and even then it was the Post, so there's that too) but I was still physically present experiencing and observing. I'm able to piece together through analysis and context what feels “real” and what misses the mark from cultural artifacts of the era. You can sit there and go “oh, what the fuck do you know about Ghostbusters' capturing the early-mid 80s zeitgeist, motherfucker, you were in kindergarten?” all you like. In so doing you forget a couple things: a) I'm really, really, really fucking smart, b) I was then, too, as well as observant c) even if a) and b) make you roll your eyes at my egotism, they're irrelevant, because lots and lots of other people will back me up on this.

Movies become hits—genuine hits, not just marketing-driven box-office numbers—by resonating with large numbers of people. They do so by tapping into universal truths, and by getting people to react, rather than think about what they're seeing (which is not to say that when you think about it, said hit doesn't hold up, it's that the feelings are running point and the intellectually substantive stuff is the fleet trailing just behind). One way to do that, as Ghostbusters does, is to ground things sufficiently in the given place and time, and by having a fundamental understanding of that place and time.

Ghostbusters was written, produced, and released during Ronald Reagan's first term, which is the early 80s (his second term, even though it mostly spanned the years one would normally think of as the mid-80s, was the late 80s; Reagan was president for the entire 80s in cultural terms). The early 80s were a time when the number of people who thought Reagan was a dangerous asshole who was cavalierly playing nuclear chicken with the Soviets was comparatively small, and where a whole lot of people, whether they want to admit it now (or even five years later) totally bought into the whole gung-ho money is everything trip. Also, it's important to not that depiction does not always necessarily mean endorsement, so the fact that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis get their asses booted out of “Columbia” (the university isn't named in the movie, but it's totally shot there) for reasons more economic than academic, leading them to have to quickly figure out a way to monetize their paranormal knowledge is perfectly in keeping with the time. What helps audiences in less avaricious times (if any such indeed exist) identify with this profit motivation is the fact that the lads have a marketable skill: Harold Ramis does some math with his cool little gadget and figures out that they can in fact imprison ghosts, if they can catch them. So, taking out some ridonkulous mortgage on Dan Aykroyd's family house to raise some quick capital actually isn't suicidally stupid, it's just risky (also, as Scott Tobias pointed out, the way Dan Aykroyd says “You didn't even bargain with the guy” afterward is hilarious, and points up Bill Murray's immature recklessness perfectly), especially because, conveniently enough, the library specter in the first scene was the herald of a lot more paranormal activity in New York.

We all know the rest of the story. Bill Murray's hare-brained idea and the unethical way he shanghais it into existence makes them celebrities (another extrapolation very much of the movie's time; the branding of the Ghostbusters, like this iconic image—

—was part of the movie's central creative process rather than being subcontracted to a marketing department), and requires them to hire Annie Potts (who's great, and does a perfect if caricatured NYC outer-boroughs accent) to answer the phones and Ernie Hudson (who replaced Eddie Murphy when he had to go do Beverly Hills Cop instead, but who brings a lived-in prole-y world-weariness to the role that Eddie simply wasn't old enough for at that point) to help with the workload. And of course there is Sigourney.

Sigourney Weaver is very important not only because she may have laid the groundwork for my lifelong passion for refined, slightly repressed brunettes, but because she brought a very formidable feminine energy to science-fiction/fantasy in the 80s. Her role in Ghostbusters is less groundbreaking in that regard than it is as Ripley, and she does veer a little close to a kind of damsel in distress business that's beneath her, but what saves it (to the degree it needs saving in this context) from collapsing into a sexist mess is that she represents an aspirational goal for Bill Murray. Not in the dumb sense of him “winning” or possessing her or any of that fuckin shit but because she's an actual grownup. And he's not. Ghostbusters is a companion piece to Stripes in a number of ways (Harold Ramis, being really fucking funny), most importantly as pertains to Bill Murray specifically in that he's playing another puer aeternus wiseass who has to, by hook or by crook, grow the fuck up before the Commies or Gozer win. While part of Stripes' charm is that he manages to squeak by without maturing past the age of 12, in Ghostbusters the stakes are a bit higher, where that Ziggy Stardust lookin ass Sumerian demigod is literally going to end the universe (which despite what Ronald Reagan would have had you believe is a little more severe than driving Bulgarian cars and wintering in Irkutsk). Fortunately, the desire to impress Sigourney leads Bill Murray to kiiiiiiiiiiiiind of grow up (enough, anyway) before the shit hits the fan.

One great benefit Ghostbusters has had, as any movie must that would become an enduring classic must, is the advantage of the culture evolving along with it, and/or meeting it halfway. In the case of Ghostbusters, it was one force among many driving that evolution, being as it is one of the movies that would be on Mount Nerdmore, were there such a thing, and were reification such that a movie could have a face. The reason for Ghostbusters' nerd appeal is simple: the Ghostbusters are giant, giant, giant nerds. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis represent two distinct genera of nerds here: Aykroyd the effusive, guileless enthusiast and Ramis the otherworldly, super-serious obsessive. Bill Murray doesn't seem to fit within this immediately, but for all his glib charm he doesn't fit terribly easily in society, and if you'll recall he has to go to rather extreme lengths to get that nice blonde girl by herself in that early scene and does absolutely horribly in his initial attempt to hit on Sigourney. He's kind of a nerd too, just in a very Bill Murray sense of the term.

At the same time that a certain degree of continuing relevance benefits a would-be classic, there's also (complicating the already near-impossible balancing act even further) a requirement that the given movie recall a distinctly irretrievable past. Ghostbusters fulfills this with room to spare in two ways: one, the pre-CG special effects, which look fake in a far more appealing way than all but the most perfectly-done CG (and, because the filmmakers understood that special effects are, you know, special, they made sure effects shots were only there when they absolutely had to be), and two, its portrayal of pre-Disneyfication New York City. New Yorkers complaining that New York isn't like it used to be has probably been going on since some old drunk Dutch dude in the 1700s bored the tits off English colonists telling them shit was only real back when Peter Stuyvesant was around. But there is an actual difference between the New York City before Rudy Giuliani's take-the-good-with-the-fascism reign as mayor and after, at which point the violent crime that had long lent a “once more into the breach” air to every venture outside one's apartment in New York was no more. It was, however, replaced by a Manhattan by, for, and of the extremely rich, which is even still rapidly expanding to Brooklyn and Queens, a place that is safer to live unless one disturbs the moneyed elite, but arguably missing that ineffable quality that made New York New York once upon a time. None of Ghostbusters' three primary protagonists have anything even remotely resembling New York accents (to be fair, it is never concretely implied that any of them are actually from here) but they—and the many locals they encounter, like Annie Potts, and the “that must be some cockroach” guy with the cigar waiting by the elevator, and Ernie Hudson—all have that kind of “what the fuck” swagger that New Yorkers all like to think they possess even now. Whether or not that's real or illusory is beside the point: it's a shared positive perception of what New York was at the time, at just the right pitch to resonate with audiences far and wide.

All of which is to say, man, Ghostbusters is still really fucking great. It's just lovely. Even if the parts that are loveliest go from “tee hee hee Bill Murray” to “wow Laszlo Kovacs sure knows how to use the wide screen and man Elmer Bernstein's a god with the tunes,” it's still about as good as pop cinema gets. The fact that the best parts change over time too is another sign that Ghostbusters is one of the great classics of its decade. Long may it reign. Who ya gonna call.

ON THE CABIN IN THE WOODS AND SPOILERS (WHICH THIS CONTAINS)

(Seriously, DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS until you've seen The Cabin In The Woods, unless you don't mind knowing about what surprises it contains. The subject of this post requires discussing them a bit, but it's really a movie best seen completely blank, because even the trailers don't reveal much of anything really important about it. So, if you haven't seen it, STOP RIGHT HERE and DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. Check out my review at Tor, which is light on specifics, but long on reasons why to see it. Alles klar? Okay, let's continue. But do not say you weren't warned.)

Yesterday, the long-delayed (for reasons having nothing to do with quality and everything to do with its initial distributor going tits up) Joss Whedon-Drew Goddard collaboration The Cabin In The Woods finally came out. For most of the week leading up to it, there was a furious argument online about a number of reviews and whether or not they were in the right, divulging as much of the picture's plot as they did. Here is, in broad strokes, the situation:

1—The trailers and official plot synopsis focused mainly on a group of five stereotypical-ish horror movie characters: the two hot girls, representing the “virgin/slut” (horror's terms, not my own) dichotomy, and three dudes, the jock, the intellectual, and the stoner. HOWEVA, there are oblique hints that All Is Not What It Seems (the movie's poster, aside from the tagline, featured a cabin floating in a void, unmoored to the earth, the trailer had a shot or two of a control room-type space). But, it must be stressed, those were not explained any further than serving as an indication that there was probably something up and that it was not a paint-by-numbers slasher picture.

2—That last observation could very easily be reinforced by the presence of names like Joss Whedon (and to a lesser extent Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford) in the cast/crew listing.

3—It screened at South by Southwest to a borderline unseemly amount of critical fapping; between it and The Raid it's amazing hospitals in Austin weren't working around the clock reattaching penises that had accidentally snapped off.

4—Since point 3 was in large part related to point 2, the kind of film critic whose formative years predate the assimilation of fandom and criticism (meaning, very roughly, people who were too old, be it chronologically or otherwise, to have grown up with Star Wars) looked at all those tweets and advance reviews and some of them bristled; “Ah, shit, here we go, another one of those fuckin' nerd movies.”

5—Whether as a reaction to their younger (chronologically and otherwise) counterparts' enthusiasm or simply because it wasn't their kind of picture, people like Rex Reed wrote things like this.

6—Eric Snider, Scott Weinberg, and other members of said younger generation, hit the fucking ceiling. Not only because Reed spoiled plot elements, but because a lot of his scorn, like that absurdly gratuitous “writing on crystal meth” swipe, was so disconnected from the reality of what the movie was. I've never done crystal meth, but I've done old-fashioned speed, and let's just put it this way, speed writing is nothing like The Cabin In The Woods. Not to mention the fact that he indiscreetly yaks about a number of plot points that would be surprising if he hadn't told you about them.

7—But, because neither life nor the Internet is simple, an increasing number of people coming out of Cabin are taking, if not in its bitchily irresponsible totality, a similar side to Reed and other critics' seeming belief that there is nothing in The Cabin In The Woods that really merits caution about spoilers.

It's a big fucking mess. Although I'm more on the Snider/Weinberg side of this particular fence, having thoroughly enjoyed my near-clean-slate viewing of The Cabin In The Woods the other day, the non-Rex Reed contrary opinion is equally valid, and one that I personally find myself on more frequently than not. A lot of plots don't spoil. But The Cabin In The Woods is a bit of a unique case. (Seriously, I'm about to start talking about it, so if the opening spoiler warning paragraph didn't chase you away, going any further is your own damn fault.)

(I'll give you another minute.)

Okay. What makes Cabin a bit of a rara avis in terms of the whole spoiler discussion is the fact that the very first scene is something unexpected, based on what the movie was obliquely hinted to be. A lot of the people making point 7 in the above list do so because, hey, if the first scene gives away the alleged “surprise”, how the fuck's it supposed to be a spoiler? Well, that's the thing: when I saw that opening scene of Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford being awesomely loose office douchebags, I was like “whoa, holy fuck.” Because that had nothing to do with anything I'd theretofore heard about The Cabin In The Woods. I thought it was a movie where a bunch of kids go to a cabin in the woods. WTF are Richard Jenkins, Brad Whitford, and the foxy WASPacita in the lab coat doin up in this piece, yo?

So, yes, the first scene makes it clear that the subsequent stuff where the girl dancing around in her underwear, her newly-blonde friend, the NBF's jock boyfriend, the dude the NBF and JBF are trying to get the girl dancing around in her underwear to shtup, and the stoner with the bong that collapses into an apparent travel coffee mug is all in some way being controlled by Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford. Fine. But that opening scene is just an opening scene if someone tells you there are control room guys. How the fuck were we supposed to know there were control room guys? That one tiny insert of a lever with a lit-up button next to it in the trailer?

Since everyone still reading at this point has already seen the movie (RIGHT?) we know that it subsequently transpires that Jenkins and Whitford are manipulating the cabin-bound college kids into a situation where they enact horror movie plots in a ritualistic fashion, only to be killed off one by one in true horror movie fashion, to placate the dormant (for now) “Ancient Ones” with blood. If the kids don't get killed, the Ancient Ones will, presumably, rise and end life on earth as we know it. The Final Girl, or the Virgin as she's called here, is allowed to live only if everyone else dies.

It is thus that The Cabin In The Woods manages to be both horror and meta-horror (even if it succeeds far more decisively as the latter), light and dark, observer and the thing observed, and have any number of either/or dichotomies both ways. Most importantly, with regards to the spoiler question, it's simultaneously completely upfront about what it is and yet consistently surprising. This is why, however Richard Jenkins/Brad Whitford-y that first scene might be, it's kind of shitty to tell people who haven't seen the movie that it's about Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford manipulating stuff. First off, because spoilers, fuckface. But second, because over the course of the movie you see the extent to which the two of them halfass their jobs, and because they're gradually laid bare as a couple dorks who play God to hide their own impotence, describing The Cabin In The Woods as a movie about Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford controlling shit is patently inaccurate. They don't control shit. And the movie isn't about them. It really is about horror, and the rules of the horror genre. The movie's (inevitable, really) conclusion serves as a darkly tongue-in-cheek warning against violating those rules (when comrade Final Girl neglects to murder the stoner Fool, the Ancient Ones do indeed rise, in the form of a giant fist rising from the Earth and coming right at the camera, ending the movie and thus the world), a firm reinforcement of the picture's theme, which is, again, genre and the rules thereof.

Now, that might not be everyone's cup of tea. Because I am, however scruffy and foul-mouthed, an intellectual and an academic (especially when it comes to genre), The Cabin In The Woods was basically Joss Whedon gift-wrapping a movie to me. And I'm thankful, not to mention relieved that there aren't any lingering hard feelings about the time Hudak and I set up camp in the TV room at Bard's student center to watch the Knicks and pre-empted that evening's Buffy conclave. But I am not the world, and the world is not me. So I understand people maybe not being so thrilled by the fact that it's more meta-horror than horror-horror. I could even understand the movie losing people when it goes bugfuck at the end of the second act when ALL THE MONSTERS come out. Shit, I could even understand people feeling cheated by the ending when the Giant Fucking Hand eradicates existence. I loved all three, to be clear, but if things like that are gonna bother you, they're gonna bother you.

Where I have a problem is in the unilateral decision that because the genre being deconstructed isn't one's personal cup of tea that said deconstruction is without merit. I'm not, comparatively, really a Joss Whedon fan. I've seen a couple episodes of Firefly and Dr. Horrible, and as above I've gone to extreme measures to not see Buffy and antagonize its fans; the Joss Whedon piece I'm most familiar with is his script for Speed, which he wrote approximately 95% of the dialogue but was ineligible for credit because the WGA requires any writer subsequent to the original to have created a certain percentage of new scenes as opposed to “merely” doing dialogue rewrites. But fan or no fan, I can recognize that the guy's extremely intelligent, a master of genre, and really goddamn fucking good with characters. I'm probably never going to see The Cabin In The Woods again, and will have to check out of the kind of massive fan geek-out conversations that'll result should it become the classic it's being heralded as, but I'd be staggeringly disingenuous if I were to claim that it didn't succeed almost perfectly in being the kind of picture it set out to be, which is the most important metric in determining if a movie is good or bad. “I didn't like it” and “It's bad” are not the same thing.

This is why, however entitled we all are to our particular opinion, criticism is more than simply I liked it or I didn't. It's about looking at what a thing is, rather than what we want it to be. If a picture you're reviewing is outside your frame of reference, do a little research. It's not going to kill you. Google exists. Shitting all over something for the sole reason of it not being within the realm of one's own personal taste is irresponsible criticism. If one doesn't particularly care for horror pictures (for example, since we're talking about Cabin), when reviewing a horror picture one is nonetheless responsible for determining how effective the given picture is within its own context. And if one is unable to properly determine how well a given horror movie is within its own context, one should offer the disclaimer that one is out of one's depth as a critic in the given instance. But hey, who the fuck wants to confess fallibility.

Empirically, this all comes down to one thing: consideration. All spoilers aren't created equal, and there is a point, undefined though it may be, when one can take the cultural temperature and begin to publicly discuss things like “she's got a dick” or “he was dead the whole time,” or “holy shit, Woody Harrelson really does need a stepladder to dunk a basketball.” But before a picture's release, when there is a clearly stated desire within the community for whom (almost exclusively) the picture in question was made, maybe shut the fuck up about its reveals. Even if you personally think those reveals are done really early. Just don't be a dick. Especially if the way in which you're going to unzip is by accusing the writers of a movie of being on crystal meth, when you clearly have no idea what that drug does to cognition.

Oh, by the way, feel free to ram this post straight up my ass if I ever fuck up and spoil something in the future. Even I'll admit I deserve it. Until then, though, I'll just stick a “This Machine Kills Fascists” sticker on the side of my soap box and enjoy the view from up here.

A NIGHT AT BASTARDPIECE THEATER: THE SEVENTH CURSE

The plot of The Seventh Curse, summarized in one still.

It's titties and B movies time again! My dear friend Bastard Keith, in his tireless quest to share disreputable cinema with the world, has taken his act to Under St. Marks. This past Thursday marked the second installment of Bastardpiece Theater (the first, where we suffered through Herschell Gordon Lewis' The Gore Gore Girls, passed without comment on these pages just because godfuckingdammit that movie was terrible), with go-go dancing by the lovely and talented Madame Rosebud (not to mention the vegan brownies she baked), and commentary by BK, Rosebud, and burlesque luminary Miss Astrid to the Hong Kong horror picture The Seventh Curse.

Now, some movies don't necessarily lend themselves to this format—which also includes drinking games—but The Seventh Curse is enhanced greatly by it. An earlyish effort by prolific Hong Kong writer-producer Wong Jing (whose 1992 Naked Killer I wrote about a few months ago, screened at another one of BK's debauches), The Seventh Curse is in his typically out-of-its-fucking-mind style of exploitation, featuring a cameo as a dorky dude in a badly-fitting suit surrounded by attractive women (I'm told by the Bastard, a far greater Wong Jing authority than I, that just about every Wong Jing cameo features him as a dorky dude in a badly-fitting suit surrounded by attractive women). The cast features Chow Yun-Fat and Maggie Cheung, but note that said “features” rather than stars, as Chow Yun-Fat is a supporting character and Maggie Cheung apparently was in this before she went to acting school (though to be fair, her character would be annoying no matter what).

The lead is Chin Siu-ho, who played the limpdick who takes over the martial arts school in Fist of Legend after the Japanese kill Master Huo, and who is no more tumescent in The Seventh Curse. He's either a doctor or a cop or a cop/doctor (the movie doesn't seem to give a fuck, why should we?) and doesn't do much except run around being less charismatic than Chow Yun-Fat, who pops up every twenty minutes or so smoking a pipe and being awesome and, more often than not, explaining the bizarre shit that happened since his previous appearance. One wonders why he couldn't have just been the lead, until one realizes that Chow Yun-Fat would never have been a big enough yutz to end up getting the “blood curse” in the first place, thus rendering the whole movie about how he's going to cure it moot.

Things kick off with the author of the book the movie's based on sitting around a well-appointed drawing room with Chow Yun-Fat and Chin Siu-Ho, asking them to tell him a story over some (presumably excellent) brandy. And what a fuckin story they tell. It starts with a random, 80s Hong Kong cop movie sequence involving a hostage situation, that for some reason Chin Siu-Ho is in the middle of. Maggie Cheung shows up shrieking about being a reporter except no one gives a fuck, so she (possibly) murks a cop with a brick; I mean goddamn, she crunches the lady cop/nurse (cop nurse?) pretty goddamn hard. But never mind that shit, there's business to attend to. Random kung fu (which is pretty well staged and edited) and explosions (which are hilarious and nearly always completely unmotivated) ensue, and Maggie Cheung almost gets everybody killed, and machine guns a guy. (Talk about taking the Hunter S. Thompson “place yourself in the middle of the story” school of journalism too far . . .)

After everything stops blowing up, Chin Siu-Ho goes home, and there's a wicked-hot mid-80s vintage permed white (Jewish, according to Bastard Keith, an authority on that subject as well) chick there who wants the sex. Chin Siu-Ho thinks this is a good idea but first he has to do some more kung fu with some dude. I think this is where the Black Dragon (who is fucking AWESOME) shows up and tells him never to fuck because the “blood curse” will kick in if he ever fucks. But he's unable to resist his lady friend's sexhortations (she was hot, and calculated risk is the life of kings) and, mid-shtup, some nasty thing on his leg explodes.

Chin Siu-Ho does the logical thing and goes to Chow Yun-Fat at this point, telling him what happened. Chow Yun-Fat—who swaggers through this whole picture like he's just getting blown constantly—rattles off some suavely incoherent talk about blood curses, which leads to a flashback to how Chin Siu-Ho came down with the blood curse. He goes to Thailand to research a cure for AIDS (“Going to Thailand to find a cure for AIDS?” --an incredulous Bastard Keith) with some guy who looks like a cross between late-period Amitabh Bachchan and shuffling-around-his-vineyards-period Francis Coppola, and ends up wandering off into the jungle and meeting a native girl named Betsy (who's Chinese too, just because why not fully embrace the implausibility) who because of a shitty subtitling job at one point, we all ended up calling “Besty” for the whole picture, which was especially apt because she was infinitely preferable to Maggie “I swear to fuck in like 15 years I'm going to be one of the greatest movie stars who ever lived, I just haven't gotten there yet” Cheung. She also, after Chin Siu-Ho comes down with the blood curse by doing something really fucking stupid, takes off her clothes to reveal a specfuckingtacular pair of tits that the audience is only allowed to bask in for like a second before she hacks open her left tit and feeds Chin Siu-Ho a golf-ball sized tumor. (Dude, seriously, don't ask.) Also, they can't fuck because she's the Black Dragon's girlfriend.

In the middle of all this, there's this cult living in the jungle that worship worms and practice human sacrifice and have skeletons who can do kung fu, whose fabulously dressed and made-up leader (Elvis Tsui) makes Freddie Mercury look like John Wayne. It turns out the only way Chin Siu-Ho can cure his blood curse is by stealing the eyes of the tribe's Buddha statue and eating them. Why exactly he goes back to Hong Kong and tries to ignore the fact that the blood curse is going to kill him is unclear, but Chow Yun-Fat swiftly rectifies this the second the unbelievably long flashback in which Chin Siu-Ho relates this story is over, and they head back to Thailand.

Maggie Cheung comes along because she's still in the movie for some reason, and sneaks into Chin Siu-Ho's hotel room and leaves a gigantic fucking pile of AK-47s there. Torn between the knee-jerk “wow, that is fucking rad” reaction at seeing so many guns sitting there on the piano and the more rational “why the fuck can't Maggie Cheung hurry up and meet Wong Kar Wai” response, Chin Siu-Ho engages Maggie Cheung in conversation and she starts monologuing in this really unhinged fashion that leaves some doubt as to whether she's even really a journalist, and in order to shut her up he agrees to bring her into the jungle with him and the Black Dragon (I know I mentioned him a couple times without explaining who he is, but that's because the movie doesn't really explain who he is, he just shows up and is awesome, even though we only get an extremely faint idea of who he is).

Turns out something nasty as shit happened to Besty's face (which I missed because I was tweeting some non sequitur about Steve Reeves as Hercules; it was that kind of night), which is one of a few thousand good reasons why the Black Dragon, Chow Yun-Fat, and several other competent people have to go along with Chin Siu-Ho and Maggie Cheung and make sure they don't accidentally use grenades as suppositories. Maggie Cheung falls down a trap door in the jungle and for some stupid reason—the whole panel was telling them “Fuck it. LEAVE HER.”—Chin Siu-Ho insists on going back to save her, which means more kung-fu skeletons and flying fetus demons, except now the flying fetus demon is the good guy (this was the part of the movie I was just gaping openmouthed at the screen in utter confusion, also known as about 90% of the movie), and the kung fu skeleton goes all H.R. Giger (h/t to Rosebud for that analogy) on a motherfucker and something happens and the derpiest bunch of monks to ever worship Buddha show up and there's another fun kung fu battle, after which Chin Siu-Ho eats the Buddha's eyes and doesn't leave any for Besty, who remains deformed and is the subject of an epically twatty condescending monologue by Maggie Cheung (who I bet breaks people's kneecaps if they ever mention this movie in her presence). And it all wraps up back in the novelist's brandy and leather armchairs party, with Chin Siu-Ho and Chow Yun-Fat having a good manly chortle and setting up a potential sequel.

The Seventh Curse, while an engagingly insane good time on its own merits, was nonetheless enhanced by the Bastard's brutally hilarious lisping imitation of the cult leader, Rosebud's incisive, effervescent enthusiasm, and Miss Astrid's strategic atomic bon mots. The commentary greatly enhanced the experience, which I must admit, if I were watching the movie by myself, would have consisted almost entirely of me going “what the fuck . . .?” and “When is Chow Yun-Fat going to come back?” A little repetitive, but hey. I leave certain things to the experts.

I'm hardly an unbiased observer, but Bastardpiece Theater is not just fun because these are my friends and Rosebud's vegan brownies are so ridonkulously fucking good. It's fun because the movies are terrible in an entertaining way, there's plenty of beer, and genuinely funny people are cracking jokes out of love, and in a shared sense of “Yeah, we're all watching The Seventh Curse voluntarily, no one here is superior.” Also, next month they're showing a Filipino midgetsploitation movie starring the legendary Weng Weng as Agent 00 entitled For Y'ur Height Only. The whole trailer is Weng Weng fucking tall people's shit up and jumping off tall buildings and using umbrellas as parachutes. It looks amazing.

HAPPY JOHN CARPENTER DAY!

Because nothing beats the master in his own words, here's an interview from 1999.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Long live John Carpenter!

IN THE RACE FOR STUPIDEST TRAILER OF ALL TIME....A CHALLENGER APPEARS....

The great Charlie Jane Anders said, "Wow. This could actually be the worst movie of McG's career." I would donate a testicle to see that be a pull quote on this poster. I mean . . . holy shit. We might have to pull the plug on Western civilization. Anything that makes one long for the halcyon days of Terminator: Salvation's lucidity and intelligence is just . . . wow . . .

A FEW WORDS FROM A HORROR MOVIE CIVILIAN

I am not particularly qualified to make assertions about The Greatest Horror Movie Of All Time. I haven’t really seen enough of them, due to an aversion to them developed in my younger years, which wasn’t really about horror movies themselves but about the mouthbreathing dipshits who insisted to my face that Friday the 13th Part 4 was better than, say, The Untouchables. Younger me developed the impression that all horror movies were as stupid and pointless as the brain-dead franchise sequels all my junior high and high school classmates venerated. Fortunately time, (sort of) maturity, and a gradual exposure to actual good horror movies has made me realize that the horror genre is a fine one indeed.

But, still, I’m not qualified to proclaim any one horror picture the greatest. However, my friend James Comtois—who is—said to me earlier this evening, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the greatest horror movie of all time,” and threw the DVD on, because I’d never seen it before. Holy tapdancing Jesus that’s a good fuckin’ movie. It’s the reason I’m still awake at 3:30 in the morning and so jittery I’m blogging instead of (futilely) attempting to sleep. I don’t scare easy at the movies, and when I do it’s usually something that doesn’t earn me too many Tough Guy Demerits, like Alien, or While You Were Sleeping. Holy fuck, though, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is fucking scary. Here’s why (tread softly lest ye trip over a spoiler or forty):

1) It could, conceivably, happen.

It’s not like it’s just another Monday when a vanload of hippies and an annoying tard in a wheelchair randomly stumble upon a bunch of inbred psychos who turn cannibal after the local abattoir closes. But it’s a lot more likely than, say, getting eaten by zombies (who do not, despite the best attempts of mass media, really exist). And show me someone who doesn’t shit themselves when some giant masked motherfucker comes lumbering at you with a chainsaw, and I’ll show you the poor schmuck he just cut in half.

2) “Basically, fuck Texas.”

James said that, I didn’t. But by repeating it I am kind of endorsing it. I know some Texans, and I like them (some of my best friends, etc. etc.), but they did leave. Clearly, this documentary about the ways of rural Texas folk is the reason why. The treatment of hippies—quickly and efficiently, with chainsaws—is sensible, but director Tobe Hooper points out, with a couple well-composed low-angle shots, that some hippie chicks have nice asses and don’t wear bras, and should be thus accorded some more politeness. Despite this, the Texans hang them on hooks, feed their blood to wizened, deformed old relatives, and, unforgivably, threaten them with the discipline of the chainsaw. Tut, tut, Texas.

3) Being a really good movie helps.

Hooper keeps things moving, doesn’t lard down the story with any stupid bullshit about the killers’ motivation, realizes that having the above-mentioned giant masked motherfucker chasing people with a chainsaw is scary enough that he doesn’t need to waste precious screen time delving into the inner lives of the hippie protagonists, employs elegantly simple cinematic technique to tell his story (he only starts showing off toward the end, but even all those fucked-up close-ups of the Final Girl’s eyes serve to emphasize the horrors she’s seen and aren’t just empty flash), and subtly (all the more impressive in a horror movie, subtlety) foreshadows the ultimate resolution. And he manages to do all that without the cinematic equivalent of run-on sentences like that last doozy. Also, as efficiently shot and creepy as everything up to and including the point when the fuckface in the wheelchair gets chainsawed and his sister is the only one left alive, the last half-hour of her trying to avoid the same fate is fucking intense. Her face when she finally gets on the pickup truck at the end, covered in blood, her terrified scream melting into maniacal laughter, is exactly how the audience feels.

(4) As per the first point, not having any money was an asset.

Not having any money forces you to use what you have, rather than dreaming up something that sounded cool when you were high but then you realize, fuck, I just spent $300 million and ended up with a video game about anorexic Smurfs fighting Halliburton. (Too soon?) Hooper makes great use of his limited resources, telling a horror story about the evils human beings are capable of, no creatures, no supernatural bullshit, just straight up crazy people. The most expensive thing in the whole movie was probably the gas it took to keep the chainsaw on for that entire 15 minute chase through the woods.


So, maybe I don’t have the horror movie stripes to say one movie is the best one ever or anything. But if you say The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the best, I’ll nod in agreement and tell you, “Yeah, that was a good fuckin’ movie.”