Would You Like To Know More?

Another April, another Steel City Con over and done with. SCC happens about three times a year, every four months or so, at the Monroeville Convention Center here in Pittsburgh, and I usually make it a point to go to at least one of them. It's sort of like a flea market -- more of a focus on older television and movies, Star Trek, old sitcoms, Dukes of Hazzard and so on. Here's a picture of me with Doug Bradley from Hellraiser. Fortunately, Doug is much friendlier than Pinhead, and I left the con with my skin still intact.

Starship Troopers (1997)

I said a few posts back that I was going to start reviewing science fiction movies here once in a while as well as horror, so I might as well start with one of the best. Starship Troopers takes place in a future that's arguably utopian -- poverty seems to have been eliminated, there's no discrimination based on sex or race. On the other hand, military service is mandatory if you want citizenship and suffrage, and public lashing is still a possible punishment for transgressions against, at the very least, military law. Humans are pushing outward into space and colonizing the solar system, but that has its own risks. Namely the Bugs, giant insects native to the planet Klendathu, who seem to be hostile on sight.

Johnny Rico, scion of a well-off Buenos Aires family, defies his father's wishes and enlists in the military instead of attending university. He wants citizenship, he wants to contribute to society, and he wants to remain close with his friends Carl and Dizzy and his girlfriend Carmen, who are also enlisting. Carmen becomes a cadet pilot and Carl, a telepath, joins Psi Ops, leaving Rico, not a particularly smart human, to join the infantry along with Dizzy, who's carried a torch for him all through high school. Just as a mistake on Rico's part results in the death of another cadet during a training exercise and Rico decides to give up on the military and return home, the Bugs drop an asteroid on -- coincidentally -- Buenos Aires, killing Rico's parents and driving him to put his mistakes behind him and join the war effort as human ships make their way to Klendathu for retaliatory assault on the Bugs' homeworld.

Starship Troopers is probably the most vicious satire of post-9/11 American jingoism and media manipulation ever made, which is a curious thing, because it was made a few years before the World Trade Center attack. And it would never be made today -- of that I'm quite sure. It was originally an unrelated script called Bug Hunt, which was later retooled to tie in with the novel by Robert E. Heinlein. It's an odd sort of adaptation in that it's basically a big middle finger flipped at the book. People who like the book hate this movie -- if they don't just pretend it doesn't exist. Heinlein's political and social views were complicated, to put it lightly, and changed over time. We can at least say that at the time that he wrote Starship Troopers, he made no apologies for the novel's glorification of a military-controlled world government, the installation of which he considered to be the only way to avoid the ultimate annihilation of the human race. The novel was written as a response to what he considered foolish calls for the cessation of nuclear testing.

Director Paul Verhoeven has a different view of war. As a child in the Netherlands during World War II he experienced both constant dangers from Allied bombings and the oppressive hand of the Nazi regime, and it shows in Starship Troopers more than in any of his other films. The main characters are a bunch of vacant-eyed idiots with perfect physiques and pearly white teeth often bared in dazzling smiles, and their love lives and friendships are utterly boring and inconsequential. Verhoeven never told his cast what sort of movie they were in, so the banality comes off as all the more heartfelt on the part of Dina Meyer, Casper Van Dien and the rest. I'm fairly certain a few of the cast are in on the joke -- a young Neil Patrick Harris as Carl, the always fantastic Clancy Brown as a cruel drill sergeant, and Verhoeven regular Michael Ironside as Lieutenant Raczak, one of Rico's teachers, who educates his class on the subject of the "failure of democracy."

The weird thing about this movie is that nobody got it when it first came out. I mean nobody! These days, yes, most critics acknowledge that it was intended as a satire, and whether you liked it or not was independent of that fact, but back in the late 90s, nobody seemed to be able to connect the dots. Reviews at the time almost universally decried the movie as a pro-fascist, gung-ho, unbearably stupid sci-fi action movie. Even The Daily Show (which was a very different show in the late 90s and sometimes did movie reviews) missed the point, which completely baffles me, as they picked up on all the individual elements of the satire but somehow didn't follow any of it to its logical conclusion -- that the humans are the bad guys. We are not supposed to be cheering for them.

The movie's generally misanthropic attitude and anti-war stance are apparent at pretty much every turn. The movie is sprinkled with propaganda videos -- even before the war begins in earnest -- that make it clear what sort of society this is. The guy behind the desk when Rico enlists, who is missing an arm and both his legs, enthusiastically tells him that "the Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today!" When Carl Jenkins shows up again later in the movie as a decorated Psi Ops officer, he's wearing a uniform that's as close to the SS as you can get without the actual armband. By the end of the movie, Earth is sending soldiers in their early teens to Klendathu to be ground into hamburger.

While Heinlein's stance on military force was that it was really the only thing that could, in the end, keep people from tearing each other apart, Verhoeven is of the opinion that people just plain like tearing each other apart and will make any excuse -- defense, necessity, the acquisition of resources, the extension of democratic ideals -- to indulge their violent nature, preferably guilt-free. In this case, it's implied that humans provoked the Bugs to attack in the first place through their aggressive territorial expansion, then used the attack to incite the moral outrage necessary to justify full-scale war, because what else are we going to do? The Bugs have weapons of mass destruction, they attacked us, they hate our freedom and we're gonna show 'em not to mess with us, dag nab it.

Again, this was all written pre-9/11, but when you watch it, it's almost difficult to believe in retrospect. It's equally baffling that no one picked up on any of this stuff. Even knowing that it was written and directed by the same team behind RoboCop, one of the sharpest satires of shallow media culture and violence ever. How did it go over anyone's head? Verhoeven doesn't deal in subtlety. The propaganda videos alone are about as understated as a brick to the goddamn face. I mean, I wonder if there are people out there who think Dr. Strangelove is advocating mutual nuclear annihilation, if they think General Jack D. Ripper is an idealization of the military mind.

You've probably heard that this is a stupid movie. If you know anyone who's read the novel, you've certainly heard that it's a bad movie, because they never shut up about it, nearly twenty years after the fact. Give it a shot for yourself, and then tell me this movie didn't predict a great many unsettling post-millennium developments in media and politics.

Available On: Netflix.

Monsters and Mullets

"Everything is true. God's an astronaut.

Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live."

Nightbreed: The Director's Cut (1990)

Nightbreed is another Clive Barker cult classic, based on his novella Cabal. It's from the 1990s, so it's bound to be a bit campy by modern standards, but it's quite a good movie and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a movie that's as unique as its monstrous characters. (Netflix has the snazzy HD director's cut Barker just finished recently.) Our protagonist, Boone (Craig Sheffer), is a troubled man who finds himself plagued with nightmares. He fears that he is guilty of terrible deeds, as a serial murderer is going around slaughtering families in their homes and Boone is afflicted with mysterious blackouts every time it happens. (He also has this truly unfortunate early-90s haircut to worry about, but I guess he's got bigger issues on his plate.)

Get that crazy-ass mullet off your skull.

In truth it's Boone's psychiatrist, Decker, played by David Cronenberg of all people, who's committing the murders and setting Boone up to take the fall. His motivations are pretty simple -- he just hates people and wants to kill everyone, which seems like a fairly ambitious goal for one person to accomplish, but at least he doesn't bother coming up with some convoluted excuse for why he goes around butchering people. He also has this kind of murder-appreciation room where he keeps articles about the killings and an assortment of long bladed weapons, so he should probably hope nobody finds out about that. Anyway, after Boone escapes from the hospital, he flees to Midian, a secret city underneath a local cemetery that's been appearing in Boone's dreams -- calling him to join the other monsters.

Midian serves as a hidden sanctuary for all the hunted, near-extinct or unique creatures of the world. Here there are the faeries, the grotesquely deformed, the things that go bump in the night, the werewolves, the shapeshifters, the freaks of nature and the more traditionally monstrous, all known as the tribes of the moon or, of course, the Nightbreed. The denizens of Midian aren't too happy with a human seeking sanctuary with them, and when he's kicked out of the city, he ends up getting himself shot by the police as a suspect in the murders.

Shuna Sassi and Peloquin

This is obviously not the end for Boone, who wakes up in the morgue -- thanks to a bite from one of the Nightbreed -- and takes a second shot at life in Midian. It turns out that he's been chosen by Baphomet, the mysterious entity who serves as the heart and protector of Midian. Boone basically becomes a vampire from Buffy. He retains his personality, has some facial scarring, acquires superhuman speed and strength and healing, but he's still concerned for the safety of his girlfriend Lori, who's become a target for Decker, who seems to have realized that his quest to kill all of humanity is futile and decides instead to kill the tribes of the moon, which is a bit more realistic since most of them are the last of their kind.

Like most of Barker's work, Nightbreed is full of body horror, the interplay of the violent and the erotic, and the overarching theme -- one Barker shares with a lot of Guillermo del Toro's movies -- that humans are capable of horrific acts of evil, while something that appears outwardly monstrous can be as human as any of us, protecting their families and homes, wishing for the outside world to leave them be. As one of them tells Lori, the tribes of the moon represent everything that humans envy and misunderstand, and what is envied and misunderstood is to be destroyed. It's a perennially relevant point that was, at the very least, wasted on the film's producers, who apparently told Barker to rewrite some parts of the script because he had "made the monsters unintentionally sympathetic." (Barker went home and slammed his head into a wall a few times.)

Cronenberg'll shank ya.

I would hesitate to call Nightbreed a horror movie. Despite the guy tearing his own scalp off and the serial murderer going around chopping people's heads off, I'd say it's much closer to dark fantasy. Think of it as a gory adult version of Labyrinth. It's full of wonderful makeup work that reflects its creator's love of the monstrous. There's no doubt in my mind that at least one person out there finds Shuna Sassi attractive not in spite of the fact that she's some kind of porcupine lizard woman that shoots poison spines out of her back, but because she's a porcupine lizard woman that shoots poisonous spines out of her back -- and I also don't doubt that Clive Barker is happy about that.

If nothing else, you have to be at least a bit curious about a movie with David Cronenberg as the main bad guy.

Trivia: There was a Nightbreed action game on the Amiga. Check out those graphics.

Available On: Netflix.
 

The Death and Rebirth of the Slasher Movie

Scream (1996)

Scream is an interesting movie, but not one that I liked all that much back when I saw it in theaters, though I was pretty much exactly within its intended audience -- 17-year-olds familiar with the conventions and cliches of horror movies. The whole series just went back up on Netflix a few weeks back, and...I still don't like it very much. So let's call it The Beatles of horror movies: a thing I'm not all that fond of, but whose influence is undeniable.

Scream starts out with the now-iconic scene of Drew Barrymore getting murdered after a phone conversation with a serial killer who quizzes his victims on their knowledge of horror movies. She gets a question wrong -- it was Jason Voorhees' mother who was the murderer in the first Friday the 13th, not Jason himself -- and she and her boyfriend end up getting stabbed to death. The real protagonist is Sydney Preston, a teen whose mother was murdered a year earlier among controversy and scandal, and the more recent killings seem to be connected in some way, drawing sensationalist reporter Gale Weathers to the small town of Woodsboro as more bodies start turning up.

Randy, who works at the local video store and knows basically everything there is to know about slasher movies, goes over the rules with everybody. Don't drink, don't have premarital sex, don't smoke pot or split up to investigate strange noises. Slasher movies have always been moralistic in nature, and conservative at that -- the killers are the scourge of God, there to punish young people who transgress. Otherwise there's no reason for it all. At the same time, there's a clearly titillating angle to it all that almost seems to run counter to the moral pecking order. Bare skin and blood. America has always been pretty confused about what it thinks of sex and violence and their relation to one another -- that's what you get when you have a country started by puritans, I suppose -- and you could probably write a book about the psychology that goes into the slasher movie formula.

 Crispin Glover wonders where the corkscrew is in Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter.

Three guesses what happens next.

As I said in my review of The Cabin in the Woods, which I think is a much better movie as horror-genre deconstructions go, Wes Craven intended Scream to kill the slasher movie by holding a spotlight on its cliches to the point where nobody could take the genre seriously anymore. There could be any number of reasons why it didn't turn out as expected. There are two that stand out as far as I'm concerned.

One is that Wes Craven tends to think he's cleverer than he is. People already knew slasher movies are full of cliches, and didn't really need him to point them out. Halloween and especially Friday the 13th -- not the first slasher movies, but certainly the most popular to date -- had resulted in such a flood of imitators, the cliches were established in a matter of months, and even as far back as 1982, there were parodies being made. The best is probably The Slumber Party Massacre, which was directed by Amy Jones (yes, the co-writer of Beethoven) and written by Rita Mae Brown (yes, the same one who writes all those mystery novels with cats). Executives meddled with it, and the end result was a more straightforward slasher movie than intended, but the edge is still there. A year before that -- only a year after Friday the 13th was released -- we had Student Bodies, a much more overtly comedic slasher-parody written and directed by Mickey Rose, best known for his writing on Johnny Carson.

So people were already well aware of the genre's foibles. Craven wasn't the first to point them out, but he was the first to do so in such an unambiguous, self-aware manner. This is part of what sets Scream apart. Take any horror movie, any science fiction movie, and they seem to exist in a vacuum. Nobody in a zombie apocalypse movie has ever watched Night of the Living Dead. Nobody in an alien invasion movie has ever watched Independence Day; maybe they'll mention The War of the Worlds, but modern movies? Never. Slasher movies were the same, until Scream. The Slumber Party Massacre and Student Bodies were comedic to varying degrees, but they didn't take place in a world in which anyone had seen a slasher movie. Scream does, everyone knows about Jason and Freddy and Michael.

No one could get iller.

The other thing that really made Scream backfire is that it wasn't even necessary. The slasher genre was basically on its last gasp by the mid-1990s anyway. Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street were played out, running on fumes, even by the late 80s, and nobody really cared about the genre anymore. Had Craven not made Scream it probably would have quietly died out, because nobody took it seriously anyway. Some of the weirder franchises like Phantasm and Hellraiser were unusual enough that someone could always pick them up and do something interesting with them, but the unstoppable guy in the mask killing teenagers for making out just wasn't making bank anymore. As it was, Scream basically took pot-shots at a dead horse and brought it back to life.

As a result of Scream's success, we had a second wave of sorts. Suddenly all these new slasher movies cropped up, starting with I Know What You Did Last Summer and moving on to flashes in the pan like Valentine and newer stuff like Chain Letter and Smiley, because the people who write horror movies aren't scared of sex anymore, now they're scared of technology. For a while in the late 90s and early 2000s there were a ton of slasher movies, all of them at least a little bit more self-aware than the genre was back in the early 80s, but still more or less playing it straight. Scream fell into that trap as well, as it was sort of indecisive whether it was a parody of slasher movies or just a slasher movie that was aware of its own cliches. In Scream 2, there's a part where the killer is completely knocked out after a car accident, and rather than doing the sensible thing and finding something to stab him about fifty times to make sure, the girls very carefully crawl out the other window so they don't wake him up. It's the sort of oversight that's all the more galling because it's a movie that takes aim at the stupidity of the victims in these things.

Scream is at its best when it's not directly referencing horror cliches in conversation. The first movie got a few laughs out of me with its sillier and more subtle moments, like when Sydney tells the killer over the phone that horror movie victims always run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door -- then ends up trying to run out the front door herself, gets surprised by the killer, and runs upstairs. Or when Craven shows up in a three-second cameo as a janitor named Fred who wears a hat and a black-and-red sweater. Or when the local comic-relief deputy, Dewey, seems like he gets killed in every movie but shows up in the next one -- and actually manages to survive all four movies. It's also unusual looking back on it now because it ends up being a sort of unintentional relic of its time -- a major plot point in the first movie is that the killer used a cell phone, and the police are tracing every cellular account in the county. (I remember this was about the same time when there was a big debate at my high school over whether students should be allowed to carry them -- I think one student actually had one.)

There are better, more recent slasher parodies out there, but the thing is, none of them would ever have been made without this one. I hope Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon shows up again on Netflix sometime, because it basically took the same premise as Scream and made a much smarter movie out of it. Scream itself became the Friday the 13th of its time, spawning legions of imitators. Slashers became postmodern, with Friday the 13th taking jabs at itself in Jason X and Freddy ending up with his own meta-movie, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Then they tried making them scary again, with less-than-successful reboots of Friday and Nightmare. So now we're sort of back to where we started, with a bunch of stupid teenagers dying as a result of their transgressions. Still, while Scream may seem dated by current standards -- the way Seinfeld doesn't seem funny since we've grown up with a dozen other sitcoms that followed the same basic formula -- Craven can't be kicking himself too hard, as it put him back on the map as a horror director and made him a lot of money. Where does the genre go from here? I only know one thing for sure:

YOU'RE DOOMED!

YOU'RE ALL DOOMED!

Trivia: The instantly-recognizable and often-parodied "Scream voice?" Know who else he was? Mojo Jojo. No kidding.

Available On: Netflix.

Colorful Metaphors

The sort of person who reads this blog has probably already heard that we lost one of the great minds of science fiction this week -- Leonard Nimoy, by all accounts a talented and gracious man who never let his fame go to his head and always had wise advice or a kind word for his fans. I never met him. I never considered myself a Trekkie -- I've been a Whovian since I was about three years old, with Star Wars in second place where the Big Three were concerned -- and my image of Nimoy is more recently tied to his role as William Bell on Fringe. His death has had me thinking that I should not only do something a little different this week, but also shake things up in general on this blog and review science fiction movies from time to time as well.

SF -- I generally use Harlan Ellison's preferred abbreviation, as he always thought the more common "Sci-Fi" was dismissive and sounded "like crickets fucking" -- is sort of a cousin to horror. It's usually larger in scale, but it's still about viewing humanity through the lens of the fantastic. It certainly shares horror's tendency to be unconditionally dismissed as brainless tripe by film critics, unless their name happens to be Roger Ebert. Whether it's the classics like Alien and Predator or cornier cult stuff like Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror, the two genres also tend to overlap. Netflix and Amazon Prime have a lot of good science fiction available, so I hope to get a bit more into it on this blog from now on.

Nimoy directed our movie this week. I'm not often affected by celebrity deaths, but Leonard was such an iconic figure in nerd culture for so many years, and such a friendly, outgoing representative of that culture long before it achieved any sort of mainstream acceptance, that I find myself deeply saddened by his passing.

Live long and prosper in memory.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

It's generally acknowledged that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the best of the original-generation Trek movies, but that The Voyage Home is the most fun. This was my Star Trek, growing up. I watched this one about fifty times. The first three movies form a plot arc, and they're notably darker in tone than the original show tended to be. Kirk's character is torn apart layer by layer. He takes over command of the refitted Enterprise in the first movie and assumes he knows everything there is to know, nearly getting the ship blown up in the process because it's not the same ship he remembers. In the second movie, he's chomping at the bit to get back in the saddle, but he's been shoved behind a desk for so long that his instincts are rusty when it finally happens. The ladies' man turns out to have a son he never knew, who hates him. And way back in the original series episode "Space Seed," he stranded Khan and his followers on a desolate planet and then basically forgot to check in on them, which bites him in the ass big-time and results in the death of his best friend.

The Voyage Home wraps up most of that storyline in the first ten minutes. It also marks a complete change in tone, tossing the darkness of the previous three movies out the window in favor of comedy. An alien probe makes its way to Earth and starts vaporizing the oceans, emitting a signal nobody seems to be able to decipher. Spock figures out that it's replicating the songs of humpback whales -- which makes answering the probe functionally impossible, as humpback whales were long ago driven to extinction. Kirk, now demoted to Captain and given command of the HMS Bounty, the Klingon Bird-of-Prey they acquired at the end of the last movie, has an idea: slingshot the Bounty around the sun so hard that it flies back in time so they can bring some humpback whales back with them to communicate with the probe.

So that works, and the crew ends up in the "primitive and paranoid" culture of San Francisco in 1986, where they split up to accomplish the various things they need to do. Chekhov and Uhura go off to find a source of radiation to power up the Klingon crystals that crapped out on them when they landed, and sending the Russian to ask about a nuclear power source in a major American city during the last years of the Cold War turns out not to be the best idea. Scotty and Bones go to find a suitable material to build a giant fish tank out of. And Kirk and Spock go looking for the whales, which they find, fortuitously enough, in a mated pair of humpbacks at the nearby Cetacean Institute. After some trouble navigating the local culture.

"Well, double dumbass on YOU!"

While Kirk and Spock try to negotiate a solution with the whales' caretaker, marine biologist Gillian Taylor, Chekhov gets himself arrested after leeching nuclear power from a navel vessel in the bay. Scotty's mission isn't exactly going as planned either, as it turns out that the material they need hasn't been invented yet. He solves that problem easily enough by just inventing it himself, since he already knew its molecular composition. (They're playing kind of fast and loose with the Prime Directive in this movie, but it's funny, so we'll let it slide.) He also has to deal with those hideous off-white boxy Macs they had back in the 80s.

"Hello, computer?"

Another snag hits Kirk and Spock when Gillian, who finally more or less says "fuck it, okay, you're from space, let's go with that," because Kirk is really her only rescue option if he's telling the truth, reveals that the whales are about to be shipped off to the ocean and set free, where they'll more than likely be hunted down by whalers. The movie isn't particularly subtle in its message, but there are things you really don't need to be subtle about. It's also right about then that Uhura gets back to them and tells them Chekhov's being held by the Navy, who think he's a Russian spy, so they have to go bail him out after a wacky hospital chase scene. Eventually everything gets back on track and works out for the best, and Gillian comes with them since she'll probably be the only whale biologist around and the 20th century sucks anyway. (This, I can definitely relate to.)

This is one of my favorite movies. If I remember correctly, it's the movie that got me watching movies again, actually. When I was young -- I mean four years old young, or thereabouts -- I went to see Go-Bots and the Battle of the Rock Lords at the Eric Theater in the Tri-State Mall, which, at the time, was not the terrifying, mostly closed-down den of drug dealers it is today. The sound on that movie was about twice the volume it should have been, and I was terrified of loud noises at that age, so after over an hour of being temporarily deafened, I basically swore off movies for a few years after that. I'm pretty sure this was the first movie I watched after my irrational terror at the prospect of going to a theater had worn off.

"You're not exactly catching us at our best."

Everybody has their moments, but Spock is pretty much the best part of the movie. He walks around with his ears hidden by a headband, and since he's 1) recovering from being dead and 2) unfamiliar with Earth culture in the 1980s, he's acting super weird, which Kirk tells Gillian is because he did a little too much LDS back in the 60s. He also notices that the language is laced with "more colorful metaphors," and Kirk tells him that nobody listens to anyone in the 20th century unless they swear every other word, so Spock starts swearing every other word. Kirk eventually tells him he shouldn't use so many colorful metaphors anymore, and Spock says "Why the hell not?" He nerve-pinches a punk blasting a boom-box on the bus. He goes swimming in the aquarium. I think Nimoy must have come up with this story (with Harve Bennett) partly just so he could act like a total goofball without ever cracking a smile. Spock is great in this movie.

The special effects deserve a mention as well. In several sequences, the whales were small-scale animatronic models filmed in a high-school swimming pool, but they were so realistic that U.S. fishing authorities criticized the producers for being too close to whales in their natural habitat, unaware that they weren't using real whales for the ocean and bay scenes toward the end of the movie. The bizarre dream sequence Kirk experiences during the time-warp also marks one of the very first uses of primitive CGI. They may not look like much now, but it's important to remember where the effects of today came from.

I also have to say that every time I watched this movie on VHS back in the day, I would rewind this one part near the end and watch it over about five times, because my younger self found it completely hilarious for no apparent reason. I can't come up with a reason now any more than I could then, but it still gets a laugh out of me.

I can't think of much else to say, and writing this review is sort of making me cry. So I'll just say that if you have Netflix, you should watch this movie tonight. Whether it's in remembrance, or just because it's the best Trek movie out there.

Available On: Netflix.

Trivia: The punk on the bus is played by the movie's associate producer, Kirk R. Thatcher.

Rat Bastards

Mulberry Street (2006)

2006 saw the first annual After Dark Horrorfest, which was a pretty good idea, even if most of the movies were crap. Basically, they'd release eight independent, low-budget horror movies every year, including a couple of foreign films (Reincarnation, from Japan, and Frontier(s), a nasty little near-future French thriller set as riots overtake Paris after a right-wing extremist political party comes to power). This was to go on for four years, the last being in 2010, after which any new entries were released direct-to-video as After Dark Originals. Like I said, most of them are pretty bad, but there are a few solid entries.

One of my favorite After Dark films -- from the second series, released in 2007 -- is Mulberry Street, which is probably the best 28 Days Later ripoff out there. I'd say it's actually probably almost as good as 28 Days Later, which is impressive, considering that 28 Days was a polished, professional effort by an already well-respected writer-director team (Danny Boyle and Alex Garland), while Mulberry Street is an indie movie in every respect, and a first effort for everyone involved.

Mulberry Street brought to my attention one of my favorite horror directors to come out of the last ten years or so -- Jim Mickle, who also directed the post-apocalyptic vampire movie Stake Land and, more recently, We Are What We Are (all, incidentally, available on Netflix and worth watching). Set in downtown Manhattan on a hot summer day, the movie mostly takes place in an old tenement building that's recently been bought up to make room for more lucrative real estate. Clutch -- more or less our main character, played by Mickle's frequent collaborator Nick Damici -- is waiting for the return of his daughter Casey, recently arrived in New York after a tour in Iraq. As reports come in from all over the island, advising residents to remain indoors due to a pandemic being rapidly spread by infected rats, Clutch, his roommate Coco, his neighbor Kay and her teenage son, and resident curmudgeons Charlie and Frank barricade themselves inside the building and deal with an all-out siege by vicious rat-people that basically stand in for fast zombies.

Meanwhile Casey, heavily scarred both emotionally and physically from her tour of duty in the Middle East, realizes something's going very wrong very quickly and makes her way through Manhattan on a stolen bicycle, trying to reach her father's apartment while he searches for her in the streets. She's more than capable of taking care of herself, but she's in for a hell of a night, all things considered.

There's a lot to like about Mulberry Street. The characters' relationships and backstories are never explained outright, there's very little exposition at all, but we come to care about them anyway by the time the shit hits the fan. One of the more interesting things about the movie is the fairly heavy implication that Clutch is gay and, at the very least, was romantically involved with Coco in the past. Coco refers to Casey as "our little girl," and is clearly jealous of Kay's flirting with Clutch. For Clutch's part, he's markedly disinterested in Kay's flirtations, and his reaction to the fates of both characters is telling. Clutch and Coco aren't defined by this -- it's just one more facet of their characters. Everyone's surprisingly realistic, and none of them are morons who go outside at night to investigate strange noises and other such nonsense.

The whole film is well-paced, the camerawork is stylish, and the scenes on the quarantined, ratman-infested Manhattan streets during the night have that sense of raw nocturnal dread I noted in my reviews of Absentia and Munger Road. There are some decidedly bad special effects -- the rat makeup can look pretty goofy at times, and whenever something is set on fire or explodes it's clearly a cheap CGI effect. A lot of what works in Mulberry Street, I think, works because of its nature as an indie film. The actors are mostly Mickle and Damici's friends and family (a valuable resource for any indie filmmaker, as noted in my interview with Matthew Pillischer last month), and the characters are based on real people from their own tenements. By modern standards, the movie was made for practically nothing with a budget of $60,000, $10,000 of which came directly from the pocket of Tim House, who plays building super Ross.

Maybe it's not the most unique of premises, but the execution is interesting enough to entertain you for an hour and a half.

Available On: Netflix.

Vacationing with Vlad

This week, we have a review of the new independent horror film A Dark Souvenir, but first, we were also lucky enough to have the opportunity to interview the movie's writer, director and editor, Matthew Pillischer, who has some insights about his movie, other movies, and what new artists could face when venturing into the realm of moviemaking.

Midnight Channel: Why a horror movie? Have you always been a fan of the genre, or was it just this one idea you found interesting?

Matthew Pillischer: I love horror, scary movies. I remember making haunted houses for my mom in my room when I was like 8 years old. Not sure where that love of scary came from, but it's always been there.

MC: My sister and I were both into horror at a pretty young age as well. Night of the Living Dead, The Thing, anything that was on TV back then. What are some of your favorite horror movies you’d recommend?

MP: Well some of them are typical: The Shining, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween...I also really liked foreign films that are generally creepy: Michael Haneke, and Ingmar Bergman has probably been my biggest filmmaking influence over the years.

MC: Hour of the Wolf was pretty creepy.

MP: Yeah, love Hour of the Wolf-- that's gotta be his scariest. But also just love the humanity in his films, the characters, the pain and sorrow, the realness of life. Lately I've really liked Ti West (especially House of the Devil), Pontypool, Resolution and The Dawning for low budget indie horror. Also love Rosemary's Baby-- that sort of slow build movie is one of my favorites.

MC: A Dark Souvenir has a “based on true events” disclaimer at the beginning, which always makes me wonder which events a movie is referring to. Do you mean the history of Vlad and the sea fort, the Copenhagen honeymoon, something totally different?

MP: Honestly, I just put it in there because it creeps so many people out. It's a little overplayed to do that.  It's also kind of an inside joke because truly the movie features a lot of our real lives-- like all the European footage and wedding footage, which of course was real and our wedding and our honeymoon.

MC: So it’s not referring to Dracula’s spirit hitching a ride back to Philly.

MP: Hopefully no. But I like that as a catchline for the movie....

MC: Did you get the inspiration for the movie from visiting the sea fort, or did you already have the movie in mind when you went there and film all the fort footage with that in mind?

MP: No, I got inspiration while we were at the fort. It was so creepy and cool. I'm always writing movies in my head, at least once a day, and I'm always taking photos or videos with my iPhone too.  So, as I'm shooting the footage at Trekroner Sea Fort and thinking of a movie idea (my movie ideas are typically horror, though sometimes drama), that's where it began. I started writing the story on the plane ride back from our honeymoon and it evolved slowly over the next 2 years as we shot it.

MC: It’s part of the whole Vlad the Impaler myth that I had actually never heard of, which leads into the whole movie being a pretty unconventional take on Dracula’s curse. That one particular image, the waterspout face, seems to be a sort of iconic image of the movie, on the website and the Facebook page, and so on. Did it just stand out as something especially creepy?

MP: Yeah, the reason the Vlad story is a little different is because I sort of squeezed it in after writing the idea of a general haunting coming back with this couple after their honeymoon. It wasn't Vlad the Impaler at first, but then I had the idea that maybe I could work that in. So I asked some people, some twitter followers and friends, and they all said, Why not? That's where that came from. The image of the fountain head is just some of the creepy footage I collected that yes really stood out as something creepy. And all the things I've chosen have symbolism to me on many levels.

And I should say, this movie has been a bit of a one-man-band. The marketing images I've used thus far have all been my creation, though I just hired a friend artist Jay McPhillips to design the real cover art and poster. It's not going to be that image, but a cross of the forest (where Frieda wanders after popping some pills), and a mixture of "freaky Frieda." The two images faded into each other. Should be done and up on our sites and social media soon, Jay's almost done.

MC: What other sort of symbolism and thematic elements should people pay attention to in the movie? There are a lot of things that stand out — the statue face, the waterspout, the recurring circle on the ground — and there’s that quote that starts it off….

MP: Right. Well, there's a lot of themes I was working through. The quote in the beginning is a clue. We are Jewish (my wife Karen was raised Jewish, and I've become very involved culturally since she came into my life), we are deeply involved in our synagogue, and we are deep social justice people-- activists, organizers. A lot of the movie explores some very controversial things within the American Jewish community that are taboo to talk about -- the trauma of the Holocaust, and how that victimization has led to extreme fear in many American Jews of another mass pogrom always around the corner (somewhat justifiable based on history of the oppression of Jewish people). But that fear has led some to the point of being willing to further victimize other communities-- namely Palestinians. So all that is in this movie too, underneath.

But not many people may get that unless I point it out, and it doesn't need to be about that to enjoy it, I think. It's just an added layer that I needed in the process.

MC: Do you have any advice for other new filmmakers hoping to break into the industry? Particularly for horror or science-fiction films, as there’s that whole other thing that comes into it, the special effects and makeup and so on, which you don’t necessarily have to worry about in, you know, a romantic comedy. Even in a horror movie that’s focused primarily on dialogue and atmosphere — like you said, a slow build.

MP: Hm. Good question. I think aspiring filmmakers have to ask themselves a couple of questions: why do I want to make movies? Usually it's a combination of art (self fulfillment, or therapy in my case) and wanting to make money doing something cool. That's how it is for me, but more because I just NEED to make art to feel alive. If you really want to make a career out of this, it requires more calculation, more of a business plan and sense. I don't really have that, and this is an awful, awful business to break into. The biggest advice I could have is focus on keeping costs ultra ultra amazingly low, so that any money made is almost instantly profit.

Work with friends to start, which is what I've been doing. They'll invest in your idea even if they're not sure what the fuck it is, because they like you. But on the I NEED TO MAKE ART side of things -- just go out and do it. Figure out what kind of story you can tell based on the resources you have. Make something. It won't be perfect, it might not even be good.  But a bad completed film is better than a great film idea that is never made. Know what I mean? It's easier said than done, but if you want to make movies in your life you should make sure to go out there and do it before you're dead in the ground.

And find great people to work with. Surround yourself with amazing people who are inspiring. I don't have anything particularly great to say about effects. I did all mine myself, super no budget.  They look decent I think. I am super lo-fi, and you can make things work.  Sound is more important than image in many ways. That's crucial to remember in horror/sci-fi genres. Get great sound, you can't fix bad sound.

MC: The sound stood out. On watching the movie again, there were bits of dialogue and sound effects I didn’t catch the first time because of our heater running insanely loud when it comes on. And the music was creepy — I’ve seen several indie horror films now with some exceptional music that heightens the atmosphere. The part where John is attacked at work, in particular — when I first watched it, I don’t think I heard Frieda’s voice.

MP: Oh cool -- yeah, that whole scene is the sound obviously. And the main climax where Frieda is on the 9-1-1 call, obviously is mostly sound. I like movies that do that, cut the lights, and it's actually dark, hard to see. And you're hearing people fumbling around in the dark. Some of it is music, some of it is sound design, some of it is sound effects. I actually recorded my cat when he was sick and making horrible noises, at first to show the vet and then later I slowed it down and that's a lot of the sounds when the spirit is around.

MC: Lastly…where do you go from here? After the initial release of A Dark Souvenir is over and done with, do you already have another movie in mind?

MP: I have a couple in mind that I'm developing -- "Tila's Last Halloween" would be a mixture of a coming of age movie about a teenager going out on her last trick-or-treating mixed with a horrifying satanic cult movie (that tries to steal her newly adopted baby brother, and she has to grow up and save him). "Brown's Blood Massacre for Christ" (or something equally ear-catching) would be a horror movie where the Abolitionist John Brown is the killer, and it's all slavemasters being slaughtered (would play on identifying more with the killer than with the killed). And as I said, I'm basically always thinking new ideas in my head, but these are the two I'm most drawn to, that could also have subtle political undertones.

MC: Thanks for talking with us, Matthew Pillischer! Writer, director and editor of A Dark Souvenir. We look forward to seeing your next work.

MP: You're so welcome!  Max, thanks so much for the work you do on your blog, I enjoy reading it, and I'm looking forward to future posts and staying in touch.

A Dark Souvenir (2014)

A Dark Souvenir is our second sort-of-vampire movie in a row, though in this case, as noted in the interview, it's partially autobiographical, as well as featuring a new and unusual take on Count Dracula's curse. We start out with John and Frieda, a newly married couple enjoying their honeymoon in Scandinavia. During the course of their vacation, they end up taking shelter in an old sea fort during a rainstorm and learn something of the place's dark history, which is tied up with the defeat and capture of Vlad the Impaler.

Upon returning to Philadelphia, the two of them find their lives unraveling thanks to a series of ominous occurrences. They receive threatening letters from the former owner of the house, who claims that they are living on stolen property. The house is broken into, but nothing is taken. Their pets start to vanish. John develops a strange rash on his side which seems to be an animal bite, and he's attacked at work -- something he has no memory of when he returns home. Shadows seem darker, and a mysterious black-robed figure with the stone face of a waterspout gargoyle roams the halls of their home at night.

Like Absentia, A Dark Souvenir finds most of its horror in broad daylight, and in a slowly mounting dread, rather than in gory spectacle against a backdrop of blue-screen night. There's an unsettling sense of a house fracturing from within under the stress of everyday hardships as well as the intervention of outside forces. It's a long time before anything actually horrific happens, and everything before this establishes John and Frieda as a likable, intelligent, artistically-inclined couple in their 30s, making it all the more disturbing when their behavior starts to become erratic and the intrusion of the spirit that's caught a ride home with them becomes more aggressive and direct. You know things can't end well for them, but you want them to somehow manage to escape their dark houseguest.

A Dark Souvenir is super low-budget, and as with most indie horror movies to come out in the last four years or so that are worth watching, this works to its advantage. Absentia was a monster movie whose monster is all the more frightening because we never see it head-on. The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh was a slow-boiling movie where very little even happens, but manages to keep you on the edge of your seat all the same. A Dark Souvenir is similarly spare in its presentation, and just as strange, explaining none of its recurring symbols and dreamlike imagery outright. Its final minutes, a confrontation with the unknown in the pitch-black house, are as creepy and tense as anything I've reviewed in recent months.

Available On: A Dark Souvenir is not currently available on any of the usual streaming services, but here's some information about how to see it online or order a physical copy on DVD. It has recently become an Official Selection at the 2015 Maryland International Film Festival.

Official Site: http://www.adarksouvenir.com/
Email Address: ADarkSouvenir@gmail.com
On Facebook: http://facebook.com/ADarkSouvenir
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/ADarkSouvenir

Hugh Grant, Vampire Hunter

Before the review, I think I should write some personal stuff. Partly to get it off my own chest, but mostly just in case anybody reading is in the same boat, or has been in the same boat, and might find it helpful in putting things into perspective.

I've been struggling with acute depression for a long time now -- not knowing it until the last couple of years, and, not knowing it, not doing anything about it either. Restarting this blog with a different concept and structure in mind was one thing I did last March or thereabouts in order to fight that, so this isn't entirely unrelated. Depression is like watching a horror movie. You watch someone going up the attic stairs with nothing but a candle or a flashlight, and no matter how many times you tell the doomed idiot onscreen not to go up there and get herself murdered, the movie will inevitably play out the same way every time. She always goes upstairs. She always finds her boyfriend's mangled corpse. She always dies. Only in this case, the person doing all this is you, and still...all you can do is watch. You're perfectly aware that you should be doing something else, and you're also aware that it will play out in the same way it always has -- and knowing that somehow makes it worse.

Other people try to help. They tell you not to be angry, or sad, or to let the things you can't control get under your skin. Naturally, at this point, you're probably stuck between wishing your own emotions had that convenient on/off switch that other people seem to have, and asking, "Well, that's brilliant, why didn't I think of that before?" Don't be sad. Problem solved. As frustrating as this is, you can't even blame them, because they're just trying to help with something they don't understand. This also makes it worse. You can't blame them, so, as with everything else, you blame yourself. (Note to anyone else reading who may have a friend who suffers from a depressive disorder: don't tell them to get over it, don't tell them to just be happier. It does about as much good as stabbing Jason Voorhees.)

So, how do you get over it? You don't, really, but getting rid of the worst of it, reducing it to a sort of background radiation, is down to you, and only you will know when this is even a possibility. Two things happened to coincide that made me realize that if I didn't change my perspective, I was going to end up jumping in front of a bus someday after work. One of these things was that a coworker who really needed to be fired was fired. This coworker reminded me entirely too much of myself. She was angry all the time, constantly complaining about everything, eventually talking at great length, out loud, about punching out her supervisor and everyone else in the office she didn't like (well, all right, that last part was something I never did). For a while I had been thinking, My God, is that what I sound like? Do people think of me the same way? After she was fired, morale improved in the office. My morale improved. My own complacent cynicism and constant petty misery, which I saw reflected in this other person, made the office a better place through its absence.

This was a sort of curtain lifted from my eyes. At the same time, the other thing that made me realize what a boring, worn-out pessimist I was (and still am, though not to the same extent, and not for lack of trying) aired on TV -- True Detective. This is probably the best new show to air in the last five years or so. It's the closest thing we'll ever get to a Call of Cthulhu TV series. Rust and Marty, the two protagonists, are kind of terrible people, but you end up caring about them anyway. Again, I heard too much of myself in Rust, and while his world-weary, misanthropic nihilism was funny at first, I eventually realized what a wreck it had made of him. I decided, in a moment of clarity, that whatever sort of person I ended up, it would not be a miserable, alcoholic, self-hating shell of a human being, waiting for an excuse to give up on life. I wouldn't let the little things get to me. I wouldn't be sad -- not all the time, anyway.

Of course, like I said, you can't just get over it. After you decide to keep going another day, another year, instead of jumping in front of the nearest truck, you may be out of the woods, but you still need something to keep your mind off of it so you don't keep looking back toward the tree line. I need more of these distractions, but resurrecting this blog was the first. Even when you think you're done with it, you're not. Like the Stephen King story says -- sometimes they come back. As long as your brain is a mix of chemicals, electricity and meat, and depression is causing that particular machine to function imperfectly, you're going to need a distraction. I stopped writing this blog for a couple of months, and I doubt it's a coincidence that I find myself criticizing myself more sharply, looking back toward the edge of that pit.

Anyway, that's enough out of me about depression. Let's get this back on track with one of the classics.

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

The Lair of the White Worm is a trippy 1988 horror film from the master of trippy horror films, Ken Russell, who was also responsible for Altered States and Gothic, the latter of which is really weird. Lair stars Peter Capaldi -- who you might recognize as the twelfth and current Doctor on Doctor Who, except that here he looks like he's about eighteen years old and has the most ridiculous hair ever -- as Angus Flint, a Scottish archaeologist who finds an ancient reptilian skull in the backyard of his landlords, the English sisters Eve and Mary (get it?) Trent. It also stars an equally baby-faced Hugh Grant as James D'Ampton, heir to the property and new Lord of the Manor. He's basically a bored, rich playboy with nothing to do but be bored and rich; he certainly doesn't care too much about his legacy, as one of his ancestors supposedly slew the legendary white dragon, the D'Ampton Worm, a bit of backstory explained to Angus at a party thrown by D'Ampton. There's also a pretty awesome folk rock song about it.

Lair is a vampire movie -- sort of. Here, vampires are snake-people who worship the Roman snake god Dionin. They're still seductive, and they still turn you by biting you, but they can also spit acidic venom that makes you hallucinate. The chief vampire is Lady Sylvia Marsh, another recent arrival in the area. Lady Marsh has just moved into a long-deserted local manor, Temple House, which happens to be near the entrance to Stonerich Cavern, where the Trent sisters' father vanished while exploring. She spends most of her time indulging her fondness for black leather, Snakes and Ladders, and eating wayward schoolboys. As master vampires go, Lady Marsh is gloriously campy, one of the best you'll find on film.

The Doctor forgot his sonic screwdriver, 

but at least he remembered his bagpipes.

The entire movie is pretty ridiculous, actually, which is mostly why I recommend it. It's fully aware of its absurdity, with its unabashedly kinky sexuality, acid-trip vampire bites and the monsters' weakness not to garlic and sunlight, but bagpipes, mongooses and snake-charming records. It also has Hugh Grant chopping a snake-lady in half with a claymore, then falling into a set of drums. If that doesn't make you want to watch something, I don't know what will.

Hugh the Barbarian.

Trivia: Lair of the White Worm is loosely based on a novel of the same name by Bram Stoker -- his final work to be published (in 1911).

Available On: Netflix.