Okay, here’s the deal. I think it’s awesome if you go out and rent one of the movies I’ve been talking about based on what I’ve said–hell, I encourage you to do so, they’re all awesome, rent ’em all and go crazy. But I worry that you’ll end up disappointed and feel like I oversold them. It’s important to note that these are my favorite movies of all time. Okay, favorite horror movies only, but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t a disproportionately large chunk of my favorite movies period. So keep in mind that I’m pretty freaking enthusiastic about all of them because I looooooove them and want to have a million of their spawn babies.
On a related note, what is up with DVDs having menu sequences that reveal key plot points and climaxes of the films they contain? That is lame with a capital LAME. I understand that DVD purchases were once largely the domain of film buffs who likely had already seen the films they were buying, but now the things are available for rental, and are generally the format of choice for gifts and so on. As someone who doesn’t even read newspaper reviews or back-cover synopses for movies he hasn’t yet seen, you cannot imagine my fury at imagining someone having a movie spoiled by the DVD of that movie itself. So, word to the wise, particularly the wise who plan on renting Jeepers Creepers or Barton Fink–try to have someone else cue the movie up for you, or just mute it and close your eyes and just start hitting play frantically on your remote and then wait a few seconds until you’re reasonably sure the movie has started. And Hollywood–please, knock this off. This is the modern-day equivalent of that trend a few years ago where all the movie trailers were ungodly loud and gave away the endings of the films they were advertisements for. STOP IT.
Anyway, here are a couple more essays I dusted off and turned into PDFs for your perusal, both of them about the last two movies I reviewed. Here’s one about mind/body duality in Hellraiser and its sequel, the just-as-good Hellbound–it touches quite a bit on Cronenberg, too. And here’s one about the complicated narrative patterns of Lost Highway. This one betrays its origin as a very specific applied-jargon assignment in a film studies class, but I actually think the jargon I was made to use (syuzhet and fabula, meaning the plot as directly shown in the film and the larger, more cohesive narrative we construct in our heads from all the information gleaned from the syuzhet) helps to unravel this film quite a bit. Grab a beer or something and have fun finding out what those student loans of mine are still paying for.
Also, Jason Adams defends Ginger Snaps. Sorry, my friend, but not only did I not find this movie scary, but I didn’t find it moving or even involving, either. I thought the performances of the two lead girls were genuinely annoying, and in the case of the non-wolf sister, pretty much movie-killing. (I kept hoping she’d be replaced with a Dollhouse-era Heather Matarazzo halfway through the movie. No luck.) And believe me, I really wanted to like this film. Good, teen-girl-centric horror is impossible to come by, and the feminist magazines I read (Bust and Bitch) lauded this flick to the heavens. Unfortunately they were too preoccupied by the fact that the movie was “empowering” (and by the way, was it? the lycanthropy does not exactly work out well for everyone. I guess their point was that the movie depicts culturally-dictated female-teen virgin-whore sexuality as a death trap, and kudos for that; but these are the same folks who get angry about movies like The Craft for punishing girls for using supernatural powers indiscriminately (uh, hello guys, that’s not sexist, that’s just sane, not to mention par for the genre course–ever hear of “with great power comes great responsibility”?), so how they could miss the implicit message behind Ginger’s fate is completely beyond me. Digression over) to notice that it wasn’t particularly well done. Also, why aren’t werewolves furry anymore? They always look like mutant hairless rat fetuses now. Wolves are furry, people. Werewolves should be furry. Am I wrong? Are we not civilized people here?
Finally, Johnny Bacardi breaks his self-imposed silence and takes on my whole 13 Days of Halloween list, film by film. I’m doing pretty well by him so far–he agrees with my assessments of 3 out of 7, and offers conciliatory gestures on a couple more, so if this were being calculated like batting averages I’d be doing Hall-of-Fame numbers right now. I’m certainly not surprised to see my praise of movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Barton Fink throwing Johnny for a loop–like Lost Highway (see below) they’re divisive films by already divisive directors. I think in the case of all three, plus The Wicker Man (another one Johnny wasn’t quite down with), my love of the long take plays a role. Folks, nothing gets my film-lover Donkey Kong going like a luscious long take, the quieter the better, lots of slow movement and facial expressions and such. Mmmmm, Andre Bazin-y goodness. Unbreakable is practically porn for me. Ahem. Anyway, what I like about Johnny’s counter-list is that even where I disagree with him, I see the point he’s making. It forces me to reengage with the movie itself, to see if my conclusions hold water, or if they need refining or even abandoning. And my appreciation of the films, and of film, gets that much richer. See how that works? Hooray for blogs!
(As for his claim that The Shining is Kubrick’s career worst, let’s just say we’ll be having words in a few days…)