The Sad Story of a Man and His Butt

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Once upon a time, there was a talented young director from the Philly suburbs named Manoj Nellyattu Shyamalan -- but he called himself M. Night Shyamalan, because Night is a badass middle name. Back in the late 90s, nobody had ever really heard of him. Then he made his first movie, The Sixth Sense, and then everybody was talking about him. For good reason, too, because The Sixth Sense is an awesome movie. I'd say it's sometimes brilliant, in fact. It popularized a particular twist to the point where you expect it at the end of any movie that features a ghost in any way, and I won't give it away here in case you're one of the two or three humans in America for whom it has not already been spoiled, either by references in other movies, in magazines, or by that guy who tells you the end of every movie ever. It also popularized twists in general, for better or worse.

The Sixth Sense was the movie that convinced me that Bruce Willis could act. I'd seen him in Die Hard, of course, and Hudson Hawk, and some other action movies I forget, but this was the first time I'd ever seen him in such an understated role. Willis plays Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who, after recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound at the hands of a former patient (Donnie Whalberg, a one-scene wonder here), finds himself estranged from his wife and hanging his future on the shoulders of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a troubled boy who has his share of secrets. Crowe asks Cole what he wants from their time together -- and Cole tells him it's not what he wants, but what he doesn't want.

Cole's working-class mother (an excellent Toni Collette) loves him with fierce determination, but she's struggling with Cole's secrecy and his troubles at school. He's bullied constantly, he's getting in trouble for drawing disturbing and violent images during art class and even his teachers are scared of him. Mysterious lesions show up on Cole's arms, leading child services to suspect his mother of abuse, and he won't tell her who's hurting him. It's a very adult sort of fear, and Collette portrays it exceptionally well.

Crowe nearly abandons Cole when the boy tells him what's really happening. Cole is plagued by ghosts. He sees them at his high school, which used to be a courthouse where people were executed. He sees them in his house, where they scare him in the middle of the night. The dead don't realize they're dead -- and it's this which leads Crowe to help Cole come to terms with his power, rather than search for some way to get rid of it.

It's a great movie. Parts of it are just terrifying. It's one of those movies that probably seems less great if you didn't see it around the turn of the millennium, because after that, dozens of movies aped its style, parodied its most well-known line ad nauseum and borrowed its final twist over and over until it's a surprise when you see a ghost movie where it doesn't happen. It's also, as far as I know, the only horror movie that -- well, let's be honest, a horror movie will never sweep the Oscars because the Academy doesn't really care how good a movie is, but it got several nominations, which is pretty much unheard of. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress for Toni Collette, Best Supporting Actor for Cole (who's really the protagonist of the film, and Osment does a fantastic job)...obviously, it didn't win anything, and I doubt anyone expected it to, but it was a breakout for our friend Manoj.

He followed that up with another good one, 2000's Unbreakable, which also stars Bruce Willis and is also on Netflix. It was a surprising take on a genre -- comics and superheroes -- that was, at the time, obscure; remember, this was well before Iron Man busted open the doors in 2008, paved the way for the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and made reading comics and watching movies based on them acceptable for adults and those outside of the rather isolationist bastion of nerd culture. Then an odd thing happened, and poor Manoj began his fall from grace.

Signs, his third movie, was suspenseful and mostly pretty damn good -- but then that ending happened. Cut the last five minutes out of Signs, end it where the daughter goes upstairs, and you have a great ending that leaves the situation ambiguous. But Manoj didn't do that. It went the same way with his next movie, The Village, which I also really like, and which is also on Netflix. This one needs a scalpel taken to about ten minutes of its footage, and it's interspersed throughout, so it's kind of hard to carve this one up into something as compelling as Manoj's earlier movies. It might be the only movie where I actually stood up and yelled "FUCK YOU!" at the screen at one point. Sometime I'll have to make a viewers' guide to The Village that tells you where to fast-forward.

My sister and I decided something unfortunate had happened to Manoj, who we kind of thought of as a director who was one of us, someone to aspire to, as someone who started out making short horror movies and hit it big -- and it was cool seeing movies set in nearby Philadelphia and Bucks County. Manoj was still a talented guy, of course, but sometime between Unbreakable and Signs, his butt started talking to him. It started suggesting stuff that might work in his movies, and when he made Signs, his butt said "Hey! Manoj, let me direct the last five minutes of this thing, it'll be killer!" I wish he'd said no, but he didn't, and his butt went on to direct several scenes in The Village.

By the time Lady in the Water came out, and it was clear that Manoj's butt was doing most of the heavy lifting by that point. Like Hitchcock, he always had a little cameo in his movies. He was a doctor in The Sixth Sense, a drug dealer in Unbreakable, and so on. In Lady in the Water, he played a writer who was going to bring about a new age of world peace, and was the focus of the last quarter of the movie or so, as he's the one everyone's supposed to be protecting. Then he made The Happening (or, as it's known among my family and circle of friends, Mark Wahlberg Is The Haps), and I don't know what the happening is, exactly, but I assume it's this thing, which certainly did happen in this movie:

Then he made the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best cartoons ever made and almost certainly one of the worst movies. For the last few years, studios have done this weird thing where they let him produce but not direct, or they let him direct but go out of their way to avoid putting his name on the movie, as if they can't decide if they want to coast on the reputation of his early films or if his later work is such an embarrassment that it's best to just keep his name out of it. Anyway, it's clear that Manoj's butt was given such editorial power over its owner that it grew large enough to eat him somehow, and it's currently all that's left of Manoj. Just a walking butt behind a camera. I don't know how it manages to write anything with just cheeks instead of hands, but "not very well" would certainly be one answer.

What is the moral of this sad tale? I don't know. "Don't listen to your butt when it wants to help you write a screenplay," maybe. I'd say it's more likely as simple as "Don't buy into your own hype." Writers hate their own work, and maybe there's a reason for that.

Maybe that's the moral, the bedtime story screenwriters tell their kids:

When someone tells you you're the next Hitchcock, don't fucking listen to them. You might end up like M. Night Shyamalan.

Available On: Netflix.

Ladies' Night

There's this persistent thing in American society that I almost thought was basically gone for good when I overheard some people talking at work, and then later at Barnes & Noble, the same thing, and I wondered if this is really what people in general believe. You know, the old preconception that girls and women, with their overemotional ladybrains and their cooties and whatnot, are genuinely scared of horror movies and don't like them. That they are "a guy thing," along with video games, sports, comics and a bunch of other things that are not actually "guy things," whatever that even means. Well, I thought, that's obviously a load of horseshit. Who actually thinks this anymore? Do they wear letterman jackets and drive red convertibles on their way to the malt shop or something? Gee whiz, I dunno.

Anyway, my sister and I have been watching horror movies since we were bipedal. And two of the three most interesting horror movies I've seen in the last five years or so were written and directed by women. Luckily, both of them are available on Netflix, so I figured I'd do a double feature in the vain hope that one or two people who continue to beat that particular dead horse might reconsider their position and discover some of the best independent horror films around while they're at it.

(If you're wondering what the third one is, it's David Robert Mitchell's low-budget retro horror movie It Follows, which is completely terrifying and is well worth watching. It's still in theaters.)

The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook will scare the crap out of you. Maybe not as much as you think it would while you're actually watching it, but it will stick with you for a long time afterward, making you jump at shadows and cross the street to avoid that gnarled tree that looks just a bit like a man in a long coat with his arms outstretched....

Written and directed by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook is an Australian horror film that was produced for well under $3 million (for perspective, Think Like a Man Too cost about $25 million) and backed in large part by Kickstarter. It's about a single mother named Amelia (Essie Davis, who you might recognize as Phryne Fisher from the mystery series Miss Phryne's Murder Mysteries) who lives with her young son Sam in a dark, creaking, gloomy suburban house. Sam is getting in trouble at school as a result of his habit of crafting surprisingly effective weapons from stuff he finds around the house. He's terrified of monsters in his closet and under his bed, and Amelia is fraying at the edges as a result of Sam's behavior.

I did the same thing for a while after I watched this.

One night, Sam finds a new book on his shelf, a pop-up book called "Mister Babadook." Mister Babadook is a friendly monster who wears a funny disguise. He knocks on your door at night and once you let him in, you'll never sleep again. Sounds fun! Sam becomes obsessed with the idea that Mister Babadook is hiding under his bed, and Amelia begins to suspect something sinister is going on when she tears the book apart -- and it shows up on her doorstep again the next day with new pages added. She finds glass in her soup. A visit from social services coincides with a sudden roach infestation. Finally the storybook monster itself manifests in a terrifying fashion, and the dynamic between mother and son is suddenly reversed.

There are a couple of ways the ending has been interpreted. Here's my two cents. (Spoilers follow.)

Nope nope nope.

The snobby critic interpretation is that Amelia is the monster. An abusive parent, nothing more. The Babadook isn't real. The other one is that the Babadook is real, and what you see in the movie is pretty much what you get. Naturally, being a horror fan, I prefer the second one, and I'll probably always take issue with the idea that monsters and ghosts and things that go bump in the night are less...worthy of your attention as a moviegoer, I suppose, if they are real.

In the case of the Babadook, I think the ending is the key to figuring out what's going on, and I have my own theories. The movie ends, more or less, happily for Amelia and Sam -- but in the creepiest way possible. You really can't get rid of the Babadook, and even if you drive it off, it will just live in your basement. The thing that really stands out for me is Sam's magic trick. He's doing this amateur magician stuff throughout the movie, and at the end, he makes a dove appear quite literally out of nowhere. The way it's shot, Amelia's reaction, there's clearly something going on here that's meant to be sinister.

My take on it is that Sam is basically a less malevolent version of that little kid from that old Twilight Zone episode who wishes people away into the cornfield when they displease him. He causes the dove to manifest, and in the same way, he also caused the book to appear and the Babadook to emerge into our reality. The specifics are beyond him, because he's five years old, but he wanted a monster his mother could believe in, one they could protect each other from -- and that is basically what he gets. The Babadook preys on, and represents, Amelia's grief over the loss of her husband, who died while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Sam. They defend each other from the monster, and in the end, they are closer to one another as a result. The Babadook is a metaphor for Amelia's sadness and frustration and rage, but it is also a real supernatural force that will always be with them because that's what the book said.

And that scares me a lot more than "Oh, she was just crazy the whole time."

Available On: Netflix.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

This is an odd one. It's not exactly meant to be frightening, though it's a vampire film. Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and produced by Elijah Wood, of all people, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes place in Bad City, an Iranian ghost town whose only industry seems to be oil, and whose only residents are a sparse population of junkies, pimps, hobos and prostitutes. Arash (played by Arash Marandi) is a nice, handsome young man who finds himself bullied by a local pimp demanding money and increasingly frustrated with his heroin-addict father. On his way back from a party one night, he happens upon the city's most unusual resident, a lonely vampire (Sheila Vand) who spends her nights wandering Bad City, on foot or by skateboard, preying on the corrupt and cruel as well as those who simply won't be missed.

Arash and the girl form an odd relationship that isn't quite mutually romantic, as both of them are ashamed of their lives and their pasts, and neither of them really believes they can simply leave Bad City together for parts unknown. Shot in black and white, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a moody, melancholy film that reminds me quite a bit of Tim Burton -- I mean 80s and 90s Tim Burton, back before he sucked -- though there are also more than a few threads of Jarmusch and Tarantino holding it together. A few shots go on, and on, but every frame has something to say. The ending had me on the edge of my seat. It's also got a pretty amazing soundtrack.

The Oscar for Best Cat goes to....

I also have to give this movie props for not only featuring a very memorable performance by a cat, but resisting the urge to kill him. I was worried this would happen a couple of times, and I always get upset when animals, particularly cats, are killed in movies. Maybe it's that they're innocent. Maybe it's that I'm generally fond of cats and other animals, but not, as a rule, all that fond of humans. Anyway, I was glad they kept Masuka the Cat alive here and gave him billing in the credits with the human cast members, because he's as much a character as Ashad and the girl -- when you trace his path through the movie, he's really the one who brings them together, and his position in the car at the end is highly symbolic if you think about it.

For a movie with so little dialogue and so many lingering shots of scenery, people walking, people standing, there's a lot going on here. It's a pulpy noir western, a movie about an endearing, awkward friendship and dangerous love, and maybe the only tolerable vampire romance you'll ever see.

Available On: Netflix.

Trivia: Ladies are also scared of thunderstorms. Just ask Kay Jewelers!

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.