The Weird Western was born out of the very myth of the West itself. In American lore, the frontier of the Southwest was never not an invitation to mythologize and a call to speculate. Its material reality was both shot through with and held up by an imaginative topography that cast its expansive eye on to the nation’s iridescent understanding of itself. Already in the 1860s, Edward S. Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies’ suggested the paradox of mystical machinery in the West: frontier living was a nominal revolt against civilizational order that was, finally, a harbinger of it. By the release of Curse of the Undead in 1959, nearly a century later, the Western frontier had thoroughly suffused the American mindscape, and the Weird Western understood the West as a mental canvas on which America’s vision of itself could be shot through a dark carnival mirror.
But the Weird Western signaled no default orientation. Its logic was a poetics of amplitude. The sacred frontier of untampered moral, spiritual, and economic progress could become a bastion of interstellar possibility in the Space Western. On the other hand, America’s history of genocide and material extraction could malevolently rematerialize as a cruel and unforgiving terrain wracked by violence and spectral presences of uncertain origin in the Gothic Western.
The latter, as a subset of the Weird Western, was still a rare breed in 1959 though, an uncommon wraith haunting the cinematic scenery, so much so that Universal Studios, near-monopolistic purveyor of horror cinema in the U.S. during the Old Hollywood era, nearly waited until their own demise to cast their shadowy eye on the American West. One ought not be surprised. While Westerns were perennial features of the Old Hollywood landscape, even the most sober, critically-minded work in the Old Hollywood genre seldom exposed the metaphysical terrors that doubled as the negative side of the desert’s eternal strangeness. If the Wild West promised an otherworldly poetics of dreamy becoming, it was also haunted by a netherworld of settler brutality.
The original cinematic adaptation of Children of the Corn was one of the early casualties of the early Stephen King explosion. Like a good many of the man’s early texts, the story is a crazy-quilt of different fabrics and textures, an uncanny divorce from reality tethering together themes and questions without always trying to develop them. King’s story is a vision of corruptible children and generational trauma that also examines a wheezing, necrotic marriage and triples as an early exploration into a genuinely cosmic horror. In its short span, though, you mostly get the sense that King himself simply wasn’t sure about settling down into the pleasantly banal domestic sphere that, the story suggests, was at once a conduit for unholy forces and a way of denying them.
The presence of so many themes does not, as it would in another author, suggest a truly deliberate mind exploring the interweaving truths of many seemingly separate terrors. Rather, if they remind us that King could turn almost anything into horror, they also suggests that horror, somehow, wasn’t what he was most interested in after all. King was not a man tormented by suggestions of otherworldly forces, as say, H.P. Lovecraft was, or terrified by humanity’s capacity to channel them, as was, say, Mary Shelley. This was a man deeply bruised by alcohol and unsure of his relationship with the people who ostensibly loved him most. “Horror” could, for all the man’s reputation as a hell-raiser, often simply be window dressing for essentially sentimental stories that happened to channel emotions that slipped into the darker side of the world and didn’t pay too much attention to the reality principle. What, precisely, was horrifying is whatever happened to enter King’s mind that day. If parts of Children of the Corn could be filed next to Cujo as among King’s most quotidian horrors, its abutment of the inexplicable and the mundane are also indication enough that the author was willing to treat the genre more as a playground, or a toolkit, than a mission statement. His horror was, finally, an act of bare survival, not an existential vision.
“Alleged horror,” remarks a youtube description of the long-forgotten, once-lost Incubus. The poster seems to intend this as a criticism, but the film itself begs to differ. Incubus seems to delight in not being very upfront about the horror it wishes to unleash, including, quite literally, having to convince a Church that they were not making one in order to get the film made. It’s as though the film itself is afraid to call itself horror, or perhaps doesn’t want to be, all the more potent for a text feeling itself out in the moment, and that doesn’t want to stick around to let us figure it out. It’s a subterranean film, so much so that the actor playing the titular demon awakened late on, and who seems none too pleased about being back on this earth, would be back in the grave before the film’s release.
Incubus is a work that makes a virtue, or demon, out of necessity. It stalks our pretensions of perfect cinema. Written on the fly so that Leslie Stevens could keep up the momentum of the recently cancelled television masterpiece The Outer Limits, the brilliantly exploratory show that he unleashed upon the world and that, more importantly, conjured cinematographer Conrad Hall right out of nowhere and on a path to redefining color cinematography. To thin the membrane between cult American television and European art house cinema, it was filmed entirely in Esperanto, an entirely artificial language with no organic connection to any lived community, and it was framed as a folk horror film despite the “folk,” in this case, not existing. While other critics have pointed out this paradox as a simple curiosity, it’s really more of a thesis statement. While the “folk horror” genre purports to channel a group’s fears, Incubus almost – if you squint right – investigates the very idea of the genre: it implies an organic effusion of a single culture’s growth, but it, in fact, reminds us that “single culture” itself is entirely constructed object.
In announcing his status as a young director to be reckoned with, Dario Argento couldn’t have picked a more provocative opening gambit, one that unapologetically, if surreptitiously, seeds his future career into one scene. Witnessing a silent murder attempt in an art museum, protagonist Sam Dalmas (Tony Muante) runs to the aid of the wounded woman, only for the would-be murderer’s ghostly-gloved hand to push a button, trapping him in between the two glass panes in the museum entrance. Neither in the museum nor outside, all he can do is hopelessly watch an imminent demise he cannot even hear. Both of these people do leave the scene of the crime alive, but for the moment, Argento lets us linger in a liminal zone between reality and art, life and death, sound and silence, helpless and unwitting voyeurs to a killing that appears to be posed for him – and painted like an art object for us – but which he can only tenuously interfere in.
Positioned between Mario Bava’s earlier Hitchcock riffs and Lucio Fulci’s (and Argento’s own) later, lurid arias of psychedelic blood, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage also feels like a liminal realm for Italian horror in general. In 1970, Argento was clearly a director poised to move the genre from hell to purgatory, from brutally experimenting with society’s sins to exploring the very limits of narrative consciousness in a miasmic middle-ground. But Bird is not as demonic, nor as speculative, as his imminent, genre-transforming works. He’s still the lizard cleverly stalking his prey, not the shape-shifting chameleon daring us to join him in the abyss of cinematic solidity itself. The opening’s portrait of embroiled masculinity and helpless passivity obviously recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and The Bird with the Crustal Plumage never quite escapes the Hitchcock obsession of the earliest giallos (and the likes of Brian De Palma), nor achieves the infectiously fractal vision of a completely broken world that Mario Bava unleashed with Bay of Blood one year later.
Yet Bird, like many great horror films, is already marvelously holding a knife to its own throat, achieving a kind of perverse self-awareness about its own debt to cinema history and the limits of its moral imagination. This is a film that knows how troubled it is, that senses its own participation in modernity’s foibles all too well. It opens with a man witnessing a helpless woman about to be murdered, framed as an art object worthy of the classics, and it closes with a reminder of just how blind he truly is. If the film, too, is myopic in many ways, it also exhibits the genre’s gleefully cruel ability to remind us that we, after all, are the ones who clicked play. The film, like most giallos, seems like a sledgehammer or a machete. We don’t notice it sneaking up on us with a scalpel, hellbent on disfiguring both its genre and our viewing habits, reminding us of the consequences of our inattention.
Night Train to Terror is undeniably trash, but its pleasures, paradoxically, are entirely intellectual. In its own unintentional, mercenary way, it severs the tension cord linking high and low art. It is, finally, only really valuable as a theoretical exercise, a strange cinematic mad science experiment (a connection that runs deep in cinematic history) in which several unfinished older films have been sliced and diced to pieces and reassembled into walking corpses of their ostensibly living selves. Born out of the forgotten remainders of unfinished horror pictures, this is an avowedly monstrous exercise in revivifying films that, as Frankenstein’s Monster himself once said, “belong dead.” That the film itself admits that this undertaking may itself be an immoral act – “bodies for money,” one character remarks in the first short film – is simply part of the fun. Night Train to Terror is a strange kind of cinematic meta-archive that salvages films while also working as proof for both the argument that this very salvaging is a heroic act and, conversely, that the films should have never been salvaged in the first place. It is, in the most literal possible sense, hack work.
All of this is to say: Night Train is probably an un-reviewable cinematic object. It feels like outsider art, so anything like a conventional standard of textual coherence or roundness seems essentially meaningless for parsing it or accessing its soul. Make no mistake, though: this is no labor of love. Its only investment is ensuring that scraps of lost and found footage might make a few dollars when unleashed on the unsuspecting, or on those who have deluded themselves into thinking this is a real movie, or on people like me who, apparently, hate themselves. For director Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, this is self-evidently an attempt to salvage a collection of films that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cohere the first time around, footage that, as if by some demonic force, simply would not coagulate into a stable form.
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood opens with consecutive images of its two villains. Neither are Charles Manson, despite what the marketing claimed. The first is wanted poster of a Wild West outlaw. The second, in a whip zoom back, is Jake Cahill, Wild West lawman extraordinaire, a nasty renegade backed by Manifest Destiny who knowingly nods at the camera and who dishes out justice with an unforgiving grimace and little interest in the formalities of legality or the niceties of compassion. A marker of a time in the American imagination when retribution required little justification and morality was Manichean and measurable rather than mysterious and muddy, it is no wonder, we’re soon told, that Rick Dalton, the actor who once played Cahill in the early ‘60s TV boon as an unbending arbiter of goodness, has been reduced to momentary turns as a weekly walk-on heavy on budget Westerns and other TV shows dedicated to newer, younger, more ambiguous stars worthy of the murky waters of the late 1960s. The kind of justice he represents, a mixture of unbridled individualism and cosmic force, casts a dubious presence in a world where pretensions of moral purity backed by national predestination are increasingly threatened by recalcitrant forces of social unrest laying bare previously concealed realities and shrouded conflicts.
Two villains I wrote, but although Dalton is now reduced to playing villains on television, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood interrogates the possibility of giving him the fantasy of hero-dom he so desperately craves. When we cut back to a scene from Bounty Law, the show on which Dalton made his career playing Cahill, it’s to the shadow of a man, who falls dead into the frame, before Cahill covers him in the shot with his own image on a bounty poster. The shadow becomes flesh becomes print, illusion into reality into the legend. By the end of Once Upon a Time, Tarantino’s film will have helped Dalton fill out his shadow by giving him the chance of becoming a real-life Cahill, to embody a cowboy in the flesh. But the cost for turning dream into reality is a reminder that reality is a game of smoke and mirrors. Whatever else it is, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a love letter to a time that, the film acknowledges, never really existed on the terms Tarantino wanted it to. Tarantino’s most recent film is a critical paean, and a wistful eulogy, for a hope that the film seems to recognize, but cannot fully admit, is a delusion. Which is to say: in aspiring to salvage the late 1960s, Tarantino also realizes he can only really be a pallbearer at its funeral.
Just as we previously left him, at the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, our man Wick was hurtling down the suspicious streets of Manhattan, fearing for his life after having been recently excommunicated from the worldwide assassin community for (deservedly, in the film’s view) killing a person on hallowed ground. That ground was New York’s Continental Hotel, one of the many hubs of official assassin activity in, as we learn, an increasingly wide and complicated network and economy of murder. Its owner is Winston (Ian McShane), and he has used his power to delay the ensuing hit on Wick by one hour. We open John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum mere minutes before that hit is to be sent out to, seemingly, every hit-person on earth. Parabellum’s Latin subtitle suggests – promises, really – no shortage of ego on the part of the film. And the dense and forbidding aura of its world, and the controlling and manhandling showmanship of this behemoth of a film, do not disappoint. This is a work that will summon swarms of extended forces, out of nowhere, to bear on one man who has to call forth an equally forceful reserve of will to survive, a celebration of one man’s capacity to survive a sheer, overbearing, unending onslaught of raw, leviathan-like cinema.
Wick 3 was the most highly stylized, most ornate of the series up to that point – the most continental of the Wick features, if you will, a kindred spirit of the aesthetic sensibilities more commonly associated with Continental Europe. That the one ostensible refuge in the film’s world suggests a hyper-controlled aesthetic sensibility seems to imply that the film’s aesthetic proclivities are ways of evacuating the ungovernable traces of real-world human spontaneity and uncertainty. This is a film that has been painstakingly manicured for us, to our liking, to do our bidding, to exert supreme effort and control in punishing one man and to take pleasure in his ability to survive that punishment. It asks that we revel in controlled chaos and the possibility of coming out the other side undaunted. It is pristine in the force of its construction, the single-minded brutality of its monomaniacal and thoroughly, violently uncomplicated imagination.
And revel we do. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum makes a pretty immaculate, almost indefensible, case for itself. The obvious criticism of the film is that its sound and fury signifies nothing, and that this film is so well-mounted and anointed that it can’t really register any suspense. That’s all true: we watch hundreds of people try to kill John Wick, and we delight as he kills them. In a sense, though, Wick’s over-modulated hollowness isn’t really so much a decrement as a sheer fact. While the film may seem empty on first blush, it might rather be that Wick refuses the injunction to make meaning out of its cornucopia of senses and perceptions. John Wick does not unearth some divine essence beneath all the madness, nor does it pluck any manna from heaven that unlocks the film’s mysteries for us. It just is.
William Castle wasn’t a natural artist, but he was certainly an organic showman of the P.T. Barnum tradition, a skillful and wily craftsman with a populist’s canny sensibility for manipulating without upsetting the status quo to his liking and a magician’s eye for how to do more with less and play in the realm between appearance and reality. Case in point, Strait-Jacket, a self-evident Alfred Hitchcock knock-off with no new ideas, and which doesn’t even try to pretend like it has any actual ideas, but whose successes still, through some magical sleight-of-cinematic-hand, somehow feel entirely its own.
Strait-Jacket is certainly a copy-cat, but then, the writer Robert Bloch did write the story upon which Psycho was based, so it’s hard to criticize him for that. Plus, while Strait-Jacket shares Psycho’s lurid morbidity and fascination with the darker regions of America lurking beneath the facades of normality, Castle’s film mostly wants to play with us rather than to play us, as Hitch always essentially did. This is an essentially democratic film. Rather than exercise a cruel, conniving, beautiful mastery, it invites us in to a strange corner of America for a little while and then lets us leave. Straight-Jacket’s raison d’etre, certainly, is the sudden success of Psycho, which sent a dark chord down the spine of an already decaying Hollywood and threatened America with the sudden fragility of notions like “protagonist.” But Castle’s soul was that of a playful huckster just delighted to show us how he can, technically, show several heads being lobbed off in 1962 because they look cartoon-y enough to get by the censors, who don’t really seem to care when the film is this off-brand. That may be a gross reduction, even a debasement, of Hitchcock’s seminal masterpiece, but it isn’t exactly a rip-off.
First things first: a film that begins with a thank you to the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia, immediately propositioning the audience with a fantasy of verisimilitude and access, and then immediately cuts to a totally opaque, ethereal non-space while an elderly John Huston, fresh off of voicing Gandalf in the animated Rankin & Bass The Hobbit, appears as an unknown prophet on an alien planet that looks like Mos Eisley, isn’t ever going to lose me completely. We seem not to be in Kansas anymore, and this high up in the sublime tornado of chaotic-evil cinema, we’re probably doomed to fall.
Yet, amazingly, The Visitor holds up its end of the bargain. It is only when we cut to a basketball game that the real mystery of the film reveals itself: how is it that essentially unknown director Giulio Paradisi never made another horror film, and his subsequent two films were apparently easy-going Italian comedies, before he unceremoniously never directed again? The Visitor’s opening basketball game is a beautifully opaque textual object, a killer opening to a film that is a bricolage of genres and textures and uncanny thematic and technical juxtapositions revealing a director of real mettle and a vision of extraordinary curiosity. This is a stupendously unsettling game of hoops, a cut-up event in which the camera floats around with haunting observational acuity, like a deconstruction of a sporting event from a ghost’s alienated perspective.
Perhaps even more interesting: a latter combination gymnastics event/bullet-removal surgery sequence (you know, one of those type-deals) clarifies that much of The Visitor is an experiment in mobilizing giallo-style filmmaking for primarily non-kill sequences. While some of the set-pieces do technically result in dead bodies, as in a phenomenal bird-in-a-car dive bomb, even they are far-removed from the giallo’s usual stalking ground. Instead, we explore everything from public sporting events to overcrowded hospitals to an abandoned apartment building to the innards of machinery scaffolding, each of which the film turns into a genuinely ethereal cinematic experiment in sheer observation.
Early in Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh and Benny Safdie (they co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein) gift us, and themselves, a visual metaphor that is simply too irresistible to pass up. After a prologue set in the blood-diamond mines of Ethiopia, a telephoto lens zooms deep into the crevices of an iridescent gem, as though excavating the soul of the diamond. The image becomes an increasingly amorphous, abstract canvas of raw colors and even rawer conundrums, an obliquely sublime carnival of sheer sensory overload. Before, that is, it finally mutates into the innards of a scan of protagonist Harold Ratner’s colon. A wonderfully grotesque metaphor for the film’s ability to find beauty in the detestable and atrociousness in the beautiful, it’s also a recognition of the ease with which the audience might overlook the violence that undergirds the artifacts of late capitalism. The cloacal excursion is a surprisingly pure encapsulation of the film itself, a sojourn into this man’s psychological innards that expose the webs of social entanglement that both construct him as himself and that invite him to believe that he can actually mobilize them for his gain before finally setting him adrift in a void of delusional egotism.
The film? It works pretty well. It’s a bit of a pity that it never develops beyond this initial, beautifully lurid metaphor, or finding variations on it. I can’t help but feel that something got lost, an intangible something missing somewhere between the anus and the mine, betwixt the film’s play of the absurd, the wonderful, and the violent. The Safdie Brothers’ Good Time was nearly my favorite film of 2017, a scintillating acid-bath of 21st century brutality and a frayed raw-nerve of psychological and architectural disarray. Uncut Gems is bigger, has more polish, and is at times more intoxicating, but it essentially repeats and in some ways reduces the formula, and like the gem at the center of the tale, it sometimes feels a bit more like the crystalline craftsmanship hides a black hole. It plays at larger thematic and geopolitical concerns, but these were already present in the earlier film, lodged between a dye pack and a hard place, and making the gestures explicit doesn’t necessarily make the film itself smarter. While it hits the ground running, it also has only, essentially, one tonal note to play from beginning to end. Despite the opening metaphor, Uncut Gems sometimes seems to work like its protagonist, so blinded by the rush of its own momentum and the thrill of its own formal beauty that it cannot quite see the full picture, let alone recognize how trapped in holding pattern it may be.
The rush is a rush, admittedly, and the thrill is, for the most part, honestly earned. This is a film that does everything in its power to evoke the choking atmosphere of sheer possibility, the way that the belief that we have an open field of play actually compresses us and squeezes the life out of us. It has a forbidding forcefield of a sonic palate that somehow manages to constrict us in the act of opening itself up, like a carnivorous plant releasing spores of sparkling metallic dust drawing any intrepid wanderer into its vise. Daniel Lopatin’s exquisite synthesizer score often seems like a demonic emanation from the gem itself, an alien artifact that is seldom seen but which organizes lines of human physical and mental energy in its name. The gem, like the score, weighs on us even when it remains invisible. When Howard cuts through the New York City streets at a pace between a strut and a shuffle, unable to stop or even look in another direction, the metallic glisten of the score takes on a gravitational quality, ever pulling him toward a forward that is actually just a spiral.
Add to that a sound mix that summons a swarm of voices and competing dialogues always threatening Howard’s supremacy in the frame, and the film starts to seem like an anti-Altman film that utilizes a dense, heterogeneous soundscape not to spread out and wander (as Altman does) but to narrow in on us and imply tightening forces that are only semi-visible but that sculpt and shrink its protagonists’ field of possibility nonetheless. The Darius Khondji cinematography is also pretty thorny, a harsh melding of vicious realism and garish ethereality, New York City greasiness and gossamer glow. For a film that traces unexpected lines of connection between all forms of matter and the entrails of one man’s belief that he can transcend them by riding the chaos of the international market to his betterment, this is stellar, pointed filmmaking. Each of these tools evokes the sense of raw potential in the air, some dormant energy all around us that invites us to search for it and weaponize it even as it is secretly using us, like a strange shimmer beckoning you that is secretly a shiv at your throat.
The Long Take 