STAKE LAND (2010)

“In a world where America falls to vampires, two hunters stand between chaos and justice – that world is STAKE LAND.” Or one can image some such 1980s dramatic voice over before the exciting montage of speeding cars, tiger roaring vampires, blood squirting out from flame flickering shadow, the silhouette hip grinding of a dancing girl, then the screeching tire shot gun blast echoing in the empty, snow falling woods.

And none of those quick flash images would be wrong, since many of them are in the movie. But what that would fail to portray is the true horrific atmosphere STAKE LAND manages to scrape off the sides of the zombiepocalypse vampire diary sarcophagus.

The story is familiar, a young boy is accidently rescued by a mumbly stranger seconds after that boy’s family is eaten by a vampire. The older stranger adopts the young boy, trains him in the art of hunting and slaying vampires, as they meander toward the promised land of New Eden. Along the way, they encounter tribes of humans more savage and frightening than the supernatural monsters that hunt in the night. The boy slowly leans toward maturity and a family is briefly created from hitchhiking stragglers and other orphaned survivors.

Yawningly familiar, right?

Except STAKE LAND is a better film than its reduced plot implies. For instance, the flashback scene where the young boy, Martin, races to chase the barking dog and narrowly escapes the vampire attack that claims his family is contrived. But the payoff introduction to the vampire monsters establishes a brutal and terrifying tone for the rest of the movie. It is an inventive and effective scene, one of many to come.

I am reminded of a recent interview with THE WALKING DEAD’s creator, Robert Kirkman, where he admits that he would not want to survive any sort of zombie invasion because such an event would turn the world into one giant prison. STAKE LAND explores this brilliantly though radio static broken by announcements from the pockets of humanity, what the movie calls “lockdowns,” that have banded together in de facto tribes. Some are just trying safety in numbers, maintaining a community the best they can. While others have gone insanely cryptomessianic subtly worshiping the vampires while adhering to an Aryan Nation Christian militia – like the movie’s real big bads, The Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood and our heroes cross swords several times, leading to the most effective menace in the movie. Radio broadcasts, roadblocks, and graffiti all proclaim the deadly intention of the Brotherhood to eek out their revenge upon the hunters. Leading to the most brilliant scene in STAKE LAND which involves a helicopter and a lot of squirting blood.

But the Brotherhood, also, provides the silliest and most unfortunate plot engine of the last third of the film. While our intrepid band moves through the elevated wilderness among the bare straight trees of winter and the gentle wisps of falling snow, the audience feels the edge of a lost civilization, the slump into a silent comfort zone that is actually a more perilous frontier. I am not sure we needed the final standoff, since it seemed tacked on and unnecessarily unexplainable in a movie that had maintained its own internal logic exceptionally well.

The whole experience of the film is heightened by Jeff Grace’s haunting piano soundtrack. The marriage of Folkways inspired Americana music and the single piano perfectly scores the normalness of the abnormality of a vampire world. One should never underestimate the power of a movie’s ambient music to maintain and elevate the impact of the visuals.

I can not recommend STAKE LAND enough to any of you. Even with its flaws it will entertain you in ways few other end of the world pictures have before.

Everyone knows about Junger because of his macho nonfiction, the literary equivalent of a hammy fist pound on the conference table during a meeting with “the suits.” He excels at exciting the reader with his daring-doo tales of doomed men and the death that surrounds them. Hertherington is, probably lesser known, because his photographs of human suffering caused by the fringe effects of armed conflict, are brutal. But if Hertherington is mentioned, outside the context of this movie and its accompanying book, it will center on his 2009 multimedia exhibit Sleeping Soldiers.

RESTREPO is a perfect example of the banality of hallowed tropes – how war makes boys into men and men into killing machines and killing machines into reluctant heroes and reluctant heroes into tiny movie award statues. The movie’s name sake is a fallen combat medic, a comrade of the fire base platoon. The fact that he is killed in an ambush the filmmakers were not present for, so off screen, he provides the sympathetic engine driving the “emotional” center. But it’s a cynical ploy, I felt.

In the opening scenes, the audience meets “Doc” Restrepo. He makes a brief appearance in amateur footage shot by the guys as they travelled on a bus or train toward the war. Restrepo comes off as a hip hop shit talker, full of the wankster virile bluster. Other than provide the name of the Outpost and the film, Restrepo, the solider, is utterly left out of the movie. His absence is noticeable, while there are a couple of interviews where his friends mention him, the audience is never given anything to connect with. Had I read this Miami Hearld piece on who Juan Restrepo actually was and why his buddies liked him, the movie might have worked better.  One wonders why such a profile was left out of the documentary.

Absence and distance are good metaphors for the documentary, though, because for the entire movie, the Afghani enemy is completely invisible and absent from the screen. The soldiers shoot at tree lines, look through high powered binoculars to describe annihilating tiny humans running across an opening hundreds of yards away. And the one single firefight patrol, Operation Rock Avalanche, is recounted by the guys in interviews. Even the body of their killed commander is only glimpsed at from a distance. The war, it seems, is happening elsewhere. One specialist even complains on his last day at the Outpost, that while he fears getting overrun, he really would like to be able to see the people he is killing.

Furthering this disconnection is a feeling, which the film creates, of the relative safety of war. While we are told the platoon is taking fire every single day, the tension of that environment is completely absent. We get a lot of gunfire, sure. But the pings of incoming fire are barely documented. In fact, I have never seen a war documentary or picture, which seemed so devoid of danger. When the platoon hears about the deaths of 9 US troops in another part of the valley, they are rocked to their core. Again, the murder of the war is remote and abstract.

This is a strange structural decision for the film to make. I found myself surprised when the platoon is shown planning Operation Rock Avalanche. As they suit up and head out, the guys reflect that they know they are walking into a hot zone and will see combat. It’s a moment of clarity as the soldiers are seen preparing for their job, to kill and be killed. But we do not really see them doing that job, in fact, contrasted with the scenes of the guys hanging out and dancing in the doorways of their makeshift Outpost, the war effort comes off as secondary, half-hearted, and in the background. It’s a weird effect of the movie.

One last point, there is a running thread about an incident with a local man’s cow. While it is not fully explained, the pieces fall into place like this, I guess – a cow wandered into the razor wire perimeter of the Outpost. The guys, unable to free it, kill it. They grill it up, which is a great day at the Outpost, and one that really let their cook shine. Later, the cow’s owner appeals to the valley’s elders, who have a monthly meeting with the Outpost commanders. Nothing comes of this, so the farmer, makes the pilgrimage, himself, to the Outpost, where he makes his own plea for cash. The United States Military will not reimburse the farmer the 500 dollars for a new cow, instead offering the cow’s weight in foodstuffs, rice and beans.

The absurdity is probably the point of this background narrative. The fact that the scenes are not consistently documented, nor is there much attention drawn to the event, speaks to the insensitivity of the combat troops. The failure of the “hearts and minds” mission. What is most important to the locals, the cow, becomes a joke to the Americans. Is there a message there that the filmmakers are subtely making about the hopelessness of the campaign, the failure of enthusiasm? Unfortunately, the movie is so disjointed and weak, that it would be impossible to say.

It’s worth a mention that in the Western genre the Native American Indian, while usually named by tribe, serves a dichotomous purpose – either as a Noble Savage with hippie communions and near superpowers over nature or as the grunting Redskin devil intent on stealing and raping white skinned wagon train virgins.  These two threads varied depending on dominant cultural trends of the times.

Not that there are many, only really two, Native Americans in the Coen Brothers’ remake of the John Wayne Oscar-winning film TRUE GRIT. Aside from the one hanged early in the movie, the other we get is a cipher, a Charon ferry man marking the entry into the otherworld uncivilized frontier. While the criminal Indian is not allowed to speak his last words, hooded into silence while the white men blubber, the frontier Indian speaks with another sort of silence, a shotgun boom notwithstanding, to Rooster. It’s the language of men, a hard stare, a life of sleeping on dirt and keeping the snakes at bay with a circle of rope.

The sole artfulness of the flick exists in this brief set of scenes, this frontier crossing, invented extra-textually from the Charles Portis novel the Brothers Coen are so proudly heralding as their film’s singular distinction. (Everyone making a remake feels the need to justify their remake as something generously better, re-imagined, and stricter to the original intent. That really insults everyone, everywhere!)

As the brush clears, Mattie and Rooster, now firmly established and on their way, amble upon the entry way beyond which is the strangeness, danger and revenging murder of Mattie’s adventure. They meet the hanged man (because it turns out Rooster does not know that man), more savagely strung up than the remorseful criminals brought to justice in town. Mattie makes the journey to cut him down, a metaphor to the heights of morality from which she looks down on the men of ill character she has been necessitated (climbed on a limb) to associate.

It is from this height, too, that she watches as Rooster and the pack animal, roving Indian exchange their words and their body bargain (corpse for shotgun warning). And who emerges from the underbrush, amid the swirl of snow, is a bear riding a horse. A fantastically heavily loaded image, that is at once terrifying and whimsical and threatening and comforting. That Bear Man on a Horse seems to have wandered out of the black and white tableau of Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN, another meta-western filmed as iconic fever dream. The Bear Man, a white man, whose gnarled speech is as comical as is what he says. His snarling voice, a jangle, rings on about dentistry and the territory. He sits there as an absurd transitional figure mocking the spiritual corruption of Western medicine, a corruption that will ultimately occur to Mattie’s righteous revenge as well. For the audience is told that everything that happens past this Bear Man, happens in an uncivilized, untamed elsewhere. And the rules are different there.

But the Bear Man, also, brings to the forefront the Coens’ fetish with language sounds. They seem to build the movies up from accents (FARGO), use of slang or phrases (MILLER’S CROSSING, BIG LIEBOWSKI), lyrics and music (O BROTHER), I vaguely remember a quote from them saying as much about FARGO.

So TRUE GRIT is all about language, really. First there is the silly growl of Rooster Cogburn (which really delightfully upset the people behind us). Second the rollicking whip smart tongue of Mattie Ross. Third, the tongue bit lisp of laBoeuf (mis-pronounced as the typically Americanized – Le Beef). Not to mention, the slow mealy mouth of the murderous simpleton, Tom Chaney.  This is before the mention of the whole return to the authenticity of the Portis novel, a textual language celebrated by Donna Tartt’s new introduction.

Aside from all the posturing and reading that can be done with the movie, it does work as an enjoyable western. And for all of us who love the dust and six gun glory of the American knights in long coats, leaving a trail of bodies as they riding off into the sunset, their chiseled jaws set in stoic resignation, TRUE GRIT is a great return to form.

The first is that the movie follows a group of hapless British terrorists as they prepare to wage jihad upon the demon West – namely London. And, frankly, London is very far away and not very American.

The second reason stems right out of the first. The movie is particularly British: it is steeped in the British slang and relies heavily upon familiarity with the Middle Eastern immigrant’s experience in the UK. Even a snooty BBC America-watching, YouTube-scouring Anglophile (of which I count myself among) will miss quite a number of the references and jokes.

Further, our American pop culture landscape has not been very friendly to the Middle Eastern experience. Our war movies paint them as the hostile Other (rarely even subtitling their dialogue – something all the WWII movies manage to do for the Nazis) or wrap them in the complicated foil of heavy handed political ‘statement’ (espousing monologues meant to shame or enrage the audience, depending on slant). Think, too, how the Middle Easterner is reduced to Islamic Fundamentalist, stripped of national origin, gradation of religious denomination, or subtly of political parties. The cancelled television show, 24, is the richest source for such black and white critiques.

So it should not be surprising that a movie about a terror cell, no matter how incompetent, would prove to be a hard sell to even the most hip, ironic, and jaded audiences. Making the hard sell even more difficult is the film’s structure. FOUR LIONS drifts between typical comedic formulas. There is a loose narrative that introduces short sketches/vignettes (most of which might work divorced from the narrative of the movie). And the suspended reality that buoys slapstick and idiocy fades in and out of the movie. One moment, characters are blowing up crows or misfiring rocket launchers to unbelievable result.

The next moment the humor shifts and the gang is squabbling loudly about broken cars or where to target or confessing to the bizarrely scatological tests the cell members are subjected to by the English convert and would-be-leader Barry. These tests of allegiance and endurance all happen thankfully off screen; something a lesser movie would have subjected the audience to, especially if done by the hateful and humorless directors, the Farley Brothers.

The film works brilliantly when it allows the evil, radicalized, unfocused radicalism to be glimpsed at its most mundane. Like Hassan’s rap personae or his firecracker introduction, or the off moments when the lads are fooling around with the explosives, playing like bored and unthinking teenagers, not diabolical terrorist masterminds. This culminates in the difficulty they group has recording a terrorist video. Without a coherent message, too influenced by Western celebrity and media, the posturing fails at all levels – ultimately rendering the terrorist activity meaninglessly banal.

This unfocused terror is a symptom of the Age Of Terror, Morris seems to want to assert. In the epiphany scene of the flick, Omar and his wife are sitting discussing the impending suicide “martyrdom,” when they are visited by a friend, a fundamentalist Muslim. Ostensibly, the Fundamentalist is there to dissuade Omar from his path of violence. But the friend will not enter the same room with Omar’s wife and ends up scolding the secular way they live. As the three argue, basically, about modernization and women’s equality, the debate slips into a squirt gun fight.

The scene drives home the fact that Omar’s drive is less about religion and more about a vague dissatisfaction and radical hatred of Western excess, all of which Omar and his family seem to embody. The idea that terrorist activity is an established counterculture lifestyle choice is driven, ludicrously, home as the gang strap on their bombs and funny costumes. The audience is asked to confront the realization that these dolts are not only going to die, but kill other people as they finalize their stupid plot. There is a moment when you root for these plucky, against-all-odds dummies. But that moment is quickly replaced by the Keystone Kops foot chase that has Omar trying to buy a new cell phone and the British police responding very poorly to the whole situation.

In short, FOUR LIONS could and should have been better.

The movie is silliest when it embraces the political myth that in times of war, a hero rises up to challenge the insanity and win the day with a clear-headed rationality that bucks orders and save everyone’s lives – military and civilian alike. It’s a familiar motif in the macho potboilers populated by the badgeless vigilante cop, the bullet dodging superspy, and the other cartoonishly invincible toughs.

Damon plays a Chief Warrant Officer whose team has been charged with investigating the intelligence reports detailing the location of the dreaded Weapons of Mass Destruction.  When we first meet him, he is charging into a hot zone, where a sniper has stopped the progress of another, less determined, American unit. Damon arrives, shouting about how he and his team need to secure a warehouse where there are reported chemical weapons. A crowd of Iraqis stream past, carrying all sorts of blurry items, possibly looters, possibly refugees, possibly, as Damon fears, removing the evidence of those weapons. In the chaos, Damon organizes his team and makes a perfect assault on the sniper’s position. His determination and drive have been firmly established. He is a passionate warrior. Completing what he feels is the noblest of tasks, finding the proof to justify the war.

From this opening scene of single mindedness and determination, the sort that was so diligently lacking on the presses’ part leading up to the war (but more on that in a moment), Damon goes on to confront in, dangerously, insubordinate ways the command of his military controllers. First, expressing his disdain to his immediate commander; then a few minutes later, openly defying his commander by challenging the veracity of intel that has him chasing ghosts.  From there the movie shifts from the purpose of locating WMDs, which everyone knows did not exist, to an odd mixture of the conspiracy theater and bug hunt subgenres. I suppose a movie could have been made where an American unit is sent digging up streets, while the Iraqi’s stand around jeering.

And there is a scene like that, except that unheroic tomfoolery is interrupted when an Iraqi man, Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), breaks through the crowd to alert the Americans of a gathering of very bad men – represented on the now infamous deck of playing cards. Damon splits off his unit, grabbing Freddy as a translator and heads off to chase the real meal of the movie.

From here on, Damon becomes embroiled in a power struggle between the administration’s main Suit (THE SOUP’s Greg Kinnear) versus the disheveled/slightly bloated CIA man (Brendan ‘Mad Eye Moody’ Gleeson). The single depth of this intrigue is the wading pool of same side political influence, each man trying to discredit the other.

The bug hunt comes in the thin plot line of tracking down a powerful Iraqi General (THE HOUSE OF SADDAM’s Yigal Naor). This General is the key to unraveling the source of the bad WMD intelligence and all sides want a piece of him – Kinnear wants him dead, Mad Eye wants him to discredit Kinnear, and Damon wants to get at the truth! This plot line serves up all the exploding brick doorways and the hand held camera chases through people’s living rooms. In the dishing this out, Damon gets captured, gets to fight the bad special forces, and general noble bad ass American soldier who kicks ass and blows the truth whistle to the end.

Amy Ryan plays an American journalist, based on the Bush Regime’s official NYTIMES mouthpiece Judith Miller. In reality, Miller was publishing articles cribbed directly from NeoCon’s press releases, taking at face value the intelligence and evidence that were being used to beat the drums of war. She has little do to in the movie other than follow Kinnear around beggingly demanding that she get that promised exclusive interview with the Iraqi source of all her stories. Of course, that source did not exist, since the evidence was fabricated. She is nothing more than a straw dog, in the movie to get kicked by all involved. The characters see her as a joke, the movie, itself, includes her only to ridicule the press’ monumental failure. In Damon, the movie condemns the press as cowardly and lazy, he models the investigative concern, diligence, and allegiance, once, reserved for the haggard, intrepid beat reporter. How conspiracy/political thriller’s have changed!

Lastly, the one legged Iraqi translator, Freddy. The uncomplicated character’s whole reason to exist is to give the colonized people of Iraqi a mouthpiece.  Freddy spends the entire movie hovering in the background, ready to voice a sound bite designed to slice through the silly posturing of the Americans. He functions like a cute kid or handicapped character (he is missing a leg from his service defending his country in the Iran/Iraq War) on a sitcom – he adds the gravitas of a supposedly unexpected perspective. Even when that perspective is painfully obvious. I suppose, the movie should be granted some leeway for at least including Freddy, though, by the end, I wondered if his whole inclusion was just to prove the point that the Americans had no idea what or why they were in Iraq. And that is a pretty heavy message to convey in a gun shot one liner.

Of course, I had Steve Martin’s WILD AND CRAZY GUY LP when it came out. Who didn’t? How much of the humor did I understand as an eight year old? I am not sure, but I can still remember the tune and some of the words to KING TUT.  And  I will admit that I listened to that album a lot. Not as much as Bill Cosby’s WONDERFULNESS or Alan Sherman’s MY SON, THE FOLK SINGER, but still it ranked a daily play for many months.

As unbelievable as it sounds, I had not seen THE JERK, all the way through, until two nights ago. I guess at some point in the 1980s, when this movie would have been making its world broadcast premier and then, on to VHS tape, I lost my enthusiasm for Steve Martin’s brand of smarty-pants nervousness. I think in part, my pre-adolescence was not defined by SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. I’ve noticed that there are numerous deviations of humor fans – for instance, there are people who love the THREE STOOGES and those who really dislike them, the same is true of SNL. Aside from the occasional bit by Eddie Murphy, I always felt that the skits dragged on too long, were based on shoddily humorless premises, and were awkwardly unfunny in their eternal quest to mint a new catch phrase.

And while Steve Martin was never a regular cast member of that show, he has hosted like 15 or 16 times, not to mention his cameo appearances. And it is this association with the SNL ethos that seems to haunt his career, a misconception that he seems desperate to distance himself. His career, these last few years, has been designed to install his reputation into the pantheon of “art.” His writing career is reviewed as semi-serious; he seems anguished to have his intelligence linked up to the higher practitioners of American culture.

Which is ironic, yes? Because the early comedy, the standup and THE JERK are so absurdly stupid. Navin Johnson is the prototype manboy, who Adam Sandler and Jim Carey would come to forge their cinematic careers playing. That borderline adult character who seems so idiotically unequipped to deal with the most mundane social experiences that his attempts come off as ridiculous and surreal. Each situation he bumbles into turns on an uncomfortable axis of innocence and arrogant obnoxiousness; idiocy and assholishness. It is this back and forth, which separates these characters from a PeeWee Herman or Mr. Bean, that defines the situational gag that runs this movie.

In short, the plot of THE JERK is inconsequential. The movie is a loose progression of gags, which have seeped into subterranean popular culture – pizza in a cup, cat juggling, the-pants-around-the-ankle-exit from the house. A scene that is so famous Oprah even references it, wrongly. She seems to see the scene has how hard it is for us to leave the house, when in context, it is about the failing selfishness of wealth. So yeah, maybe she does get it.

There is a throwback timeless to the movie. One can imagine that the original pitch was to have Navin floating through Depression Era America, which would explain some of the jokes like the questionable poor black family trope, as well as the traveling circus stint. The accidental capitalist millionaire inventor and the sweetness of the duet, nod toward classic American sketch comedies in which Carl Reiner cut his teeth. But a Depression Era conceit would have required a bit more budget than THE JERK could drum up, one suspects – though PENNIES FROM HEAVEN and the cut and paste DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID all assume Martin’s obsession which acknowledging a vaudevillian influence.

Aside from the classic comedy-kitsch, THE JERK, is incredibly racist, groaningly drug fueled, and falls flat more than it hits a high enough note to make me laugh. It’s influence is undeniable and incredible. And as a foray into the twisted stomach comedy of a cocaine addict, it is an amazing movie.

I felt it was a jumble of meta-movie making, the confluence of self-aware nods to those slick Behind The Music rockumentaries and true crime shows like America’s Most Wanted which featured poor reenactments/dramatizations of real events. The whole movie felt hackneyed. It was meant to represent the style and substance of Harvey Pekar’s groundbreaking American Splendor comic book. You know that comic: the one that laid the foundation for a whole explosion of masturbatory asshole confessionals – the junk that clogs up zinefests with minicomics and other bubbly perzine self-indulgence.

Sure, the movie tried to capture that feel – the difference between the represented, scripted story versus the real strange grump who wrote them. It was an inevitable conceit for the movie. It does not take much imagination and little effort to see that structure.  But it suits Pekar fairly well, because, well let’s be honest, he was not very imaginative and was horribly predictable, himself.

I should tell you that I knew Harvey Pekar. He came into the library where I worked, a few times a day for over ten years. But in the last seven or eight years, he really came to rely upon us, the librarians, more and more. I knew him as a customer, a patron, as a staggering, sloppy, mumbling helpless old man who liked to flirt with the female librarians and was severely disappointed when he went unrecognized by the general public.

Harvey was an uncomfortable mix of arrogance, pride, helpless passivity, rudeness and shtick. He epitomized a certain aspect of Clevelandness. Anyone born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio will immediately understand the boringness of Harvey Pekar. He was a dime a dozen among the depressing characters that populate the failure and misery of a town on the verge of self-conscious collapse. The inherent pride in living in “a tough town” where nothing ever works out and the sky is always the color of domestic violence. A town, STUCK. And the sulfur cabbage farts belting out of the still-born industry smokestacks still hobbling along the Cuyahoga River no longer makes the residents gag.

Harvey represented the mixed lineage of Cleveland, eastern European, predominately Jewish, working class with a pretentious cosmopolitan inferiority.  His fame and achievement was local and permanently unrecognized, aside from his trips to the David Letterman show, more as a Midwestern freak  in line with Larry Bud Melman or stupid pet tricks than as an established writer.  His biggest claim to fame was that his stories had once been illustrated by R.Crumb – a true underground comics hero. All the while, his comics stared out from their local bookstore display, that same panicked scowl, sweaty and untouched by human hand or employee dust rag.

Once the movie came out and he had signed a new deal to produce more comic books, he started bothering us at the library every couple hours a day. He would limp up to the reference desk, asking us to look up specific things for him on the internet. Specifically, always things about him. “Hey willya put into that thing, Harvey Pekar and Comics Journal.” Then he would want print outs of what we found.

You see, he would hear from friends, his wife, or telephone calls about reviews or interviews or other website mentions about him and his new work. He could not wait to read it. And no one at his house would help him look it up. His wife refused to print out what she found nor would she read it to him, even when the site was right there on her home computer screen.  Nor could he wait for the weekly package of press clippings he got from his agent. His ego demanded urgency. Immediate gratification. Or at least that is what he told us as he plodded off with his print outs rolled into a tube.

He, also, thought that the grumpy, curmudgeon moniker was overused. He was constantly disappointed that people only latched on to that and did not see his larger purpose as an artist, as a prose stylist. For he really thought he was doing great work, designing literature, telling epic stories. But, in fact, all he was writing were cranky little episodes in the life of a grump. It was what he did best and the thing he most despised in his own work.

So in the end, it really was a movie that brought Harvey fame. Or at least closer to a status he felt he deserved. And once again it was R. Crumb that really made it all possible. Had CRUMB failed as a sideshow attraction of malformed oddities, then a movie like AMERICAN SPLENDOR would never have been green lit. The appeal of the movie is not a celebration of crankiness or curmudgeonly goodness, but rather a sort of gawking expose of kooky weirdoes. Horrible people, living horribly.  AMERICAN SPLENDOR, short on pathos, made Harvey famous, not for being a jerk, but for being a pathetic loser who’s life makes our own seem all the more tolerable. And maybe that was Harvey’s purpose all along.

The fact that the character was an immediate hit for the publisher should surprise no one who understands the conflict raging inside adolescent boys. “The Guns and Snoopy Clause” – so named by the phenomenon that I observed, time and time again, while working in a public library helping boys, roughly aged nine to sixteen, navigate the book stacks. The conversation of the Guns and Snoopy Clause usually went like, “Mister, where are the books on guns? (pause) and Snoopy?” Such is the conflicted mind of the young adolescent boy.

The two movies, so far, dealing with the Iron Man character have done a lot to extend and expand upon the idea of reactionary, macho salvation. It’s not surprising, given they were both directed by Jon Favreau, the creator of such macho tripe as SWINGERS, MADE, and the writer of COUPLE’S RETREAT. His bare knuckle approach to manhood is combative sensitivity encased in tough designer suits and skid along, navigating at hyperspeeds, toward loud moments of introspection and vapid revelation.

IRON MAN I dispatched the origin of the superhero as a transformative event in the life of a crass celebrity playboy. Aside from the invention of the Arc Reactor, the most implausible element of the movie is the idea that a sexy weapons designer, a glorified war mongering arms dealer, would enjoy magazine cover superstardom. Even in this voyeuristic reality tv culture, this seems highly unlikely. His magnetism is ferocious; the angry Vogue interviewer who’s righteous challenge is only foreplay, while his ability to confront his sexual conquests remains timid – hiding in the lab the next morning.

Only after he is captured and kept alive by the benevolent Yinsen, who’s necessary sacrifice superficially challenges Stark’s worldview. This idea of the crass becoming the compassionate, powers the hero engine like so much enhanced Palladium.  The whole first movie exists in service of this idea, that evil can be used to produce the counterweight to itself.

The sequel does much to expand upon these ideas. First by adding, the frailty and mortality to the seemingly invincible – the hero is being poisoned by the mechanics of his heroics. In addition, to the obviousness that weapons technology remains deadly, no matter its use, the poisoning remains a surface tension. A reason for Stark to play at confronting his mortality, which he does by racing a car and handing the reins of Stark International over to his love interest assistant/handler. His bravado is not dulled. His ‘live life to the fullest’ cowboy-ism remains unchanged. His drunken dancing in the Iron Man suit is ridiculous. But the captain of industry, this self-styled superhero, needs some touch of humanity for the audience to identify with him. Since Batman has the market cornered on “brooding,” Stark is left with “dying.” Until he isn’t.

Next, IRON MAN 2 introduces the concept of Stark International still bucking the trends and fighting the uphill battle. First, against the government – an arrogant senator who wants the Iron Man suit for the military. This should surprise none. Government exists to stand in the way and hinder the capitalist businessman’s interest. As an audience, we have been subjected to this motif, time and time again (remember X-Men’s Sen. Kelly?), to the point of disinterest. Aside from the subtle digs at the imposed censors and hearings that swirled around and almost killed the comic book industry in America, this anti-government sentiment plays into the general disgust all political affiliations subscribe to, in one manner or other. It is a safe wicker man upon which the hero can singe with great contempt and long self-serving monologues.

Then there is the corporate intrigue, represented by the horribly incompetent, Justin Hammer. Hammer’s impotence is immediately made manifest – he is seen failing to enthrall that little Vogue reporter, who Stark bedded and tossed away in the first movie. Hammer can’t even keep her interest by relaying stories ABOUT Tony Stark. Hammer exists as a foil for Stark. For all of Stark’s egoism and self-absorption, while potentially unattractive, exists in direct contrast with Hammer’s ineptitude. Stark’s genius and skill emerges as Hammer fails.

Hammer’s ambition to BE Tony Stark turns into a vendetta, which blinds him to all the consequences of his employing the marginally defeated Vanko. By unleashing Vanko, who he sorely underestimates, Hammer unwittingly funds a more deadly project than the one he conceived. Hammer’s ambition to beat Stark in the market is trumped by Vanko’s vendetta to kill Stark, literally.

Before diving right into the daddy issues, this idea of “privatized peace” begs to be addressed. As another of the prime movers of the narrative, this de-escalation of world conflict at the hands of Iron Man, seems to fulfill the contract of the weapons manufacturer. Peace through superior fire power, or the concept of the Cold War’s Mutually Assured Destruction Deterrent.  It’s a wonderful notion that one single weapon, utilized solely to stop conflict and interfere with war, could not only bring an end to war, but, also, a profit to its manufacturer/inventor.

But the whole notion that a single person, no matter what moral code they act upon, could successfully curtail armed conflict, borders upon the tyrannically absurd. Even if it is assumed that Iron Man was only disposing of Stark International guns, missiles and other weapons systems, there would come a point of miscalculation and “collateral damage.” The state of peace would be tenuous, at best, and probably, built around a boogieman-like fear of the wrath of the Iron King.

Further, by extension, “privatized peace” assumes that a single person could operate on the world theater unbridled from constituent politics, fear of all out war or retaliation, and with the precision that large scale military endeavors seem to lack. A private individual, a vigilante if you will, could stabilize the geo-political landscape? If Iron Man is to work as a hero, one must take him at his word. Much like we must take Blackwater Inc. at their word about Iraq.

IRON MAN 2 is riddled with enough daddy issues to make any Freudian blush. Poor Tony never got enough attention from his brilliant, wealthy father. This conflict is an easy motivation for a lot of the Marvel heroes. It is part of the cosmology that the hero must forge his own path, assume the responsibility without any direct guidance. They must learn to be the “man” after the superpower. This ‘lack of daddy’ adds the illusion of depth, of some larger emotional framework to boys’ soap opera with punches. Tony Stark’s daddy issues are easily resolved by a few well timed newsreels handed over by Nick Fury.  Tony, not only gets to hear his daddy say he has faith and love in him, but also, gets to resolve the issue of what sort of man his father really was – a good one, duh!

Contrast that with Vanko Sr. – an old partner of Stark Sr., who made the unforgivable error of wanting to sell the new power source they were on the verge of creating. Dangerous, foolish, and worthy of deportation. The sort of thing they were working on, which Whiplash and Iron Man invent at the same time, was much too powerful to entrust to a government. No, this was the sort of thing that could save the world, save it from itself, and needed to be entrusted to only the best and brightest. The independently wealthy, the genius, capitalist upper class. A new elite? Of course. A bit creepy? You betcha.

Of course, Whiplash grew up caring for his bitter, broken and vengeful father. A man destroyed by Stark’s father. Whiplash’s fury was justifiable to the point he started working for Hammer. His plan was brilliant in its slow burn take down of Stark. Open the floodgates, show the world that the Iron Man technology was already loose in the world. The artificial peace powered by the energy blasts was suddenly cast in a shadow of doubt. But this subtly cannot be sustained. So, Whiplash suddenly comes to fulfill all the Marvel heavies. His vendetta gets the best of him, instead of destroying a single man, Whiplash sets upon destroying the world that worships him. Obvious bad guy territory.

While I can’t say much good about the movie, I can say that it does remain faithful to the tenor, tone, and intent of the source material.

That said I would not blame you if you dismissed these films out of hand. Never wanting to watch or read or think or acknowledge them in any way. I am not attempting to justify those scenes. Nor am I ignoring them. They are horrible and some would say unforgivable. I do not agree with either side, really, and frankly, the scenes compared to the extreme nature shows we now have on cable and the real death available on the youtubes greatly diminish their impact for me.

So let’s get right into the meat of the matter. I am only going to touch on a few of the movies, and not necessarily “the best” of the bunch. I have very little to add to and nothing to say about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980). It’s worth all the attention it has and continues to receive.

Rather, what I want to focus on is a strange thing that I noticed while watching the core films of the genre. There were a group of movies that seemed intertwined, mostly due to a cost cutting measure of inserting scenes from previous other movies into the narration of the newer movie. This common trick of low budget genre movies, inadvertently created a meta-narrative running through the movies. Could it actually be possible that all these movies were happening at the same time, the action separated by a few hundred yards apart? No. Probably not. But yet, maybe.

There are three films discussed here Umberto Lenzi’s MAN FROM DEEP RIVER (1972),  Sergio Martino’s MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD, and Umberto Lenzi’s EATEN ALIVE. All three movies intertwine due to their shared scenes.

Lenzi’s MAN FROM DEEP RIVER is actually a fairly sweet little love story, believe it or not. DEEP RIVER is inspired by A MAN NAMED HORSE, in that they share the plot of an arrogant white outsider from the more “civilized world” who is captured by a primitive native tribe and slowly learns to love it there. The tribe that our hero falls in with keeps his lily white behind alive because the tribe’s chief’s daughter has the jungle fever. There is a witch doctor that puts some nasty curse on the happy couple. Then the tribe is attacked by some neighboring cannibals. First the cannibals attack a young man and woman hanging out by the river bed. The cannibals do terrible things to the woman as the young man barely escapes. This scene appears again in EATEN ALIVE.

EATEN ALIVE is a weird pre-cognitive dream of ROMANCING THE STONE. When a well-to-do-blonde woman goes looking for her lost brunette sister, who has disappeared in the green jungley expanse, one heck of an adventure ensues! She hires a down on his luck mercenary who is not very tough, but somewhat durable. They end up finding that the brunette sister has hooked up with a Jim Jonestown-like cult that lives in the dense jungle surrounded by cannibals and crocodiles. On their way through the jungle, Blondie and Mr. Mercenary come upon a horrible scene where a native couple is attacked. The same scene form DEEP RIVER, which is the timing is correct, then the Lily White in the village of that movie is under a mile from our exploring EATEN ALIVE heroes.

Further complicating things, once the action shifts to the Jim Jonestown compound, Mr. Mercenary bucks the system and is beaten and tied to a log. Of course, once he manages to break free from the compound, he ends up in the stony caves of the cannibal tribe. Where he witnesses the castration of one of the cannibals and then watches as they all eat snake soup. Later, after he is captured and tied to a rock, he it tortured by the cannibal tribe’s pet midget. Who ends up helping him escape. All this happening while Blondie is naked and being painted gold for some Jim Jonestown sex ritual. Or something. But the gold body paint is just like the kind the cave cannibals have lathered up Ursula Andress in THE MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD.

Starring Stacey Keach and Ursula Andress, MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD is probably one of the more accessible of these films. It is even streamed on youtube, for Allah’s sake. Again, the plot revolves around a lost relative, in this case the brilliant professor/explorer husband of Andress. She organizes an expedition to head in the green inferno to track his trail and find out if he is still alive. Of course, in short order everyone is attacked by cannibals. Andress and her dutiful guide, Manola, are taken to the cannibal caves. Where Andress is painted like a golden naked goddess and tied up next to her waxy decaying husband with a Geiger counter heart. When one of the tribe does not resist temptation and tries to sex himself on the golden body of Andress, the tribe takes horrible revenge. The punishment that Mr. Mercenary from EATEN ALIVE gets to witness from up in the cave crevices. The snake soup, the midget, everything, it’s all here. In fact, Mr. Mercenary escapes only a few scenes before the Andress/Manola team manage to float down the river to safety!

While this is most likely just a case of bad film making, the possibilities of linking these movies into one large, almost Keystone Cop-like narrative, with the missed opportunities and almost bumping into each other, really crowds the jungle up. Plus it really makes for an interesting week for the cannibals. After all, there seemed to have been a lot of out of town guests in the neighborhood and they brought some very succulent treats.

Why? Two reasons:

1) The storytelling. The magic combination of a plausible plot and original characters. That’s art to me. I find very few creative forms as engrossing as a good movie.

2) Movies are a common contemporary reference point that keeps me connected to the world around me like few other art forms. I’ll forever identify the teen movies of the 80s with my early youth. I’ll forever identify hit independent films like Swingers, Pulp Fiction, and others with the storytelling of the 90s. Five years from now, I’ll remember 2010 as the year ofAvatar and the maturation of 3D technology. You’ll probably remember it too. We might talk about how that movie was overrated over a cup of coffee. Try doing that over the opera or the symphony some time.

Unfortunately, the movies and I are having problems in our relationship. We go out. She talks and dances on screen. The credits roll. I always pay the bill (which has steadily risen over the years) and trundle from the theater dissatisfied. My wife asks me how I liked the film. Sometimes, I shrug and answer “It was good” in that disingenuous high tone. More often, I offer an unwanted, blistering rant on topics vital to our national interests like “I f——g hate Paul Haggis! He can turn Van Wilder into an overwrought melodrama!”

Recently, I saw Greenberg, a film by Noam Baumbach, whose films include The Squid and The Whale and Margot at the Wedding, both of which I loved. Baumbach’s married to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s had a great career with tons of indie cred and anyone who grew up in the times of Fast Times at Ridgemont High will forever love her and Phoebe Cates in a way that’s not entirely related to her acting skill. Greenberg stars Ben Stiller playing a misanthrope, another promising trope for me. I love unlikable characters that find their way. The point is: I was really looking forward to Greenberg. But there’s something wrong with this film from the get-go. There’s no character arc, no gradual unveiling of a misanthrope’s soft side. The movie is just Stiller playing a neurotic asshole in one scene after another as he repeated mistreats the somewhat slow-talking young woman who, for reasons unexplained to the audience, loves him.

It’s been a good year since I really enjoyed a film. Admittedly, this may be a function of my curmudgeonly nature but we’re talking about a variety of films including Avatar, The Blind Side, The Hurt Locker, The Ghost Writer, Inglorious Basterds, the list goes on and on. Movies with solid actors, giving solid performances, but something significant is missing.

Why am I falling out of love with movies? Am I the only one? Has there been a decline in the storytelling? Is the movie declining in cultural relevance? Try going to a film festival sometime. You might notice that the crowd resembles that of an opera – a gathering of senior citizens.

On the surface, it seems like I might be the only person who’s falling out of love with the movies. Worldwide movie attendance is up according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Global box office receipts reached an all time high of $29.9 billion, an increase of 7.6% over 2008 and almost 30% from 2005. After a down period between 2005-2008, people seem to be going to the movies in large numbers again, even in a bad economy.

But dig underneath the numbers and you’ll find that the profit growth is being driven heavily by the 3D movie. In US and Canada, the take from 3D movies accounted for 11% of the growth. What was the big budget action film of yesteryear is now the heavily promoted 3D extravaganza like Avatar or Clash of the Titans. For all the artistic merits of the 3D movie, good storytelling is not high on the list. I like the big 3D experience. But you can be sure that at some point during a 3D film that one of the characters will spend five minutes of screen time flying through the air for reasons that have nothing to do with the story. And precisely at the 45-minute mark and the 90-minute mark, a Kraken (or whatever large monster applies) will be unleashed. Makes me pine for a good, old pointless car chase.

Maybe as a dude, moviemakers just don’t care about me anymore. Last year, the studios were taken completely by surprise by the big box office receipts of movies like The Hangover,Paranormal Activity, and Taken. Comedy, horror, action – all guy movies. According to a recent research report, males have diminished as a moviegoing target thanks to online gaming, the Internet, UFC and MMA. The female audience remains robust as evidenced by the never-ending spew of rom-coms and dressed-up Lifetime movies like The Backup Plan, Dear John, and Valentine’s Day.

Well, I’m not into UFC, MMA, or online gaming, but I must confess that I’ve finally started cheating on my relationship with the movies. I’m starting to care much more about the many quality television series that fulfill the storytelling-and-cultural-relevance jones that movies used to fulfill. I’m talking about “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” and all the HBO and Showtime shows I can only afford to watch in hotel rooms. And you know the great part about the scripted series? I don’t have to pay $15 a pop or wear ugly glasses or unleash the Kraken (whatever that is) or anything. I don’t have to wait until decent movies targeted for me come out on DVD because the studios are marketing the crap out of movies that offer everything except what matters: a compelling story and unique characters.

What’s even better is that now, during this golden age of the television series, a well-executed series keeps giving after two hours, prolonging its cultural relevance and deepening our relationship with a variety of characters.

Ultimately, something’s got to give in this damaged relationship between me and the movie. Perhaps I’ll have to stay home to spend time with the Walter Whites or Don Drapers of the screen. Perhaps American movies are evolving to become overwrought thrill-ride or melodrama machines for teens and seniors and I should just accept it. The days of Miramax and relative unknowns changing filmmaking are over. If I don’t like it, perhaps I should move to France or Spain and watch their movies. But who wants to read subtitles, right? In fact, if it’s not on a small, handheld screen, who wants to read, period?

Perhaps I’ll need to plan to break off my relationship with hardcovers as well. Perhaps a topic for another column.

Photo by Flickr user arbyreed

So how do the Norwegian gorefest DEAD SNOW and the Woody Harrelson vehicle ZOMBIELAND fare under the weight of my narrow-minded standards? Well, neither do that well, but at least DEAD SNOW has some truly inspired moments of over-the-top gore.

Ostensibly, DEAD SNOW is about a bunch of jerky medical students who head up to an isolated cabin on top of a snowy mountain for some vacation fun. Of course, there is a meta-element a’la SCREAM where the fatty character lays out the forthcoming undead onslaught by listing a host of movies which the action will reference. This sort of name checking usually turns me off since such ground rules are always contradicted in order to wrap up the movie and save the last girl. But in this case, the movies referenced are some of the biggies – EVIL DEAD, DEAD/ALIVE, and the FRIDAY THE 13^th contrivances – that I basically forgave the movie its stupid opening playfulness.

Once the action sets in, DEAD SNOW delivers some pretty clever situations and does not shrink from dispatching characters whose names we have actually learned. There is a heavily armed snow mobile, a charge of the garden tool brigade, a lot of intestine munching, violence to birds, and some really nice work on the Nazi zombie’s mythology. But my friend, Jason Read summed that up the best when he said, “I can believe in Zombie Nazis, in secret Nazi gold, and people using their intestines as mountain climbing ropes, but I cannot accept that anyone would want to have sex in an outhouse.” Personally, I think he was just bitter that Jenny Skavlan kept her bra on during the scene!

DEAD SNOW does, however, have scene that stands out. You will know it when it happens because it ends with a grenade blast and zombie parts flung into the air. It is a gruesome, unholy and completely effective scene.

ZOMBIELAND, on the other hand, quickly dispenses with a dangerous world filled with horrible zombies to focus more on the humorous interaction of two unlikely people who learn to love again. Or something. Maybe they were on a spring break road trip? I don’t think it matters that much. I felt the zombies were more of a family therapy trust-building exercise than as a defining plot point. Aside from the witty use of the FIGHT CLUB-esque cartoon text of survival rules sliding through and over the action, there is hardly any screen time devoted to zombies or killing them.

Aside from an absolutely brilliant death scene for a celebrity cameo , there is nothing memorable about ZOMBIELAND. I guess it was fun to watch at the time I saw it, but really, it is not a zombie movie. Harrelson mugging it up is fun to watch, but Jesse Eisenberg is a low rent Michael Cera. Emma Stone really shines as the too-many-chromosome-next-door neighbor-love-interest that buddy comedies always dredge up for the endearing loser to bag at the end. The final show down at the amusement park is so unbelievable and contrived, but by then I had abandoned all hope that ZOMBIELAND could even redeem itself.

I guess making an effective zombie movie is harder than it looks, especially when your audience is a fanboy nerd with too little to occupy his vast amounts of free time, huh?

Playing on the, now, clichéd Hitchcockian trick of killing off an above the title star in the first few minutes of the film (see PSYCHO, SCREAM, et. al.), THE HURT LOCKER begins by blowing Guy Pierce into the dirt. The opening sequence establishes the tension of the movie – but it has nothing to do with the dangers of defusing unstable ordinance. In fact, the potentiality of the bombs supplies none of the film’s tension, anxiety, nor power. Instead, as shown in the opening scene, the film relies upon more cynical tricks to fool the audience.

The tension is, first, built by the unreliability of military technology. The film blinks open through the lens of a grab-and-stab robot peeling along the side of a bustling dusty road, next to the shoes and burka hems of the locals. The tension mounts as the metal claw pokes at a laundry bag, I found myself cringing in anticipation, “How loud is this movie going to be?” But the booming sound effect is delayed. Next the improvised cart, a joke of ingenuity among the team, breaks down which means the bomb suit must be equipped. The first of a litany of action movie clichés follows, as the impressive suit is loudly snapped, tightened, and slapped into place, recalling scenes from COMMANDO to ALIENS to EVIL DEAD II, where the hero readies for battle strapping on a  personal arsenal that borders on the absurd. The fact that the suit fails, too, in the end, should surprise no one.

Second, the workaday aspect of the opening scene is set up to contrast the cowboy recklessness of the “wild man” to step on stage. The routine grind of mission, the deployment of the tools (i.e. robot and suit) and the good natured complaining/teasing, each remind us of the mundane banality that sets in to any situation when it becomes employment.  This setup establishes an internal tension between the team and their new cavalier leader. While the team excels at risk aversion, their new leader thrives on risk enhancement. It is a tension of macho opposites. Manly responses at odds with each other. Neither any less than the other, for both are potentially deadly, but inherently different in their embrace of the masculine as identity (war as hard work v. war as extreme sport). These roles play out most obviously during the barracks bonding night. The three team members share alcohol, confessions, and belly punches. The antagonism grows until the wild man takes the rough housing too far and mounts his more cautious opponent, riding his shoulders in an obscene bucking bronco simulation of oral sex and alpha dog dominance. And that is to say nothing of the more odious racial implications of the same scene.

The third, and most disturbing aspect of the film’s tension, is established in the opening scene. In the chaos of the moment, a butcher slips through the fingers of the military to rush back into his store hung with carcasses. There he detonates the bomb that kills Guy Pierce. This is extremely important for a couple of reasons.

The Iraqis are portrayed as crowds, as an omnipresent and dangerous audience. The intractable other whose singularity presents the greatest threat. In other words, in a crowd of suspicious looking characters, the one who is up to no good blends right in. This is a familiar trope of all colonial art, the casting of the colonized as babbling outsider intent upon obstruction, if not outright confrontation. The differences in cultural standards of personal space, duration of gaze, religious customs, style of dress, are all singed by hostility.

Language is the biggest stumbling block. The DVD selling kid with his broken English slang, cribbed from hip hop and action films, provides the lighter side of the language divide (the fact that he is engaged in commerce must be mentioned, for capitalism is the great mission of Iraq, the prime mover for assimilation to the ruling culture). While the sudden approach of friendly banter, “Where are you from?” provides a dangerous distraction during two scenes – one ending with a predictable explosion. Even by the last mission, where a translator is present, the blubbering incoherence of the suicide bomber, adds fatigue to the tension.

The depiction of the Iraqis as a crowd, or peeping audience, is the source of all of the movie’s tension. Again, touted as a realistic portrayal of the situation on the ground as experienced by American forces, the real purpose is more manipulative. Without defining any rules of engagement, the movie implicates its viewer by setting up scenes so the viewer expects a level of violence that never materializes. In other words, the viewer, tricked into thinking they are watching a standard cartoony action blockbuster, expecting that when guns are pointed they will be fired with deadly accuracy.  When this fury of bullets does not rain down in a pyrotechnic orgy, the viewer’s level of anxiety is elevated by the fact that the bloodthirsty expectations are left unfulfilled. What remains are the staring faces of the Iraqi extras. Their every move, gesture, and prop made suspicious, since as we learn from the opening scene, even the corner butcher might have the cell phone detonator that will set off the bomb. Again, we are informed of the colonial project. The crowds of onlookers are all suspect, all targets, all hostile – a point driven home by the slow motion scene where a group of boys throw rocks at the passing humvee. The viewer becomes frustrated by the inaction of the characters on the screen, as they hesitate and obey rules of engagement that are never clearly defined by the film.  The viewer’s impatience, anxiety and frustration implicates the viewer in the tension – a slick manipulation that displaces by jacking up the levels of suspicion and inaction by the characters. The best example of this is the UN car bomb scene, where the video camera guy might be receiving messages from a threatening group on a minaret. The audience fidgets impatiently, almost shouting at the screen “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

There are so many clichés packed into the rest of the movie it is hard to not want to list them all. THE HURT LOCKER almost mirrors, or at least mocks, with its structure, John Wayne’s GREEN BERETS – right down to the night firefight chaos, the secret missions, and the scruffy haired kid that hangs around the base. There are the four major war film archetypes – the shell shocked fatalist who makes good at war by killing the enemy; the rogue risk-taking cowboy; the pragmatic stoic; the Ivy League trained officer who should have just worn the dead meat t-shirt.

Had the movie been braver, then the critical accolades it received might be justified. But I can’t help thinking that, much like the war it is fictionalizing, we were tricked into supporting it. And maybe, that is its brilliant statement.

DEMONS is an amazingly heavy-handed treatise on the corrupting power horror movies supposedly have on the audience. Exploiting the conservative commentator’s incessant refrain that these movies have the power to influence and dictate violent behavior to the audience, DEMONS posits this question: “What if a movie actually transformed the audience into monsters?”

Of course, no single critique will quiet the argument that violent behavior is stoked by video games, loud music, and horror movies. We have an innate fear of effectiveness of advertising (and by extension political propaganda). But instead of attacking those engines of our socio-economic system, it is far easier (and safer) to attack a minority genre of entertainment – the weak gazelle in the pack, as embodied as a niche market.

The movie takes place in West Berlin, the divided Cold War city always on the verge, a symbol of Capitalist excess pounding at the wall of Communist political conformity, drab poverty, individualistic oppression, etc. (Is it just by chance that the movie’s movie-goers are trapped by a large concrete wall where the doors once were?) By the time the demons (those media-saturated degenerates) have overrun the city and doomed free society, the metaphor is heavy-handed and gloved by schlock.

The story starts with the lure of a free movie tickets. The tickets embody the double fold here – first playing on themes of the test audience of market research. That influential cross section of demographics that drive the desecration of so many genre films (how many happy endings have been re-filmed and tacked on because of those pesky audience comment cards? Notice, too, all the shocking ground-breaking film posters in the lobby). Second, the free tickets, themselves, threaten the Capitalist purpose of movie making, the commodification of narrative and star-making vehicles, not to mention the restoration of the old movie theater, are all subverted by the profitlessness of the evening.

As the audience moves into the theater, there is the allure of a shiny fetish object – the demon mask. Again, as a strictly horror convention, it functions as the prime mover, the object of evil, that needs to be activated by blood. Pretty standard. But it, also, operates as a commodity fetish object.  First, it is a lobby display, extending the reach of the film, by producing prop-like 3-D advertising (the idea of souvenir). Second, by actuating the contagion of the Demon curse, the nick on the face creates patient zero of the infection (not surprisingly it is a prostitute that grabs the item and sets off the infection!), the mask operates as a metaphor for the desirability of the commodity object. By being a singular item, on display in the lobby, the mask functions as highly alluring and rarefied, therefore increasingly its power as a metaphor for the panic of consumption (the idea that there are not enough objects for everyone who wants one, thereby creating the need of possession which spreads like a virus).

“What is wrong with that girl?”

As the movie-within-the-movie starts, the audience watches the audience watching, as well as the essential parts of the internal movie. The movie-within-the-movie is interrupted to introduce the various doomed characters in the audience, and instill a sense of connection and identification that will deepen the coming horror. There are teens on the make, sitting behind the unhappily married couple out for their anniversary; there are the sloppily smooching lovebirds; a blind theorist and his seeing eye girl; and a pimp with his two whores. All are poorly defined, stiffly acted, and overdubbed in post-production.

What is interesting about the group, though, is the inclusion of the criminals – the pimp and his two prostitutes. The fact that the two ladies-for-hire are the first two to succumb to the demon transformation should not be surprising.  They are the logical choice to embody the corrosive evil since they are vanguards of morality and outside the social structure of the responsible economy. There is, also at work, the idea of body modification. Since prostitutes transform their bodies into specific commodities ,who’s access can be purchased for increasing prices, it makes sense to have them the assume the most graphic and visual demonic transformations. Their bodies are overtaken and transformed by a blood borne contagion – the demon inside.  The metaphor is one of consumption, consuming. By acting on the desire for a commodity, the actor is changed into a creature of need, a singular purpose to extend and support the commodity base. The prostitutes make this physical, drawing forth the allusion.

To have the second victim (the other prostitute) attacked in a bathroom, and, then, fall through the screen of the movie being shown is a brilliant, if a bit contrived, touch of flippancy. Here we see the critique of art influencing life–literally plowing through the fourth wall. The movie scene that the morphing prostitute falls out of is a scene where a demon is attacking a young woman in a tent. As the screen knife tears into the tent, the possessed prostitute uses her long nails to rip at the movie screen. The disorientation on the movie audience is profound. They are confused as life blurs with the entertainment. The effect is meant to be horrifying.

After the initial transformation and the famous fangs pushing teeth out effect, DEMONS cuts to a speeding car of petty thugs. Punks, in every sense of the word. They are snorting coke out of a straw stuck in an actual Coca-Cola soda can. The visual pun may have deeper importance. The drug addict car thieves represent the other side of criminality. As opposed to the prostitutes, the drug addict car thieves commit crimes against commodities. They steal and destroy, unproductively, other people’s items. Yet, they, too, are damned to brand loyalty and a crass sort of consumption that moves Capitalism forward. As simple cannon fodder, these idiots offer no resistance, being chomped up quickly and effectively by the hive of Demons, unleashed by violent media depictions. They are solely a consumer group, swayed by the basest and most obvious forms of manipulation. Their snorting cocaine out of the Coke can implies a critique that is void because of the vacancy left by their nihilism. While they scoop up of the spilled powder they are shown as slaves to the very consumption they seek to rebel against.

ZOOOM!

Once the movie has tipped the balance between survivors and demons, the action takes on a near-slapstick absurdity that is indicative of schlocky horror flicks. We are treated to some nasty effects, such as the mini-demon emerging from a woman’s back, as well as some touching transformations of supposed friends or lovers. DEMONS reaches deep to provide us with some truly stupid moments – take the motorcross battle scene, where our hero and his best girl zoom around the theater as the possessed bounce and wail and move their bad rubber glove hands in windmills. Our hero impossibly drives over the seats, then uses a ninja sword to cut down the baddies with slice, stab, slice. The whole time the soundtrack is completely overtaken by Udo’s ACCEPT blaring out. And that is not even mentioning the stupidity of a helicopter crashing down from the roof.

The end of DEMONS is equal parts a conventional horror “gotcha” moment and a hint at survivor porn. The fact that our hero’s best girl turns into a green-slime vomiting-demon, and is blasted off the back of the stallion white jeep by the Aryan princess in the front seat, makes no sense considering how our hero’s mangled arm has been featured since the theater escape. It is out of sync with the rest of the movie’s silly cosmology. But that is not as contrived as the whole survivor porn conceit. The white jeep with the well-armed motherless family, heading out to the country to see if there are any other survivors, is the wet dream of the Cold Warriors. The singularity of self-reliance, prepared and willing to defend one’s self (and implied continue the correct way of political life), became a cottage industry during the post-World War II Capitalist contract.  See Geopolitics of Hibernation. As the 1980s rolled on, the survivor porn genre would take on a more militarized form (RAMBO, RED DAWN, DAY OF THE DEAD,) offering a corrective against the hopelessness of the nuclear arsenals and the mutual assured destruction gambit.

How much the movie’s successes are dependent upon the subtle undercurrents of social commentary seems overshadowed by the silliness of the genre’s snide trappings. The ultimate failing of the movie is that it was designed first as a cheap and shocking exploitation flick. A product who’s economy opens up a whole other level of critique, if one wished to explore the fundamentals of drive-in first feature productions – which would include the Continental sensibilities of the grindhouse, the speed and inventiveness of the filmmakers, etc.

While most sequels continue the story or exist in a timeline of events, the Blind Dead movies are stand-alone episodes. The only links are recycled footage, namely the graveyard rising scenes (which recur in three of the four movies), the opening mythology scene wherein a ritual involving a topless village woman is enacted, the costuming, and the soundtracks.

The soundtracks are non-stop cacophony of howling winds, crickets, screech owls, babbling monkeys, and crashing waves. None of which is reflected on screen.  To listen only to the soundtrack, the viewer might think that there was a terrible storm whipping about, yet the trees are still and the characters untouched by any gusts or gales. This in addition to a stampeding musical score that rocks back and forth in wild incongruity with the action. One wonders if perhaps the blind dead scored these movies along with starring in them.

The gore in these films is trivial, even by1970s standards. It appears that most of the special effects budgets was spent on other things, possibly the soundtrack.  The films all seem to have been conceived around locations rather than plot. The great ruins of Tombs, the winding village streets of Return, the pirate ship set of Gallons, and finally the crumbling seaside hamlet of Seagulls.  All are authentically uncomfortable and creepy even before the fog machine coats them in an ankle-deep layer of atmosphere. The settings are among the best features of these movies, one of the few things worth appreciating non-ironically.

The Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) sets the tone for the following three movies. It features perhaps the slowest undead attacks in the zombie canon.

There is a running subtext of lesbianism in this episode. Virgina, the first victim, storms off after her boyfriend cozies up to her college girlfriend. She ends up in a sleeping bag, listening to a transistor radio after taking a sleeping pill.  While she’s smoking a cigarette, she is attacked by the Blind Dead. She manages to get away on one of the dead horses.  She appeals to a Trotsky-lookalike station agent before being chased down and stabbed by the zombies as the train conductor watches from the safe distance of the railroad tracks.

Then, a sadistic coroner’s assistant who is ambushed by Virginia’s reanimated corpse while torturing a frog in the morgue. Throw in some cops, a forlorn boyfriend investigating his girlfriend’s death, and a group of smugglers lead by a rapist who fights the Blind Dead with nothing but a tight tee-shirt and a switchblade. He loses. If a coherent plot is what you’re after then you may want to abandon this genre entirely; however, the gotcha ending may satisfy.

Return of the Blind Dead (1973) This time the blind dead thirst for revenge more than blood. This film wastes no time nor sentiment.  The cast of victims are plain jerks: pyrotechnician, his ex-girlfriend, the slimy mayor, his henchmen, a bumbling governor with a hot secretary, and a mom, dad, and little girl. And of course the unibrowed groundskeeper, who is stoned by the town children and delights in the Templar’s bloodbath. None of them are particularly worth saving, and one finds oneself rooting for the Templars.

A lot of the footage of the blind dead was simply cut from the first flick and spliced into this one, incorporating even the improbable horse chase.

The primary cast holes up in the church, waiting impatiently, for the blind dead to finish their rampage.  In the movie’s only truly shocking image, we watch the little girl walk slowly through the horde of dead, crying as she calls for her dead father. The finale is more upbeat than the first one, a decision I would quibble with, but which is in the end effective.

Ghost Galleon (1974) I am not even sure the dead are blind in this one. They might just be nearsighted and riddled with arthritis. They live on a ghost ship that appears in a twilight zone of treasure and fog.

One of the great mysteries of this movie, for me at least, is why a meteorologist from the weather bureau is an expert in the occult.
Once again, there is a lesbian couple, a rape, jerks being jerky, and slow-moving victims who could easily escape if they just stepped a few feet out of the way.
Plot conventions are even more ludicrously flouted in this installment.
I would recommend Galleon for the horrible dubbing and the stunning Blanca Estrada, who makes a few delightful appearances. The ending, the image of our favorite Deadites slowly emerging from the ocean is surprisingly well done..

The Blind Dead series does Wicker Man/Shadow over Innsmouth in the brilliantly titled Night of the Seagulls (1976).  Just try telling someone that you are really excited to see this horror movie called NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS and see how they respond.

Outsiders arrive in a truly awful seaside fishing village to find the town caught up in a terrible seven-year ritual sacrifice of pretty girls to the blind immortal knights. If that sentence does not entice you, I do not know what would. My question is this, aside from the bared boobs, why do the undead knight need pretties? Send in the crones.

I can’t say I was disappointed at all by the fact that the graveyard rising scene reappears in Seagulls. The ending is even more stupid than in the first three films - the solution to the zombie invasion seems so obvious that one wonder why the townspeople never thought to try it.  Still, the dialogue is, as usual, priceless.

Overall, the Blind Dead do not have that much to do in this one,  just riding in slow motion up and down a sunny afternoon beach that is presumably midnight since the church bells ring ominously. And that is sort of a shame, since the Blind Dead are really the heroes of these things.

Welcome to Value Added, a semi-monthly column named after one of the most despicable phrases in the English language. Expect capsule reviews of assorted culture I’ve been consuming, that is not necessarily timely, but is worthy of attention:

Podcast: Tank Riot
Hailing from “Tropical Madison, WI,” as they announce at the beginning of each show, Tank Riot is best described as a “geek podcast”, but without the self-satisfied smarminess that pervades many such podcasts. The three hosts are undoubtedly geeky, but have a wide array of interests: history, politics, film, technology, and yes, geek culture. Each episode focuses on a single topic or historical figure–think the History Channel as hosted by three drunk smart-asses from Madison. It’s consistently engaging stuff, and the hosts’ lack of guile is refreshing–even the prehistoric site design harkens back to a more idealistic vision of podcasting, one that was both entertaining and educational, before it was over-run by self-styled SEO experts and wannabe comedians. They’ve been at it for four years, so there’s a lot of gems in the archives, but I’d recommend starting with the Henry Kissinger, Rod Serling, or Nicola Tesla episodes. The affectionately skeptical series on conspiracy theories is a must-hear as well.

Book: Wormwood, Nevada
Though it’s being marketed as a science fiction novel, David Oppengaard’s second novel Wormwood, Nevada is more cosmically existential than fantastic. The story centers around Tyler and Anna Mayfield, a midwest couple whose newlywed glow is fading. They move to the small Nevada town of Wormwood and come face-to-face with the desolate state’s eccentric culture, from alien cultists to meth addicts. When a meteor crashes in town, the population scrambles for meaning, with some townspeople considering the meteor to be potential tourist bait, others as a sign of the end of the world. It’s a story of small-town Americana, loneliness, coming to terms with adulthood, and in a very broad sense, the inscruitability of the universe. While it’s clearly the work of a young author learning his voice, Oppegaard’s language is lyrical when called for, and the world is completely enveloping.

Movies: “For All Mankind”
This 1989 documentary of the moon landings is a refreshing counterpoint to the current documentary style, in which even PBS docs overuse gimmicks and quick cuts. There are no such gimmicks in “For All Mankind”: told entirely through stock footage and interview clips, there’s almost a zen-like quality to this collection of rarely-seen footage taken from the moon lander. There’s an affecting desolation to the the lingering footage of the moon’s surface (scored by an ambient Brian Eno soundtrack.) It would be hard to bankroll a languidly-paced documentary like this now, which is a shame–it’s meditative, beautiful work. It’s available to watch on streaming Netflix.

Music : Sleigh Bells
Described by a friend as the sound of a head exploding, blog-buzz band Sleigh Bells have hit upon one of the most unique sounds I’ve heard in a long time: alarm-siren guitars, lo-fi buzz, and blue-eyed R&B refrains compete for attention in the din, as if My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields had been tasked with remixing a Nelly Furtado single. It’s an delirious cacophony, forcing the listener to wonder where all that sounds are coming from. Remarkably, it’s only a duo, guitarist Derek Miller and vocalist Alexis Krauss. The band has yet to release a full-length album. There’s no way of knowing whether the gimmick will hold up over an album, much less a career, but it’s rare and refreshing to hear something that sounds so exhilaratingly new.