Shoot ‘Em Up is a shitty movie. I mean that literally: At least two scenes involve the feces of an infant being smeared across someone or something in all its brownish-green, Vertigo Comics color palette glory. The ostensible reason for this is because the movie involves a gunsel and a prostitute attempting to save a baby from assassins, and hence the baby shit. But the real reason is for the filmmakers to show us that that’s how far out they’ll go! That’s if you didn’t catch the part where they jammed a carrot through a guy’s throat, or through a guy’s eye. Or where a john looks up from Monica Bellucci’s awe-inspiring breasts with her milk dribbling down his chin. Or where another john moans and groans up against a dumpster as Bellucci sucks his cock off frame. Or where a woman who’s just given birth is shot in the head and left in a stairway by the hero with one breast exposed, with said exposed breast of a dead woman getting a close-up as our hero leaves, and another as the bad guy takes a look at her, and a third and final one a while later as the bad guy checks it out, lasciviously fondles it, then sniffs his hand after the fact.

In other words, Shoot ‘Em Up is an icky movie in which the shit-smearing is all too appropriate, because yes it’s far out, but it’s also unpleasant and who wants to see that? The fact that it’s knowingly far out–it is called Shoot ‘Em Up, after all–only makes things worse. Why should Paul Giamatti engage in necrophiliac groping in a movie whose ostensible goal is to be Kung Fu Hustle with shooting instead of kicking?

Maybe that tonal inconsistency will hook fans of stuff like The Host, but for me the laughs (well, “laughs,” because nothing in this is terribly funny except for one bit about drivers who don’t signal while changing lanes, a bit that’s immediately undone by a bout of wanton property destruction that is a lot more inconsiderate than our hero’s pet peeve about signaling), anyway for me the “laughs” don’t leaven the icky stuff at all–they make me feel like I’m being either pandered to or condescended to or both by that icky stuff by filmmakers who know better. I got the same vibe from the gun-control message that pops up rather incongruously in the fourth act. I totally get the point–there’s nothing about enjoying gun violence in the movies that makes gun violence okay in real life–but first of all that’s a truism, and second of all, again, there might as well be a subtitle reading “we’re slumming” running across the bottom of the screen every time Clive Owen shoots someone in the torso.

Thanks to the periodic Manly Movie Mamajamas that my friends and I get together for every few months–in which we gather at someone’s house, eat junk food, get drunk, and enjoy a triple bill of extremely macho movies–I’ve seen quite a few action films of ’80s vintage in the recent past. At last I understand why Reagan-era culture warriors thought movies like Rambo were undermining America’s moral fabric. This is because movies like Rambo were undermining America’s moral fabric. Rambo, Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Tango & Cash, Road House–it’s almost difficult to describe how gratuitously violent these films are, how much these films are unimaginable without violence, how much the violence is woven unthinkingly into what makes them work so goddamn well, unless you’ve seen them. They make Shoot ‘Em Up look like a Noel Coward comedy of manners. How? Allow me to demonstrate with this scene involving Mikhail, the bad guy from the 1985 Chuck Norris vs. invading Communists actioner Invasion U.S.A.. (Originally found at the wonderful So Bad It’s Good.)

Don’t bother trying to out-batshit-crazy a movie that contains a scene like that. You can’t! It isn’t knowing, it isn’t camp, it isn’t funny, it isn’t pretty, it isn’t prettified with in-jokes, irony, or Looney Tunes references. It’s approximately 90 minutes of people being shot to death with machine guns–cops, bystanders, women in shopping malls, office workers, Cubans, fucking everybody. It’s insane, a gleeful kind of crazy you can only get from the movies. I love it. I’m sure it was made as a cheap cash-in that no one thought twice about, but that too is part of its magic. It is what it is, like Yahweh. You go po-faced or you don’t go at all. The second you add wink-wink nudge-nudge you confront the audience with idea that on some level you know better. And to hell with that.

I don’t know, part of my principled defense of those indefensible action flicks may just be blog bullshitting. I think those ’80s action movies are extraordinary films for how guilelessly manipulative they are, is mainly what I’m saying–today, in the post-Bay/Bruckheimer world, the popcorn explosion flicks are so much slicker about it, or they put it in quotes like Shoot ‘Em Up does. And maybe I’m inventing a principled objection to Shoot ‘Em Up where none exists. I think that ultimately my real beefs with the movie are simple. The jokes aren’t funny (late-period Pierce Brosnan Bond wordplay, mostly). Worse, the action isn’t really innovative or well-choreographed or even particularly bloody. For every memorably sanguine offing, there’s like forty miscellaneous goons getting popped in their black leather jackets in medium shot. It’s like the squib shipment got sent to the wrong set, and maybe if I go see that movie where the Rock has to take care of a little girl, all of a sudden her ballet class will erupt in a Wild Bunch orgy of bloodletting. There’s certainly nothing that’ll push boundaries or stick in your head like Sin City or 300 or Kill Bill, to use three idiosyncratic American action films to which this one will inevitably be compared. (I’d compare it to the John Woo Hong Kong action flicks that have been cited as inspiration, but I don’t think much of those either, to be honest. End already, Hard Boiled!) If there were, that’d go a long way to replicating the gonzo thrill you get from watching Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren punch each other in the face for ten minutes at the end of Rocky IV, but you don’t get anything like that. You don’t even see Monica Bellucci’s tits or Clive Owen’s ass. Instead, you get Paul Giamatti groping the exposed nipple of a mother who was shot in the head minutes after getting birth, and a baby’s shit smeared on a henchman’s face. The Bugs Bunny riffs can’t help you.

Ain’t It Cool News’s Moriarty is the site’s man in The Mist, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s much-beloved novella. He’s seen an early cut and, unsurprisingly, is in total fucking love with it and wants to marry it and have a million of its tentacled babies. As good as this movie could be, it could also be really, really bad–slick and hamfisted and predictable and bad–and I’m reserving judgment.

After much anticipation I saw Dragon Wars (aka D-War) yesterday. It’s a strange beast because it really is about 50% eh, 50% awesome, and ymmv as to whether the latter outweighs the former.

In terms of the awesome, the monster material is really dynamite. I’m baffled by the complains alleging that the CGI work is SciFi Original-level terrible. You can certainly tell it’s CGI–at the risk of repeating myself around here, we’re not talking Weta Digital–but (again at the risk of repeating myself) you could tell King Kong was stop-motion animation, couldn’t you? The real issue is the visual imagination behind the effects, and in this case it was excellent. Several images made me gasp out loud or laugh with delight: A giant serpent weaving its way up a crowded city avenue loaded with cars, tossing them into the buildings lining either side with explosions and debris galore. A helicopter pilot flying low down a skyscraper-lined street, looking up to see the side of a massive building literally crawling with winged creatures, then a cut to a shot nearly straight-down the building right at the creatures themselves. Cut-away vistas of a bustling metropolis engulfed with combat between the military and the invading army of creatures and their demonic warrior handlers, on the streets, on the buildings, in the sky. A Korean dragon hovers vertically in the air against a backdrop of stormclouds. And most breathtaking of all, the two protagonists isolated atop a towering skyscraper as the giant serpent, coiled around it, rears its head yards above them, while the camera swirls around to offer a vertigo-inducing panorama of the city that surrounds the scene. At their best–and their best is very, very good–Dragon Wars‘ giant-monster images offer the same terrifying, awesome (in the original sense) sense of scale, sweep, and immensity as The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, even that masterful bird’s-eye-view shot in the clouds from Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The problem, as you might have guessed, is a script that’s almost completely inadequate to the task of supporting these images with an involving plot or interesting characters. Time and again, when it comes to developing its leads, delineating relationships, or creating a sense of the stakes at hand, the film is content to assert or intone rather than establish through dialogue, performance, or visual framing. We’re required to believe that leads Jason Behr and Amanda Brooks are reincarnated lovers whose passion is destined by heaven, but it’s tough to imagine them calling each other after an awkward first date. Poor Robert Forster really phones in a role as the wise old man, with his tough-guy accent marring every attempt at playing Basil Exposition with regards to the Good Imoogi and the mark of the red dragon and on and on and on. Contrary to several reviews I’ve read, the constant mystical mumbo-jumbo infodumps didn’t bother me at all–I mean, I wasn’t expecting Ursula K. LeGuin, I just wanted some basic set-up for the giant monsters, and that’s what I got. But the film’s ability to sell the mystical mumbo jumbo, to create a sense of urgency without resorting to a giant snake showing up to eat a house or whatever, was nonexistent.

I hit a matinee (score one for unemployment!) and thought it was seven bucks well spent; the strength of the monster stuff was worth sitting through the weakness of the other stuff. If you’re an intolerant type you might wanna wait for a rental. I think all of us are waiting for someone to apply that visual imagination–a “what if the Battle of the Pelennor Fields took place in Manhattan?” imagination–to a film whose other aspects are its equal.

Man alive, I waited ever so impatiently to be able to post this, and now it can be done!

As readers of this blog, or anyone who knows me really, are likely aware, I am a big David Bowie fan. I also enjoy comics. When I discovered that several of my coworkers had themed sketchbooks in which they coaxed various artists into all drawing the same character–Nova or Lockjaw or Yoda or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, say–I knew what had to happen. And at MoCCA this past summer, happen it did. And so…

SEAN T. COLLINS’S DAVID BOWIE SKETCHBOOK

Jeffrey Brown: Jeff grabbed the sketchbook from me during an afterparty and furiously produced this elfin rendition. Bowie as homunculus.

Charles Burns: Even though I’ve interviewed him before, I was still enormously starstruck by watching Burns draw live and in person, not least because of how much I love the Bowie imagery in Black Hole. Burns didn’t use photo ref, but I’m not sure if that’s because he didn’t want to or just because he didn’t realize I had it. I don’t care either way.

Brian Chippendale: The only color image, and the only one to riff on early-90s bearded Bowie. “Bow down to Bowie” indeed–he looks like a real rock and roll animal here.

Becky Cloonan: Becky was extremely gung-ho about drawing David, perhaps more than any other artist. Given her Pirates of Coney Island and East Coast Rising gigs, she naturally went for the late-glam pirate look. “As a general rule…Bowie does it better!” Truer words, my friends.

John Cuneo: Cuneo is primarily an illustrator, and he’s a big honking deal in that world. MoCCA was his first comic con and this was his first sketch request, and he was really amused/bemused by the specificity. After some self-effacement, he tore the goddamn roof off the book, even matching the photoref he more or less randomly chose with the era (Diamond Dogs–note the tail) with no help. People who’ve looked at the sketchbook say “this is my favorite” a lot.

Robert Goodin: Goodin’s table was set up next to ours at MoCCA, and I grabbed him last minute. He’s the only guy to go for the “Space Oddity”-era perm.

Paul Hornschemeier: A definite Young Americans lounge-lizard vibe to this one.

Michael Kupperman: This was the most painstakingly drawn sketch in the book, at least of the ones I watched happen. I handed Kupperman the book open to Gary Panter’s sketch so as to be impressive, but he took this as a request to sketch on the same page, which he did. He handed the finished product back saying “This is NOT worthy of being on the same page as Panter’s,” which I think is selling himself short, but I was bummed out for making him feel that way nonetheless.

Vasilis Lolos: Vasilis, like Paul Pope and Charles Burns, eschewed photo ref. You could tell that this Bowie had been in his head for a while.

Anders Nilsen: From my standpoint on the other side of the table, watching Anders draw this upside-down, I couldn’t figure out what was going on in this sketch until he turned the book back around and gave it to me. This sketch seems to get to people.

Bryan Lee O’Malley: Bryan knew exactly which era he wanted to tackle–the Thin White Duke. This tends to be a lot of people’s favorite sketch, and Bryan took a picture of it himself before he gave the book back, so I guess he dug it too.

Gary Panter: Panter was the first artist I approached to do a Bowie sketch, thinking (correctly) that a) this would be awesome in and of itself and b) having Gary Panter in your sketchbook will go a long way toward convincing other artists to go along with this cockamamie idea. He was game but concerned that he wouldn’t remember what Bowie looked like–then blam, out came my book of photoref (BowieStyle), and off he went.

Paul Pope: Unlike virtually everyone else who was nice enough to draw for me, Paul a) dove right for the virgin first page of the book (and his idea coincidentally made a great kick-off image) and b) didn’t need photo reference at all. Note the mistaken label of “SPX” in the dateline–he caught this right away but didn’t want to screw up the sketch by scribbling it out.

Zak Sally: When I pitched him on the Bowie idea, Sally immediately brought up the recent incident where an audience member lobbed a lollipop at David’s eye during a show, and lo behold that’s what he drew. Note the microphone cord.

Frank Santoro: I was really excited to get a Santoro sketch because his comic with Ben Jones, Cold Heat, captures the Ziggy-era Bowie mystique and appeal as well as anything I’ve read, even though it isn’t about Bowie.

Adrian Tomine: I find Tomine’s work very sexy so I suppose I expected something glammer, but his Bowie (which I believe was the tiniest rendition) has a nervous, almost fragile air. And the surprisingly popular pirate look makes another appearance.

Then there were the ones that got away: Alison Bechdel (I missed her signing by literally 30 seconds), Bill Sienkiewicz (a no-show), Nick Bertozzi (he promised to do it at a future time when he could take it slow), and Hope Larson (she felt like she couldn’t do David justice). We’ll see what the future brings.

Here’s the link to the whole shebang as a Flickr set. Hopefully I’ll have more to add after SPX next month. And oh how I wish I’d made it to the superhero-artist bonanzas that were San Diego or Chicago this year. Again, look to the future!

UPDATE: See more of my Bowie sketchbook here!

Well, how’s this for a folly: I’ve been laid off. Hey, no hard feelings. The upshot around here is that I can blog about comics again, so we’ll see how that goes.

CIA Bans Water-Boarding in Terror Interrogations

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Never let it be said that goofball hipsters are good for nothing. This fine fellow is sporting a shirt that reminds me of that corpse they find upstairs in the Night of the Living Dead house, and good for him. (Misshapes, via the never-miss-a-week Blue States Lose.)

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks what horror-related event from the past we wish we’d been present for. My answer sort of begs the question: Is it possible to “be there” for what I’m pretty sure is an urban legend?

Underworld – Dark Train (Live Central Park 9-14-07)

In the shadow of no substance?

I will never understand so many comics readers’ apparent desire for “hugely popular” comics, and the implied belief that that popularity goes hand in hand with being “aesthetically vital”….I don’t care if comics in the future are aimed at 13-year-old girls or 31-year-old boy-men or both. I don’t care what genre they fit into, or what country they’re produced in. All I want are comics that are good.

—Timothy Hodler

Right on:

After all (the theory goes), one must be interested in what is popular and therefore relevant. (You see similar arguments being made against comics readers who don’t read a lot of manga, incidentally.) My question is, what is it about hip hop (and manga, I guess) that has enabled popularity to replace quality in terms of the reason why a listener/reader/critic should or should not get into a particular work?

—Me, March 2006

The need for my opinions on this week’s issues of B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground, Green Lantern, Daredevil, Punisher War Journal, Ultimate Spider-Man, and The Walking Dead is the disease. Wizard’s Thursday Morning Quarterback is the cure.

Just found this in my inbox: DeepDiscount.com is holding a “buy 2 get 1 free” sale on all of Anchor Bay’s horror DVDs, from Abominable to Zombi. Am I the only one who had no idea they had that many releases?

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

Here’s another cataclysmically violent trailer for John Rambo.

Amazing.

Here’s a cover image for the upcoming installment in Brian Ralph’s first-person post-apocalyptic zombie comic, Daybreak.

Just lovely. Via the New Bodega blog.

This week at The Horror Blog’s Horror Roundtable, we’re down on our knees, we’re begging directors who’ve left horror behind to come home. Here are a few hints as to the man I’d welcome back:

(Images via Arwen Undomiel.)

Learn what one Sean T. Collins thinks of the most recent issues of Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Amazing Spider-Man, Captain America: The Chosen, Countdown, and The Exterminators over at Wizard’s Thursday Morning Quarterback.

Sean and the Missus, Negril, Jamaica, August 2007.

The David Bowie shirt was an eBay find–I wish I could dig up the vendor, but alas. It’s a shot of Bowie holding a revolver, from The Man Who Fell to Earth, part of the era during which David was the best-looking man in the world.

Sorry, old habits die hard.

My post in defense of the term “torture porn” has resulted in some interesting responses. In favor are Bruce Baugh and Craig Moorehead, opposed are Steven Wintle and Kimberly Lindbergs, and somewhere in between are Jon Hastings and Jesse Mazer.

Steven’s response is the lengthiest, so I’ll take it point by point. He starts by arguing that appending the word “porn” to the equation adds a qualitative connotation above and beyond what a straightforward might do. (In order to illustrate the point, he tacks the word on to a whole bunch of different genres to striking and humorous effect here.) “I’m sure someone will come along to correct me on this,” sez Steven in the original post, essentially tossing me a softball right down the middle, “but I’m fairly sure ‘Torture Porn’ is the only horror sub-genre label that denotes not only the content of the film but also suggests a particular quality, as well.” Now, I’ve already suggested that the term “horror” itself has a pejorative connotation. But even putting that aside, there’s the entire “-sploitation” super-genre: exploitation, sexploitation, blaxploitation, nazisploitation, et cetera and sometimes ad nauseum. Then you’ve got “trash,” an appellation enthusiastically embraced by many niche horror bloggers. And surely “splatter,” “slasher,” and “creature feature” were not coined in the same value-neutral fashion as, say, “romantic comedy.” The recently en vogue “grindhouse” sure wasn’t. Hell, I think “torture porn” fits a lot more comfortably in the same continuum as “weepies” and “chick flicks” and “queer cinema” than Steven would admit.

Next, he quibbles with my attempt to play Webster, saying he’s encountered at least three applications of the “torture porn” label that hold to different definitions than the one I proposed (“horror films in which the physical brutalization of a person or persons, frequently to death and always while somehow immobilized or held captive by the brutalizer or brutalizers, is the primary locus of horror in the film”). He cites this John Campea post, arguing that “torture porn” refers to films that focus on torture to the exclusion of all other considerations, as exhibit A. In this case I think the problem lies not with the term, but with the person using it–he’s clearly out to use the phrase to describe only “bad” movies with torture on them. He’s written good movies involving torture clean out of the term, in a micro example of what the “transcending the genre” crowd does with horror writ large. But just because he has doesn’t mean we have to! As the above list of horror sub-genres demonstrated, we horror fans have embraced any number of labels with the scent of disrepute lingering about them, and I don’t see why a few misguided attempts to conflate “torture porn” with “horror movies that suck” should steer us away from doing so again.

Steven’s second example of a rival, irritating “torture porn” definition is one where it’s used to attack both film and audience, indicating a film designed for people who “get off” on torture. Steven means this in the “enjoying watching other people suffer” way; Jon takes it a step further and says it implies that they enjoy watching other people suffer “in a sexual way.” Again, I wouldn’t let certain critics’ attempts to use the term to deride the films’ audience dictate whether I must use it the same way. But regarding the linguistic point, Jesse points out “food porn” as an example of a genre wherein the “porn” tag is not meant to imply that people literally get aroused by watching the Food Network (unless, of course, Nigella Lawson is on), just that the food content is designed to bypass your usual rational filters and hit you straight in the lizard brain. Along those lines I’ve seen references to kitty porn, shoe porn, and T-shirt porn (I coined that last one myself, naturally). In my view, the violence in torture porn movies and in many horror movies in general is spectacle in the filmic sense, material that through its confrontational, aestheticized, frequently plot-independent presentation is meant to bypass the typical processes by which we view and comprehend film narratives and access you in a rawer way. “Torture spectacle,” though, doesn’t have that catchy internal rhyme to it. (I kid.) If the porn fits, wear it.

Finally, Steven points out that there are, in fact, literal torture porn films, movies involving extreme S&M and sex. Well, yeah. But this just reminds me of the argument that there are literal “graphic novels,” novels containing graphic sex or violence or language or whatever. That’s certainly a drawback to that particular term–and even if it weren’t, one need look no further than From Hell artist Eddie Campbell’s blog on any given day to see that you can haggle about definitions until armageddon–but take a look at my bookshelf and you’ll find a lot of book-length comics with the words “graphic novel” above the ISBN.