Baghead

Baghead in the kind of movie I would have liked to have made.

It's probably no secret by now that I'm a slasher movie aficionado. Lord knows I review enough of them on this website. I view them as a perverse lowbrow sort of haiku: the art and skill of the filmmakers shine through the rigid structure of the narrative. To put it in a less pretentious way, there ain't a hell of a lot you can do with a slasher film. Guy in a mask stalks some people, kills a bunch of them, and then finally dies (or not.) It's a chase narrative, and chase narratives are by definition limited. Sure, I can wax philosophic about what Jason's motives might be and how they relate to my anti-social upbringing, but all I'm doing is reflecting my own psychodrama off what is essentially a blank image. Practically speaking, there's very little to differentiate Jason Voorhees from Harry Warden from Chrome Skull from Michael Myers. So I'd watch these movies and applaud them for their clever little touches or their...ahem...skillful execution. Then Baghead came along and showed me that the rigid framework of a slasher narrative can be used to tell an interesting story about artists and dreamers and relationships.



The framework is pretty routine: four people depart for a cabin in the woods, some sexual shenanigans ensue, and they find themselves being stalked by a knife-wielding man with a bag on his head. The poor besieged group are a quartet of struggling actors, slightly older than the average slasher bait, people who've clearly wandered the path of their chosen careers for awhile and haven't had much success. Inspired by an acquaintance's success in the indie film scene, they retire to a cabin to create a story that will bring them fame and recognition. One of the ideas they kick around is the story of Baghead, a man with a brown paper bag over his face stalking a house full of people. Eventually the character realize that someone is actually stalking them and the movie becomes a tense game of stalk and slash that turns into a twist ending.



I was surprised how close the movie actually cleaved to the formula. The cliched slutty/dumpy/vengeful/smarmy characters are all represented, there are boobs, there are late night stalker sequences in the woods, Baghead takes out the character's car, etc. Given the low budget of the movie this could have easily turned into something amateur-looking were the characters and performances not so skillfully crafted. Relationships between slasher bait tend to fall into typical teenage drama, but the characters in Baghead relate to each other very naturally. The writing is smooth and the performances feel really authentic.

Underneath the horror film tropes, Baghead is about a socially awkward guy who likes a girl. It's a movie about a bunch of creative people who want to do something with themselves. Underneath my horror movie sturm und drang, I'm a softie. I thought Baghead was sweet.

Halloween 1 and 2

There is nothing more controversial in the internet horror community than Rob Zombie's Halloween remakes.

Some people think the are vicious, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners masterpieces of modern horror. Others think they're a travesty of John Carpenter's original work, soaking the eerie horror of Michael Myers in Zombie's white-trash aesthetic. Either way, ever since the "hobo Myers" images released some months back, the boards at Bloody-Disgusting have been essentially one big screaming match. Because of that, I can't really write this essay in a vacuum.



I didn't like Zombie's Halloween remake much. I do think humanizing Michael Myers removes a lot of the mystique of the character, Zombie's shock-offensive dialogue sounded ugly and unnatural coming out of the mouths of innocent teenagers, and the jump in focus from Myers to Laurie Strode resulted in a movie that felt like it was missing its center. Despite all this, I can't seem to stop myself from watching the movie every few months or so. Underneath the problems I have with Halloween, it was clearly made with an enthusiasm that makes the experience infectious.

That pretty much describes my feelings toward this new one.

I was kinda optimistic, despite all the hobo/maskless Myers stuff. The trailers hinted at a supernatural angle, which I really missed in the original. The trailers emphasized a supernatural element, something I felt was missing in the original. Michael Myers's life, crimes, and death were all pitifully human. It made him a psycho, but it really didn't make him a monster. This one appeared to have Michael Myers' mother commanding him to kill Laurie and reunite the family in death. Sure, that doesn't really jibe with his mother's nicer incarnation in the earlier movie, but at least he's got some of his old mojo back.

I think Zombie has a lot of potential. The Devil's Rejects was a helluva movie and I like directors who take their horror seriously. Having said that, the dude does have a white trash aesthetic that doesn't necessarily jibe with the subject matter. When he's writing a bunch of outlaw banditos the dialogue works, but when he's writing teenagers in a small suburban community he completely misses. This is where I get all "but it's not the Halloween I rememmmmmberrrrr..." but I always remembered Haddonfield as a boring suburb, not a rotted meth-lab town. I don't remember Laurie Strode talking like an angry metalhead trying to shock her parents. This is kind of a goofy thing to say about a horror movie, but it's all meaner and uglier than I want it to be.

One of the core problems of the remakes is Zombie puts too much focus on too many characters. The movie would have been better served with following Laurie bouncing between her, Myers, and Dr. Loomis. The iconic Dr. Loomis really gets the short end of the stick here, as he spends the movie being unpleasant until he dies for no reason.

Speaking of unpleasant...

I do have to give credit to Rob Zombie and Scout Taylor Compton for making Laurie Strode's damaged mental state believable. The best final girls, from the original Laurie Strode to Scream's Sydney Prescott are all traumatized by their experiences. They become isolated, suspicious, and destructive, and their vulnerabilities become as much of a challenge as the maniacs that stalk them. Zombie's Laurie Strode is a very honest portrayal of how a terrified young woman would behave. She fluctuates from chaotic to destroyed, and it's a really good portrayal. Unfortunately, she's not particularly likable. I liked her room mate/friend Annie Brackett better.

I gotta get this out of the way: I have a HUGE crush on Danielle Harris, the actress who played Annie Brackett. I keep meaning to write a big I HEART DH article on her, but the long and the short is I think she's more adorable than a basket of bunnies, even Professor Demon Bunny.

But Annie comes off as a much more sympathetic and likable character than Laurie. She's much more composed, much more confident, and much more capable than Laurie, even though she was arguably put through far worse in the first film. I thought it was interesting that she lived with and took care of Laurie, but was not in her social circle anymore. She even occasionally seemed exasperated with Laurie's behavior, which wouldn't have been out of line given that Laurie seemed to go gutter-punk chic.

So having Michael Myers rape and butcher her was a little bit much.

We all knew she was going to die. The trailer shows her running away from Myers. But Myers goes a step further and rapes her. It's not entirely out of character, as Zombie's Myers is a much angrier and more vicious creature, but raping Annie took the character and the story into a much uglier direction.

Horror creators have a symbiotic relationship to their creations. Brian Pulido looked very similar to his Evil Ernie and Michaeal Myers looks kinda like Rob Zombie on steroids. I do kinda wonder what compelled Zombie to include such a scene.

Beyond that, quibbles. Why did Myers show up to the party, zero in on Laurie's one friend, and disappear after murdering her? Why is Mrs. Myers such an evil bitch now after being such a nice person in the original? What exactly was Dr. Loomis thinking when he entered that shack in the end? What was with all the goddamn close-ups?

Whatever. Despite all the grips, I'm still gonna see it again and I'm probably gonna own the DVD. Unkle Lancifer at Kindertrauma wrote an amazing article defending the movie. Also, here's a Rob Zombie interview. Finally, here's the cream-of-the-crop of the horror blogadoo world weighing in on Old vs. New Myers. Enjoy!

Sorority Row Trailer

So Carrie Fisher is now getting herself murdered in slasher movies, huh?

Is Sorority Row, as some boards are calling it, a chick slasher flick? I kinda hope so. I approach the genre with the novel notion that artificially-constructed horror is a universally appealing emotion and I'm interested in what scares different types of people. When you go to most mainstream horror movies, you often see groups of 12-15 year old girls clumped together shrieking and laughing as the movie goes. I think they should get a horror flick targeted to 'em.

I hope it's good. God knows, the last one I saw sucked.

Prom Night

Man, I was totally ready to defend Prom Night.

Even before the movie came out, the "hardcore" horror community was trashing it. "Man, fuck PG-13 horror! There's no blood or tits or anything in it! This is excluding us! And it's not even related to the original! Raaawwrrr!"

First off, not to assault sacred cows here, but the original movie wasn't all that good. Granted, it's been a long time since I've seen it, but I remember a whole lotta nuthin' happening, with some dancing footage thrown in to pad out the running time. It's not like we're losing a lot in translation.

Second, not every goddamn horror movie has to be targeted to the hardcore market. The target audience of Prom Night is clearly teenagers, particularly teenage girls. The things that are going to affect 'em are significantly different than what's gonna turn Dark Forum Lord Vivisection's crank. People are scared by shit they can relate to. People are titillated by buckets of blood. There is a difference, yo.

I was interested in the fact that Prom Night's killer was an older stalker that the victim had a previous relationship with. Having hung out with sexual crisis councilors before, I know that there are some fears resonate strongly with women, particularly fears of violent, obsessive men. There are a lot of men who can't/won't relate to that experience. I recognized that this movie needed to be seen in the context of its target audience. I was ready to watch the movie from the eyes of a teenage girl.

So, like I said, I was ready to spring to Prom Night's defense. Too bad the movie sucked.



The fundamental problem is that the movie is neither particularly interesting nor particularly scary. The filmmakers shoot the movie like one of those MTV reality shows, so the glitz of the world's most expensive prom overshadows the actual scares. The camera is good at mimicking the voyeuristic gaze of the stalker, but there is an almost willful ineptitude at building and maintaining tension. I counted not one, not two, but THREE separate instances where a character stepped into frame behind the lead, the music spiked, and the lead said "You scared me." That's not even trying, guys.

The characterization is pretty inconsistent. For a supposedly traumatized girl, Donna comes off as pretty unfazed. She wanders off into darkened suites on her own, doesn't obsessively check all potential dangers, and returns to the hotel after being evacuated to pick up an heirloom. Jonathan Schaech does a good job as the movie's villain, but the movie is somewhat ambivalent on what kind of monster he'll be. Is he a silent, faceless slasher movie butcher? Is he a feral, obsessed stalker? They keep coming teasingly close to making a real character out of him, but then they pull back and have him do typical slasher shit. There's no reason for him to kill Donna's friends but he goes through them like a buzzsaw through a flesh tree.

Look, I'm not against PG-13 horror. The Ring was PG-13 and that scared the crap out of me. I am against stupid, and watching two hours of this movie was like being hit upside the head with concentrated mediocrity. Horror filmmakers, there are some meat on these bones. Do something with it.

Oh, for what it's worth, I really liked the poster. If only it could have been attached to the movie I wanted this to be.

Hatchet

I'm always hesitant to be too harsh to creators who have real passion for the genre. Horror needs new blood and if you've got guys like Rob Zombie and Adam Green out there who genuinely love and revere this stuff, you've gotta support them and hope their talent grows. The big problem with fanboy creators, unfortunately, is that the stuff they bring to the table tends not to be anything original but reheated leftovers marketed as "homage" to the genre classics. Horror in general suffers from a strong desire to cannibalize its past rather than look to its future and I think this was one of those things that hamstrung my enjoyment of Hatchet.

Don't get me wrong, I had a very good time watching the movie. It's well-shot, it's got a wacky sense of fun, it's completely over the top, and the acting is really good. But after the movie was over, after the popcorn bowl was empty and my co-reviewer Professor Demon Bunny



was put away for the night, I left the movie with that "I just ate too much fast food" feeling. I'm full, but I'm not really satisfied.

Fanboy films spend way too much time playing to the audience. Characters just about turn to the camera and comment directly on the tropes of the stalk and slash genre. The humor is way too self referential, in a way that breaks my connection with the story. It does no good, for example, to comment on how dumb a certain action is when the characters go and do it anyway. And while I love and admire the work of Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, and all the other chappies they wrangle into these things, their appearance is kinda distracting. I see Tony Todd in his AWESOME cameo as an eccentric voodoo tour guide and I get distracted by salivating fanboy glee.



That sense of self-satisfaction torpedoed one of the other major aspects of the the movie for me, which was that Hatchet wasn't particularly tense-scary. Oh, it's got blood by the buckets, courtesy of effects maestro and Friday the 13th Part VII helmer John Carl Buechler, but we see the monster too often, he's not particularly subtle or mysterious, and it's just a series of jump scares between strings of jokes.

Having said that, one of the things that really worked for me was the cast. I've been known to complain about the slasher movie tendency to make their stock victims complete assholes, but the characters in this movie were all really fun and likable, from the sweet Midwestern couple to the theatrically goofy tour guide. Also, I tend to think it's crass to go on about how attractive a leading lady is but if I went to high school with Tamara Feldman I totally would stutter around her.



In the end, I thought Hatchet was fun in a very superficial way. I don't want to come down too harsh on the movie or on Adam Green. I watch DOZENS of slasher movies a year and most of them are crap. His, at least, was kinda nifty. But I hope that he's got something more inventive and original than "Old School American Horror" up his sleeve. That ground has been trampled on by so many feet it's impossible to distinguish any one individual mark.

April Fool's Day

Huh. Okay...

First off, I want to apologize to my more book-oriented readers. I know my posts lately have been very movie-oriented. I'm always reading something but it's not always horror. I am a fast reader, but it takes significantly longer to go through a book than watch an movie. More are coming, just be patient.

Anyway, April Fool's Day. I've been wanting to see this one for awhile, given its dubious legacy among my people. Final Girl hearted it, so that's a pretty good recommendation, and I was finally able to sit down with it over the weekend.

My impression? Huh. Okay...

I don't honestly know what my reaction is, being as inundated as I am with other people's opinions. I had a genuinely good time watching it. I thought it was well constructed and fun, The acting and characterization was much richer than your average slasher movie. It lost me a little bit in the middle, but the movie was brief enough to regain the momentum.

It also had a great opening. Interviewing people through the eyes of a camera is an old and stupid narrative trick for my tech-savvy generation, but it worked really well here. The island itself looked great and had a fantastic atmosphere. That bit with the eyes in the painting was really cool. The improbably-named Muffy St. John was kinda hot.

But it was all building up to a surprise ending I already knew.



I love spoilers. I'm generally able to enjoy a work on its own merit, even if I know how it ends. It was nice to know, having found that I liked all these characters, that none of them were actually being harmed. At the same time, I think I can understand the anger of people who were caught unawares. I was always one of those kids who, when watching Scooby Doo, used to hope that they'd pull the werewolf mask and discover an actual monster underneath. What Muffy does to her friends is very fucking weird, but they all seem game (well, most of them. The movie has the sense to infer that a couple guests may have been put off by the whole thing) and it doesn't require a whole lotta cheating to pull off. Still, there was something vaguely off-putting about the whole thing. Maybe it was a sense of missed opportunity, especially in the way Muffy screwed with everyone's personal secrets, or maybe it was the general weirdness of the premise, but there is something off about it that I can't quite put my finger on.

I don't need everything I watch to be grim and grisly, and I do tend to look down at the nimrods who rail against this movie because it's not gruesome enough for their taste. FG is right; horror fans whine about encountering the same old thing over and over again, but they whine when people try something new.

I think I really enjoyed it. I wish I could articulate what threw me about it. I probably shouldn't have known the ending before hand. It was like I wasn't really watching it, but waiting for stuff to happen.

Oh, well. The ending theme song is fucking awesome! It should totally be classic-era Joker music.

20 Too Bad Youre Crazy (Jerry Whitman) - End Credits - Bernstein, Charles

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.

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.

Return To Sleepaway Camp

This movie begins with a bunch of kids in a cabin lighting their farts on fire and ends with a guy laying skinned on the ground and a cackling madwoman howling into the camera.

I love horror movies.

Okay, I get that Sleepaway Camp is a strange cult classic among our tribe, well known for its infamous twist ending and flamboyantly campy style. Next to Norman Bates, Angela is the most famous tranny serial killer in cinema history. The later movies gleefully embraced and magnified the goofy campiness of the original, and they became the ultimate movie to watch when you were in a certain kinda mood with a certain kinda friend.

But movies like these, and like Return To Sleepaway Camp completely flummox me as a reviewer, because they're not actually "good" in the conventional sense of the term. Yet here I am, forced to articulate the fact that there's something twisted and enjoyable in these kinds of films. Watching a Z movie that embraces it's z-movieness is kinda like watching one of those summer camp sketch comedy shows, where you're laughing at the execution as much as the jokes.

Long and the short, you gotta judge these movies by a different criteria.

RTSC is made by the original director, and the movie directly follows the first movie. SC2 and 3 were created by a different guy, and aren't technically 'canon'. The story takes place in a camp staffed by unprofessional, negligent councilors and seemly completely free from scheduled activities. Teenagers (all of whom appear to be slightly too old to be in camp in the first place) seem to spend all their time hanging out and getting killed. Slasher movies are essentially campfire ghost story distilled into cinematic form, so the camp setting is a natural locale for gory mayhem. Some bastards get bumped off in inventive ways, there's a "twist" ending, and blah blah blah. You already know the plot. You've seen this movie, in different form, a dozen times over. These movies are like haiku anyway. The basic structure doesn't change, but the art is found in what the creators do within the limitations.

I think one of the big problems of the movie is that it is too aware of the cult following surrounding the original and it plays up to that audience. RTSC knows that people are coming for the campy, grisly joy of the previous features, so it doesn't bother with building tension. Instead, the movie puts far too much of the focus on setting up a red herring around the killer's identity, painting a big red bullseye around the the damaged Alan (Michael Gibney.)

Man, these last two posts all seem to focus around fat guys playing awkward, damaged characters. While Michael Gibney doesn't have the same dramatic pull as Bostin Christopher, the character he creates in Alan is fascinating and realistic. I've known guys like Alan before. He's angry and damaged, clueless to the intricacies of basic human interaction, and completely at the mercy of the other campers. A lot of slasher movies are thinly-disguised revenge fantasies, and Angela's motivation always centered around cruel and immoral kids getting their just desserts. I think a fantastic coming-of-age movie could have been made around Alan growing up and moving away from the loneliness and fury that binds him, but he's painted to be the most likely candidate to be the murderer, which of course means that he's innocent.

There is no actual HORROR in this movie. We rarely get any sense of tension, none of the victims are particularly sympathetic and the whole situation is so over-the-top and farcical that it becomes impossible to actually get engaged enough to be scared. The make-up effect work is pretty good, especially the murder lifted from 1984, but the only scares you'll get out of this come if you're particularly squeamish.

In the end, I don't think I can recommend this movie to people who aren't already twisted enough to have enjoyed the first few. There is fun to be had here, but it's also trying to be a little too precious for their own good.

Also, how far you have fallen, Big Pussy. How far you have fallen.

Anyway, check out Final Girl's review here.

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