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.)

Ever since I visited the place and found that one of the tourist attraction museums basically admits that all the good evidence is forged and the beastie is probably just a series of landlocked sturgeons, I’ve gone from true believer to skeptic on the topic of the Loch Ness Monster. Still, the Gordon Holmes footage of Nessie is easily the biggest water-monster news since the giant squid discoveries, and Loren Coleman’s Cryptomundo is all over it (as you might expect), with image stabilizations, close-ups of the “head and neck” area, a comparison to an easily hoax-able radio-controlled model, and a version of the footage without that irritating watermark, which I’m reproducing here.

I’m goin’ back to the Mythic Creatures exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History tomorrow. I bought tickets in advance and everything!

Aside from movies and books and comics and albums, which to me don’t really count because they’re works of art with which I actively engage rather than objects to be appreciated, the one thing I collect (I realized about a month ago or so) is T-shirts, and I’ve been meaning to post about some of my favorites, for no other reason than I think they’re neat. (Man, looking at these past few entries, it’s been an eclectic few days around here, huh?)

We’ll see if I get to that plan anytime soon, but in the meantime, here’s howto fold a T-shirt in two seconds.

And here’s a YouTube video of a similar feat, but without the step-by-step explanation offered above.

I’ve got a couple drawers of clothing with this thing’s name all over them.

(Hat tip: Jackie Danicki.)

Who would have anticipated the Barkerian horror Pac-Man would become if you flayed the little yellow chomper of his skin and exposed the skull and teeth beneath?

Seriously, is that not the kind of thing a Books of Blood character would gaze upon in speechless, insane awe just before it clambered up his body to snuff out his life? Almost makes you want to root for Blinky and the rest of the little ghosts.

More at Le Gentil Garçon.

(Via Strange Ink.)

Like The missus, I love Klaus Nomi. Here’s an outrageous video of his for “Falling in Love Again.” I don’t know who he was trying to kid with the heterosexuality on display here, but hey, go for it, Klaus, god bless you.

And here are some lovely first-hand Klaus stories and pictures by Madeline Bocaro.