New Nightmare on Elm Street Trailer

W00t!

Necronomicon

Things not working out too well for you? Are you struggling with matters of faith? Looking for a new path? Maybe you should turn to Cthulhu...

Ti West Interview

The Onion just published an interview with House of the Devil director Ti West. The conversation is interesting and West's views on the genre and the audience's expectations are fascinating. West is an interesting dude and I have to check out his work.

Life Sucks

Life Sucks is a graphic novel about an unassertive emo loser vampire who works in a convenience store and impotently pines for the hot goth chick who regularly comes in.

I loved it.

I guess I'm not supposed to. It belongs to that whole vampire romance thing that's been running roughshod over the genre for the last few years. Our poor protagonist, convenience store drone Dave, suffers from Nice Guy Syndrome, and he often degenerates into self doubt and inaction. Both of these things would normally have me running for the hills, but I was completely engrossed in Life Sucks' story. The writing is strong enough to overcome the conventions of the genre, the characters are constantly engaging, and the story takes some surprising turns toward the end.



Life Sucks is the story of a vampire who gets a crush on a goth girl. The goth girl has a fascination with vampires, imagining them to be majestic lords of the night. Instead, they're bossy franchise owners, directionless slackers, or entitled douchebags. Both characters are longing for something, both are approaching it from different angles, and both have to deal with frustration and disappointment along the way.



There seems to be a basic framework for emo-guy-wants-girl stories: Emo pines for good-hearted, impossibly beautiful Girl. After much prodding from friends/co-workers/parole officers, Emo makes introduction to Girl. Girl opens up to Emo but constantly refers to Emo as a "true friend" or some such. Girl hooks up with Douchebag, who likely bullied Emo earlier. Emo mourns from afar. Girl complains to Emo about Douchebag and Emo lashes out. Girl is confused at Emo's reaction until it slowly dawns on her that Emo is carrying a torch. Life Sucks follows the framework pretty faithfully. It's got enough surprises to lift it out of the realm of cliche.



I liked Dave, the passive convenience-clerk vampire. Yeah, he spends the entire story being everyone's doormat but he never quite tilts over into entitled rage. Underneath the shitty job and constant capitulation to his vampire lord, we know that Dave is a decent guy.

The story does a lot with the seldom-explored relationship between a young vampire and his/her creator. Dave becomes a vampire after his Transylvanian boss decides he needs a night manager for his 24 hour convenience store. The vampires of Life Sucks are completely subservient to their masters, which dovetails nicely into Dave's hellish existence as a retail drone. Dave's master Radu, a former Transylvanian lord turned franchise owner, is a great character. I like the little expatriate vampire community he belongs to, a group of immigrants with old-world customs, huddled away in their little social clubs, trying to figure out how to navigate the new world.



The Girl in the tale is Rosa, the beautiful Latina goth girl. In romance stories told from a Emo guy's perspective, the women are often completely idealized and placed on a pedestal, their only personality traits being their unearthly beauty. Life Sucks made Rosa into an actual character. She's fiery and foolish, impatient and rash, charming and kind-hearted. The plot doesn't simply happen around her. Not all of her decisions are wise and some of the things she does is downright catastrophic, but she is a real, believable character. I also like the fact that they made her heritage and culture part of her character. Goths in most stories tend to be lily-white, modestly affluent kids. It's refreshing to see a new perspective on the community.



The story doesn't have a lot of actual horror elements to it. Most of the blood drinking is done off-stage and the vampire condition is portrayed as being fairly similar to humanity. The one really unsettling moment is when the Douchebag character, whose name currently escapes me, is hanging around in the surf with his vampire brides. As he's talking about his pursuit of Rosa, one of his brides becomes violently jealous. The Douchebag, impatient and bored with his bride, tears the woman's head off. It's a shocking moment and it grinds home the danger involved with vampire life. I especially liked that the other dude-bride has to applaud the Douchebag's behavior, lest he lose his own head to the Douchebag's rage.



Finally, I dug the fact that the story didn't end the way I expected it to. Not everyone gets what they want, some people wind up surprised when the things they wished for don't exactly turn out as expected, and there's a lot of real adult compromise in the story. It's not necessarily a bad thing and Life Sucks isn't a downer story, but I was pleasantly surprised by how far the creators were willing to turn my expectations on their head.



I really dug reading this. If you have a soft spot for vampire romance and you want something a little more quirky, go check out this graphic novel. It doesn't....um...suck.

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.

Daybreakers

Daybreakers was kind of a strange movie.

Back in the halcyon days of my youth, before vampires had all these rules governing their creation, it used to be that if you were killed by a vampire you'd rise as one of the undead. I probably thought waaaay too hard about it because the notion terrified me. If vampires need to feed and feeding creates more vampires, what happens when the world gets taken over? What happens when vampires run out of people to feed on? What happens when they turn on each other?

Apparently I wasn't alone in these thoughts. Someone made Daybreakers. It gets points for doing something vaguely, kinda-sorta newish with vampires. In an era of darkly romantic love interests, the vampires of Daybreakers are unapologetically predatory and cruel.



Well, that's not exactly true. The vampires of Daybreakers don't actually think about the cruelty they inflict on the human race. They get their blood from coffee shops and grocery stores, mixed in with commuter beverages as they move around in underground walkways. Sure, Sam Neill's sleazy vampire CEO stares at his dwindling farm of humans in the same sad way Depression-era fat cats look at dwindling stock portfolios, but the bulk of vampire society is guilty by consumerist demand. I pass very harsh judgment on their consumerist society, all the while wearing cheap clothes made by overseas slave labor.

But I'm wandering. I digress.



The movie is pretty amusing. Ethan Hawke is a vampire hematologist who doesn't feel good about himself. He joins up with some humans, they figure out a cure for vampirism and do a bit of running around. Stuff happens, other stuff happens, and there's something vaguely resembling an optimistic ending. I like Ethan Hawke for reasons I can't quite fathom, but the movie never quite jelled with me until the last 45 minutes or so. Fuck it, I enjoyed Daybreakers more as a travelogue of the vampire society and less as a story.

There's so much cool stuff in this flick. I loved the blacked out cars that allow vampires to drive in the day. I like the chime-y warnings in the suburbs that warn the locals of dawn's approach. I liked the crazy shiny look of all the buildings and the subwalks. I liked the weird, Blade-esque lighting. I liked the retro-50s vampire chicks working at the coffee shops. I liked the fascist, predatory vampire soldiers. I liked the slow degeneration of vampire society as hunger overtakes them and a starving desperation begins creeping in their eyes.



I also dug how absolutely, horribly violent the movie was. The vampires play by pretty traditional rules and I was probably expecting a bit of Twilight-style romance but the actual feedings were brutal and disgusting. There's a scene where one of the vampires changes a human and it's an extremely nasty, unromantic moment. Later, when the starving vampire soldiers get ahold of a human being, they rip him apart like in a zombie movie. It ain't pretty, but it made vampires scary again. Underneath all the restraint and melodrama vampires are addicts and whether or not a movie is a supernatural romance or a horror movie depends on how much the creators play up that angle.



I mentioned that the story really didn't come alive for me until the end, and most of that is due to Michael Dorman's portrayal of Frankie Dalton, the soldier brother of Ethan Hawke's character. He's set up to be an antagonist, a weary soldier impatient with his brother's idealism and discomfort with his vampire nature. He's got that Iraq-era fictional soldier personality, impatient and constantly on the verge of snapping, with an unshakable faith in his mission beyond the scope of morality. He turns his back on his brother and sides with the eeeeevil corporation trying to bring him in and spends most of the movie as a villain.

The movie could have easily let the character run his course to his inevitable annihilation, but as the situation worsens and society falls apart, Frankie begins losing faith. His former rock-solid beliefs are shaken and he returns to his brother. What could have been a simple story of good brother vs. jerky brother turns into something with depth, complexity, and value. As the story was structured it wouldn't have been enough to carry the whole film, but I really liked him.

Now, one thing that REALLY pissed me off about Daybreakers was the over reliance on the soundtrack-spike jump scare. It was one of those movies that relied heavily on things suddenly popping up on-screen accompanied by a sudden scream. It's a fine trick every once in awhile, but I really can't stand horror flicks that rely on that effect. It's a cheap shot and it rattles my nerves.

Anyway, I can't say I regret seeing the movie. If you like vampires and want to see something new done with their mythos, I'd say check it out.

New footage from A Nightmare on Elm Street

Io9 posted a new article on the upcoming NoES remake. We get to see Freddy fillet a kid, which is nice. Check it out, and try to ignore the fact that the movie is supposedly troubled and there's tons of reshoots. Still, gotta be optimistic, right?