What does it mean to watch a murder? What does it mean to meditate on the cause of a murder? What does it mean to plan one? What does it mean to watch one being planned? To what extent are these four things different, and to what extent are they the same? “We’re just not very skillful at that sort of thing,” the film reminds us, and demonstrates, and the statement might apply to all of the above. Even when we think we’ve got a bead on what will happen to Edward G. Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley, or what bit of evidence will or will not convict him, we keep wondering what it even means to judge someone, or to find someone guilty, or whether we can or should rely on any evidence given how easily each agentive act is contaminated by context, each exhibit for the prosecution claimed in part by chance. The ease with which the two protagonists find themselves more prepared than they expected to cover up a death and facilitate a murder, and the methodical way they begin to calculate their own moral slippage, is quietly penetrating. When the lights go up and the machinations of fate are apparently reversed in the film’s final minute, the grim realization is not that this was all an unfathomable dream but that the membrane separating determinism from contingency, demarcating sudden relief from a nightmare of existential guilt, is only molecule-thin. 

For a director most associated with expressive harshness, Fritz Lang was an abnormally varied, prismatic artist. Even his American sojourn, long considered a fall rather than a fault-line, an adventure of its own, reveals multiple distinct periods emerging out of one another. His despondent ‘30s texts, evocations of a Depression-beset nation submerged in restless ennui, are preludes to his flourishing film noir American missives in the ‘40s. Noir itself was a trend that Lang had, of course, precipitated in his German expressionist classics, but he would go on to break them down as well, essaying several coldly analytical later texts in the 1950s that abstract noir to nearly Kafkaesque levels of conceptualization, reflecting the return of European thought to a mid-century America wracked with anxiety about its Byzantine bureaucracies, corporate homogeneities, and ambivalent position in the global fight for a freedom that America had long claimed but also inhibited.

These final films were among his most despairing, anticipating the post-modern criticism of the ‘60s and suggesting that the soul-ravaging violence Lang worked through as a young man in Germany was an all-too-perfect waystation for his discovery of a more distinctly American violence. While Lang adapted to the particular anxieties of multiple time periods, from Depression-era miasma and social neglect to ’40s-era social consensus politics, he became a dark poet of life within the apocalypse at its most fatalistic.

People have been sleeping on this one, and Die Hard with a Vengeance is a film precisely about not falling asleep on the job. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the rare action movie that is interested not in demonstrating what it can show us but how it can attune us to the act of showing. So many times throughout this film, the camera gracefully and sinuously pivots around a character’s face and then zooms inward to the object of a dawning realization, either across the street or across the city, a recognition that consistently signals something is afoot but seldom explains what, exactly, is going on. Director John McTiernan repeats this maneuver so often throughout Die Hard with a Vengeance that it becomes a nervous tic, tweaking the text into a series of variations on a theme, a tilted, post-modern blockbuster for a tumultuous world.

Die Hard with a Vengeance is a highly-strung text, a film for the masses with the movements of the masses on its mind. For the series protagonist’s first film back in New York, John McClane’s ostensible home, the film dedicates itself to making us feel like a stranger, casting us adrift, unanchored, through transportations, transmutations, and teleportations. Die Hard with a Vengeance feels like the anti-Die Hard, and no surprise. Star Bruce Willis only agreed to return if the film zigged when the earlier texts zagged. Rather than the first film, a vicious bottleneck, Die Hard with a Vengeance splays outward, a murderous carousel rushing us back and forth while also tacitly and gravely intimating that it’s having maniacal fun with us. (Speaking of which, this film walked so that Fincher’s The Game could run.) An episode at Yankee Stadium is just the film giving the characters and the audience the runaround, showing us a New York City landmark merely because what would McClane’s return to NYC be without it? This is a rich, relational film about what it means to get across a city like this, and what it means to survive through it.

There’s a proto-Giallo mischievousness to The Vampire Moth’s overstuffed story, an ever-cascading sense that this amounts to more and less than is on display, that the limits of logic are beside themselves, hopelessly unable to explain what we’re confronted with. The narrative implodes and folds in on itself, hurtling by with a feverish, feral brutality that is disarming in its disinterest in narrative closure. Written along with Hideo Oguni, and Dai Nishijima, director Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Vampire Moth is mostly a tatters from the beginning. In relation to post-war Japan, it feels mutational, like a nation growing quickly and in ways it hadn’t anticipated, organically following lines of inquiry that were not expected of it, a proliferating madness that the tidy rules of narrative cinema cannot contain.

Most pre-Gojira Japanese science fiction cinema, even if it isn’t the no-man’s-land its reputation suggests, isn’t exactly self-conscious art. Its texture is blunt and suggestively playful, grimy and loaded with pulp. While Ishiro Honda’s apocalyptic Gojira unleashes an antediluvian earth resurrected by modernity’s godlike attempt to subject reality to what Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve,” and his later Matango evokes a world in which humanity was mutating in multiple directions, Nobuo Adachi’s The Invisible Man Appears doesn’t initially seem to have quite so much on its mind.

Yet Adachi’s film explores the entanglement of control and curiosity as shifting sand in a world where the possibilities, and perils, of the modern world seem both omnipresent and evaporative. In this tight potboiler, Dr. Kenzo Nakagato (Ryunosuke Tsukigata) tasks his two proteges, Shunji Kurokawa (Kanji Koshiba) and Daijiro Natsukawa (Kysouke Segi), with the development of an invisibility serum, offering his niece Ryuko Mizuki (Takiko Mizunoe) to the victor. Success in post-war Japan is a cut-throat intermarriage of private and public, in which personal ambition on all fronts is tethered to national and corporate well-being in a psychologically bruised and physically devastated ex-empire.

The thing about Hollow Man is how trivial it is. I’m not the first to make that point, and I won’t be the last. This is an irrepressibly small-scale film for a Hollywood A-list director. Admittedly, Paul Verhoeven had been shunned by Hollywood with Showgirls and forgotten with Starship Troopers, but one senses this was less because the machine grew hip to his viciousness than because audiences hadn’t. They confronted these texts as incompetent films rather than self-conscious visions of Hollywood’s grotesqueness. With Hollow Man, it’s hard to blame the public for being ungenerous. It’s initially difficult to detect any critique altogether. It feels like this infamous self-hating Hollywood conspirator has finally been brought to his knees, forced to play along, as though he had lost any appetite for drawing blood. The American violence(s) explored by Robocop and Starship Troopers are forms of national fascism couched in ideological projects and delusory visions of a better world. Hollow Man is entirely devoid of any such romanticism, any grandness of vision, any sense that any of this amounts to anything. How does a film critique visions of American efficiency and brutality couched in aspirational opulence and moral zealotry when the film, itself, is so openly limited, so business-like, so blandly functional? There’s just so astonishingly little here.

Yet Hollow Man is major vision because it occupies such a minor key. I would submit that its viciously un-visionary nature is core to its vision of mercenary corporate cinema. Paul Verhoeven’s final English language Hollywood film is not arbitrarily banal but self-consciously inconsequential, a mercenary shiv to Hollywood’s gut from a double-crossing hired goon. Its vehemently local texture is the point. The aspirations and delusions of scientist Sebastian Crane (Kevin Bacon) are distinctly post-modern. His desire is not to control the world but to inhabit it, to fulfill himself more efficiently, to unlock his own personal capacity. Once he allows himself to be injected with the invisibility serum he has been developing, he has no interest in marketing this to the American military-industrial complex as a weapon to expand American hegemony. He just wants to become a more efficient killing machine all his own, to get off on his own competence, his own ability to manipulate sheer matter, light and shadow, to his own effects.

That 1992’s Sleepwalkers was the first film Stephen King wrote directly for the screen is both a promise and an enigma. The idea suggests an unadulterated slab of Stephen King, the pure, uncut thing, untempered by the guiding hand of a translator. Watching the film, though, I can’t say I have any idea of what King thinks cinema is, or what its relationship to the written word is supposed to be. Sleepwalkers is quite a bedeviling monstrosity itself, actually. On one hand, it feels like a shredded expanse, the forced tightening of a larger, deeper, book-length text, the kind of thing that people refer to as the result of badly adapting an “unfilmable novel.” On the other hand, it feels equally like the product of King in the full grips of his drug-infused mania, badly grasping at half-finished ideas before they fade into murky nothingness.

In a literal sense, this film is neither of these. He was sober when he wrote it, and it was not, apparently, based on a larger text. But it feels like both. There are both too many and no ideas within it. It feels both overworked and entirely unfinished. It suggests the offspring of a man in the apparent full command of his own artistic invention who nonetheless doesn’t understand the core of what he has produced. It is a film whose genesis is as opaque as its final state. This is, charitably speaking, not a fully fleshed-out storyline. For all the flesh that gets ripped, shredded, broken, serrated, and corn-cobbed (read on), there’s very little meat on the film’s bones. It has the patina of a man who isn’t quite remembering why he has released this into the world, or where he wants this to go. The film accretes in, and is best remembered in, a fog.

Godmonster of Indian Flats is like its titular creature in more ways than one. It shares its unruly, mercurial nature, its frustrated friction. It comes out of nowhere, from the abyss of an American id, or from some dim region of consciousness. And, above all, it has our souls on its conscience, the weight of the world impressing upon it. This is an alien being, a wonderful cinematic monstrosity that looks and sounds like nothing else, that feels like nothing else, and that was bequeathed to us, lost children in need of salvation, at the twilight of one period of American growth to teach us the error of our ways and offer, in the ugly, beautiful, grotesque, revolting fact of cinema, a shock that might help us see through the darkness, to see our darkness. In spite of it all, the film says, art, with all its misshapen curiosity and lumpy monstrosity, remains.  

But saving us, the film posits, may mean destroying us. Godmonster of Indian Flats projects no beautiful harmony with the earth, no romantic image of art as a channel for grace. It is angry with us, a forgotten creature born unto this earth to witness our failings and prey that we might do better. It is an impossible creature of a film, a truly mad object, the prodigal creation of a nation and the scion of a mad scientist of an artist trying his hand at cinema. Writer-director Frederic Hobbs, was by day a wild bricoleur stitching solar energy and nomadic errantry and mid-century ideas about ecology and technology into something called Art Eco, one of those micro-artistic mid-century forms that resonated with a constellation of ‘60s modes, from the ever-curious, ever-deflationary termite art of Manny Farber to the more purely explosive tornadoes of internal energy produced by Jackson Pollock to the anti-technocratic romanticism of Frank Herbert’s Dune to the collective eulogy for a myopic world that was Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. All of these frameworks, mechanisms of social critique and machine-work for a more humane world, invite us to rethink our relation to the rhythms of the cosmos, to expend less energy, or expend the right energy, to appreciate the irreducibly uncertain nature of reality and the horizontality of our diffuse formations and strange interconnections with one another.

Hobbs’s paintings celebrated this sensibility. His film, however, seems much less sure of our worthiness for salvation. We begin with a spirited journey to the margins of the nation, a group of youths on the path to adventure, “lighting out” to the territories, as they used to say. Cut to them pushing in on the camera, like a zombified parade of the damned, soon driving to nowhere, on the edge of an abyss. Perambulating into an uncertain future, this is the American road trip not as a long night of the soul but a night of the living dead. Promising a bounty of possibility, this Nevada-set film only offers a parched desert permafrost, a harbinger of a national thaw.

If a film could contract tetanus, it would be Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. The people who consider this a lesser retread of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, worse, an unsympathetic revelation of the limits of that earlier film’s imagination, are losing their minds. They are not, as they say, down with Hooper’s peculiar way of rendering the American sickness. This is a nasty piece of work, a cinema of morbid fixations, of the fragile emaciation of the American body as it thought it had been fashioned, and as it was apparently unfashioning itself in the mid-‘70s.

If anything, Eaten Alive is more uncomfortably disconcerting than Texas Chainsaw, more unwilling to privilege accepted divisions between center and outsider, urban and rural, digital and analog. While Chainsaw takes us to the margins of America, Eaten Alive seems to fold center and margin in on one another. While the intrepid heroes of Texas Chainsaw venture into the margins of modern America, out of their comfort zone, Eaten Alive collapses distinctions almost entirely. We move from an apparently urban brothel to the film’s forsaken bayou cottage without any sense of the passage of space or time. The film retroactively seems to be infused with the need to demarcate spaces, as well as the failure to do so, uncannily underlining the limits of American dominance.

The feral fecundity of the early ‘80s slasher boom, before the genre had codified into a morass of corporate nothingness, was ironically a time when the swamp of slasher cinema excreted genuine difference. In the very early ‘80s, slasher cinema could be a metastatic thing, maliciously destabilizing the cinematic body, or simply following whatever ramshackle impulse the people making it happened to divine while making it.

Usually, this meant slightly more competent cinematic products, crafted by thoughtful journeymen who hadn’t yet been conscripted by the reduction of the mold for a quick cash-grab. In the case of Just Before Dawn, it’s closer to the excavating of a cinematic fossil, the discovery of some unfathomable, primordial thing. I’ve been making the comparison between Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre for a decade now, but, apparently, writer-director Jeff Lieberman got to it long before I was born. This is a horror sublime, a transcendental text about the limits and aporias of human transcendence through reconnection with the region one construes as “nature.”