Laid To Rest Trailer

Um. Sure?

I'm getting a bit burned out on slasher movies lately but I saw this trailer on the His Name Was Jason DVD and I just got a feeling, y'know? At this point, I've inundated myself with so much genre crap that it's permeated my senses and I get gut feelings about this stuff.

My gut reaction has been telling me to give this a shot, so give it a shot I shall. Besides, I'm really curious about the camera-looking thing the killer has strapped to his shoulder. Is he filming this stuff? Is he framing his rampage as some sort of demented movie?

One of the tropes of horror that always fascinated me are the tales centered around the line between story and suffering and the people who can't tell the difference between the two. Horror as a genre is all about exaggerating themes, and the ghastly notion of people doing evil because they see their victims through the prism of fiction strikes me as the sort of idea that hits home for horror fans. I don't need another thinly disguised lecture on the evils of horror cinema, as I am exposed to a ton of this stuff and I came out humane and kind, but elements of something deeper might elevate this above the stalk-and-slash crowd.

Or maybe it won't. Fuck it, just so long as they do it right.

Drag Me To Hell

Um. Sure?

Like every other horror guy, I had a Pavlovian drool response when I heard about Sam Raimi doing something in the genre. So far I've only been able to watch the trailer at work, where sound is not allowed. It looks cool. Something about a bank?

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

Crap. If I keep this up, this blog is going is going to turn into yet another Friday the 13th site. Okay, after this post there will be a moratorium on slasher-related postings. Besides, I just got Quarantine from my company's nifty free video rental service. I'll try to put together something clever for that. Anyway, this one is on His Name Was Jason, the recently released documentary on the F13 series.

I love horror-themed documentaries. I'm the kind of guy who watches the special features on DVDs, who goes to conventions and asks all the nerdy questions, and who loves to pick apart the stories I love and see what makes them tick. Horror, with all it's wonderful taboo-breaking charm, always has the most fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff going on. Sometimes you pull back the curtain and find the backstage logic distasteful (I'm looking at you, See No Evil), but by and large I really enjoy these glimpses into the construction of the genre.

Anyone who's ever read Peter M. Bracke's Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (and if you're a fan, you really should) will find HNWJ to be similar in form and scope. A bunch of former Jasons and former victims chat about their experiences, their memories, and what being a part of the F13 legacy has meant for them. As you can imagine, the movies are made by a bunch of amateurs, shooting late at night in uncomfortable locations. Tempers flare, mistakes get made, the wrong people get credit for things, and somehow out of all of this chaos a movie gets made.

The whole endeavor is hosted by the ever-charming Tom Savini, who frames the interviews with amusing little skits, chatting with the viewer as some poor girl runs for her life. Each segment is split into general themes, talking about the production, the effects, the character, and the impact on their lives. There's a lot of stuff covered, and nobody ever stays on camera long enough to get boring.



One of the things that struck me was the amount of sympathy the cast had for Jason. When you go back and read interviews with stuntmen who assumed the role early in the series, it's pretty clear that the filmmakers weren't too interested in what makes Jason tick. As the series wore on and Jason became the star of the show, a sort of internal life grew from the character's patchwork origins. Now he's become victim-as-villain, an outsider avenging his mother's death and his social banishment. This aspect of the character is a big part of his appeal, as opposed to the more ethereal and distant Michael Myers.

Anyway, if you're one of those goofballs who would find a two hour long discussion of a B-movie boogeyman interesting, go check this one out. Side note: controversial F13V director Danny Steinmann has some iiiinteresting violence-as-impotency theories going on. Also Kane Hodder, once my childhood icon, is starting to creep me right the fuck out.

Quarantine

Watching Quarantine reminded me of Watchmen villain Adrian Veidt's ultimate solution to the threat of nuclear conflict, how the sacrifice of millions of lives may ultimately save billions. In the morality of the story's world Veidt's actions were probably correct, but it's hard cheese for his victims.

Quarantine is the story told from the point of view of the victims.

In brief, the story is about a group of people trapped in an apartment building when an outbreak of (say it with a straight face) super-rabies begins infecting the tenants. The story is told from the point of view of a news crew who follow the first responders into the building, then struggle to capture the story as the CDC cordons off the building. The enforced isolation, the informational blackout, and the intense suppression by military forces make a straightforward, zombie-esque tale all the more terrifying.



Let's get something out of the way: I haven't seen REC, the Spanish film Quarantine remakes. I know, that makes me a bad horror fan but there are only so many hours in the day. As such I can't write a snotty, pretentious, pajiba-style review comparing the two, with arch comments about people's capacity to read subtitles. They sound really damned similar, the only difference being the Vatican stuff has been replaced by allusions to a doomsday cult terror attack.

Anyway, I really liked this movie. It scared the bejeezus out of me, the whole thing remained punchy and engaging, and it had the integrity to take the grim nature of the story to a fitting conclusion.



POV Horror tends to be good at generating the one strong defining image. In Blair Witch Project it's the often-parodied confession scene, in Cloverfield it's the Statue of Liberty's mauled head clanging toward the viewer. In Quarantine, it's the night vision shot of poor Angela crawling toward the camera, only to be dragged away into the darkness. It's a powerful image, used regularly in posters and trailers, but it also gives away the ending. There are a lot of people in Horrortown who are pissed off by the advertiser's willingness to compromise the story, which I think is a bit silly. The characters in the film KNOW they aren't getting out alive, and that fatalism lends a real horrific tone to the proceedings. You leave the tale knowing it's not safe, the world is not okay, the monsters are still out there, and that they often win. Creepy.

Ultimately, Quarantine is a precisely-designed spectacle. I greatly enjoyed it while I was watching it and would highly recommend it to anyone wanting a relentless and uncompromising horror film, but it's not going to go down as one of my favorite genre pieces. The pacing is too quick to allow much characterization, so you're treated to a well-crafted horror show. I really should have seen this in theaters.

Side note: Here's a nifty little video I found of the Knott's Scary Farm's Quarantine Haunted House.

Resident Evil: Degeneration

Things I've learned while watching Resident Evil: Degeneration:

• Nothing is more entertaining than an hour and a half video game cutscene.
• You can actually name a South American dictator "General Grande" and people will take it seriously.
• Top police commandos will be selected based on the poutiness of their lips and their ability to stand so they're bathed in light.
• The film makers like to take cool past the point of "cool" and deep into the wild land of the ridiculous. Hot shot special agents all have emo-kid hair, soldiers do crazy hand jives to communicate, and people have to pose before laying waste to armies of zombies.
• Protesters are mindless, uninformed busybodies and should stay out of the way of well-meaning corporate entities, except:
• Pharmaceutical companies do nothing but design monster drugs and create gigantic, self-immolating laboratories. When the monster apocalypse comes, you damn well better believe Johnson & Johnson will play a part in it.
• Everyone's face perfectly matches the role they will play in life, with no imaginative deviation. The obnoxious swine will be fat and jowly, the overconfident lug will be huge and blockheaded, the kid will be made out of porcelain and radiate near-toxic levels of cute, the love interest will be frail and model gorgeous even if they're elite police, and the icy mastermind will be a near albino with a British accent.
• It ain't Resident Evil without some obnoxious kid for the heroes to worry about.
• If you ever want to know who the villain is, look for the dude/dame with the hair curtain:
  
  Hey there, surly teenagers! I've got my eye on you.
• Given a choice between subtlety and exposition, Anime-style storytellers will ALWAYS choose to hit you over the head with the exposition bat. Also, big ups on the melodrama.
• Watching this was like being clubbed in the face with stupid. Still, the zombie shootouts were fun. Eff it. Two stars.

Let the stoners live.

So I'm calling for a change, horror movie makers: let the stoners and the sluts and the drunks live.

The vast majority of final girls are withdrawn, guarded, uncomfortable in their bodies or with their sexuality, and are usually outside their peer group. It is their isolation and their perceptiveness that allows them to put the clues together, to realize that Something Isn't Right, while their friends are lost in booze and sex and debauchery and blah blah blah....

Boring.

There will always be a fondness in my black little heart for slashers flicks, the dopey embarrassment of the horror scene. Unlike a lot of my fellow horror bloggers, I am not blind to some of the subtext build into the cliches of the genre. Slasher films always had a vaguely puritanical streak, where the good (read: Christianly) young woman is given both perception and strength by her abstinence, while her friends who've succumbed to temptation fail to see the danger they're in.

This isn't actually anything new. All the way back to the atomic horror films of the fifties, back in less graphic times, the rubberized squiddy monster From Beyond The Stars would chance upon Johnny LetterManJacket and Janie AngoraCardigan. The exchange would be something like this:



Johnny: Come on, baby. Let us French.
SFX: Twig snaps.
Janie: Wait, Johnny. Did you hear something?
Johnny: I didn't hear anything.
Resumes groping and/or necking. Janie looks distracted.
Janie: I wanna go home.
Johnny looks exasperated.
Johnny: Babe, there's nothing out here.
Janie: I don't know....
Johnny turns on the charm.
Johnny: You look beautiful tonight.
Janie is smitten.
Janie: Oh, Johnny.
Kissy kissy. The Atomic Monster shows up.
Atomic Monster: Blaugh.
Johnny and Janie: Aaaaaaahhhh!!!

See where I'm going with this? If Janie just trusted her instincts, if she didn't succumb to Johnny's wiles, they wouldn't be Atomic Monster chow. This formula has been repeated, with significantly more boobs, ever since.

(Side note: there's something to be examined as to why men are always portrayed as such base and lowly animals, incapable of perceiving anything around them because they're too busy trolling for sex, but that's a whole different essay.)

Before you jump down my throat, I don't think that slasher flicks are thinly disguised propaganda for conservative Christian ideology. I think someone deliberately included a slightly abstinence oriented message into a movie, the formula worked, and people kept following and adapting it. Slasher movie makers can be accused of a lot of things, but originality is seldom among the charges.

But here's the thing about virgins: they make for pretty boring characters.

People who live with an overabundance of restraint come off as tightly wound and creepy. Some of the more scholarly work on the slasher subgenre posits that this is why the final girl survives; in the end, she's a mirror image of the outsider-killer. Most of the movies I'm talking about don't have that level of depth, and so you're left watching a square.

That might have been fine once upon a time, but it's 2009 now. Even our crappy slasher movies tend to have better acting, better production values, and better writing (stop snickering back there!) So I'm gonna throw something I've always wanted to see in a slasher flick: the character journey.

My favorite example is Freddy vs. Jason. The final girl, Lori, is both uninteresting and kinda fucking weird ("Why yes, I'm leaving high school yet still pine for my long-absent middle school boyfriend.") Her friend Gibb, on the other hand, is a habitual drinker whose self-esteem is ground down into the mud by her alpha-male asshole boyfriend. She has more dimensions, she's less serenely perfect, and she can be saved. Imagine a movie where this already damaged girl endures the fires of evil and becomes stronger for it. Wouldn't that have been fantastic? The movie doesn't give her that chance, which would have made FvJ a whole lot richer and more likable.



Or, more recently, Chewie from the Friday the 13th remake. This one is kind of a harder sell, because it's hard to believe that the good natured Chewie would voluntarily hang out with the idiots he keeps company with, but he's the most likable character in the movie. He's the most free-spirited, has the most engaging sense of humor, and is just awesome. Fuck it, I heart Chewie.



The fake final girl isn't particularly likable, because she (maybe) dates the biggest asshole in the group, while the actual final girl and guy don't really have much characterization. Really, doesn't it make more sense to have the most engaging character be the survivor. Sure, he's not a bulky manly-man, but has that ever really mattered when you're going up against Jason muthafuckin' Voorhees?

I'm really tired of bland, withdrawn, final girls. I related to them more when I was a scared, nervous Catholic-school virgin. I don't relate to those people anymore, and I don't think the average horror fan does, either. If evil truly is pure, then it's arbitrary: it will not let the virginal girls survive with any more frequency than anyone else. People who've lived, people who are a little wild and a little damaged, are more likely to have to tools needed to fight back and triumph.

So, yeah, clemency for the losers. This posts were inspired by the awesome Who Would You Save? posts circling around the webs. Check out final girl's posts here and here.

Wondercon 2009

So, this is the first in my new collection of horror-themed autographs to be placed on this blogadoo, courtesy of Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives Jason, C.J. Graham.

Some point I should write about illustrious part six. The "funny one" of the franchise, six has both fans and detractors. Generally, humor in horror turns me off, but I thought six was the most entertaining and accessible, with the series' best final girl and the presence of ever-dependable Thom Mathews.

Anyway, I picked this up at Wondercon, San Francisco's premiere pop-culture event. Kane Hodder and Tony Todd were supposed to be there, but they were apparently no-shows. C'est la vie.

Not a whole lot of horror content this year. I did attend the panel of Alien Trespass, a retro-50s atomic horror pastiche. I got a feeling this movie, like Psycho Beach Party, is gonna be more wacky than actually good. Still, I love fifties nostalgia. Check out the trailer here:



Catch y'all on the flip.