poughkeepsie tapes real
In short, no.
lifetime scary movie plot
I don't see this search turning up a lot of results.
the bunny game movie dick scene
Of all the horrible shit that is in that movie, I'm not sure what this person means by the "dick scene."
urinates "the bunny game"
My, that's awfully...specific.
monster impregnates girl
Creepy? Maybe. That it was repeated 3 or 4 times? Creepier.
Dying God penis
Okay fuck this I'm out of here. Internet, you win.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sunday, June 24, 2012
The Clinic: It's Quiet…Too Quiet
There was a period of time when my wife and I used to watch medical documentary shows, and in all of their real gore and ickiness, I was never as grossed out by shows set in the ER as much as shows set in maternity wards. Bullet wounds, knife wounds, broken and gangrenous limbs, none of those squicked me out the way live birth did. On TV, freshly born babies look like nothing so much as rubber props covered in slime. It felt like I was watching a monster movie to some degree.
In short: Babies, birth, children, and parenthood are fucking scary.
At best, you get movies like Rosemary's Baby, Eraserhead, and The Exorcist. At worst, you get any number of maudlin, heartstring-tugging Lifetime specials about plucky mothers fighting to get their kids back or protecting their kids from psycho ex-husbands or nannies. Kids are fucking scary, losing your kid is even scarier. That said, The Clinic manages to deftly avoid the obvious beats - most of them, not all of them - to good effect.
I don't usually single out opening credits for comment, but these are nicely creepy - long, low tracking shots of tile floors and rows of hooks, more reminiscent of a slaughterhouse than the titular clinic, the contrast communicates something important about this movie early on: We're telling you it's about one thing, and it's not not about that thing, but it's also not about that thing.
A young couple - Cameron, and his hugely pregnant fiancee Beth - are driving through rural Australia to visit her parents. As near as I can tell from pretty much every movie set in Australia that I've ever watched, this involves long stretches of highway going across flat desert nothing with little towns dotting the route, but miles and miles away from each other. They're arguing a little, but not so much as to be a whole thing. They're young, and in love, and have a lot of stuff with which to deal. In short order, our young couple get run off the road by a truck that's come pretty much out of nowhere.
(This is where I expected to say "A-ha! The truck driver is evil and is going to hound them or come back and try to kill them!" Nope, truck driver was, as near as I can tell, just an asshole. This isn't important to the movie, but I appreciate it when movies dodge the obvious. It's not the thing you think it's going to be.)
The car's pretty banged up, so they get it towed to the nearest garage and pay for a room at a ratty little motel in one of these tiny little towns. The proprietor is appropriately gross, as is the room, but it's only going to be for one night, so they can deal. This bit hits entirely too close to home for me, being pretty much a reenactment of an unfortunate overnight stay I had in St. Louis. The night clerk looked like his parents skimped on the chromosomes, and the mattress in the room was an air mattress. Aaaaggghhhhhhh but anyway this is about the movie. So Cameron gets up before Beth and goes to get some food, which ends up being sort of a production in this one-horse town. When he comes back, Beth is gone. Creepy motel owner and suspiciously good ol' boy sheriff are less than no help, and so Cameron flips out a little and goes looking for Beth on his own.
Meanwhile, Beth wakes up in an abandoned warehouse, in a tub of ice, with a freshly-stitched incision across her abdomen.
The rest of The Clinic is Cameron trying to find Beth, and Beth trying to figure out exactly what the hell has happened to her. It could be really tired and awful - terrified, traumatized woman running around what turns out to be an abandoned slaughterhouse (see what they did there?), I mean, it sort of has Saw-type "we're going to play a game" bullshit written all over it at first blush, but what we get instead is a relatively low-key mystery - it's not immediately apparent who has captured Beth or why, apart from the obvious baby-stealing, and the movie does a pretty good job of revealing just enough information at any given point in the story to keep us interested without completely throwing us. It could be a lot more histrionic, though Beth's grief and terror are palpable and real, even the highest-tension points for much of the movie take place in quiet and stillness. It walks sort of a queasy line in that sense - we don't get really wound up as much as you'd think, it's much more careful and deliberate, which is good. But at the same time, I sort of wanted to be wound up more - I wanted more visceral scares than the movie really communicated.
So what I'm left with is something akin to ambivalence. Which is weird, because there's a lot about The Clinic to like - it's smart, careful, doesn't overexplain, and takes all of these odd or implausible things that happen throughout the movie and provides reasons for them. It's a movie that doesn't underestimate the viewer - it treats us like adults, doesn't beat us over the head with explanation. It's not airtight - its endgame stretches plausibility a little in a few different ways, but for a movie where people run around, scream, and spill blood, it's pleasantly free of juvenile mistakes or cheap scares. Honestly, I'd like to see more movies with ostensibly lowbrow narratives (like, say, slasher films) handled with this much intelligence and skill, because the end results would probably be scary as hell. As it is, I'm sitting here, quietly impressed with what I've seen, but not really scared or moved as much as I feel I should have been. Like, I don't want to scream watching this, I want to give it a golf clap.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Amazon Instant
Available on Netflix
In short: Babies, birth, children, and parenthood are fucking scary.
At best, you get movies like Rosemary's Baby, Eraserhead, and The Exorcist. At worst, you get any number of maudlin, heartstring-tugging Lifetime specials about plucky mothers fighting to get their kids back or protecting their kids from psycho ex-husbands or nannies. Kids are fucking scary, losing your kid is even scarier. That said, The Clinic manages to deftly avoid the obvious beats - most of them, not all of them - to good effect.
I don't usually single out opening credits for comment, but these are nicely creepy - long, low tracking shots of tile floors and rows of hooks, more reminiscent of a slaughterhouse than the titular clinic, the contrast communicates something important about this movie early on: We're telling you it's about one thing, and it's not not about that thing, but it's also not about that thing.
A young couple - Cameron, and his hugely pregnant fiancee Beth - are driving through rural Australia to visit her parents. As near as I can tell from pretty much every movie set in Australia that I've ever watched, this involves long stretches of highway going across flat desert nothing with little towns dotting the route, but miles and miles away from each other. They're arguing a little, but not so much as to be a whole thing. They're young, and in love, and have a lot of stuff with which to deal. In short order, our young couple get run off the road by a truck that's come pretty much out of nowhere.
(This is where I expected to say "A-ha! The truck driver is evil and is going to hound them or come back and try to kill them!" Nope, truck driver was, as near as I can tell, just an asshole. This isn't important to the movie, but I appreciate it when movies dodge the obvious. It's not the thing you think it's going to be.)
The car's pretty banged up, so they get it towed to the nearest garage and pay for a room at a ratty little motel in one of these tiny little towns. The proprietor is appropriately gross, as is the room, but it's only going to be for one night, so they can deal. This bit hits entirely too close to home for me, being pretty much a reenactment of an unfortunate overnight stay I had in St. Louis. The night clerk looked like his parents skimped on the chromosomes, and the mattress in the room was an air mattress. Aaaaggghhhhhhh but anyway this is about the movie. So Cameron gets up before Beth and goes to get some food, which ends up being sort of a production in this one-horse town. When he comes back, Beth is gone. Creepy motel owner and suspiciously good ol' boy sheriff are less than no help, and so Cameron flips out a little and goes looking for Beth on his own.
Meanwhile, Beth wakes up in an abandoned warehouse, in a tub of ice, with a freshly-stitched incision across her abdomen.
So what I'm left with is something akin to ambivalence. Which is weird, because there's a lot about The Clinic to like - it's smart, careful, doesn't overexplain, and takes all of these odd or implausible things that happen throughout the movie and provides reasons for them. It's a movie that doesn't underestimate the viewer - it treats us like adults, doesn't beat us over the head with explanation. It's not airtight - its endgame stretches plausibility a little in a few different ways, but for a movie where people run around, scream, and spill blood, it's pleasantly free of juvenile mistakes or cheap scares. Honestly, I'd like to see more movies with ostensibly lowbrow narratives (like, say, slasher films) handled with this much intelligence and skill, because the end results would probably be scary as hell. As it is, I'm sitting here, quietly impressed with what I've seen, but not really scared or moved as much as I feel I should have been. Like, I don't want to scream watching this, I want to give it a golf clap.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Amazon Instant
Available on Netflix
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Penumbra: Having A Really Bad Day
There's an old aphorism that comedy is the absolute worst day of someone else's life. Which is sometimes true, I think, but not always - I mean, let's face it, the story of Oedipus isn't exactly a laugh riot, and I'm pretty sure the day he discovered that he'd inadvertently killed his own father and slept with his mother was the worst day of his life. So what distinguishes funny worst days from frightening or tragic worst days? I think it might be empathy. If we like or identify with the person, we don't want to see them hurt or suffer. If we don't, we're indifferent at best and rejoice in it at worst.
This is why I think it's so important to give the audience a connection to the protagonists of a horror movie - if we don't care, how are we going to be scared? Where it gets a little weirder is when the protagonists are actively unsympathetic, and you sort of find yourself rooting for their demise. Is that horror, or just really black comedy? I'm not saying there are clear-cut demarcations (American Psycho is a pretty tense, scary movie, and it's got some great dark comic moments), but if you're trying to make a scary movie, it helps if we're generally frightened for the protagonists. And I think this is where Penumbra runs into trouble.
Margarita Sanchez is having a very bad day. She's a high-powered yuppie lawyer from Barcelona who, much to her dismay, is stuck in Buenos Aires trying to unload an apartment her family inherited. She hates the country for its dirtiness and lack of sophistication and cannot wait to get back to Spain. She bears the sort of energetic contempt you associate with the aggressively upwardly mobile, perhaps someone trying desperately to outrun her own humble beginnings. She can't even be bothered to be polite to the people around her. She's rudeness and snobbery stuffed into a power suit and tethered to the world by a cell phone.
So Margarita's stuck in Buenos Aires, waiting for the realtor to come by to look at the apartment. The realtor keeps not showing up and not showing up, until finally he does - well, it turns out he was upstairs already, looking around. She lets him in, and he explains that he's still waiting for his boss to show up, and that he was sent ahead to look around. She's impatient enough to start to shoo him off, but his employer is willing to pay about four times what the property is worth to expedite the sale. That gets her attention, and so she suffers his presence while pacing around the apartment on her cell phone, juggling her sister, an annoyed co-worker, a lecherous client, and her boss, all without letting on that she's running late for her meeting because she's trying to get rid of this apartment. She's very busy trying to keep all of her lies straight.
So busy, in fact, that she doesn't take too much notice of the other people who start coming into the apartment, or the fact that none of them really seem like realtors, or that they're very insistent on taking this specific apartment by a specific time, or that Buenos Aires is about to experience a total solar eclipse.
What I think Penumbra is trying to achieve is a mixture of menace and surreal comedy like you might find in one of Roman Polanski's films, but the comedy almost seems more slapstick than anything else, and it's at odds enough with the menacing moments that both end up undercut - the funny stuff either seems less funny or the scary stuff seems less scary. And since we don't really identify with Margarita - she really isn't anything but unpleasant - the scary bits scare us even less. We aren't worried for Margarita because she's pretty much at fault throughout. At most, we watch as all of her previous bad behavior throughout the movie comes back to bite her on the ass in her moments of real need. So by the time things start going really bad, the appropriate response seems less "oh shit," and more "well, there you go."
There are some nice little moments throughout that, true to Polanski's approach, make you wonder not so much if it's all in Margarita's head or not (because we know it isn't), but just how deep the rabbit hole goes - other people's behavior does seem a little off, a little suspicious at times, and it's almost enough to keep you wondering, but not enough to mitigate the way the rest of the movie veers between creepy and goofy without really integrating the two. Our protagonist and her situation are both just terrible enough to leave us undecided between comedy and horror. It's the worst day of the worst person's life, so what are we supposed to feel?
Unavailable on Netflix
Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Task: Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory
I seem to be on a streak right now of movies that don't have the courage to stick to their original premise, that almost make it to the finish line as (to one degree or another) a well-told story but then oops! It's a horror movie, so we need to throw more horror shit around, and any goodwill the film has built up to that point goes right out the window. The Dead tries to do too much in its last 15 minutes, Undocumented doesn't have the guts to do something non-obvious with its premise, and Wake Wood is a great low-key supernatural tragedy until someone decides there needs to be more EEEEEEVIL in it. They get close, and then blow it.
I pretty much feel the same way about The Task, though there's a lot more whipsawing back and forth before all is said and done.
The movie opens on a guy helping a woman with some packages she dropped, after which he is dragged into a van and hooded, along with a bunch of other people. Oh shit, they're being kidnapped! Well, no, not if you know the premise. Said helpful dude, along with six other people, has signed up to be on a reality show called The Task. They have to spend a night in an old abandoned prison (maybe prisons are the new hospitals) and perform a number of tasks (see what they did there?) in order to win a big ol' cash prize. One of the other contestants helpfully exposits that they're all crazy for doing this because don't you know what the brutal, autocratic warden did to prisoners in this prison? It's a place of evil, et cetera ad nauseam. He even wets his pants at the sight of the prison. Oh shit, it's really that haunted and scary? Well, no, the guy who peed was just a plant by the production company to rile up the other contestants. So, see, it's not really a damned place after all, they just want the contestants to think it is.
This is actually the part with which I had the least trouble. MTV used to run a series called Fear, in which teenagers who were probably skimmed off the bottom of the Casting Vats for whichever iteration of The Real World was on at the moment competed for cash and prizes by doing a series of tasks in abandoned places with terrifying histories (which were made up wholesale and tacked onto thoroughly scouted locations). So these kids go in to these old abandoned buildings, pretty much pre-scared, and have to do things that are just going to ratchet up their level of terror and anxiety (sit alone in a totally dark room, stick their hand into an opening to retrieve something, that kinda thing). And the whole thing was captured by fixed cameras and cameras worn by the contestants in sickly nightvision green. Like anything else MTV does, it didn't last, but it seemed like a pretty effective exercise in the power of suggestion and context. So the game in this movie is pretty much Fear, only a little cornier, with even less likable contestants.
Yeah, this was the part that bugged me the most - the protagonists are annoying as shit, to a person. The African-American man (the one getting kidnapped in the opening) speaks mostly in slang, the blonde who wants to be on TV isn't so much a ditz as the cardboard cutout of one, we know the smart girls is smart because she wears glasses and speaks in the verbose pseudo-scientific bullshit that people do when they're trying to appear intelligent, the British girl and her brother are both edgy and tough and cool and, well, British, and the gay guy isn't just gay, isn't just openly gay, he's a lisping, mincing twink with a fauxhawk who says things like (when told to walk straight ahead) "there's nothing straight about me" and "closets are scary - that's why I came out of mine." It's like, the characters don't annoy me as people, but as a lack of people - they're flat, empty stereotypes. Walking signifiers. People with air quotes around everything they say and do.
(On the other hand, and I'm pretty sure I've said this before - that isn't necessarily a problem for narrative plausibility because those seem to me to be the exact sort of people one expects to try out for reality shows. So I spent a good chunk of the movie wavering between being annoyed by them and wondering if that wasn't actually the point. You get an answer eventually, and I have to give the movie golf claps for it, but more about that in a minute.)
So long story short, one of the contestants has to perform some creepy ritual for his task, and it appears to inadvertently raise the ghost of the brutal warden who ran the prison (wasn't that just part of the backstory? Oh shit! There really was a really brutal and horrible warden and he really committed atrocities!), and then blood, stabby-stabby, people start dying and it's mostly sort of static and enervated. It's pretty much a cycle of 1) Someone leaves the base to complete a task 2) That person ends up dead somewhere 3) GOTO 1. In between, we get to look in on the production crew, who are all sort of awful in their own showbiz ways (and the acting is pretty terrible here too, but again, golf claps) and it takes them too long to react when things start going south and they don't seem too fazed when someone they send out to fix some equipment never comes back, but believe it or not, there's actually a decent explanation for all of this. I was continually irritated by this movie, so when we get to the third act and some mounting suspicions about what we're seeing get confirmed, I was actually a little pleased that they made the choices they did, no matter how obnoxious those choices were up to that point.
But they could not leave well enough the fuck alone, and attempt yet another twist in the last ten minutes, and although it doesn't unravel the whole movie, it's just predictable and poorly executed enough to take any air out of whatever saving grace this otherwise by-the-numbers creepy-stuff-in-abandoned-buildings film gets from its final act. This wasn't going to be a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a little frustrating to see what little charm the movie had snuffed out because somebody didn't think what they had was obvious enough.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Watch on Amazon Instant
I pretty much feel the same way about The Task, though there's a lot more whipsawing back and forth before all is said and done.
The movie opens on a guy helping a woman with some packages she dropped, after which he is dragged into a van and hooded, along with a bunch of other people. Oh shit, they're being kidnapped! Well, no, not if you know the premise. Said helpful dude, along with six other people, has signed up to be on a reality show called The Task. They have to spend a night in an old abandoned prison (maybe prisons are the new hospitals) and perform a number of tasks (see what they did there?) in order to win a big ol' cash prize. One of the other contestants helpfully exposits that they're all crazy for doing this because don't you know what the brutal, autocratic warden did to prisoners in this prison? It's a place of evil, et cetera ad nauseam. He even wets his pants at the sight of the prison. Oh shit, it's really that haunted and scary? Well, no, the guy who peed was just a plant by the production company to rile up the other contestants. So, see, it's not really a damned place after all, they just want the contestants to think it is.
Yeah, this was the part that bugged me the most - the protagonists are annoying as shit, to a person. The African-American man (the one getting kidnapped in the opening) speaks mostly in slang, the blonde who wants to be on TV isn't so much a ditz as the cardboard cutout of one, we know the smart girls is smart because she wears glasses and speaks in the verbose pseudo-scientific bullshit that people do when they're trying to appear intelligent, the British girl and her brother are both edgy and tough and cool and, well, British, and the gay guy isn't just gay, isn't just openly gay, he's a lisping, mincing twink with a fauxhawk who says things like (when told to walk straight ahead) "there's nothing straight about me" and "closets are scary - that's why I came out of mine." It's like, the characters don't annoy me as people, but as a lack of people - they're flat, empty stereotypes. Walking signifiers. People with air quotes around everything they say and do.
(On the other hand, and I'm pretty sure I've said this before - that isn't necessarily a problem for narrative plausibility because those seem to me to be the exact sort of people one expects to try out for reality shows. So I spent a good chunk of the movie wavering between being annoyed by them and wondering if that wasn't actually the point. You get an answer eventually, and I have to give the movie golf claps for it, but more about that in a minute.)
So long story short, one of the contestants has to perform some creepy ritual for his task, and it appears to inadvertently raise the ghost of the brutal warden who ran the prison (wasn't that just part of the backstory? Oh shit! There really was a really brutal and horrible warden and he really committed atrocities!), and then blood, stabby-stabby, people start dying and it's mostly sort of static and enervated. It's pretty much a cycle of 1) Someone leaves the base to complete a task 2) That person ends up dead somewhere 3) GOTO 1. In between, we get to look in on the production crew, who are all sort of awful in their own showbiz ways (and the acting is pretty terrible here too, but again, golf claps) and it takes them too long to react when things start going south and they don't seem too fazed when someone they send out to fix some equipment never comes back, but believe it or not, there's actually a decent explanation for all of this. I was continually irritated by this movie, so when we get to the third act and some mounting suspicions about what we're seeing get confirmed, I was actually a little pleased that they made the choices they did, no matter how obnoxious those choices were up to that point.
But they could not leave well enough the fuck alone, and attempt yet another twist in the last ten minutes, and although it doesn't unravel the whole movie, it's just predictable and poorly executed enough to take any air out of whatever saving grace this otherwise by-the-numbers creepy-stuff-in-abandoned-buildings film gets from its final act. This wasn't going to be a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a little frustrating to see what little charm the movie had snuffed out because somebody didn't think what they had was obvious enough.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Watch on Amazon Instant
Sunday, May 20, 2012
The Dead: To Dust We Will Return
Zombies are mostly a defanged nerd-culture joke now, and I'm generally over in the corner with copies of Night of the Living Dead and World War Z and 28 Days Later, sulking. But I've started thinking about the contexts in which most zombie stories are set. Basically, the modern zombie story is an urban one, where the zombies are actively predatory and there's a lot of interpersonal conflict. After a certain point, it's less about the zombies than it is about what zombies mean for civilization, relationships, society. This is a function of the urban setting - supplies and shelter are pretty accessible, so once the protagonists have set up their little fortress, the zombies start to become window dressing. What happens when you strip all of that away, all of the first-world resources that mean we have the luxury of interpersonal drama in the face of a plague of walking dead?
The Dead got me thinking about all of this.
The movie opens on a desert landscape of blue and gold, interrupted only by a lone figure swathed in black. He makes his way across the dunes, AK-47 on his back. He could be the hero in some Lawrence of Arabia-style badass war movie, but for the figure who captures his notice - an African man, blank-eyed, managing to hobble along on one really, really broken leg. He's too badly wounded to be alive, and yet he walks. Just the two of them against the desert sun. There's no sense of threat or danger - the man in black just walks around him, out of reach. This is happening now, most of the rest of the movie is an extended flashback to how the man in black ended up here.
The setting is Africa, and the dead walk. The dead walk, and consume the flesh of the living. The man in black is an engineer named Brian, and he is the sole survivor of the last evac flight out. He told the pilots that the plane wasn't ready, but they took off anyway. It crashed in the ocean, and Brian washed ashore. He heads inland. Meanwhile, some time before, it is nighttime and a village is burning. The dead move through the village, falling onto the inhabitants and chewing hunks of their flesh. There's nothing predatory about it, it's just blunt, implacable need. A soldier named Daniel arrives home too late, finding his wife dead and his son missing. The rest of The Dead is the story of how Brian and Daniel meet, and their journey north - Brian to find a plane out, Daniel to find his son.
The Dead is pretty much the antithesis of the modern zombie movie. It is stripped down, stark, and quiet. There's barely any dialogue. These are two men driven by necessity, by their individual destinations and what it will take to live long enough to get there. In the African bush, nothing can be taken for granted - transportation, food, ammunition, fuel, safety - none of it is guaranteed, and the dead are always there. They're in the distance, they come out of the long grass, they're just standing there, and although they're easy enough to outrun, they never get tired. That's something I think a lot of modern treatments of zombies forget - what makes them scary is that they just…keep…coming. Zombies do not sleep, zombies do not retreat and regroup. Zombies just walk and walk and walk, and long after you've run out of breath and ammo and food and water, they're still walking, closer and closer to you. This is a movie that actually manages to make changing a tire into something tense, and the discovery of a working water supply into a major victory.
And that's what I think The Dead does right - it provides a correction of perspective. Brian and Daniel have their differences, and they don't always get along, but instead of being the biggest threat to the group, it's almost beside the point. It doesn't matter whether they like each other or not, because all of that is irrelevant in the face of the threats before them - the walking dead and the desert, both silent and uncaring. You can reason with neither, you cannot hope for mercy, so you stay alive instead. Talking is beside the point, sharing feelings is beside the point. All of that goes out the window when what little safety there was in the world is completely gone.
And the dead are always there. They're in the background, they're walking slowly into focus, unhurried. The steady march of entropy made flesh. The problem is not that you don't get along with the other survivors or that one of them is going on a power trip like on some bullshit reality show, the problem is that the dead are fucking walking and they are going to eat you and you cannot outwit them or outrun them forever. In a land where life is hard, you learn very quickly what's important and what isn't. This is what made the gritty nihilism of Night of the Living Dead so powerful. It's not so much that they're going to end your life, it's that they never stop.
That's not to say that this movie is flawless - I was sort of disappointed in the last act, where the mood the rest of the movie has built sort of goes out the window and way too much happens in the last 10 minutes, not giving any of it time to breathe, but as a response to what the modern zombie has become, it speaks little, but says much.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Unavailable on Netflix
The Dead got me thinking about all of this.
The movie opens on a desert landscape of blue and gold, interrupted only by a lone figure swathed in black. He makes his way across the dunes, AK-47 on his back. He could be the hero in some Lawrence of Arabia-style badass war movie, but for the figure who captures his notice - an African man, blank-eyed, managing to hobble along on one really, really broken leg. He's too badly wounded to be alive, and yet he walks. Just the two of them against the desert sun. There's no sense of threat or danger - the man in black just walks around him, out of reach. This is happening now, most of the rest of the movie is an extended flashback to how the man in black ended up here.
The Dead is pretty much the antithesis of the modern zombie movie. It is stripped down, stark, and quiet. There's barely any dialogue. These are two men driven by necessity, by their individual destinations and what it will take to live long enough to get there. In the African bush, nothing can be taken for granted - transportation, food, ammunition, fuel, safety - none of it is guaranteed, and the dead are always there. They're in the distance, they come out of the long grass, they're just standing there, and although they're easy enough to outrun, they never get tired. That's something I think a lot of modern treatments of zombies forget - what makes them scary is that they just…keep…coming. Zombies do not sleep, zombies do not retreat and regroup. Zombies just walk and walk and walk, and long after you've run out of breath and ammo and food and water, they're still walking, closer and closer to you. This is a movie that actually manages to make changing a tire into something tense, and the discovery of a working water supply into a major victory.
And that's what I think The Dead does right - it provides a correction of perspective. Brian and Daniel have their differences, and they don't always get along, but instead of being the biggest threat to the group, it's almost beside the point. It doesn't matter whether they like each other or not, because all of that is irrelevant in the face of the threats before them - the walking dead and the desert, both silent and uncaring. You can reason with neither, you cannot hope for mercy, so you stay alive instead. Talking is beside the point, sharing feelings is beside the point. All of that goes out the window when what little safety there was in the world is completely gone.
And the dead are always there. They're in the background, they're walking slowly into focus, unhurried. The steady march of entropy made flesh. The problem is not that you don't get along with the other survivors or that one of them is going on a power trip like on some bullshit reality show, the problem is that the dead are fucking walking and they are going to eat you and you cannot outwit them or outrun them forever. In a land where life is hard, you learn very quickly what's important and what isn't. This is what made the gritty nihilism of Night of the Living Dead so powerful. It's not so much that they're going to end your life, it's that they never stop.
That's not to say that this movie is flawless - I was sort of disappointed in the last act, where the mood the rest of the movie has built sort of goes out the window and way too much happens in the last 10 minutes, not giving any of it time to breathe, but as a response to what the modern zombie has become, it speaks little, but says much.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Unavailable on Netflix
Sunday, May 13, 2012
The Bunny Game: Here It Is...Look At It
Comedian Wanda Sykes does a bit about strip clubs, describing the different levels of (un)subtlety the dancers have. She wraps it up by describing one stripper at an especially seedy club who comes out already stark naked, stands in front of the customers, opens her legs, and just stands there saying "well, here it is…look at it! Look at it!"
That's kind of how The Bunny Game made me feel.
I'm not one to shy away from transgressive or upsetting films, as I think past posts will attest. Still, when I first read about The Bunny Game, I was given pause. It's the story of a prostitute who is abducted by a truck driver and tortured for five days. There's almost no dialogue, it's shot in stark black and white, and consists almost entirely of the victimization of the prostitute (referred to only as "The Bunny") at the hands of her johns and the truck driver. There's some interstitial footage of The Bunny at some other unspecified time and of the truck driver (referred to as "The Hog") torturing and eventually killing another victim. That's it. No story of which to speak, just scenes of violence and degradation punctuated by abrasive noises and equally abrasive music.
Okay, so, minimalist and sensationalistic. Perfect fodder for the market depicted in S&Man, the jaded violence fan looking for the next August Underground. But, trangressive? Disturbing? Really? Well, see, here's the thing: All of the violence inflicted on The Bunny by The Hog is unsimulated. The Bunny really is getting the shit kicked out of her, getting asphyxiated, getting dragged naked through the desert, getting branded. None of that is fake, and that's where people are up in arms about this movie. If you're watching this, you're watching someone being tortured, full stop.
So this required some thought on my part. According to an interview I've read with the director, this was a pretty much improvised piece in which the actress playing The Bunny was an active collaborator. They came up with the idea, and she went into it eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what could happen, even embracing the potential risk of making herself completely vulnerable to a stranger (and non-actor, at that) about whom she knows nothing in terms of his capacity for violence.
And there's precedent for this in other films to one degree or another - Christian Bale lost unhealthy amounts of weight for his role in The Machinist, Lars von Trier terrorized Björk throughout filming of Dancer in the Dark, and it shows in the harrowing final act. The shooting conditions for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were so physically uncomfortable and inhospitable that Marilyn Burns was pretty much bleeding and screaming for real. Hell, even Peter Jackson used a take in which Viggo Mortensen broke his foot for The Two Towers. Never mind the isolation Heath Ledger endured to turn in his brilliant performance in The Dark Knight. This point gets lost, I think, in the discussion around this movie. People hurt themselves in film and for film all the time. It is primarily a matter of context and degree that separates movie trivia from moral panic, then.
So given the subject matter (bleak), and the style (unsparing), what is the end result? For what was blood shed and flesh scarred? From where I'm sitting, not a whole lot.
The movie opens cold, hard, and ugly, with The Bunny fellating someone in a back alley. It's unsimulated and violent, with The Bunny gagging on the john's penis as he forces it further and further down her throat. She is a victim from the first frame. The first half of the movie is pretty much a cycle of degradation, grief, rage, and drug abuse. The Bunny wanders around Los Angeles, teetering on impossibly high platform shoes which seem less like a way to make her taller than a way to keep her perpetually off balance, to keep her from standing her ground. She fucks dirty strangers in cheap motel rooms. Some of them beat her. Others take advantage of her being unconscious to rape her and steal her possessions. In between, she cleans herself off, sobbing, and snorts line after line of either cocaine or speed, it's never made clear which. As if it matters. Snort, fuck, cry, rinse, repeat.
We get glimpses of The Bunny's life outside of this as blasts of jumbled imagery, but it all moves by too fast to give us anything to hold as true or real about her. What she is here and now is basically meat - a thing to be used and discarded. At one point, she squats, braced up against a fence, and urinates on the sidewalk. She rearranges her clothes and moves on. It is like we are being dared to see her with anything other than contempt.
The second half of the movie is primarily concerned with her captivity and torture. The Hog is an older man, a truck driver. The Bunny shares some drugs with him, offers him a blow job. He responds by chloroforming her. He puts her in the trailer of his semi, chains her to the wall, and drives his truck out into the desert, where nobody can hear them. What follows is scene after scene of The Hog terrorizing either The Bunny or an earlier victim (listed in the credits as, surprise, "Martyr"). He cuts their clothes away, asphyxiates them, brands them. Plays with their bodies, forces himself on them while they lie bound and gagged. Sometimes we see this directly, sometimes we see it recorded and played back for The Bunny. Point of view is less important than just seeing it. It's just there, people getting hurt by this man. It's often accompanied by loud, harsh music and primitive editing tricks, looping scenes over and over again. Pretty much all this accomplishes is taking us out of whatever drama builds up. With one hand it refuses us the comfort of it just being a movie, and with the other it pushes its artificiality in your face.
And that's pretty much it. There's no real story here. It's just a lot of torture, and then it ends. There's some ham-handed Christ imagery toward the end, but to no apparent effect. She gets hurt one way, then another. There's no rhythm to it, no rise and fall, no quiet to make the noise worse, just blasts of imagery and noise and screaming. There's no reason to care about The Bunny outside of her basic humanity, which the movie spends its first half trying to undermine as much as possible. As near as I can tell, it signifies nothing outside of itself. I know the director and actress intended it as a way for her to work out some issues she had around something traumatic in her past, and maybe that's the case, but whatever came from that isn't really shared with the audience. We don't get included in that, and so all we have are the images on the screen, and they don't say much outside of pain, helplessness, and fear. I'm not big on authorial intent, and I firmly believe that a film's vocabulary communicates as much as the content of the film, but at the end of this, I was left feeling nothing. Not numb, not emptied out, just indifferent. All I could do was ask why - not the "why" of "how can this exist under the gaze of a just and loving god?", but the "why" of "what was the point of doing this?"
Any film - no matter how transgressive - should leave us with something at the end of it. It should communicate something and leave us feeling something at the end of it. The Bunny Game did neither for me. Whatever the filmmakers' intent, what I saw on the screen was empty and awful, and left me no different for the experience.
It did not haunt me. It did not move me, except maybe to feel slightly sad that for all of the blood and tears shed for it, this was all that came of it. A filmic voice saying "here it is…look at it", as if that is reason enough.
IMDB entry
That's kind of how The Bunny Game made me feel.
I'm not one to shy away from transgressive or upsetting films, as I think past posts will attest. Still, when I first read about The Bunny Game, I was given pause. It's the story of a prostitute who is abducted by a truck driver and tortured for five days. There's almost no dialogue, it's shot in stark black and white, and consists almost entirely of the victimization of the prostitute (referred to only as "The Bunny") at the hands of her johns and the truck driver. There's some interstitial footage of The Bunny at some other unspecified time and of the truck driver (referred to as "The Hog") torturing and eventually killing another victim. That's it. No story of which to speak, just scenes of violence and degradation punctuated by abrasive noises and equally abrasive music.
Okay, so, minimalist and sensationalistic. Perfect fodder for the market depicted in S&Man, the jaded violence fan looking for the next August Underground. But, trangressive? Disturbing? Really? Well, see, here's the thing: All of the violence inflicted on The Bunny by The Hog is unsimulated. The Bunny really is getting the shit kicked out of her, getting asphyxiated, getting dragged naked through the desert, getting branded. None of that is fake, and that's where people are up in arms about this movie. If you're watching this, you're watching someone being tortured, full stop.
So this required some thought on my part. According to an interview I've read with the director, this was a pretty much improvised piece in which the actress playing The Bunny was an active collaborator. They came up with the idea, and she went into it eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what could happen, even embracing the potential risk of making herself completely vulnerable to a stranger (and non-actor, at that) about whom she knows nothing in terms of his capacity for violence.
And there's precedent for this in other films to one degree or another - Christian Bale lost unhealthy amounts of weight for his role in The Machinist, Lars von Trier terrorized Björk throughout filming of Dancer in the Dark, and it shows in the harrowing final act. The shooting conditions for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were so physically uncomfortable and inhospitable that Marilyn Burns was pretty much bleeding and screaming for real. Hell, even Peter Jackson used a take in which Viggo Mortensen broke his foot for The Two Towers. Never mind the isolation Heath Ledger endured to turn in his brilliant performance in The Dark Knight. This point gets lost, I think, in the discussion around this movie. People hurt themselves in film and for film all the time. It is primarily a matter of context and degree that separates movie trivia from moral panic, then.
So given the subject matter (bleak), and the style (unsparing), what is the end result? For what was blood shed and flesh scarred? From where I'm sitting, not a whole lot.
We get glimpses of The Bunny's life outside of this as blasts of jumbled imagery, but it all moves by too fast to give us anything to hold as true or real about her. What she is here and now is basically meat - a thing to be used and discarded. At one point, she squats, braced up against a fence, and urinates on the sidewalk. She rearranges her clothes and moves on. It is like we are being dared to see her with anything other than contempt.
The second half of the movie is primarily concerned with her captivity and torture. The Hog is an older man, a truck driver. The Bunny shares some drugs with him, offers him a blow job. He responds by chloroforming her. He puts her in the trailer of his semi, chains her to the wall, and drives his truck out into the desert, where nobody can hear them. What follows is scene after scene of The Hog terrorizing either The Bunny or an earlier victim (listed in the credits as, surprise, "Martyr"). He cuts their clothes away, asphyxiates them, brands them. Plays with their bodies, forces himself on them while they lie bound and gagged. Sometimes we see this directly, sometimes we see it recorded and played back for The Bunny. Point of view is less important than just seeing it. It's just there, people getting hurt by this man. It's often accompanied by loud, harsh music and primitive editing tricks, looping scenes over and over again. Pretty much all this accomplishes is taking us out of whatever drama builds up. With one hand it refuses us the comfort of it just being a movie, and with the other it pushes its artificiality in your face.
And that's pretty much it. There's no real story here. It's just a lot of torture, and then it ends. There's some ham-handed Christ imagery toward the end, but to no apparent effect. She gets hurt one way, then another. There's no rhythm to it, no rise and fall, no quiet to make the noise worse, just blasts of imagery and noise and screaming. There's no reason to care about The Bunny outside of her basic humanity, which the movie spends its first half trying to undermine as much as possible. As near as I can tell, it signifies nothing outside of itself. I know the director and actress intended it as a way for her to work out some issues she had around something traumatic in her past, and maybe that's the case, but whatever came from that isn't really shared with the audience. We don't get included in that, and so all we have are the images on the screen, and they don't say much outside of pain, helplessness, and fear. I'm not big on authorial intent, and I firmly believe that a film's vocabulary communicates as much as the content of the film, but at the end of this, I was left feeling nothing. Not numb, not emptied out, just indifferent. All I could do was ask why - not the "why" of "how can this exist under the gaze of a just and loving god?", but the "why" of "what was the point of doing this?"
Any film - no matter how transgressive - should leave us with something at the end of it. It should communicate something and leave us feeling something at the end of it. The Bunny Game did neither for me. Whatever the filmmakers' intent, what I saw on the screen was empty and awful, and left me no different for the experience.
It did not haunt me. It did not move me, except maybe to feel slightly sad that for all of the blood and tears shed for it, this was all that came of it. A filmic voice saying "here it is…look at it", as if that is reason enough.
IMDB entry
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Undocumented: If Truth Is Stranger Is Fiction, Stick To The Truth
There's something about ripped-from-the-headlines horror movies that sort of bugs me. I feel like associating a story with some real-life events is supposed to lend it legitimacy, sort of a "oh shit, this could have happened to you!" sort of vibe, which should make it more frightening, but I think what it ends up doing is detracting from the story. You can either play it gritty and realistic, which might not be over-the-top enough, or you can embellish the story for the sake of dramatic impact. But if you're expecting real and you get fake, it kind of blows the whole thing. Which is pretty much what happens with Undocumented.
It's not based on a true story, but it's highly plausible. The story concerns a group of student filmmakers who are making a documentary on the trafficking and exploitation of illegal Mexican immigrants. They interview laborers who have been injured on the job, a sweatshop owner, and a friend of one of the film crew, who is hoping to bring his wife and daughter over the border. The filmmakers are going to travel with him and his family and allow themselves to be smuggled back into the U.S. along with a bunch of other hopefuls. They're young, idealistic, and on balance, kind of annoying. All is going as well as a spectacularly illegal smuggling operation can, with a truckload of Mexican nationals sneaking through an old drug cartel tunnel under the border, until they run smack dab into a corpse left strung up in the tunnel.
But - awful as it may be - between the realities of human trafficking and the drug trade, that's not necessarily unexpected. Worse has happened. When the group gets pulled over, well, getting busted by the border patrol is an occupational hazard. Only it isn't the border patrol. It's a group of masked militia members - people who have decided to take the immigration problem into their own hands, and are more than aware than illegal immigrants sometimes just disappear.
The militia leader strikes a deal with the film crew - he'll let them go if they agree to document what his group is doing in their remote desert compound. Of course, what it is that they're doing is exactly what you'd expect a bunch of zealots with no accountability to do to a group of people they've completely dehumanized. They spend a lot of time hosing blood off the floor, and shit starts getting pretty weird pretty quickly.
By all rights, this should be a great setup for a movie - a bunch of people, locked up in the middle of nowhere by xenophobic lunatics, and nobody knows they're missing. But to take advantage of this, it's probably best to keep it low-key, gritty, realistic. There's nothing about the situation that isn't plausible. It's what would happen if some group like the Hutaree Militia started kidnapping illegal immigrants. I mean, terrible shit like this already happens every day. The story pretty much writes itself. But instead, what we get is entirely too close to a bog-standard teens-in-trouble sort of movie. The characters are just on the wrong side of caricature for the most part. Not wildly off, but just enough that things feel artificial. The sound guy's an irresponsible doofus who can't go five minutes without making some horrible decision, the director is pretty much of one of those "keep shooting, this is great footage" types from the word go, and he's got a past with the producer, whose current boyfriend is apparently a huge douche (his douchiness is firmly and evocatively captured in a single exchange - it's one of the most economical character beats I've ever seen in a movie, and may be my favorite thing about this). But it all feels a little too loud and stereotypical.
This artificiality and staginess is also a problem with the antagonists - there's a single sequence with the film makers blindfolded, being interrogated by members of the militia, that comes off really well, thick with menace, but once we're introduced to the group's leader (who calls himself "Z") that goodwill is squandered as well. He's too over-the-top, ranting and making dramatic gestures, and what makes it even worse is that most of the other militia members are believable, exhibiting the sort of bland menace I've seen in documentaries about real-life white supremacist groups. They aren't self-aware bad guys, they really believe this shit, and everything they do to the immigrants they capture they do because they genuinely believe these people are less human than they are. That's scary, not the torture-porn bullshit Z cooks up.
And the torture-porn bullshit doesn't make sense in context - it's all theatrical, but until they run into this film crew, there's nobody for whom to perform. There's also not really a clear through-line on the events, how things get worse, or how the film crew get worn down. It suffers a little from being episodic. A bunch of stuff happens, they try to escape, they fail, they end up locked up again, start over. There are moments of menace and suspense, but they're sort of isolated as another set piece among set pieces.
This is all too bad, because Undocumented could have been a good, taut hostage drama - all the pieces are there. A leader with a strong personality and a bunch of alienated rednecks with their own little kingdom out in the desert, an Other who can't even speak the language, and the sort of escalation and craziness that this sort of situation breeds. But - much like Wake Wood, in the end - the creators of this film didn't trust what they had, they gussied up the truth with some bullshit that only happens in the movies, and the final product is the weaker for it.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix
It's not based on a true story, but it's highly plausible. The story concerns a group of student filmmakers who are making a documentary on the trafficking and exploitation of illegal Mexican immigrants. They interview laborers who have been injured on the job, a sweatshop owner, and a friend of one of the film crew, who is hoping to bring his wife and daughter over the border. The filmmakers are going to travel with him and his family and allow themselves to be smuggled back into the U.S. along with a bunch of other hopefuls. They're young, idealistic, and on balance, kind of annoying. All is going as well as a spectacularly illegal smuggling operation can, with a truckload of Mexican nationals sneaking through an old drug cartel tunnel under the border, until they run smack dab into a corpse left strung up in the tunnel.
But - awful as it may be - between the realities of human trafficking and the drug trade, that's not necessarily unexpected. Worse has happened. When the group gets pulled over, well, getting busted by the border patrol is an occupational hazard. Only it isn't the border patrol. It's a group of masked militia members - people who have decided to take the immigration problem into their own hands, and are more than aware than illegal immigrants sometimes just disappear.
The militia leader strikes a deal with the film crew - he'll let them go if they agree to document what his group is doing in their remote desert compound. Of course, what it is that they're doing is exactly what you'd expect a bunch of zealots with no accountability to do to a group of people they've completely dehumanized. They spend a lot of time hosing blood off the floor, and shit starts getting pretty weird pretty quickly.
This artificiality and staginess is also a problem with the antagonists - there's a single sequence with the film makers blindfolded, being interrogated by members of the militia, that comes off really well, thick with menace, but once we're introduced to the group's leader (who calls himself "Z") that goodwill is squandered as well. He's too over-the-top, ranting and making dramatic gestures, and what makes it even worse is that most of the other militia members are believable, exhibiting the sort of bland menace I've seen in documentaries about real-life white supremacist groups. They aren't self-aware bad guys, they really believe this shit, and everything they do to the immigrants they capture they do because they genuinely believe these people are less human than they are. That's scary, not the torture-porn bullshit Z cooks up.
And the torture-porn bullshit doesn't make sense in context - it's all theatrical, but until they run into this film crew, there's nobody for whom to perform. There's also not really a clear through-line on the events, how things get worse, or how the film crew get worn down. It suffers a little from being episodic. A bunch of stuff happens, they try to escape, they fail, they end up locked up again, start over. There are moments of menace and suspense, but they're sort of isolated as another set piece among set pieces.
This is all too bad, because Undocumented could have been a good, taut hostage drama - all the pieces are there. A leader with a strong personality and a bunch of alienated rednecks with their own little kingdom out in the desert, an Other who can't even speak the language, and the sort of escalation and craziness that this sort of situation breeds. But - much like Wake Wood, in the end - the creators of this film didn't trust what they had, they gussied up the truth with some bullshit that only happens in the movies, and the final product is the weaker for it.
IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix
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