It’s been a while since I’ve done these Friday B and/or cult movie reviews, and I’ve decided to return with two dystopian films set in the year of our Lord 2019, offering visions of THE FUTURE that may or may not have come to pass. 

… And then there are those films which receive consummate passes in the mainstream simply because they’re “prescient,” a word that should, at this point, clearly join “honest” in the critics’ jailhouse. Running Man is one such film, far less provocative in its embodiment and critique of fascistic tendencies (and its ability to recognize the fascism latent in capitalism) than Paul Verhoeven’s fellow 1987 action-sci-fi classic Robocop, lacking Verhoeven’s almost psychotically perfect understanding of blockbuster mimicry (without ever tipping his hand), not to mention Verhoeven’s impish, gleeful bloodletting. Compared to Verhoeven’s film, The Running Man delights in showing us the cards early on: this is a broad, unashamed Hollywood action film, and a satire totally ashamed that we won’t realize what kind of social commentary it has on its mind. Continue reading →

One might think TCM2 is an obvious proposition: director Tobe Hooper attempting to escape the dark days of artistic poverty known as the ‘80s by returning to his most demonic days, forging a communion with the film devil and resurrecting the zombified corpse of his most famous film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But TCM2’s is no sycophant wearing its father’s clothes; more like a renegade fugitive dressing up like a horror film to throw the authorities off its trail. It is its predecessor’s polar opposite, as overt a case of a cinematic progeny rebelling against its parent with youthful indiscretion as the medium has ever birthed. Anticipating the devil-may-care comic mania of The Evil Dead 2 with as much brio but much less skill, Tobe Hooper’s sequel to his most famous film at least deserves points for attempting – rather openly – to misdiagnose its predecessors’ successes and run around in its own bizarre head-trip version of the original. An overt comedy, the film’s combustible zaniness is spirited even if it isn’t really inspired, and it sometimes feels like a colossally misjudged entity that is worth seeing only for the courage with which it misjudges itself. The quasi avant-garde set design and the ludicrous, anarchic disinterest in conventional mood skeletons mark Texas Chainsaw 2 as a fugitive inferno of sustained weirdness.

Which is not the same thing as a good film, simply a potent one. Ripe and sour in equal measure, TCM 2’s basic line of attack is to inflate the corpse of its predecessor with noxious laughing gas until it explodes, toppling to the ground in chaotic convulsions of violence and beguilingly standoffish comedy. At the least, it has an identity – as baroque and strangely misguided as it can be – that is not synonymous with the dredged-in slasher glut so thick on the ground in the ‘80s. Possibly aware that the genre was waning (it was already on the way out by 1986, when TCM 2 was released), it at least diffuses the general tepidness of the genre and indulges in the incredibly toxic potencies of producers Golan and Globus, the most notorious producers of the ‘80s, responsible for a proper murderer’s row of cinematic monstrosities. Faced with the choice of going bad or going middle-of-the-road, let no one say the film wasn’t courageous. Proceed at your own peril. Continue reading →

With the untimely passing of another horror icon, a quick look at a few of his films that aren’t *that one*. 

The Funhouse

Lost amidst the dregs of slasher cinema circa 1981 – easily the single most fertile year of the genre – Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse isn’t as vicious or fanged as Hooper’s seminal The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nor is it as truly deranged and willing to disfigure American narrative norms, which by and large fetishize what historians refer to as “casual fertility”. That earlier, 1974 proto-slasher was not simply grotesque in its narrative content, but relentlessly disfigured in its tactile form and truly unsettling in depiction of ‘70s America as an existentially adrift open wound. If that work – lacking an ounce of explanation and flaying any slice of fat with its serrated formal blades – remains truly unyielding in its immutable disdain for explication and causal question marks, its refusal to rationalize itself – Funhouse suffers for turning its uncanny – the unexplained, the under-rationalized – into the explained, and thus the pacified. It suffers, for a slasher film, from a surfeit of context.

While it’s explaining, though, The Funhouse also enrobes itself in a tainted, uprooted visual sensibility that at least rings true as a diluted form of TCM’s infamously gnarled nastiness. When we defend horror as intellectuals, we tend to position our arguments in the safe retreat of abstract ideas. Thus, history has reclaimed Wes Craven, who – after his exemplary The Hills Have Eyes – settled into the realm of concepts and struggled to develop images which were more than mere correlates for his stories, images which only depicted his ideas and never commented on them or pushed back against them. But, even at his most ineffective, Hooper always tried to retain his exploitation-schooled eye for the haunted emptiness and unmooring vacancy of the American out-of-the-way. Flaws aside, the circus milieu of The Funhouse is dementedly effective: a grotty and disassembled take on the putrefying, decomposed aura of the intersection of workaday capitalism, public spectatorship, and Guignol theater. Continue reading →

A new Annabelle sequel I haven’t seen is out; faced with the grim opportunity of reviewing its immediate predecessor, here is a much better killer doll film. 

In the ’80s, an era of next-big-thing horror, Stuart Gordon’s Dolls – a Weimar-styled Faustian film FW Murnau might have directed in the ‘20s, although certainly with more skill – coaxes something remarkably and unexpectedly classical out of its mélange of Gothic glee. Not to mention its general atmosphere of childlike (not childish, mind you) uncertainty about the state of adult affairs. Although the demented John Carpenter-speckled intro credits sequence, all severed doll heads and spotlights and portals into darkness both literal and metaphorical, speaks to Gordon’s awareness of the godfather of slasher cinema, the film’s spirit is much older. Or, perhaps, it merely connects the dots from Carpenter and, say, Spielberg’s Poltergeist, to the classics they were implicitly quoting.

Those influences, incidentally much precede cinema. Dolls is, like many of the original horror films, an extraordinarily Germanic fairy tale, stitched together not out of back-patting and compassion but moral retribution and gravely-imagined, essentially tragic certainties about anti-rationalist, ambiguous forces creeping around beneath the veneer of adult domestication and reason. Ambiguous forces, I might add, that are unambiguously ready to drive a knife not only into your body but your existentially-resolved certainty that the world, broadly, functions according to the rulesets your mind sets out for it. Although nominally the story of a collection of adults and one child trapped in a puppet maker’s house for the night, murdered one by one by his creations, Dolls is really about the fragility (and possibly the fraudulence) of the hubris adults collect when they believe their rationalist way of seeing the world is intrinsically unalterable.   Continue reading →

I can think of hundreds of better films, but Face/Off is some kind of zenith, like a pure slab of movie-making distilled. Beyond being a gleefully trashy amped-up B-movie delight, as gloriously dysfunctional as it is intoxicatingly sure-handed, John Woo’s best (and only good) American film is a blockbuster treatise on the nature of identity, the only American picture he handled that remains truly permissive to his personal predilection for films about the dualistic nature of identity and the loss and retention of self. Hard Target (dementedly designed climax aside), Broken Arrow, Mission Impossible II, and certainly Windtalkers and the abominably luke-warm Paycheck all feel like imposters, but Face/Off has the special sauce, that auteurist alacrity and deliciously eccentric sense of self that only Woo could bring to a production like this. Nervously coiled interpersonal drama interpolated with orgasmic explosions of pressured-violence, this radioactive tangle of a film is exultant movie-making from beginning to end.

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Freud and Superman and Fellini and sleaze-house dens all make walk-on appearances just in the introductory passages of Brian de Palma’s Hi, Mom!, a quasi-satire, or at least a loosening up of, the malevolent Hitchcockian Rear Window. A bizarre-world antecedent to Taxi Driver, this is a film with Robert De Niro obsessively subjecting New York to his viewfinder until he is himself victim to and participant in an artistic nightmare. Relentlessly aware of its own spectatorship and shot-through with neurotic ambivalences, the film always has film on the brain, and the muscles, and the loins. But De Palma refuses to rest on this tried-and-true meta-textual laurel, instead wandering off – skipping, even tumbling – in untold and untested directions. Call him a Hitch parasite all you want, but Hi, Mom! commandeers Hitch for its own sinful purposes. Continue reading →

Hectoring becomes a professional endeavor, or professional filmmaking becomes a form of hectoring the audience in John Huston’s whacked-out Beat the Devil, entirely denounced when it was first released and somehow bent and mutated even further sixty four years later. Temptation begs that I reclaim the film by arguing that it was “misconstrued’ upon release, but I’m not entirely certain it exists to be construed. That might only breed domestication, curbing the film’s vigorous unruliness. With a regular goon squad of odd cartoon shapes masquerading as people waiting around in a squalid sea-port town, the whole film seems to exist to breathe in the salt water. The most exciting moment is entirely about an aging, wheezy Bogart and a pair of portly fellows schlepping after a runaway car, teasingly dramatic music massaging out the irony of their failure to exert more than a modicum of effort. It’s awkward, heinous, mismatched, and oddly brilliant in its idiom. Continue reading →