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.
Continue reading
I meant to get this out a month ago for Halloween, but here’s a (delayed) review of one of the great, deranged, unsung horror classics of 1968, and one which by virtue of totally refusing to put its finger on the pulse of that year, seems to encapsulate it all the more so. 
A classic of Cuban Marxist-inflected cinema, director Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s La Ultima Cena offers an intimate portrait of the paradoxes that arise when attempting to reconcile “Western” Christianity and slave life on the plantation. Focused on a slave master’s self-fashioned “benevolence”, La Ultima Cena examines how slave masters’ self-regarding visions of personal sacrifice – their collective belief that they were moral patriarchs sacrificing for their slaves in hopes of “teaching” them “civilization” – couldn’t but require them to engage their slaves in ways which sometimes invited the latter to announce their humanity through means the master wasn’t likely to want to hear. Alea’s film depicts slaves themselves debating real freedom on the sham stage of a master’s faux-freedom, pushing liberation’s meaning well beyond the pale of what their master could possibly imagine.
No special occasion here, just a re-watch for a course, and because I haven’t updated the site in a few weeks. 
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. 
Jordan Peele’s Us bears many obvious linkages to Get Out, Peele’s 2017 box-office slayer, but Us feels less like a retread or even an update or extension of Get Out than a perversion, a disruption, a chaotic disfigurement of the earlier film’s elegant simplicity. Us is both more existential and more surreal, more playful and more brutal, and, above all, more experimentally distended, exhibiting a newly ravaged and warped texture that is very much to my taste, but not necessarily to those looking for a clean like of argumentation in the film, or even a clear subject. Get Out’s comparatively streamlined metaphor for sight, sightlessness, and embodiment was tight, vicious, and tenacious – perfect for itself, and perhaps for a first film – but not nearly so troublesome as Us, which actively and conspicuously refuses the snug moral logic and trimmed-down narrative of Get Out. Us isn’t avant-garde in any overt sense, but where Get Out’s story fell into place, this new film buckles, utilizing horror for its demonic textural and thematic elasticity and indescribability rather than merely as a generic skeleton for a moral parable. It’s storytelling by way of allusion, digression, and disturbance, a film that benefits or suffers greatly (depending on your proclivity) from writer-director Jordan Peele’s obvious enthusiasm overtaking his discretion, his ensuing disdain for hedging his bets and, probably, his frustration with heeding the rules and regulations of Hollywood storytelling. It’s as if, having mastered the art of skillful middlebrow horror cinema, Peele decided to dismember it. 
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.
Many self-consciously “weird” motion pictures expend energy and time establishing a stable sense of cinematic self that they will only then destabilize later on, tweaking the style several notches south of sanity as the film progresses. Horrors of Malformed Men lathers the surrealistic absurdity on thick from the first shot. It introduces us immediately to a thoroughly dismembered reality, a cinematic hall of mirrors that finds us wandering into a B-movie and discovering a metaphor for Japan’s mid-century dreams of paternal control, familial destiny, and authoritarian anxiety, all (appropriately) malformed into a kaleidoscopic nightmare. The subject of the cinematic allegory? Deluded men working at any cost to recreate their lineage and preserve the fragile illusion of a linear, biologically-sanctioned family hierarchy.
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. 
The first cinematic adaptation of the writing of James Baldwin, perhaps unexpectedly and perhaps perplexingly but undeniably fittingly in light of the writers’ artistic omnivorousness, takes its most obvious cues not from Baldwin’s profession but from the profession of its main male character. If Beale Street Could Talk follows a young African-American couple Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne), nineteen, and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James), twenty-two and working as a sculptor’s apprentice who conjures visions of tragically stilled beauty that the film, if not modeling itself after, at least siphons energy from.
