Spooktober III Review 18: In the Mouth of Madness

In the Mouth of Madness (1995)
John Carpenter

"God's not supposed to be a hack horror writer!"

Welcome to part two of my series on "John Carpenter films I hadn't seen up to now." After a hiatus for some Dungeons and Dragons on Wednesday, I was ready for more Carpenter weirdness last night, and oh baby, what a beautiful journey it was.

This is a total departure from Prince of Darkness in terms of tone and style. This was directed by Carpenter, but he didn't write it. That was left up to Michael De Luca, who went on to write nothing else of significance, but has had a long and lucrative producing career. While Carpenter is a great writer, and explores weird and interesting things with his scripts, this was a much tighter story and had less of the bloat that Prince of Darkness suffered from in the first act.

There's so much to talk about here, let's dive right in.

What it's about: John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator who is hired by a publishing company to locate their missing star author, Sutter Cane (Juergen Prochnow). Cane is like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John the Baptist all rolled into one in terms of the popularity and impact of his writing, so the publishing company is keen to locate him, or at least cash in on their insurance policy with him. Trent reads all of Cane's books and believes he's figured out a secret message as to the author's whereabouts. Believing this all to be a big publicity stunt, Trent and Cane's editor, Linda Styles, drive to a small town in the middle of New Hampshire to try and solve the mystery. Things get complicated quickly.

What's interesting: I'm just going to say it now: this movie fucking rules. If you've never seen it, which would not be a surprise, do not read any further because there's no good way to discuss this film without spoiling everything. And this is going to be more of a plot breakdown than anything. But if you don't mind having thing spoiled for you, keep on reading!

This is one of those great films that makes you feel like you're going crazy along with the main character. The film starts off in a bizarre insane asylum that looks like it was built by Terry Gilliam. Trent is being admitted against his will by men in white coats for crimes and events unknown to us. He appears terrified and desperate, and clearly unhinged. Sam Neill is an amazing actor, and this might be his best film. He's intense, charming, funny, and over the top in the best possible sense of the term.

We quickly get the sense that things are not as they seem, however, and a federal agent comes to speak to Trent and does not believe that he has gone insane. There are vague discussions of how bad things are getting "out there," implying that there is some sort of pandemic gripping the world. Trent's retelling of his tale is the vast majority of the plot of the film.

The main story begins with an introduction to Trent, insurance investigator extraordinaire, as he cracks open a random insurance fraud case with calm precision. As he and his boss sit down for a celebratory cup of coffee, an ax wielding maniac breaks the window at the diner, asks Trent if he reads Sutter Cane, and prepares to split him open before being gunned down by the cops.

These sorts of bizarre occurrences follow Trent around as soon as he is assigned to the case of the missing author. He and Styles drive for hours and hours through the dark highways of central New Hampshire and find nothing. About to pass out from exhaustion, Styles has a strange dream about the car taking flight and then passing through a tunnel, before the car ends up near the center of Hobb's End, the small town Cane uses in all of his stories, like Stephen King does with the fictional Derry, Maine.

As they investigate the town, they realize that every detail is just as Cane has written about them in his books. Characters from his stories seem to be the only inhabitants, which Trent takes to mean this is all part of the grand publicity stunt for Cane's new book. Still, there's something unsettling about how the townsfolk interact with these out-of-town city folk, and none of them seem to know who Sutter Cane is.

The story takes a beautiful twist when Trent investigates a dark byzantine church on the edge of town, and finds Sutter Cane inside. Cane discusses the magic of the town, his new book, and his ascension to becoming God. 

Both Neill and Prochnow are fantastic here. Prochnow plays Cane as a quietly disturbed genius, while Neill makes Trent desperate for a reasonable explanation to all of the strangeness around him, before devolving completely into shrieking madness.

Here's the trick of the film: Prochnow really is God. Whether he's just a god or The God isn't totally clear, but he clearly wields some power over this small town at least. The townsfolk gather at the church to confront Sutter about leading all of their children away from their homes, but are quickly driven back by a pack of ravenous dogs that seem to form out of nowhere. One of the villagers later laments to Trent that he can't remember what came first, him or the book that Cane is writing. He then blows his head off, saying that he has no choice, because he's written this way.

As Trent tries desperately to unpack this mystery, and holds on to the shreds of hope that this is all a crazy publicity stunt, the town begins to change. The townsfolk transform into hideous monsters (for example, the old woman who runs the hotel Trent is staying at morphs into some kind of otherworldly demon, grows long prehensile tits and chops up her husband with an ax) and Cane's power appears to be growing. Cane invites Trent to deliver his new novel to the world, extending his grasp over all creation. As Trent tries to resist, a giant throbbing door behind Cane opens, spilling stygian interdimensional horrors into our world. This is some real Lovecraftian horror, and the practical effects on the nightmare creatures are outstanding.

As Trent's terrified panic hits its peak, he finds himself inexplicably on the highway outside of town, in broad daylight, still holding the manuscript to Cane's new book. A passing newspaper delivery boy (played by a very young Hayden Christensen!) denies ever hearing of the town of Hobb's End, and Trent makes his way back to civilization.

When he arrives at the publisher's office, Trent is told that he delivered the manuscript months ago, the book is a blockbuster best seller, and the movie adaptation is coming soon to theaters. Whoops.

Trent watches as civilization begins to crumble around him, with people being driven to madness due to Cane's writing. Not able to shake off the feeling that he may too be a character in this drama, Trent tries to break the continuity and gets thrown into a mental institution by pretending to be mad, catching us up to the beginning of the film.

Trent is turned out onto the streets, and we learn from background news broadcasts that a wave of madness has gripped the populace, and those who have yet to be exposed to Cane's book or movie are forced to hide underground. Trent, still desperate to understand his role in all of this, finds a movie theater and sits down to watch In the Mouth of Madness, and it is the exact film we all just watched, complete with a John Carpenter director's credit. Here, at the end of all things, while munching popcorn, he laughs uproariously and desperately. You've got to love an ending like that!

This film really has it all: outstanding performances, great practical effects, a twisting story that feels like its own sort of psychosis, and the genius vision of John Carpenter.

While a lot of Carpenter's films from the 90's fall below his work from the 70's and 80's in terms of vision, this feels different. He spent the 1980's studying the decay and degradation of the terrible Reagan years, shining a light on the paranoia, consumerism, and greed that was destroying our society. Here, Carpenter shows us that after all of the insanity of the 1980's, the fear and madness gripped us all tightly and turned us into misshapen husks screaming wordlessly into the void. And he was 100% right.

This is also an indictment of the studio system. Carpenter creates his worlds out of nothing, shaping emptiness into life, but his career is one of being beholden to the money men behind the scenes. No matter how important or special he believes his work to be, those with more money and power can reshape it or even destroy it. At the end, when we see Cane attempting to hold back the mutant nightmare creatures at the door, you can imagine Carpenter desperately trying to keep some MGM executive out of the creative process. But you can only do so much, even if you are God, because those stygian horrors are going to break through eventually.

Other films I thought of: Oddly enough, I couldn't stop thinking about Double Indemnity. The character of Trent seems anachronistic, and Neill plays him as Mr. Too Damn Smart, which reminded me of the Fred MacMurray character.

Miscellany: The head of the publishing company that sends Trent out to find Cane is played by Charlton Heston. It was a nice surprise to see him featured here, and Carpenter always knows the best way to use his actors. It's a small role, but it's great, and Heston plays him as equal parts greedy and disinterested. The world is tearing itself apart at the seams, and he's just interested in the bottom line.

Recommendation: YES YES YES YES YES

Remarkably Good

Spooktober III Review 17: Prince of Darkness

Prince of Darkness (1987)
John Carpenter

"You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED"

Would you believe me if I told you there were still two John Carpenter films I had never seen? Well, it's true, and it's even worse than that: up until a few weeks ago, I hadn't even heard of them. And while I wish I was talking about Memoirs of an Invisible Man or Escape from LA, I'm referring to a couple of supposedly underrated horror classics, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness (stay tuned).

Carpenter is one of my favorite filmmakers ever. He's got an iconoclastic and counter-cultural viewpoint while also possessing real filmmaking chops, which is something that is rarer and rarer to find in our postmodern Hellworld. As an example, let's compare a couple of films that I feel have very similar purposes, but are handled in two distinct ways. One is The Post, a film about the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. Sure it's a historical political drama about the Nixon administration, but it was released to capitalize on the liberal fetishization of mainstream journalism and to wag a finger at the illiterate fascists in the White House (who will never see it ever). The other is They Live, which John Carpenter made to put a cherry on top of the horror that was the Reagan years in America. Instead of creating some one-to-one historical drama about Iran Contra or whatever, Carpenter told us all what we needed to hear: we are being ruled by violent and grotesque monsters through capitalism and mass media, and we need to destroy it all.

One film made $150 million. The other made $10 million. One is the movie equivalent of a bad Doonesbury comic strip. The other is like a Hieronymous Bosch triptych featuring Rowdy Roddy Piper. One is shit; the other is art.

But this isn't a look at the innumerable ways John Carpenter is a far better filmmaker than Steven Spielberg. We're here to talk about 1987's Prince of Darkness.

What it's about: A recently closed Catholic church in the bad part of town is harboring a dark secret (uh, no, not that). Deep within the labyrinthine bowels of the church is the lair of a mysterious Catholic sect known as the Brotherhood of Sleep, whose existence is kept a secret even from Rome. There they keep vigil over a strange sealed vessel filled with swirling green goo. A scientific research team, hired by the last of this secret order, sets up shop to investigate the strange nature of this ancient vessel, and hopefully prevent the apocalypse.

What's interesting: You can immediately tell this is a John Carpenter film, and I mean immediately. Even before the credits start, the minimalist keyboard music begins to play, and you get that warm and comforting feeling that strange madness is sure to follow.

This is also a slow burn of a film, at least at the beginning. The credits go on for, no joke, 15 minutes. It's done interstitially between threads of seemingly unconnected plot and characters (a catholic priest here, a college professor there, a dude with a sick mustache everywhere), so it takes a while to get a feel for what the narrative is going to become. Things pick up nicely once we get into the church and start learning about the mysterious vessel, but the first act feels needlessly bloated.

The story is a nice blend of metaphysical nonsense and religious mumbo jumbo. Carpenter is clearly intrigued by end of the world stuff, and creates a harmonious marriage between religion and science by making Jesus a space alien who tries to put us on the right path (yes, really) and Satan an anti-particle to God. It's weird, heady stuff, but done in a pop-science kind of way. Like something Lovecraft would have come up with if advanced theoretical physics existed in the 1920's.

Once the vessel opens up and starts spraying its green juice into the mouths of the research team, the movie takes on a more standard Carpenter flavor. As soon as a human being gets juiced, they become mindless servants to the green fluid, killing and maiming all those who oppose the triumph of the juice. At one point, a grad student tries to leave, and a couple of the juiced up zombies turn him into a pile of beetles. Another has his neck snapped. A third slashes his own throat with a bit of jagged wood. The deaths are generally creepy and fun.

One of the poor students bumps her arm while looking at the vessel, and develops a strange mark on the resultant bruise. This means that she's the chosen one, and becomes the de facto leader of the juice zombies. Also her flesh melts off, so that's cool.

And after wading through the shit lake that is Halloweens 4 through 6, it was nice to see Donald Pleasence in a film where he's actually trying, and seems to be putting forth a solid effort. Prince of Darkness only came out a year before Halloween 4, but he seems 10 years younger. You can tell he enjoys working with Carpenter, and vice versa, which is good to see.

Other films I thought of: Hmm, I dunno. Is there another John Carpenter movie about a bunch of characters trapped in an enclosed space, trying to prevent a globally cataclysmic event from happening, all while being menaced by villains who look human? If there is, please email me and let me know.

Miscellany: John Carpenter's fascination with the homeless (which would continue strongly in the following year's They Live) is well represented in Prince of Darkness. An army of "street people" descend on the church, drawn toward the power of the juice, and they violently prevent anyone from trying to leave the church before the great juicing takes place. One of the street people (listed in the credits as 'Street Schizo') is none other than Alice Cooper. He says absolutely nothing throughout the film, but he does impale a man with half of a bicycle. Reading through IMDB, it sounds like he just wanted to hang out on set since he was a big Carpenter fan, but was invited to play one of the characters.

Recommendation: If you're a fan of John Carpenter: absolutely. Like I said, it's a little slow to get going, but the third act rules, and there's enough B-movie weirdness in the middle to keep things interesting. It's a broader meta-story than most of his other films, and there's not really a hero to speak of, but it's still a very Carpenter film. It's not one of his best, but it's certainly underrated or at least under-viewed.

Unremarkably good

Spooktober III Reviews 14, 15, & 16: Halloween 4, Halloween 5, and Halloween 6

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
Dwight H. Little

"Goddamn you."

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
Dominique Otherin-Girard

"He'll never die."

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Joe Chappelle

"Michael Myers is my business."

I am going to cheat today for a few reasons. One: it's far too nice of a day to type out three separate reviews,  two: these movies suck, and I can't possibly devote that much energy to each, and three: they're kind of one movie, since 5 and 6 are direct sequels of 4. So we're going to kill three dumb birds with one very low-effort stone.

First things first, I absolutely love John Carpenter's Halloween. I'd go so far to say that it's in my top five horror films ever. It's so moody and atmospheric, the soundtrack is amazing, and it's a great premise for a slasher. Michael Myers in that film is just a man, but his insatiable drive and the brutality of his crimes is what makes him scary. His costume is simple (because the budget was so low), but it's way more effective that way. Just a lovely film.

I've never been a fan of Halloween 2, because it feels so much like a cheap cash grab sequel (which is what it is). Still, inadequate sequels come with the slasher territory, so whatever.

Halloween III, which we looked at last year, is so fucking fun. Michael Myers is gone, and in his place you get an evil toy company run by an ancient druid cult whose evil plan is to turn every child in America into snakes and bugs using masks powered by a television commercial. And the hero of the film is a drunken Tom Atkins. It's beautiful and too weird not to love, but the teeming masses hated it because it didn't feature Michael. Different is bad when it comes to box office take, I suppose.

And that was it. That was my experience with the "franchise" up until this week when I subjected myself to this terror (I saw Halloween H20 in the theater but have absolutely no memory of it). I didn't know what to expect, but I guess I should have expected crap. Lots and lots of crap.

What they're about: Get ready for this: Michael Myers is back baby!

4: Forget what you know about the ending of 2, because Dr. Loomis and Michael Myers did not die in the massive hospital explosion that obviously killed them! Instead, Dr. Loomis just has a small scar on one side of his face (that changes shape throughout the film), and Michael's hand is a little melted. Michael escapes from his sanitarium during a poorly planned and executed prisoner transfer. During the ambulance ride he hears that he has a niece, the daughter of the killed-off-screen Laurie Strode from the first two films. This means he has more killin' to do, so he gets away, steals a car, finds the exact same jumpsuit and mask he wore years earlier, and starts terrorizing Haddonfield, Illinois once more. Oh, and they drag Donald Pleasence out of the mothballs and make him run around to his obvious great chagrin.

5: After Michael is shot approximately 850 times by the cops at the end of 4, he slides down a hill and into a river. He is nursed back to health by a blind homeless man (a tip of the cap to Bride of Frankenstein, maybe?), but Michael kills him and intends to keep hunting down his niece. She is now in a mental institution herself, because they share a psychic link after she touched his hand, and he (possibly) made her stab her foster mom with scissors at the end of 4. Oh yeah, and now she's mute for no reason, except that goes away when it is no longer convenient to the plot. Donald Pleasence is once again made to debase himself, and is somehow even more checked out this time around. Luckily Dr. Loomis VERY CLEARLY dies at the end, so he can retire in peace. Michael is taken to jail, but soon after he's locked up, a mysterious man in a weird hat shows up, machine guns all of the cops, and busts Michael out of the jail. There is no explanation for any of this. It just ends.

6: Six(!!!) years later, we get another sequel to tie up the loose ends nobody cared about. It seems that Michael was busted out of jail by a clan of secret evil druids (not the ones from III, unfortunately) who recognize him as a child cursed by the "thorn" rune or whatever the fuck. Michael's niece, who was 9 years old in #5, now appears to be 30 years old and has just given birth to a baby in the druid's secret underground bunker that also used to be the mental hospital where Michael spent most of his life (this is not a joke). She gets away, Michael chases her, kills her with a wheat thresher, and the story invariably leads back to Haddonfield, Ill. There, we discover that the little boy from the first Halloween has grown up to become Paul Rudd (credited as Paul Stephen Rudd), and is obsessed with Michael Myers. A bunch of incomprehensible things happen that involve Michael and the druids. Oh, and yes, they dangled another paycheck above Donald Pleasence's head, because why not. This time though he must've had a "I'm not wearing any god damned makeup clause" in his contract, because his scars are mysteriously gone. He died like a month after filming wrapped, but I assume they're still somehow making him do Halloween sequels in the afterlife.

What's interesting: Not a lot, unfortunately. The little girl who plays the niece is a pretty good child actor. It's fun to see Paul Rudd, age 25, look exactly like Paul Rudd, age 49. And I really do love Donald Pleasence, so I'm glad he was able to make a little scratch at the end of his life.

4 is easily the best of the bunch, so if you're curious to watch any of these, that's the place to start and stop. It's at least a cohesive narrative, and there are parts that make you think there was some intelligence behind it. Plus the best character of any of these sequels is in this one: Officer Exposition. I have dubbed him that because at the beginning of #4, after years away from Michael Myers' loving touch, the filmmakers thought it would be a good idea to get people caught up. So, on an elevator ride down to the bowels of this sanitarium, Officer Exposition gives the most awkward and shoehorned-in rundown of the entire mythos to a couple of EMTs (and the audience).

It's literally three uninterrupted minutes of: "Aw gee whiz, this guy gives me the willies. Yep, Michael Myers, the kook who murdered 16 people one Halloween night a few years back is here at our facility. Yep, tried to kill a babysitter, who turned out later to be his sister, and a bunch of folk at a hospital. His psychiatrist tried to kill him, if you can believe that, but he escaped the explosion too." This unnecessary babbling gave me a lot of early hope, but it's all downhill from there...

And just so I'm not going to be completely negative, I give it to the producers of #6 for trying something so off-the-wall bizarre. It didn't work, and was a horrible disaster that damaged the franchise so badly that they had to retcon everything just four years later for H20, but at least they tried goddammit.

Other films I thought about: John Carpenter's Halloween, mainly because they use his soundtrack throughout the films. In #1, it was a minimalist theme to build tension as Michael quietly and methodically stalked his victims. By #5 the song is played as Michael Myers chases his niece through a forest in a 1988 Dodge Challenger. In #6 they chopped and screwed the song to fit in with the industrial music scene of the mid-90's. Awful.

Miscellany: Don't watch these movies. But there's a new one coming out in a week or so. Go see that.

Recommendation: If you are extremely bored, watch 4. It's pretty funny, there are still vestiges of goodness sprinkled around, and you'll get a kick out of it if you like dumb movies. If you just can't resist, I guess watch 5. It's a far more aggravating experience, but it's tolerable if you drop your standards to nothing. Fair warning, though: after the ending of 5 you're going to be be compelled to watch 6 just to make sense of things. That's when it's time to seriously rethink your life decisions.

4: Eh
5: Ugh
6: ...

Spooktober III Review 13: Tenebrae

Tenebrae (1982)
Dario Argento

"Any humiliation which stood in his way could be swept aside by the simple act of annihilation: murder."

The American release title of Dario Argento's Tenebrae is "Unsane," which is a little weird, because that's not what Tenebrae means at all. I learned after watching the film that it means "darkness," and is a pre-Easter thing that Catholics do, and involves extinguishing candles. The anti-Hanukkah, I guess. But the title makes sense, considering how much time Argento spends in the film showing lights, both literal and figurative, being extinguished.

The confusing part of the "Unsane" title is that there's another film that was released this year by Steven Soderberg with that title, and that got me to rent it. Expecting a chopped and screwed version of Argento's giallo film, what you get is an incomprehensible mess about a woman who gets wrongly institutionalized at a facility where her sex pervert stalker works. That's a pretty good premise, but it's handled clumsily, and the whole thing looks like it was shot on an iPhone 4. So don't see Unsane (2018) but do see Unsane (1982)!

Tenebrae is another one of those giallo films we've been discussing on this blog for the past couple of years. This means it was incredibly stylistic, beautifully shot, gruesome, and feels a bit pulpy and rough around the edges, but in the best sort of neo-noir way possible. There's a lot here that you can tell directly impacted the world of pulp cinema around the world. One scene in particular, where a woman's hand is chopped off with an axe, looks right out of Kill Bill, as the character swings her stump around, and sprays a bright red fountain of blood across her apartment. It's bloody, it's disgusting, it's captivating, it's giallo!

After the dour and distressing The Eyes of My Mother, we needed something a little more flashy, so we settled on Tenebrae out of my love for Argento and the prospect of glorious color. This was my first time seeing it, so I was excited to dig in. Naturally, it did not disappoint at all.

What's it about: Ah, what a great premise for a whodunit: an American author, Peter Neal, who writes (evidently) misogynistic murder mystery novels arrives in Rome for an extended press junket. Even before he lands, a woman is murdered, and pages from Neal's newest novel, Tenebrae, are shoved into the corpse's mouth. Soon, bodies are piling up around the city, and the murders are seemingly inspired by Neal's work. With the Italian authorities unable to crack the case, Neal leads his own investigation to find out who is using his work to carry out a violent and pseudo-moralistic crusade against women in Rome.

What's interesting: Tenebrae is a great murder mystery, full stop. If you're a fan of that kind of story, but don't mind a more visceral experience, you should make it a point to see Tenebrae. Along with the twisting, turning, never obvious story, you get a true artist's vision splashed across the screen like a technicolor nightmare. This is simply a great film.

A few minutes in I began to wonder if Argento is colorblind, or at least has some difficulty seeing color vividly. I know that Nicolas Winding Refn has some issue seeing color, which is why his films are so drenched in it. This might be shortchanging Argento's vision, but it would make sense. Details in Tenebrae seem to glow iridescently: a woman's dress here, a telephone there, a spray of blood everywhere. Bright color is an accent to nearly every scene, and the film becomes a dazzling spectacle, elevating the mundane and juxtaposing with the macabre. 

The cinematography here, like in all of Argento's films, is stunning. He uses light, color, and reflection to convey meaning layers deep. There's a distinct Hitchcockian vibe throughout the film, as we routinely look through windows and with reflection at characters who think they're safe in their homes. There's a beautiful and elaborate crane shot where the camera pans along the exterior of a house, up and down, peering in windows, looking for our next victim. The audience is on this voyeuristic journey with the killer, subconsciously cheering it on, taking blissful part in this perverse activity.

This meta thread flows throughout Tenebrae. Even the plot line is a wink and a nod: the novel in the film is called Tenebrae, and is specifically referenced as being in the giallo genre. This is a film that Argento is making about his own experience as an artist. He's not the main character, but he's exploring the idea that someone could get the wrong idea of his work and try to carry out a cruel imitation. A whole scene where a woman confronts Peter Neal about how he treats his female character feels like Argento trying to answer his critics as to why all of the women in his films meet such grizzly and bloody ends.

Is Argento a misogynistic filmmaker or is our world designed to destroy women?  If the latter is the case, who's at fault? Those who take active or ignorant part in it, or the artist who shines a bright light on it?

I don't know if there's a real answer here, but isn't it great that a gruesome murder mystery can ask these sorts of questions?

Other films I thought of: Psycho and Rear Window are obvious choices, mainly because of the element of voyeurism that's so tightly woven into both of them. I'd also say Kill Bill, because of the amazing blood effects.

Miscellany: The soundtrack fucking slaps, my friends. Italian prog rock gods Goblin lay down a theme that might be one of my favorite in film history. Here, take a listen:

I know I'm a sucker for Goblin's music, but this is an objectively amazing piece for a film like this. 

Recommendation: Oh my God 100% yes. It's definitely near the top of the list of the films I've watched so far this year, and I can't wait to make it part of my regular rotation. It's a little gory, which might turn some people off, but maybe just close your eyes when the gross stuff happens.

Remarkably Fuckin Awesome

Spooktober III Review 12: The Eyes of My Mother

The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Nicolas Pesce

"I can't be alone again!"

About 20 minutes into our film last night, I paused it, turned to Emily and exclaimed, "Why do we insist on watching movies like this? What is wrong with us?" There's no answer, of course, other than the more we debase our sensibilities in fiction, the less we will feel the sting of reality. But sometimes you start to hit the upper limits of what the human mind can take. And it's not like The Eyes of My Mother is the goriest or most disturbing film we've watched, but the gentle subtlety of its awfulness just makes you feel terrible.

If you can remember back to Spooktober II, we took a look at Henry: Portrait of a Serial killer, and my general impression of the film was: "Ew." It's not an easy film to watch because it's so viscerally gross and unsettling. It holds you down and pours black sewage into your eyes, but it's too compelling to stop watching. The Eyes of My Mother isn't on that level of quality, but it's so quiet and serene with the on-screen trauma that when the real crazy shit starts going down, you're unprepared.

So let's hold hands and try and get through this together.

What's it about: A young girl and her parents live on a secluded farm in the middle of these blessed United States. One day a traveling salesman/serial killer comes to the home and murders the girl's mother in front of her. Her father comes home, discovers the murderer in the midst of his crime, and locks him in the barn. We follow the girl on her journey into a lonely adulthood. It...does not go well.

What's interesting: There's so many weird and disturbing things about this film, I'm not sure where to begin. Our main character, Francisca, is clearly very close to her mother. As they walk around the family farm, mom takes time to educate her daughter about anything and everything. At one point, they remove and dissect a cow's eyeball on the dining room table, as Francisca's mother was an eye surgeon in her native Portugal and hopes her daughter will grow up to be a doctor some day as well.

As I said in the recap, a sex weirdo shows up at the farm and kills Francisca's mother, only to be captured himself by Francisca's father. Dad does not seem to handle the trauma well, as they never bother calling the authorities of any sort, and simply lock the killer in the barn, and bury mom in the woods out back. When the killer wakes up later that night and begins screaming out Francisca's name, she creeps into the barn and plucks out the guy's eyes and removes his larynx. Yeah.

Hereabouts we jump forward in time, and Francisca is a young woman lying in bed next to the very still and clearly dead body of her father. We also learn that our traveling salesman/serial killer is still alive these years later, still chained in the barn, turned into a sort of perpetual infant that Francisca feeds and soothes every day (or when she feels like she needs a good snuggle).

Francisca also does not handle her father's death very well. There is a long and squirmy scene where she has his nude corpse in a bath, and she climbs into the milky fetid water just to be with him. She props him up in front of the television and cuddles with him. He sits him up in a rocking chair to watch her dance around to weird old Portuguese records. When she's feeling particularly sad, and dad's corpse won't suffice, she will go dig up mom's bones and get cozy with them for a while.

The crux of the film is here in Francisca's adulthood. She cannot tolerate loneliness and becomes more and more desperate to avoid it. She's also not looking for meaningful relationships with people (and maybe isn't capable of that), she just wants a helpless, voiceless infant.

I don't want to spoil anything else, but there's more, and it's much worse than the first half.

Finally, this is maybe the shortest feature length horror movie you can find. It clocks in at a tight 76 minutes, and feels somehow shorter than that. Pesce could have padded the film out, but I'm guessing the budget would not have supported that, and I'm not convinced it would have benefited the film in any profound way. There's an hour and 15 minutes worth of story here, and that's what you get.

Other films I thought of: Like I said above, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer came to mind as soon as I realized what was going on. They're both serial killer origin stories in a way. I know I also thought about Hannibal in the way the horrible crimes were handled. And Emily had a good call: this was like a really long, uncensored, non-supernatural episode of X-Files without any of the Mulder/Scully scenes. 

Miscellany: There's not much more to say, really. It's gross, you'll feel icky after watching it, and there's no joy here. Hail Satan.

Recommendation: Eh? If you read the above and thought: "aw hell yeah fuck me up fam," go for it. If you're nearing your maximum on misery and nightmare fuel, maybe steer clear. It's certainly a well made film, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the director does in the future.

Remarkably disturbing

Spooktober III Review 11: The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon (2016)
Nicolas Winding Refn
(and Natasha Braier)

"I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't write...no real talent. But I'm pretty, and I can make money off pretty."

Quick note: this review is going to assume you've seen The Neon Demon. If you haven't, I strongly recommend seeing it first before reading on. I also recommend buying the BluRay for the super clear visuals and great sound, but it's also on Amazon Prime.


Watching The Neon Demon has become a yearly treat, like my annual viewing of The Shining or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I suppose that means it's one of my favorite movies, or I guess I notice something new or different each time I watch it. Maybe that's true of any movie this visually sumptuous, and that's why I included the name of the cinematographer along with the director for today's review. She has as much to do with the success of this film as the writer/director did.

The sheer talent for composition and camerawork by Braier and Winding Refn exhibited in The Neon Demon makes me a bit weak in the knees. There are whole scenes (like the performance at the model party, or Jesse's turn down the runway at the big fashion show) that I rewind to watch again and again, to make sure I fill all of my rods and cones with as much filthy goodness as possible before it goes back in my Blu Ray closet for another year.

This is the kind of film that makes you want to own the best television and sound system possible. It forces you to take part in a ritual to get ready for it. This is not a Sunday afternoon hangover movie. You kill the lights, you turn up the amp way beyond where you'd normally stop, you make sure there's nobody else around, and you get sucked into it.

And I'll admit, not everyone will have such powerful feelings about a bloody post-modern horror movie about models, but god dammit they should. A lot of the criticism of this film comes from those who just don't get it™, and this applies to critics and audiences alike. Most of the criticism references how the film is dense with style, but hollow on message, or how it just uses extreme gross-out as the film goes on to paper over it's lack of substance. I think they're just plain wrong.

What's it about: A young girl leaves her small town to make it big in the LA modeling scene. She's like a gentle fawn stepping into a wolf den. She enters this predatory world full of dangers untouched by cynicism or the cruelty of reality. Luckily for her she's also the modeling world's messiah; the alpha and omega of beauty and some intangible quality that can't be purchased from a plastic surgeon. But like so many others, this world will chew her up and spit her out.

What's interesting: There's an art to this film that maybe just doesn't speak to a certain type of person, but that doesn't mean it's not there. The best analysis I've seen of the film comes from Gretchen Felker-Martin (naturally), who points out the self-dehumanization that the characters in the film routinely take part in: "They see only collections of things they aren't, and of things they're better than."

The criticism of fashion and our beauty obsessed culture is there. The first shot of the film is Jesse lying on a couch, covered in blood, while flashbulbs go off. For several seconds you're unclear whether this is some avant-garde photoshoot or the police taking pictures of a grisly crime scene, and that's exactly the point. At every turn in this film, Jesse is being preyed upon for something. It's her look, but it's also her attitude; it's her sexual appeal, but it's also her virginity; it's the desire to be her, but it's also the desire to destroy and devour her.

In one of my favorite scenes in the film, as Jesse returns to her dingy Pasadena motel, she enters her room to discover a mountain lion has decided to hole up for a while. She is forced to seek aid from the lecherous motel owner who has been leering at her since she arrived in LA. There's nowhere Jesse can go without being hunted for something.

Over and over throughout the film, Braier and Winding Refn focus on character's eyes to show just how focused the entire world is on Jesse. During the crazy dance performance at the party, while a dancer in bondage is being suspended from the ceiling, Jesse's three...friends(?) seemingly ignore the performer, because can't take their eyes off of Jesse. When the big-shot fashion photographer clears the set to work with Jesse alone, he never bothers to look back at anyone else. When Jesse tries out for the fashion designer, she's the only one that he actively stares at.

Nobody can take their eyes off of her, and it begins to nourish Jesse on a quasi-religious level. When one of the other models asks her how it feels to be looked at like the sun in the middle of winter, she doesn't even blink. "It's everything."

A sign of a great film is how it can make you think of something new each time you see it, and this year's viewing was no different. The first few times I watched The Neon Demon, I assumed Jesse was being corrupted by the toxic culture she plunged into, but this time I'm not so sure. She's confident, yes, but I didn't read it as narcissism. There's something about the way that Elle Fanning plays the character of Jesse that sets her apart from every other actor in the film. I know nothing about fashion or how runway models should look while modeling, but there's an almost imperceptible difference between the walk that another model does and the walk that Jesse does. But it's there, and it makes a world of difference. Not just to the characters evaluating her, but to the audience as well.

Jesse is unique because she's confident. She's sure of herself, and is the only model in the film to actually describe herself as pretty. As Felker-Martin points out in her review, the other characters only see themselves as the things they have and the things they don't. They're constantly striving to be beautiful in an ever-shifting and subjective world dominated by shallow, predatory, and lecherous men. But this is not narcissism from Jesse. I'll admit, she gets a bit weird and preachy by the end, but if you were the kiwsatz haderach of your profession, wouldn't you act that way too?

When Jesse fully gives herself over to that mindset, that's when things finally break for the others. They could tolerate her natural beauty, her naivete, her effortless and meteoric rise through the world they've tortured themselves to climb into, but once she outwardly verbalizes the self-confidence the rest of the characters have long since given up on, there's nothing left to do but kill her and try to capture that intangible essence for themselves.

I don't want to give the impression that this makes Jesse the tragic hero of the story. This is all completely unimportant to the world at large, and even to their cynical industry, despite what they may have thought of her. In the film's denouement, the two models who murdered and ate Jesse are at a photo shoot, and it doesn't seem like the world of beauty and fashion has missed a beat. There's no black bunting, nobody appears too terribly upset (even the photographer who was so enthralled by Jesse earlier appears nonplussed), and everyone seems more than willing to move on. The world of professional beauty is so broken and cynical that even the horrific death of the One True Model is met with bored indifference. Winding Refn is clearly not glamorizing that world at all.

Other films I thought of: I've only seen one other Winding Refn film, Drive. I like The Neon Demon more, but the visual style is there. Honestly, this film gives me strong Shining vibes, and you can tell how much of Braier's cinematography is influenced by Kubrick.

Miscellany: Two other quick thoughts: 1) this is the film LA LA Land should have been, and they tell basically the same story, only without a boring know-it-all who insists everyone else love jazz as much as he does.

And 2) even though this was my fourth or fifth time seeing it, I somehow forgot about the necrophilia scene. It goes on and on, and gets distressingly spitty and drooly. I love how it makes me feel ill and how my mind tried to purge it from my memory, but it's a hard scene to sit still through. It's also a big reason why you should maybe not watch this one with mom.

Recommendation: Saying it's not for everyone is a cop out, so I'm going to recommend this on the following grounds: if there's a piece of art that is challenging, thought provoking, and forces you to have complicated emotions, it's a piece of art worth experiencing.

Remarkably Good and definitely one of my favorite films of the past 10 years.

Spooktober III Review 9 & 10: Child's Play and Child's Play 2

Child's Play (1988)
Tom Holland (not the good Tom Holland)

"I have a date with a six-year-old boy and you have a date with death!"

&

Child's Play 2 (1990)
John Lafia

"If I don't get out of this body soon, I'm screwed."

This past weekend I went out with a group of friends to tour this year's Grand Rapids ArtPrize offering. If you're not aware, my city hosts a yearly (now every-other-yearly) "art" "competition" to determine which painting of a soldier or Jesus deserves hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. It's always kind of bad, but this year was exceptionally awful. A top five finalist for 2018 is a mural of the late night TV hosts made out of duct tape. Why duct tape? Why late night hosts? Why is it so popular? Because whatever shred of our culture that still existed is now dead and rotten.

I don't pretend to be some great critic of art, although I am fair enough to myself to admit that I can do a pretty good job of sniffing out gormless facileness, and there's heaps of that at ArtPrize. One of the finalists was this pile of shit titled "Too soon:"

FYI: Curly Howard died in 1952.

This isn't art. There's no possible emotion to feel while looking at this, other than basic recognition of the people depicted and saying, "Oh that's John Candy." This is art in the way that the random shit on the walls at an Applebee's is art.

So why make it? Because you're bankrupt both creatively and literally, and some cretinous billionaire is offering money to the most bland, mass-appealing art possible.

What does any of this have to do with Child's Play or Child's Play 2? Christ, I don't know, but it sure was a frustrating day.

What's it about: In Child's Play, a murderer transfers his soul to a creepy My Buddy style doll through a voodoo magic spell after being mortally wounded by the police. The doll is purchased by a single mom for her idiot son, and the doll starts killing people, I guess. Then it ends after 85 minutes or so.

In Child's Play 2, for some inexplicable reason, the Chucky doll is rebuilt by the giant mega-corporation that designed him (it almost looks like the same toy company that was in the Robin Williams film Toys crossed with Silver Shamrock from Halloween III). Chucky escapes and begins hunting the boy who owned him in the first movie. Initially it feels like the sequel might be in on the joke (the factory and toy company are very weird, but are forgotten about right away), but that quickly gives way to more foul-talking doll banality.

What's interesting: Brad Dourif is an incredibly talented actor, and probably doesn't get enough credit for his career, which includes Grima Wormtongue, Doc Cochran in Deadwood, and the young and impressionable Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He also plays the murderer in Child's Play, but only for five minutes or so, then he does the voice of the doll for like 8 more movies or something. It's admittedly pretty funny to hear his voice screaming swear words out of a doll.

Does anybody genuinely enjoy these movies? I hadn't seen them up until now, because they were a little before my time. I was six when the first one came out, and eight when the sequel landed; a little too young to process that the My Buddy-type doll in my closet wasn't going to come to life and murder me. My parents were fairly permissive with my entertainment choices, but they did my prefrontal cortex a solid by keeping these away from me.

Full disclosure: because I was a plump Little Lord Fauntleroy dandy, I was given a My Buddy knockoff known as Corky for Christmas one year. It was like My Buddy, except it could "talk" using a cassette deck stuck into his back (my cousins put a Pantera tape into my Corky at one point, which is a memory that's scorched into my brain) and had a face made out of incredibly hard plastic. I somehow did not think it was creepy or weird, probably because I was too young to realize it. 

I give my older sister a lot of credit for A) sleeping in the same house with that thing, and B) not throwing it into a woodchipper at first blush. 

Aaaaaaaaah!

There's a whole page of some Christmas photo album of me posing with my Corky doll in matching outfits, because of course. No I do not have them. Do not ask me for them. Ask my mom.

So you'd think with my rich creepy doll history these two movies would be right up my alley, but eh. They're incredibly dated and frankly a little dull. Each film is 70% "Chucky does things and no adult is paying attention, so they think the little kid is doing it," and that gets frustrating and boring damn quick. The doll kills aren't even all that exciting. Yeah he's kinda scary looking at times, but you can never suspend disbelief enough to ignore that you could just tear him apart with your bare hands...because, well, he's a 3 foot tall doll. 

The strong points? Brad Dourif doing swears, a couple of the kills are funny, and the ending of the second one features a doll machine that turns out body horror nightmares for no discernible reason. Why would you need a machine to create a fleshy dollpile with 8 arms and no head? Why would anyone design such a machine? It's frustrating that the sequel didn't explore this further.

Other movies I thought of: I thought of a lot of other movies while I was watching these two. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. Brad Dourif is real good in that.

Miscellany: The little kid smokes in the second one, and it seems like it might be a real cigarette. If so, that's cool as hell and this kid owns:

Also, in the first one, the kid's mom (played by the woman who played Captain Kirk's whale biologist girlfriend in Star Trek IV) works a part-time job at the perfume counter at some nameless department store, and yet owns a palatial downtown Chicago apartment. This tells me that the Child's Play movies take place in the John Hughes-verse, where everyone owns giant homes.

I guess I do love how they crowbar the voodoo subplot into the films. There's absolutely no explanation for why Brad Dourif's murder guy character knows voodoo, except that he was maybe friends with a voodoo priest at some point. But this is a universe where voodoo is extremely real, and not just on a fluke basis. Chucky straight up breaks a dude's limbs in real time using just a voodoo doll  (and then it's never used again).

Recommendation: I'm probably the wrong person to be asking. If you have some connection to these films out of nostalgia or an affection for the doll effects, that's cool, but they're a little hard to jump into in 2018.

Unremarkably Bad

Spooktober III Review 8: Pieces

Pieces (1982)
Juan Piquer Simon

"You'll be playing so much tennis it'll be coming out of your ears!"

I usually try to pick out a quote for my reviews that expresses something poignant about the film. Today's selection from the movie Pieces might lack poignancy, but it's a perfect example of what this movie has to offer in terms of coherence.

Pieces is a Spanish production (originally titled "Night of 1,000 Screams," which, what?) that was performed in English, I think. Or at least large chunks of it were. But maybe the accents were too heavy or the audio so poorly captured that they had to dub over the whole thing before release. So what we end up with is an unintentional What's Up Tiger Lily because there's no way for a normal, Earth born human to be ok with some of this dialogue in a non-absurdist comedy.

Characters float through the film like they're on powerful narcotics and vomit out incoherent dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone with advanced dementia. And it's hard to pin down what the problem is. Even Godzilla films have some sort of editorial process before they're dubbed into English, and the stories still make at least a little sense. With Pieces, the actors are clearly speaking English some of the time, but in other parts the dialogue doesn't match at all, which tells me that they rewrote some of the script for the dubbing. This turns a standard whodunit slasher story into an incomprehensible mess.


Here's a little sampler of the beautiful writing in Pieces:










Outstanding!

What's it about: The movie opens in the 1940's in "Boston USA" with a young boy putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman. His mother catches him and admonishes him for being a dirty sex pervert. He doesn't really like that, so he hacks her up with an axe. We jump to the modern day of 1982, and our nameless child has grown up to be one of only four old men in the film, and starts hacking apart coeds so that he can keep assembling his nude jigsaw puzzle.

What's interesting: First of all, this movie is awful. Truly abysmal. But that's not the worst sin in film. In fact, a lot of the awfulness is what makes Pieces so compelling. There's a chainsaw killer loose on a college campus, and the police only assign two (unbelievably incompetent) officers to the case. They stumble around the college, contaminating crime scenes, ignoring obvious suspects, and helping the school's dean keep the murders under wraps, even as more dismembered bodies appear.

As the corpses pile up, the cops get desperate and enact a plan to install two beautiful female undercover cops into the student body, which is a plan that only works if nobody talks about it. But it is common knowledge among, well, everybody, because the cops don't shut up about it. Then, when we're introduced to one of the undercover cops (the woman screaming bastard in the clip above), she says that there's only her, because it was a volunteer assignment and nobody else signed up.

So why, as a filmmaker, spend the time setting up that there will be two undercover cops only to have one? Is it because there's another cop installed somewhere on campus that even the audience doesn't know about? No, that's too smart. Is it because they wrote the script before hiring the actors? Maybe. That would be pretty dumb. Is it because this movie was made by 1,000 Spanish chimps typing at 1,000 Spanish typewriters? Absolutely.

Anyway, the undercover cop is made the school's new tennis coach (no word on what happened to the old one), so we get treated to the most exciting and skillful tennis match ever recorded on film:



That action leaves me breathless! But why is the tennis coach playing a match against a student? Is that how coaching works in Spain?

We're given two main suspects for the horrible chainsaw murders: the grizzled groundskeeper, who possesses and regularly uses a chainsaw, and the anatomy professor who routinely shows up at the scenes of the various crimes immediately after they happen, and contaminates them with only polite admonishment by the police. Instead of arresting, holding, or even questioning either of the suspects, the police just say things like "We're watching you," or "I'm going to question you later." And the bodies keep piling up.

Of course neither of the obvious suspects are the actual killer. We know this the whole time because the movie insists on implicating both of them in the most ham-fisted ways possible. They literally walk around the film with shifty eyes, acting like silent movie villains who just tied a young damsel to the train tracks. 

So who is the real killer? The only other character in the film who's old enough to have been a child in the 1940's (only he's developed a British accent since then): the crusty old dean of the college. This is obvious from the start, but the movie dangles it around until the last five minutes, as if this is some profound revelation.

The good news about Pieces is that the murders are excellent. Chainsaws buzz off heads, limbs, even torsos, and they are not shy about splashing gallons of blood around the set. And there's quite a body count. In an 89 minute movie, there's a solid kill every 10 minutes or so, which is a damn good ratio!

Other films I thought of: Any other slasher from the 1980's for the standard tropes. Troll 2 for the incoherence. Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster for the dubbing issues.

Miscellany: The climax of the film is really something. Our two idiot cops finally manage to solve the most obvious crime in history with help from a dorky college student protagonist, and with absolutely no assistance from the undercover officer/tennis coach other than her stumbling blindly into the killer's trap. 

The cops rush to the dean's office, shoot the door open, and find the tennis coach drugged but no dean. Without even searching the room, the cops run outside leaving our protagonist alone. The dean, who like a dimwitted three year old, was hiding behind the window drapes, bursts out and attacks the boy before being shot in the head by the cops who got back just in the nick of time. Whew. Crisis averted. Everybody's happy. 

There's a funny little scare when they discover the dean's corporeal jigsaw puzzle stuffed into an armoire, and it falls on the dorky protagonist, giving everyone a good laugh.

Oh, and then this happens:




Yes, that's the jigsaw puzzle corpse coming to life and violently castrating our protagonist in the last seconds of the film. 

Why? Well, I'm guessing the director saw Friday the 13th or Carrie and thought that's how big fancy Americans end their slasher pictures. So why is it the corpse of the murderer's victims doing this and not the "not really dead" body of the murderer himself? ¡Deja de hacer preguntas!

Recommendation: The only person I could reasonably recommend this movie to is myself. So if you're me, you should definitely see Pieces. And lucky for me, the whole thing is on YouTube!

Remarkably Awful