The Twilight Zone Movie

When I was a kid, the Twilight Zone scared the crap out of me.

Aside from being masters of the chilling final line/image, there was something sinister about the notion that you could be going along, living your buttoned-down fifties life, and suddenly the Dark Gods of Narrative decide to hit you upside the head with the irony stick. Plus, considering the climate and the technology, they were forced to rely on actual storytelling and imagination instead of gore and cliches. Good stuff.

Anyway, I thought I'd give the Twilight Zone movie a spin. It's been awhile, y'know? Time to go visit an old friend.



I liked the really cool back-and-forth patter in the opening story between the driver and his demonic passenger. The doomed driver and his mysterious passenger are clearly old friends, and their exchange feels very natural as it descends into very creepy territory.



As to the first full tale, the sad saga of a racist confronted with oppression through history, made notorious by the death of actor Vic Morrow and two children in an on-set accident, it's pretty good but there's something missing. There's always been a strong moralistic thread running through The Twilight Zone. Characters are supposed to start ignorant and come to wisdom, usually at a horrible cost. I never got the sense that Vic Morrow's frustrated salesman actually grew as a person. He got jerked around a bunch, then he got dragged off to the concentration camp. Still, it's well shot and has that classic episode feel.



The second one, by Steven Spielberg, bugged the living crap out of me. Yeah, I know,
Twilight Zone isn't all gloom and doom and the Dark Gods of Narrative can sometimes turn a kind hand, but this was really too much. It's pretty much every horrible saccharine thing Spielberg is known for, all awkward Hallmark-card sentimentality wrapped up in goofy morals and fluttery wind instruments. The only time the story affected me was when the grumpy old coot who refused to join the others begged to be set free. That was pretty good. Everything else, meh.



Story three, about the kid with the freaky cartoon powers, is probably the best original story in the movie. It's been copied and parodied a thousand times since, but the original still holds a lot of freak-the-shit-outta-me, from the creepy forced cheer of the family to the mouthless girl alone in the room to the horrible cartoon images the kid conjures up. It's a really, really good piece of horror filmmaking. My only quibble is with the ending, which takes a much happier tone than situation would logically warrant. Anthony has clearly used his powers kill before, and the notion that he was just waiting for someone to teach him is a bit absurd. Sure, he rides off into the sunrise with his new teacher but the second she crosses Anthony, he's going to feed him to a cartoon werewolf.



The last story...oooh. I hate flying. I don't like being up high, turbulence terrifies me, and every time I get near an airport I have a minor panic attack. Some people think John Lithgow is overacting to the point of comedy, but I am totally on board with the level of claustrophobic panic Lithgow displays. Plus, I like the way they shot the creature. It's a vague shape, the wind and storms buffeting it around as it goes about it's gruesome work. Yeah. Good stuff.

Anyway, there ya go. Good stuff on this one. If you see one anthology horror/sci-fi movie based on a TV show from the early sixties, make it this one.

The Zen Of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, just across the bridge from Marin County. For those of you with unaligned chakras, Marin County is the local epicenter for the self-indulgent New Age movement. New Age stuff is a convenient way for middle aged, dissatisfied, affluent people to feel good about themselves without actually taking responsibility for how their lives turned out. My old man was really into this stuff, and I can't tell you how much Deepak Chopra/energy crystals/communication coaches/sweat lodge/rebirthing ceremonies I've been exposed to. It's probably why I turned out so ornery and negative.

Anyway, I've probably flipped through my fair share of self-help books in my time and they all seem to run along the same lines: stop comparing yourself to other people, understand that you have value, banish negativity, and visualize your goals with an 'active mind.' I've heard people visualize themselves as spiritual travellers, power animals, reborn children, and confident sexual dynamos. But finding a path to self-improvement by visualizing yourself as a flesh-hungry zombie? That's a new one.

The Zen of Zombie finally targets the niche market in horror-themed self improvement. With a series of simple lessons, the reader will transform from an indecisive, vacillating wimp to a confident, straight-shooting undead hero.

All right, this book is a joke. And a pretty funny one, too.

I like the way Scott Kenemore writes. He's got a sense of humor and gift for absurd one-liners that appeals to my Simpsons-quoting ass. In his chapter on the insecurity surrounding human's desperate quest for love, he gives us this chestnut:

You never see zombies lying or prevaricating because they don't feel "worthy" of someone's brain. Doesn't make much sense, does it? A zombie knows he (or she) is good enough just as God (or the voodoo priest, or the nerve reagent) made him. A zombie says, "Here I am. I can only be myself. Take me as I am. Give me your brain."

It's not perfect. Like most gimmick books you find in the impulse purchase stands, it's a little content-light. You'll finish this one in two trips to the can. Sometimes the funny word play that highlights the book gets lost as the author slips too deep into referential parody. But in the final analysis I had a good time, I learned some valuable lessons, and I'm ready to put my new and improved zombified outlook to the test.



Check out author Scott Kenemore's blog here.

The Midnight Meat Train

I'm not a huge fan of getting sick and missing work but in the last two days I've played through eight levels of Dead Space, started reading Book of More Flesh, and watched both Session 9 and The Midnight Meat Train. It's been a pretty good sick week for this horror fan.

Anyway, MMT. Been looking forward to this one, as I mentioned earlier this year. I'm a big fan of the original short story and the hype around this movie has been pretty intense, what with all the drama around its release. I don't necessarily get the politics or the logic behind dumping the movie in favor of The Strangers, but I think people will seek this one out and it will have a life of its own.



MMT is about a photographer who finds himself obsessed with a serial killer who butchers the last passengers on the late trains leaving NYC. What starts as a game of cat-and-mouse becomes a tale of conspiracy, corruption, and the dark heart of the greatest metropolis of the country. I can get behind that ideal. New York City stole my girlfriend a couple of months ago. Of course it's secretly infested with demons.

Maybe it's the Theraful currently packed into my skull, but it's proving difficult to write a linear, coherent review on this one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna load all my opinions in a shotgun, take careful aim at this blogadoo, and fire. Maybe something will stick.

I liked the photographer and his girlfriend. I liked the way, again, they're not stupid teenagers who wandered into something bigger than they can handle. I bought into their relationship, into their comfortable sexuality, and into all that weird secret language people develop when they've been together for a long time. The scene where she tries to turn him away from the path by undressing for his camera is absolutely heartbreaking.



I liked the fact that they incorporated the photographer's creative drive into the story. Director Ryuhei Kitamura did a great job bringing the audience into Leon's POV. I felt for him when his work got rejected, I understood the nervous itch he felt when he walked into the city at night, and I've had awkward conversations with very literal-minded people where I tried to explain the compulsion I've had to create and fallen silent, much like the scene where he goes to the (apparently) one police detective in the city. It's no wonder Leon makes Mahogany the subject for his study. The man moves through the city with purpose.

I liked the cold look of the movie. I loved the beautiful killing coldness of the stainless steel train station interiors. I loved the shadowed corridors of Mahogany's home and the isolating austerity of the art gallery. I really liked the clever way the gore was used in the movie, from the artfully prophetic blood spray to the intense POV murder. I loved the ending fight at the rear of the train, which was easily one of the most awesome fight scenes in horror. It's a genuinely beautiful film, make by someone with a strong command of the medium. Hopefully Kitamura hasn't been soured by the experience of working in the American film industry and we get more awesome genre work from him.



I like Mahogany. He was a great character in the story and he's really come to life in the movie. We see in the way he dresses and the manner he carries himself that he is first and foremost a professional. There's something hesitant and lonely going on in his head, but it doesn't diminish his effectiveness as a monster. The horrible conspiracy at the root of Mahogany's grim work is kept tantalizingly mysterious, and I hope Barker keeps to his promise to continue the story behind the secret masters at the end of the train line.



As to the stuff I didn't like, there was no sane reason for Maya and Jurgis to sneak into Mahogany's apartment. They knew he was a killer, they had proof to take to the police, and yet they chose to wander inside his den in search of Leon's camera. It was a tense scene, but it was so illogical it lost me.

Leon also descended into obsession too quickly. I suppose a case could be made that it wasn't entirely natural, that the city chose him for the role of watcher, but this notion wasn't entirely played up in the story. Either that or I've still got Session 9 on the brain, where the notion of external forces influencing behavior is much more obvious to the story.

Finally, the movie styles itself as a sort of detective yard. While we don't know the ends to which Mahogany plies his trade until the story's close, the movie has the characters fixated on his actions and not the result. The audience already knows what Mahogany is doing. We want to know why. Having the heroes chase after things the audience already knows is redundant and slows the pacing down considerably.

Quibbles. I really like the movie. If it had a proper studio advertising push behind it, it would have been a big hit. Creature wants more. Make it happen.

Session 9

I avoided Session 9 for the same reason I avoid women: I really can't bear to fall in love again.

This is one of those flicks people talk about with wide, wary eyes. They tell you that Session 9 doesn't mess around. It doesn't do cheap jump scares and over-the-top gore effects and characters announcing their motivations in hackneyed screenwriter-exposition prose. It's a movie that's out to fuck you up and the kind of minds that would put something like this together lives somewhere deep in the dark.

The kind of movies I've been watching lately are popcorn. They play by the rules, they tell their little campfire tales, and you go home essentially unaffected. I can write about those because they're easy dates. I didn't want the emotional commitment of engaging in something really, really good.

The story is simple enough: A group of asbestos cleaners take a job cleaning the Danvers Mental Institution. As the week drags on the characters get bound up in despair and madness until shit goes down. The movie recalls Kubrick's interpretation of The Shining in its use of days as narrative framing devices, the long claustrophobic hallways, and the wide shots of cavernous rooms that dwarf the characters. Honestly, the location does half the work for the directors. Anyone who has ever gone urban spelunking knows how dreadfully silent abandoned institutions can be.



It's the characters that really make the movie sizzle. Without any jump scares or obvious gore, the horror has to come from the people trapped in the house. I'm a big believer that the best haunted house movies work because the characters are just as haunted as the places they visit. The four middle-aged men and young trainee who take the renovation job aren't wisecracking, beautiful post-teens off the assembly line, but real blue-collar men whose lives lead them into a dangerous line of work and who engage with each other in practical, honest terms. We rarely get to spend time with characters this rich and it's a rewarding experience. It passes my high bar for horror characterization, which is that you can remove the horror elements and tell these character's story as an engaging drama. Very few horror movies, even the classics, can stand up to that scrutiny.

After the movie was over, my brain was on fire. I wanted to make out with this movie. I wanted to awkwardly fumble around under its clothes, I wanted to push myself through its skin and be a part of it. I want to share it with my friends, if only to creep the hell out of them.



Session 9 is absolutely my kind of movie. It plays fair, it avoids any obvious genre cliches, it's shot with macabre artistry, it creates characters you fall in love with, and it descends into absolute, nihilistic horror without apologizing or cracking jokes. Do this one right. Watch it alone in the dark.

As for me, I'm gonna check out director Brad Anderson's contribution to the Masters of Horror series, Sounds Like. Also, if you're keen on asylum-based horror, read Shadows in the Asylum, which stands as one of my favorite horror books of all time. More on this one later.

Fangoria Weekend of Horror L.A.

On to happier topics:

I'm going to be attending the Fangoria Weekend of Horror in Los Annnngelez this month. I've been going to these sporadically since I was a kid and these have always been a lot of fun. It's been a bumpy couple of months in old Creature's personal life, and I'm really looking forward to kicking back, relaxing, and chucking away my hard-earned money on all kindsa memorabilia. If I can remain sober and responsible enough, I intend to blog from the show floor.

If you are gonna be there, drop me a line. Maybe we'll do some sorta meetup thing.

Horror and the real world.

"At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them." -Clive Barker

There's horror and then there's HORROR.

A few days ago, while driving to the showing of Alien Trespass, I found myself stuck in traffic. This wasn't particularly surprising, as it was rush hour and San Francisco traffic can be brutal. But we were parked on that off-ramp for a long time and highway patrol cruisers kept whizzing by with clear urgency. Eventually we got detoured to an exit that brought us an elevated view of the blockage. There were smashed vehicles all over the place. A tanker truck had blown its rear compartment. A medical helicopter had landed on the freeway and was preparing to take off with victims. Bodies were being loaded onto an ambulance while officers were busy interviewing crying witnesses.

It was, to put it mildly, surreal. The irony that I was going off to see simulated versions of this sort of thing wasn't lost on me.

Perhaps I shouldn't spend too much time contemplating why I like horror movies. Perhaps its one of those touchy points of my psychology that would only wig me out if I looked at it too closely. I know I've covered this subject before, but if you really want to see pure, hopeless, despair-ridden horror, all you really have to do is live your life and pay attention.

I think the Clive Barker quote is pretty good. We all know that at some point in our lives the curtain is gonna fall, the stage lights will be shut off, and we're all gonna wind up in the dark. I think horror fiction, be it movies/music/stories/whatevs is a way for us to dip our toes in that water, to twist the notion around like a Rubik's cube and eventually set it down. That's all fine and good for the people who dip into that well from time to time, the mobs of teenagers who descend on the multiplexes when Topless Chicks Get Slaughtered pt. 8 comes out. But what about those of us who keep coming back to those foetid pools over and over again?



I have always had a fascination with the quote-dark-unquote side of life. I likes my stories grim and creepy. But when I go to horror conventions and see a bunch of serial killer memorabilia or overhear a couple of kids talk about how they would have done Columbine better, I understand that there's a line.

I started this blog because I wanted to create a venue I can comfortably communicate in. When I started going to the horror community sites I encountered a lot of misogyny, a lot of homophobia, and a lot of people confusing reality with fantasy. Sure, I probably shouldn't take the dumb stuff kids say online too seriously, but I sometimes think the anonymity of the Internet makes it easier to stir the sediment at the bottom of the soul.

Without getting too deep into the back story of the Creature, I got an opportunity, during the course of my strange journeys, to see the real thing firsthand. I think, on some level, that my lifetime of watching Tom Savini's make up effects would prepare me for the real world. It didn't. The two have very little to do with one another. The one thing that was really ground into me from the whole experience was plain old human empathy. To whit: we're all stuck on this rock. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There's one rule, goddamnit, and that's to be kind.

It's easy for the weak and the wounded among my tribe, when given a choice to be an awkward angel or a powerful monster, to choose the latter. I've wandered down that dark path a time or two myself. But horror fiction involves characters. Really real life capital-H Horror involves people.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. -Stephen King

Ultimately, horror fiction is safe. It's not going to hurt you, it's not going to follow you home and murder you in your sleep, and it's not going to make you into a killer, unless you bring serious damage with you in the first place. Real horror is the excrement of existence. It's the unexplained lump, the phone call late at night, the unexpected fire, and all the other agonies of life. No artist, no matter how twisted, can inoculate their audience against that kind of misery. It's the tidal wave waiting to wash away our sand castles, but we take what we can from it, wrap it up in artistry, and call it horror.

Make of that what you will.

Alien Trespass

Before I get started, I gotta say that I'm never going to another free screening in San Francisco. I get that this isn't exactly a big movie, but please don't give away free ticket passes at the local homeless shelter. Dudes were bringing in their bindles to the theater and I had the dubious pleasure of smelling a lot of pee and horrible body odor throughout the movie.

Anyway.



My first reaction after the lights went up was "How the hell am I gonna write about this." I like fifties stuff, I have a soft spot for retro kitsch, and I absolutely want more of these kinds of movies to be produced. It's probably why I'm so excited about Monsters Vs. Aliens. However, this movie is trying too hard to be a cult classic. As my faithful co-watcher hater#1 pointed out, you can't set out to make a cult movie. It has to be an organic process of something quirky finding a loyal audience. You try to make something deliberately quirky and it becomes self-aware and awkward.



Having said that, I really dug the relationships between the alien Marshall and the bored waitress with the big dreams. Eric McCormack did a heckuva job in his dual role as the doctor and the alien who inhabits his body and I liked his weird way of looking out at the world. Jenni Baird worked as the small town dreamer stuck in a dead end life. She brought the fifties nostalgia element without being corny, and when the chips were down she brought moxie to her salt-armed alien fighter. If the movie paid more attention to this type of character development and less time being deliberately hokey I think I would have enjoyed the movie more.



So, yeah, go see it. It's cute. It deserves a pat on the head. Points also go out to Robert Patrick, who plays a really sleazy, really fun crumb bum, and to the girl who played the biggest killjoy girlfriend I've ever seen in a movie. "No, I don't wanna make out. No, I don't wanna go up the big scary hill. No, I don't wanna have a soda. No, I don't wanna see a monster movie." Boo on her, yay on the actress.

Side note: I get that this movie is in a very small town and all, but everything I know from my fifties era rumble movies tells me that no greaser would ever hang out with a preppy. It's like Tom and Jerry buddying around, solving mysteries. It ain't gonna happen.