nazimova's camille: art deco

(1921. dir: Ray C. Smallwood) June Mathis wrote the script the same year her breakout hit the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse emerged, the one that made her protege, Valentino, an overnight sensation. He's here, as well, playing Armand, but anyone hoping for a Valentino Movie would have been disappointed. This is very much directed and choreographed towards showcasing the talents of the women. Nazimova was a massive star of the theatre, beginning at Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre before immigrating to New York where she was the Liv Ullman of her day, bringing Ibsen and Chekhov to the yanks. (According to Wikipedia, Dorothy Parker called Nazimova the best Hedda she'd ever seen.) Today she may be best remembered as the proprietrix of the infamous "Garden of Alla", a sort of sodom-and-gomorrah pleasure-den which has become an architectural fixture in the Classic Hollywood which resides in our collective unconscious.

Camille was to be a bold production, set in the modern day, photographed very much to emphasize Nazimova at the expense of her co-star, with a strong focus also placed on Rambova's striking art deco production design. Its Parisian scenes may be, in retrospect, the most stylistically "'20s"-looking pieces ever caught on celluloid. Rambova, Valentino's future wife and very much Nazimova's protege (and possibly her lover), was never well-liked among the Hollywood elite, but she owned a forceful artistic vision. Here, she's created spare sets designed around circles, amongst which Nazimova can bend her graceful body into expressive arcs and esses.

The script itself, alas, is no great shakes, giving us long scenes we don't need and far too little time spent with Marguerite and Armand together. Once she makes her decision to leave her lover for his own good, the movie falters and crawls to a slow finish, both actors hamming it up, and we never do get the scene we really want, which is la dame dying gracefully in her sweet boy's forgiving arms. The only times Valentino's star appeal comes apparent are when his eyes shine with sorrow; all else is either bland, predictable, or overplayed. It doesn't help that what we expect from a Valentino character, the strong, forceful lover, is instead a submissive, grasping Marguerite around the knees and offering to be her dog, and signing a gift for her not with love, but with "humility". Granted, nobody ever watches any version of Camille for Armand, but there are hints in Valentino's biographies that the relationship may be a sort of mirror image of his love affair with Rambova, who was most definitely a domineering powerhouse thrusting up through the center of his short life and his career, reshaping both; he was devastated when she left him.

More generally, it is a fascination to look back on the power these women had in those early Hollywood days: Rambova, Nazimova, and June Mathis, all three, and wonder, where did it all go, that female forza on the backlot?

In the end, this Lady of the Camellias seems flat and uninteresting in her virtuousness, with none of the fascinatingly layered sense of conflict we glean from Garbo's later rendition. Even Paris manages to feel claustrophobic, as if all of Parisian night-life is one roomful of pretentious humans who travel from a restaurant to a party to a casino. The most beautiful scene may be when Marguerite's car, headed to Paris on a night of Biblical rains, passes the car in which Armand is enjoying his last moments of happiness, on his way back to find a house empty but for betrayal.

samhainfest 2014: allison hayes triple feature

Disembodied: (1957. dir: Walter Grauman) You could call Allison Hayes the poor man's Jane Russell and you wouldn't be too far off-base. She suffered bad luck under the studio system, but that's to our advantage, because she wound up one of the original scream-queens, one of the greats.

In this ill-conceived and badly-written supernatural melodrama, Hayes is the Great White Voodoo Queen, leading the necromantic rituals of an unnamed native tribe in an unnamed jungle in deepest Africa. (One of my favorite lines is when the white men are awakened by drums and Paul Burke says, "It sounds like it's coming from the jungle," as if there's a second choice, as if in the jungle hut's back yard there's a nice rolling savannah they just never show us.) She's got the sex appeal and charisma to carry this femme fatale, but it's so badly written, incorporating so many unmotivated actions and crazy choices, that it's no great success. Also, and more damningly, her dances during the voodoo rituals are absurdly choreographed, and she winds up looking pretty silly doing them. The action never really gets rolling, the pace constantly derailed by the archenemies pausing to have a nice talk over tea cosies, some of it a lot of nonsense touching on Pythagoreans and metempsychosis, which makes no sense except to prepare us for one nice effect, when one of the natives switches personalities with one of the white men (ala "Turnabout Intruder" from the third season of Star Trek).

Still, she looks great, and when she hears her prey approaching the house and hikes up her skirt to show off the gams, you know the poor sod hasn't got a chance.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Zombies of Mora Tau: (1957. dir: Edward L. Cahn) These zombies walk underwater out into the sea; you can tell them from a distance because they're often adorned with seaweed. They have the 100-yard gaze, but otherwise look like men, and somehow their sailors' clothes from fifty years prior are still pretty neat and well-darned. They're guarding a chest of diamonds which was stolen from a local temple (this, also, is in darkest Africa, of course). Every so often a new expedition of white men come seeking the diamonds, and the old white lady of the island, widow of one of the zombies, shows the newest group the graveyard of all the men who've come, tried, failed, and either been buried or, if you don't get them into the ground fast enough, resurrected as the walking dead.

Sound like Pirates of the Caribbean? Well, it is, except without the charm or skill of execution. There are some chills, as when the ingenue is stolen by one of the zombies and dumped on the floor in the sort of bomb-shelter where the undead bunk down. The zombies all silently rise from their coffins (now, why do they sleep in coffins, again?) and gaze at her in utter silence before beginning, slowly, to encroach. (Don't worry. She gets saved.) Mostly it's pretty silly, but fun to watch. The diamonds are in a safe in the hold of a sunken ship, and the men diving have to fight off zombies underwater, which is not, I assure you, the makings of an exciting fight-scene.

Because she's an obvious slut, Hayes' character gets hers early on and becomes the only she-zombie amongst 'em. It's nice to see her man hit her with all his clout and the force of it bounce off her as if she's made of stone. In the end, the Old Widow "destroys" the diamonds (by tossing them out of a boat into water about a foot deep, where anyone could just reach down and grab them up again), and the zombies all vanish, their clothes fall into neat piles on the ground, and their souls, at last, are at rest. It's completely, entirely absurd, and a lot of fun to watch.

the Hypnotic Eye: (1960. dir: George Blair) I remember this one from when I was a kid, although I didn't remember it until the climactic, rather shocking moment. Beautiful girls are maiming themselves after they see a stage hypnotist at work. The early part about the girls and their auto-mutilations has almost a Sam Fuller feel to it, the perverse shock of it, but there are great hunks of the film devoted to Jacques Bergerac and his pretty dull mesmerism act (although, I'm here to tell you, when somebody keeps describing the taste of a lemon, your mouth really does react as if you're tasting it) and to a dull policeman (Joe Patridge) bumbling around trying to solve the crime. He patronizes his girlfriend (Marcia Henderson) when she gets the idea that the hypnotist is involved, letting her take all the risks, following her petulantly, almost letting his jealousy get her killed. He's patronizing to her friend, too, who defaces herself with sulfuric acid (which she just had sitting around the house. The fifties were a crazy time), disbelieving her when she claims that she really was hypnotized.

Hayes has the strong woman role here, and she's far more interesting than the suave, French magician himself. Even while she's lurking in the background her presence is powerful, and when she steps to the fore, she does it with a vengeance. To the film's credit, it doesn't pause to explain her motivations; it doesn't have to. If it weren't for the protracted clumsiness of the "let's hypnotize the cinema audience" scenes, this would have been a small but intriguing success.

samhainfest 2014: snippets

the House that Dripped Blood: (1971. dir: Peter Duffel) An anthology of horror stories, lackadaisically encased within an unconvincing "the house gives people what they deserve" framework, and ranging in quality from the engaging (Christopher Lee moves in with his daughter and is less than forthright with the new governess about his sweet little girl's true nature) to the downright silly (Jon Pertwee is a movie star who buys an "authentic" vampire cloak, which turns out to bestow the actual curse and powers of the vampire upon the wearer). Good acting by the likes of Peter Cushing, Joss Ackland and Denholm Elliott lift it above its under-par effects (a wax figure whose siren-like charms supposedly draw men to their deaths is heavy-featured, frumpy and petulant-faced, tossing a farce-like wrench into the works, and when Ingrid Pitt "flies" then "turns into a bat", the clumsy mechanisms involved bring the words "Ed Wood" to mind).

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch: (1982. dir: Tommy Lee Wallace) The infamous "but wait! where's Michael?" episode in the very long Halloween sequence, it's really a decent watch. It has an interesting story, Tom Atkins is always a stalwart lead, and Dan O'Herlihy as the evil mask-maker is fantastic.

Oculus: (2013. dir: Mike Flanagan) Effective and inventive psychological/supernatural thriller, about a mirror which is either an evil mastermind which devours life around it and lures its prey by planting illusions in the mind, or else a scapegoat which two grown siblings target to excuse the bloody demise of their parents. The acting is good, Katee Sakhoff will be my favorite scream-queen if she keeps going with it, and by the end, you'll be questioning yourself what is illusion and what is not. The scene in which the brother and sister stand outside safely in the yard, watching themselves standing in peril inside in front of the mirror and wondering if they are the real humans or if the other two are is mind-twistingly suspenseful.

the Reeds: (2010. dir: Nick Cohen) Small-cast English horror venture going for something along the lines of Christopher Smith's Triangle. It's got some decent acting, and the locale, a chartered boat lost in a landscape of narrowing canals pushing through desolate reeds, is low-budget effective. It's a power-place: something about the reeds "captures" those who die there, in effectively haunting variance of levels, sometimes mere breaths and suggestions, sometimes as corporeal as you and me. Some time-displacement gets woven into the mix, and it very nearly approaches success, but not quite. In the end, it reaches for one too many clever turns, goes one earth-shaking coincidence too far, and leaves us behind.

samhainfest 2014: scarecrows

(1988. dir: William Wesley) We enter in media res: a band of toy-Rambos have stolen a metal box full of money from an army base, kidnapped a pilot and his nubile daughter, and are bound for the good life in Mexico. Somewhere over the badassed Confederate region of this fine country, however, one greedy bastard chucks the money out and bails after it. Before long, the lot of them are holed up in a house apparently protected by the ghosts of the three Confederate duckhunters whose photograph we keep seeing on the wall, but I don't know how anyone really knows that, other than that it's in the script. The place is lousy with scarecrows, and, one by one, each of our anti-heroes becomes one of the walking, hay-stuffed dead.

By no stretch of anyone's imagination does Messengers 2 need to worry about losing its championship title to this turkey. It looks bad, sounds bad, and the acting is largely mediocre, although Ted Vernon, whose vanity project it is, gives himself a low-key, strong-guy-in-the-background role, which is a nice surprise, and Michael David Simms does rather well with his breakdown scene. The scarecrows look pretty impressive when they're passive, but the effects are ho-hum. You could call it a gewissengeist venture, since at least one of the party feels badly enough about the dead MPs back on the airfield to freak out and give the are-we-really-dead-is-this-really-hell? speech, but there's no reason to give any of it too much thought.

That said, there are sufficient touches of interest to make it watchable. One of the revenants, Jack, has a great rictus-grin-under-the-night-vision-goggles look, and there's a "hey, whassup?" quality to his banter reminiscent of those immortal Undead Griffin Dunne scenes in American Werewolf in London. The exposition at beginning and end are carried by radio newscasts, which is efficient, provides a pleasant book-ended format, and evokes memories of past classics. The atmosphere, although clunkily low-budget, carries a continuing sense that something interesting MIGHT still happen, but, alas, it never does.

samhainfest 2014: bad-night-at-the-mansion double feature

Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye: (1973. dir: Antonio Margheriti) The cat who witnesses the murders is one of those big, bored, Garfield cats; about halfway in it occurred to me that the killer was only continuing his slaughter to try and impress the feline, an impossible task. Sometimes it looked a little discomfited, but only inasmuch as if you'd put bass instead of salmon in its supper-dish.

It's a romping giallo with Jane Birkin scampering terrified in her nightie through the hidden passageways of a Scottish castle, a castle filled with a family called MacGrieff, who are all unabashedly Italian. The fun of these giallos is that you have a finite number of humans stuck in a bounded space together, and one by one they will all get picked off until there are only the killer, the innocent, and maybe her lover left. Can you guess who the killer is before the population falls below, say, seven? I guessed, but I didn't know why, which doesn't exactly count.

This one also has Serge Gainsbourg (he and Birkin are Charlotte Gainsbourg's parents) as an unflappable Scottish (!) detective, an ancient family vampire curse, a rat-eaten corpse in the basement, an accidentally burned Bible, and a man in a gorilla suit, which adds a little je-ne-sais-quoi. The sounds the rats make are indescribable, but will make you giggle.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Night of the Demons: (2009. dir: Adam Gierasch) Not to be mistaken for the b&w classic Night of the Demon with Dana Andrews, one of the best horror films ever made. This, rather, is a surprisingly endearing remake of the '80s B-schlock-fave starring scream-queen Linnea Quigley about a Halloween party gone terribly awry. This new, doomed cadre of kids is well acted, the film boasts a very convincing New Orleans vibe, and no aging Goth from my generation can resist its soundtrack (45 Grave and Type O Neg, among others). It's all about the grue, oceans and oceans of it, so not for the squeamish, but if you can live with that, if you can live with some macabre and disturbing sexual situations, and if you have no problem bonding with twenty-year-olds who say "fuck" every other word, then you just might enjoy it.

The laughs come genuinely, not via camp effects, but from the ridiculous things that panicking teenagers say to each other. Behold:

After a horrific attack by the first demon who has possessed their dead friend: "That wasn't Suzanne! Suzanne has a fucking face!"

When they find a gun: "Do you think it works?"
"You're a drug-dealer! Aren't you supposed to know about that shit?"

And, at a dead end: "We're stuck in a fucking closet!"
"It's not a closet! It's a fucking pantry!"

Alright, I'll be straight with you. It's possible that if you have no fondness for New Orleans, and you have no fondness for the old Gothic Rock catalogue, there may not be much in it to tempt, outside of some major, super-charged cleavage. The demons look a little bit like KISS in their make-up, and although the ending is kind of a rip-off, it's accomplished with sufficient insouciance that you don't really mind. The poor girl, by that time, deserves a break.

samhainfest 2014: the fourth kind

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2009. dir: Olatunde Osunsanmi) We all know about alien abductions, right? the night-terrors, the unexplained lights and paralysis, the lost time, and, eventually, with courage, working through the memory-lapses to find salvation in truth. Right?

Well, forget your slanty-eyed greys and the lab-coat examinations, your antiseptic, minor implants and radiation burns. What if that false screen-memory of the owl outside your bedroom window is NOT there to block out a scientific, invasive but basically even-keeled little smooth-headed alien dude who wants to know more about your anatomical makeup? what if it's there to preserve your sanity against repeated molestations by ancient Sumerian demigods who are both insane and running rampant in a tiny, isolated community? always during the three o'clock hour, the hour of late-night anxieties, of hagridden nightmares, the "hour of the wolf"?

A movie compiled, sometimes simultaneously in split-screen, of dramatizations and "actual footage" (in the sense that old World Wrestling Federation matches can be generously called "actual footage"), it manages to deliver some creepy discomfort, largely through admirable underplaying from Milla Jovovich and Elias Koteas as Alaskan psychologists trying to make sense of a widespread sleeping disorder which involves shared hallucinations of a barn owl. If the most effective thing a horror film can do is to convince us, if only for a moment, that this world of mundanities in which we spend our days exists alongside and hard up against a Lovecraftian world of madness, horror and tentacles, and only our rhino-skin-solid walls of psychological denial, no doubt evolved from sheer necessity, allow us to continue living in it, then this movie achieves some measure of success.

As in much of the most effective horror, the bulk of the fear leaps up from suggestion, as the video footage is mostly obscured by static when the entities are present. The rest of it comes with the hypnosis sessions, in which puzzled victims are led back into lost memories and wake screaming, hyperventilating, real Arthur Machen type terror, the kind where a person is ready to claw their eyes out rather than look again on what they've just seen. Let's hand it to these actors, then, particularly to Corey Johnson and Enzo Cilenti, for some really convincingly Grand Guignol, hair-whitening panic, in the old, relentless, Dionysian sense. They had me fully creeped out. I had a hard time walking into the darkest corner of my bedroom after watching it.

samhainfest 2014: the quiet ones

(2014. dir: John Pogue) It's a new Hammer Film, and it's "inspired by true events." In fact, accompanying the end credits, we are shown old photographs of what we are to assume are the original players in the real-life game. Very crafty.

The incident by which this was purportedly "inspired" is famous in Fortean circles, known as "the Philip Experiment". A group of Canadian intellectuals gathered in Toronto in the mid-70s with the aim of creating a ghost, or, more exactly, a tulpa, or collective thought-form, which would behave in the manner of a ghost. They began by creating a fictional character, an old Elizabethan named Philip Aylesford, gave him a life-story with details, even a portrait. Once they knew him very well, they began "table-tipping", trying to rouse him into communication. After a good year of very little happening, Philip came to life with a vengeance: not only rapping answers to questions on the table, but making it dance and levitate, lowering lights and temperatures at request.

Such stuff, although interesting in context of real life, is not particularly cinematic. The movie gives us something more traditional: a troubled girl locked in a room and tortured "for her own good" so that she will psychically manifest apparently supernatural phenomena. A professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford sequesters a small group of students in a spooky mansion to monitor the girl using the latest technology, bombarding her with loud music (Slade's version of "Cum on Feel the Noize", which had to sound just dreadfully vulgar in 1973), pulling her out of her cage now and then to strap her up with wires and berate her until she contacted "Evie", the evil alternate personality they were hoping to conjure. (The philanthropic idea was to get her to project the malignant personality into a foreign object, a doll, then destroy it along with its container, thereby freeing the girl from her madness. Brilliant, right? What could go wrong?)

In short, none of the movie bears any resemblance to anything that's probably ever happened outside of a horror film studio. It's well done, though, with Jared Harris leading the pack, a few shocks and chills along the way, a disappointing end, but a brilliant feel for the time and place.

samhainfest 2014: the house of dark shadows

(1970. dir: Dan Curtis) The movie was cashing in on the TV series, which had been a monster hit (sorry) since 1966. The genius of the franchise was that it was the first time soap opera was melded with Gothic, or with the supernatural at all, now a staple combination on cable channels everywhere, from Grimm to Penny Dreadful to Sleepy Hollow. Not only did it bring the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel, it brought to the forefront that dreadful and steadfast Gothic law that, to some extent, the victim willingly submits. Possibly against his (her) conscious will, possibly in spite of the ego and the left brain, but, comes the moonlight, the Gothic victim is like an addict and cannot explain in the light of day what he (she) has gotten up to in the night. Crucially, the one intended victim in this movie who does NOT submit has yet to approach sexual maturity, and so, it is implied, is still thinking straight, and runs away to safety instead of relaxing into ecstasy and death.

Dark Shadows, Barnabas Collins and his whole dysfunctional clan, are so deeply imbedded in my underconscious that the tendrils could not possibly be weeded out of my psyche: the incomparable theremin music floating over waves crashing in Collinsport Harbor, the shiver-inducing sight of Collinwood Mansion, hunkered over, watching and simultaneously embodying all manner of malignancy and evil from beyond the reach and ken of mankind. If you scroll down through the "full cast" listing on IMDB, you see roles listed like "Ghost of One-Armed Man", "Figure Holding a Knife", "Zombie", "The Werewolf", and "Bat". It inspired the one and only time I ever switched off a television set out of sheer fright. I remember, vaguely, a dead man's head in a glass tank sitting in the parlor, and much concerned talk over it, and the camera lingering far too long and suggestively on it, until I was certain its eyes would open, and it would be a moment of Lovecraftian revelation too horrible to be withstood, it would have transported me beyond the Despair Event Horizon, and I would never have found my way back into the innocence of childhood. So I switched it off. Amazingly, my left-brain, science-only, no-nonsense brother concurred with the decision. To this day I don't know what happened with that head, but in my under-psyche, it's something unspeakably, unsurvivably dreadful.

This two-hour introduction incorporates many of the accepted vampire tropes: the beast is unchained from his bondage by a treasure-seeking Renfield (John Karlen), feeds himself back into strength, reintegrates with his family, where he finds the spittin' image of his long-lost love is employed as governess, and becomes obsessed with sharing eternity with her as his undead bride. Meanwhile, there is a whole ton of barely-suppressed lust and dark ecstasy brought to light by the introduction of the beast, and death is so fully and successfully associated with sexual satiation as to reach a certain level of shamelessness, which in no way curtails its enjoyment. It is lurid, unabashed, bodice-ripping, penny-dreadful, pulpy, potboiler greatness, done with a small budget and wildly divergent levels of talent in both acting and writing.

My favorite character is Dr. Julia Hoffman, indelibly played by Grayson Hall, she of the magnificent cheekbones. Although in reboots her character was played by the great Barbara Steele and then again by Helena Bonham-Carter, a general favorite of mine, nobody can touch the original. Her role in the initial plot is to isolate the "vampire cell" and offer to "cure" Barnabas of his affliction, but, on the brink of success, as is fitting in a Gothic story, the empirical is overwhelmed, utterly submersed, by the interfering demands of human emotion, and the beast remains, thank all the eldritch gods, incontrovertibly bestial.

samhainfest 2014: dwight frye double feature

*SPOILER ALERT, BOTH FILMS*

the Vampire Bat: (1933. dir: Frank R. Strayer) Blue-tinted like a silent film, written and acted like an old play, it's a vampire movie without anything supernatural, and in that sense it resembles a Val Lewton movie: supernature permeates it, and yet it cannot be pinned down, and, in the end, is dismissed with a sigh of relief. Melvyn Douglas is a policeman (although we never really see him at work), Fay Wray some sort of scientific assistant (although we only see her sort of dawdling amidst beakers and Bunsen burners in a fetching white lab-coat), and they are both ridiculously American to be running around in a lugubrious castle plagued by bats and howling wolves.

Dwight Frye, who made a career of playing The Renfield Character in horror films, including in the original Dracula, plays Herman, a crazy-eyed half-wit who is scapegoated when the village decides the mysterious deaths plaguing them are the work of a vampire, just because the victims all have fang-punctures in their necks and their bodies are drained of blood. Melvyn Douglas, the rationalist, naturally scoffs at the notion, but poor Herman has a fondness for raising bats to keep as pets, so he's done for. In the end, it turns out there is a mad scientist at the back of it all, and the town's bat-infestation is merely synchronicitous.

There are a few rather lovely visuals which are reminiscent of the old, beautiful vampire classics (Dreyer's Vampyr, Murnau's Nosferatu, Browning's Dracula): a torch-bearing mob pouring every which way, bat-like, into a cave in pursuit of Herman. A disembodied, nebulous bodily organ pulsating in a tank in front of a splayed, unconscious victim. The "vampire" creeping up on his sleeping prey while dressed in an opera cloak and slouch hat, as if he stepped out of a Toulouse-Lautrec print. On the whole, it's slow, the humor plods, and only the piercing gazes of Frye and Lionel Atwill inspire any chills, but it's an interesting oddity.

Dead Men Walk: (1943. dir: Sam Newfield) It begins with a challenge: "How can you say with absolute certainty what does or does not dwell within the limitless ocean of the night?" and, later: "We're all quick to call insane any mentality that deviates from the conventional."

We open at a funeral. The casket is open, the minister invites anyone who cares to view the deceased to come forward. After an uncomfortable moment, an older man (George Zucco) rises reluctantly and looks into the coffin at his own face, the face of his twin.

The dead twin was evil; the living is a doctor, a kind man, a paragon of virtue. This is both a vampire and a Jekyll & Hyde story. When the doctor sees the leeringly malicious face of his dead brother out the second-floor window of a dying woman's bedchamber, we cannot help but imagine for a moment that it is his own reflection he sees, himself as he truly is. And when the end-battle comes, we know that if the evil brother is to be destroyed, it will be the good one who does it, and he must sacrifice himself in the doing.

The vampirism itself comes not from the traditional curse passed on from another, but is conjured purposefully by the Crowleyesque brother through black magics in his relentless hunger for a powerful immortality. Moonlight is repeatedly associated in the script with lovers, and it is only beneath the lover's moon when the monster can walk. Once again, as in the most effective vampire stories, a virgin on the brink of matrimony is the slowly fading victim, as if her own opening to sexuality invokes the demonic energy. Her fiancee, a young doctor, is woefully misplayed by Nedrick Young, who in profile looks very much like Leonard Cohen and communicates all the emotions of a garden vegetable, but who was primarily a screenwriter (the Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Jailhouse Rock) blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and so can grudgingly be forgiven his stiffness in front of the camera. Dwight Frye again plays the Renfield character, and does it with his usual, eerie, wild-eyed flair.

samhainfest 2014: tormented

(1960. dir: Bert I. Gordon) ...or, as the poster reads, "Tormented by the She-Ghost of Haunted Island!" Crazy, dad! Director Gordon, responsible for such classics as Attack of the Puppet People and War of the Colossal Beast, ramps the action down a few notches but doesn't let up on the camp, making for a truly strange, Ed-Woodian evening of ghost story. Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) plays jazz piano for a living but lives on a tiny, secluded island full of wealthy vacationers in the northern Atlantic. He's about to marry a rich broad, Meg, who wears Doris Day's wardrobe and walks like her, too, and is utterly clueless, and happy to remain so, as to the dark depths lurking within her purported beloved's psyche.

We see his darkness straight off because we are introduced to him as he fights with an ex-girlfriend, a sultry, faux-Marilyn chanteuse (Juli Reding) who will destroy his life before she lets anyone else have him. The introduction is a good one: we begin with waves crashing violently and continually against rocks under the credits, then Stewart narrates, Sunset Boulevard-like, as we travel across the picturesque beach to a decrepit lighthouse, then up the stairs toward the bickering voices. It allows us to relax into the beauty of the place without fully trusting it before we are thrown in with the more wooden, two-dimensional human inhabitants. Right away we watch the incident which jump-starts the whole shebang: Stewart doesn't exactly KILL his evil chanteuse, he just ALLOWS her to fall to her death. And, almost immediately, his guilt starts to drive him nuts.

There's a slightly agitated, not quite histrionic, jazz score splashing up near constantly against the action, and it helps, rather than hinders, keeping the tension alive. Unfortunately, the supernatural occurrences (footsteps in the sand, a hand crawling across the floor, a head without a body conversing naturally from atop a table until Stewart wraps it in a cloth and tosses it down the stairs, where he finds it is only a bouquet of flowers, an incriminating phonograph record switching itself repeatedly on) are so clumsily done as to elicit only laughter, and the film lacks any semblance of the Polanski-touch, that dark, awful sense of slow-encroaching madness and the strange behaviors it inspires in its victims (see the Tenant, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, the Ghost Writer, Macbeth, and no doubt a hundred other examples from his body of work) which it sorely needs.

You can't write it off entirely, though. A young Joe Turkel (the genius robot-maker in Blade Runner, that cadaverous, spooky-assed barman in the Shining), looking wonderfully Stephen McHattie-ish, is assured and ominous as a hep-cat ferry-man with an attitude who susses out the situation and tries to wrangle money from the knowledge. The wedding, when it finally comes, has an organ-played processional which sounds like a funeral march and all the flowers decay beneath a breath of maledictory wind. Stewart's true love, interestingly enough, turns out to be Meg's nine-year-old sister, Sally (played by the director's daughter, Susan, who had a long and successful television career until she grew up). Sally is forthright from the beginning about her devotion to him, telling Stewart plainly that he is marrying the wrong sister. And, indeed, whereas the older girl willfully blinds herself to necessary truths, Sally sees her beloved clearly, sees his increasingly erratic behavior, even watches him do murder, and still fights through her fears to stand by her man.

The MST3K crew has already done a job on this movie, which I'm guessing is probably very funny. Meanwhile, the sheer strangeness of it makes it a good time on its own.

samhainfest 2014: the black plague

(2002. dir: Alberto Sciamma) (original title: Anazapta) It's interesting that even in these days of glaring, fluorescent scientism we still look backward aghast at the Black Plague, particularly as it swept across England in the middle 1300s, secretly wondering if it proves the existence of a harsh and malevolent God. Or so one would guess from our horror films.

This one is a true example of the Gewissengeist film, this time set within the Dark Ages. A feudal village labors beneath the secret of a shared guilt: a terrible wrong was done to its chatelaine at her husband's behest. Years later, soldiers return from the Hundred Years' War, and with them a witchy stranger, a Frenchman who wields the kiss of death and bears a scar which terror-smites all who see it. The Bishop, as is de rigeur in our cinema, is corrupt, carnal, utterly ruthless. A curse is manifested through manipulation of Holy Communion. The world is made of mud and rain and the eerie cries of foxes.

Jon Finch is the lord of the manor, gone these many years in Europe, and Lena Headey his young wife, confused by her abandonment and possibly by the chastity belt she wears. While she fights at home to keep the creditors at bay, gather the ransom to deliver her husband from his French captivity, and curb the mounting mob-panic the new pestilence is breeding, there are interesting interscenes in which we see her escaped lord, alone and trudging homeward, howling mad curses. Finch is so wonderfully imposing an actor that although we don't see much of him until the end, he is very satisfying, with his rich voice, his rolling "r"s and thunderous roars. The whole cast is made of marvellously steady, English journeyman actors (Christopher Fairbank! Jason Flemyng!), and so it cannot fail to engage, and Headey is good as the innocent on the brink of a revelation. The ending is unexpected, and I was utterly pleased with it, although I can see how it might not be to all tastes.

The tragedy of this movie is that, like so many failures, its story so far outclasses its screenplay as to create an untenable imbalance. The dialogue rarely rises above the pedestrian (although the noseless gaoler gets some decent banter), and never approaches the level of intrigue offered by some of the storyteller's ideas. Too much not-very-interesting time is spent on the slow-percolating attraction between the discarded wife and her mysterious visitor, there is an embarrassing scene in which the Frenchman pulls out his dick to win an alpha-male contest against his bullying English captors (of course it doesn't work; they beat the crap out of him), and somebody in power either needed to A) pick up the pace or B) heighten the tension, because we need one or the other to pull us along. As it stands, most people are going to turn the channel at an early commercial break, long before they reach the more interesting plot-turns.

samhainfest 2014 triple feature

Madhouse: (1974. dir: Jim Clark) Whimsical, if sometimes clodhoppingly heavy-handed, companion piece to 1973's Theatre of Blood, in which an aging horror icon is haunted by copy-cat murders from his "Dr. Death" slasher films. The cast of characters is nuthouse bold, with some of its camp reaching Rocky Horror levels of madcap, although without any trace of giddy humor. The acting is solid, though, with Peter Cushing as the writing-partner half of the "Dr. Death" duo, and lots of screaming lovelies meeting terrible ends. There's also a good deal of space given over to some hard-edged ribbing of Hollywood, its ways and means. Catherine Wilmer and Ellis Dale work particularly well together as a team of blackmailers. The ending, although absurdly far-fetched, is bold and enjoyable.

Halloween H20: (1998. dir: Steve Miner) Really fine sequel to a game-changing movie. The cast is stunning: Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams, young and baby-faced but already in possession of the instincts and burgeoning skills. Jamie Lee Curtis brings us the grown-up Laurie Strode, finally getting her closure, in a well-written, well-shot, and well-directed movie. And did you know the mask was a white-faced William Shatner mask? Once Curtis says so in the extras, you'll never be able to look at Michael quite the same way again.

Dagon: (2001. dir: Stuart Gordon) A game effort at bringing one of those notoriously difficult works of Lovecraft to the screen. Based on "the Shadow Over Innsmouth" and relocated from New England to a spooky coastal village in Spain, it involves Gordon's usual bespectacled nebbish shipwrecked in a town inhabited by fish-people who worship the fish-god of the title. Gordon brings his visual clarity and enthusiasm, and his young-Raimi-esque relishing of unstoppable, howling monsterfests. The village is great, creepy and slimy and wet and decayed; the villagers are great, with their varying remnants of humanness and their eerie fish-languages.

Ezra Godden, like Bruce Campbell without the charisma, like Ted Raimi without the comic overlay, is game enough but uncompelling in the lead. All in all, it's too bad this doesn't spark entirely to life. On one hand, it feels like a lot of filler padding insufficent plot, and, on the other, like the dial is pushed up to eleven for too much of the time, and we slump back in our chairs indifferently after a certain amount of high-angst explosiveness. Still, the world itself is so real you'll feel the wetness creeping into your joints, making your bones creak; you'll smell the moldering rot.

samhainfest 2014: the black death

(2010. dir: Christopher Smith) This is the nightmare version of the Hobbit. A young monk (Eddie Redmayne) embarks on an adventure through a plague-stricken landscape, guiding an embassage of God's soldiers (led by Sean Bean, a Boromir calcified in his own darkness) on a mission to investigate reports of a town beyond the marsh over which death holds no sway. The constant threat of what appears to be a divine genocide sweeping across the land brings the worst out of its denizens: even good men give in to cowardice and become immune to empathy, while the worst become witch-burners, predatory outlaws, blood-crazed fanatics.

It is advertised as "an occult thriller", but its horror lies in man's continuing cruelty to man. The supernatural element, which is almost overpowering sometimes, comes from the unseen, exulting presence of a God so malevolent he is exterminating his people. The power of Smith's presentation of his world is that God is sometimes felt as an impartial, amoral, balancing force, while at others you can almost hear Him cackling with self-satisified delight at the ingenuity of His torments.

The acting is uniformly wonderful, from David Warner as an abbott fighting theodical thoughts, to Bean, an actor who is always at his magnificent best when exploring how nobility and tyranny can exist within the same breast. Redmayne is perfect in an introspective role which becomes extraordinarily complex by the astonishing ending, and John Lynch is utterly marvellous as our everyman narrator, a veteran soldier returned from France, a man who has faced the darkness of this world head-on while managing to keep hold of a sense of honor, and even he finds himself befuddled by the horrors around him. The final words of his narration, the melancholy optimism of them, are, in context, heart-rending.

samhainfest 2014: prophecy

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1979. dir: John Frankenheimer) Is it ancient Native American vengeance, sprung up red-clawed from myth? or grotesque mutation from mercury dumped into the waters by the white man's paper mill? Frankenheimer is coy on the subject of choosing. Indeed, why choose? Perhaps the denizens of the daimonic dimension make use of what gateways are available.

I love these old 70s horror things, love them for their flaws. I'm not talking about the greats, about the Exorcist. I'm talking about the cheese: the Fury, the Car, Motherlode, Burnt Offerings, and this. The pace is set at so easy an amble, the orchestral music so overbearing and lush, that a child today wouldn't recognize it as a horror film. When you get to the brutality and gore, it's doubly surprising.

It's an ecological showdown between the Indians and the loggers, the former represented by a thunder-browed Armand Assante, the latter by an amiable and avuncular Richard Dysart, both formidable actors who do very well under the circumstances. (To demonstrate the circumstances, I'll point out that the initial clash between the two groups involves a duel between an axe-wielding Indian and a logger sporting a chainsaw. I guess it must have looked good on paper.) To give Frankenheimer his due, there are some marvellous pieces of skill here. One scene in particular, in which our intrepid group hides from the beast in an underground tunnel, is especially masterful, his use of framing and silence and lighting. There is also a poetic murder in the mist, a dreamlike glimpse of the village elder being borne aloft by the gargantua. On the flipside, there is a notoriously risible bit in which the beast attacks a family camping and a boy zipped into a mummy-bag explodes in a cloud of feathers when it throws him with force against a rock. It's almost as if there were multiple directors involved, as if Frankenheimer lost interest and the project was taken over by a hack.

Our heroic lead is Robert Foxworth, a disillusioned do-gooder who set out to save the world and is growing cynical in his failed effort. Talia Shire is his cello-playing wife, the true lead, since we begin with her, share the secret of her pregnancy, and follow her emotional process more intimately than his. It is, in fact, her pregnancy which is the true heart of the movie, and it feels like a cheat that its story is never completed.

The local animals (in this far, far northern forest) who eat the mercury-poisoned fish are giving birth to monstrous hideosities. The Foxworth character has a key speech in which he describes the development of a fetus as going through marine, amphibious, reptilian and finally mammalian stages, and his revelation is that these monster-babies have been retarded at each stage, and so carry over traits from each. His wife, having tasted of the poisson maudit, listens in horror, realizing she has damned her unborn baby to an inhuman existence. The theme is not ignored, exactly, giving us particularly apt and eccentric images like the couple carrying a squalling mutato-bearcub, swaddled like an infant, as they are pursued by its fearsome and ursalike mutato-mater. Still, in context of horror films of the time, the fate of her child and her attitude towards it are the main issues, and that end is left dangling. What is growing within her womb? how will it emerge into the world, and what will happen then?

The seventies were obsessed with choices about mothering, childbearing, and the question of the "demon seed". Consider not just Rosemary's Baby and its many Z-class offspring, but It's Alive, the Brood, Demon Seed, the Manitou, the first two Alien films and their focus on gestation and motherhood, even Eraserhead. Prophecy (which is a misnomer; it should be called after its mythical daimon, the Katahdin) is very much linked onto that train of thought, but defaults any definite comment on it, prefering to stay within the safer realm of beasts attacking, men defending, and, sadly, all the Native Americans dying while many of the white men get to survive, probably to poison another river on another day.

welcome to my samhain horrorfest

Deer Woman: (2005. dir: John Landis) Another entry in the tepid "Masters of Horror" series, this one is actually fairly funny. Jumping off from Native American legend, it brings a figure from myth into modern life. Told the story of Deer Woman by a worker in a casino (she is a beautiful woman with the legs of a deer; she seduces men, then stomps them to death), the cops ask what her motive is and are told, "Why does everything have to have a 'why' with you people, you know? She's a woman with deer legs. Motive isn't really an issue here." True to that myth-persistent ambiguity, there is no real closure to this case, only a sort of temporary cease-fire.

Why do I think it's funny? I'm not sure. It's got a nice, light tone, and there's something funny about a cop walking down a city street and knowing he's being stalked but the footsteps sound like the clacking of bipedal deer hooves. There are nice touches like the talking stag named Steve who's the "official greeter" at the kitschy casino. There's something funny about Bambi turning killer, and Landis makes great hay of that in the dramatised daydreams the cop has about how the murders might have occurred. There's even a direct reference to the werewolf-killings in the director's own an American Werewolf in London. Landis, for all his faults, is usually unpretentious, and I may at last be coming to terms with his idiosyncratic preferences in story-telling.

the Four-Sided Triangle: (1953. dir: Terence Fisher) One of those early b&w Hammer films from before they caught their Hammer groove and sailed into glory on the technicolor waves of fear and lust underpinning our collective unconscious.

More sci-fi than horror, it involves a pair of boffins in the English countryside who invent a machine which will exactly duplicate ANYTHING, from a cashier's check to an atom bomb to... a living girl! When they both fall for the same girl, complications ensue. Slow-paced and talky and very, very English, it's of interest as an oddity more than a genuine success. There are shades of early Goth recognisable in the girl's character, sounding like she might have walked off a Val Lewton set with her deadpan justification of suicidal thoughts ("I never asked to be born, so it's my right to die.") and slow, assured, glamorpuss way of moving, as played by sex kitten and fading Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton.

I'm convinced that studying the genre films of an era is as important in understanding a time as delving into the accepted tomes (who won what battle, what explorer planted what flag on that promontory first). In that respect, these early Hammer films are a treasure trove, giving us unbroken surface complacency electric with a crazed current of malcontent and barely-controlled hysteria slamming up beneath it.

On its own merits, however, it's a little slow.

norman reedus film festival: let the devil wear black and hello, herman

Let the Devil Wear Black: (1999. dir: Stacy Title) "We can so easily fall back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted, can find that we are caught as in a dream and die there without ever waking up. This can occur." It's from Rilke, it's a recurring coda throughout, and it's indicative of the note of poetic melancholy to which this movie keeps returning.

I knew three things about Devil when I got it: it's a modernized bowdlerization of Hamlet, the actor in the lead is best known for a stint on "Survivor", and the Ophelia character eats dog-food. Three strikes against it. My expectations were low.

It's surprisingly, refreshingly, strange. The script is strange and well-written, about 90% of it plays, and the cast is splendid. What was I just saying about vanity projects? Jonathan Penner co-wrote and starred in this, and it was directed by his wife, but I guess he left sufficient checks and balances in there that it all works out. (It doesn't hurt that his wife is a damn fine director.) Maury Chakin has a great supporting role, and Kevin West is fantastic in his one scene as a sugar-huffing night-pharmacist. Mary Louise Parker is absolutely Ophelia, she's great, exploring her incipient madness with childlike curiosity and wielding moments of clarity like weapons, calling the sexism so deeply imbedded in our relationships "neo-colonialism by proxy" and reprimanding her shouting father with, "I'm unbalanced, not deaf." Chris Sarandon as the Dead King is also perfect. There's a moment at the end, once justice has been done at terrible cost, where he ascends, and we see he is barefoot, as the young Hamlet is now wearing his shoes. Jonathan Banks, standing in for Horatio, and Tony Plana as a menacing cop also have small but excellent turns.

This director, Title, has vision. It all falls together in odd, unpredictable but unified fashion, held together against a groovy trip-hop score.

Reedus plays Brautigan, the Rosencrantz character, a thug, young and thick. The action takes place all in a single day and night, and much of the time Hamlet (Jack, played by Penner) spends driving around in the company of Brautigan and his cohort, Bradbury (Randall Batinkoff). They're good; they inhabit a decent plot twist; the time snakes inexorably towards death.

Rating: four stars
Reedus Factor: three stars

photo courtesy of fanzone50 http://www.fanzone50.com/Norman/Let.html

Hello, Herman: (2012. dir: Michelle Danner) Ill-written diatribe on the Columbine Aberration, all preaching and no insight. Reedus gives it a game effort but stumbles again. You know how directors like Gus Van Sant and Harmony Korine and Larry Clarke can put kids in front of the camera and they're, like, kids? The kids in this movie are like drama geeks, culled from Acting 101 university classes, who feel like they have to ACT like kids. (Albert Finney does this. He's an old man, but I think he doesn't believe it, so he's always trying to act like an old man would act.) It dulls an already dulled effort. Soapboxes so rarely work, unless they're sweetened with humor or, you know, written well.

Rating: one star
Reedus Factor: two and a half stars for lots of screen time

norman reedus film festival: floating and pulse

Floating: (1997. dir: William Roth) It's one of those movies about a kid (once again, Reedus is playing younger than his age) asking the question, "What do I do with my life?" and getting Hollywood's only answer, "Either college, or crime. There is NO THIRD CHOICE." (Which is a funny message coming from Hollywood. Think Woody Allen went to college? thrown out of NYU after one semester, then dropped out of CCNY. Kevin Bacon, Jack Benny, Naomi Watts, Quentin Tarantino, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine, Peter Bogdanovich: all high school drop-outs. Brando was expelled from both high school and military academy. Paul Thomas Anderson? left NYU after two days. David Fincher? jumped straight from high school into Lucasfilm to work on the ewoks, and Humphrey Bogart flunked out of Andover. Charlie Chaplin never finished the English equivalent of grade school. Norman Reedus? one semester at Bethany College, in the Swedish part of Kansas, in 1987.)

This boy, Van, lives on the edge of the '90s punk rock scene (no women in the mosh pit, bands with heavy-muscled, sweaty, shirtless, Rollins-type singers) but the film itself sports a super-sweet soundtrack by David Mansfield (the fellow who was my personal favorite part of Heaven's Gate). It's ostensibly a coming-of-age movie about a straight boy finding his way without sacrificing his honor, but in truth it's a fairly thinly disguised gay fantasy with a Madame Butterfly finale.

Flawed as it is (slowly paced, with an unevenly-told story), it's a beautiful coming-out party for Reedus. It's his first big film: not his best work, but he's already strong enough to bear it aloft, and the whole thing radiates outward from him, from the easy command of his presence.

Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: five stars

*SPOILER ALERT*

Pulse: (2002. dir: Marcus Adams) On a late night drive, a mother and teenaged daughter bicker and hallucinate. By the end of the night, they have fought their way free from the clutches of a murderous cult. Or have they?

The story is so disjointed and dreamlike that it's possible it only makes sense if you think of it as a fever-dream in the pill-addled, half-asleep, at-the-end-of-her-tethered mind of the mother (Madeleine Stowe). Mischa Barton is the petulant girl-child, nubile of body but still a girl elsewise. There's a lot of tricksey photography and effects which bolster the dream-quality, but can be annoying until you sink into the aesthetic. The only successful way to watch this, in fact, may be late at night in a fever or a dream-stupor, so you can turn your left brain off and let the right brain play.

Reedus gets a different kind of turn as a lurking, watcher guy, The Recovery Man, he's called, the guy in the tow-truck. These cultees, they kill people by causing auto accidents and lure girls estranged from their families into the ongoing rave in the back of their empty oil tanker. The Jim Jones is played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers, who is good at that sort of thing. He's the sort of guy who can slice his tongue open, slow and sexy for shock appeal, then still has no trouble speaking clearly. Lots of minor mutilation in this one. We watch close-up the piercing of a belly button, that sort of thing. There's a lot of fascination with the mingling of cars and blood, sort of Crash-inspired, but nowhere near as inspired as Crash.

And what's with the razor blade ending? What is it supposed to mean, exactly, beyond a gesture of ill-defined menace? How did it get into the car? are we to take it as confirmation that the whole thing is a folie-a-deux, a shared and manifested hallucination from the two women's brains, and the razor blade is a sign that although the night of terror is through, the underlying tumult which launched it into being still lurks at the threshhold, and may, like Dracula, rise up again?

Well, OK. When I put it that way, it's far more interesting. I initially read it to mean the film-maker didn't know how to end the story.

Rating: two stars, maybe more late at night if you're stoned
Reedus Factor: three stars

photo courtesy of fanzone 50: http://www.fanzone50.com/Norman/Pulse.html

single-scene reedus, part two

Luster: (2002. dir: Everett Lewis) This was a projet du coeur for someone, writer/director Lewis, I guess, a fantasia to his own erotic homosex. It's a z-grade indie film with romantic pretentions to punk-rock DIY, made on a budget of five bucks and a case of beer, with a ton of heart, really bad sound, and exactly two good performances in it (Shane Powers as Sam and Susannah Melvoin as Sandra). That said, I know for a fact that this is somebody's favorite movie ever made; some gay kid in, I don't know, Nebraska, is even as we speak wearing out his old VHS copy with multiple viewings, using it as a doorway into a dreamworld of deliverance. There's an argument to be made that there is no greater achievement, no higher calling for a film-maker than that.

Reedus has one scene; he is the Sextools Delivery Boy. He comes in, gets the guy to sign for the delivery, stretches provocatively, flirts nonchalantly, taking the pen out of the guy's mouth, then doesn't hesitate when he's invited into the bathroom. Once there, he's asked if he wants a blowjob. Following the time-honored tradition of straight guys throughout history in that position, he asks, "How much?" Once a deal is brokered, he advances toward the kid who's going to do the work.

That's it; that's his whole bit. Mostly, he broadcasts that particular admixture of jokey embarrassment, blush of flattery, and edge of belligerence which is also the traditional response from straight men on finding themselves desired by other men. Reedus the Superstar has always had a sizable gay following, though: between this, Floating, Dark Harbor, and the so-homophobic-it's-homoerotically-epic Boondock Saints, he's like a gay icon. Plus, he donned drag for a Bjork video (what could BE more gay?), and now, they hint darkly, it will come out that Daryl Dixon is perhaps the world's first sympathetic, rednecked queer. He's a ground-breaker.

Rating: one and a half stars, but not for lack of trying, and I'm not part of its specific demographic
Reedus Factor: zero stars

A Lot Like Love: (2005. dir: Nigel Cole) Ward Bond used to do this to me all the time. I waste a whole Netflix rental on a movie I know he's going to be in for like a second, and then it turns out that second is right at the beginning, like he plays a cab driver stuck in traffic and the heroine leaps out of the cab and runs down the street and that's the last you see of him. Then I'm stuck with two hours of a movie I never would have chosen to watch of my own free will.

If you're like me and tend to avoid the romcoms, this is neither the best nor the worst you will ever see. It's actually closer to the top of the scale than the bottom. It's derivative, yes, most shamelessly of Four Weddings and a Funeral, but if you're going to derive, might as well pilfer from the best. On the plus side, the Girl is not only played by Amanda Peet, she's also not obsessed with weddings, children, shopping, shoes, accessories, or her career. Also on the plus side, Ashton Kutcher is never as bad as you think he's going to be, and he wields a certain charm.

Reedus is Peet's musician-boyfriend when we first see her, dropping her at the airport and breaking up with her over the credits. He's like a blur of activity. Honestly, you never even get a clear glimpse of him.

Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: zero stars

Cadillac Records: (2008. dir: Darnell Martin) Sentimental journey backwards through the history of Chess Records and the original black superstars of the blues. The characters are full and complex, the relationships realistically fraught, the music is (as demanded in such a venture) great. The color scheme glows with a sort of warm amber light. The cast is particularly good, led by a downright inspired Jeffrey Wright, who shines as Muddy Waters. It's still nostalgic hogwash, of course, highlighted by sometimes shrieking melodrama, but there's a reason the movies keep returning to this formula. It's got legs: there's enjoyment to be had in travelling ancient, well-scrubbed roads.

Reedus officially has more than one scene, but he's always just hanging around in the background. You never really see him properly.

Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: zero stars

Pawn Shop Chronicles: (2013. dir: Wayne Kramer) A pawn shop in the deep South plays centerpiece to this comic-book-shaped tryptych of stories. There's a coulrophobic tweaker, an Elvis impersonator, an army of naked zombie women, a pair of white supremacists who are trying to puzzle out why they should hate Jews and black people ("I went to the meetings for those little smoky sausages, next thing I know I'm a card-carrying member, with the tats and everything"), salvation showing up in the form of the Marlboro Man driving a pickup with a gun-rack and the devil in the form of an evangelical handing out leaflets, a lot of very smooth and inventive camerawork, and, even more surprisingly, very fine acting. (So that's Paul Walker. I get it. It's sad in so many respects.)

Reedus, I'm guessing from the musculature and the tattoos, is the meth-cook in the gas-mask. It's hard to judge a performance that's filtered through a gas-mask, but his scene is extreme in a good way, and it's kind of funny when a guy in a gas-mask cracks up laughing at a guy in a clown mask.

And why is it funny when a guy in a grinning clown-mask is screaming in terror? I mean it. It made me laugh. Is there something wrong with me?

Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: one and a half stars

Mimic: (1997. dir: Guillermo del Toro) Del Toro loves some visual tropes: the aesthetics of plastic sheets draped over things, for one. (Thanks to my friend Sam Gregory for pointing it out.) Underground tunnels, slime on stone. Wetness in general: viscera, effluvium and discharge, and bodies, often of the young, caught and preserved in jars. In Mimic, the young are of a superstud cockroach species, one which has evolved to a stage at which its physique mimics that of its primary predator: namely, us. So, as later in Blade II, we have a humanish face which cracks open and unfolds to reveal the monster beneath. Quite the metaphor.

We also have a vernal Norman Reedus, in one scene, vivacity amid the darkness. He's young, vibrant, doofus, full of life, and we only get him for a minute before we plunge back into the subterranean slime.

Rating: two stars
Reedus Factor: two and a half stars

single-scene reedus: pandorum and i'm losing you

Pandorum: (2009. dir: Christian Alvart) It's a darkly-lit, quickly-paced, sci-fi psychological thriller, and monsters come included in the package. Probably it belongs loosely in a category with Alien and Pitch Black, but also with a foot set firmly in Moon territory. If it fails ultimately to satisfy, the fault lies with its method of communicating the onset of madness: filming with quick cuts and from strange angles a man moving fast and erratically, giving a beetle-like effect, coupled with the usual "I'm mad! I'm mad!" grins and grimaces. Unfortunately, enough of it is included in the climactic scenes that it's hard to hold the tension; it crosses into unintentional humor.

Outside of that, I can't find much to fault it, as long as you're willing to exercise your suspension-of-disbelief muscles some, but it's hard to get excited about it, either. The monsters are a sort of nefarious cross between orcs and Firefly reivers, and waking disoriented from suspended animation on a long space voyage is a brilliant device for setting up ongoing horror and doubt. Ben Foster is the lead, and there's something inherently creepy about him, which plays well when we're trying to figure out the good guys from the bad, but in the end it's hard to fully buy his nice-guy act.

I just watched this movie about half a year ago, and I honestly didn't remember Reedus was in it, so I watched it again. There he is, in one great scene, a member of the flight crew on this vast, crippled, chaos-riddled ship, living in the throes of ongoing terror and privation, when our newly-roused hero runs across him. He gives us a full five minutes of nothing but varying degrees of panic, dread, and psychic anguish. When I watch him in something like this, or Red Canyon, in which he's so fully assured in his task, it makes me think that his failures come when directors fail simply to give him enough to do. When he has a pointed task to accomplish, or a heightened enough emotional state to explore, he never sets a foot wrong. It's in the meandering movies in which he stumbles, when the stakes aren't high enough, the emotional demands diffused. Maybe the director's hand is too weak to guide him. Or maybe he just gets bored.

Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: two and a half stars

I'm Losing You: (1998. dir: Bruce Wagner) Unapologetic melodrama, leavened some by Jewish mysticism, set amongst the Hollywood elite and its offspring. (Wagner is the guy who wrote the screenplay for Cronenberg's new and controversial, anti-Hollywood acid-scather, Maps to the Stars.)

The best part is that there's some interesting talk about menstruation, a subject infrequently addressed on the silver screen. Reedus is going down on the Rosanna Arquette character until interrupted by, well, menstruation. She says to him, "Older men like the blood," to which he retorts, horrified, "Well, then, go fuck an old guy." As he's leaving, she laughs and says, "Don't go away mad. Just go away." Those two lines of hers, taken together, are some of the most startling and unexpectedly delightful I've heard from an onscreen woman's mouth in some time. Reedus' unnamed boytoy character (she avoids introducing him properly to her brother and niece as he's leaving, and after he's gone, refers to him as the plumber) really only exists to more sharply delineate her, and then he vanishes, nameless, no doubt to find a less complicated woman, leaving her to her philosophical musings and the crowd of whispering voices in her head.

This movie is a kind of a familial soap-opera fortress from which one stands protected whilst staring at death: the main characters are a grown brother (Andrew McCarthy) and adoptive sister (Arquette) whose father (Frank Langella), the wealthy producer of a Trek-ish type sci-fi TV franchise, is dying. Death, in fact, is omnipresent. The dead and dying and death-obsessed pile up in heaps before the end. This film-maker wants you to think about it, the shuffling off of the mortal coil, but his attitude can pretty much be summed up in the fact that the AIDS-stricken Elizabeth Perkins character is in the story as long as she's still beautiful and well-coiffed, but tastefully leaves the screen before crumbling into the unsightly grotesquery of her death-throes. In short, this guy wants you to think about death, poetically and philosophically, but he doesn't trust you to deal with its physical realities.

Rating: one and a half stars
Reedus Factor: one and a half stars

norman reedus film festival: night of the templar

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2012. dir: Paul Sampson) Aristotle said, "If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person." If there'd been cinema back then, he'd have included it in his caution, and I'm beginning to wonder if, as I dig down into the dregs of Reedus' resume, I might be slowly mutating into some older, more troglodyte form. Certainly I'm cursing more than I used to. That's all preamble to my warning to you: even the keenest Reedus fans may have some trouble with this one.

You know how sometimes at a party someone will ask what was the worst movie that you ever saw? and the question covers too much ground, it's too huge, you can't even begin to answer it? I'm not saying this is the worst movie I've ever seen, but I guarantee it'll be one of the select which pop into my head next time someone asks.

First of all, it's a vanity project. This guy Paul Sampson wrote it, directs it, stars in it. That should set off your crap-detector right there. Nobody but Woody Allen should try all three at once, and, for the last thirty years, not even him. We'll allow Warren Beatty his Reds, and Orson Welles his Citizen Kane, but those pieces of genius are the exceptions, not the rule.

It's a double story, jumping back and forth in time. It begins in the 14th century, with a band of Crusaders led by their own Percival, a blood-smeared, holier-than-all-of-thou guy named Gregoire. Lord Morris (possibly Maurice?) McGuirk Gregoire of Reading, to be exact. Reading is in England, not far from London; Ethelred and Alfred the Great fought the Vikings there in the 9th century, and lost. McGuirk is an Anglicized version of a Gaelic name which shows up in Scotland and Ireland from the late 13th century. So is this cat Scottish (and,if so, what's he doing in Reading, for crying out loud?) or did his family come over from France with the Conqueror? he has a modern American accent, with some Bronx in it, I think, although he tries to soften it by throwing in the odd "'tis"; he says "pureness" when he means "purity" and "prophesized" instead of "prophesied". I don't know. I'm just saying.

Anyway, you have a band of Templars, some of whom turn treacherous, sell their souls in exchange for "ten lifetimes of excess," assassinating poor, pure Gregoire in the meantime, who vows, with his dying words, to return at the end of the allotted lifespans to wreak his vengeance upon each and every one. The other half of the story is set in modern day, in a medieval castle, where the reincarnation of Gregoire has been hired as "events coordinator" for an assemblage of disparate folks gathered to experience the Weekend of Their Dreams. Never mind that the dream of one is to rape all the women, which might easily interfere with the dreams of the women. None of that matters, because in truth these are the reincarnated Judas-Templars at the end of their given stretch, and it's time to pay the righteously angry piper.

This is where things get dodgy. First of all, we're on theologically shaky ground, since Thomas Aquinas will tell you (with rage in his voice) that the Catholic Church holds no truck with metempsychosis, and the Templars were unequivocally Catholic soldiers, so what's up with the reincarnation? unless you want to argue the Templars were worshipping some other god, like the notorious Baphomet, or belonged to some Manichean strain of pseudo-Christian heresy, but it's evident from the basics of the story as told that these good Knights certainly thought they were fighting for the Pope and the Catholic Church.

Alright, that's nitpicking, granted. The real crux of the moral problem lies elsewhere: since only a few of the victims recall their true identities and so know they're walking into battle, what we end up with is the piecemeal slaughter of unarmed women and weaklings. Henry Flesh (Reedus) is one of the latter. He's a sensualist (ie: a chain-smoking, sex-fiend, rapist guy who enjoys some kind of "animal thing" which is never explained), a fellow who's looking for a big fuckfest and who winds up instead on the skewery end of a Crusader sword, splattered all over the barkdust. Is that really holy revenge? Ten incarnations past the wrongdoing, defenceless and unprepared, and the wrath of God descends in the form of a hardened warrior to, what, cut a woman's throat while she's drawing a bath? What kind of God is this, again? I don't know. I'm just saying.

I'm talking about these things because I don't know what else to talk about. Some movies make you feel like a bully just for reviewing them, because they're so far subpar they don't even count as real movies.

To his credit, Reedus throws himself with glee and enthusiasm into the role. He's wearing old-school Keds on his feet, or are they Converse All-Stars? it's endearing, and kind of funny, and they figure into his death scene. He gets to say things like, "You see her? I'm gonna do some dirty shit to that one," and, during a blow-job, he takes off his belt and wraps it around his neck, which would normally seem an inspired choice, except that this is David Carradine's last movie, and so it seems creepy instead.

I want you to wrap your mind around that. This was David Carradine's last hurrah. What kind of foul luck is that?

Rating: zero stars
Reedus Factor: one and a half stars