Two Midnight Screenings were originally intended for publishing this week, but they got a little long individually and separating them seemed more appropriate. Besides, more than any other film I can think of, this week’s entry stands on its own.
Sometimes you wander into the wilds of film land and come back a changed person. Sometimes, however, a film grabs you kicking and screaming into the wilds and you aren’t even afforded the privilege of returning a changed person, and the challenge of writing about such a film dumbfounds and exercises the mind beyond its safely mechanical, utilitarian qualities. Ladies and gentlemen, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House.
Released in 1977, the perplexing and ever-inquisitive House (Hausa in its native Japanese) defies expectation and thumbs its nose at common sense, knocking down the pieces of classical Japanese Kabuki ghost stories before it even sets them up. Obayashi’s “horror” doesn’t begin until the audience is well within the film’s vortex, entrapped in its visionary milieu. Well before anything that even rumors to chill the spine, Obayashi has already lulled us into his alarmingly postmodern variation on everything from irrepressible teenage determinism and heightened melodrama to Harlequin romance to the backstages of film production.
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Just when I’d gotten over using “new” films for the weekly Midnight Screenings column, a film had to come along that would have been unethical to put anywhere but in the halls of the Midnight Screening. Next week we’ll return to older films, with an especially fitting two-fer of classic ’70s efforts important to the development of the Midnight Screening idea in real life and not simply on the internet. It promises fun, but in the meantime just check out that movie poster to the left. Seriously, even if you don’t read the review (which you absolutely should, if I have anything to say about it), just bask in the look of that poster. It speaks for itself. 
Repulsion
It’s been a couple weeks, so here’s a double-dip of classic cult comic book movies for you, and some prime so-bad-its-good filmmaking on both counts. 
It’s been a couple weeks, so here’s a double-dip of classic cult comic book movies for you, and some prime so-bad-its-good filmmaking on both counts. 
Update mid-2019: With the release of a jokey, essentially hesitant new Shaft film that seems more frightened of the possibility of a serious African-American hero than skillfully parodying the same archetype, the original 1971 film’s defiantly un-hesitant seriousness is bracing to this day. Cutting both American politics and the elephantine girth of ’60s Hollywood productions down to size, there’s a fugitive simplicity at the core of Shaft, a no-nonsense vision of black empowerment that simultaneously seems uncertain about whether it is truly achieving anything politically. As a film, it’s both a blunt portrait of a rapidly neoliberalizing America and, despite its black heroism, a skeptic when it comes to the question of whether this “sex machine to all the chicks” is truly the hero who will lead us after the fire next time.
Update 2019: Another viewing, and the sensibility of The Warriors intrigues me even more than last time. While Walter Hill’s film feigns late ’70s New Hollywood realism at times, it’s a mislabelling, and perhaps an intentionally teasing one. Rather than presuming access to the “reality” of the lives of these youthful characters, Hill creates a world out of time, a big, poisonous apple that animates its characters’ interior psychologies – their aspirations to stave off the doldrums of youth by abstracting their own identities and turning themselves into heroic caricatures – but seems to keep the protagonists at a melancholic remove. It’s as though the city is their playground, but it can’t be their home.
I apologize for the temporary absence of the weekly Midnight Screening from this blog for the better part of the month of November. I was too busy elsewhere and found myself too distracted with other reviews. I justified it to myself by reminding myself I had published three full length reviews instead of the usual one for the final week of October, but, seeing as I didn’t tell you all playing at home about this, that’s not an excuse. I’ll try to be better about staying consistent and giving a heads-up when things are to change. On the positive side, I can’t think of a better film to re-start the series with than this week’s entry. Consider it an apology. Enjoy.
I Walked with a Zombie was the second film Val Lewton produced once given complete control of RKO’s horror unit, and it was released only a year after Cat People, his most famed horror film. Given this, one might expect a retread, but I Walked with a Zombie is certainly not the film anyone then or now would be expecting. A tension seethes in the air and grasps all, but the film doesn’t demand in the way a work like Cat People is so tersely constructed to fight for our attention. Absent are the soul-deep colors of Cat People which lighted up the screen with black energy. And in place of the rampant diluted German Expressionism of American horror throughout the ’30s and ’40s, all caught up in harsh and angular nightmares, we have something that more closely approximates a hazy dream, a curious cross between an English period drama and a work of French impressionism that centers mournful, elegiac long takes and has room enough for lost secrets deviously begging to get out . It is, above all, wholly distant from anything resembling horror logic, and it is all the more fascinating for it.
Update in late 2019 with the release of Dark Fate: The glum and more self-consciously morose later sequels track, recode, and needlessly convolute this film’s elegant, inescapable trudge toward oblivion, shading and sharding Cameron’s original vision in various ways, but they all completely miss the original’s brilliance: its sense of soul-death. Nominally an action film but far divorced from the self-amused tone of the Schwarzenegger pictures that were in the can as soon as this one made a fortune, The Terminator is as implacable and monosyllabic as its namesake: a blood-and-guts slasher film in a metallic overcoat, and one with significantly less Pavlovian satisfaction at the death it deals. Brutal simplicity at its finest, The Terminator essays a dystopic future that ultimately, tragically, realizes its far-flung visions of eventual catastrophe already came to pass in the present while it wasn’t looking. How far this franchise has fallen …
The Long Take 