At the dawn of the 1960s, a number of Italian directors came to prominence with the rise of world cinema (or, rather, the construction of “world cinema” as an idea). Among the most famous, and certainly the most invested in dissecting the tensions of modernity, was Michelangelo Antonioni, whose 1960 film L’Avventura spreads outward in search of an exit from the present rather than following its line. Following two people who lose interest in searching for their suddenly-evaporated friend, the film suggests the limits of the detective’s epistemology, the hunt for the smoking gun. As we expect it to hone in, the film’s narrative seems to diffuse into the ether, as though something in the air and atmosphere was sucking dry the capacity to link cause to effect. Antonioni’s film suggests a search for an answer that, before long, blinds the protagonists to what question they were originally searching for. The need to reclaim a past, to resolve a conundrum, soon enough, unloosens into a wayward, wandering space where we can search around and within but not move toward.

At the same time, while Antonioni was exploring the limits of cinema’s capacity to follow narratives, prove conclusions, or answer problems, another Italian director was taking the old-school cinematic detective’s epistemology in another direction that, ultimately leads to a similar and similarly cruel meditation on the birth pains of the late 20^th century. While no one would mistake Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s 1964 Blood and Black Lace for Antonioni – it is a loving Hitchcock tribute rather than Antonioni’s tribute to all that was inadequate about Hitchcock – Bava’s films also explored the inadequacy of their own governing principles, also investigated themselves. But they did so less out of Antonioni’s deconstructionist intellect, his interest in perusing the world’s death throes, than a desire to playfully push the living to their limits. Bava’s early films nominally replicate Alfred Hitchcock’s style, but like the master, you can see him breaching unasked questions, testing and contesting their own frameworks. Bava’s bold, primary-hued splotches of color and narrative looseness, where the trajectory of the character’s arcs and the flow of the narrative become increasingly difficult to parse, suggest a touch of the surreal, a  dream logic taking Hitchcock’s parts and recombining them for their own purposes just as surely as Godard did with old Hollywood gangster pictures.

Released at the tail end of a number of remakes of mid-century horror pictures, Chuck Russell’s The Blob often gets the short end of the remake stick. If the remake trend was the fruit of the decade’s fixation with recovering, or rather creating, a mid-century optimism, the 1988 The Blob was released at the end of the trend, on the cusp of Bush-era cynicism, and is usually considered an also-ran amongst the heavy hitters of the era’s remakes. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers started the trend with a new version that updated that ultimate meditation on Eisenhower-era conformism into a critique of the failures of ‘70s individualism, the exsanguinating of the possibility of ‘60s liberation into a cult of mere personal difference. John Carpenter’s brutally poetic 1982 film The Thing recognizes and laments the fact that a group of men stranded and with even a little reason to worry are fundamentally willing to destroy one another. (His Christine one year later also turns mid-century iconography and masculinity into an auto-erotic death-drive and a failure to genuinely progress, but it is not a remake). David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) refigures Frankenstein as a post-industrial blues for the neoliberal era and a striking meditation on the human mind overtaking and corrupting the human body.

The Blob is, arguably, the least essential of these films (I wouldn’t quibble with the claim), and the comparisons arguably invite expectations The Blob itself doesn’t have much interest in validating. Plus, it only slightly precedes the end of this remake cycle and the birth of a second round of remakes: Savini’s Night of the Living Dead (1990) and a third version of Invasion, simply titled Body Snatchers, anticipating a decade of ‘70s nostalgia. Nonetheless, The Blob does feel of a piece with these earlier films. It lacks Carpenter’s meditative sangfroid and Cronenberg’s psychosexual energies and exploratory fixation on the limits of the human body, but it is, in its own way, a terse and cunning quasi-satire of ‘80s-era cultural conformity. When the film begins, a phenomenally moody, empty town suggests a derelict, post-apocalyptic hellscape for several minutes before the film cannily reveals seemingly the town’s entire population at the local football game. The titular mass of metastacizing pink extraterrestrial goo, it seems, hardly needs to get to work. Small town life has already eaten itself alive.  

Lord save The Exorcist III. While never succumbing to the dark depths that suffered John Boorman’s delirious 1977 The Exorcist II: The Heretic, writer-director William Peter Blatty’s 1990 attempt to salvage his beloved franchise from the mismanagement of other voices fared little better among critics when it is released. While William Friedkin’s adaptation of Blatty’s original book The Exorcist was a truly epochal zeitgeist hit in 1973, a refraction of social backlash to the free-wheeling ‘60s, Blatty was always uncomfortable with Friedkin’s quintessentially ‘70s quasi-nihilistic hopelessness. Following Stephen King’s own famous critique of Stanley Kubrick’s demonically beautiful adaptation of The Shining, Blatty took it upon himself to reframe the film franchise that was surely his greatest claim to fame, turning it into what he’d always intended it to be: a beacon of light in the face of unmitigated evil in the world. Suffice it to say, the resulting film wasn’t what audiences or critics, deeply enmeshed in post-Reagan era cynicism, wanted.

Friedkin’s original The Exorcist, despite barely resembling his other films, is unmistakably the work of a man who was fascinated with psychic, social, and cosmic forces assaulting porous bureaucracies and systems in crisis. The deeply disturbed Exorcist II: The Heretic, a cosmic fracas of late ‘70s entropy as the decade tried to figure out what it was up to, was simply a psychic force all itself, not a film with something to say but an energy with designs on our consciousnesses. While Friedkin was a skeptic and Boorman a crank, Blatty was a zealot. Gone from The Exorcist III are Friedkin’s muscular mercuriality and Boorman’s psychedelic maelstrom. Instead, Blatty creates a comparatively unambiguous, deeply sober examination of the potential for evil in the world, a film that could for all intents and purposes be called simplistic, even “square.” But this is certainly not for lack of trying. The Exorcist III was released during a remarkably unimpressive few years for the horror genre, and, whatever else it does or does not do, it is certainly the work of someone seething to unleash something upon the world.

I am making a New Year’s Resolution to return to blogging during the year 2024, starting with a slew of horror films in January to start the new year off on the dark side. But I had one or two holiday lumps of coal that just couldn’t wait until the calendar year switches over. Happy Holidays.

Christmas, an ostensible apotheosis of human togetherness, is also the apex of modernity’s hypocrisy and self-contradiction. While Christmas offers possibilities, it also implies assumptions and standards, and smuggles in judgement and failure. In addition to exacerbating consumerism, it metastasizes potentially possessive orientations toward compassion doled out in objects rather than genuine empathy. It is, as many have remarked, the loneliest time of year. While this isn’t a new observation, few films dissect these paradoxes as viciously and unapologetically as Lewis Jackson’s Christmas Evil. In the guise of an exploitation film – or because it is an exploitation film – it exploits the gap in our stated and performed values, scratching at it until it bleeds.

You know you’re in for something special almost immediately: Christmas Evil joins the wonderful club of films whose on-screen titles are different from their marketed titles. Christmas Evil’s in-credit title is You Better Watch Out, whose declarative claim suggests a moralistic missive which can’t quite match the blunt vagueness of Christmas Evil, perhaps the most straightforward title one could conjure for the narrative presented, but also the opaquest. “Christmas Evil” is almost totally unrevealing – it tells us next to nothing – yet it really tells us everything we need to know. It evokes the real feel of this film, a kind of brute poetry that puts in very little ostensible effort but radiates a kind of demonic sorrow. The vicious simplicity of the title anticipates a film that is both, minutely observed and deeply abstract, extremely simple and deceptively complex, a film that reveals more with every viewing, a gift that keeps on giving.

I originally wanted to write this up in reference to the release of Craig Brewer’s My Name is Dolemite next week, without even realizing the highly appropriate irony that the last (only?) great Blaxploitation film was released almost one decade ago to the day.  

It’s extremely tempting to refer to Black Dynamite as the sharpest cinema-parody of the ‘00s, at least among those parodies that take a cinematic form, except for the curious and altogether unexpected fact that the best moments in the film only register as “parody” by circumstantial virtue of being contained in a film we’ve been told is a parody in the first place. Case in point: the film’s most famous scene, a free-associative riff-off that begins with M&Ms, sidesteps into Ancient Greek mythology and cosmology, and wanders into phallus-related hijinks, before solving the film’s McGuffin with what amounts to a supreme imaginative leap on the screenwriters’ part. But it’s hard to call this riddle scene a “parody” in any meaningful sense.

Earlier, there’s a more overt reference to the planets: a fairly amazing verbal pimp-off where the elaborate abstractions of pimp culture verbal cosmology suddenly mutate into a quite literal cosmology metaphor that lies well-beyond-reason, the head pimp explaining his plan in terms of the earth’s axis. That joke is “about” Blaxploitation cinema, or at least about the impenetrable ridiculousness of the depiction of pimps in Blaxploitation cinema. And it’s a pretty great joke too. But Black Dynamite discovering the villain’s plot via references to Ares and Athena, for no reason? Is that a satire of cinematic deus ex machinas? Of characters conveniently gifted with screenwriter’s verbosity? Cinema parody, I suppose we could say, if we’re being generous, but certainly not Blaxploitation parody in any meaningful sense. The minds of the filmmakers are clearly well beyond the pale of a mere genre parody. Continue reading →

Neoliberal American aimlessness is recoded as anticipatory national fantasy in Rambo: First Blood Part II, a film that both thoroughly disgraces the legacy of its progenitor and perversely fulfills the dormant desires which may have animated many viewers’ affection for the original character. That original film envisioned Stallone as a bruised dog. He was as inarticulate as any of his other characters, but his motor-mouthed struggles were construed less as a function of a screenplay disconnected from humanity (as in, say, Cobra) and more as a theme: the result of a nation and a man unable to vocalize their severe trauma and societal disaffection. The original First Blood, then, was a fairly doleful thriller about unmet expectations, a thoughtful meditation on American lapses that framed the US’ involvement in Vietnam as a national aporia that not only chewed out and spit up the soldiers but cast the whole nation adrift, leaving it to wander a moral wilderness.

Out of the many early ‘80s action films that dissected the corpse of the Vietnam war in one way or another, one would be hard-pressed to pick that Stallone vehicle as the likeliest candidate for a sequel of any caliber, let alone the sequels we received. There’s no obvious commercial reason why First Blood became the basis for its sequels, excepting perhaps Stallone’s success in another role in another franchise that had undertaken a similar rightward trajectory: the disaffected populist working-stiff boxer who had, with America’s rightward drift, metamorphed into America’s new Great White Hope capably defeating both black and Soviet enemies. Within the span of a few years, Stallone was no longer a cipher for a wayward everyman but an icon for American ego-boosting, the latent whiteness of his characters’ populism suddenly on full display as he became an American avenger. Continue reading →

In honor of the release of Colour out of Space, the new Richard Stanley-Nicolas Cage-HP Lovecraft film  (what a wonderfully demonic cinematic Cerberus that is!), I decided to look back at Stanley’s last film, a full 23 years ago. Let us hope that his new attempt at channeling the deranged spirit of century-old pulp literature and tearing open and excavating the most demented corners of the cinematic void don’t render him victim of that void, unable to find his way back, for nearly a quarter-century, like they did last time. 

A travesty of Welles as well as Coppola, The Island of Dr. Moreau is as sure an example as any of that old maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.  It’s also one of the most beguilingly meta-textual would-be blockbusters ever released, one whose off-screen production ended up not only mimicking its textual themes but folding in several layers of mediating texts and prior films just to stir together enough post-modern cinematic madness to satiate audiences. It feels less like a unique product than a ghoulish aftershock, a horrible, mangled echo, of its seventeen-years forebear, Apocalypse Now.

Now, normally, production turmoil can distract from an analysis of what actually makes it on screen as much as it can enhance that analysis. But The Island of Dr. Moreau is a special enigma, the dream of a cinematic wunderkind so feverishly and immediately collapsing on-screen that it begs comparison not only to its most obvious cinematic predecessor (Apocalypse Now) but to another cinematic directorial hanging by another Welles, one more deranged than HG: Orson Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons. (And not only because Marlon Brando is on hand for Moreau, reminding us that only one actor can go toe to toe with Orson Welles for sheer insular late-period delirium). Continue reading →

I meant to write this about a month ago when Hobbs and Shaw was released, but I thought of that film as a good opportunity to reconnect with my once-favorite Jason Statham vehicles, and the ones most transparently aware that they are vehicles for a character called “Jason Statham”. 

Crank

The protagonist of Crank is a hitman, a killer for hire. In one thoroughly offhand moment, never referenced again, he admits this to his girlfriend, exposing his bullshit claim about being a video game programmer to her. This feels like a smiling admission of guilt on the filmmakers’ part, the film’s winking Rosetta Stone, or maybe its cheat-code: this really is a video game, and perhaps video games have some relationship with societal violence, or maybe blaming video games is merely a ruse, a distraction from the hard work of exposing real violence in society at the political level. Writer-director Neveldine and Taylor’s response, collectively, is a proud “we don’t care, we’re making our film anyway”.

I’ll be the first to say that I really don’t know what to make of that morally, except that the impishly amoral Crank is Neveldine and Taylor’s attempt to tease out the aesthetic essence of video game filmmaking much more eloquently than any formal video game adaptation ever has. When that aforementioned protagonist, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), fails to fulfill one particular hit, he is immediately targeted for extermination, and the rest of the film is transparently a series of levels and trials haphazardly disconnected by narrative fragments that only register as real at the most abstract level.

In point of fact, Crank’s first subversion of the time-honored cinematic trope of the hitman being hunted for failing to kill a target is that Chev has already been killed before the film begins, poisoned and left for dead: Crank, in other words, has no business with formalities, no time to waste. When he is informed that he can delay the effects of the poison seeping into his heart by keeping his adrenaline up by any means necessary, he proceeds to try to hunt down the killers in the most direct manner possible, his life depending on it. It feels like a high-concept joke: a thoroughly immoral action film that is, in an entirely ironic way and without any emotion, all-“heart”, a mockery of the fact that we expect this film to make any excuses for itself, to have any character or soul. We aren’t interested in salvaging his soul, but in keeping what amounts to one of those video game heart icons from filling up with poison, symbolizing a player character’s demise. Continue reading →