Look: I get it. It’s a horror comedy. True, the non-horror comedy parts were a bit shopworn. Of course the neurotic guy’s phobias include clowns, and when a zombie clown finally appears, of course he says “Look at this fucking clown.” Of course the redneck carries a banjo he uses as a weapon, and when he uses it to lure out zombies, of course he plays “Dueling Banjos” on it. And of course the junk food he’s obsessed with is fucking Twinkies.

But the horror-comedy aspects were pretty top drawer. I’m sort of astonished by the credit sequence, for example. A series of shockingly gory kills, played for laughs, shot in super slow-mo so they look like a cross between one of those stagey horror photos by Whatsisname and that Spike Jonze video with the burning guy chasing the bus (referenced outright, by the way), and soundtracked by the ever-awesome “For Whom the Bell Tolls”? Add in the slightly overripe, saturated color palette that medium-budget studio efforts all seem to use these days, and the whole opening plays like an Opposite Sketches version of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. Hey, well played!

The four main characters, they’re okay. Jesse Eisenberg must feel about Michael Cera the way Gollum feels about the Ring–he hates and loves him, as he hates and loves himself–but he’s pretty game in this the second film in which he’s a one-man Cera cover band who has some adventures in an amusement park. Woody Harrelson’s genial shitkicker is woefully underbaked, a collection of pro forma cliches that coasts entirely on Harrelson’s CV full of genial shitkickers, but that meant I could pretend this was an unofficial sequel to Natural Born Killers, which was a ton of fun. It’s entirely plausible that Harrelson played this role while all the while thinking of himself as an older, slightly mellower, but no less lethal Mickey Knox. Abigail Breslin is spunky and seems to be aging into teen roles pretty gracefully, while the other girl they gave the raccoon-eye make-up to was fine in a cute tough girl with a soft streak kinda way. Mostly I like dark-haired girls in jeans and t-shirts with rock and roll make-up, so, you know, mission accomplished there.

And the movie had its moments. I liked the fourth-wall-busting use of Columbus’s “rules,” popping up and getting knocked around by the action. Riffs a little bit on Tarantino, presages what I’m assuming will happen in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim movie, which you can’t help but think about when you’re watching a post-Shaun of the Dead zombie comedy starring a guy who’d play the other Michael Cera character if they did a new version of The Twelfth Night. Great bit with the girl from the next apartment. Some nice music on the soundtrack, “Oh Sweet Nothing,” “Kingdom of Rust,” ” Everybody Wants Some.” And though it was thoroughly spoiled for me by now, great cameo.

But then! They fucking kill the guy, act like it’s no more big a deal than if they broke his television, crack jokes during his death, dump his body off his balcony, and carry on having target practice and goofing around and doing the romantic-comedy bit as though nothing had happened. FUCK that. I seriously almost walked out. Not because I was so ouuuuuutraaaaaaged or anything, but because how the fuck could I care about anything else that happened? Like I said, I get it: It’s a horror comedy. But it’s a horror comedy predicated on the notion that these four people grow to care about each other and act accordingly–I mean, you could see that ending coming a mile away. (Though its wonky timeline was a surprise.) And yet they run into another living person, a person that for reasons I won’t spoil they already feel enormously attached to, a person who’s being really, really nice to them–and, might I add, a person who was in a far better and more tonally consistent horror comedy!!! And then they fucking kill him and act like they don’t care? Blam, there goes the whole movie. I was thrown so far out of it it was like someone hit the eject button. I didn’t care about Tallahassee’s tragic backstory anymore, I sure as shit didn’t care about the romance, I didn’t care about the pointless “big climactic battle” at the amusement park. Totally, utterly movie-ruining misstep. To paraphrase the movie itself, “[NAME REDACTED] was a photo in someone’s wallet, too.”

* The theme for today at Robot 6 was people interpreting other people’s work. Besides this impressive sneak peek at an upcoming theatrical adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl…

…there’s also Tony Millionaire doing Achewood, Ryan Dunlavey & ToyFare’s excellent comic-strip mash-ups, and Dustin Harbin’s Dune book club–featuring art by Paul Pope, Dustin, and lots of other folks.

* Speaking of Paul, I love his dirty drawings.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews The Best American Comics 2009. Heck, Tom Spurgeon reviews a comic!

* Curt Purcell gives Blackest Night its midterm progress report. He’s not that impressed. That’s fine. What’s irking me (and Curt’s not guilty of this so much as the reviewers he links to, who fall all over themselves to find inventive new put-downs) is the fashionable new response to Johns’s work among many comics critics, which is that he likes Hal Jordan too much and therefore he stinks. I’m sorry but the idea that he likes Hal Jordan more than, say, Grant Morrison likes Bruce Wayne or Kal-El is ludicrous.

* Keep posting Cold Heat stuff on your blog and I’ll keep linking, Frank Santoro.

* Jeet Heer discusses what he thinks The Comics Journal has done well lately, and by implication what it’s done not-so-well. I think they’re simply at the mercy of whoever wants to do reviews and criticism for that publication anymore. I love that they’ll pay me to talk to Josh Cotter for an hour, but I’d rather read something and post a review of it that same day than read something that’s a few months old and watch the review come out a few months after that. I’ll be curious to see if the new site gets involved in the day-to-day discussion again.

* My wife is pretty. And pale.

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days

Al Columbia, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

240 pages, hardcover

$28.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

At SPX this year, a friend of mine approached Al Columbia for a sketch in his themed sketchbook. Columbia started drawing, didn’t like it, tore out the page, crumpled it up. Started drawing again, didn’t like that one either, tore out the page, crumpled it up. Told my friend he couldn’t do it with all the noise and distractions in the room. Stopped drawing sketches for anyone for the rest of the day, except for a tiny circle-dot-dot-curve smiley face next to his signature for anyone who purchased a copy of this book. After I heard this story I told it to a couple of friends. One remarked that if he’d been forced to concoct a story about what trying to get a sketch from Al Columbia would be like, this would have been it. Another said he’d agree with that assessment, but only if Columbia had been paid for the work first.

Al Columbia may be the closest alternative comics has come to producing a Syd Barrett, an Axl Rose, a Sly Stone, a Kevin Shields, a sandbox-era Brian Wilson, or heck, a Steve Ditko–a prodigious, world-beating talent chased off stage by his own…ugh, I don’t want to say demons, but even if you ascribe Columbia’s Big Numbers flameout and lack of published work post-Biologic Show to perfectionism, surely perfectionism that total and unforgiving is a demon of a kind.

The genius of Pim & Francie is harnessing the power of that demon–whatever it is or was that led Columbia to abandon his impossibly immaculate conceptions of monstrousness and murder half-drawn on the page time and time again–and deploying it as a conscious aesthetic decision. Reproducing unfinished roughs, penciled-in and scribbled-out dialogue, half-inked panels, torn-up and taped-together pages, even cropping what look like finished comics so that you can’t see the whole thing, Columbia and his partners in the production of this book, Paul Baresh and Adam Grano, have produced a fractured masterpiece, a glimpse of the forbidden, an objet d’art noir. As I wrote on Robot 6 the other day:

my favorite thing about Columbia’s comics–many of which can now be found in his new Fantagraphics hardcover Pim and Francie–is how they look like the product of some doomed and demented animation studio. It’s as though a team of expert craftsmen became trapped in their office sometime during the Depression and were forgotten about for decades, reduced to inbreeding, feeding on their own dead, and making human sacrifices to the mimeograph machine, and when the authorities finally stumbled across their charnel-house lair, this stuff is what they were working on in the darkness.

The horror of Columbia’s sickly-cute Pim & Francie vignettes–a zombie story, a serial-killer story, a witch-in-the-woods story, a haunted-forest story, a trio of chase sequences–is extraordinarily effective. And the stand-alone images both inside and outside those stories–the Beast of the Apocalypse as story-book fawn, a field of horrid man-things staring right at you, a broken-down theme park and the phrase “there’s something wrong with grandpa,” a forest of crying trees, some dreadful being of black flame running full-tilt down the basement stairs, zombie Grandma stopping her dishwashing and glancing up toward where the children sleep–are as close as comics have come (hate to keep using that formulation, but there you have it) to the girls at the end of the hall in The Shining, the chalk-white face of the demon flashing at us in Father Karras’s dream in The Exorcist, the inscrutable motionlessness of characters in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. The craft involved in their creation is simply remarkable, with Columbia’s assuredness of line, faux-vintage aesthetic, and near-peerless use of blacks all actually gaining from his panels’ frequent extreme-close-up enlargement throughout the collection.

But moreover, these scary stories and disturbing images are all so gorgeously awful that they appear to have corrupted the book itself. They look like they’ve emerged from the ether, seared or stained themselves partly onto the pages, then burned out, or been extinguished when the nominal author shut his sketchbook and hurled it across the room or tore up the pages in terror. It’s comic book as Samara’s video from The Ring, Lemarchand’s box from Hellraiser, Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon from Lovecraft, the titular toy from Stephen King’s “The Monkey”–an inherently horrific object. Bravo.

In the long list of things that Nigel Tufnel was right about, “there’s a fine line between stupid and clever” is right up near the top. Which side of that line Paranormal Activity falls on has been bedeviling me since I (finally) saw it Halloween afternoon. Just by way of a for instance, while we chatted about the film in the lobby, I complained to the folks I saw it with about the demonologist who never barked. If the filmmakers were never going to actually put him in the movie, why introduce the concept in the first place? It left me with this weird sensation that either a chunk of the movie had gone missing, or the filmmakers just didn’t have that much of a grasp on what they were doing. But then my wife theorized that maybe that truncated feeling was the point–the movie gets you believing that this demonologist will show up “in a few days,” so when the end comes and he’s still nowhere in sight, it’s all the more shocking. Which got me to thinking about how I’d spent most of the movie believing the climax would come on the night of October 31st, only for the proceedings to stop short several weeks before then. Then there was my brother’s paranormal-buff fiancee, who “explained” that this kind of haunting had to be “a demonic” rather than the work of a (formerly) human entity, so they needed to address this (the psychic telling them to hire a demonologist) without actually allowing it to fix the problem (Micah puts off calling him, and when Katie finally does, he’s out of town). You could probably go back and forth about all the other loose ends–the house fire, Katie’s sister, the haunting of Diane back in the ’60s–in a similar fashion.

Ditto the believability of the two main characters. I found Micah’s desire to get to the bottom of the haunting rather than wave the white flag, even when this ran counter to Katie’s express wishes, a totally credible trait; amusingly, my wife found his behavior so dickish as to shatter her suspension of disbelief. On the flip side, I thought the seams really showed on Katie’s performance during scenes where she was obviously required to express a certain sentiment or say a certain line; The Missus found her compelling and her story sad. That part we agree on, at least, which is why this post analogizing the story arc of Paranormal Activity to domestic violence has lodged itself in my head the way it has. Overall, again, it’s difficult to say whether the shortcomings of the characters are simply the fault of them as characters or the result of poor choices by the filmmakers.

And the scares? As I alluded to the other day, the film shares with The Hurt Locker a structural advantage: The second you’re placed in a certain environment (a mission/bedtime), you in the audience are prepped to have the shit scared out of you (by an explosion/by the haunting). Both films smartly let you do most of the work for them, letting you sit there, hearing the pounding of the blood in your ears, straining toward the screen to see what happens yet pushing back in your chair dreading it as well. Paranormal has the added advantage of doing for bedrooms what Psycho did for showers and Jaws did for beaches, transforming a familiar environment into a locus of horror–how much of the “scariest movie ever” buzz simply stems from people not being able to avoid their own bedrooms and therefore recalling the movie whether they want to or not? Ditto how deftly it works with the uncomfortable idea of being watched while you sleep–by a camera, by some malevolent entity, and (we’ll get to this again later) even by someone you love.

The difference between the two set-ups, of course, is that Kathryn Bigelow pretty much delivers something memorable every time, from world-class action sequences to gorgeous scenery to those haunting extreme close-ups of falling shells or shockwaves. Director Oren Peli, on the other hand, can really only show you a static shot of a bedroom or a shakicam shot of a living room, in night vision; at times, the “action” disappears into the darkness where you’re vaguely aware there’s something going on–the tug of war between Micah and the demon after it drags Katie out of bed is the best example–but can’t make it out. Once again, is this a deft use of parametric filmmaking or amateur hour?

With all these unsettled questions, there’d be no way I’d feel comfortable proclaiming this “the scariest movie ever made” even if I were inclined in that direction to begin with. Which (the moment you’ve been waiting for!) I’m not. With a couple of exceptions, there was nothing here you couldn’t get out of a particularly well done episode of A Haunting; in fact I can think of a moment from that series that scared me and The Missus worse than anything here. Because of the film’s abrupt ending, the sense of relentless pacing and crescendoing terror that characterizes (here it comes) The Blair Witch Project is absent. With it goes the gut-wrenching grinding down of the protagonists–Katie can collapse and cry on the floor all she wants, there’s still nothing here that approaches that desperate conversation between Heather and Mike as they droolingly rattle off their favorite foods, knowing they’ll probably never taste them again. There’s no sense that Micah and Katie have been driven to that desperate a strait, even after the thing yanks her out of bed and bites her.

A big part of the problem is that just like Micah (and Katie, prior to her final under-the-influence decision to stay), we in the audience can’t help but associate the haunting with the house. That’s what a million haunted-house movies and stories have taught us to do since time immemorial. Even ones that aren’t predicated on the location still tend to make tremendous use of it–cf. The Exorcist and how inseparable your memories of it are from that freezing cold, harshly illuminated bedroom. Paranormal Activity is similar: It does such a good job of violating domestic tranquility and transforming the bedroom, a place of comfort and refuge, into a horrorshow, that you can’t help but want to scream at them “Check into a hotel and hang out in the lobby overnight! Go to a Walgreen’s!” As hard as the movie works to establish that there’s no escape, it also never shows them trying and failing to do so (budget limitations, perhaps?), so we’re left wondering what-if and letting the air out of the scare. Heather, Josh, and Mike are lost in the woods; Micah and Katie could go grocery shopping or visit his mom or catch a flight to Hawaii if they wanted.

But all of this just keeps the movie from being an awesome stone-cold classic. I think it’s still a fine film, and largely for the same reasons it’s not a great one. All that ambiguity about the characters, the loose plot threads, whether or not they could have escaped–that’s still very interesting, even if you can’t nail it all down as a point in the film’s favor for certain. I find myself thinking “What if he’d done this? What if she’d tried that?” It’s giving me something to chew on.

And while nothing here genuinely freaked me out once I was in the comfort of my own home–something Blair Witch, The Exorcist, The Shining, and The Ring all managed to pull off, just to name a few–nor really traumatized me during the viewing–all those movies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Birds, Psycho, Hostel, The Descent, Hellraiser, Hellbound, etc etc–I can say that there were a few world-class horror images in here. Not the grunts and footprings, not the mysterious photograph, not the ouija board, not the shattered photograph, at least not for me. What got me were two things. For some reason, the lights being flipped on and off really got me. They weren’t flickering–something was walking around turning lights on and off. Not only was something else present in the house, it was basically using the house the way we would–only it was nothing like us in nature or intent. I dunno, that creeped me out pretty bad.

But best/worst of all were the two scenes where somnambulist Katie got out of bed, turned to face it, and just…stood there, for hours and hours. That’s pure automaton Freudian uncanny, of course, and a monumental horror-image par excellence. And it’s reminiscent of the original-edit ending of Blair Witch to boot–to this day the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in a movie–because there’s just no reason for it to be happening. It hits all my buttons, hard, as does the resolution of that first scene, where she walks away and Micah finally wakes up, following her down and out into the backyard, where she’s just swinging in a swing. These are actions that really have no inherent emotional or psychological content whatsoever. They’re purely neutral. But when you have no idea why someone’s doing them, even totally neutral actions can become sinister, almost intolerable. That much I’m sure about.