Shocktober Revisited: Carnival of Souls

Is there a statute of limitations on SPOILERS? I feel like if a movie has been out in the world for, oh, say, fifty-two years, that it might maybe be okay to discuss the big "twist" without fear of ruining it for everybody. Particularly a movie like Carnival of Souls, which has been in both the public domain and also the Criterion collection for quite a while. I know that a lot of you have probably heard of the film but maybe haven't seen it, but there's no point in writing about Carnival of Souls this late into the game without discussing what makes it so unique for its time. And that means directly addressing the end of the film, when the creeping sense of unease finally overtakes you.

 So here's what I'm going to do: consider this your SPOILER warning, because I'm diving in. The Blogorium has been around too long not to have included Carnival of Souls, and the Cap'n isn't going to shy away from twists and turns. Continue at your own risk if you haven't seen the film (and you should).

 Still with me? All right, let's get into it. I've always found Carnival of Souls has a lasting effect particularly because it's such an unorthodox "ghost story." Astute viewers of today can no doubt figure out that there's no way Mary (Candace Hilligoss) survived the car crash and somehow emerges from the river, to the surprise of the rescue crew and onlookers. We know, in fact, that she didn't at the very end of the film when the tow truck pulls the car out and her body is next to the other two girls, but it raises the question: what is the rest of the story? Is it a dream in the moments before death? Does her spirit escape, and try to carry on as before, only to be pursued by the spirits of the dead? She interacts with other people who are very much alive, who have scenes that Mary doesn't appear in, including the next to last moment at the carnival.

 In most horror movies - and certainly all of the great ones - atmosphere is key. Carnival of Souls excels at atmosphere, in particular the way that the mundane world Mary settles into is interrupted by phantoms who follow her at every turn. Arguably, the use of organ music is a dead giveaway when the shift is going to happen - which is forgivable, considering that it isn't nearly as egregious as, say the "monster" theme from Creature from the Black Lagoon. The organ music is also unsettling at times, as it too straddles the line between the sacred and profane. That it is Mary's chosen profession is all the more appropriate considering the trajectory of Carnival of Souls.

There's something to the phrase "spiritual insouciance" in the IMDB synopsis - there's something to the idea that Mary refuses to die that makes the deliberately dreamlike second half of Carnival of Souls so alluring. She skips town, takes a job as an organist at another church, but is constantly drawn to the dead, the abandoned, the profane. The moments when she "ceases to exist" are really quite something, especially for 1962 (remember, this only two years after Psycho, and Mary dies even sooner than Marion Crane). Carnival of Souls has an illusory quality, juxtaposed with the very normal world of working and having a landlady and fending off your randy neighbor. Mary is torn between two worlds - one she's desperately trying to avoid - and the matter of fact shift between one and the other gives the film a kind of proto-Lynchian vibe. It's not entirely clear where Herk Harvey and John Clifford are heading with the story.

 Many ghost stories have characters who interact with the dead, but the protagonist is often alive or, in the case of something like The Sixth Sense, has a spiritual guide who is alive that introduces them to the world of the undead. Mary is our main character, and most of the film is told specifically from her perspective. She's haunted by the "The Man," (Harvey) who she attempts to avoid everywhere except at the carnival, where she's inexplicably drawn. It's there, after all, that she (and the audience) is revealed the truth - during their dance macabre (sorry, I couldn't help myself), The Man's partner is none other than an equally ghoulish version of Mary. She runs, they pursue her, she disappears.

 Which makes sense, but the following scene, when the Minister (Art Ellison), Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt), and the police go to the carnival the following day and trace her footprints out to the water, where they stop. It's not the first time we've seen Dr. Samuels or John on camera without Mary in the shot, so there's some argument to be made that this represents objective reality, and yet they considered Mary to be a living, breathing person among them. In that respect, Carnival of Souls differentiates itself from films both before and after that deal with ghosts, poltergeists, or the like. It's reminiscent of the story of the woman in white, hitchhiking to the dance she never lived to see, but on a larger scale. This ghost refuses to believe she's dead - not in an ignorant way (like The Sixth Sense), but in a determined sense to stay alive.

 On some level, Mary knows she's deceased - her attraction to the abandoned carnival (filmed at the abandoned Saltair Pavilion outside of Salt Lake City) is linked to the idea of something (or someone) existing past their purpose. She intermittently flirts with John Linden (Sidney Berger), her neighbor, alternating between a need for human contact and some distant understanding that he has nothing to offer her. Mary's destiny is with The Man, her partner in the dance of the dead, if I may drop all subtlety. Her at times inexplicable behavior is much clearer at the end, when it's obvious that these are the last whims of a dead woman, one who slipped free from the afterlife. For a little while, anyway.

 To this day, Carnival of Souls is best viewed late at night, when the mind begins to wander, and when its dreamlike logic is more effective on viewers. That, at least, is how I prefer to introduce it to people. Its influence stretches far beyond its familiarity with most audiences - one will be hard pressed to find people who haven't heard of it, but many of them still haven't seen it. It's presence in the public domain no doubt muddies the water - along with Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls can be found bundled with any number of cheapie monster flick from the 1950s and 60s, doomed to be downgraded by association, a fate a film this good doesn't deserve. It's somewhat amazing that this is the only feature Herk Harvey ever made, but if you're only going to make one, we should all hope it's a Carnival of Souls.

Shocktober Revisited: Theory, Audiences, and Horror

 This critical essay originally appeared in 2009.

Greetings, Blogorium readers! Tonight I thought I'd share with you part of a large-ish paper I've been working on.

The paper is on movie-going as a ritual activity, which in and of itself was fun researching, but a healthy section is devoted to Horror films and the role they play in group catharsis, so I'll drop that knowledge on you, followed by a section devoted to the question: "Why do horror fans like $1.50 movie theatres?", in which I think you'll find the Cap'n comes to a reasonable conclusion.

Just a tiny forewarning: this is from a first draft, so if anything reads as dodgy or the sentences are awkward, I'll be adjusting them in ensuing drafts.

Horror Films

“Each of us experiences a film individually, and our different tastes in films demonstrate how unique our individual reactions are. Yet, what are we to make of those films that seem to have tapped in the collective fears of an entire generation?” (Phillips, 3)

Horror films repulse and terrify us, yet they remain financially, if not critically, successful. Noel Carroll poses the question “But – and this is the question of ‘Why horror?’ in its primary form – if horror necessarily has something repulsive about it, how can audiences be attracted to it?” (33) The answer may be that the genre presents us with escapist variations of real life anxieties. The genre of horror taps into our deepest primal fears, and coupled with the venue (total darkness), collectively audiences must overcome individual terrors.

Consider the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which tapped into mounting tensions about race relations and the Vietnam War through the lens of a zombie film. Kendall Phillips describes the reaction to Night thusly, “for many contemporary critics, the film was ‘cathartic for us, who forget about the horrors around us that aren’t, alas, movies’” (93). Similarly, films like The Exorcist or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre tapped into apocalyptic concerns of the mid-1970s, though less literally than atomic holocaust films. “Apocalyptic visions… need not express a literal end of the world but may entail a sense of the inevitable decay and demise of broad social structures and order” (Phillips, 111).

Horror manages to, in the words of critic Robin Wood, “respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences, the fusion made possible by the shared structures of a common ideology” (30). Its role as a societal release is a more extreme version of cathartic theatre, one designed to explicitly face our fears in dark spaces, with the comfort of being able to safely walk away when we choose to. Linda Williams, in learning to scream, identifies a similar mechanism in horror films designed to help audiences gasp and scream together:

Anyone who has gone to the movies in the last 20 years cannot help but notice how entrenched this rollercoaster sensibility of repeated tension and release, assault and escape has become. While narrative is not abandoned, it often takes second place to a succession of visual and auditory shocks and thrills.” (163)

Despite its role in tapping into our collective experience, the horror film is not highly regarded by critics. Robin Wood describes the phenomenon:

The horror film has consistently been one of the most popular and, at the same time, the most disreputable of Hollywood genres. The popularity itself has a peculiar characteristic that sets it apart from other genres: it is restricted to aficionados and complemented by total rejection, people tending to go to horror films either obsessively or not at all. They are dismissed with contempt by the majority of reviewer-critics, or simply ignored. (30)

Horror is regarded as a “lesser” form of cinema, one that is frequently associated with “low culture” and is beneath contempt for cultural critics. Audiences, however, flock to this ritual of being scared half to death and walking out at the end. The ways that horror films function as a dual ritual of “movie-going” and “date” are also related to cultural norms. In her discussion of horror marketing during the “classic” monster-movie era, Rhona Berenstein notes the ways that male / female reactions during this ritual are performative:

Just as social mandates invited women in the 1930s to cling to men while screening horror movies, thus encouraging them to display conventionally feminine behavior as a means of garnering male attention, so, too, did the male viewer… use female fear, as well as his own traditional display of bravery, to disguise his terror behind a socially prescribed behavior. (137)

In fact, women were frequently the target audience during the “classic” monster movie era, for reasons that solidified gender roles in American society. Berenstein continues, “women were classic horror’s central stunt participants because they were thought to personify the genre’s favored artifact: fear. The upshot was that if women could survive the viewing or a horror film, and moreover, if they could respond bravely, then other patrons, meaning men could do the same” (143).

The horror film provides a number of valuable roles in maintaining the movie-going ritual: in addition to reinforcing cultural norms, it taps into collective fears and faces taboos, even at the chagrin of most critics. At the end of a horror film, no matter how traumatic or cathartic the experience, the collective returns to the daylight, capable of functioning as members of society. As we will see, the horror film provides for a different kind of engagement in the movie-going ritual based on what theatre an individual chooses to visit.

[...]

For many critics, the reputation of Horror as a “low culture” genre comes from these second run houses. Conversely, many Horror aficionados will also attend the Sedgefield of Blue Ridge Road theatres because they replicate the “Grindhouse” experience, based on one-screen cinemas in large cities, most of which no longer exist. The Grindhouse theaters were permissive of rowdier behavior, much of which is considered by aficionados as “augmenting” an otherwise marginal film. The most famous example of a Grindhouse film or “Midnight Movie” turned ritual experience is The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

[...]

Shocktober Review: Carnival of Souls

 Is there a statute of limitations on SPOILERS? I feel like if a movie has been out in the world for, oh, say, fifty-two years, that it might maybe be okay to discuss the big "twist" without fear of ruining it for everybody. Particularly a movie like Carnival of Souls, which has been in both the public domain and also the Criterion collection for quite a while. I know that a lot of you have probably heard of the film but maybe haven't seen it, but there's no point in writing about Carnival of Souls this late into the game without discussing what makes it so unique for its time. And that means directly addressing the end of the film, when the creeping sense of unease finally overtakes you.

 So here's what I'm going to do: consider this your SPOILER warning, because I'm diving in. The Blogorium has been around too long not to have included Carnival of Souls, and the Cap'n isn't going to shy away from twists and turns. Continue at your own risk if you haven't seen the film (and you should).

 Still with me? All right, let's get into it. I've always found Carnival of Souls has a lasting effect particularly because it's such an unorthodox "ghost story." Astute viewers of today can no doubt figure out that there's no way Mary (Candace Hilligoss) survived the car crash and somehow emerges from the river, to the surprise of the rescue crew and onlookers. We know, in fact, that she didn't at the very end of the film when the tow truck pulls the car out and her body is next to the other two girls, but it raises the question: what is the rest of the story? Is it a dream in the moments before death? Does her spirit escape, and try to carry on as before, only to be pursued by the spirits of the dead? She interacts with other people who are very much alive, who have scenes that Mary doesn't appear in, including the next to last moment at the carnival.

 In most horror movies - and certainly all of the great ones - atmosphere is key. Carnival of Souls excels at atmosphere, in particular the way that the mundane world Mary settles into is interrupted by phantoms who follow her at every turn. Arguably, the use of organ music is a dead giveaway when the shift is going to happen - which is forgivable, considering that it isn't nearly as egregious as, say the "monster" theme from Creature from the Black Lagoon. The organ music is also unsettling at times, as it too straddles the line between the sacred and profane. That it is Mary's chosen profession is all the more appropriate considering the trajectory of Carnival of Souls.

There's something to the phrase "spiritual insouciance" in the IMDB synopsis - there's something to the idea that Mary refuses to die that makes the deliberately dreamlike second half of Carnival of Souls so alluring. She skips town, takes a job as an organist at another church, but is constantly drawn to the dead, the abandoned, the profane. The moments when she "ceases to exist" are really quite something, especially for 1962 (remember, this only two years after Psycho, and Mary dies even sooner than Marion Crane). Carnival of Souls has an illusory quality, juxtaposed with the very normal world of working and having a landlady and fending off your randy neighbor. Mary is torn between two worlds - one she's desperately trying to avoid - and the matter of fact shift between one and the other gives the film a kind of proto-Lynchian vibe. It's not entirely clear where Herk Harvey and John Clifford are heading with the story.

 Many ghost stories have characters who interact with the dead, but the protagonist is often alive or, in the case of something like The Sixth Sense, has a spiritual guide who is alive that introduces them to the world of the undead. Mary is our main character, and most of the film is told specifically from her perspective. She's haunted by the "The Man," (Harvey) who she attempts to avoid everywhere except at the carnival, where she's inexplicably drawn. It's there, after all, that she (and the audience) is revealed the truth - during their dance macabre (sorry, I couldn't help myself), The Man's partner is none other than an equally ghoulish version of Mary. She runs, they pursue her, she disappears.

 Which makes sense, but the following scene, when the Minister (Art Ellison), Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt), and the police go to the carnival the following day and trace her footprints out to the water, where they stop. It's not the first time we've seen Dr. Samuels or John on camera without Mary in the shot, so there's some argument to be made that this represents objective reality, and yet they considered Mary to be a living, breathing person among them. In that respect, Carnival of Souls differentiates itself from films both before and after that deal with ghosts, poltergeists, or the like. It's reminiscent of the story of the woman in white, hitchhiking to the dance she never lived to see, but on a larger scale. This ghost refuses to believe she's dead - not in an ignorant way (like The Sixth Sense), but in a determined sense to stay alive.

 On some level, Mary knows she's deceased - her attraction to the abandoned carnival (filmed at the abandoned Saltair Pavilion outside of Salt Lake City) is linked to the idea of something (or someone) existing past their purpose. She intermittently flirts with John Linden (Sidney Berger), her neighbor, alternating between a need for human contact and some distant understanding that he has nothing to offer her. Mary's destiny is with The Man, her partner in the dance of the dead, if I may drop all subtlety. Her at times inexplicable behavior is much clearer at the end, when it's obvious that these are the last whims of a dead woman, one who slipped free from the afterlife. For a little while, anyway.

 To this day, Carnival of Souls is best viewed late at night, when the mind begins to wander, and when its dreamlike logic is more effective on viewers. That, at least, is how I prefer to introduce it to people. Its influence stretches far beyond its familiarity with most audiences - one will be hard pressed to find people who haven't heard of it, but many of them still haven't seen it. It's presence in the public domain no doubt muddies the water - along with Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls can be found bundled with any number of cheapie monster flick from the 1950s and 60s, doomed to be downgraded by association, a fate a film this good doesn't deserve. It's somewhat amazing that this is the only feature Herk Harvey ever made, but if you're only going to make one, we should all hope it's a Carnival of Souls.

Shocktober Revisited: The Frighteners

 Review originally appeared in 2009

 It's been quite a while since I'd seen The Frighteners from beginning to end, but after watching it last night, time seems to be kinder to it than I remembered.

 The first time I saw The Frighteners was sometime in 1996, when my dad took me out to the Colony in Raleigh (the only theater playing it as I recall) to see Michael J. Fox's comedy horror epic. I don't really think I knew who Peter Jackson was at the time; I certainly hadn't seen Bad Taste, Dead Alive, or Heavenly Creatures, but I knew about Meet the Feebles (the most demented puppet movie not this side of Jan Svankmajer) and was probably seeing it soon. I was thinking The Frighteners would be something along the lines of Ghostbusters, since the ads play up the humor. Clearly, I was mistaken.

 I remember liking The Frighteners, although the mix of humor to horror tended to lean heavily in one direction or the other for long periods of time, and the hell worm eating Johnny and Patricia (Jake Busey and Dee Wallace-Stone) really disturbed me at the time. Critics seemed to take exception to a horror comedy that was more horror than comedy, and to this day The Frighteners is regarded as a misfire for Peter Jackson.

  Looking back at it, I'm not so sure. Yes, the film is marketed as a comedy, and yes, it's not a comedy in the sense that Ghostbusters is, or even Dead Alive, which took gore to such extreme lengths that one couldn't help but laugh. The horror in The Frighteners is unabashed; characters we care about are murdered wantonly by the Soul Collector, and the gore is often more disturbing than laughable (with the notable exception of Jim Fyfe and Chi McBride's ghosts in the first act, where gore is played for laughs). Jackson pulls the rug out from under us, setting us up for a funny romp and then turning things dark very quickly.

 That being said, it still works if you know what you're getting into. Even having not seen it in years, I knew The Frighteners was a horror-comedy that leans more in one direction than the other, and when weighed with what Jackson's done before and since, the movie give us a glimpse of a director moving from one type of film to another.

 For The Frighteners, Jackson really relied on the still fresh WETA team to use what computers could do in 1995 to make the ghosts seem real in the film, and because of what they accomplished, he felt comfortable enough to consider making The Lord of the Rings next. Frighteners was also Jackson's first major studio picture with an "A List" Star (bear in mind that Kate Winslet was an unknown when Heavenly Creatures came out and had not yet appeared in Hamlet or Titanic) and a large budget. For a director accustomed to low budget movies, this was a high concept film, and Jackson's brand of black comedy was a little darker than most American audiences were ready for.

 Uneven as it may be, The Frighteners is still fun to watch, and as the last major starring role for Michael J. Fox as Frank Bannister, a time capsule of an actor still in his prime. It also has a fine supporting cast, with Trini Alvarado, the aforementioned Busey and Wallace Stone, Fyfe, McBride, John Astin, and Jeffrey Combs playing the most demented FBI agent you're likely to see. Oh, and let's not forget that extended cameo from R. Lee Ermey, basically reprising his role in Full Metal Jacket.

 The version I watched was the extended Director's Cut, which runs a little over two hours and adds fourteen minutes back into the running time. A few sequences seemed new (like the ghosts dressing up as The Grim Reaper to scare Frank and more flashback material of Johnny and Patricia) but for the most part I can't really remember what was new and what wasn't.

 The Frighteners is unfairly maligned in the Peter Jackson filmography, and certainly worth another look. You might be surprised that is still holds up, or that Jackson went from this directly into Lord of the Rings, but a watered down PJ film this is not.

Blogorium Review: Spider Baby

 Jack Hill's Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told is one of the more unusual films I think I've ever seen. That has to say something, as the Blogorium has seen its share of the strange and "off the beaten path" cinema. It's more coherent than Death Bead: The Bed That Eats, and less hyperbolic than Blood Car, to be sure, but there's something about the tone of Spider Baby that resonates well after the film ends. Lurid? Yes. Graphically violent? At times. It meets most of the check-marks for "low budget shocker" from the 1960s, but Spider Baby is nothing like the two most famous titles from that era: Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls. It's so weird that the film often makes Freaks look tame by comparison, if only in how nonchalant everyone seems to be about the Merrye family.

 Somewhere in the hills of California (?) is what remains of the Merrye Mansion, a place nobody wants to go anymore. Its only inhabitants are Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), her younger sister Virginia (Jill Banner), and their older brother Ralphie (Sid Haig), under the care of the family chauffeur, Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.). Well, there might be a few odd uncles and aunts in the basement, but that's Bruno's business. The Merrye's have a unique affliction: a genetic disorder that causes them to "regress" as they grow older, mentally at first but eventually physically as well. Virginia believes that she's a spider, and eats bugs, along with anything (or anyone) she catches in her "web." Elizabeth dresses and behaves like a child and wants nothing more than for Bruno to hate her sister, to the point that she allows Virginia to kill the mailman (Mantan Moreland) early in the film. Ralphie? Well, it might be better to think of him less as a person and more like a dog - he's in the late stages of "Merrye Syndrome" and is basically feral.

 To Bruno's great dismay, the mailman (who was dead when he got home, to be fair) is delivering notice from the niece and nephew of "The Master" of the Merrye Estate, Emily (Carol Ohmart) and Peter (Quinn Redeker) Howe, who have come to take control of the manor and assume custody of the children. Emily brings along her lawyer, Mr. Schlocker (Karl Schanzer) and his assistant, Ann Morris (Merry Mitchell), with hopes of cashing in on the estate, but what they find is a very different matter indeed. The children trust Bruno and they do their best to appear "normal" for their extended family, but it's only so long before their natural tendencies surface...

 Originally titled Cannibal Orgy, the film begins with a kooky animated credits sequence, accompanied by a song about the story to come, sung by Chaney. If you didn't know what you were getting into, this sets the tone right away, and Mantan Moreland's jittery mailman give a clear sense that Spider Baby teeters on the brink of "camp" territory. Not intentionally, mind you, but the bizarre display of "Merrye Syndrome," and Elizabeth and Virginia in particular are a template for the sorts of characters who populated John Waters films in the 1970s. They just don't know any better - it's how they've always lived, with Bruno keeping a close eye on them and the rest of the world shut out.

 For the Merrye family, it's perfectly normal that Ralphie uses a dumbwaiter between floors of the house, and while Emily is appalled at their lack of "manners," Peter takes it all in stride. He accepts them as they are, a choice that makes Spider Baby all the more unusual; the film doesn't revel in how bizarre the Merrye's are (and they certainly are), but takes them at face value and presents the intruders as the "strange" ones. At no point in the film is the audience ever sympathetic towards Schlocker or Emily, and the emerging romance between Peter and Ann seems to exist so that Virginia's affections toward him go unrequited. That they're family only seems to go noticed by Peter, but he's so accommodating of the girls that in more lurid hands, who knows where the story may have headed...

 I'm almost positive that Spider Baby is a direct influence on Rob Zombies' House of 1000 Corpses, particularly on how the presentation of the Merrye's mirrors the behavior of the Firefly clan. It's not just that Sid Haig is in both films, although that certainly doesn't hurt the case that Zombie has seen Spider Baby and borrows from it (in particular, watch the dinner scene and compare Baby on the couch in Corpses with Virginia and Peter in the "web" scene). The difference that makes a difference between Spider Baby and House of 1000 Corpses is that the former was intentionally designed to be a comedy and the latter resembles a grab-bag of "grindhouse" tropes in the guise of a horror movie. (In the interest of full disclosure, the Cap'n is not a fan of House of 1000 Corpses).

 We're meant to laugh at the arch behavior and the unexpected resolution to the Ralphie / Emily "romance" - if you want to call it that - in the same way that Bruno's admission the family is "vegetarian" at the dinner table. The concession to this rule is that Virginia eats bugs and Ralphie is allowed to eat whatever he "catches," which includes the cooked cat on the table. Only Peter seems interested in partaking, mostly because he assumes it's a fox or something of that nature.

 The distinction that Spider Baby is a comedy - a very, very black comedy at that - is often missed by people who discover the film. Hill, who made his feature debut with Spider Baby, lost the film in a series of tangled rights issues following the producers going bankrupt, delaying its release for the better part of the 1960s. When Cannibal Orgy finally made its way to theaters, it was unusually paired with biker films (Hells Chosen Few) or horror anthologies (Dr. Terror's House of Horrors). Given that sort of pairing, it's understandable that Spider Baby remains largely unknown to this day. I had heard of it, but had never seen a copy of the U.S. DVD, and ultimately came to the film through the Arrow Video Blu-Ray release, which does look fantastic for a 50 year old film that only made it to drive-ins. It existed on the margins of cult cinema for so long that even Jack Hill is surprised by the affinity its fans have for the film. He seems puzzled to be remembered for this over Switchblade Sisters or Foxy Brown, but for a young filmmaker working on a low budget, it's a very assured debut.

 Part of the appeal was seeing a younger Sid Haig, and also Ohlmart (memorable as Vincent Price's venomous wife in House on Haunted Hill), but chiefly I wanted to see Lon Chaney, Jr. in one of his better later roles. Unlike Alligator People or Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Chaney wasn't consigned to the "drunken caretaker" role, and is instead the surrogate parent for the Merrye children. He has quite a few tender moments with the girls, particularly when Virginia does something unforgivable and Elizabeth desperately wants him to shun her for it. He tells them that he could never hate them, and does his best to manage an untenable situation when Emily and Peter arrive. His sense of resignation about the real world colliding with the fantasy world of the Merrye "children" keeps Spider Baby from simply being a freak show. Tonally speaking, Chaney is what makes Spider Baby such a strange film, in that he simply refuses (as a character and, presumably, as an actor) to treat this madness as anything other than "par the course."

 The big surprise, at least for me, was Jill Banner as Virginia. I knew almost nothing about her going into the film, and only found out after the fact that she had been developing scripts with Marlon Brando prior to her untimely death (car accident). While Beverly Washburn has the more "camp" performance, Banner is mesmerizing as the titular character, who seems totally disconnected to reality in any form. Her fascination with "Uncle Peter" is both creepy and sweet, although her intentions always lead back to playing "spider" with a pair of kitchen knives for fangs. It's a shame there isn't more of Banner to see on-screen, but as first impressions go, she makes the most of hers.

 (SPOILERS AHEAD) I do have one minor point of contention for the film - the original title, Cannibal Orgy, doesn't actually make much sense until the very end of the movie, when the completely devolved "relatives" in the basement are revealed. To that point, we're only aware that Bruno and the girls put the bodies of the mailman and Schlocker in the dumbwaiter and send them to the basement, but it's not clear that the "uncles" and "aunts" are eating them. Furthermore, it's hard to tell exactly what Elizabeth eats other than moss and mushrooms, and Virginia only eats bugs and cuts up people - she keeps the mailman's ear in a box, but never makes any overtures that she'd eat it. Ralphie eats other animals, and Bruno doesn't appear to have any cannibalistic tendencies. I understand that the title is lurid and grabs your attention, but in this instance Spider Baby may, in fact, be the better choice, even if the opening song specifically references cannibalism.

 It's a minor quibble, I admit: Spider Baby is a film that deserves to be better known than it is, but if you like hunting out on the edges of cult classics, I think you'll find it is every bit as deserving of your attention as Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead. Possibly as influential, albeit to a different group of filmmakers. And don't worry too much about the goofy prologue with Peter that sets up "Merrye Syndrome" - the closing bookend wraps it up well (or does it???).  Spider Baby is the sort of low budget exploitation that sneaks up on you, and continually surprises, confuses, and amuses you. I wish I'd have seen it sooner, but even a Cap'n can be late to the party some times. Come over some time and I'll be happy to show it to you, but do watch out for my web. I get to eat what I catch, you see...

Shocktober Revisited: Four Reasons to Remake Obscure Horror Films

Welcome to another installment of Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium. Tonight I'll have a few preamble-ish comments, followed by what I hope will be a brief addressing of a question I posed long ago: "why are studios remaking such random horror movies?"

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One blogorium reader was kind enough to point out to me that the spaces do count in that "140 characters max" on Twitter, which renders my little experiment moot. It also proves to me that I could in no way give you reasonable feedback on movies using that ridiculous site.

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To be honest, I understand why the remake happens. I don't necessarily like it, but rather than harp on its downsides - as the Cap'n usually does - I thought I'd take the opportunity to look at the pluses of this trend, because there are a few.

Big name remakes make enough sense; repackage a title that's well enough culturally recognized (your Friday the 13ths, Nightmare on Elm Streets, Halloweens, Texas Chain Saw Massacres, and so on), throw in a dispensable cast of Abercrombie and Fitch models-turned-CW-stars, and pay lip service to the "classic" original producers know their target audience doesn't watch because it's "dated" and "stupid", and voila - big box office pay off. I get that.

We've moved in a different direction, though: one you get past the "top tier" remakes, rather than simply go for the comparably well known second tier movies (your Critters, Phantasm, The Exorcist*), studios are jumping for lesser known "cult" films. In the past seven years, we've seen The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left, Prom Night, Terror Train, Black Christmas, April Fool's Day, My Bloody Valentine, It's Alive, The Crazies, The House on Sorority Row, The Stepfather, The Fog, The Wicker Man, The Toolbox Murders, and When a Stranger Calls.

Not exactly part of the cultural zeitgeist, I'd say. Horror aficionados? Sure, but hardly the kind of movie everybody knows immediately. I can say "Freddy Krueger" and people who haven't seen A Nightmare on Elm Street. If I say "The Tall Man", it's 75/25 against, but I guarantee you most people couldn't name the killer in most of the above slasher films. In fact, I'm willing to bet that a solid 2nd-tier title like Creepshow is mostly unknown to the masses.

So why turn to such obscure films for remakes? Name recognition falls off steeply after The Last House on the Left, so let's look at four other reasons (besides "it's cheap"):

1. The Days of Video Store familiarity are almost at a close - meaning that the era of familiarity with "cult" horror films, or even more obscure titles like The Crazies, The Stepfather, and The House on Sorority Row are coming to an end. The DVD market, also winding down, is so packed with releases of "cult" horror films (not to mention Blu-Ray reissues, as Blue Underground has been devoting themselves to) that it's very easy for these once-recognizable films to lose shelf space.

That wasn't really the case in the golden age of VHS. Speaking strictly from personal experience, Carbonated Video and Video Bar had rows of horror films with lurid cover art, facing forward so that you always knew what it was you were in for. Go to Best Buy and try that. Their horror section (at least here) is packed in tightly between the end of "Drama" and the beginning of "Boxed Sets", with every movie scrunched together, spine forward. Unless you know what you're looking for, it's up to the title of the movie to do the work for you, and while I might think about looking twice at something called Bloodsucking Freaks or Gore Met: Zombie Chef from Hell, I never missed those titles at the video store.


2. Attention Spans are Getting Shorter and the Market is Getting Larger - It's very, VERY easy to find a dozen horror titles from the last year you've never heard of. Seriously, now that DVD distribution can get every zero-budget slasher / zombie movie a review on the major web sites, the older films get lost in the shuffle, no matter how revered they are. The frequency of releases and the relative obscurity of some of the titles even makes me mistake a movie like Street Trash for a movie like Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, chronology-wise.

When I have to remind people that a movie from last year - The House of the Devil - even exists, imagine how tricky it is to keep the horror neophyte abreast on The Burning. Or jeez, Visiting Hours, which I don't even like that much! There are simply too many horror movies that somehow never made it to DVD that should, because the VHS copies are getting harder to find. However, if a studio remakes the film, we get to reason number #3

3. The Original Film Gets Its Day in the Sun - Oh sure, it may not be for very long, but consider the fact that until The Stepfather remake was on its way to theatres that you couldn't get a copy of the original on DVD. There was an out-of-print copy of the sequel, but the very fact that a remake was happening ushered the release of both Terry O'Quinn Stepfather films in special editions, which might have eventually happened, but until that point had not.

The same applies for The House on Sorority Row (albeit several months later), Black Christmas, My Bloody Valentine (in an uncut version to boot), The Gate, Child's Play**, The Crazies on Blu-Ray, and (I would imagine) is coming for Piranha, Suspiria, Patrick, The Brood, I Spit on Your Grave, Maniac, Fright Night, and Night of the Demons.

Even if you aren't planning on seeing the remakes (and I think I've seen two in the last year - Friday the 13th Shit Coffin and My Bloody Valentine 3-D), it was nice to be able to pick up the originals on DVD and Blu-Ray in something a little better than "bargain bin" editions. In fact, this leads me to my final point, one that might seem tangentially related, but -

4. Other, Lesser Known, Horror Films are Also Being Released "Just in Case" - There may be no plans to remake Night of the Creeps, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, Maniac Cop, Two Evil Eyes, Silent Night, Deadly Night, or Monster Squad, but they've been slowly but surely coming out on DVD and Blu-Ray in between releases of movies that are being remade. As much as might might seem annoying, the remake mania opened up the market for older, "cult", titles to get their own special editions, on the off-chance somebody decides to option them. How else do you explain video nasties like Cannibal Holocaust getting a two-disc edition, or Faces of Death on Blu-Ray(!)?

This gives me hope for those films yet to be available. I talk a LOT about Terrorvision, but considering how many movies that are much worse are already on DVD, it's a crying shame that such a twisted movie is only on VHS. Or The House of Long Shadows, which maybe isn't a great movie, but has Vincent Price, John Carradine, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee together on-screen. That's not on DVD, but Uncle Sam is coming out on Blu-Ray. Look, I can understand City of the Living Dead on Blu-Ray, but Uncle Sam??? Really? And we can't even get a standard definition copy of Terrorvision?

But I digress. The point is, that with all of these remakes in the pipeline, as much ire as it raises, and the slow push to get "every movie out on DVD", I can look forward to eventually seeing these and many other lost "cult" horror films on shelves, however briefly. Then I have to contend with their remakes eating up space, but the option will be there for a while. And smaller companies like Severin or Blue Underground or Synapse or Dark Sky will continue to release other movies, possibly with remakes in mind, but possibly not. As long as I'm not obliged to see the new version, it's really a win-win

So there you have it, the "silver lining" to the remake madness. If I have to put up with continual announcements about this-or-that beloved rarity being churned out for a quick buck in order to have a proper copy at home, so be it. It could be worse: they could not be greedy and just bury the original films to we can never see them again...

* I realize some of you are going to take umbrage to my suggestion that The Exorcist is in any way "second tier", you have to admit that the fact nobody is even trying to remake it when The Evil Dead continues to be a viable remake is odd. I intentionally left out Hellraiser, as it apparently is the subject of ongoing remake attempts.
** While, technically speaking, there is no Child's Play remake yet, its existence figures prominently in the special edition dvd and Blu-Ray commentary tracks.

Retro Review: Battle Royale

 Everybody is talking about The Hunger Games, a movie that I can feel comfortable reporting comes out this Friday. I can't confirm that, but I have a hunch. And when I say "everybody," I mean one person I know and every entertainment program on television, nearly every store that sells books, music (it has a soundtrack), and any website that wants to piggyback on this manufactured "phenomenon."

 Look, I'm sure that The Hunger Games will do very well (because its target audience was told it would do very well while they're waiting for the next Twilight movie which, by the way, is also now part of a fake "feud" designed to sell teen magazines) in the way that John Carter did not, largely for the same reasons: one movie has been announced as the next "must see" movie and the other was deemed a "failure" with the likes of Ishtar and Heaven's Gate before anyone had seen either film. It's how these things go, and to be honest, I'm not really interested in seeing John Carter or The Hunger Games. They might both be great movies or they might blow chunks and I'm not going to know. I also haven't read The Hunger Games trilogy or any of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

 To be fair, I haven't read Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, which Kinji Fukasaku adapted into a feature in 2000. I'm not sure that it falls into the "Young Adult" category of fiction or not, but it's certainly a "dystopian" novel, which I was told (on NPR) is "all the rage" and the "new 'vampire'" for teenagers. Fair enough, because when I found out what The Hunger Games was about, the first question I had was "so it's Battle Royale?" The answer, I learned, was "kind of."

 Despite the last few paragraphs, this is not going to be a comparison of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale. Today is probably the first time that a mass audience in America even knew that Battle Royale was a film. The DVD and Blu-Ray sets released by Anchor Bay represent the first official release of Battle Royale or its unfortunate sequel in the United States. For the last twelve years, the film has been available, usually through imports or suspicious looking copies, and I'm going to guess as the internet developed, probably online somewhere.

 In 2000, Battle Royale was a film of mythic proportions. I was in college, and the film was unofficially "banned" in the U.S. because of the subject matter: a dystopian future where high school students were forced to fight to the death on an abandoned island. There could be one survivor, or everybody died. It was too close to the Columbine massacre, and no American studio wanted to touch Fukasaku's film for fear of the backlash that would follow. As a result, Battle Royale was immediately taboo; it was a film we were not allowed to see, that was being withheld from audiences in the states. That's how it felt to us, in a world where it wasn't a click away, where Amazon and imported DVDs and region free players weren't as accessible as they are now.

 The premise had my attention. The "forbidden" nature increased my desire to see the film. Eventually I purchased a VHS copy of a copy of a dupe of a DVD from overseas. That was probably early 2001, and then I could see what the brouhaha was all about.

 If Battle Royale had been a lousy movie, or had simply been just about some cheap thrills for the sake of titillating gorehounds, it wouldn't mean anything that it took twelve years to be able to buy it in a "Big Box" retail store. The good news was - and is - that Battle Royale is an effective, dark, thrilling, and yes, gory, examination of human nature in extreme situations. It's an inversion of The Most Dangerous Game, where everyone is the hunter AND the hunted.

 42 students from class 3-B in Japan, some time after a massive economic and cultural collapse, are headed out on a field trip. Normally they can't be bothered to go to class - they're openly hostile to teachers, show no respect for authority, and generally act like teenagers. But in this Japan, the government developed a system to keep this problem in check: The Battle Royale Act. After being gassed on the bus, the students wake up in an abandoned school with two strangers. They're wearing metal collars they can't remove, and before they can process what's happening, armed soldiers storm into the classroom, along with Mr. Kitano (Takeshi "Beat" Kitano), their old teacher.

 He explains to them they have been selected at random to participate in Battle Royale, belittles them for being insolent brats, and kills two of the students (one to demonstrate how the collar explodes by remote control and the other because she wouldn't stop talking). This is not a joke, despite the bubbly instructor on the video Kitano wants them to watch. The 40 remaining students (plus two "transfers") are given a bag with food, supplies, and one weapon (ranging anywhere from a machine gun to the lid of a pot), and sent out onto the abandoned island. If they don't kill each other off until one survivor remains in three days, they all die.

 That's a schlocky enough gimmick to keep most people engaged, but Battle Royale goes beyond simply satisfying our urge for carnage: the film becomes a microcosm of societal responses to traumatic situations. When forced to fight each other to the death, the students don't immediately go after each other in a free for all. Their schoolyard relationships are magnified: cliques band together with different strategies and old grudges and crushes are manipulated, sometimes to unexpected advantages. Not everyone wants to kill: a group of girls hole up in a lighthouse in the hope that they can wait it out, and the computer savvy, anarcho-leaning outsiders formulate a plan to disrupt the BR system and even construct a suicide bomb to drive into the school.

 Meanwhile, the transfer students arrived with very different agendas: one volunteered in the hope of killing as many people as possible (indicated on-screen by their student number and name, plus the remaining number of contestants). The other has a history with BR and a lingering question he needs answered, as well as a strategy to beat the system. All he has to do is avoid being killed and finding himself in the "danger zone," areas of the island that cause the collars to automatically explode.

 There are a few flashbacks scattered throughout Battle Royale, providing some depth to why some of the teenage boys and girls do what they do and who they target. It explains some of the jealousies and misunderstandings that lead to tragic results, and the atmosphere of mistrust also causes some of the students to act in ways they'll immediately regret. The film succeeds both in being violent escapism but also as a study of teenage behavior pushed to an extreme degree. The ending may be a little unbelievable, even when you factor in a surprise motivation for Kitano, a man whose own children hate him. If it stumbles a little at the end, I don't mind too much. That, and I do as much as I can to pretend Battle Royale II: Requiem doesn't exist. It's the sequel that continues the story, largely in the wrong ways, and that fails to add anything to the world hinted at in the first film.

 There is an interesting side note that comes from watching Battle Royale again: based on the opening of the film, BR is something covered breathlessly by this future Japanese media. Throngs of reporters and cameras crowd in on the truck carrying the winner of the previous Battle Royale, trying to get information about the survivor of this imposed massacre. What do they get? A smile. It's a potent and disturbing way to open the film, but the concept of media coverage never figures into Battle Royale again. There's no indication that the games are televised or that people are following along at home. Other than Mr. Kitano's daily briefings, there's virtually no communication between the people running the game and the "contestants," let alone the outside world.

 I had forgotten that incongruity, but watching the film again it's clear that the prologue is either abandoned or simply was not considered relevant to Fukasaku or his son (who adapted the screenplay). That element was developed further in the film Series 7: The Contenders, a satire of reality television released in 2001. Battle Royale is successful perhaps because it doesn't even attempt to comment on the rise of reality television or media coverage beyond that opening, but I had forgotten how minute of a factor it is in the actual movie. In the end, I don't think it matters all that much. Eleven years after seeing that washed out VHS copy, I was still enthralled watching Battle Royale on Blu-Ray*. It still holds up, and now hopefully everybody will see what they've been missing all this time.


 * I don't actually have the Anchor Bay release - the Blu-Ray I have is the Arrow Films UK release from 2010, which is region free. It has the first film in its theatrical and director's cut versions, plus a disc of extras. It's basically what was released in the U.S. recently, but without the sequel. I don't miss it.

News and Notes

Normally, the Cap'n tries to avoid being "too" topical: for example, I tend to not mention celebrity obituaries. I struggled with mentioning the death of Elizabeth Taylor, a name that ought to be instantly recognizable to film fans, casual and devoted. She's an icon, a legend, and if I mentioned Charlton Heston's passing, it only seemed fair. That being, said, I don't know what to add to the wave of coverage yesterday, save to point out the one movie that doesn't seemed to be mentioned alongside Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cleopatra, National Velvet, Giant, or The Taming of the Shrew (all fine films in their own right, mind you).

If you want to see why Elizabeth Taylor is more than just an icon, more than just a sex symbol, do yourself a favor and watch Mike Nichol's directorial debut, an adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are fantastic; the movie is exquisitely written, directed, and acted, and while it's not an easy film to watch emotionally, you will come out of it understanding why Taylor is remembered the way she is, even after being out of films for nearly twenty years.

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Oh, speaking of Charlton Heston (my go-to guy for 70s paranoia films), Soylent Green is coming to Blu-Ray. If we're going to stamp this particular post in time, I thought you might want to know. That concludes his "Science Fiction Hero Trilogy" (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Soylent Green) on High Definition, so go ahead and pick those up. No seriously, I'm not actually being sarcastic there. The Planet of the Apes series are all worth seeing, the first one all the more so; silly ending aside, The Omega Man does a better job of portraying the loneliness of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend than The Last Man on Earth or, well, I Am Legend; Soylent Green doesn't quite have the budget to back up its scope, and it's the least surprising twist this side of Psycho*, but the film is still compelling.

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While I understand Patton Oswalt's argument that the over-availability of films is slowly destroying "geek" culture and removing what seemed to special about being a cinephile, I have to say that the rise of Blu-Ray and the movement on the part of DVD manufacturers to stay alive have only increased the availability of films I never knew existed, and that's a treat.

For example, the concept of having a "Blaxploitation Night" for Summer Fest may well have been a pipe dream were it not for the discovery of Blackenstein on DVD, which then led me to Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, a film that fortuitously was scheduled for release this month. That led me to Abby, the Blaxploitation Exorcist, and then gave me cause to expand my search beyond the 1970s to include Tales from the Hood and Bones. I realize this seems to have less to do with the previous paragraph than it ought to, but the sudden presence of a "35th Anniversary Edition" of Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde is attributable to the growing market for smaller titles, in part because most of the "mainstream" audience is moving to high definition.

It also explains how and why films like Santa Sangre, The Dorm that Dripped Blood, WUSA, Boss, and Teenage Mother are suddenly appearing after years of wallowing in obscurity. Meanwhile, cable channels increasingly have been picking up movies that still haven't made their way to home video. Turner Classic Movies, who launched TCM Underground in 2006 and continued the series unofficially until some time this year, still shows a Friday night double feature of exploitation, cult, or obscure horror films.

Last week, their double feature included Ghoulies and a horror film from 1981 called The Boogens. I had no idea The Boogens even existed, it's not on DVD, and as best I can tell there are no plans to release it. Is the film any good or not? I don't know, but I'll certainly check out the film after recording The Boogens, which seems to be about killer turtle creatures. For someone like me, who loves the thrill of discovery, this period is a blessing.

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Finally, when I went to check out TCM Underground's page, I found that it no longer existed, but the "error" image almost made its absence worthwhile:






* Imagine, for a second, what it must have been like to not have the "shower scene" in the collective subconscious of moviegoers, and to have entered Psycho thinking that Marion Crane was the character we were supposed to follow throughout the film. And then the "shower scene" happens.

A Few Thoughts on SyFy Channel Originals

If there's one thing the Cap'n gets more grief about from friends, it's my unwillingness to embrace the Syfy (née Sci-Fi) Channel Original films. "But you love schlock," they say, "this is the same kind of b-to-z grade crap they churned out in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, so where's the love?"

And it's true: I have no love for Syfy originals like Frankenfish, Mega Piranha, Raptor Island, S.S. Doomtrooper, Ice Spiders, and Grizzly Rage. Beyond that, I really don't like the more recent trend of "giant _____" films that are then combined into dreck like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus or Dinocroc vs. Supergator (or the forthcoming Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid). I'm not even sure the latter qualify as "Syfy Originals" or if Syfy just airs them.

It is true that I enjoy low budget "thrillers" like Them! or Fiend without a Face or The Beginning of the End. All are imminently watchable, and while cheap often attempt to disguise their low budgets with imaginative monster effects and as many thrills as they can muster with a no-name cast. Attack of the Crab Monsters, a very early Roger Corman film, is still far better than it has any right to be, as does Beast from Haunted Cave. So yes, I do like vintage schlock; now allow me to explain why calling what Syfy does the same is erroneous.

The central difference between the films listed in the above paragraph (plus many, many others) and the weekly Syfy output is simple - every time I see a Syfy Original, it seems like nobody is trying at all. The films are barely competent, and not because the people involved weren't capable of doing so, but because many of them look like they're in it for a quick paycheck. I mean, who's going to see this garbage, right?

That's the impression one quickly gleans from these films, which all seem to follow a similar formula: cast one or two actors / musicians / quasi-celebrities on a career decline in lead roles, find one more B-movie icon to cast in a tiny role that requires as little work from them as possible, fill the rest of the cast out with desperate unknowns, then unleash a Toy Story 1-era CGI monster to kill them off, mostly by eating them because it requires less animation for one "gulp."

The films then pad out the cheap, uninteresting "monster" attacks with long, pointless subplots that continually separate the main characters from the action, introduce superfluous roles for truly talentless amateurs as "comic relief," then eventually get back to the monster in time for the finale, which of late consists of the main characters watching two badly animated creatures "fight" until one or both "die" - at least until the next sequel.

For example, this is exactly what happens in Dinocroc vs. Supergator, minus any recognizable cast members aside from the late David Carradine, who really seemed to be shooting his scenes at home and literally phones in most of his dialogue as the evil corporation head who had something to do with... I don't know, let's say Supergator's existence. Even he doesn't seem to care that he's in the movie, so why should I be enthused that he graced this waste of 90 minutes with his presence? Or F. Murray Abraham trying to stay involved in Blood Monkey before being killed? (Oops, SPOILER).

The Mega-whatevers vs Giant-whatsits are even more transparent in their attempts to draw audiences into interminably boring conversations and lab scenes by including "whatever happened to's" like Deborah Gibson, Lorenzo Lamas, Jaleel White, Corin Nemec, Vanessa Williams, Casper Van Dien, Lou Diamond Phillips, Sean Patrick Flannery, Armand Assante, Amy Locane, Robbie Williams, Mickey Dolenz, Barry Williams, Daniel Baldwin, and Tiffany. The plots are so interchangeable that it doesn't matter how the monsters got there, let's just watch the singer of "I Think We're Alone Now" fight a giant piranha! Then they throw in Bruce Campbell, Robert Englund, Tony Todd, Daryl Hannah, John Rhys-Davies and Jeffrey Combs (or anyone else who won't say "no") to come in and give the film some "cred" for fanboys.

It's fair to note that the other big Syfy trick has been licensing sequels on the cheap, like Lake Placid 2 (and 3), Firestarter 2, Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming, House of the Dead 2, Pumpkinhead (Ashes to Ashes and Blood Feud), Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God, Bats: Human Harvest, Anacondas 3 and 4, and a remake of Children of the Corn. Of the films I've sampled from that last, almost all of them had the same "we just don't care" attitude that rubs off on the audience.

Say what you will about schlock films of yesteryear, but they weren't boring. Well, some of them were boring, and a lot of those have faded into obscurity, with good reason. Horror of the Blood Monsters is a turgid, lifeless mishmash of prehistoric and vampire elements, and I can't finish it. I will happily watch The Blob though, because an effort was made to, oh, entertain audiences even as the producers sought a quick buck.

By the way, it's not as though movies with virtual unknowns and limited cgi effects can't be entertaining - Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, which has Torchwood's John Barrowman as its marquee name (nothing against Barrowman, who is great in the movie and on the show, but this did come out four years before Torchwood and I'm making a huge assumption that the average visitor to this site has seen the spin-off of the 2005 relaunch of Doctor Who). It has all of the same hallmarks of cheap "giant monster" schlock, but the film is funny, occasionally surprising, has better than expected "kills," and the best pick-up line in film history (even better than "get the butter"). Blood Car, another Blogorium favorite, has no monster but a better gimmick and My Girl's Anna Chlumsky, and it's better than any Syfy film mentioned above.

There are a handful of Syfy Originals that I've found amusing in small doses - Alien Express, Terminal Invasion, parts of Alien Apocalypse, The Man with the Screaming Brain, and Beyond Re-Animator. It's probably worth noting that almost all of them deviate from the formula listed above in one or all aspects. Alien Express, for example, has actual puppets instead of CG monsters, and even if they look goofy, it's a creative choice. Terminal Invasion makes the best of a limited location, and Alien Apocalypse tries hard (and fails miserably, if enterainingly) to tell an Planet of the Apes knock-off story. I've heard good things about Abominable from people like Dr. Murder and the Cranpire, and he also swears by Hammerhead because of the presence of William Forsythe and Jeffrey Combs.

The recent Sharktopus (with Eric Roberts) at least has the right idea with the goofy trailer and theme song, even if it looks like every other "hybrid / giant monster" movie the channel ever aired. And what is Syfy airing this week? Will it break the trend of movies the Cap'n is happier not seeing? It's - oh, something called Mega Snake. No thanks. Let me know when the execution actually meets the premise of this so-called "schlock."

Retro Review: Meet the Feebles

Any review of Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles ought to begin with the story of how the reviewer came to learn of its existence. Meet the Feebles and Bad Taste are in all likelihood Jackson's least seen films (the next closest is Heavenly Creatures, the bridge between his early films and The Lord of the Rings), and the fact that anyone sees them passes like a meme from viewer to viewer. The Cap'n was in high school when a friend said "you have to see this demented puppet movie. There's a rabbit that gets AIDS and screams 'Yippeeeeee! Blech!'" and then made a hideous vomiting sound.

Meet the Feebles was not an easy movie to find - to this day, it isn't available on Netflix, is incredibly rare to see at a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, and is frequently checked out without hope of return at what's left of the "Mom and Pop" chains. Outside of a major metropolitan area, you're going to have to do some serious searching for it. The DVD has its own sordid history, as I can't tell if any of the US releases are "legit" - the copy I have is out of print, looks like it was mastered from VHS, and has a half dozen unrelated trailers for softcore porn murder mysteries as "extras."

All is is my way of setting the stage for Meet the Feebles's place as one of the most viewer unfriendly, disgusting, underground examples of a "Video Nasty" as you're likely to see in the age where Battle Royale can be ordered on Blu-Ray. Seriously, it's easier to buy I Spit on Your Grave and Faces of Death in HD than it is to find an authentic release of Meet the Feebles. There's a good reason for this, and it goes back to the "yippeeee! blech!"

Meet the Feebles is Jackson's twisted take on the Muppets as told through the sleaziest soap opera imaginable. If the film was one or the other, it might not be so disturbingly revolting, but taking the sordid backstage details of a TV show and replacing the humans with cutesy puppets has never failed to increase the "gag" factor for me. The film is a comedy, and it is funny, but if you have any attachment to Jim Henson, it's going to be a rough ride. Unless of course you wanted to see puppets vomit, wallow in filth, bleed, make pornos / snuff films, or eat each other.

On the surface, it's your standard tawdry backstage melodrama: Robert (Mark Hadlow) is a new arrival to The Feebles Variety Hour, a struggling show getting its big break in twelve hours. Its star, Heidi (Danny Mulheron) is a past her prime diva who thinks she's carrying on with Bletch (Doug Wren), the boss and overall lothario. There are muckraking journalists, drug addicts, bad deals with criminals, and two-timing opportunists, as well as a stage manager with a taste for... well, I'll let you find out.

If this sounds like Soapdish, with a dash of All About Eve or any number of other "behind the scenes" pictures, it is. The difference, as I mentioned, is that instead of humans, Feebles deals with puppets, so you get things like sex scenes involving a walrus and a cat. That's the tip of the iceberg, and considering that Meet the Feebles is the bridge between Bad Taste and Dead Alive, feel free to appropriately insert Jackson's stomach-turning gore into the proceedings.

The cast is split up between actual puppets and humans in oversized puppet costumes - ala The Muppets, Sesame Street, et al - which are done well for their crude appearance on-camera. It's impossible to separate Meet the Feebles from The Muppet Show because Jackson stages a musical number at the opening of the film reminiscent of the opening of Henson's TV series, but the film quickly moves backstage into soap opera tropes, just with deliberately cutesy animals just waiting to do filthy things.

The closest thing I can compare Meet the Feebles to is the live action Saturday TV Funhouse that Comedy Central ran several years ago, and believe it or not but that's tame compared to how filthy this film is. There's a pervasive grime to Meet the Feebles, visually and thematically - I've never actually seen a "restored" print, so it's always looked grainy and damaged, but the lighting often casts against the puppets in ways I can only describe as "greasy." It's actually better if I let you find out the context of Harry the rabbit's line (mentioned above) other than it involves an STD called "The Big One" (not officially identified as AIDS in the film).

Please don't take this to mean you shouldn't watch Meet the Feebles; the film is actually rather amusing, and it is entirely possible that you won't have the same "dirty" feeling after watching the film. It is vile, but intentionally so, and you're going to be humming the songs (hopefully not singing the last of of them aloud in public, unless you want strange looks). For Peter Jackson fans this is as important to track down as Forgotten Silver in tracing his path as a director, even if it's not the easiest search. There aren't many films left that are tricky to find with good reason, but Meet the Feebles is quite unlike anything you're expecting.

Blogorium ( re-)Review: Midnight Movies

I'm opting to call this a re-review in that the Cap'n "sort of" reviewed Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream almost two years ago. At the time I wrote the following blurb:

I've also been watching Midnight Movies, which is so far a fun documentary about the birth of the "midnight" cult film phenomenon. It begins with Jodorowsky's El Topo (the first "midnight movie"), and also covers Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Eraserhead, with shout outs to Reefer Madness and Bambi Meets Godzilla, among other movies that played at the Elgin in New York and the Orson Welles theatre in L.A*.

The directors are all involved and it's half about how the films came to be and half interviews with theatre owners, distributors, critics, and fans. Interesting tidbit: Roger Ebert gave Night of the Living Dead a harsh review because he watched it with parents who brought their children to the show. Just let that simmer a little bit, and imagine the review you might write after seeing the reactions he did.

I'm not done yet but they've just transitioned from Rocky Horror to Eraserhead, and it's particularly interesting to hear the overlap with people involved. Richard O'Brien talking about watching Eraserhead is almost as interesting as John Waters talking about seeing NotLD first run at a drive-in in Baltimore. For that, this is a definite "must see".

For the most part, this covers my impressions of watching the doc again - as I did last night - but as my motto is increasingly becoming "do your homework before you write a review," it seemed apropos to fill in the considerable gaps in that initial write-up.

The documentary is a condensation of J. Hoberman and Johnathan Rosenbaum's book Midnight Movies, which understandably has more room to work with in order to properly cultivate the inception, release, and second life as a late night attraction (Rosenbaum and Hoberman appear in interviews). While the film adaptation attempts to distill the book, sacrifices are made in order to make the transition: much of the opening history of cult and exploitation films are dropped in order to focus specifically on the period between El Topo (1970) and Eraserhead (1976), centering around Ben Barenholtz's Elgin and Larry Jackson's programming at the Orson Welles Cinema. The depth of coverage for the films vary, but the six central "midnight movies" are El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Eraserhead.

Midnight Movies is a Starz production, which is not to disparage the work of writer / director Stuart Samuel or co-writer Victor Kushmaniuk, but I've noticed a trend with Starz related documentaries: they attempt to cover a considerable amount of information in a minute amount of time (Midnight Movies is 88 minutes long). In this instance, the film covers six films, plus an intro and outro in less than 90 minutes, leaving roughly 15 minutes per film, which needs to cover the making of the film, its entrance into the "midnight movie" circuit, and its lasting cultural impact.

Not all of the films get that, either; Night of the Living Dead's "making of" portion is considerably less in-depth compared to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and is more focused on the social forces at work surrounding Romero's seminal "zombie" picture than the film itself. Romero's segment is topped off by a cynical comment that the film had no copyright and could therefore make money for any distributor who had a print (with text overlays of grosses for Night of the Living Dead in various territories), while the fact that Night's creators saw none of the revenue is left out.

Larry Jackson (who programmed the Orson Welles Cinema) suggests that his choices in "midnight movies" were based on "ironic" movie going casts a dubious shadow over Reefer Madness, Bambi Meets Godzilla, and makes his advocating of The Harder They Come slightly confounding. Jackson appears to be a genuine fan of the film, but the rationale behind midnight programming at the Welles seems counter-intuitive to the Jamaican made, reggae infused crime drama. The Harder They Come actually feels the least explored of the six subjects, with more time devoted to its distribution than the film itself.

Because I had not finished the film when writing about it, I also neglected to mention the more interesting connection between Eraserhead and John Waters: while promoting Desperate Living, Waters was so enthusiastic about Lynch's debut that he devoted most of the interviews to talking up Eraserhead rather than his third feature. The fact that many of these directors intersected thanks to the "midnight movie" phenomenon is in and of itself a component of the documentary worth watching.

While I understand the point that Midnight Movies: from the Margin to the Mainstream makes, the title can be taken two ways, neither of which I completely agree with: the documentary asserts that the subversive elements of "midnight movies" has become the mainstream, and accordingly their impact is dulled by a tendency towards hyper-irony in modern cinema (this is the central reason Roger Ebert appears in the film, albeit in an extremely limited capacity). The other argument one could make is that the "midnight movies" covered in the film have become mainstream in their own way, particularly as their respective directors elevated in stature.

The arguments bleed together in some ways: I strongly suspect that mainstream audiences have never seen The Harder They Come, Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, or El Topo. They may have some inkling that Eraserhead and Pink Flamingos exist, but it is incredibly unlikely that simply because David Lynch moved on to make The Elephant Man - the film's primary evidence of the "mainstreaming" of the margin - that the cult films have extended as far as Samuel would like us to believe. Waters makes the point that the subject matter of his films hasn't changed, but culture changed to accept the "freaks" he showcases. This is fair, but the argument is not universal across the doc's subjects: Jodorowsky, Henzell, and Romero (to a degree) are still relatively outside of the "mainstream," and while Lynch occasionally taps into the cultural zeitgeist (Twin Peaks), his idiosyncratic filmmaking often scares off the audiences Samuel assumes have come to accept "midnight" culture. I also find the argument that Jaws and Star Wars are "midnight movies" that went mainstream a bit specious - it suggests that there was no precedent for these kinds of film before the "midnight movie" era.

Waters also makes a salient point about the death of "midnight movies": the advent of VHS functionally rendered the midnight experience moot by giving audiences greater access to "cult" films, coupled with the ability to do everything they would do at a late-night theatre in the comfort (and safety) of their own home. In a sense laziness, rather than a shift of values, killed the "midnight movie" (as well as the Drive-In, although that's something I prefer to save for another time).

Accordingly, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is a cinematic Hors d'oeuvre, a taste of "cult" cinema that covers six major films in the history of the midnight movement to a relatively satisfying degree. It functions as a primer, designed to interest you in the individual histories of the films covered, and while I may not concur with the assertion it reaches, with the limited running time, it packs in enough valuable morsels of trivia** that film fans will leave the film hungry for more information.



* The Orson Welles Cinema is not in Los Angeles, but Cambridge, Massachusetts.
** George Romero openly refutes a misleading rumor featured in Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, which is also suggested in Midnight Movies before he corrects it: that Duane Jones was a deliberate casting choice to comment on race relations in the 1960s. Nightmares edits Romero interview footage to suggest that WAS the case, where he directly corrects the misconception in Midnight Movies.

Winnebago Man vs. Best Worst Movie

As I alluded to yesterday in my review of Ben Steinbauer's Winnebago Man, I'm slightly perplexed why none of the reviews I've seen have compared the documentary to another, very similar type of film, Michael Stephenson's Best Worst Movie. While they differ in the medium addressed, Best Worst Movie and Winnebago Man are functionally about the same thing: a long-forgotten piece of media has taken on a new life, separate from the people principally involved with it, and a filmmaker sets out to connect with one specific person and build a documentary around their reaction to new-found fame (or infamy).

Both films begin with an introduction to the "cult" following, including interviews with critics, media personalities, other people involved with the production, and then set about focusing the film on one person who the director feels is impacted most. Both films feature directors who are personally involved in the narrative of the documentary and both feel they have a stake in their subject. Best Worst Movie and Winnebago Man also deal in the culture of "to be laughed AT," a relatively popular phenomenon in the age of the internet and of "viral videos," where the subject(s) of mockery are largely removed from their audience, especially in the case of Troll 2 and Rebney's Winnebago outtakes.

Where they differ is on two key distinctions: the type of media (and the way it is /was disseminated) and the reaction of the film's "subject" (in Winnebago Man, Jack Rebney; in Best Worst Movie, George Hardy). These differences are critical in the success or failure of each film, in part because they frame the "subject" of the film and their audience well before the two ever meet on camera.

The first distinction is an important one, and it explains to some extent why Winnebago Man stumbles in its mid-section. The "viral video," and specifically Rebney's outtakes, are generally speaking viewed on an individual level. One person watches the video on Youtube (or videocassette, as is explained in the film), and passes it on to someone else. We watch them alone, we enjoy them alone, and don't tend to think of these videos as a truly "shared" experience. Gatherings to view the footage, like the Found Film Festival which is featured in Winnebago Man, are fairly rare events.

Troll 2, on the other hand, expanded from an initial home video run to appear regularly in theatres as a "midnight movie" like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The experience of Troll 2, unlike the Winnebago outtakes, is inherently communal. In nearly every instance during Best Worst Movie, it's clear that fans enjoy watching the film together, laughing at the film together, and sharing the experience of Troll 2. The audiences also seem much more invested in the idea of meeting a George Hardy or a Michael Stephenson than a Jack Rebney, who the founders of the Found Film Festival assumed was dead.

This brings us to our second distinction, and the one that benefits one film and seriously undermines the other: the subject(s). I understand why Ben Steinbauer was interested in finding Jack Rebney: it's a fascinating project to track down the "lost" star of one of YouTube's most popular videos, and to find out how he feels about his indirect fame. The problem is that once it is apparent Rebney has no desire whatsoever to interact with Steinbauer on those terms, Winnebago Man struggles to move forward. Jack Rebney offers no insight into the questions Steinbauer hoped to answer, and moreover, he refuses to interact with the fan base the director planned on connecting him to for almost three years.

George Hardy, on the other hand, is a relatively benign subject who has fond memories of making Troll 2 and an inkling that people seem to like the film now, partly because Stephenson was also in the film. Michael Stephenson lucked out, in some ways, by choosing Hardy to expose to the screenings of Troll 2 he'd been observing prior to making Best Worst Movie. Hardy is easygoing, gregarious, and clearly a little struck by the sudden popularity he encounters, and he has the benefit of knowing the director as they experience Troll 2's resurgence together. Best Worst Movie can then accordingly document Hardy's rise and fall as a quasi-celebrity, complete with a narrative arc right out of classic Hollywood: the humble hero who brushes with fame, becomes consumed with it, and then realizes that it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Stephenson has a willing participant and Best Worst Movie becomes something more than a document of a twenty-year-old stinker's "cult" status, and as luck would have it, no one needs to be prodded to make it happen*.

Trying to manufacture an event with the mercurial Rebney moves the film out of the realm of "what would happen if" and make it a "let's see what happens when I drag someone who clearly isn't interested in what I want to do out of his comfort zone and put him face to face with people he doesn't want to meet for reasons he has every right to express. It reminded me of something that hasn't happened yet - but could - tied to Best Worst Movie.

During a post-screening Q&A, one of the producers indicated that Fragasso wanted to make a Troll 2: Part 2 (in 3-D), and if that were to happen, they would certainly document it for a Best Worst Movie 2. And that's a horrible, misguided idea, I have to say. It's not simply trying to catch lightning in a bottle again; the concept as presented is trying to create it, and that never works. Troll 2 isn't the endearing train wreck it is because the writer, director, cast, and crew set out to make the "best worst movie": it was simply the accidental byproduct of their efforts.

By making a Troll 2: Part 2, everyone involved (and especially the people making Best Worst Movie 2) is going to have the reputation of Troll 2 in their minds, and many of them will be trying to replicate it - or worse, play it up. The documentary crew is certainly hoping for this (and if you doubt me, they also expressed hopes for a reality series with George Hardy and The Room's Tommy Wiseau that fortunately never came to pass) and the result will be a film trying so hard to be bad (on a conscious level or not) that it lacks the necessary "it" that makes Troll 2 the "best worst movie." It's like expecting Jack Rebney to show up at a screening of his Winnebago outtakes ready to spew profanity and swat at flies.

Winnebago Man dances around the nature of Rebney's "fans" by portraying them exactly as he suspected while waiting in line but then soft-pedaling the Q&A and post-screening. Only one person expressly states their perception of the "Angriest RV Salesman in the World" was way off, while other people exiting the theatre substitute for earlier interviews (who sometimes appear taking pictures with him but saying nothing, thereby neither asserting or refuting their earlier opinions). Best Worst Movie doesn't directly address the fan reaction with Stephenson, but the film certainly shows you the ugly side of how the "laughing AT" audiences regard Fragasso, Hardy, and Troll 2 in general. The fans move from genuinely enthusiastic near the beginning to partially hostile (or at least incredibly judgmental, as with the case of the "how come it's called Troll 2 when there are no trolls?" question) to the people involved. There's an ugly undercurrent to the fan relationship in Best Worst Movie that Steinbauer avoids addressing during the second half of Winnebago Man**, much to the latter's disadvantage, in part because the film struggles to find its footing at that point.

I do feel that Best Worst Movie is successful in ways that Winnebago Man is not, but I would like to point out that this is not the fault of Ben Steinbauer: he found himself in the unenviable position of changing a documentary midway through his search with a subject that continued to throw him curveballs and refuse to meet him halfway on almost every decision. Winnebago Man is a well constructed documentary that lost its sense of purpose and has to push onward. Best Worst Movie has the tremendous benefit of everything falling into place in a compelling manner, but this is not to belittle or undermine Stephenson, who put together a consistently entertaining, endearing, funny, and disturbing documentary. It takes just as much work to make either film, and I think they both handle their subject manner in the best way possible. One has a better go at it for me, but I understand why the other one exists, and more importantly, deserves to be seen.



* It doesn't hurt that Best Worst Movie is also populated with a host of interesting supporting characters, from the rest of the cast of Troll 2 to its egotistical director, Claudio Fragasso. Winnebago Man ultimately rests on Jack Rebney's shoulders, and he's clearly less interested in being the subject of that particular documentary than anyone in Best Worst Movie.
** Early in the film, he interviews two hosts of a "found video" cable access show that state upfront they have no interest in ever meeting Rebney or anyone else in the tapes they receive. To meet the person associated with the injury or embarrassment would remove any joy taken from their suffering, they explain, which is a telling comment the film never again explores.