Recently Viewed: The Final Kanopy Binge

Well, as of today, the New York Public Library has officially severed ties with Kanopy, my favorite streaming service. Sadly, like MoviePass and Sunshine Cinema, the free membership model was simply too good to last. Luckily, I managed to cross several movies off of my (forty page long) watch list before my account expired:

Recently Viewed: A Bay of Blood

Well, it must be snowing in Hell, because I actually had enough time and energy to watch a movie after work tonight. Sticking with my recent Halloween theme, I went with Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood, the missing link between giallo and the modern slasher. The film’s opening moments play as a sly, tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the former: an unseen, black-gloved murderer brutally strangles an old woman; then, once the grisly deed is done… the camera pulls back, revealing the perpetrator’s face without much fanfare. From there, the narrative ventures closer to the territory of the latter—though because this is such a seminal work in the genre, many of the now-common tropes are conspicuously absent. It lacks, for example, an iconic monster analogous to Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers; instead, we get a veritable parade killers, all driven by greed (the most mundane of motivations). The result is a strange hybrid, neither as technically and formally precise as Bava’s own earlier, Hitchcock-inspired efforts, nor as imaginative in its bloodshed as its eventual imitators. Still, it remains valuable for its historical significance.

Recently Viewed: Wicked, Wicked

Went and saw Wicked, Wicked, which was playing a very limited engagement at Metrograph.

I don't usually dismiss gimmicks out of hand; after all, the drive to experiment and defy conventions (Griffith's early adoption of intercutting, Hitchcock's desire to simulate a single unbroken take in Rope) can sometimes be the first step towards genuine innovation. Unfortunately, this schlocky proto-slasher flick’s "groundbreaking" Duo-Vision (basically a split screen effect that spans the film's entire running time) doesn't quite measure up to those other examples. The best I can say about it is that it enhances the film's inherent kitsch value; in choosing to juxtapose a tender love scene with footage of a cavalry charge, crashing waves, and an atomic explosion, director Richard L. Bare accidentally discovers the kind of comedy gold that the Zucker Brothers spent years developing and refining. It's an absolute stinker—and I (and the rest of the audience) loved it for all the wrong reasons.

Recently Viewed: The Guard from Underground

Before We Vanish left me hungry to discover more of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work. Fortunately, my MoviePass card came with a Fandor subscription, and the service is currently streaming The Guard from Underground, one of the director’s earlier efforts. I’ve seen this obscure J-Horror flick pop up elsewhere, always with average user ratings hovering in the range of two stars and change… so naturally, I loved it.

Granted, I can understand why it would alienate some viewers; it’s definitely rough around the edges. The transfer is rather faded and grainy… which feels somehow appropriate, reminiscent of watching Friday the 13th or Sleepaway Camp on VHS. The narrative is a slow burn, building tension for nearly an hour before the slaughter begins in earnest… and every single minute benefits the film; unlike the unapologetic filler in a lot of classic slashers, that screen time is expertly utilized to develop the characters and explore their everyday conflicts (our heroine must contend with workplace harassment and petty office politics, while the killer’s relationship with his unwitting accomplice fleshes out his motivations and bleak worldview), ensuring that we become fully invested in their desperate struggle to survive. Indeed, despite the villain’s penchant for sadistic torture, the most effective scares are more psychological than visceral, with the worst violence remaining tastefully obscured—though Kurosawa wisely shows just enough to spark the audience’s imagination.

Ultimately, The Guard from Underground isn’t the blood-soaked splatter-fest that the site’s description advertises. No, in my insufferably contrarian opinion, it’s far, far better.

Recently Viewed: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

The season finale of Telltale’s Walking Dead adventure game showed up on Playstation Network way late in the day. To kill time while my Wi-Fi chokes on the five-hour download, I logged into Netflix and watched Wes Craven’s New Nightmare for the first time.

I love memetic horror—the idea that belief can reshape reality, bring the things we fear to life, make them stronger, deadlier. Candyman, the Slender Man mythos, and even the Persona series all touch on this theme, but Craven’s metafictional revival of the franchise that he created offers one of the more interesting variations I’ve yet encountered. This time around, “Freddy Krueger” is actually an ancient, bloodthirsty demon that can only be defeated by trapping it in a narrative (the story of “Hansel and Gretel”, for example); it turns out the original A Nightmare on Elm Street was Craven’s subconscious attempt to imprison the monster, but the increasingly watered-down sequels have allowed it to break free and wreak havoc on the “real world.”

Obviously, New Nightmare belongs to the late ‘90s trend of slasher deconstructions (The Faculty, Final Destination, Craven’s own Scream), but the tone is so earnest that it never feels overly self-satisfied with its references and cameos. Heather Langenkamp, playing a fictionalized version of herself, keeps the action emotionally grounded, and it’s a genuine delight to see Robert Englund both in and out of his iconic makeup, clearly having the time of his life. And while some of the special effects (computer-generated and otherwise) haven’t aged particularly well, the production design is superb; Freddy’s nightmare realm has never looked more… well, nightmarish.

All in all, New Nightmare still doesn’t quite hold a candle to the first installment, but it’s a lovely homage, as well as a fascinating evolution of the series’ core concept. It experiments and innovates without discarding what made its predecessors successful, recycles a few old ingredients without resorting to pale imitation; anyone intending to direct a remake, reboot, or reimagining would do well to study Craven’s exemplary work here.

Honestly, I think the Friday the 13th series kind of lost its luster after Part 67. Still, it’s mighty impressive that they managed to crank out over a hundred entries in the span of about two years.

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Random Thought Before Bed: Self-Satire in Friday the 13th Part 3

Many critics credit Wes Craven’s Scream with starting the trend of self-referential slasher flicks, but having recently re-watched the third entry in the Friday the 13th franchise, I can confirm that the phenomenon dates back to at least 1982. The film’s opening teaser, which lasts approximately six hours fifteen minutes, savvily deconstructs the genre’s already-familiar visual language as a wounded Jason Voorhees stalks and kills the proprietors of a mom-and-pop grocery shop. Granted, it’s not a particularly successful deconstruction—watching a pair of unfunny sitcom characters stumble around in the dark, jumping at the sight of mice and snakes (there’s misdirecting the audience’s attention, and then there’s being obnoxiously coy) until they’re murdered for no discernible reason becomes an interminable bore after about five minutes—but it nevertheless makes a conscious effort to acknowledge the formulaic nature of the slasher narrative. It even offers an explanation as to why the doomed protagonists don’t just drive away at the first sign of trouble (albeit a ridiculously convoluted one that involves a gang of bikers, siphoned gas, and the convenient failure of a car battery) and goes out of its way to lend the comic relief’s annoying hijinks some genuine emotional context and psychological depth (a better movie might have explored how poor Shelly’s brush with a serial killer helped him to discover his true worth, inviting empathy rather than sympathy). Much like the recently-released You’re Next, however, Friday the 13th Part 3 remains far too immersed in the very same tropes and conventions it attempts to criticize; if you’ll allow me to invoke an old cliche of my own, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”

Recently Viewed: You're Next (2013)

You’re Next is a clever, creative, and often quite funny deconstruction of the home invasion horror genre that asks a single, deceptively simple question: “What would happen if a halfway competent person found herself pitted against a gauntlet of slasher movie cliches?”

Unfortunately, you’d never know that from the film’s first twenty minutes, which delay the tantalizing narrative hook by playing many of the familiar, uninspired tropes completely and utterly straight: long, largely inert scenes devoted solely to developing the obviously doomed characters; incessant bickering undercutting the tension at the least appropriate/opportune moments; and the protagonists making decisions so implausibly illogical that they cannot even be justified by anxiety or distress.

And that’s a shame. Sharni Vinson plays such an admirable, iconic Last Girl: cunning, resourceful, intelligent, tough—I can’t imagine why any filmmaker would want to hide her for the sake of humor/shock value. Under different circumstances, her performance would have elevated the material; instead, the structurally-flawed nature of the movie as a whole drags her admirable work down with it.

From Our Nightmares: Michael Myers, Halloween (1978)

You can feel them. Frigid as a bucket of ice water poured straight down your back. Eyes. The eyes of a stranger. Stalking you through the sunlit suburban streets. Lurking in the shadows of your own home. Wherever you go, the eyes follow. Suddenly, a twig snaps, or an empty bottle rolls across the floor. Your knees lock. Your heart freezes. You turn around and see--nothing. Only air.

Perhaps you've just survived an encounter with Michael Myers.

There's a good reason little Tommy Doyle repeatedly calls John Carpenter's cold-blooded killer "The Boogeyman": Michael personifies fear itself. His expressionless white mask is a blank canvas onto which the viewer can project... pretty much anything (even the screenplay approaches its antagonist in vague terms, referring to him only as "The Shape").

Consider how Carpenter ends the movie. After Dr. Loomis discovers that Michael's corpse has (unsurprisingly) vanished, the director cuts to a series of dark, empty rooms in the Strode household. And on the soundtrack, the implacable killer's muffled, labored breathing--monotonous, oppressive, taunting. But do these shots conceal a monstrous murderer... or simply reveal the stuff that haunts our dreams?

[Part 11 in a special series of Halloween-themed posts. Have a spooky day!]

Part 1: Candyman

Part 2: The Cenobites

Part 3: The Thing

Part 4: The Xenomorph

Part 5: The Shark

Part 6: Orlok

Part 7: Mamiya

Part 8: Hannibal Lecter

Part 9: Hans Beckert

Part 10: The Demon Woman