Horrors
God, but DVD reviews are a bore. They are a bore to read and a bore to write. I know; I've written hundreds since 2000, and read four times as many more in the same time frame. Most DVD reviews are formulaic and generally unimaginative and don't say anything that the mainstream reviewers didn't say the first time around. Worse, most reviews favor the minutia over ideas.
Yes, of course, I am speaking broadly, and naturally exclude from this dire screed the reviews by colleagues whom I respect (you know who you are). And I charge myself with these very same crimes. But I am sorely sick of the reviews that I have read, and the ones that I have written. DVD reviews are also harder than hell to write. A regular theatrical movie review simply requires that you summarize the story and describe the pictorial effects and then get out. A typical DVD review requires at the least two viewings of the movie, sometimes three or four more (depending on the number of audio tracks), and the suffering through of X number of minutes and hours more of supplement viewing (of supplements which are themselves all too formulaic). Not to mention that on DVD Tuesday you have anywhere from 10 to 25 potential discs to deal with. And my natural collector's mania for completion has always driven me to try and provide as much technical and filmographical info about a movie as possible. I don't have a technological marvel for a viewing set up; I have just a TV and player like everyone else does. Noting defects in discs is important reporting, but other websites do it better because they specialize in it, and I never went into the DVD reviewing dodge to spend all my time looking for signs of shimmer at time code 0:42:35 in Chapter 12.
It's easy to lose sight of why we like movies in the first place amid all the minutia of technical error searching. But even more, DVDs have dramatically changed the ways we watch movies, even more so than VHS did (or Beta could have) starting back in the mid '70s. Studios market their movies differently, viewers watch them differently, and collecting is more of a mania with DVD. DVD publicists especially want reviews to appear around street date, which is fine, that's their job, but often it takes longer than a week to digest a DVD, and even more so, if you wait a little bit it's fun to pair one DVD thematically with another or with a book about the film (I've been sitting on RULES OF THE GAME for weeks, waiting for a book about it to come out from the U of California Press).
No more! I did it that way for a year here at MoviePoopShoot, perhaps the best forum for such writing on the Internet; now I am going to try it the other way for a while. I'm going to write down whatever the film inspires to come out of my head, and even skip the extras if they aren't interesting (or skip the movie and dwell on the extras if they are more inspirational). I'm going to look for interesting connection between different movies and DVDs and whatever the hell else inspires me amid the two to seven DVDs that come my way a week. Filmographical details are easily available at the IMDB; and DVD Angle and scores of other websites offer up to date (indeed even early) warnings about "shimmer" and "artifacting" if concerned consumers want it. But the old habits may prove difficult to break; we shall see where the DVDs take us.
Brothers Under the Skin
FREDDY VS. JASON
FREDDY VS. JASON is just about the best DVD I've seen in a few weeks, and that's despite the fact that it is a wholly cynical attempt to cash in on two flailing franchises, and thanks to the fact that the two disc set comes from New Line, which has long established itself as one of the best DVD studios. I don't remember how the picture was originally received (it got a 41 per cent rating at Rotten Tomatoes), but Ronny Yu's film does what these seemingly only horror films can do best, which is to offer a stylish visual treat. You just have to get past the weird moral universe of the premise.
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What's disturbing about the ELM STREET movies, especially the sequels, the TV series, and now this mishmash, is the world of Freddy Krueger's brain. He is pedophile (with no seeming sexual preference) and child killer who got off. The parents banded together and killed him, but as the bastard spawn of a 100 maniacs, his evil cannot be so easily quashed. The movies revel in the terror of the kids, and FvJ includes images of blinded pre-teens and little kids standing in the corner, as if they were waiting for the Blair Witch. It really is a series that makes you wonder about the mind that conceived it. I think what happened was that the series got out of hand, and the original conception was diluted and the villain became the hero, the only consistent figure usually from one horror franchise entry to another. And then there is the fluidity of Freddy's power. How do you stop an unstoppable monster, one who manages to blend dream and reality in torturing and killing his victims (which were originally the remaining children of the parents who killed him, and are now all teens everywhere)? Jason is just an unmovable force, and thus ultimately very boring. Freddy is perplexing because I don't think that the host of successive filmmakers had the brains to fully think out the concept.
On the on the hand, Yu and credited writers Damian Shannon and, Mark Swift did the wise thing by going back to the roots of both series and re-thinking the concept basically by truly reviving it. You even see Jason's mother, who was the actual original serial killer in the first FRIDAY THE 13TH.
The premise they've come up with is simple. Freddy is "using" Jason to create fear in the hearts and minds of teens so that he can acquire the strength to once again invade their nightmares. But at a certain point master and slave come to blows and there is a knock down, dragged out fight between the two villains that has the giganticism of a Bob Kane Batman comic. The danger of slasher films is that the "victims" are little more than anonymous lithe teen girls or moronic males, and FvJ succumbs to that to a certain extent. Ideally you'd want to care if this or that teen lives or dies (one of the services Jason provides is that he kills bad teens, too). Against my personal taste, the film killed off too early the one teen I liked looking at.
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If you're wondering who wins the battle, well, just think about which one of the two is the more brutal and forceful, the most unstoppable when it comes to crowds of teenagers. Social Darwinism, it turns out, has come to the horror genre — only the strongest survive. It's the most brutish who make life nasty and short.
The battle scenes between these two nasty pieces of work are spectacular, with lots of leaping and flames and water. Unfortunately, as is par for the Freddy-Jason course, the film ends with a coda that leaves open the option of a sequel. Please, don't.
Among the numerous extras is a whole second disc of making of features, deleted scenes, music videos, and a documentary about the film's premiere in Austin at a faked summer camp. There pops up Harry Knowles, to reveal that he has a deal to make a movie in 2004.
The transfer of the film is excellent and all the "making of" materials have the frankness and detail that we've grown used to from New Line. The audio track on disc one, by Yu, Robert Englund, and Ken Kerzinger, is informative.
Children of the Corn Redux
JEEPERS CREEPERS 2
I had my say on JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 back when it first came out. It's sufficient to note that the disc, with all its lavish supplemental material, does little to address the worries of viewers who might know about the director's past and the remnants of his predilections found in his horror films. But the audio track chatter and the "makings of" on the DVD of JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 do raise, as the supplements on the discs for FREDDY VS. JASON and CABIN FEVER also do, interesting questions about what the filmmakers all think they are doing as they make these violent fantasies.
What's probably disturbing to viewers who are at the very least shocked or at the most disgusted by the tone of current horror films is how much fun the filmmakers seem to have had making it and how frivolity prevails on the set in which horrid things happen. On his audio track for JP2, conducted with what sounds like the complete cast, Salva notes of the young men sunning themselves on the bus that they are splayed out like sushi for the Creeper's delectation, which evokes howls of laughter from the others. The more conservative minded auditor might wonder, How can they joke about such things? Yes, it is "just a movie," but there are lives under consideration here, even if they are manufactured or imagined lives. Are movies not to have any reference to reality? If we don't "care" about the characters, how will we care about the movie, the action, life itself?
Critics have frequently linked horror and comedy over the years. It's not just at the level of psychic survival that compels Salva to make jokes to ease the strain of dealing with horrific subjects; it's also that horror and comedy are inexplicably intertwined. The most famous example of this is the black humor — the in-jokes, the lines of dialogue that only make sense as a blend of foreshadowing and giving the game away on a second viewing — that are sprinkled through PSYCHO. Hitchcock said that he inserted the jokes as a way to relieve the tension. Otherwise they would have all gone mad. This is all understandable but — where does the urge to horror come from in the first place? The question comes up especially in the context of Salva's more extreme vision of the conflict between monsters and kids. The horrific vision is really a comic vision, about the absurdity of human life. But like most movies it is also an opportunity to explore obsessions, visions, fetishes, dark urges and underground aspirations by other means.
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Salva himself seems to be sick of the series. He notes in his commentary track that as far as he was concerned the first film was sui generis. Still, he managed to come up with a successor, which takes place four days after the events of the first one, and ends, in a coda, something like 20 years later. Yet the last few minutes hints at the possibility of more to come as well. This confounds the viewer whose desire for more horror is in conflict with a desire, finally, for closure.
Overall, on disc the film is beautiful to look at, with golden fields of corn and rich blue skies. The transfer is lush and rather beautiful, as autumnal as a fall day in Vermont, and the sound good. And unlike the first film the second half is better than the first. Once the number of characters has been whittled down there is more clarity. But the deeper creepiness of the Creeper keeps JEEPERS CREEPERS a novelty pleasure.
MGM has lavished a lot of attention of JP2. This special edition features a host of deleted and alternate scenes and fragments, two commentaries, seven making ofs, the trailer, and two photo galleries. JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 hit the street last December 23rd.
Nightmare Catchers
CABIN FEVER
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CABIN FEVER was one of the unexpected pleasures of last year, but now that I think about it, the film is really a tale of medical horror out of something like Crichton rather than the '70s slasher film it more or less looks and feels like. Like WRONG TURN and a few other recent horror films, it's premised on the idea that a bunch of mostly unsympathetic young people (though director Roth tries to make them less so) is going off for a vacation in the woods. Things all go wrong when a mysterious 28 DAYS LATER-Rage style virus leaps from an infected dog to a human being thence to the campers. It's a movie that may well have started first as a title, with a plot constructed around the clever pun. Director Eli Roth, the son of a doctor, has a special knack for the horrors of the body. Blending bits of Cronenberg and Romero, the film also throws in a little Don Siegel, and includes a strong flavor of what Joe Bob Briggs calls on his I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE audio track a city versus country conflict that may evoke the worries or prejudices of a city-bred filmmaker toward the "flyovers."
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Lion's Gate did a lavish job with CABIN FEVER. Not only is the transfer very good, very solid with rich autumnal hues and with good sound, but also the disc is packed with extras. There are no less than four commentary tracks, plus all sorts of comically conceived additions, such as a "family version" of the film, and a "chick alert" feature that warns squeamish girls of approaching gore.
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The best supplementary elements are the audio tracks. The first one is by the enthusiastic director Roth, who gives what amounts to a master class in getting a film made. He first provides the listener with some background on his life-long interest in gore movies, and then launches into the tale of how this film came to be made. Roth is not only informed about the horror genre itself, having been raised on a steady diet of FANGORIA magazines and scary movies, but also has a Tarantinoesque command of the movie making process. He's had a lot of experience in a lot of different aspects of NY filmmaking, and it helps that he "knows" everybody. It's also curious to learn that Troma only paid him $35 dollars to provide an audio track to its DVD of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS, which the actual director didn't want to do. The other tracks include the cast (boys first, then girls), and the crew. The "girls" commentary ends with Roth talking to his mother, an artist, and father, a psychiatrist, about the film and his background and his childhood. Ten hours later, after four tracks and the film itself, you will know more about CABIN FEVER than you thought you even could know. Roth is especially perceptive about pace in horror films, and notes that usually they have a slow pace; so-called MTV style editing, he says, has never worked in horror films.
Slay Bells
THE SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT COLLECTION
Just in time for last Christmas, Anchor Bay, the horror aficionado's Criterion, released this set of the first two SILENT NIGHT films. Just in time for a suite of horror film reviews, I finally get around to watching it.
SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT (originally SLAY RIDE) was the controversial horror film from 1984 in which the figure of Santa Claus becomes the source of ghastly deaths. It wasn't really Santa Claus, of course, but a disturbed adult traumatized by early events in his life propagated by a criminal disguised as a store Santa. Apparently the mothers of America had, after TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, HALLOWEEN, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, and scores of others, enough. Letters of protest, and even some bad reviews (both quoted in one of the disc's extras) led to Tristar pulling the movie (not to worry, though; after something like $3 million dollars, the film had already made its $730 thousand dollar budget back).
Despite the protests, SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT (by people who probably hadn't seen it) is one of the more interesting approaches to the slasher film. For one thing, the filmmakers approach the story like a biography. They are telling the full story of Billy Chapman, who, at the age of six or so, sees his father killed and his mother raped and murdered (not in that order) by a crook in a Santa suit. Billy isn't the nicest kid in the world to begin with. He's kinda impatient with his disabled grandfather, and not even very pleasant to his parents. In any case, the orphaned kid grows up to be actor Robert Brian Wilson, a blonde strapping lad with an anti-Santa fixation and a fucked up morality thanks to the Catholic orphanage where he was raised in lieu of parents. The psychology of the film is all bunkum, of course; I doubt if we become mad killers in adulthood because certain images are imprinted on us at an impressionable age. In any case, how isolated is Billy in the orphanage? Were there no "positive" images of Santa for Billy to see in the prior 13 years? It's a good thing he didn't see BAD SANTA.
Filled around or near Redford's home town in Utah, SILENT NIGHT has a snowy milieu and a tract home ambiance and in most other ways follows the slasher template, with victims such as a young Linnea Quigley offed just after or during sex. Billy's hatred of sex and "naughtiness" is thoroughly established by his scenes of trauma and life in the orphanage. Billy is the reverse of Bruce Wayne. His witnessing of the terrible death of his parents by a cheap hood doesn't inspire him to do good; instead he absorbs the evil, and becomes another thug. Billy is also a fallible serial killer. He makes mistakes, and in the end, is easily shot down just before he is about to kill the Mother Superior who has been tormenting him.
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Bearing witness to this death is Billy's even younger brother, Ricky, played in THE SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT PART 2 by Eric Freeman (his only other film besides CHILDREN OF THE CORN). 2 is an odd project in that half of it consists of footage from the first film, reedited by director Lee Harry. Roger Corman must have been jealous over the sheer genius of this cost saving scheme. The premise is that the little brother is undergoing examination by a shrink after going on a killing spree. As he tells his story, Harry cuts to cunningly re-edited snippets from the predecessor. The rest of the film is new footage, in which Billy grows up, gets a bad job, kills a guy in an alley with an umbrella, dates a blonde girl and then kills her and her ex-boyfriend and finally dresses up as Santa by the one hour, 14 minute mark in order to hunt down the bad old Mother Superior after he escapes from the psychiatric ward.
SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT and its brother are released by Anchor Bay in a nice little package that somehow fails to include SILENT NIGHTS 3 (directed by Monte Hellman), 4 and 5 (the last two having nothing to do with the original characters or story). Still, the set tells you more or less everything you'd want to know about the SILENT NIGHT series. Side one, which has the first film in a nice widescreen transfer (1.85:1 according to the box), is presenting with a warning that the elements comprising the film came from different sources and vary in some scenes, all in the interests of offering as complete a version of the film as possible. Supplements to the film on side one include a stills gallery, quotes from letters and reviews (all negative), and an audio interview (by telephone) with the film's director, Charles Sellier, who reveals that he is a Christian, regrets making the film today, and asserts that it was just a work for hire. Supplements for side two include the trailer, poster and stills gallery, the script (which has lots of gaps where the scenes from the first movie are meant to be inserted), and an audio commentary track with director Harry, writer Joseph H. Earle (who also assistant directed), and James Newman, the actor who plays the shrink. Newman is one of those actors with humor deficit disorder but who doesn't know it, so he does funny voices and makes gags and all of it is lame, but eventually he settles down and Harry and Earle are finally able to explain how they made the movie, include a remarkable car gag in which a red Chevy on its two right wheels spins past the killer, just standing in the middle of the road.
Masters and Slaves
MAITRESSE
From THE VALLEY and MORE to REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, former "new wave" director Barbet Schroeder has taken women as his subject, women with conflicted desires who are thwarted by the society around them. REVERSAL is a little unusual in the Schroeder filmography by giving equal weight to the male who figures in the story, in this case Claus von Bulow, and BARFLY doesn't especially fit into this lifelong theme. But MAITRESSE certainly does. Indeed, it too pairs off a woman of some means with a roguish male who doesn't understand her world. MAITRESSE is also one of the first portrayals of a professional dominatrix in a major motion picture. It's is also certainly one of the most sympathetic.
Those only familiar with the world of professionally dominant women from Nick Broomfield's documentary FETISHES may be surprised by the elaborate nature of the studio or torture chamber used by Ariane (Bulle Ogier). Her digs are divided in two, the chamber downstairs, all glass and dark marble and mirrors and chains, reached by an unfolding stair ladder, in which skulking clients enter stealthily, and the upstairs, white and warm and cozily girlish. That's where Ariane lives when she is not playing Mistress for pay.
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And it's there where she houses, for a time anyway, her new boyfriend, Olivier (Gèrard Depardieu, in an early role during his transitional phase toward fame). Olivier is a burglar who (like the character in FOLLOWING) stumbles into a room that serves as a gateway to an unknown realm. They "meet cute." Olivier and his partner are bursting into the darkened chamber when Ariane's dog besieges them. Ariane catches them and puts the pair on ice until she can deal with them. Then Ariane takes on a client, but soon returns to the penned up Olivier in order to incorporate him into the scene she's playing in the chamber. She hauls in Olivier, and while her client is ordered to give Olivier a BJ, Ariane lip-locks the surprised thief while she's using the slave as a bench. Olivier takes well to both the BJ and the kiss (slaves aren't allowed such liberties with their Mistress, don't you know), and seems to take it as a sign that he has a new girlfriend.
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Olivier (like most of the characters Depardieu was playing in those days) is a brutish lout, and soon ends up making work difficult for Ariane. They break up, she quits the business, he finds her in the country, they get back together, have an accident while driving down the road, and in an ambiguous (or perhaps not fully thought out ending) walk away from the accident to resume their frivolous life.
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As Schroeder explains elsewhere, he happened to know a real professional dominatrix, and Ariane's clients in the film are her real clients, crazily kidnapped by the woman to be in the film, some masked, others not. Bulle's Ariane rides them like ponies and whips them and lets them suck boot heel, but when it comes to the hard stuff, Ogier subtly slips off screen and the pro-domme takes over, such as when she settles down to drive a few nails in the flaccid male member of one of the guys. This is the moment in the film that is most likely to cause unsuspecting males to quiver and recoil, and drive unsympathetic females from the room. Schroeder is as much an anthropologist as he is a filmmaker, and he seems to be interested in extreme behavior in the same way that the earliest filmmakers wanted to catch shots of trains and pyramids. What he shows is not particularly erotic. If you're a masochist you're probably like to be disappointed in the movie. There is a lot of cross-dressing and hammers and nails and stagy scenes that don't feel quite right; or perhaps it's that the director presents them coldly. Schroeder doesn't bother to try and get into the minds of clients by showing it all as erotic from their perspective. Bulle looks great in her leather and latex, but Schroeder doesn't bother to eroticize her, as a good music video director would.
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The supplements on MAITRESSE are fairly skimpy for a full Criterion Collection item. They consist solely of a video interview with Schroeder, looking very John Malkovich-ike, and with apparently something wrong with his left eye (what is it with movie directors and blindness). Schroeder is interesting and informative on the background of the movie, but his explanation of the ending's meaning (the couple are sharing the power) is unconvincing.
NEXT TIME: Japanese crime films, Sherlock Holmes, RULES OF THE GAME, John Sayles, and more!
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