A nice, straightforward Horror Roundtable this week: “Name your favorite horror movie.” If you’d asked me that question on a different day you might have gotten a different answer, but I’m pleased with the answer I gave. Most interesting is how many participants were unable to pick a number one…

Scientists believe they’ve discovered the origin of déja vu. I always thought it had something to do with a short-term memory accidentally getting stored in the long-term memory bank, but rather it’s a question of a part of your brain called the dentate gyrus not properly processing a new situation that resembles a similar situation that happened in the past, leading you to believe that this exact situation happened in the past. This creepy phenomeon happens to me a lot, so I’m a little disturbed that the sensation is associated with Alzheimer’s. But sometimes I’m in the shower and I can’t remember if I shampooed already or not, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

Yo, cut it.

Several trailers for upcoming horror films of note have appeared online in the past few days.

First up is I Am Legend, the Will Smith-starring adaptation of Richard Matheson’s post-vampire-apocalypse novella. It’s actually rather interesting, or at least not annoying, which is what I thought it would be. Obviously showing how things got to the pass we’re at when the novella begins is a big change, as is setting the thing in Manhattan, but neither is necessarily bad, just different. Still, casting Will Smith and spending the amount of money they must have spent on this thing to shoot in New York and close the Brooklyn Bridge and so on would indicate that this is supposed to be a blockbuster, which frequently (though not always) proves inimical to the values that make post-apocalyptic horror interesting in the first place. We’ll see.

Next up is The Invasion, the latest incarnation of the thrice-remade sci-fi apocalyptic paranoia classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, this time starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. The trailer feels like a misstep to me, showing way too much of the movie and centering on a bored-of-it-already child-in-peril plot. But I’m struck by how much what we see here is indebted to the fast-zombie horror school of 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead, an interesting road to go down for this property. The leads show a lot of promise, of course.

Finally, there’s 30 Days of Night, based on the not actually very good graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith about vampires who besiege a small Alaskan town where the sun won’t come out for another month. The idea behind the book was much better than the book itself, which is why I hold out some hope for the movie, though the trailer comes across as over-the-top and cheesy. Still, that’s what most trailers tend to do, so who knows.

My post called “Meet the new boss,” on how the Museum of the Moving Image’s current ’70s/’00s horror film exhibition represents a new conventional wisdom that “good” horror films offer sociopolitical criticism (of America, for the most part) has attracted some interesting comments, most notably from “carolclover.”

First of all, if “carolclover” is in fact THE Carol Clover of Men, Women and Chainsaws fame, it’s a pleasure to have her visit my blog. (The reminds me of the time I was hanging around on the Comics Journal message board and wound up in a discussion with Scott Bukatman, and I said, “Wow, THE Scott Bukatman?” and Scott said “that’s definitely the first time anyone’s said THAT to me.”)

Anyway, carolclover writes:

I think you’re the one who’s taking the reductive view, if you’re really looking at the museum’s schedule for that series. What do Martin, Ichi the Killer, House by the Cemetery, It’s Alive, Bird with the Crystal Plumage, High Tension, Rabid, Carrie, The Descent, for example, really have to do with either Iraq or Vietnam? It’s a thematically wide-ranging and well-selected series of contemporary and 1970s horror (both particularly fecund periods for the genre).

I tried to be clear in my original post that while Iraq and Vietnam are the foremost targets of the horror-film-as-political-commentary set (for obvious reasons), I didn’t mean they’re the only targets; that was the point of bringing up Night of the Living Dead‘s resonance with issues of race. Also, I don’t deny that the 1970s and today are fecund periods for the genre, though again I believe the omission of the intervening years speaks more to an absence of the kind of genre exemplars for which the curators were searching, and a perceived similarity between the films being made in those two time periods, than any kind of comment on the relative fecundity of those periods.

So. Regarding the politics of the Museum’s festival, here’s the introductory paragraph on the handout available at the Hostel 2: Part II screening:

Horror movies are currently enjoying a resurgence in production, popularity, and inventiveness unparalleled since the rise of th eindie horror movement in the 1970s. Today’s Splat Pack directors–Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, and Alexandre Aja among them–draw direct inspiration from the earlier generation’s masters, including John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and George A. Romero. Then and now, the best horror movies are transgressive and powerful, challenging taboos and offering social commentary while delving deeply into our darkest desires and fears.

And here are sample quotes from the write-ups for the individual films:

The American Nightmare: “examine[s] the 1970s horror renaissance against the backdrop of war and social turmoil.”

A Clockwork Orange: “In Kubrick’s sardonic view, Alex’s sadism is more than equaled by the violence of the state.”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: “a rural Texas family of laid-off slaughterhouse workers who consume everything in their path” (consume!–ed.)

Panel discussion – “Considering Horror”: panelists “examine the aesthetic, cultural, and political implications of contemporary and 1970s horror films.” (The panelists include the Village Voice’s Nathan Lee, perhaps the foremost “it’s about Bush” film critic in the country, incidentally.)

The Hills Have Eyes: “Craven’s innovative horror film is an attack on pollution and on middle-class American life.”

The Hills Have Eyes (2006): “Aja’s visually and thematically startling film expands the original’s critique of ‘nuclear’ family.”

The Host: “This hilarious and pointedly topical movie about a rampaging mutant lizard has many satirical targets, including American foreign policy and environmental recklessness.”

It’s Alive: “With his distinctive blend of iconoclastic humor, social satire, and genre mastery, maverick director Larry Cohen unleashes a domestic and environmental nightmare”

Bug: “A woman and her boyfriend, a Gulf War veteran convinced he has been purposely infested with infects, spiral into paranoia in an Oklahoma motel room.”

Dawn of the Dead: “Snyder (300) remakes George A. Romero’s satire of consumerism, with zombies surrounding a shopping mall in post-apocalypse surburbia”

Dead of Night: “A fallen Vietnam soldier returns as a zombie in this scathing satire by the late Bob Clark…one of the first movies to deal with the impact of Vietnam on the American psyche.”

Homecoming: “Slain soldiers return from Iraq as zombies intent on voting republicans out of office in this bold and inventive satire. In The Village Voice, Dennis Lim hailed it as ‘easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era.'”

George A. Romero’s Martin: “an unsettling study of post-adolescent alienation, religious fanaticism, and urban decay.”

28 Weeks Later: “The U.S. military takes over the reconstruction of plague-ravaged England, then loses control of the country to a zombie-fueled insurgence…smartly satirical.” (insurgence!–ed.)

The Last House on the Left: “Craven’s Vietnam-era rape-and-revenge tale…pits the counterculture Stillo family against the bourgeois Collingwoods.”

The festival also includes Hostel and (obviously) Hostel: Part II, as well as Carrie (which, DePalma-isms aside, is pretty clearly “about” American suburbia, gender politics, and religiosity). And it’s surely no coincidence that the first film to be screened at the Museum itself is The American Nightmare–as all of the above indicate, that’s the exhibition’s thesis statement. Ichii, Final Destination 3, The House by the Cemetary, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage–it seems clear to me that these are the exceptions, not the rule. It also seems abundantly clear exactly what that rule is.

So I’ve been promoted at work to Online Managing Editor, helping to run WizardUniverse.com. Why do I bring this up? Because if you’re reading this blog there’s a very good chance you’ll like the site, which frequently features extensive coverage of the kinds of movies and comics and TV shows I yak about here.

For example, I already mentioned our interview with Hostel: Part II director Eli Roth. But wait, there’s more!

Here’s a report on the recent Battlestar Galactica season four press event by our new West Coast Editor (and my old boss from my Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly days) Savas Abadsidis. Old-school Cylons and the sex organs of Jamie Bamber and Katee Sackhoff are involved.

Here’s an interview by Kiel Phegley with cartoonist Eddie Campbell on The Black Diamond Detective Agency, his new graphic-novel thriller.

Here’s Andy Serwin waxing enthusiastic about The Immortal Iron Fist by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja, one of the best superhero titles on the stands today and a must-read for fans of the Kill Bill school of pasticheur pulp.

And as always, I’m pontificating about the week’s comics–specifically Detective Comics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight, New Warriors, Iron Man, Midnighter, Sock Monkey: The “Inches” Incident, Supergirl, and Superman–at Thursday Morning Quarterback.

Something for everybody! Especially if you’re me.

What’s up, new recurring feature?

I was watching a TiVo’d episode of MTV2’s alterna/indie music video show Subterranean–sort of the heir to 120 Minutes–and came across this clip: “D.A.N.C.E.” by Justice, an act signed to Ed Banger (Daft Punk’s vanity label) and Vice Records. About 45 seconds into it, I said in a stunned voice, “This is like T-shirt porn!” This led me to be mocked savagely by my wife, but hey, I am who I am.

A lot of the designs sported here are a little too design-y for my taste, but there’s plenty of great, simple, solid ideas in there too, and the basic concept is dazzling. Enjoy!

If you could remake an ’80s movie, what would it be?

“Caddyshack II.”

You’d do it as a horror movie?

No, I’d just remake f—ing “Caddyshack II”! They really f—ed it up. It could have been amazing. I want to remake it, just f—ing start from scratch and pretend the other one never existed. That’s a franchise I’d really like to take a crack at.

—Eli Roth, interviewed by Chris Ward at Wizard

Tom Spurgeon likes my comic in the Elfworld indie-fantasy comics anthology! It’s called “Destructor Comes to Croc Town,” it has a story by me and art by the great Matt Wiegle, and you might like it too. Why not find out by buying the book?

The audience member at Wednesday’s screening/Q&A who put Eli Roth on the defensive about a particular scene in Hostel: Part II, as I mentioned in my review, turns out to be writer S.T. VanAirsdale of The Reeler. Here’s his extremely negative take on the movie, and on Roth’s work in general–including a complete transcript of his back and forth with Roth.

Last night’s Hostel: Part II screening was sponsored by the Museum of the Moving Image. It was the kick-off for a month-long exhibition called “It’s Only a Movie: Horror Films from the 1970s and Today”. Not “to Today,” mind you–“and Today.” A quick look at the films selected and the descriptions offered thereof will clue you in as to why this choice was made: Sociopolitical commentary, specifically about Vietnam and/or Iraq (two wars that are, apparently, completely interchangeable) is the new rubric by which critics are judging the quality of horror films. This is obviously something I’ve discussed before, but I’m kind of stunned to see how rapidly the new CW has solidified, to the point where bien pensant cultural institutions are using it as an excuse to ignore fully two decades of work in the genre in favor of the fashionably allegorical.

It’s not that I don’t think this criticism is present in many of these films–of course it is, even if the filmmakers have now been well and duly trained, post-The American Nightmare, to cry My Lai, Kent State, and Abu Ghraib on cue. Nor is it that I think the criticism isn’t justified. Nor is it that I think it’s not an interesting avenue of exploration–you’d kind of have to be stupid to see Night of the Living Dead and not want to talk about, say, the Watts riots (or to see Hostel: Part II and not talk about the use of attack dogs in interrogations by American military personnel, for that matter).

The problem?

A) It’s reductive. Ten years ago, while studying horror films in college, I discovered that the only acceptable mode of discourse was rooted in issues of gender and sexuality. Again, that stuff is present, and pointed, and interesting. But that’s not all there is.

B) It’s incomplete. This is a fine and dandy way to “explain” the American brutal-horror cycles of the ’70s and ’00s, and close cousins of this theory involving the Red Scare and Weimar can “explain” ’50s sci-fi and German expressionist horror flicks respectively. But what about ’30s Universal pictures and ’50s Hammer horror and ’60s Hitchcock and ’80s slashers and ’90s meta-movies and The Sixth Sense and The Ring and, and, and? Who had Japan and Korea invaded when Ichii the Killer and Audition and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance were made?

B) It’s pat. It gives filmmakers easy justification for what they’re doing and critics an easy way to avoid actually engaging with what makes these films tick, for better and, as in the case of the actually-not-very-good The Host, for worse. As Jon Hastings has written, it also gives them a lame out for justifying their declasse appreciation for genre work.

C) It’s safe. If all good horror movies are about bad American policies, then if you don’t support those policies, you really have nothing to worry about. I mean, you can be scared of Those Brutes, but that’s not all that difficult, is it? I don’t like the idea that you can avoid being implicated in the horror simply by, say, voting for Barack Obama.

Seriously, people.

I’m not kidding about this.

I blow the ending and the surprises and everything.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

Everyone gone who doesn’t want to be here?

Good.

Hostel: Part II

There’s no other way to slice it so I might as well lead off by saying it: Hostel: Part II is nowhere near as good as the original.

This is not to say it’s a poorly made movie. Just like the first one, it’s frequently, nearly always in fact, gorgeous to look at. During the Q&A that followed the screening I attended yesterday, Eli Roth said that his years of experience as everything from a P.A. to an A.D. on movies with budgets ranging from $100,000 to $100,000,000 taught him how money is wasted on movies before he ever helmed one himself. “I think I know how to spend the money on-screen,” he said, and he does, from that breathtaking ruined-factory shot to the torture props.

And there are occasional–occasional–moments of great wit and intelligence, the stuff from which the first movie was constructed. The cryptic warning offered by the apparently sole decent human being left in the Slovakian town where the torture-factory is located was a knowing callback to horror films past, a creepy bit of foreshadowing like the drunk at the cemetery in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or the old man who warns Ned Beatty “you don’t know nothin'” in Deliverance. There’s an equally enjoyable Aliens shout-out at the beginning, too.

Gems on the movie’s own terms can be found as well. The fact that female members of the “hunting club” receive the bloodhound tattoo on their lower back, party-girl style, is a welcome example of the first film’s keen eye for the downside of modern-day gender politics. A set piece involving competing bids for the privilege of torturing American women to death, shown in quick cuts between an ever-widening network of wealthy businessmen and women the world over, elicited audible “oh my God“s from the audience as it conveyed the sheer scope of the torture operation, and hammered home the “no one is innocent” message. When you figure out early on that two American-businessmen customers of the torture factory will be our main characters alongside the trio of turistas, it seems that, as an exploration of man’s inhumanity to (wo)man to rival the first film, this one’s off to a good start.

But it doesn’t go much further than that, I’m afraid. In the Q&A, Roth said that his motto for making the movie was “the next level,” a raison d’etre he said was best served by making the film more “operatic,” more “cinematic.” “I wanted to let people know that hey, it’s only a movie.” Well, mission accomplished. The incisive sadness and genuine horror of the first has been replaced by gialli-by-way-of-Studio-City revenge plots, stylized murder set pieces, and splatstick as a substitute for character-based story resolution.

Ultimately, the believability of the characters in the first Hostel made the film frightening–think the Dutch businessman’s speech about the closet to his future victim, think the German’s horror at hearing his victim speak his language, think the almost elegiac scene in the dive bar when Paxton tracks down the two women who’d made his friends disappear, finding them half-drunk and shrouded in smoke, their make-up and glamor stripped away. In place of that, we have Heather Matarazzo playing to the cheap seats as a nerd straight out of a Disney live-action comedy, the alpha-male American stereotype from the first film stretched out to an unmanageable length, and a final girl who all but instantly morphs into a the kind of two-dimensional victim-become-victimizer who makes with quips before she chops people’s heads off. You know how the basic concept behind the ending of the first film was easily the toughest part of the whole movie to swallow, but the spoonful of sugar, in the form of razor-sharp performances and cinematography plus a psychologically desperate tone, made it work? This one’s a horse pill of artifice with nothing to help you choke it down.

The Slovakian setting gets infused with unreality, too. The wink-wink return of the hostel’s desk clerk, best known for his behind-the-scenes origin as a local production assistant and Star Wars fan club president who ended up with the role when the professional actor bailed, is lingered on for far too long; “it’s only a movie” indeed. Meanwhile, the village festival, handsomely shot though it may be, appears to consist more of half-remembered costumes from The Wicker Man and mondo movies than any real research into local customs.

And the ending! The most shocking ending EVAR turns out to be a guy’s dick getting cut off and fed to a dog, followed by a woman being decapitated and her head being used by little kids as a soccer ball. Shockingly, I’m not describing the end of the new Toxic Avenger sequel! Because that’s exactly how these things are filmed, folks–as a laff, complete with those quick extreme close-up shots that are Troma’s trademark. (Think an even goofier version of the ending of Death Proof.) I definitely laughed and cheered and clapped–the way the film’s set up, it’s impossible not to, as impossible as not feeling repulsed by the torture scenes. But the sensation wasn’t any deeper a satisfaction than laughter from getting tickled. When I told Roth that I thought the comedy element might not have been a good thing and asked him why he went so over the top, he said “I wanted people to leave the theater feeling good.” Well, I walked away from the computer screen feeling good the first time I saw that hilarious fake trailer he made for Thanksgiving. But I wanted more than the gore equivalent of a knee-slapper for the climax to the sequel to one of the most powerful films I’ve seen in years, you know? At least two other should-be-huge character-rooted moments of violence are marred by rimshot-shots as well. Why bother, man?

The funny thing is that there are two scenes that are not funny at all in this movie, two scenes among the most unpleasant I’ve ever watched: the Heather Matarazzo bloodbath sequence and, in what I’m sure will be the most controversial scene in the movie, the execution of a child. Roth said that the former created the most trouble for the movie with the MPAA because the look of terror and pain on Matarazzo’s face was so convincing. “Would it be okay if she gave a bad performance?” he asked them. “Well, yeah, actually,” they replied. “Then don’t punish us for doing a good job!” he argued, and won. And they did do a good job, so good that you spend those minutes, watching a nude woman hanging upside down, crying and screaming for help, while her skin is cut to ribbons, kind of wondering what the fuck you’re doing here. The giallo influence Roth was mainlining is particularly strong in that sequence–velvet fabrics, candlelight, decadent naked Eurobabe, scythes, the aestheticized abuse of women. If we’re just going end with yuks, what’s the point?

This goes double for the murder of children. Another questioner really put Roth on the defensive about this, to the point where he was saying, “I’m not exploiting children here–plenty of movies have shown kids getting killed before.” But we’re not talking about City of God (which he cited), nor the handful of Italo-horror flicks he also rattled off–we’re talking about this movie, one that ends with a dick joke and a soccer game with a human head. “Awful shit really happens,” Roth explained. “I wanted to take the audience to that place where they’re completely horrified. I wanted the stunned silence.” Hey, hold a gun to a kid’s head and pull the trigger (offscreen, admittedly, but there’s a lengthy run up as the killer presses the barrel against the faces of every kid in the pack, and you see the body with blood running from it afterwards), and you’ll get that.

But if “it’s only a movie,” again, why?

From tragedy to farce.

The day job has some cool Battlestar Galactica features up on its site right now.

First up, there’s ToyFare magazine’s complete BSG episode guide for all three seasons and the miniseries, featuring the thoughts of pretty much the entire cast and crew.

Second, there’s a huge transcript of the recent conference call with Ron Moore and David Eick on BSG‘s fourth and final season, plus its movie-length prequel airing this fall. Tons of juicy stuff, including whether or not there will ever be a Battlestar movie after the series ends.

Because one of us is attending a sneak preview of Hostel: Part II–complete with a Q&A session with Eli Roth–tonight. Guess which one that would be?

+

4-EVA

Behold, Vinnie Jones as Mahogany, the killer, in Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train. God bless us, it looks like they’re making a real movie out of this.

(Pic from Shock Till You Drop, via Hellraiser Gallery.)

In a move that I’m sure will be totally helpful, some clowns in the UK are offering a $2 million bounty to anyone attending a rock festival in Loch Ness who comes up with proof that the monster exists. Break out the loony-detector van!

It turns out that the guy who took the recent “Loch Ness Monster” footage is what Monty Python would refer to as “a loony.”

While I certainly can’t speak for David [Chase], I will say that messages are not his style.

—Sopranos writer Terence Winter, The Sopranos Final Season TV Club, Slate.com

We’re doing the Monster Mash over at this week’s Horror Roundtable, singing the praises of underrated movie monsters. I’ve got a whole slew of choices, all of which have one thing in common…

I talk about the latest issues of Daredevil, New Avengers: Illuminati, Justice Society of America, Hellboy: Darkness Calls, and Wolverine in this week’s Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard. (Although it’s technically Friday Morning Quarterback this week.)